In those days the prairie farmers were all gentlemen, high-minded, truthful, honourable, and hospitable.  There were no poor houses, no asylums.  All orphans were adopted and treated as members of some family in the neighbourhood.

I am informed that things are quite different now.  The march of empire has been rapid; many men have grown rich, to use a novel expression, beyond the dreams of avarice, and ten times as many have grown poor and discontented.

The great question for statesmen now is, “What is to be done for the relief of the masses?” and the answer to it is as difficult to find as ever.

But I have to proceed up the Illinois river.

The steamboat stopped at Lasalle, the head of navigation, and we had then to travel on the Illinois and Michigan canal.  We went on board a narrow passenger boat towed by two horses, and followed by two freight barges.  We did not go at a breakneck pace, and had plenty of time for conversation, and to look at the scenery, which consisted of prairies, sloughs, woods, and rivers.  The picture lacked background, as there is nothing in Illinois deserving the name of hill.  But we passed an ancient monument, a tall pillar, rising out of the bed of the Illinois river.  It is called “Starved Rock.”  Once a number of Indian warriors, pursued by white men, climbed up the almost perpendicular sides of the pillar.  They had no food, and though the stream was flowing beneath them, they could not obtain a drink of water without danger of death from rifle bullets.  The white men instituted a blockade of the pillar, and the red men all perished of starvation on the top of it.

The conversation was conducted by the captain of the canal boat, as he walked on the deck to and fro.  He was full of information.  He said he was a native of Kentucky; had come down the Ohio river from Louisville; was taking freight to Chicago; reckoned he was bound to rake in the dollars on the canal; was no dog-gonned Abolitionist; niggers were made to work for white folks; they had no souls any more than a horse; he’d like to see the man who would argue the point.

Mrs. Beecher Stowe was then writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” at too great a distance to hear the challenge, but a greenhorn ventured to argue the point.

“What about the mulatto?  Half black, half white.  His father being a white man had a whole soul; his mother being black had no soul.  Has the mulatto a whole soul, half a soul, or no soul at all?”

The captain paused in his walk, with both hands in his pockets, gazed at the argumentative greenhorn, turned his quid, spat across the canal, went away whistling “Old Dan Tucker,” and left the question of the mulatto’s soul unsolved.

When I arrived at Joliet there was a land boom at Chicago.  The canal company had cut up their alternate sections, and were offering them at the usual alarming sacrifice.  A land boom is a dream of celestial bliss.  While it lasts, the wisest men and the greatest fools walk with ecstatic steps through the golden streets of a New Jerusalem.  I have been there three times.  It is dreadful to wake up and to find that all the gold in the street is nothing but moonshine.