Yet for the dream’s sake, as I told myself at this time, and as against an illimitable background of natural chance and craft, I would like to see this and the other sections with which it is so closely allied, this vast republic, live on. It is so splendid, so tireless. Its people, in spite of their defects and limitations, sing so at their tasks. There are dark places, but there are splendid points of light, too. One is their innocence, complete and enduring; another is their faith in ideals and the Republic. A third is their optimism or buoyancy of soul, their courage to get up in the morning and go up and down the world, whistling and singing. Oh, the whistling, singing American, with his jest and his sound heart and that light of humorous apprehension in his eye! How wonderful it all is! It isn’t English, or French, or German, or Spanish, or Russian, or Swedish, or Greek. It’s American, “Good Old United States,”—and for that reason I liked this region and all these other portions of America that I have ever seen. New England isn’t so kindly, the South not so hopeful, the Far West more so, but they all have something of these characteristics which I have been describing.
And for these reasons I would have this tremendous, bubbling Republic live on, as a protest perhaps against the apparently too unbreakable rule that democracy, equality, or the illusion of it, is destined to end in disaster. It cannot survive ultimately, I think. In the vast, universal sea of motion, where change and decay are laws, and individual power is almost always uppermost, it must go under—but until then——
We are all such pathetic victims of chance, anyhow. We are born, we struggle, we plan, and chance blows all our dreams away. If, therefore, one country, one state dares to dream the impossible, why cast it down before its ultimate hour? Why not dream with it? It is so gloriously, so truly a poetic land. We were conceived in ecstasy and born in dreams.
And so, were I one of sufficient import to be able to speak to my native land, the galaxy of states of which it is composed, I would say: Dream on. Believe. Perhaps it is unwise, foolish, childlike, but dream anyhow. Disillusionment is destined to appear. You may vanish as have other great dreams, but even so, what a glorious, an imperishable memory!
“Once,” will say those historians of far distant nations of times yet unborn, perchance, “once there was a great republic. And its domain lay between a sea and sea—a great continent. In its youth and strength it dared assert that all men were free and equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights. Then came the black storms of life—individual passions and envies, treasons, stratagems, spoils. The very gods, seeing it young, dreamful, of great cheer, were filled with envy. They smote and it fell. But, oh, the wondrous memory of it! For in those days men were free, because they imagined they were free——”
Of dreams and the memory of them is life compounded.
THE END
Transcriber’s Note