And so, were I one of sufficient import to be able to speak to my native land, the galaxy of States of which it is composed, I would say: Dream on. Believe. Perhaps it is unwise, foolish, childlike, but dream anyhow. Disillusionment is destined to appear. You may vanish as have other great dreams, but even so, what a glorious, an imperishable memory! “Once,” will say those historians of far distant nations of times yet unborn, perchance, “once there was a great republic. And its domain lay between a sea and a sea--a great continent. In its youth and strength it dared assert that men were free and equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights. Then came the black storms of life--individual passions and envies, treasons, stratagems, spoils. The very gods, seeing it young, dreamful, of great cheer, were filled with envy. They smote and it fell. But, oh, the wondrous memory of it! For in those days men were free, _because they imagined they were free_.” Of dreams and the memory of them is life compounded.[24] This loyal citizen of democratic America is too good a Darwinian to believe in equality. He sees the United States like the lobster and the squid in the tub, as a land of bitter conflicts scarcely concealed by humanitarianism, a land where the strongest coaxes the weak in order to stifle him more effectively. As a philosopher Dreiser shows little respect for the masses, although they delight his artistic sense. He has little or no confidence in them. If any change for the better happens in human conditions, we must attribute it to the supermen, who are acting as Providence first for their own profit, but also indirectly for that of the greater mass of mortals. Great men are the sole palliation offered by Nature to the average mediocrity of the human race. Dreiser’s partiality for the supermen has gone as far as praising as the most wonderful of all books Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” that bible of crafty and cynical statesmen. He praised Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal and Napoleon like another Carlyle. These were men of prey, sharks and vultures, but the energy of Nature was seething within them with its most virulent ferments. As a masterpiece of bio-chemistry they stand out preëminently among the _homoculi_. Of course the fight with the giants and the dwarfs is unequal. The masses do not give the supermen their chance. Dreiser bemoans that plight. Turning to his country he waves to the captains of industry as the true reincarnations of Alexander and Bonaparte. During a visit to the Vatican galleries he was impressed, he tells us, by a striking air of resemblance between certain American magnates and the proconsuls or the emperors of Rome!