sports?  No cricket, no rowing.  Nothing but trotting around in buggies.  Recreation consists of lounging around on sofas at Saratoga.  All the public men ill.  I hear that Toombs is indisposed.  Sumner is in poor health.  Douglas, the little giant, is losing strength.  What a curious people, aged and young, corrupt and idealistic, candid and hypocritical, religious and materialistic, hoarders and spenders, self-righteous, licentious, Puritanical.”  “Like all others,” I interjected.

“Like no other,” Aldington rejoined.  “Go back to your native England and see.  You have forgotten some things.  There is such a thing as a definite stock.  And if you call the English bulldogs, for example, your America is a mixture of the wolf, spaniel, lapdog, shepherd, and about all breeds; and according to the occasion any one of them, with quick changes.  Abigail and I have been here for a number of days and we have been entertained by some of her splendacious friends, to use Thackeray’s adjective for American fashion; and the impression it all makes on me is beyond description.  I want to see a better thing made of Chicago.  I really hate it here, all this striving for money—­but of course no place can beat Chicago for that—­but also the idlers here, the worship of Mammon, the dullness and the gloom of elegant people, the extravagant dressing, the liveried servants, all this imitation.  And all this talk here of America being the only religious, free, and enlightened people in the world.  Why, they are not free at all.  The mind must be free before the man is free, and the mind cannot be free in a despotism.  The slavery of the North is just as bad as the slavery of the South.  For look at these people; slaves to fear, slaves to stupid customs, slaves to superstition, slaves to foreign ideas of dress, fashion, wealth; slaves to all the vices by which money is made, and all the tricks and hypocrisies by which it is piled up and invested with rulership; slaves to absurd ideas; slaves to every foolish reform.  Why, sometimes as I think of it, I see the negro in the South as the freest man in America.  He is only a slave as to his labor.  Every one must work.  Instead of receiving money he gets clothes and a hut.  He can’t go away from the plantation, but why go away?  One must be somewhere.  And as to these other things, he is not a slave at all.”

“Yes, and that’s not all,” I said.  “A money power is fast growing up in this country which will rule the country so thoroughly that the small dictation of the cotton industry of the South will not be a comparison.  Slavocracy is only one of the scales on the tail of the dragon of plutocracy.  Gold and silver, tariffs, subsidies, colonies, banks of issue—­these are the claws and teeth of the big slavery.”

“So says Adam Smith,” Aldington interjected.

“Exactly so, and it’s all true.  Every one of the old timers knew these things, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton.  I am beginning to think that Franklin, Payne, and Jefferson were the truest thinkers and greatest planners for a republic that America has had.  And what do you think of Douglas now?  He is a Nationalist with Jackson, and a Republican with Jefferson; a let-alone philosopher all the time.”