t off, and so forth. The unhappy laborers were subject to the
most cruel oppressions, but the knowledge that their wages came from the
pockets of those whom their work nowise benefited was so gratifying to
them that nothing could induce them to leave the service of their
heartless employers to engage in lighter and more useful labor.

Another characteristic of "Protection" was the maintenance at the
principal seaports of "customs-houses," which were strong fortifications
armed with heavy guns for the purpose of destroying or driving away the
trading ships of foreign nations. It was this that caused the Connected
States to be known abroad as the "Hermit Republic," a name of which its
infatuated citizens were strangely proud, although they had themselves
sent armed ships to open the ports of Japan and other Oriental countries
to their own commerce. In their own case, if a foreign ship came empty and
succeeded in evading the fire of the "customs-house," as sometimes
occurred, she was permitted to take away a cargo.

It is obvious that such a system was distinctly evil, but it must be
confessed our uncertainty regarding the whole matter of "Protection" does
not justify us in assigning it a definite place among the causes of
national decay. That in some way it produced an enormous revenue is
certain, and that the method was dishonest is no less so; for this
revenue--known as a "surplus"--was so abhorred while it lay in the
treasury that all were agreed upon the expediency of getting rid of it,
two great political parties existing for apparently no other purpose than
the patriotic one of taking it out.

But how, it may be asked, could people so misgoverned get on, even as well
as they did?

From the records that have come down to us it does not appear that they
got on very well. They were preyed upon by all sorts of political
adventurers, whose power in most instances was limited only by the
contemporaneous power of other political adventurers equally unscrupulous.
A full half of the taxes wrung from them was stolen. Their public lands,
millions of square miles, were parceled out among banded conspirators.
Their roads and the streets of their cities were nearly impassable. Their
public buildings, conceived in abominable taste and representing enormous
sums of money, which never were used in their construction, began to
tumble about the ears of the workmen before they were completed. The most
delicate and important function