What a magnificent body of men are those Members of Parliament.  They meet and go about without the ostentation of some of our men in Congress.  Men of great position in England are born to it; they are not so afraid of losing it as our celebrated Republicans and Democrats.  Even the man who comes up into political power from the masses in England is more likely to hold his position than if he had triumphed in American politics.

In the spring and summer of 1880 I took a long and exhaustive trip across our continent, and completely lost the common dread of emigration that was then being talked about.  There was room enough for fifty new nations between Omaha and Cheyenne, room for more still between Cheyenne and Ogden, from Salt Lake City to Sacramento.

An unpretentious youth, Carey by name, whom I had known in Philadelphia, went West in ’67.  I found him in Cheyenne a leading citizen.  He had been District Attorney, then judge of one of the courts, owned a city block, a cattle ranch, and was worth about $500,000.  There wasn’t room enough for him in Philadelphia.  Senator Hill of Colorado told me, while in Denver, about a man who came out there from the East to be a miner.  He began digging under a tree because it was shady.  People passed by and laughed at him.  He kept on digging.  After a while he sent a waggon load of the dust to be assayed, and there was $9,000 worth of metal in it.  He retired with a fortune.

A man with $3,000 and good health could have gone West in 1880, invested it in cattle, and made a fortune.  San Francisco was only forty-five years old then, Denver thirty-five, Leadville sixteen, Kansas City thirty-five.  They looked a hundred at least.  Leadville was then a place of palatial hotels, elegant churches, boulevards and streets.  The West was just aching to show how fast it could build cities.  Leadville was the most lied about.  It was reported that I explored Leadville till long after midnight, looking at its wickedness.  I didn’t.  All the exploring I did in Leadville was in about six minutes, from the wide open doors of the gambling houses on two of the main streets; but the next day it was telegraphed all over the United States.  There were more telephones in Leadville in 1880 than in any other city in the United States, to its population.  Some of the best people of Brooklyn and New York lived there.  The newspaper correspondents lost money in the gambling houses there, and so they didn’t like Leadville, and told the world it was a bad place, which was a misrepresentation.  It is a well known law of human nature that a man usually hates a place where he did not behave well.  I found perfect order there, to my surprise.  There was a vigilance committee in Leadville composed of bankers and merchants.  It was their business to give a too cumbrous law a boost.  The week before I got to Leadville this committee hanged two men.  The next day eighty scoundrels took the hint and left Leadville.