I did not understand whether you looked for these perils to come together, or whether they were to appear in orderly succession. But I came to the conclusion that either the country is in a bad way, or you are. You will pardon me if I choose the latter alternative, for I too am an optimistic American, and I like to choose the lesser of two evils. If there is an attack of "hysteria," I should like to think of it as somewhat localized, rather than having suddenly attacked the whole country.
Now, my opinion is that the American people were never minding their own business more good-humoredly and imperturbably than at the present moment. They have been slowly and silently making up their minds, and now they are beginning to express a deliberate judgment. What you take to be the noise of demagogues, I consider to be the sober sense of a great people which is just finding adequate expression.
You seem to be afraid of an impending revolution, and picture it as a sort of French Revolution, a destructive overturn of all existing institutions. But may not the revolution which we are passing through be something different,--a great American revolution, which is being carried through in the characteristic American fashion?
Walt Whitman expresses the great characteristic of American history: "Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars."
It is this mass movement, slow at first, but swift and irresistible when the mass has come to consciousness of its own tendency, which has always confounded astute persons who have been interested only in particulars. It is a movement like that of the Mississippi at flood-time. The great river flows within its banks as long as it can. But the time comes when the barriers are too frail to hold back the mighty waters. Then the river makes, very quickly, a channel for itself. You cannot understand what has happened till you take into account the magnitude of the river itself.
Now, the successful man of affairs, who has been intent on the incidents of the passing day, is often strangely oblivious of the mass movements. You, for example, are disturbed by the unrest which is manifest, and you look for some one whom you can blame for the disturbance. But perhaps no one is to blame.