The City of Brotherly Love flickered by and was left behind, like the
sentiment which it once stood for. We were headed for Washington, where
the will and conscience of the nation take form and pass into effect.
Government of the people by lawyers, for lawyers; did they know what
they were doing? The Constitution, bulwark of our liberties; the letter
of the law, technicalities, precedents, procedure, the right of the
individual merged in the public right, and lost there! The House--five
hundred turbulent broncos, each neighing for his own bin; the
Senate--four score portentous clubmen, adjusting the conservative
shirt-front of dignity and moderation over the license of privilege and
"the interests"; the Executive--dillydallying between nonentity and the
Big Stick; the Supreme Court--a handful of citizens and participators in
our common human nature, magically transmuted into omniscient and
omnipotent gods by certificates of appointment! And the rest of our
hundred millions, in this era of new discoveries and profound upheavals,
on this battlefield of Armageddon between Hell and Heaven, in this
crumbling of the old deities and the looming of the Unknown,--are we to
lie down content and docile and suffer this hybrid monster of
Frankenstein, under guise of governing, to squat on our necks, bind our
Titan limbs, bandage our awakening eyes, gag our free voices, sterilize
our civic manhood, and debase us from sons of divine liberty into the
underpinning of an oligarchy?
My friend and I--while our licensed proprietors napped with one eye
open--smiled to each other perhaps, recognizing how the prick of
personal injury and injustice will arouse far-reaching rebellion against
human wrongs and imperfections in general.
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