one feature of it was the support, by general taxation, of a few favored citizens in public palaces, where they passed their time in song and dance and all kinds of revelry.  They were not, however, altogether idle, being required out of the sums bestowed upon them, to employ a certain number of men each in erecting great piles of stone and pulling them down again, digging holes in the ground and then filling them with earth, pouring water into casks and then drawing it off, and so forth.  The unhappy laborers were subject to the most cruel oppressions, but the knowledge that their wages came from the pockets of those whom their work nowise benefited was so gratifying to them that nothing could induce them to leave the service of their heartless employers to engage in lighter and more useful labor.

Another characteristic of “Protection” was the maintenance at the principal seaports of “customs-houses,” which were strong fortifications armed with heavy guns for the purpose of destroying or driving away the trading ships of foreign nations.  It was this that caused the Connected States to be known abroad as the “Hermit Republic,” a name of which its infatuated citizens were strangely proud, although they had themselves sent armed ships to open the ports of Japan and other Oriental countries to their own commerce.  In their own case, if a foreign ship came empty and succeeded in evading the fire of the “customs-house,” as sometimes occurred, she was permitted to take away a cargo.

It is obvious that such a system was distinctly evil, but it must be confessed our uncertainty regarding the whole matter of “Protection” does not justify us in assigning it a definite place among the causes of national decay.  That in some way it produced an enormous revenue is certain, and that the method was dishonest is no less so; for this revenue—­known as a “surplus”—­was so abhorred while it lay in the treasury that all were agreed upon the expediency of getting rid of it, two great political parties existing for apparently no other purpose than the patriotic one of taking it out.

But how, it may be asked, could people so misgoverned get on, even as well as they did?

From the records that have come down to us it does not appear that they got on very well.  They were preyed upon by all sorts of political adventurers, whose power in most instances was limited only by the contemporaneous power of other political adventurers equally unscrupulous.  A full half of the taxes wrung from them was stolen.  Their public lands, millions of square miles, were parceled out among banded conspirators.  Their roads and the streets of their cities were nearly impassable.  Their public buildings, conceived in abominable taste and representing enormous sums of money, which never were used in their construction, began to tumble about the ears of the workmen before they were completed.  The most delicate and important functions of government were