there. The newspaper correspondents lost money in the gambling houses
there, and so they didn't like Leadville, and told the world it was a
bad place, which was a misrepresentation. It is a well known law of
human nature that a man usually hates a place where he did not behave
well. I found perfect order there, to my surprise. There was a vigilance
committee in Leadville composed of bankers and merchants. It was their
business to give a too cumbrous law a boost. The week before I got to
Leadville this committee hanged two men. The next day eighty scoundrels
took the hint and left Leadville. A great institution was the vigilance
committee of those early Western days. They saved San Francisco, and
Cheyenne, and Leadville. I wish they had been in Brooklyn when I was
there. The West was not slow to assimilate the elegancies of life
either. There were beautiful picture galleries in Omaha, and Denver, and
Sacramento, and San Francisco. There was more elaboration and
advancement of dress in the West than there was in the East in 1880. The
cravats of the young men in Cheyenne were quite as surprising, and the
young ladies of Cheyenne went down the street with the elbow wabble,
then fashionable in New York. San Francisco was Chicago intensified, and
yet then it was a mere boy of a city, living in a garden of Eden, called
California. On my return came Mr. Garfield's election. It was quietly
and peaceably effected, but there followed that exposure of political
outrages concerning his election, the Morey forgeries. I hoped then that
this villainy would split the Republican and Democratic parties into new
fields, that it would spilt the North and the South into a different
sectional feeling. I hoped that there would be a complete upheaval, a
renewed and cleaner political system as a consequence. But the reform
movement is always slower than any other.

I remember the harsh things that were said in our denomination of
Lucretia Mott, the quakeress, the reformer, the world-renowned woman