The country, you said, is in a bad way, and it must be awakened from its lethargy.  After a period of unexampled prosperity and marvelous development, something has happened.  Just what it is you don’t really know, but it’s very alarming.  Instead of working together for Prosperity, the people are listening to demagogues, and trying all sorts of experiments, half of which you are sure are unconstitutional.  The captains of industry who have made this the biggest country in the world are thwarted in their plans for further expansion.

There are people who are criticizing the courts, and there are courts which are criticizing business enterprises that they don’t understand.  There are so-called experts—­mere college professors—­who are tinkering the tariff.  There are over-zealous executives who are currying favor with the crowd by enforcing laws which are well enough on the statute books, but which were never meant to go further.  As if matters were not bad enough already, there are demagogues who are stirring up class feeling by proposing new laws.  Party loyalty is being undermined, and the new generation doesn’t half understand the great issues which have been settled for all time.  It is rashly interested in new issues.  For 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?