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 more than they thought of Nature being the poorer because of the electricity which they induced to run along their wires.  A public franchise was a plum growing on a convenient tree.  A wise man would wait till it was ripe and then, when no one was looking, would pick it for himself The whole transaction was a trial of wits between rival pickers.  A special privilege, according to this view, involved no special obligations; it was a reward for special abilities.  Once given, it was property to be enjoyed in perpetuity.

This was the code of ethics which you, in common with multitudes of American citizens, accepted.  You have yourself prospered.  Indeed, things had gone so well with you in this best of all countries that any fundamental change seemed unthinkable.

But that a change has come seems evident from your conversation last night.  All that fine optimism which your friends have admired seemed to have deserted you.  There was a querulous note which was strangely out of keeping with your usual disposition.  It was what you have been accustomed to stigmatize as un-American.  When you discussed the present state of the country, you talked—­you will pardon me for saying it—­for all the world like a calamity-howler.