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 cheer