Well and good. The thing has substance enough even now in the face of some setbacks and because of virgin soil and boundless untouched opportunities, unharassed by war or slavery, which offer to physical labor as well as to the imagination of those who come or who went before us, great opportunity. Their success hitherto has been written into our songs, our books, the public messages of our statesmen and patriots. Even to this day, many who lack even a shadow of the substance of these dreams are still dreaming, if not in their reality at least in their possibility and eventuality here. I in my youth was one of these. I saw in America what many others around me seemed to see: i. e., many if not all of the things for which our forefathers fought and bled: generous, protective and encouraging laws in all walks of life; an amazingly free and unterrified press; a warm, sympathetic and encouraging educational system reaching down to the poorest and humblest child and helping it to rise and better its station; a real political referendum or ballot system by which all projected laws and movements for the betterment and control of the impulses and tendencies of the people were formulated and with their consent;--and these seemed real enough. Well? Well, I still think we have a modicum of these things. The pressure of the strong upon the weak is as yet not too grinding perhaps, and let us hope may never be, although it is daily becoming sharper. The poor are being put upon while being loudly told that they are not--fed on air and kind words, as it were. The powerful are learning that the poor, here as elsewhere, are either fools or, being poor, may not help themselves; a very dangerous state of mind to begin with, I think. * * * * * Yes, in recent years a certain change has come over the spirit of our original dreams. Our bright morning sky has been overcast with something that was by no means foreseen by the charming and gracious idealists who framed our Constitution and, better yet, our ideals. America, ungracious as it may seem on the part of one who has prospered well enough in it, is neither so free nor so liberal as many imagined it would be. Our press, our school system, our laws, our political methods--do these today answer to the incisive aspiration which was characteristic, or at least was supposed to be characteristic, of the spirit of those who generated the American Republic? Let us see.