id not know how,
the thing would come out right in the end. The silver collapse, together
with the Civil War over slavery, are striking illustrations to occur in
one century, of the fact that if things come out right in the end, it is
often after periods of great suffering and disaster. Could people have
foreseen how the slavery controversy would end, what frantic efforts
would have been made for peaceful abolition! Could people have foreseen
the panic of last year, with its wide-spread disaster, what haste would
have been made to stop the silver purchases! And yet the experience of
mankind afforded abundant reason for anticipating both results.

This leads me to say that the reason why educated men should try and
keep a fair mental balance between both pessimism and optimism, is that
there has come over the world in the last twenty-five or thirty years a
very great change of opinion touching the relations of the government to
the community. When Europe settled down to peaceful work after the great
wars of the French Revolution, it was possessed with the idea that the
freedom of the individual was all that was needed for public prosperity
and private happiness. The old government interference with people's
movements and doings was supposed to be the reason why nations had not
been happy in the past. This became the creed, in this country, of the
Democratic party, which came into existence after the foundation of the
federal government. At the same time there grew up here the popular idea
of the American character, in which individualism was the most marked
trait. If you are not familiar with it in your own time, you may
remember it in the literature of the earlier half of the century. The
typical American was always the architect of his own fortunes. He sailed
the seas and penetrated the forest, and built cities and lynched the
horse thieves, and fought the Indians and dug the mines, without
anybody's help or support. He had even an ill-concealed contempt for
regular troops, as men under control and discipline. He scorned
government for any other purposes than security and the administration
of justice. This was the kind of American that Tocqueville found here in
1833. He says:--

"The European often sees in the public functionaries simply
force; the American sees nothing but law. One may then say
that in America a man never obeys a man, or anything but
justice and law. Consequently he has formed of