Politics in those days--and not alone in those days either--were mean, and while I do not intend to say that this meanness bowed me with despair, it did fill me with disgust, and made the whole business utterly distasteful. Politics were almost wholly personal, there was then no conception of them as related to social life. An awakening was coming, to be sure, and the signs were then apparent, even if but few saw them. They were to most quite dim; but there were here and there in the land dreamers of a sort, who had caught a new vision. The feeling of it, the emotion, was to find expression in Mr. Bryan’s great campaign in 1896; but there was then in Chicago a little group, men who had read Henry George, or, without reading him, had looked out on life intelligently and gained a concept of it, or perhaps had merely felt in themselves the stirrings of a new social instinct, and these saw, or thought they saw, the way to a better social order. They could not in those days gain so patient a hearing for their views as they have since, if any hearing they have had may after all be called patient; they were not so very patient themselves, perhaps, as men are quite apt not to be when they think they see as clearly as though a perpetual lightning blazed in the sky exactly what is the matter with the world, and have a simple formula, which, were it but tried, would instantly and infallibly make everything all right. But these men were not in politics; some of them were too impractical ever to be, and the only man in politics who understood them at all was Altgeld. Generally, the moral atmosphere of politics was foul and heavy with the feculence of all the debauchery that is inseparable from privilege. The personnel of politics was generally low; and in city councils and state legislatures there was a cynical contempt of all the finer sentiments. It was not alone that provincialism and philistinism which stand so obdurately and with such bovine stupidity in the way of progress; there was a positive scorn of the virtues, and the alliance between the lobbyists and the lawyers of the great corporation interests on the one hand, and the managers of both the great political parties on the other, was a fact, the worst feature of which was that no one seemed to care, or if a few did care, they did not know what to do about it. It was a joke among the newspaper men, who had little respect for the men who filled the positions of power and responsibility; the wonder was, indeed, after such association, that they had any respect left for anything in the world. Only the other day, reading Walt Whitman’s terrific arraignment of the powers that were in control of the government of the nation in Buchanan’s time, his awful catalogue of the sorts of men who composed the directorate of affairs,--it may be read in his prose works by those who wish,--I was struck by the similarity in this respect of that time