partisanship denounced. People express the wish that there might
be an end to "party politics" and to "partisanship," and that "all
good men might get together" for the good of the whole country.
This may happen when there is Heaven on earth, but not before.
Even the good and honest men continue to differ about which is the
wisest way to do things, and so the people who think the same way
about most matters get together in a party. The suggestion, by the
way, that people should give up "partisanship" often comes from
people who do not by any means intend to give up their own
partisanship,--they wish other folk to come over to their own way
of thinking. We are all apt to wish that others would only be
reasonable enough to agree with US.

Nor is it at all sure that everything would be fine if there were
no parties. Countries which have tried to do without parties, have
not made a great success of it. There must be some organized group
to hold responsible if men in office do badly; some people to warn
that the things they are doing are not approved by the majority of
the people.

With parties in existence, as they have been for almost all of our
history as a nation, there are in the main, four ways in which a
man may act toward them. He may be a hidebound party man, always
voting the party ticket, and swallowing the party platforms whole.
Such persons often get into the newspapers when they are elderly,
as having voted for every candidate on this or that party ticket
for fifty or sixty or seventy years. It simply means, of course,
that these men are proud of the fact that they let other people do
their thinking for them.