“He did not seem to think the world held out any very bright inducements for him to leave home,” the Altrurian suggested.
“Oh, let him get one of these lively, pushing Yankee girls for a wife, and he will think very differently,” said Mrs. Makely.
The Altrurian disappeared that afternoon, and I saw little or nothing of him till the next day at supper. Then he said he had been spending the time with young Camp, who had shown him something of the farm-work, and introduced him to several of the neighbors; he was very much interested in it all, because at home he was, at present, engaged in farm-work himself, and he was curious to contrast the American and Altrurian methods. We began to talk of the farming interest again, later in the day, when the members of our little group came together, and I told them what the Altrurian had been doing. The doctor had been suddenly called back to town; but the minister was there, and the lawyer and the professor and the banker and the manufacturer.
It was the banker who began to comment on what I said, and he seemed to be in the frank humor of the Saturday night before. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a hard life, and they have to look sharp if they expect to make both ends meet. I would not like to undertake it myself with their resources.”
The professor smiled, in asking the Altrurian: “Did your agricultural friends tell you anything of the little rural traffic in votes that they carry on about election time? That is one of the side means they have of making both ends meet.”
“I don’t understand,” said the Altrurian.
“Why, you know, you can buy votes among our virtuous yeomen from two dollars up at the ordinary elections. When party feeling runs high, and there are vital questions at stake, the votes cost more.”
The Altrurian looked round at us all aghast. “Do, you mean that Americans buy votes?”
The professor smiled again. “Oh no; I only mean that they sell them. Well, I don’t wonder that they rather prefer to blink the fact; but it is a fact, nevertheless, and pretty notorious.”
“Good heavens!” cried the Altrurian. “And what defence have they for such treason? I don’t mean those who sell; from what I have seen of the bareness and hardship of their lives, I could well imagine that there might sometimes come a pinch when they would be glad of the few dollars that they could get in that way; but what have those who buy to say?”