"Free fiddlesticks"! Alfred was in a rage. "Melting-pot be hanged. There wall be anarchy in this land if these rattlesnakes are not scotched--you can't kill them. A republic is doomed to tyranny; the worst sort of tyranny--public opinion. I grant you, Milt, that the modern breed of those Mayflower pests are more tyrannical than the original lot of religious degenerates--what else were they, crazy as lunatics with their private interpretations of biblical texts; the book of the Apocalypse is responsible for more madmen than any other so-called sacred script in existence--yet the neo-puritan means to put us all in a little hell of his own. He calls it heaven, but it will be hell. The country is overrun by astrologists, fortune-tellers, unchristian scientists, holy howlers. We are not far from being a nation of mad folk. One neurosis follows another. I tell you--anarchy looms ahead. And woman-suffrage--the worst of all our tyrants; woman, the eternal ninny. She is to rule, as if she doesn't play her sex now for all it's worth. Pardon me, Milt--she is right as a cook or a concubine, but as a ruler! Excuse me. And prohibition. It's coming, and in its train, drugs and other tyrannies. Men will smoke bad tobacco in fear and trembling. The melting-pot--I see the locusts swarming for their last attack on the good things of America. Poor old America! She succumbed because she was too sentimental, and sentimentality breeds altruism, and altruism breeds busybodies, and busy bodies breed war. War breeds more war, and then the final catastrophe...."