The steel-mills of Mr. Durrett and Mr. Hambleton, he continued, would be forced to shut down, and thousands of workmen would starve.  This was just a sample of what would happen.  Prosperity would cease, he declared.  That word, Prosperity, made a deep impression on me, and I recall the certain reverential emphasis he laid on it.  And while my solicitude for the workmen was not so great as his and Mr. Durrett’s, I was concerned as to what would happen to us if those twin gods, the Tariff and Prosperity, should take their departure from the land.  Knowing my love for the good things of the table, my father intimated, with a rare humour I failed to appreciate, that we should have to live henceforth in spartan simplicity.  After that, like the intelligent workman, I was firmer than ever for the Tariff.

Such was the idealistic plane on which—­and from a good man—­I received my first political instruction!  And for a long time I connected the dominance of the Republican Party with the continuation of manna and quails, in other words, with nothing that had to do with the spiritual welfare of any citizen, but with clothing and food and material comforts.  My education was progressing....

Though my father revered Plato and Aristotle, he did not, apparently, take very seriously the contention that that government alone is good “which seeks to attain the permanent interests of the governed by evolving the character of its citizens.”  To put the matter brutally, politics, despite the lofty sentiments on the transparencies in torchlight processions, had only to do with the belly, not the soul.

Politics and government, one perceives, had nothing to do with religion, nor education with any of these.  A secularized and disjointed world!  Our leading citizens, learned in the classics though some of them might be, paid no heed to the dictum of the Greek idealist, who was more practical than they would have supposed.  “The man who does not carry his city within his heart is a spiritual starveling.”

One evening, a year or two after that tariff campaign, I was pretending to study my lessons under the student lamp in the sitting-room while my mother sewed and my father wrote at his desk, when there was a ring at the door-bell.  I welcomed any interruption, even though the visitor proved to be only the druggist’s boy; and there was always the possibility of a telegram announcing, for instance, the death of a relative.  Such had once been the case when my Uncle Avery Paret had died in New York, and I was taken out of school for a blissful four days for the funeral.