“A servant! Call her anything but that, ’Squire, if you wish for success! A prisoner accused of capital crimes, with a servant, would be certain to be condemned. Even the court would hardly stand _that_.” “Timms, you are a shrewd, sagacious fellow, and are apt to laugh in your sleeve at follies of this nature, as I well know from long acquaintance; and here you insist on one of the greatest of all the absurdities.” “Things are changed in Ameriky, Mr. Dunscomb. The people are beginning to govern; and when they can’t do it legally, they do it without law. Don’t you see what the papers say about having operas and play-houses at the people’s prices, and the right to hiss? There’s Constitution for you! I wonder what Kent and Blackstone would say to _that_?” “Sure enough. They would find some novel features in a liberty which says a man shall not set the price on the seats in his own theatre, and that the hissing may be done by an audience in the _streets_. The facts are, Timms, that all these abuses about O. P.’s, and controlling other persons’ concerns under the pretence that the public has rights where, as a public, it has no rights at all, come from the reaction of a half-way liberty in other countries. Here, where the people are really free, having all the power, and where no political right is hereditary, the people ought, at least, to respect their own ordinances.” “Do you not consider a theatre a public place, ’Squire Dunscomb?” “In one sense it is, certainly; but not in the sense that bears on this pretended power over it. The very circumstance that the audience pay for their seats, makes it, in law as in fact, a matter of covenant. As for this newfangled absurdity about its being a duty to furnish low-priced seats for the poor, where they may sit and look at pretty women because they cannot see them elsewhere, it is scarcely worth an argument. If the rich should demand that the wives and daughters of the poor should be paraded in the pits and galleries, for _their_ patrician eyes to feast on, a pretty clamour there would be! If the state requires cheap theatres, and cheap women, let the state pay for them, as it does for its other wants; but, if these amusements are to be the object of private speculations, let private wisdom control them. I have no respect for one-sided liberty, let it cant as much as it may.” “Well, I don’t know, sir; I have read some of these articles, and they seemed to me——” “What—convincing?” “Perhaps not just that, ’Squire; but very _agreeable_. I’m not rich enough to pay for a high place at an opera or a theatre; and it is pleasant to fancy that a poor feller can get one of the best seats at half-price. Now, in England, they tell me, the public won’t stand prices they don’t like.”