Our laws were moral earthquakes that destroyed our standards.  We were opposed to sneak thieves, but we admired the two million dollar rascals.  Why not a tax of five or ten thousand dollars to license the business of theft, so that we might put an end to the small scoundrels who had genius enough only to steal door mats, or postage stamps, or chocolate drops, and confine the business to genteel robbery?  A robber paying a privilege of ten thousand dollars would then be able legally to abscond with fifty thousand dollars from a bank; or, by watering the stock of a railroad, he would be entitled to steal two hundred thousand dollars at a clip.  The thief’s licence ought to be high, because he would so soon make it up.

A licence on blasphemy might have been equally advantageous.  It could be made high enough so that we could sweep aside all those who swear on a small scale, those who never get beyond “By George!” “My stars!” or “Darn it!” Then, again, the only way to put an end to murder in America is by high licenced murderers.  Put a few men in to manage the business of murder.  The common assassins who do their work with car hooks, dull knives or Paris green, should be abolished by law.  Let the few experts do it who can accomplish murder without pain:  by chloroform or bulldog revolvers.  Give these men all the business.  The licence in these cases should be twenty thousand dollars, because the perquisites in gold watches, money safes, and plethoric pocket-books would soon offset the licence.

High licences in rum-selling had always been urged, and always resulted in dead failures; therefore the whole method of legal restraint in crime can be dismissed with irony.  The overcrowding in the East was crushing our ethical and practical ambition.  That is why the trains going westward were so crowded that there was hardly room enough to stand in them.  We were restoring ourselves in Kansas and Missouri.  After lecturing, in the spring of 1887, in fifteen Western cities, including Chicago, St. Louis, and westward to the extreme boundaries of Kansas, I returned a Westerner to convert the Easterner.  In the West they called this prosperity a boom, but I never liked the word, for a boom having swung one way is sure to swing the other.  It was a revival of enterprise which, starting in Birmingham, Ala., advanced through Tennessee, and spread to Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri.  My forecast at this time was that the men who went West then would be the successes in the next twenty years.  The centre of American population, which two years before had been a little west of Cincinnati, had moved to Kansas, the heart of the continent.  The national Capital should have been midway between the Atlantic and the Pacific, in which case the great white buildings in Washington could have been turned into art academies, and museums and libraries.

Prohibition in Kansas and Iowa was making honest men.  I did not see an intoxicated man in either of these States.  All the young men in Kansas and Iowa were either prohibitionists or loafers.  The West had lost the song plaintive and adopted the song jubilant.