CHAPTER XVII.

IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA.

Alfred Cridge, who reminded me so much of my brother David that I felt at home with him immediately, had prepared the way for my lectures on effective voting in San Francisco.  He was an even greater enthusiast than I.  “America needs the reform more than Australia,” he used to say.  But if America needs effective voting to check corruption, Australia needs it just as much to prevent the degradation of political life in the Commonwealth and States to the level of American politics.  My lectures in San Francisco, as elsewhere in America, were well attended, and even better received.  Party politics had crushed out the best elements of political life, and to be independent of either party gave a candidate, as an agent told Judge Lindsay when he was contesting the governorship of Colorado, “as much chance as a snowball would have in hell.”  So that reformers everywhere were eager to hear of a system of voting that would free the electors from the tyranny of parties, and at the same time render a candidate independent of the votes of heckling minorities, and dependent only on the votes of the men who believed in him and his politics.  I met men and women interested in public affairs—­some of them well known, others most worthy to be known, and all willing to lend the weight of their character and intelligence to the betterment of human conditions at home and abroad.  Among these were Judge Maguire, a leader of the Bar in San Francisco and a member of the State Legislature, who had fought trusts, “grafters,” and “boodlers” through the whole of his public career, and Mr. James Barry, proprietor of The Star.

“You come from Australia, the home of the secret ballot?” was the greeting I often received, and that really was my passport to the hearts of reformers all over America.  From all sides I heard that it was to the energy and zeal of the Singletaxers in the various States—­a well-organized and compact body—­that the adoption of the secret ballot was due.  To that celebrated journalist, poetess, and economic writer, Charlotte Perkins Stetson, who was a cultured Bostonian, living in San Francisco, I owed one of the best women’s meetings I ever addressed.  The subject was “State children and the compulsory clauses in our Education Act,” and everywhere in the States people were interested in the splendid work of our State Children’s Department and educational methods.  Intelligence and not wealth I found to be the passport to social life among the Americans I met.  At a social evening ladies as well as their escorts were expected to remove bonnets and mantles in the hall, instead of being invited into a private room as in Australia—­a custom I thought curious until usage made it familiar.  The homeliness and unostentatiousness of the middle class American were captivating.  My interests have always been in people and in the things that