What do I want with practical politics?
Most all the practical politics I see anywhere is practical villainy—
The politicians, standing back in the shadow, telling lies,
Empty flesh, putrid mouths, mumbling and squeaking,
The eminence of meanness, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed, indecency—
How mean a person is sometimes a rich man or a man in a great office, even in the presidency!
You, paid to defile the people—
Whom have you slaughter’d lately?
Whose is that blood upon you so wet and sticky?

Thoughts, of the frivolous judge—court thieving in its manifold mean forms:
Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states and men,
Justice is always in jeopardy, the law is as likely to defraud you as to give you justice.

I agree with fellows who do not believe that the criminal classes are the cause of themselves. I see other causes for them—causes as to which they are no more guilty than we are. To me, any judge, or any juror, is equally criminal—and any reputable person is also—and the president is also. (Here is a consideration that the theorist on the evils of society might build a big structure upon.)

O the horrid contrast and the sarcasm of this life,
To know who they really are that sit on judges’ benches, and who they perched on the criminal’s box—to know.
The criminal that stood in the box, the judge that sat and sentenced him, the fluent lawyers, the jury, the audience,
Committers of crimes,
Committers of many beautiful virtues—
I swear they are averaged now, one is no better than the other—
The murderer that is to be hung next day, how does he sleep?
And the murder’d person, how does he sleep?

So let that which stood in front go behind,
Let that which was behind advance to the front,
Let judges and criminals be transposed! let the prison-keepers be put in prison! let those that were prisoners take the keys!
Say! why might they not just as well be transposed?
All of us are parties to the same bargain,
The worst, the best, the middling—all parties to the same bargain.

Thoughts, of the corrupt congressman, governor, mayor,
Of such as these standing helpless and exposed:
You liars, mark!
Time, with soon or later superciliousness, disposes of presidents, congressmen, party platforms, and such,
They think they are providing planks of a platform on which they shall stand—
Of those planks it would be but retributive justice to make them coffins.

Thoughts, of the solemn and murky mystery about the fate of the president,
The president with pale face asking secretly to himself, What will the people say at last?
I will make a song for the ears of the president, full of weapons with menacing points—
I joined the stern crowd that still confronts the president with menacing weapons,
And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces,
See, for his derelictions, the president is menaced face to face by the common people,
Those that look carelessly in the faces of presidents and governors, nonchalant, as to say,  All you are doing and saying is dangled mirages,
Who are you? Have you outstript the rest? are you the president?
It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.

He that was president was buried, and he that is now president shall surely be buried,
Time clears the stage of each and any mortal shred that thinks itself so potent to its day,
After which, (with precious, golden exceptions once or twice in a century,) all that relates to sir potency is flung to moulder in a burial-vault,
The wide-swelling one, the braggart that would yesterday do so much,
Today a carrion dead and damn’d, the despised of all the earth,
An offal rank, to the dunghill maggots spurn’d,
And no one bothers himself the least bit about it afterward.

Thoughts, of public opinion:
Of misery, meanness, the craft of tyrants, and the credulity of the populace, no voice can at any time say, “They are not.” There is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in men.
But the working class is slow to learn. They are cheated, swindled, robbed, pay all the pipers’ bills and hear none of the music—yet go on year after year putting their robbers back in Congress, in the legislatures—making them mayors and what not.
In politics—just as it is in religion—some people get an idea of the necessity of believing certain things, not so much from weight of evidence, but from mere mental and emotional setness. They intend believing—and that is all there is about it.

Yet how little you senatorial and executive dignitaries know of us, after all. How little you realize that the souls of the people ever leap and swell to anything like a great liberal thought or principle, uttered by any well-known personage—and how deeply they love the man that promulges such principles with candor and power. It is wonderful, in your keen search and rivalry for popular favor, that hardly anyone discovers this direct and palpable road there.

 NEXT: DEFIANCE AND REVOLT

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