“Well, it’s something connected with the gizzard,” I was about to say, but instead I observed: “It’s your spiritual consciousness of well being, Bert. You’re all right only you don’t know it. You want to get so that you always know it.”
“Uh huh!” he grunted heavily. “I see.”
But I don’t think he did.
Then we climbed in, and in about two more minutes we were carrying our bags up Franklin’s front steps and dismissing the car for the night. Mrs. Booth came out and welcomed us.
“We thought you were going to get back last night. What delayed you?”
“Oh, we just took a little longer,” laughed Franklin.
There were letters and a telegram, and instead of my being able to stay a few days, as I had hoped, it seemed necessary that I should go the next day. My train left at two, and to get various things left at Indianapolis on my way south, I would have to leave a little before one. Speed appeared the next morning to say he would like to accompany me as far as Indianapolis. Bert came to say goodby early. He was off to join a high school picnic, composed exclusively of ex-classmates of a certain high school year. I was beginning to think I should see no more of my charming friend of a few days before, when,—but that——
On my long, meditative ride back to New York, I had time to think over the details of my trip and the nature of our land and the things I had seen and what I really thought of them. I concluded that my native state and my country are as yet children, politically and socially—a child state and a child country. They have all the health, wealth, strength, enthusiasm for life that is necessary, but their problems are all before them. We are indeed a free people, in part, bound only by our illusions, but we are a heavily though sweetly illusioned people nevertheless. A little over a hundred years ago we began with great dreams, most wondrous dreams, really—impossible ideals, and we are still dreaming them.
“Man,” says our national constitution, “is endowed by his creator with certain inalienable rights.” But is he? Are we born free? Equal? I cannot see it. Some of us may achieve freedom, equality—but that is not a right, certainly not an inalienable right. It is a stroke, almost, of unparalleled fortune. But it is such a beautiful dream.
As for the American people, at least that limited section of it that lies between New York and Indiana, the lakes and the Ohio River—what of them? Sometimes I think of America as a country already composed of or divided into distinct types or nationalities, which may merge or not as time goes on;—or they may be diverging phases of American life, destined to grow sharper and clearer—New England, the South, the Far West, the Middle West. Really, this region between New York and Indiana—New York and the Mississippi really—may be looked upon as a distinct section. It has little in common with New England, the South, or the Far West, temperamentally. It is a healthy, happy land in which Americans accept their pale religions and their politics and their financial and social fortunes with an easy grace. Here flourishes the harmless secret order; the church and the moving picture entertain where they do not “save”; the newspapers browbeat, lie, threaten, cajole; the plethoric trusts tax them of their last cent by high prices, rents, fares and interest on mortgages,—and yet they rarely, if ever, complain. It is still a new land—a rich one. Are they not free and equal? Does not the sacred American constitution, long since buried under a mass of decisions, say so? And have they not free speech to say what the newspapers, controlled by the trusts, will permit them to say? Happy, happy people!