I kept in touch with affairs in England and Europe through the London
_Times_. I was also a subscriber to Greeley's _New Yorker_; and I did
not slight the local paper, which belabored Douglas in proportion as he
increased in popularity and power. I read many books as well.

For I felt the stir of a new age. I saw the North, the country around
me, growing in wealth and dominance. I saw old despotisms giving way and
new ones coming to take their place. The factory system was arising, due
to machinery. Weaving and spinning processes had improved. The cry of
women and children crowded in the factories of Pennsylvania began to be
heard. The hours of toil were long. And if the whip descended upon the
back of the negro in the South, the factory overseer in Philadelphia
flogged the laborer who did not work enough to suit him, or who was
tardy at the task. Women and children there were feeling the lash of the
whip. Just now there was talk of a machine which would cut as much grain
in a day as six men could cut with scythes. I ordered two of these
machines for the next year, for I was farming more and more on a big
scale. But what seemed most wonderful to me was an instrument now being
talked about which sent messages by electricity. It was not perfected
yet. It was treated with skepticism. But if it could be! If I could get
a message from St. Louis, a distance of more than a hundred miles, in a
few minutes or an hour!

Douglas came out to see me one night to tell me what was on his mind. He
wanted to be the prosecuting attorney. Consider the straits of a young
man who must make his way and get a place in the world! Is there
anything more desperate at times? What was the law business in this
community, divided, as it was, by eleven lawyers, shared in by visiting
lawyers? Douglas had to live. Youth is forced to push ahead or be
crushed. I know he has been accused of manipulation in having the law
passed by which he could be appointed to the office and supplant a
rival. Well, if he had not had the gifts and the energies to do such
things, how could he have served the country and maintained himself? The
next February before he was twenty-two, he was state's attorney for the
district. No wonder that lesser men railed at him. But what one of them
would not have done the same thing if he could?

And now I was seeing much of Dorothy. What did it mean? Was she only my
friend? Reverdy, her brother, was my most intimate friend. Did she