“The reader will have seen by the extracts given that we were a party full of enthusiasm.  I was but fifteen when our party called Dr. Brownson to deliver the lectures above mentioned.  But my brothers and I had long been playing men’s parts in politics.  I remember when eleven years of age, or a year or two older, being tall for my years, proposing and carrying through a series of resolutions on the currency question at our ward meetings.  As our name indicates—­ ’Workingman’s Democracy’—­we were a kind of Democrats.  As to the Whig party, it received no great attention from us.  At that time its chances of getting control of this State or of the United States were remote.  Our biggest fight was against the ‘usages of the party’ as in vogue in the so-called regular Democracy embodied in the Tammany Hall party.  This organization undertook to absorb us when we had grown too powerful to be ignored.  They nominated a legislative ticket made up half of their men and half of ours.  This move was to a great extent successful; but many of us who were purists refused to compromise, and ran a stump ticket, or, as it was then called, a rump ticket.  I was too young to vote, but I remember my brother George and I posting political handbills at three o’clock in the morning; this hour was not so inconvenient for us, for we were bakers.  We also worked hard on election day, keeping up and supplying the ticket booths, especially in our own ward, the old Seventh.  I remember that one of our leaders was a shoemaker named John Ryker, and that we used to meet in Science Hall, Broome Street.

“If this was the high state of my enthusiasm, so was it that of us all.  Our political faith was ardent and active.  But if we had been tested on our religious faith we should not have come off creditably; many of us had not any religion at all.  I remember saying once to my brother John that the only difference between a believer and an infidel is a few ounces of brains. . . .  We were a queer set of cranks when Dr. Brownson brought to us his powerful and eloquent advocacy, his contribution of mingled truth and error.  He delivered his first course of lectures in the old Stuyvesant Institute in Broadway, facing Bond Street—­the same hall used a little afterwards by the Unitarian Society while they were building a church for Mr. Dewey in Broadway opposite Eighth Street, the very same society now established in Lexington Avenue, with Mr. Collyer as minister.  The subsequent courses were delivered in Clinton Hall, corner of Nassau and Beekman, the site now occupied by one of our modern mammoth buildings.  I forget how much we were charged admission, except that a ticket for the whole course cost three dollars.  There was no great rush, but the lectures drew well and abundantly paid all expenses including the lecturer’s fee.  The press did not take much notice of the lectures, for the Workingman’s party had no newspapers expressly in its favor, except the one I have already quoted from.  But he was one of the few men whose power is great enough to advertise itself.  Wherever he was he was felt.  His tread was heavy and he could make way for himself.