It was a capital of Contradictions and Inconsistencies. At one end of
the Avenue sat the responsible High Keeper of the military honor, valor,
and war-like prestige of a great nation, without the power to pay his
own troops their legal dues until some selfish quarrel between Party
and Party was settled. Hard by sat another Secretary, whose established
functions seemed to be the misrepresentation of the nation abroad by
the least characteristic of its classes, the politicians,--and only then
when they had been defeated as politicians, and when their constituents
had declared them no longer worthy to be even THEIR representatives.
This National Absurdity was only equaled by another, wherein an
ex-Politician was for four years expected to uphold the honor of a flag
of a great nation over an ocean he had never tempted, with a discipline
the rudiments of which he could scarcely acquire before he was removed,
or his term of office expired, receiving his orders from a superior
officer as ignorant of his special duties as himself, and subjected to
the revision of a Congress cognizant of him only as a politician.
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