United States or Puerto Rico ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This industry of vote-getting is a comparatively new one; but the Church has been handling the masses for so many centuries that she quickly learned this new way of "democracy," and has established her supremacy over all rivals. She has the schools for training the children, the confessional for controlling the women; she has the intellectual machinery, the purgatory and the code of slave-ethics.
There is no real truth in all this business. It is the lesser reality of deals and bargains, wheedling, persuasion, and vote-getting. And no one has the gift of specious logic and stump hypnotism better than Douglas. To me he is one of the greatest of small men. Have you read Emerson or Lowell yet?
By electing a Chief Executive and charging him with the responsibility of selecting competent men to act as judges. That is what is meant by the short ballot. Reformers-for-politics-only include as many vote-getting planks in a platform as they can get in it without regard to their consistency or inconsistency.
And precisely as it is with the work of nursing and almsgiving, so it is with the work of vote-getting, the elaborate system of policemen and saloon-keepers and ward-heelers which the Catholic machine controls.
It was therefore with the shock of almost complete surprise that he entered his proper bailiwick to find Bernard Graves's opposition regarded seriously. Saloons, cigar stores, street corners, the billiard room of the Tuscarora House, all his familiar haunts, buzzed with the vote-getting possibilities of an independent ticket in a community where regularity had become well-nigh a fetich.
The candidate was tired, very tired, and was trying to gain a few hours' rest before plunging again and for the last time into the whirlpool of vote-getting; and as he sat enjoying a few moments of blissful ease behind the close-drawn portieres of his library there came the much-dreaded sound of heavy feet upon the porch without, and the door-bell rang.
Word Of The Day