In America I know that many persons may consider the Grindwell Governing Machine a humbug,—­an obsolete, absurd, and tyrannous institution, wholly unfitted to the nineteenth century.  A machine that proposes to think and act for the whole people, and which is rigidly opposed to the people’s thinking and acting for themselves, is likely to find little favor among us.  With us the doctrine is, that each one should think for himself,—­be an individual mind and will, and not the spoke of a wheel.  Every American voter or votress is allowed to keep his or her little intellectual wind-mill, coffee-mill, pepper-mill, loom, steam-engine, hand-organ, or whatever moral manufacturing or grinding apparatus he or she likes.  Each one may be his own Church or his own State, and yet be none the less a good and useful citizen, and the union of the States be in none the more danger.  But it is not so in Grindwell.  The rules of the Grindwell machine allow no one to do his own grinding, unless his mill-wheel is turned by the central governing power.  He must allow the big State machine to do everything,—­he paying for it, of course.  A regular programme prescribes what he shall believe and say and do; and any departure from this order is considered a violation of the laws, or at least a reprehensible invasion of the time-honored customs of the city.

The Grindwell Governing Machine (though a patent has been taken out for it in Europe, and it is thought everything of by royal heads and the gilded flies that buzz about them) is really an old machine, nearly worn out, and every now and then patched up and painted and varnished anew.  If a committee of our knowing Yankees were sent over to gain information with regard to its actual condition, I am inclined to think they would bring back a curious and not very favorable report.  It wouldn’t astonish me, if they should pronounce the whole apparatus of the State rotten from top to bottom, and only kept from falling to pieces by all sorts of ingenious contrivances of an external and temporary nature,—­here a wheel, or pivot, or spring to be replaced,—­there a prop or buttress to be set up,—­here a pipe choked up,—­there a boiler burst,—­and so on, from one end of the works to the other.  However, the machine keeps a-going, and many persons think it works beautifully.

Everything is reduced to such perfect system in its operations, that the necessity for individual opinion is almost superseded, and even private consciences are laid upon the shelf,—­just as people lay by an antiquated timepiece that no winding-up or shaking can persuade into marking the hours,—­for have they not the clock on the Government railroad station opposite, which they can at any time consult by stepping to the window?  For instance, individual honesty is set aside and replaced by a system of rewards and punishments.  Honesty is an old-fashioned coat.  The police, like a great sponge, absorbs the private virtue.  It says to conscience, “Stay there,—­don’t trouble yourself,—­I will act for you.”