Explore "The Game of Politics" by Ambrose Bierce on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"What we most need, to secure honest elections," says a well-meaning reformer, "is the Clifford or the Myers voting machine." Why, truly, here is a hopeful spirit -- a rare and radiant intelligence suffused with the conviction that men can be made honest by machinery -- that human character is a matter of gearing, ratchets and dials! One would give something to know how it feels to be like that. A mind so constituted must be as happy in its hope as a hen incubating a nest-ful of porcelain door-knobs. It lives in rapturous contemplation of a world of its own creation -- a world where public morality and political good order are to be had by purchase at the machine-shop. In that delectable world religion is superfluous; the true high priest is the mechanical engineer; the minor clergy are the village blacksmiths.
It is rather / a pity that so fine and fair a sphere should prosper only in the / attenuated ether of an idiot's understanding.