articles, and that the American manufacturer
consequently could sell his goods for a healthy sum. Thus an imported
hat would, with duty, cost two guineas. The American manufacturer would
make a hat for seventeen shillings, and sell it for one pound fifteen.
In these things, he said, lay the greatness of America and the
effeteness of England. Competition between factory and factory kept the
prices down to decent limits, but I was never to forget that this people
were a rich people, not like the pauper Continentals, and that they
enjoyed paying duties.

To my weak intellect this seemed rather like juggling with counters.
Everything that I have yet purchased costs about twice as much as it
would in England, and when native made is of inferior quality.

Moreover, since these lines were first thought of, I have visited a
gentleman who owned a factory which used to produce things. He owned the
factory still. Not a man was in it, but he was drawing a handsome income
from a syndicate of firms for keeping it closed, in order that it might
not produce things. This man said that if protection were abandoned,
a tide of pauper labor would flood the country, and as I looked at his
factory I thought how entirely better it was to have no labor of any
kind whatever rather than face so horrible a future.

Meantime, do you remember that this peculiar country enjoys paying money
for value not received? I am an alien, and for the life of me I cannot
see why six shillings should be paid for eighteen-penny caps, or eight
shillings for half-crown cigar-cases. When the country fills up to a
decently populated level a few million people who are not aliens will be
smitten with the same sort of blindness.

But my friend's assertion somehow thoroughly suited the grotesque
ferocity of Chicago.

See now and judge! In the village of Isser Jang, on the road to
Montgomery, there be four Changar women who winnow corn--some seventy
bushels a year. Beyond their hut lives Purun Dass, the money-lender, who
on good security lends as much as five thousand rupees in a year. Jowala
Singh, the smith, mends the village plows--some thirty, broken at the
share, in three hundred and sixty-five days; and Hukm Chund, who is
letter-writer and head of the little club under the travellers' tree,
generally keeps the village posted in such gossip as the barber and the
mid-wife have not yet made public property.

Chicago husks and winnows her wheat by the million bush