The conviction of ordinary Americans is that our system of government is so evidently perfect, and the course of our development so manifestly healthy, that nothing but sheer blindness can account for any suspicion as to their future stability. To those who question the success of our future we are wont to reply by a smile of genuine pity, or by pointing to the results already achieved and the difficulties which have been surmounted. We have fused the most incongruous race-mixture into one homogeneous nation. We have occupied a continent, and laid the foundations of a great empire upon a comprehensive and stable adjustment of all the functions of government. We have eliminated the vast system of human slavery from which our ruin had been predicted. We have overcome the most powerful assault upon the integrity of our national existence; and any violent attempt upon our government seems at present to be both impossible of occurrence and hopeless of success. It cannot be denied, however, that recent events have awakened in the minds of earnest and patriotic Americans a sense of uneasiness and anxiety very different from any similar feeling in the past. The professional politician sees in the corruption lately developed in Washington simply the evidence of decay manifested by a powerful organization which has enjoyed unlimited power and survived the issues which brought it into existence. He would persuade the people that a “rotation” is all that is necessary in order to restore things to an honest and sober condition. Less thoughtful men demand a return on the part of officials “to the simplicity of our forefathers,” and applaud blindly every effort at retrenchment. All observant writers and thinkers deprecate any such impossibility and are quite clear as to the folly of attempting it. The _Nation_, March 16, says: “We confess that there is to us something almost as depressing in this kind of talk as in the practice, in which many of our newspapers indulge, of drawing consolation for the present corruption of this republic from the reflection that the corruption of the English monarchy one hundred and fifty years ago was just as great; because both one and the other have a tendency to turn people’s minds away from real remedies and throw them back on quackery.”