Excerpt from Reminiscences of Parmenas Taylor Turnley, From the Cradle to Three-Score and Ten; By Himself, From Diaries Kept From Early Boyhood: With a Brief Glance Backward Three Hundred and Fifty Years at Progenitors and Ancestral Lineage

Mankind are worshipers of idols the more enlightened preferring the man hero, rather'than the dumb stock and stone! It is war that creates heroes! Therefore the masses crave war! A few people here and there, at different epochs and periods, in sentimental moods of despondency, or of occasional religious fervor, may decry the strong arm of the sword, and advocate tribunes of arbitration; but such advocacy will never prevail and such peaceful trib une will ever be the iridescent dream of the imagination! No human government was ever established, save by abso lute physical force' - nor one ever maintained except by theexercise of that force. We, of these United States, never tire of boasting of our aft-warlike popular government, forgetting for a moment that our boasted government was created in blood and slaughter and that it has been maintained in deeper seas of bloodshed, and loss of life and destruction of material wealth, than all other nations of the earth have expended during our century of existence! The period is rapidly approaching when military force, on a colossal scale, will be invoked to determine and settle the disputes between contending political parties and factions in our government; and to suppress the corrupting ele ments and rottenness now fast accumulating! The power of concentrated wealth must and will rule nations and peoples, in the future as in the past! To this end the heterogeneous masses of the American Republic, gathered from all parts of the earth and called the populace, who are tickled, for the time being, with the appellation of sover eigns and exercising for abrief period the shadowy fiction, called eox papali - which in turn is the basis for that other fiction, Voice of God - will be set aside and kept in bounds by the strong arm of power, while superiors will maintain human government commensurate with the intelligence of the superior elements! The scramble for spoils of office is a barrier to good government by the populace. Equally erroneous is another feature of our American Republic, which is the boasted contention that State and Church are separate and distinct, and shall be kept so - that politics and religion have nothing in common! This is not true; never was, and never will be! No government formed by men since the world began was based on any other foun dation than some kind of religion! The most savage and barbarous tribes on earth have no conception of govern ment, save as a religion! Equally so, do all higher civili zations merge, finally, its aims, efforts and motives, in the religious sentiment dominant among them. The weaker sects will be subdued, and the one stronger prevail! Every political party works under the inspiration of a religion and all so-called political campaigns in a popular govern ment are in fact religious contentions - and religious campaigns! Even as I write this Introduction, and the autumn leaves are falling silently on my grassy lawn, Har rison and Cleveland are before the people for the presi deney; both parties being managed and commanded by political religionists, with a deep and pious fervor in the heart of every leader, determined to down his opponent.

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