s," he asked, "to get fighting over something we
don't know anything about?"

That was Gene's French blood, of course. But his question rankled. And
how was I to know that he would have got as little satisfaction if he
had hurled it into the marching ranks of those imposing torch-light
processions which sometimes passed our house at night, with drums
beating and fifes screaming and torches waving,--thousands of citizens
who were for the Tariff for the same reason as I: to wit, because they
were Republicans.

Yet my father lived and died in the firm belief that the United States
of America was a democracy!

Resolved not to be caught a second time in such a humiliating position
by a Democrat, I asked my father that night what the Tariff was. But I
was too young to understand it, he said. I was to take his word for it
that the country would go to the dogs if the Democrats got in and the
Tariff were taken away. Here, in a nutshell, though neither he nor
I realized it, was the political instruction of the marching hordes.
Theirs not to reason why. I was too young, they too ignorant. Such is
the method of Authority!

The steel-mills of Mr. Durrett and Mr. Hambleton, he continued, would
be forced to shut down, and thousands of workmen would starve. This was
just a sample of what would happen. Prosperity would cease, he declared.
That word, Prosperity, made a deep impression on me, and I recall the
certain reverential emphasis he laid on it. And while my solicitude for
the workmen was not so great as his and Mr. Durrett's, I was concerned
as to what would happen to us if those twin gods, the Tariff and
Prosperity, should take their departure from the land. Knowing my love
for the good things of the table, my father intimated, with a rare
humour I failed to appreciate, that we should have to live henceforth
in spartan simplicity. After that, like the intelligent workman, I was
firmer than ever for the Tariff.

Such was the idealistic plane on which--and from a good man--I received
my first political instruction! And for a long time I connected the
dominance of the Republican Party with the continuation of manna and
quails, in other words, with nothing that had to do with the spiritual
welfare of any citizen, but with clothing and food and material
comforts. My education was progressing....

Though my father revered Plato and Aristotle, he did not, apparently,
take very seriously the contention that that government alone i