Note v-4 — Chapter V · HONESTY IN POLITICS

These scenes, until then happily without parallel in American history, recall the political slaughter with which Charles James Fox had seventy years before signalized a crushing victory in the British House of Commons. To quote his biographer: “The fight was over, and the butchery began. Every one who belonged to the beaten party was sacrificed without mercy, with all his kindred and dependents; and those public officers who were unlucky enough to have no political connections fared as ill as the civil population of a district which is the seat of war between two contending armies. Clerks, messengers, excisemen, coast-guardsmen, and pensioners were ruined by shoals because they had no vote for a member of Parliament, or because they had supported a member who had opposed the peace.” (Trevelyan’s Fox, 28.)