els, a hundred
banks lend hundreds of millions of dollars in the year, and scores of
factories turn out plow-gear and machinery by steam. Scores of daily
papers do work which Hukm Chund and the barber and the midwife perform,
with due regard for public opinion, in the village of Isser Jang. So
far as manufactories go, the difference between Chicago on the lake,
and Isser Jang on the Montgomery road, is one of degree only, and not of
kind. As far as the understanding of the uses of life goes, Isser Jang,
for all its seasonal cholers, has the advantage over Chicago.

Jowala Singh knows and takes care to avoid the three or four
ghoul-haunted fields on the outskirts of the village; but he is not
urged by millions of devils to run about all day in the sun and swear
that his plowshares are the best in the Punjab; nor does Purun Dass
fly forth in an ekka more than once or twice a year, and he knows, on
a pinch, how to use the railway and the telegraph as well as any son of
Israel in Chicago. But this is absurd.

The East is not the West, and these men must continue to deal with the
machinery of life, and to call it progress. Their very preachers
dare not rebuke them. They gloss over the hunting for money and the
thrice-sharpened bitterness of Adam's curse, by saying that such things
dower a man with a larger range of thoughts and higher aspirations. They
do not say, "Free yourselves from your own slavery," but rather, "If you
can possibly manage it, do not set quite so much store on the things of
this world."

And they do not know what the things of this world are!

I went off to see cattle killed, by way of clearing my head, which, as
you will perceive, was getting muddled. They say every Englishman goes
to the Chicago stock-yards. You shall find them about six miles from the
city; and once having seen them, you will never forget the sight.

As far as the eye can reach stretches a town-ship of cattle-pens,
cunningly divided into blocks, so that the animals of any pen can be
speedily driven out close to an inclined timber path which leads to an
elevated covered way straddling high above the pens. These viaducts are
two-storied. On the upper story tramp the doomed cattle, stolidly
for the most part. On the lower, with a scuffling of sharp hoofs and
multitudinous yells, run the pigs, the same end being appointed for
each. Thus you will see the gangs of cattle waiting their turn--as they
wait sometimes for days; and they nee