in our Patent Office at Washington, I shall beg the reader's indulgence
while I attempt to give some account of it. It may be thought a very
curious affair, though I believe there is little about it that is
original or new. The idea of it was handed down from remote generations.

In America I know that many persons may consider the Grindwell Governing
Machine a humbug,--an obsolete, absurd, and tyrannous institution,
wholly unfitted to the nineteenth century. A machine that proposes to
think and act for the whole people, and which is rigidly opposed to the
people's thinking and acting for themselves, is likely to find little
favor among us. With us the doctrine is, that each one should think for
himself,--be an individual mind and will, and not the spoke of a wheel.
Every American voter or votress is allowed to keep his or her little
intellectual wind-mill, coffee-mill, pepper-mill, loom, steam-engine,
hand-organ, or whatever moral manufacturing or grinding apparatus he or
she likes. Each one may be his own Church or his own State, and yet be
none the less a good and useful citizen, and the union of the States be
in none the more danger. But it is not so in Grindwell. The rules of
the Grindwell machine allow no one to do his own grinding, unless his
mill-wheel is turned by the central governing power. He must allow the
big State machine to do everything,--he paying for it, of course. A
regular programme prescribes what he shall believe and say and do; and
any departure from this order is considered a violation of the laws, or
at least a reprehensible invasion of the time-honored customs of the
city.

The Grindwell Governing Machine (though a patent has been taken out for
it in Europe, and it is thought everything of by royal heads and the
gilded flies that buzz about them) is really an old machine, nearly worn
out, and every now and then patched up and painted and varnished anew.