Every one remembers the fable of the old man who,
when dying, made his sons break their staves one by one, and then bade
them bind a bundle of others together, and to try and break them by one
effort. In the uniting of individuals in a party there is strength, but
there must also be complete unity. If the old man had bidden his sons bind
their staves in several bundles instead of in one, the result would have
been doubtful. That is what party spirit makes men do. Party spirit is a
universal solvent; it is the great acid, the _aqua fortis_ of
political alchemy, which eats through bands of steel and corrodes pillars
of iron in its acrid virulence, till the whole engine of a nation's
government is crumbled and dissolved into a shapeless and a worse than
useless mass of broken metal.
"Man is free, his will is free, his choice, his judgments, his capacity
for thought, and his power to profit by it are all as free as air, just so
long as he remembers that they are his own--no longer. When he forgets
that he is his own master, absolutely and entirely, he becomes another
man's slave.
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