The courts are presided over by foreign judges, it is true, and they are not generally favorites with the lawyers. But the people are not wholly dissatisfied. A New York attorney who was suspected in the fall of 1893 of trying to clear a murderer by the introduction of false testimony, was actually tried, convicted, disbarred, fined to the last cent of his ill-gotten wealth, and sentenced to prison for ten years. Those who depend upon the courts for justice are not entirely displeased by such things. The newspapers are held in strict accountability. There is no longer such an issue as “politics” for them to discuss and play the demagogue over. They are confined to the publication of news and the discussion of such topics as cannot be twisted into a seditious turn. Under the influence of the prevailing tendency toward honesty and fairness, they are actually coming to aim at the truth in their news. In brief, throughout the whole land the moral atmosphere is purer and healthier than it ever was before. Socialists and anarchists and dynamiters still lurk beneath the surface, but they have little opportunity for organization, and a single overt act on their part is the signal for an instant exercise of such severity as men use towards a nest of poisonous reptiles which show a tendency to attack innocent passers-by. There is no longer private liberty within the land, but there is public order. Individual rights are respected, protected, and enforced; the law is justly administered; crime is punished as surely and as severely when committed by men of rank and station as when committed by less intelligent, and therefore less responsible, men. There are signs that the popular mind is beginning to feel aspirations after honesty and fairness for their own sakes, and to regard successful dishonesty and corruption with less respect than were common during the existence of the Republic. If these signs continue and increase, there is the possibility that the Great Republic of the past may at some future time arise once more from the ashes in which its memory now sleeps, and on a purer, nobler, more enduring foundation than that on which the men of 1776–1888 builded. But it will hardly come in our time. The mills of the gods grind slowly when their task is to grind into perfect flour the grist of a corrupt and ignorant humanity. APPENDIX. I. THE SOCIALISTIC SPIRIT IN 1885.