mes through such critical
seasons as I have described.

Through such seasons the United States will have to pass in the course
of the next century, if not this. How will you pass through them? I
heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason and my wishes are at
war and I cannot help foreboding the worst. It is quite plan that your
government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented
majority. For with you the majority is the government, and has the rich,
who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy.

The day will come when in the State of New York a multitude of people,
none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more
than half a dinner, will choose a legislature. Is it possible to doubt
what sort of a legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman
preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of
public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of
capitalists and usurers and asking why anybody should be permitted to
drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest
folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates are likely
to be preferred by a workingman who hears his children cry for more
bread?

I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such seasons of adversity
as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from
returning; that you will act like people who should in a year of
scarcity devour all the seed corn and thus make the next year not of
scarcity, but of absolute famine. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The
spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh
spoliation.

There is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution is all sail and no
anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward
progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar
or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or
your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by
barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the
fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and vandals who ravaged the
Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and vandals will have
been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.

I have the honor to be, dear sir, your faithful servant, T.B. Macaulay.

H.S. Randall, Esq., etc., etc., etc.

A FOOL'S PARADISE

Radical propagandists, w