Our talk last night set me to thinking. It was the first time during all the years of our acquaintance that I had ever heard you speak in a discouraged tone. You have always been healthy to a fault, and your good-humor has been contagious. Especially has it been pleasant to hear you talk about the country and its Manifest Destiny.
I remember, some years ago, how merrily you used to laugh about the "calamity-howler," whose habitat at that time was Kansas. The farmers of Kansas were not then as prosperous as they are now. When several bad years came together they didn't like it, and began to make complaints. Their raucous cries you found very amusing.
The calamity-howler, being ignorant of the laws of political economy and of the conditions of progress, did not take his calamities in the spirit in which they were offered to him by the rest of the country. He did not find satisfaction in the thought that other people were prosperous though he was not. Instead of acting reasonably and voting the straight ticket from motives of party loyalty, he raised all sorts of irrelevant issues. He treated Prosperity as if it were a local issue, instead of a plank in the National Platform.
Now, all this was opposed to your good-natured philosophy of progress. You were eminently practical, and it was a part of your creed never to "go behind the returns." As to Prosperity, it was "first come, first served." In this land of opportunity the person who first sees an opportunity should take it, asking no questions as to why he came by it. It is his by right of discovery.
You were always a great believer in the good old American doctrine of Manifest Destiny. This was a big country and destined to grow bigger. To you bigness was its own excuse for being. Optimism was as natural as breathing. It was manifest destiny that cities and corporations and locomotives and armies and navies and national debts and daily newspapers, with their Sunday supplements, and bank clearances and tariffs and insurance companies and the price of living should go up. It was all according to a beautiful natural law, "as fire ascending seeks the sun." Besides these things, it was manifest destiny that other things not so good should grow bigger also,—graft and slums and foolish luxury. They were all involved in the increasing bigness of things.
Sometimes you would grumble about them, but in a good-natured way, as one who recognized their inevitability. Just as you said, boys will be boys, so you said, politicians will be politicians, and business is business. If one is living in a growing country he must not begrudge the cost of the incidentals.
In your talk there was a cheerful cynicism which amazed the slower-witted foreigner. You talked of the pickings and stealings of your elected officers as you would of the pranks of a precocious youngster. It was all a part of the day's growth. Yet you were really public-spirited. You would have sprung to arms in a moment if you had thought that your country was in danger or that its institutions were being undermined.
Your good-natured tolerance was a part of your philosophy of life. It was bound up in your triumphant Americanism. You were a hero-worshipper, and you delighted in "big men." The big men who gained the prizes were efficient and unscrupulous and unassuming; that is, they never assumed to be better than their neighbors. They looked ahead, they saw how things were going, and went with them. And on the whole, things, you believed, were going well. Though they were not scrupulously just, these big men were generous, and were willing to give away what they had acquired. Though grasping, they were not avaricious. They grasped things with the strong prehensile grasp of the infant, rather than with the clutch of the miser. They took them because they were there, and not because they had any well-defined idea as to whether they belonged to them or not.
These big men were very likable. They were engrossed in big projects, and they were doing necessary work in the development of the country. They naturally took the easiest and most direct methods to get at results. They would not go out of the way to corrupt a legislature any more than they would go out of the way to find a range of mountains. But if the mountain stood in the way of the railroad, they would go through it regardless of expense. If the legislature was in their way, they would deal with it as best they could. They were willing to pay what it cost to accomplish a purpose which they believed was good.
Their attitude toward the Public was one which you did not criticize, for it seemed to you to be reasonable. The Public was an abstraction, like Nature. We are all under the laws of Nature. But Nature doesn't mind whether we consciously obey or not. She goes her way, and we go ours. We get all she will let us have. So with the Public. The Public was not regarded as a person or as an aggregate of persons, it was the potentiality of wealth. They never thought of the Public as being starved or stunted, or even as being seriously inconvenienced because of what they took from it, any more than they thought of Nature being the poorer because of the electricity which they induced to run along their wires. A public franchise was a plum growing on a convenient tree. A wise man would wait till it was ripe and then, when no one was looking, would pick it for himself The whole transaction was a trial of wits between rival pickers. A special privilege, according to this view, involved no special obligations; it was a reward for special abilities. Once given, it was property to be enjoyed in perpetuity.