10 CANADIAN NIGHTS 



of God who has deluged the fair earth with blood ? 

 What were considered the most useful qualities 

 in a public man ? Statesmanship, sound judg- 

 ment, intuitive insight ? Not at all. Mob oratory ; 

 the dramatic instinct, the power so to identify 

 self momentarily with an assumed part as to move 

 great audiences. Oh well, I need not go into all 

 that. Public political life seemed to me at any 

 rate to be compounded of personal ambition, 

 private jealousy, and profound contempt for all 

 the great principles for which the players in a 

 disreputable game professed to be willing, nay 

 anxious, to sacrifice their lives. I am not laying 

 down the law, mind you. I may be all wrong, I 

 admit. I am only telling you how the insight 

 affected me. I found myself, according to my 

 instincts, playing a subordinate part in a sordid 

 comedy not unlikely to turn into a tragedy for the 

 poor stupid ignorant people herded like bleating 

 sheep into the party folds of the principal actors 

 on the stage. I felt degraded. I am not a re- 

 ligious man, certainly not in the dogmatic sense, 

 but I even then believed in a great first cause, 

 in the persistence of some core of me derived 

 from that Supreme Being, and in my responsi- 

 bility ; and I began to wonder whether anything 



