LITERARY PAPERS 
3 8 4 
try, etc. (desirable and precious advantages as they all are), 
do of themselves determine and yield to our experiment of 
democracy the fruitage of success. Society in these States is 
canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten. Political, or law- 
made society is, and private, or voluntary society is also. . . . 
The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of 
hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, 
nor the women in the men. The aim of all the litterateurs is 
to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, 
etc., the most dismal phantoms I know, usurp the name of re¬ 
ligions.” 
He tells of the business depravity of our country: that it “is 
not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater.” He 
speaks of all official services and departments as “tainted” 
and saturated in “corruption” and “falsehood.” These are 
the sins that men have to answer for. Woman’s share of all 
this purification is her part in “fashionable life, flippancy, 
tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims or no aims at all.” 
These things are all untruth, soul-unsatisfying. All these ex¬ 
crescences are to be cut away, and in their stead arise “char¬ 
ity and personal force — the only investments worth any¬ 
thing.” 
Whitman would favor the financial independence of wo¬ 
man as part of his scheme. He says, “my theory includes 
riches and the getting of riches,” and he maintains that, after 
the rights of property have been listened to and acquiesced 
in, the liberalism of these United States asks “for men and 
women well off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash 
in the bank.” Thus he would extend wealth to all, giving to 
men and women money, products, and power as a base upon 
which to raise the edifice of personal liberty. He does not sug¬ 
gest how these riches are individually to accrue, although he 
condemns modern business methods and despises materiality 
as the aim of all effort; still he is not in sympathy with the 
idea that “property is theft,” for in other passages than those 
just quoted he perceives “clearly that the extreme business 
energy, and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth preva¬ 
lent in the United States, are parts of amelioration and pro- 
