insignificant-looking person, sent a messenger up into this county and
challenged the opposition to debate with him. They didn't quite like the
idea, but they were too proud to decline, so they put up their best
debater, a big, good-natured man whom everybody was familiar with as
"Tom," and it was arranged that Massey should have the first hour and that
Tom Whatever-his-name-was should succeed him the next hour. When the
occasion came, Massey, with his characteristic shrewdness, began to get
underneath the skins of the audience, and he hadn't made more than half
his speech before it was evident that he was getting that hostile crowd
with him; whereupon one of Tom's partisans in the back of the room, seeing
how things were going, cried out: "Tom, call him a liar and make it a
fight!"

Now, that kind of debate, that spirit in discussion, gets us nowhere. Our
national affairs are too serious, they lie too close to the well-being of
each one of us, to excuse our talking about them except in earnestness and
candor and a willingness to speak and listen with open minds. It is a
misfortune that attends the party system that in the heat of a campaign
partisan passions are so aroused that we cannot have frank discussion. Yet
I am sure that I observe, and that all citizens must observe, an almost
startling change in the temper of the people in this respect. The campaign
just closed was markedly different from others that had preceded it in the
degree to which party considerations were forgotten in the seriousness of
the things we had to discuss as common citizens of an endangered country.

There is astir in the air of America something that I for one never saw
before, never felt before. I have been going to political meetings all my
life, though not all my life playing an immodestly conspicuous part in
them; and there is a spirit in our political meetings now that I never
saw before. It hasn't been very many years, let me say for example, that