Agriculture was beginning to be undertaken seriously; and while this would be an ultimate source of wealth, its immediate effect was to diminish the demand for imported foodstuffs--another blow to a purely mercantile city. All this made for excitement, some immediate gain, but a sure ultimate loss. Markets fluctuated wildly. A ship in sight threw operators into a fever. No one knew what she might be carrying, or how she would, affect prices. It was, therefore, positively unsafe to keep-many goods is stock. Quick, immediate sales were the rule. And failures were many. Now in these middle fifties the pinch was beginning at last to itself felt. Everybody was a little vague about it all, and nobody had gone so far as to formulate his dissatisfactions or his remedies. The tangible result was the formation of two as yet inchoate elements, representing the extremes of ideas and of interests. The first of these elements--that can with equal justice be called the parasitic or the middleman class--consisted in itself of several sorts of people. The nucleus was a small, intellectually honest set of men who believed, in the law _per se_, in the sacredness of formal institutions in the constitution, and in the subservience of the individual to the institution. This was temperamental. Behind them were many much larger groups of those needed either the interpretation or the protection of the law for their private interests. These were of all sorts from honest literal-minded dealers, through shady contractors and operators, down to grafters and the very lowest type of strong-arm bullies. The tone and respectability came from the first, the practical results from the second. The first class had a genuine intellectual contempt for men whose minds could not see--or at least would not accept--the same subtleties that it did. Its members were fond of such phrases as the "lawless mob," or the "subversion of time-honoured institutions." This small, subjectively honest, conservative, specially trained element must not be forgotten in the final estimate of what later came to be known as the "Law and Order" party. On the other hand was first of all an equally small nucleus of thinking men whose respect for the law, merely as law, was not so profound; men who were, reluctantly, willing to admit that when law completely broke down in encompassing justice, individualism was justified in stepping in. Behind them was a vast body of more or less unthinking men who recognized the indubitable facts that the law had become a farce, that justice had degenerated to tricks, and who were, therefore, instinctively against law, lawyers, and everybody who had anything to do with them.