looking in, and the proprietors eagerly
watching the effect of the bait. I went within and noted the hawk-eyed
floor-walker watching for business, overlooking the clerks, keeping
them up to their task of inducing the customers to buy, buy, buy, for
money if they had it, for credit if they had it not, to buy what they
wanted not, more than they wanted, what they could not afford. At times
I momentarily lost the clue and was confused by the sight. Why this
effort to induce people to buy? Surely that had nothing to do with the
legitimate business of distributing products to those who needed them.
Surely it was the sheerest waste to force upon people what they did not
want, but what might be useful to another. The nation was so much the
poorer for every such achievement. What were these clerks thinking of?
Then I would remember that they were not acting as distributors like
those in the store I had visited in the dream Boston. They were not
serving the public interest, but their immediate personal interest, and
it was nothing to them what the ultimate effect of their course on the
general prosperity might be, if but they increased their own hoard, for
these goods were their own, and the more they sold and the more they
got for them, the greater their gain. The more wasteful the people
were, the more articles they did not want which they could be induced
to buy, the better for these sellers. To encourage prodigality was the
express aim of the ten thousand stores of Boston.

Nor were these storekeepers and clerks a whit worse men than any others
in Boston. They must earn a living and support their families, and how
were they to find a trade to do it by which did not necessitate placing
their individual interests before those of others and that of all? They
could not be asked to starve while they waited for an order of things
such as I had seen in my dream, in which the interest of each and that
of all were identical. But, God in heaven! what wonder, under such a
system as this about me--what wonder that the city was so shabby, and
the people so meanly dressed, and so many of them ragged and hungry!

Some time after this it was that I drifted over into South Boston and
found myself among the manufacturing establishments. I had been in this
quarter of the city a hundred times before, just as I had been on
Washington Street, but here, as well as there, I now first perceived
the true significance of what I witnessed. Formerly I