CHAPTER XII
THE HAPPY ENDING
I have hesitated a long time over writing this last chapter, because of the natural desire to give to my book a happy ending.
One may write critically of America and things American, but only if one ends in a mood of hopeful confidence. There is so much youth, so much latent power here, that one cannot fail to have faith that the spirit of man will gain some enlargement from the experiment in living which we are carrying on in this country.
And even if that were not true, egotism requires us to believe that we are ever going forward to better things; for how should "the forces" have the effrontery to establish so splendid a people as ourselves upon so rich a continent, while reserving for us nothing but a commonplace career, that of one of the many peoples who have from time to time occupied the fairer regions of the earth?
At least we shall fill a place in history alongside Greece and Rome; we feel it as the imaginative young man feels in himself the stirrings of a future Shakespeare, Napoleon, or Lincoln.
The human mind refuses to conceive of so much power coming to ordinary ends. The justice illusion which men have found so indispensable a companion on their way through time requires the happy ending. As it is only right and fair that when the forces send us a crisis they should send us a man equal to it, so it is only right and fair that when they put so great a people as ourselves in the world they should prepare for it a splendid destiny.
I subscribe heartily to this doctrine. It is as convincing as any I have ever seen based on the theory which we all cheerfully accept, that man is not master of his own fate, that he does not need to be, that he had better not be, that he reaps where he does not sow, reaps, indeed, abundant crops.
In the preceding chapter, working toward the happy ending, I have brought my characters to the verge of felicity: the perfect union between minorities and majorities, which is the aim of all social order, is in sight.