necessity and pain are and will remain no doubt the goads to comparative ease. Yet the tramping American when he utters the marvelous word democracy believes that he has it, and when he is not complaining and the newspapers tell him so, believes that he is perfectly happy. At the same time, considering our aggressive and progressive financial leaders--and heaven forbid (on humanitarian grounds, at least) that I should defend them, for a more selfish, cruel and undemocratic pack never lived (consider the packers, the street-car corporations, the railroads alone, not to mention a thousand others)--there is this to be said, that although nearly every crime in the decalogue may be charged to them, bribery, perjury, murder, even a total indifference to individual welfare (twelve and a half cents an hour, for instance, up to six years ago for hard, grinding day labor on a railroad or in a canning factory), as well as greed, love of power, and lust after it--still much if not all of America’s boasted financial supremacy is due to them and to none other. We jeer at John D. Rockefeller at home perhaps, or Morgan, but when abroad among envious strangers who is first to thrust out his chest and boast of what America has done--its financial leaders, no less? Who? The average American? You know so. Such being the case one often wonders what is to be done with a country or a people that can so readily blow hot and cold out of the same mouth. Can it be made to follow an austere democratic program--the sharp, taut socialization of everything--or will it succumb to autocratic or to financial domination, and if so, which? At the present moment the air hums with the rival theories. To me the chief problem in connection with America, if it has one, and as I see it, is that of finding itself mentally as well as finding a formula that will allow and encourage leadership without submitting to the abuses which in the past and even the present the latter tends to give rise. For here as much as anywhere else the average small American is as much a petty tyrant as may be found. Consider only the food profiteer, the small dealers, jobbers and wholesalers. And here, as elsewhere, are all the petty tyrannies of small and large enterprises in regard to wage-earners, the scorns, the brutalities, the exactions. Can these be outrivaled if readily duplicated in any autocracy or democracy ruled by a dictator anywhere? At the same time, is it not true that, if the country is to succeed or at least progress materially, a place must be made for the selfish, self-aggrandizing individual either as leader politically or as creator? Will life go forward without some such process or opportunities for immense rewards or honors to the individual--the right to satisfy his feverish if ridiculous ambition for supremacy? Will patriotism, love of country, alone do it? Can it be discovered?