Of course, their government was powerless to restrain any aggression or
encroachment upon the general welfare as soon as a considerable body of
voters had banded together to undertake it. A notable instance has been
recorded by Bamscot in his great work, "Some Evil Civilizations." After
the first of America's great intestinal wars the surviving victors formed
themselves into an organization which seems at first to have been purely
social and benevolent, but afterward fell into the hands of rapacious
politicians who in order to preserve their power corrupted their followers
by distributing among them enormous sums of money exacted from the
government by threats of overturning it. In less than a half century after
the war in which they had served, so great was the fear which they
inspired in whatever party controlled the national treasury that the total
sum of their exactions was no less annually than seventeen million
_prastams_! As Dumbleshaw naïvely puts it, "having saved their country,
these gallant gentlemen naturally took it for themselves." The eventual
massacre of the remnant of this hardy and impenitent organization by the
labor unions more accustomed to the use of arms is beyond the province of
this monograph to relate. The matter is mentioned at all only because it
is a typical example of the open robbery that marked that period of the
republic's brief and inglorious existence; the Grand Army, as it called
itself, was no worse and no better than scores of other organizations
having no purpose but plunder and no method but menace. A little later
nearly all classes and callings became organized conspiracies, each
seeking an unfair advantage through laws which the party in power had not
the firmness to withhold, nor the party hoping for power the courage to
oppose. The climax of absurdity in this direction was reached in 1918,
when an association of barbers, known as Noblemen of the Razor, procured
from the parliament of the country a law giving it a representative in the
President's Cabinet, and making it a misdemeanor to wear a beard.