One of the first to join, after our florist friend and the great hostess of Springfield, is John Fletcher, a Doubter. He is a person in whom we place much confidence in practical affairs. He is high authority in the financial circles of Springfield. He is religious, on Sunday only, from eleven till twelve-thirty, when he sits in his pew. He represents the present State House view which takes for granted that the fewer ideas men have the better, if only the crowd in power “get theirs.” The general assumption is:—politics is business and business is politics and the only worth while citizens are those that “get the money,” and, of course, those others who keep it safely and who correctly add the accounts till the money is wanted. They hate any new current in any party. And they hate the idea of any clan wanting anything except established well-dressed bank accounts to rule the city. Children are sent to universities to polish their manners, but not to bring back any changed thoughts on these subjects. The gentleman who incarnates this dream lives in the north, is therefore a Republican. He is quite sure the Emancipation Proclamation meant that millionaires are exempt from criticism, except from other millionaires or their shrewedest lackeys, and that the Emancipation Proclamation was sent forth into the world to establish more thoroughly the lackey, the toady, the tuft hunter, the snob, the bootlicker, and the parasite, in the service of the stupidest holders of money and land. He will defend this position quite ardently, almost in those terms, and he is quite sure that anyone who protests against his views is a “red.” And “red,” “radical,” “anarchist,” and “liberal” are absolutely synonymous, according to his thinking. He is sure that anyone who does not want to be a millionaire or serve one well is contemplating arson. He is quite sure that every large bank account is automatically moral, that every small one is almost moral, and the one crime is to be without money. He is quite convinced that Abraham Lincoln died to establish such ideals more firmly in the Republican Party, and when he is in the South he maintains that Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson lived and toiled and suffered to establish them in the Democratic Party, and did it with eminent success: that all other notions have been recently imported from the shameful streets of Russia. When he sent his son to college he urged him to spend money on the conservative professors and their sons and daughters, and to put the radical professors in bad odor with the “best fellows,” and get them fired as soon as the trustees would listen to one so young.