uth
confident of the golden future, lavish alike in its borrowings and its
spendings, over-careless of forms and formalities. Happily the
confidence in the future has been justified and ten times justified, and
it is rich--richer than it yet knows--with resources larger even than it
has learned properly to appraise or control. Whatever obligations it
incurred in the headlong past are trifles to it now,--a few hundreds of
college debts to a man who has come into millions. And with its position
now assured it has grown jealous of its credit, national and individual.

It was inevitable that the heedless days should beget indiscretions, the
memories of which smart to-day. It was inevitable that amid so much
recklessness and easy faith there should be some wrong-doing. Above all,
was it inevitable that in the realisation of its dreams, when wealth and
power grew and money came pouring into it, there should be bred in the
people an extraordinary and unwholesome love of speculation which in
turn opened their opportunities to the gambler and the confidence-man of
all kinds and sizes. They flourished in the land,--the man who wrecked
railways and issued fictitious millions of "securities," the man who
robbed the government of moneys destined for the support of Indians or
the establishment of postal routes in the farther West, the man who
salted mines, the "land-grabber" and the "timber-shark" who dealt not in
acres but in hundreds of square miles, the bogus trust company, and the
fraudulent land and investment agent. When even the smallest community
begins to "boom," the people of the community lose their heads and the
harvest ripens to the sickle of the swindler. And the entire United
States--sometimes in one part, sometimes in another, sometimes all
together,--with only an occasional and short-lived panic to check the
madness, boomed continuously for half a century.

It is still booming, but with wealth, established institutions, and
invested capital, have come comparative soberness and a sense of
responsibility. The spirit which governs American industrial life to-day
is quite other than that which ruled it two or three decades ago. The
United States has sown its wild oats. It was a generous sowing,
certainly, for the land was wide and the soil rich. But that harvest has
been all but garnered and the country is now for the most part given
over to more legitimate crops.

[Tares still spring up among the wheat. The commercial