that was a standing indignity to all on whom it looked; and my next most disagreeable remembrance is of a bracing, Republican postman in the city of San Francisco.  I lived in that city among working folk, and what my neighbours accepted at the postman’s hands—­nay, what I took from him myself—­ it is still distasteful to recall.  The bourgeois, residing in the upper parts of society, has but few opportunities of tasting this peculiar bowl; but about the income-tax, as I have said, or perhaps about a patent, or in the halls of an embassy at the hands of my friend of the eye-glass, he occasionally sets his lips to it; and he may thus imagine (if he has that faculty of imagination, without which most faculties are void) how it tastes to his poorer neighbours, who must drain it to the dregs.  In every contact with authority, with their employer, with the police, with the School Board officer, in the hospital, or in the workhouse, they have equally the occasion to appreciate the light-hearted civility of the man in office; and as an experimentalist in several out-of-the-way provinces of life, I may say it has but to be felt to be appreciated.  Well, this golden age of which we are speaking will be the golden age of officials.  In all our concerns it will be their beloved duty to meddle, with what tact, with what obliging words, analogy will aid us to imagine.  It is likely these gentlemen will be periodically elected; they will therefore have their turn of being underneath, which does not always sweeten men’s conditions.  The laws they will have to administer will be no clearer than those we know to-day, and the body which is to regulate their administration no wiser than the British Parliament.  So that upon all hands we may look for a form of servitude most galling to the blood—­servitude to many and changing masters, and for all the slights that accompany the rule of jack-in-office.  And if the Socialistic programme be carried out with the least fulness, we shall have lost a thing, in most respects not much to be regretted, but as a moderator of oppression, a thing nearly invaluable—­the newspaper.  For the independent journal is a creature of capital and competition; it stands and falls with millionaires and railway bonds and all the abuses and glories of to-day; and as soon as the State has fairly taken its bent to authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch on private property, the days of the independent journal are numbered.  State railways may be good things and so may State bakeries; but a State newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of the State officials.