Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, page 219 by Various Authors
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holding. The shorter the interval the less should our enjoyment of it be marred. Investigations into past elections serve only to interfere with it, or to assist the newspapers in interfering with it; and newspapers are our daily food or a part of it. Three-fourths of the reading-matter in the five or six thousand of them published in the Union are filled with politics, although the conductors of them, like the rest of us, are aware that politics are temporarily in eclipse. They can teach us nothing on that subject, and we want to learn nothing. Their occupation as trade-journals devoted to the art and science of government is gone. Other periodicals devoted to a specialty, whether iron, coal, calico or the Thirty-nine Articles, show judgment and compassion on their readers when a "slack" time comes by turning miscellaneous and slipping in choice literary tidbits among their regular "shop" items. The five thousand should do likewise. If they will not wholly exclude politics, they might at least sweep political news and disquisitions into a separate corner of the sheet--say among the jokes, base-ball accidents and last year's advertisements.
Could our legislators and their chroniclers only convince themselves that they are de trop, that the best they can do just now is to assist us in cultivating a transitory oblivion of them and their deeds, and that, instead, they are depriving us of the refreshment of our forty winks, they would show a correct understanding of the situation. If they cannot be altogether silent, they might at least give their noise another pitch, and direct it into some humdrum monotone that would not jar upon our slumbers. Do their worst, however, they cannot take from us the delicious consciousness that it will be two years before another Presidential campaign. Panoplied in that reflection, we can stand a good deal.
We sometimes think it must have been a vast relief to the Poles when partition came and the three powers for good and all put an end to the