with the notion that the law knows no preferences. The preferences which are more to the point at present are those in which government force is used to enrich the already rich and impoverish the impoverished still further. At the very time that property was bitterly resisting enlightened pleas for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, for the enactment of a mechanic's lien law, and for the extension of the suffrage franchise it was using the public money of the whole people for its personal and private enterprises. In works dealing with those times it is not often that we get penetration into the underlying methods of the trading class. But a lucid insight is inadvertently given by Walter Barrett (who, for sixty years, was in the mercantile trade), in his smug and conventional, but quaintly entertaining, volumes, "The Merchants of Old New York." This strong instance shows like a flashlight that while the success of the shippers was attributed to a fine category of energetic qualities, the benevolent assistance of the United States Government was, in a large measure, responsible for part of their accumulations.
THE SHIPPERS' HUGE GRAFT.
The