or
the life of you, you say, you can't understand what these issues are.

New and divisive questions which lead only to faction are propounded so
that the voters are confused. The great principle of Representative
Government, on which the Republic was founded, is being attacked.
Instead of choosing experienced men to direct public policy, there is an
appeal to the passions of the mob. The result of all this agitation is
an unsettlement that paralyzes business. The United States is in danger
of losing the race for commercial supremacy. Germany will forge ahead of
us. Japan will catch us. Socialism and the Yellow Peril will be upon us.
The Man on Horseback will appear, and what shall we do then?

I did not understand whether you looked for these perils to come
together, or whether they were to appear in orderly succession. But I
came to the conclusion that either the country is in a bad way, or you
are. You will pardon me if I choose the latter alternative, for I too am
an optimistic American, and I like to choose the lesser of two evils. If
there is an attack of "hysteria," I should like to think of it as
somewhat localized, rather than having suddenly attacked the whole
country.

Now, my opinion is that the American people were never minding their own
business more good-humoredly and imperturbably than at the present
moment. They have been slowly and silently making up their minds, and
now they are beginning to express a deliberate judgment. What you take
to be the noise of demagogues, I consider to be the sober sense of a
great people which is just finding adequate expression.

You seem to be afraid of an impending revolution, and picture it as a
sort of French Revolution, a destructive overturn of all existing
institutions. But may not the revolution which we are passing through be
something different,--a great American revolution, which is being
carried through in the characteristic American fashion?

Walt Whitman expresses the great characteristic of American history:
"Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars."

It is this mass movement, slow at first, but swift and irresistible when
the mass has come to consciousness of its own tendency, which has always
confounded astute persons who have been interested only in particulars.
It is a movement like that of the Mississippi at flood-time. The great
river flows within its banks as long as it can. But the time comes when
the barriers are too