Irresistible bodies met the immovable, cheered on by yelling legions, each phalanx would conquer or die, and die they did by scores; they kicked and slugged like maniacs until separated by the combined police-forces of the surrounding cities, and more were killed and wounded than in the entire Spanish War.  When night fell, thousands of collegians invaded the capitol of the State, and with savage yells and wedge-rushes drove all citizens from the streets; they closed every theatre, pelting the actors with whiskey bottles stolen from the saloons in which they had smashed thousands of dollars’ worth of costly furniture; they stole every sign from stores, which caught their fancy; no woman was respected, until their orgies were stopped by the bayonets of the national guard.

Such “scholars” as these had for many years been ground through these educational mills by thousands, crowding the ranks of the professional classes to suffocation.  Legions of unscrupulous lawyers, more heartless than pirates or brigands in Bulgaria, infested every city and town, busy as demons stirring up strife, drilling witnesses to perjury, bull-dozing the innocent even unto death with the full connivance of the plunder-sharing judges, until the jails were crowded with victims who could not pay their outrageous fees.

These lawyer-sharks packed caucuses, stuffed ballot-boxes, and thereby elected themselves to legislatures where they enacted unjust laws to subserve their own iniquitous depredations.

But this nefarious pillaging was not confined to the courts alone:  armies of patientless doctors must be fed at the expense of the long-suffering public, and as all the people were not naturally sick all the time for the benefit of the quacks, these so-called doctors prevailed upon their legislative college-chums to pass laws compelling all to be innoculated with virus, ostensibly to render them immune to various contagions, but really to furnish unlimited plunder to their “family physicians.”

Even the women caught the craze for “higher education” to fit themselves for “kid-glove” professional emoluments; they, too, tore each other’s hair, scratched each other’s faces in frantic football rushes, tumbling over each other in the wild scrimmage for fees, leaving the kitchens to the ignorant foreigners, who ruined digestions with preposterous cookery, which would have killed a nation of ostriches.

The great Republic might have survived even such horrors as these had it not been for the out-breaking of another craze more terrible far than an army with gattling guns, I refer to the most destructive of all scourges, the mania for stock-gambling.  The crafty, unscrupulous managers of bucket-shops, stock-exchanges, and brokerages filled the columns of the press with manufactured accounts of vast fortunes made in an hour by imaginary investors of small sums, and at once multitudes of farmers, mechanics, and even teachers abandoned their honest pursuits to squander their hard earnings in the vain attempts to “buck the tiger,” and “beard the lion in his den.”