the terrible end to the piece well enough, I could not take the actors very seriously; the whole thing seemed a vile tragedy played by a provincial troupe." Some quotes from Mount's The Theater of Politics follow: "... [T]he political confidence trick, whether monarchic or presidential, oligarchic or democratic, whether necessary or unnecessary, is at any rate effective, because most people are foolish and gullible." "Is political history the record of a mass of mugs being taken for a series of rides?" "We see the politician rather as an actor who takes on a part; and we judge him according to whether he plays well or badly." "The theory is comforting: they are our hired servants. The practice is humiliating; we are their wayward wards, to be comforted, cajoled, bullied, but never to be treated as equals, never to be told more of the truth than suits their present purposes, and too often to be told off-white lies." "He [Churchill] is, as all political actors must be, the analyst of humbug, the humbugger and the humbugged all in one." From Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution , describing political rhetoric: "... a theatrical, bombastick, windy phraseology of heroick virtue, blended and mingled up with a worse dissoluteness, and joined to a murderous and savage ferocity, forms the tone and idiom of their language and their manners... Statesmen, like your present rulers, exist by everything which is spurious, fictitious, and false; by everything which takes the man from his house,