The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays

olitical convention. It is there that all those objectionable elements of the national character which evoke the laughter of Europe and are the despair of our friends find fr

ws" uttered in speech and platform are expressed in sickening syntax and offensive rhetoric. Doubtless an American politician, statesman, wh

ome great man from abroad, a popular ceremony like the laying of a corner-stone, the opening of a fair, the dedication of a public building, an anniversary banquet of an ancient and honorable order (they all belong to ancient and honorable orders) or a club dinner-they all belong to clubs and pay dues. But it is in the political convention that they come out particularly strong. By some imperious tradition having the force of written law it is decreed that in these absurd bodies of our fellow

of the speech in which a man

erial triumph. On every hilltop and mountain peak our beacons blazed a

es so that they should conform to the simple truth and be

epublican party won

which were old when Rome was young are essential to that. The first man (in early Greece) who spoke of awakening an echo did a felicitous thing. Was it felicitous in the second? Is it felicitous now?

canvass is enough to make one sick and sorry.... An election has no manner of likeness to a campaign, or a battle. It is not even a contest in which the stronger or more dexterous party is the winner; it is a mere counting, in which the bare fact that one party is the more numerous puts it in

ponent of the military metaphor, away off there in "the dark backward and abysm of time," knew a

politician once made a purely military speech of which a single sam

s of the great Sierras stand clad in eternal snow, there is no more loyal county to the Republican party in this State than the county from which I hail. [Applause, naturally.] Its loyalty to the party has been tested on many fields of battle [Anglic

his military mouthing wou

ere the Republicans have unif

-worn figures of speech in which their predecessors have dealt for ages, and in which their successors will traffic to the end of-well, to the