The picture nourished Richard's failing of cynicism, and served to dull
that edge of native patriotism which it was assumed he owned when first
he came. He got an impression of government that left him nothing to
fight and bleed and die for should the thick mutter of the war-drums
call folk to the field. Good politics, as the term is practiced, means
bad patriotism, and Washington was a nest of politics and nothing else
besides. It made decisively a situation, so Richard was driven to
conclude, wherein that man should be the best patriot who knew least of
his own government; he should fight harder and suffer more cheerfully
and die more blithely in its defense in exact proportion to his
ignorance of whom and what he was fighting and suffering and dying for.
It was a sullen conclusion surely; but, forced home upon Richard, it
taught him a vitriolic harshness that, getting into his letters to
flavor all he wrote, gave him national vogue, and added to that mixture
of hatred and admiration with which official Washington was already
beginning to regard him.

Neither did he escape forming certain estimates of Senator Hanway, and
the white purity of what motives underlay his public career. For all
that, Richard was quite as sedulous as ever to advance our statesman's
fortunes; loyalty is abstract, love concrete, and in a last analysis
Richard was thinking on Dorothy and not upon the country. Richard, you
may have observed, was no whit better, no less selfish, than were those
about him; and it is as well to know our faulty young gentleman for what
he really was.

Richard not only considered the politics of men, but he studied men
themselves. The narrowest of these came from parts of the country where
region was important, and where you would have been more thought of for
the deeds of your grandfather than for anything that you yourself might