ful cynicism which amazed the
slower-witted foreigner. You talked of the pickings and stealings of
your elected officers as you would of the pranks of a precocious
youngster. It was all a part of the day's growth. Yet you were really
public-spirited. You would have sprung to arms in a moment if you had
thought that your country was in danger or that its institutions were
being undermined.

Your good-natured tolerance was a part of your philosophy of life. It
was bound up in your triumphant Americanism. You were a hero-worshipper,
and you delighted in "big men." The big men who gained the prizes were
efficient and unscrupulous and unassuming; that is, they never assumed
to be better than their neighbors. They looked ahead, they saw how
things were going, and went with them. And on the whole, things, you
believed, were going well. Though they were not scrupulously just, these
big men were generous, and were willing to give away what they had
acquired. Though grasping, they were not avaricious. They grasped things
with the strong prehensile grasp of the infant, rather than with the
clutch of the miser. They took them because they were there, and not
because they had any well-defined idea as to whether they belonged to
them or not.

These big men were very likable. They were engrossed in big projects,
and they were doing necessary work in the development of the country.
They naturally took the easiest and most direct methods to get at
results. They would not go out of the way to corrupt a legislature any
more than they would go out of the way to find a range of mountains. But
if the mountain stood in the way of the railroad, they would go through
it regardless of expense. If the legislature was in their way, they
would deal with it as best they could. They were willing to pay what it
cost to accomplish a purpose which they believed was good.

Their attitude toward the Public was one which you did not criticize,
for it seemed to you to be reasonable. The Public was an abstraction,
like Nature. We are all under the laws of Nature. But Nature doesn't
mind whether we consciously obey or not. She goes her way, and we go
ours. We get all she will let us have. So with the Public. The Public
was not regarded as a person or as an aggregate of persons, it was the
potentiality of wealth. They never thought of the Public as being
starved or stunted, or even as being seriously inconvenienced because of
what they took from it, any mor