fabric. That the arrangement and relation after half a century of strife
thus established should continue through all time is the hope and prayer
of every thoughtful, patriotic American. There is no greater dissonance
to that sentiment in the South than in the North. To what end, therefore,
except ignominious recrimination and ruinous dissension, could a revival of
old sectional and partisan passions--if it were possible--be expected to
reach?



V


Humor has played no small part in our politics. It was Col. Mulberry
Sellers, Mark Twain's hero, who gave currency to the conceit and enunciated
the principle of "the old flag and an appropriation." He did not claim the
formula as his own, however. He got it, he said, of Senator Dillworthy, his
patriotic file leader and ideal of Christian statesmanship.

The original of Senator Dillworthy was recognized the country over as
Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, "Old Pom," as he had come to be called, whose
oleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, adjusting themselves with equal
facility to the purloining of subsidies and the roasting of rebels, to
prayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the Satirist of
the Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in Congress. He was a
ruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, and resembled
Cruikshank's pictures of Pecksniff.

There have not been many "Old Poms" in our public life; or, for that matter
Aaron Burrs either, and but one Benedict Arnold. That the chosen people of