land. 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 labour would flood the
country, and as I looked at his factory I thought how entirely better it
was to have no labour 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 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 Puran Dass,
the money-lender, who on good security lends as much as five thousand
rupees in a year. Jowala Singh, the _lohar_, mends the village
ploughs--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 midwife have not yet made
public property. Chicago husks and winnows her wheat by the million
bushels, a hundred banks lend hundreds of millions of dollars in the
year, and scores of factories turn out plough 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 manufactures go, the difference between
Chic