'Whenever a man imbued with republican politics and progressionist views ascends the platform and delivers an oration, it is a safe wager that he makes some allusion at least to Chicago, the famous mushroom city of the United States, which sprang up in a night, and thirty years ago consisted of a dozen miserable fishermen's huts, and now counts over two hundred thousand inhabitants. Chicago! Chicago! look at Chicago! and see in its development the vigour which invariably follows republican institutions.... Men need not go so far from their own doors to see another instance of rapid expansion and development which has taken place under a monarchical government. The Swindon of to-day is almost ridiculously disproportioned to the Swindon of forty years ago....'
Eight years later Jefferies rewrote 'The Story of Swindon' as it is given in this book, and the allusion to Chicago was reduced to this:
'The workmen required food; tradesmen came and supplied that food, and Swindon rose as Chicago rose, as if by magic.'
Yet it is certain that in 1867 Jefferies was already carrying about with him an experience and a power which were to ripen very slowly into something unique. He was observing; he was developing a sense of the beauty in Nature, in humanity, in thought, and the arts; and he was 'not more than eighteen when an inner and esoteric meaning began to come to him from all the visible universe, and undefinable aspirations filled him.'
In 1872 he discovered part of his power almost in its perfection. He wrote several letters to the _Times_ about the Wiltshire labourer, and they were lucid, simple, moderate, founded on his own observation, and arranged in a telling, harmonious manner. What he said and thought about the labourers then is of no great importance now, and even in 1872 it was only a journalist's grain in the scale against the labourer's agitation. But it was admirably done. It was clear, easy writing, and a clear, easy writer he was thenceforth to the end.
These letters procured for him admission to _Fraser's_ and other magazines, and he now began for them a long series of articles, mainly connected with the land and those who work on the land. He had now freedom and space to put on paper something of what he had seen and thought. The people, their homes, and their fields, he described and criticized with moderation and some spirit. He showed that he saw more things than most writing men, but it was in an ordinary light, in the same way as most of the readers whom he addressed. His gravity, tenderness and courage were discernible, but the articles were not more than a clever presentation of a set of facts and an intelligent, lucid point of view, which were good grist to the mills of that decade. They had neither the sagacity nor the passion which could have helped that calm style to make literature.