A Clay or Webster, a Seward or Sumner, sometimes gets into politics, but it is by accident.

There is not enough money in our politics to cause honest men to make it an object, while the corruption frequently necessary to maintain a political position, is so disgusting as to deter honest men from making it a business.
A love of power easily degenerates from patriotism into treason or tyranny, or both.

As it is easier to fall from virtue to vice than it is to rise from vice to virtue, so it is easier to fall from patriotism than to rise to it.
Before the war the men of the South engaged, at first, in politics as an elegant pastime.

They had plenty of leisure and plenty of money.
They did not take to literature and science, because these pursuits require severe work and more or less of a strong bias, for a thorough exposition of their profound penetralia.

It may be, too, that their assumed patrician sensitiveness shrank from entering into competition with the plebeian fellows who had to study hard and write voluminously for a few pennies to keep soul and body together.