Olmsted was at pains to show how the people were duped by Charlatan guidance of their political leaders; this comes out particularly in his quotation of and comments upon the famous election speech in Virginia in the fifties, in which the aspirant declared to his audience that "Commerce has long ago spread her sails, and sailed away from you ... you have set no tilt-hammer of Vulcan to strike blows worthy of the gods in your iron foundries; you have not yet spun more than coarse cotton enough, in the way of manufacture, to clothe your own slaves. You have had no commerce, no mining, no manufactures. You have relied alone on the single power of agriculture--and such agriculture! Your sedge-patches outshine the sun.... Instead of having to feed cattle on a thousand hills, you have had to chase the stum-tailed steers through the sedge-patches to procure a tough beef-steak. (Laughter and applause.) ... The landlord has skinned the tenant, and the tenant has skinned the land, until all have grown poor together," "and how," asks Olmsted, "does the fiddling Nero propose, it will be wondered, to remedy this so very amusing stupidity, poverty, and debility? Very simply and pleasantly. By building railroads and canals, ships and mills; by establishing manufactories, opening mines, and setting up smelting-works and foundries. And, 'Hurrah!' shout the tickled electors; 'that's exactly what we want.'" And then he showed that it was much like the quack telling the confirmed paralytic to live generously, take vigorous exercise and grow well; that with the disease of slavery in its vitals the South could not do else than languish; that in holding out promise of wholesome measures which contemplated everything but the attacking of slavery,[81] the politicians were just laughing at the people.[82]
A reflection just as sorrowful as the confirmed bias of the people, however, is one that Olmsted did not see in this and myriad other episodes, namely, the blindness of the leaders that, with no doubt strong elements of quackery, showed even stronger signs of being themselves duped by a situation. Not that the crowd was believing, but that the leaders were so largely sincere, was most melancholy. As to both considerations, however, a passage of Sir Horace Plunkett in comment upon Irish politics, is much to the point: "Deeply as I have felt for the past sufferings of the Irish people and their heritage of disability and distress, I could not bring myself to believe that, where mis-government had continued so long, and in such an immense variety of circumstances and conditions, the governors could have been alone to blame. I envied those leaders of popular thought whose confidence in themselves and in their followers was shaken by no such reflections. But the more I listened to them, the more the conviction was borne in upon me that they were seeking to build an impossible future upon an imaginary past."[83]