great spiritual truth or principle at the bottom of correctly and beautifully buying a turnip is to begin by saying that you do not want a turnip at all, that you never eat turnips, and none of your family, and that they never would.  The other man begins by pointing out that he is never going to sell another turnip as long as he lives, if he can help it.  Gradually the facts are allowed to edge in until at last, and when each man has taken off God knows how much from the value of his soul, and spent two shillings’ worth of time on keeping a halfpenny in his pocket, both parties separate courteously, only to carry out the same spiritual truth on a radish perhaps or a spool of thread, or it may be even a house and lot, or a battleship, or a war, or a rumour of a war, with somebody.

The United States, speaking broadly, is not like this.  But it might have been.

In the United States some forty years ago, being a new country, and being a country where everything a man did was in the nature of things, felt to be a first experiment, everybody felt democratic and independent, and as if he were making the laws of the universe just for himself as he went along.

There was a period of ten years or so in which every spool of thread and bit of dress goods—­everything that people wore on their bodies or put in their months, and everything that they read, came up and had to be considered as an original first proposition, as if there never had been a spool of thread before, as if each bit of dress goods was, or was capable of being, a new fresh experiment, with an adventurous price on it; and before we knew it a moral nagging and edging and hitching had set in, and was fast becoming in America an American trait, and fixing itself by daily repetition upon the imagination of the people.

The shopping of a country is, on the whole, from a psychologist’s point of view, the most spiritual energy, the most irrevocable, most implacable meter there can ever be of the religion a country really has.

There was no clergyman in America who could have made the slightest impression on this great national list or trend of always getting things for less than they were worth—­this rut of never doing as one would be done by.  What was there that could be done with an obstinate, pervasive, unceasing habit of the people like this?

What was there that could be done to touch the imagination of the crowd?

Six thousand women a day were going in and out of A.T.  Stewart’s great store on Broadway at that time.  A.T.  Stewart announced to New York suddenly in huge letters one day, that from that day forward there should be one price for everything sold in his store, and that that price would be paid for it by everybody.

A.T.  Stewart’s store was the largest, most successful, original, and most closely watched store in America.

The six thousand women became one thousand.

Then two thousand.  Some of them had found that they finished their shopping sooner; the better class of women, those whose time was worth the most, and whose custom was the largest, gradually found they did not want to shop anywhere else.  The two thousand became three thousand, four thousand, six thousand, ten thousand, twelve thousand.