There, too, moves the game of politics in plot
and counterplot. It is the climax of the subjective. From those lists
the trumpet-blare, the crowd, the glitter, the banners, "the boast of
heraldry and pomp of power," melt utterly away. To the world-champions
who bend above the little board the big glass houses and all the
treasures stared at by admiring thousands are as naught.
[Illustration: SCENE AT ONE OF THE ENTRANCES TO THE GROUNDS--THE
TURNSTILE.]
But man is an animal, and not by any means of intellect all compact. The
average mortal confesses to a craving for the stimulus of great shows,
of material purposes, substantial objects of study and palpable prizes.
It is so in 1876, as it was in 1776, and as it will be in a long series
of Seventy-sixes.
It is the concrete rather than the abstract which draws him in through
the turnstiles of the exposition enclosure. Separated by the divisions
of those ingeniously-contrived gates into taxed and untaxed spectators,
the masses stream in with small thought of the philosophers or the
chess-players. Their minds are reached, but reached through the eye, and
the first appeal is to that. Each visitor constitutes himself a jury of
one to consider and compare what he sees. The hundreds of thousands of
verdicts so reached will be published only by word of mouth, if
published at all. Their value will be none the less indubitable, though
far from being in all cases the same.
Pages:
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48