American stomachs have not time enough to wait on nature. Hence doctors’ gigs and apoplectic whirligigs. A patent stomach that should grind grist for a neighborhood or village, and leave the unstomached worker to avail himself of his accelerating opportunities, would command a high price. It would be hired out around the neighborhood, like a threshing-machine or corn-sheller. In fact, American households might in general be advantageously grouped around or framed into one of these mechanical digesters, with attachments for washing out, ironing, and starching their clothes, and for doing up the wasteful processes of visiting, to economic advantages that would tell on the census. One of the disadvantages would be the discouragement of that branch of American industry, now so largely prosperous, of doctors’ bills, chasing in vain after many of the living and at last only overtaking the administrator of the estate, clean out of breath. Of course, the benefits of associated wealth and skill have not been overlooked as levers to move enterprises, people’s purses, and sometimes those low-down, coarse adjectives, volcanic in their origin, which, in case of dissatisfaction, erupt over the surface. Universal clothes-wringers are the product of this observation. So other combinations have been and are rapidly forming to wring money out of city, State, and Federal exchequers. It is curious to see how the handles of these joint pumping and pocket-exhausting companies all lie towards the great cities. Most of the business in the United States, north of Washington, is carried on after an express and accelerated fashion, which is impatient of holidays, and rides over the Fourth of July even, as ruthlessly as an express-train over the human obstruction which thus gets forwarded on his journey out of the United States with a despatch almost enviable to the survivors. Even the Federal Constitution prescribes “speedy trials” as a right, and treats a man as injured who does not go it in a capital way, when on that precipitous road, with a final rush. The common law of the United States presumes that all are minute-men, and know the quick step; while the uncommon law in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado dispenses with the tedious confinement between the apprehension of the accused and his transporting sentence and uprising. “Delays are dangerous,” is their condensed code. [Illustration: MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN A. D. 1900. (p. 520) ] The law of dower, as practically enforced, is shaped by the same rapidly revolving lathe, which makes so much of our domestic hollow-ware. The wife spends the principal before her husband’s death, and thus shuns the tedious complications of legal proceedings, which admeasures the dower often to the enterpising lawyer, the bailiffs, and the court clerks.