We young men of that time were mostly Republicans, but some of us were Democrats and some of us were Southerners, or derivatively Southern. I have said how little society with us was affected by New England, even in such a custom as Thanksgiving, and I may go a little farther and say how it was characterized for good as well as for evil by the nearer South rather than the farther East, but more for good than for evil. Many people of Southern origin among us had chosen a Northern home because they would rather live in a Free State than a Slave State; they had not cast their sectional patriotism, but when it came to a question of which ideal should prevail, they preferred the Northern ideal. They derived from that South which antedated the invention of the cotton-gin, and which could take a leading part in keeping the Northwestern Territory free, with Ohio the first Free State born of that great mother of Free States. The younger generation of their blood were native Ohioans, and these were not distinguishable from the children of the New-Englanders and the Scotch-Irish Pennsylvanians by anything that I can remember. We had already begun to be Ohioans, with an accent of our own, and I suppose our manners were simpler and freer than those of the East, but the American manners were then everywhere simple and free, and are so yet, I believe, among ninety-nine hundred-thousandths of our ninety-nine millions. It seems to me now that the manners in Columbus were very good then among the young people. No one can say what change the over-muchness of subsequent money may have made in them, but one likes to think the change, if any, is not for the better. There seems to have been greater pecuniary equality then than there is now; there was an evener sky-line, with scarcely a sky-scraping millionaire breaking it anywhere. Within what was recognized as society there was as much social as pecuniary equality; apparently one met the same people everywhere on that easily ascertained level above the people who worked for their living with their hands. These were excluded, as they always have been excluded from society in all times and places; so that if I had still been a compositor at the printer's case I could not have been received at any of the houses that welcomed me as a journalist, though that did not occur to me then, and only just now occurs to me, as something strange and sad; something that forever belies our democracy, but is so fast and deep-rooted in the conditions which our plutocracy has kept from our ancestral monarchies and oligarchies and must keep as long as men live upon one another in the law of competition.