Whenever an observer of the signs of the times in the United States ventures to say that they offer little food for hope, he is branded as pessimistic or unpatriotic. He is told that if he had the confidence in democratic institutions of a man with a good digestion and a fair intelligence, he would know that they possess a vitality, a power of rejuvenation, that does not belong to an autocracy nor an aristocracy. If he is particularly despondent, and seeks to justify himself with fact and argument, he is denounced as a dangerous agitator, or, what is a shade more odious, as an absurd _doctrinaire_. But Mr. Roberts has not been consigned to any such depths of contempt. He is known as a “hard-headed business man,” a title of honor that always frees the most ridiculous optimist from any suspicion of the theorist or sentimentalist. Yet, as the supervisor of the finances of a great State, he was brought in contact with a mass of phenomena that forced upon him the conviction that something is wrong, and that if it is not righted it will bring disaster. Indeed, I do not recall a pessimist, however dyspeptic, nor a _doctrinaire_, however visionary, that has struck a more melancholy note than he. In all his reports much will be found that indicates anything but a belief that a democracy that plunders and enslaves a people is any better than any other despotism guilty of the same offense, or that the practice in the one case will be productive of greater prosperity and happiness than in the other.