Norwich bulletin., 1910-01-29

 slim accordingly. But every time you add a new voter you change the aver age. And besides if we could find perfect system, would it satisfy long? After all, is not the dominant human instinct love of variety for sheer va 4 riety's sake? Must we not expect that I new fashions in gowns and govern | ments will be as popular a thousand years from now as they are today 7 VIII people stand a monotony of per lection even? I once heard minister 1 or the gospel say that as he mad no ear for music he dreaded somewhat the promise of eternal measures upon the harp. We are all fond Of our friends and of companionship. but think it was Benjamin Franklin who said that fish and visitors go stale Tn three days. Poor Alcibiades the Just was banished because his fellow men couldn't endure the humdrum of his name Napoleon came to the front and was kept there during the first decade Of his career because Frenchmen had grown sick and weary of having their lives and fortunes subjected to that genius of the revolution, the voice or the people. And does not the demo- cratic party once in a great many years nominate a candidate for the presi- dency other than the Peerless Bryan through sheer love of variety? Is it strange that we must have variety in Any Kind of Treatment.
 
 any kind of treatment can be had un- der any system of government. Some where I have read that the Spanish 1nquisitors quoted the Code of Justin ian. and we are told that Queen Eliz- abeth burned her enemies at the stake because she considered it her duty to begin in this world the punishment that Jehovah had promised to make permanent in the next. There is no more elastic form of government than a representative democracy With sympathetic supreme court and public opinion behind it, you can have any thing you want from the reddeSt so- cialism to the blackest individualism. AS Emerson once said, Laws are mere memoranda. They follow. They never lead" Lincoln once said that any people anywhere having the de- sire and the power have the right to throw off an existing form of govern ment and choose a new one that suits them better Had he lived until to- day, he would have said, I think, that any people anywhere under a. consti- tuition like ours can have any kind of government they desire. Good judges make good laws, just as good bankers make sound banks. where statutes don't make 1t impossible. Strange things have happened in our own his tory. Chief Justice Fancy declared that the black man had no rights that the white men were bound to respect. A few years afterwards Abraham Lin coin gave liberty to two billion dol lars worth of colored men, and in do- ing so he did what John Brown had been hanged for trying to do a few years before; all under the same con- stitEtion. Great men too change their minds. Did Daniel Webster make his 7th of March. speech because he loved the union. or wanted to be president? Did Gladstone shift his musico-politi- cal entertainment from the bagpipes to the harp because he loved Ireland, or wanted to be prime minister Jeff ferson Davis in the senate once de- clared most emphatically that his love for the union overruled all other in Stincts. And a few years afterwards he took the oath as president of the Confederate States Of America. This sort of things happens to good men and bad. It takes a greater courage and a better quality of courage to change ones mind than to adhere to it. Minds. like springs, must be con- stantly refreshed or they will breed wigglers.
 The Caucus Is the Constitution.
 But to return to our representative democracy. Whether governed for weal or woe. it must be governed by political parties And these parties are governed by the caucus. So that the American constitution today is the caucus. It is in the caucus that the eggs of sovereignty are laid, and you may hatch them later on in the very bosom of unSelfish patriotism but
 
 bird Governments, like horse races and ball games, represent different phases of human nature. We vote as our fathers voted. ninety per cent. of us. In 1865 I went to the old town hall with my father to hear a lot of men sing John Browns Body" and rejoice over the salvation of the un- ion. A day or two afterwards my schoolmate called me black re-1Ib- lican. I called him copperhead. I have never scratched my ballot and I don't think he ever scratched his. l hope I have been right part of the time. The first time I ran for the gen. eral assembly one of the prominent citizens of my community told me that he was goin~ to vote against me be- cause when l was shaver l threw a rotten apple at his horse. Another prominent citizen told me that he was going to vote for me because when I was a shaver I put a rotten egg in a buggy cushion belonging to the wo- man he, worked for. and he had never liked the Womah. And yet such stuff has thrown the scales where thrones have been the stake. Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter. Antony might have done as he had oughter." And so on through hiStory-ft is the little horse shoe nail Of love or spite or fear or gain that many times decides who shall win and who shall lose. There is nothing in all this that should be discouraging. On the contrary it
  exceedingly well under the circum- stances. Too many of us think that the world will end when we do. We must remember that thousand years isn't January day in Natures call endar. ARd if, as we are told, our ancestors in the jungles spent hun- dreds of thousands of years throwing stones and bad cocoanuts at one an other, by sheer force of comparative biology we must expect to throw bad laws and old jokes at each other for many years to come. But we can cas- fly say to the man whose hands are too clean to nneddle with politics, that no matter how bad the government may be- it is a better one than he de- serves. So. too with the man who thinks we are in leaking boat, tbe multi millionaire, perhaps, whose only interest in the government is to have it let him alone while he gathers in what fel dollars there are left; it would clearly seem to be his duty to take hold and bail and help stop the leak, or else get out of the boat. Per Sonally, I have no use for the intel lectuaI or rich pessimists who don't help better things When see man do the best he can with the tools God gave him and who cannot even then earn more than $9 a week, my feel