"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 is good
"whic