POLITICAL PACHYDERMS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 38, 14 October 1871, Page 9

POLITICAL PACHYDERMS.

(From the “ Graphic.”) One class of the pachyderms owes its origin to the impenetrable quality of vanity. They are insensible to the whips and prods of the outside world, because they are so well fortified|by self-complacency within ; and, thinking themselves all right, it matters little to them who holds them to be all wrong. In sublime action and with elevated natures this is the thing we call the martyr’s spirit; with the pachyderms it is simply the thick skin of vanity, which does not suffer because it has no nerves wherewith to feel. Discourse with one of these vainglorious pachyderms on any matter of his own life wherein he has been silly or blameworthy, and what will you get out of him ? Not a reasonable justification ; that would imply more consciousness, more sensibility than he possesses; but a blunt and confident “ I was perfectly right.” without the faintest power of proving how or why. No remonstrances have any effect on him. He is as much deterred from following out his own will by his neighbors’ opinion, as would be his four-footed pachydermatous brethren by a child’s rattle. Wrapped in his self-conceit, as in a coat of mail, he forges on right-ahead ; and if his play is damned,if his hook falls still-born from the Press, if his bill is ignominiously rejected amid the jeers and laughter of the House, if he defiles into the lobby in a glorious minority of one, he is as serenely confident that he has done well, and that all of you, his opponents and satirisers, are in the wrong, as if Heaven had opened where he stood, aud he had been called by a divine voice to prosecute his mission of absurdity. He is a pachyderm; and as such fulfils his destiny, which, in his own eyes at least, is undeniable, in both dignity and value, whatever an ungrateful and undiscriminating word may say to the contrary. Well, let us give him his due, and confess that he has his uses. In politics he is the am damnee of his party; ready at any time to mount the whipping-block, to stand in the pillory, to put on the cap and bells, if taken the right way; in the reason of free thought generally he may be seen as the pioneer (when he has brains enough for the task), trampling down the thorny tangles which hedge in the more sensitive, knowing nothing of that agony of doubt, that faintness of the hesitating conscience, which besets those tender souls who fain would find the true way, yet are always fearing less they miss it and wander off into the wrong. These, then, are the uses of the pachyderm in the mental world; and as some one must be the battering-ram, it is as well that he should accept that office, and give his head and his fist to the wall rather than another whose skin might suffer more.