As for government--that is to say, the thing controlling and not the thing controlled: it was made up of the President, the Speaker, and a dozen more in Cabinet and Congress; and that was government.
The picture nourished Richard's failing of cynicism, and served to dull that edge of native patriotism which it was assumed he owned when first he came.

He got an impression of government that left him nothing to fight and bleed and die for should the thick mutter of the war-drums call folk to the field.

Good politics, as the term is practiced, means bad patriotism, and Washington was a nest of politics and nothing else besides.

It made decisively a situation, so Richard was driven to conclude, wherein that man should be the best patriot who knew least of his own government; he should fight harder and suffer more cheerfully and die more blithely in its defense in exact proportion to his ignorance of whom and what he was fighting and suffering and dying for.
It was a sullen conclusion surely; but, forced home upon Richard, it taught him a vitriolic harshness that, getting into his letters to flavor all he wrote, gave him national vogue, and added to that mixture of hatred and admiration with which official Washington was already beginning to regard him.
Neither did he escape forming certain estimates of Senator Hanway, and the white purity of what motives underlay his public career.

For all that, Richard was quite as sedulous as ever to advance our statesman's fortunes; loyalty is abstract, love concrete, and in a last analysis Richard was thinking on Dorothy and not upon the country.