From the Easy Chair, Volume 2 — A Closer Reading

This was probably the tenor of the sermons of the Vicar of Bray, and this was the way that he strove to save souls. But Fénelon and John Knox and Edwards and Whitefield and Wesley and Channing and St. Paul, each in his own way, said, "Thou art the man," and rebuked both the sin and the sinner. Yet all of them were very human and very fallible, and all came very short of the ideal of duty. To point out a defect in a picture, or to exhort the artist to avoid it, is not to declare yourself an incomparable artist. To demand honesty in public affairs is not to proclaim yourself a saint. To say that school-teachers should be thorough and use their common-sense as well as a text-book is not to scold them. Romilly was not a scold because he denounced the unjust criminal laws, nor John Howard because he rebuked the inhumanity of prisons, nor John the Baptist because he exhorted men to repent.

The poets rebuke our lives by the fair ideals that they draw, but they do not scold. If a man preaches a little sermon illustrating the way in which men in a certain profession, let us say, shirk their duty, and somebody cries out, "Don't scold so!" the preacher may safely exclaim, "Fellow-sinner, thou art the man." But the best illustration is closer at hand. If the Easy Chair reproves certain fellow-sinners for remissness in doing their duty, and for that offence is a scold, what is the censor who scolds the Easy Chair for scolding? Let us avoid Phariseeism, brethren, and the assumption of superior virtue.

NATIONAL NOMINATING CONVENTION.

It was a wise newspaper that recently advised every American who could do so to see a national nominating convention. It is a spectacle visible in no other country, and the most exciting political spectacle in this. It is the arena in which the prolonged and passionate strife of countless ambitions, intrigues, interests, and conspiracies is decided; and it is the more exciting because, with every effort to predetermine the result, the result is still at the mercy of chance. The action of the convention is a lottery. Suddenly, at the decisive moment, an unexpected combination, an impulse, a whim, like an overwhelming tidal wave, sweeps away all plans and calculations, and the result is as complete as it is unanticipated.

Even the device of a two-thirds vote to make a nomination valid does not avail to secure the real preference of the party which the convention represents. The two-thirds rule, as it is called, was designed to baffle the fundamental democratic principle, which is the rule of the majority. When that is abandoned, the proportion selected is purely arbitrary. It may as well be nine tenths as two thirds. But even such a dam will not resist the swelling waters of feeling in a convention. The French say that it is the unexpected that happens, but in a national convention it is the unforeseen which is anticipated. The palpitating multitude, which has been stimulating its own excitement, confronts every doubtful moment with an air which says plainly, "Now it's coming."

There is always a preliminary contest of various cities before the national party committee to decide where the convention shall be held. Local orators with honeyed persuasion dazzle the committee with statistics of the superior convenience, accommodation, beauty, healthfulness, resources, facilities, and whatever else their good genius may suggest, of the city for which each one of them contends. The convention is held in the largest hall, or in a building erected for the purpose, like the Wigwam in Chicago in 1860. The convention itself is composed of about nine hundred state delegates, their seats designated by a flag with the name of the state placed by the seat of the chairman of the delegation. The alternates are also seated.

Every convention is full of distinguished leaders and members of the party, and as any of them appears, either entering or rising to speak, they are greeted with great applause. If the temporary chairman be an eminent party chief or an eloquent popular orator, his address touches the springs of emotion and arouses hearty enthusiasm. But the friends of the leading candidates deprecate the mention of names until the candidates are presented by the chosen orator. The reason is that the applause of the convention is one of the counters in the game. There are hired _claques_ in the conventions which keep up a humming cry which is a substitute for applause, and which is sometimes continued for a quarter of an hour. The longer the hum, the more popular the candidate.