I have put up my last dollar south of the Potomac.” Then I went to the King of the transcontinental railways.

But McKinley’s doing was the crowning stroke of union and peace.

His humor though perennial was subdued; his wit keen and spontaneous, never acrid or wounding.

Burton stood and had stood for twenty-five years the recognized, the reigning king of comedy in America.

The exact reversal of the Lear suggestion in the last act was an inspiration, his own and not Boucicault’s.

Religion’s the only game whar you can’t lose.

From fakers who have cards up their sleeves, not to mention snakes in their boots, we hear a great deal about “the people,” pronounced by them as if it were spelled “pee-pul.” It is the unfailing recourse of the professional politician in…

Socialism, disappointed of its Utopia, may then repeat the familiar lesson and reproduce the man-on-horseback, or the world may drop into another abyss, and, after the ensuing “dark ages,” like those that swallowed Babylon and Tyre, Greece…

Too many churches—or, shall I say, church fabrics—breeding controversy where there should be agreement, each sect and subdivision fighting phantoms of its fancy.

O Liberty,” cried Madame Roland, “how many crimes are committed in thy name!” “O Churchism,” may I not say, “how much nonsense is trolled off in thy name!

In my early life—as it were, my salad days—I aspired to becoming what old Simon Cameron called “one of those damned literary fellows” and Thomas Carlyle less profanely described as “a leeterary celeebrity.” But some malign fate always sat…

Men took their politics, as their liquor, “straight”; and this father of mine was an undoubting Democrat of the schools of Jefferson and Jackson.

In one way and another they lived by their wits, the one all dignity, the other all cheek.

There was a famous statesman and orator who came to this at last, of whom the typical and characteristic story was told that the holder of a claim against the Government, who dared not approach so great a man with so much as the intimation…

The great man listened and replied: “I have noticed you scattering your means round here pretty freely but you haven’t said ‘turkey’ to me.

Whether the War of Sections—as it should be called, because, except in Eastern Tennessee and in three of the Border States, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, it was nowise a civil war—could have been averted must ever remain a question of…

Thus, restricted to the South, it came to represent in the Southern mind a “right” which the South was bound to defend.

I strolled down to the river and sat myself upon the brink, almost despairing—nigh heartbroken—when I began to feel an irresistible fascination about the swift-flowing stream.

The Northern radicals were wont to say, “Let the South go,” the more profane among them interjecting “to hell!” The Secessionists liked to prod the New Englanders with what the South was going to do when they got to Boston.

The world—the whole trend of modern thought—was set against slavery.

What is to be,” says the predestinarian Mother Goose, “will be, though it never come to pass.

In a nation of blind men,” we are told, “the one-eyed man is king.” In a nation of undiscriminating voters the noise of the agitator is apt to drown the voice of the statesman.

One cynic tells us that “A statesman is a politician who is dead,” and another cynic varies the epigram to read “A politician out of a job.” Patriotism cries “God give us men,” but the parties say “Give us votes and offices,” and Congress…

Lord!” cried the most delightful of liars, “How this world is given to lying.” Yea, and how exigency quickens invention and promotes deceit.