“’. . .  He is very shortsighted, however, who thinks that a majority of the people, where universal suffrage exists, will submit long to a state of toil and mendicity.  The majority would soon learn to exercise its political rights, and command its representatives to carry the laws abolishing primogeniture and entails one step further, and stop all devises of land and prohibit it from being an article of sale. (In a foot-note of the editorial:) We actually heard these and several such propositions discussed by a number of apparently very intelligent mechanics, after the adjournment of a meeting called to consider the subject of wages, rents, etc.’

“At that time the main question was the condition of the public finances, and our agitation was directed chiefly against granting charters to private banks of circulation.  We condemned these as monopolies, for we were hostile to all monopolies—­that is to say, to the use of public funds or the enjoyment of public exclusive privileges by any man or association or class of men for their private profit.”

We interrupt our direct quotation from this article in order to relate one of the humors of the period, so far as these brothers were concerned, in the words of the late Mr. George Hecker: 

“When we were bakers the money in common use was the old-fashioned paper issued by private banks under State charters.  We were regularly against it.  So we bought a hand printing-press and set it up in the garret of our establishment.  All the bills we received from our customers, some thousands sometimes every week, we smoothed out and put in a pile, and then printed on their backs a saying we took from Daniel Webster (though I believe it was not quite authentic):  ’Of all the contrivances to impoverish the laboring classes of mankind, paper money is the most effective.  It fertilizes the rich man’s field with the poor man’s sweat.’  They tried to punish us for defacing money, but we beat them.  We didn’t deface it; we only printed something on the back of it.  Isaac and I often worked all night putting up handbills for our meetings, for in those days there were no professional bill-posters.”

Father’ Hecker’s acquaintance with Dr. Brownson, which had so powerful an effect upon his future career, began in 1834, when Brownson was invited to lecture in New York in favor of the principles and aims of this party.  Isaac was then in his fifteenth year.  Among the conversations recorded in the memoranda we find this reference to their earliest interview: 

“I first met Dr. Brownson in New York, in our house.  I was then reading the Washington Globe, Benton’s speeches, Calhoun’s, etc.  The elder Blair was its editor; its motto was, ’The world is governed too much’—­a motto in whose spirit there could be no great movement except in the way of revolution.  After the establishment of the American Government the principle expressed in that motto could only be abandoned or pushed into revolution and anarchy.