e national guard.

Such "scholars" as these had for many years been ground through these
educational mills by thousands, crowding the ranks of the professional
classes to suffocation. Legions of unscrupulous lawyers, more
heartless than pirates or brigands in Bulgaria, infested every city
and town, busy as demons stirring up strife, drilling witnesses to
perjury, bull-dozing the innocent even unto death with the full
connivance of the plunder-sharing judges, until the jails were crowded
with victims who could not pay their outrageous fees.

These lawyer-sharks packed caucuses, stuffed ballot-boxes, and thereby
elected themselves to legislatures where they enacted unjust laws to
subserve their own iniquitous depredations.

But this nefarious pillaging was not confined to the courts alone:
armies of patientless doctors must be fed at the expense of the
long-suffering public, and as all the people were not _naturally_ sick
all the time for the benefit of the quacks, these so-called doctors
prevailed upon their legislative college-chums to pass laws compelling
all to be innoculated with virus, ostensibly to render them immune to
various contagions, but really to furnish unlimited plunder to their
"family physicians."

Even the women caught the craze for "higher education" to fit
themselves for "kid-glove" professional emoluments; they, too, tore
each other's hair, scratched each other's faces in frantic football
rushes, tumbling over each other in the wild scrimmage for fees,
leaving the kitchens to the ignorant foreigners, who ruined digestions
with preposterous cookery, which would have killed a nation of
ostriches.

The great Republic might have survived even such horrors as these had
it not been for the out-breaking of another craze more terrible far
than an army with gattling guns, I refer to the most destructive of
all scourges, the mania for stock-gambling. The crafty, unscrupulous
managers of bucket-shops, stock-exchanges, and brokerages filled the
columns of the press with manufactured accounts of vast fortunes
made in an hour by imaginary investors of small sums, and at once
multitudes of farmers, mechanics, and even teachers abandoned their
honest pursuits to squander their hard earnings in the vain attempts
to "buck the tiger," and "beard the lion in his den."

The inevitable result followed: the lion and the lamb lay down
together, with the lamb inside the lion, thousands of formerly
well-to-do people w