voters will believe and be
influenced by such transparent subterfuge.

Is there any remedy for all this? I much fear that there is not.
Government, like all else, is impossible of perfection. It is as man
is--good, bad and indifferent; which is but another way of saying we
live in a world of cross purposes. We in America prefer republicanism.
But would despotism be so demurrable under a wise unselfish despot?

III

Contemplating the contrasts between foreign life and foreign history
with our own one cannot help reflecting upon the yet more startling
contrasts of ancient and modern religion and government. I have wandered
not a little over Europe at irregular intervals for more than
fifty years. Always a devotee to American institutions, I have been
strengthened in my beliefs by what I have encountered.

The mood in our countrymen has been overmuch to belittle things
American. The commercial spirit in the United States, which affects
to be nationalistic, is in reality cosmopolitan. Money being its god,
French money, English money, anything that calls itself money, is wealth
to it. It has no time to waste on theories or to think of generics. "Put
money in thy purse" has become its motto. Money constitutes the reason
of its being. The organic law of the land is Greek to it, as are those
laws of God which obstruct it. It is too busy with its greed and gain to
think, or to feel, on any abstract subject. That which does not appeal
to it in the concrete is of no interest at all.

Just as in the days of Charles V and Philip II, all things yielded to
the theologian's misconception of the spiritual life so in these days
of the Billionaires all things spiritual and abstract yield to what they
call the progress of the universe and the leading of the times. Under
their rule we have had extraordinary movement just as under the lords
of the Palatinate and the Escurial--the medieval union of the devils
of bigotry and power--Europe, which was but another name for Spain, had
extraordinary movement. We know where it ended with Spain. Whither is it
leading us? Are we traveling the same road?

Let us hope not. Let us believe not. Yet, once strolling along through
the crypt of the Church of the Escurial near Madrid, I could not repress
the idea of a personal and physical resemblance between the effigies in
marble and bronze looking down upon me whichever way I turned, to some
of our contemporary public men and seeming to say: "M