The word stung me like an adder; and I half rose from my chair, my face suffused and my eyes indignant.

“Why, what is the matter?” asked Maximilian; “I hope I have said nothing to offend you.”

I fell back in my chair, ashamed of the exhibition of feeling into which I had been momentarily betrayed, and replied: 

“Oh, no; but I am sure you are wrong.  If you had looked, for but a moment, at the younger of the two, you would never have made such a remark.”

“I meant no harm,” he answered, “but the Prince is a widower; he has a perfect harem in his palace; he has his agents at work everywhere buying up handsome women; and when I saw two such in his carriage, I naturally came to the conclusion that they were of that character.”

“Buying up women!” I exclaimed; “what are you talking about?  This is free America, and the twentieth century.  Do you dream that it is a Mohammedan land?”

“It isn’t anything half so good,” he retorted; “it is enslaved America; and the older we grow the worse for us.  There was a golden age once in America—­an age of liberty; of comparatively equal distribution of wealth; of democratic institutions.  Now we have but the shell and semblance of all that.  We are a Republic only in name; free only in forms.  Mohammedanism—­and we must do the Arabian prophet the justice to say that he established a religion of temperance and cleanliness, without a single superstition—­never knew, in its worst estate, a more complete and abominable despotism than that under which we live.  And as it would be worse to starve to death in sight of the most delicious viands than in the midst of a foodless desert, so the very assertions, constantly dinned in our ears by the hireling newspapers, that we are the freest people on earth, serve only to make our slavery more bitter and unbearable.  But as to the buying up of women for the harems of the wealthy, that is an old story, my dear friend.  More than a century ago the editor of a leading journal in London was imprisoned for exposing it.  The virtuous community punished the man who protested against the sin, and took the sinners to its loving bosom.  And in this last century matters have grown every day worse and worse.  Starvation overrides all moralities; the convictions of the mind give way to the necessities of the body.  The poet said long ago: 

                        “’Women are not
     In their best fortunes strong, but want will perjure
     The ne’er-touched vestal.’

“But he need not have confined this observation to women.  The strongest resolves of men melt in the fire of want like figures of wax.  It is simply a question of increasing the pressure to find the point where virtue inevitably breaks.  Morality, in man or woman, is a magnificent flower which blossoms only in the rich soil of prosperity:  impoverish the land and the bloom withers.  If there are cases that seem to you otherwise, it is simply because the pressure has not been great enough; sufficient nourishment has not yet been withdrawn from the soil.  Dignity, decency, honor, fade away when man or woman is reduced to shabby, shameful, degrading, cruel wretchedness.  Before the clamors of the stomach the soul is silent.”