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Updated: May 14, 2025
At a later date Ingersoll was able to vary the pastime of "Bible-smashing" with the profession of an active Republican wire-puller, without any of the embarrassments which that much better and honester man, Charles Bradlaugh, had to encounter.
In America there is a division of politicians into wire-pullers and blowers; under the voluntary system the member of Parliament would be the only momentary mouth-piece the impotent blower; while the constituency-maker would be the latent wire-puller the constant autocrat.
Robinson was a worthy gentleman who happened to come out publicly on the side of a political wire-puller. Immediately Hosea caught up his name and wrote a comic poem on voting for a bad candidate for office. Looked at in that light, the poem applies just as well to political candidates to-day as it did then. Here are a few stanzas of the poem.
"How are you going to vote for captain, Kendall?" said Wilton, stopping up to the young gentleman who had proposed so many questions to the principal, and who had been so honest in confessing his ignorance of nautical matters. "For Carnes, of course." "Humph! I wouldn't vote for him," sneered the wire-puller. "Why not?" "He's too stiff; he'll put on airs, and be a tyrant over us." "No, he won't."
The king thoroughly understood the advantage which accrued to him from this state of things; and with that short-sighted shrewdness of the mere political wire-puller, in which few modern politicians have excelled him, he had from the outset preferred to fight his battle on constitutional questions in America rather than in England, in order that the national feeling of Englishmen might be arrayed on his side.
This was characteristic of Forster's high sense of public duty. He was too proud and too high-spirited to try to enlist any man's sympathies, or to secure any newspaper advocacy. Men spoke of him as a clever wire-puller who could manufacture a spurious public sentiment in his own favour. How little they knew him!
Experience offers proof on every hand that vigorous mental life may be but one side of a personality, of which the other is moral barbarism. A man may be a fine archaeologist, and yet have no sympathy with human ideals. The historian, the biographer, even the poet, may be a money-market gambler, a social toady, a clamorous Chauvinist, or an unscrupulous wire-puller.
So among ourselves does the press constantly represent public opinion to be one thing while the cold arithmetic of the polls conclusively declares it to be another. The ballot alone effectively liberates the quiet citizen from the tyranny of the shouter and the wire-puller.
Francis Place was the wire-puller, to whose energy was due the abolition of the Conspiracy Laws in 1824. Joseph Hume in the House of Commons, and M'Culloch, then editor of the Scotsman, had the most conspicuous part in the agitation, but Place worked the machinery of agitation.
It is not, of course, pretended that he never used a fallacious argument or made an unfair score he was entirely human. But this is the testimony of an Illinois political wire-puller to Lincoln: "He was one of the shrewdest politicians in the State. Nobody had more experience in that way. Nobody knew better what was passing in the minds of the people.
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