to Colonel Walton the next time I went to the hotel where he was then
living--I have since learned, with a lady not his wife, though he was then
three score and ten--and he cried, "That old hag! Good Lord! Don't they
ever die!"

Seeing every day the most distinguished public men of the country, and with
many of them brought into direct acquaintance by the easy intercourse of
hotel life, destroyed any reverence I might have acquired for official
station. Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it is a veritable
eye opener. To me no divinity hedged the brow of a senator. I knew the
White House too well to be impressed by its architectural grandeur without
and rather bizarre furnishments within.



VII


I have declaimed not a little in my time about the ignoble trade of
politics, the collective dishonesty of parties and the vulgarities of
the self-exploiting professional office hunters. Parties are parties.
Professional politics and politicians are probably neither worse nor
better--barring their pretensions--than other lines of human endeavor. The
play actor must be agreeable on the stage of the playhouse; the politician
on the highways and the hustings, which constitute his playhouse--all the
world a stage--neither to be seriously blamed for the dissimulation which,
being an asset, becomes, as it were, a second nature.

The men who between 1850 and 1861 might have saved the Union and averted
the War of Sections were on either side professional politicians, with here