His English great-great-grandfather had been historically active in the reforms of 1832; a great-uncle had devoted his services to the passing of the Reform Act of 1867; and a cousin to the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883. Reform was in his blood, and as, after all, the United States was as much his own as Great Britain, he hoped in time to feel for it the same passion of affection he had cherished for the country that had given him fame and honors with both hands. And he knew that his other hope of being of practical service to the United States in accordance with his own ideal was no idle dream, for it was quite apparent from the newspapers and reviews that the best men all over the country were awake at last to the perils besetting the Republic, and that a bloodless revolution was slowly making its way over the country. He had unmitigated contempt for the revolutionist of the red shirt, insatiable for the notoriety so easily obtained by appealing to the passions of men a shade more ignorant than himself; no blood revolution was possible in the United States during its present condition of prosperity. No country can be universally roused to revolt with any weapons more deadly than words until it has long felt the pinch of hunger in its vitals, and watched millions starve while hundreds consumed the fat of the land. No doubt there was grinding poverty in the crowded tenement districts of the Eastern States, but those men were not the stuff of which revolutionists were made, if only because they deliberately elected the rigors of the town rather than supply the crying demand for labor and servants throughout the country. It was only the idle that foregathered and talked anarchism or even socialism; not those that cared to work.