To me no divinity hedged the brow of a senator.

I knew the White House too well to be impressed by its architectural grandeur without and rather bizarre furnishments within.
VII I have declaimed not a little in my time about the ignoble trade of politics, the collective dishonesty of parties and the vulgarities of the self-exploiting professional office hunters.

Parties are parties.
Professional politics and politicians are probably neither worse nor better--barring their pretensions--than other lines of human endeavor.
The play actor must be agreeable on the stage of the playhouse; the politician on the highways and the hustings, which constitute his playhouse--all the world a stage--neither to be seriously blamed for the dissimulation which, being an asset, becomes, as it were, a second nature.
The men who between 1850 and 1861 might have saved the Union and averted the War of Sections were on either side professional politicians, with here and there an unselfish, far-seeing, patriotic man, whose admonitions were not heeded by the people ranging on opposing sides of party lines.

The two most potential of the party leaders were Mr.Davis and Mr.Seward.The South might have seen and known that the one hope of the institution of slavery lay in the Union.

However it ended, disunion led to abolition.