, 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."