co does not grow in Russia, and the Prophet of
Discouragement may never have eaten of it; perhaps he is only like the
shepherd, mainly withdrawn from human intercourse and sympathy in a
morbid mental isolation, hearing only the bleat, bleat, bleat of the
'muxhiks' in the dullness of the steppes, wandering round in his own
sated mind until he has lost all clew to life. Whatever the cause may be,
clearly he is 'locoed'. All his theories have worked out to the
conclusion that the world is a gigantic mistake, love is nothing but
animality, marriage is immorality; according to astronomical calculations
this teeming globe and all its life must end some time; and why not now?
There shall be no more marriage, no more children; the present population
shall wind up its affairs with decent haste, and one by one quit the
scene of their failure, and avoid all the worry of a useless struggle.

This gospel of the blessedness of extinction has come too late to enable
us to profit by it in our decennial enumeration. How different the census
would have been if taken in the spirit of this new light! How much
bitterness, how much hateful rivalry would have been spared! We should
then have desired a reduction of the population, not an increase of it.
There would have been a pious rivalry among all the towns and cities on
the way to the millennium of extinction to show the least number of
inhabitants; and those towns would have been happiest which could exhibit
not only a marked decline in numbers, but the greater number of old
people. Beautiful St. Paul would have held a thanksgiving service, and
invited the Minneapolis enumerators to the feast, Kansas City and St.
Louis and San Francisco, and a hundred other places, would not have
desired a recount, except, perhaps, for overestimate; they would not have
said that thousands were away at the sea or in the mountains, but, on the
contrary, that thousands who did not belong there, attracted by the
salubrity of the climate, and the desire to injure the town's reputation,
had crowded in there in census time. The newspapers, instead of calling
on people to send in the names of the unenumerated, would have rejoiced
at the small returns, as they would have done if the census had been for
the purpose of levying the federal tax upon each place according to its
population. Chicago--well, perhaps the Prophet of the Steppes would have
made an exception of Chicago, and been cynically delighted to push it on