Mr. Bryce wrote: “This tendency to acquiescence and submission; this sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movement may be studied but cannot be turned, I have ventured to call the Fatalism of the Multitude.” It is, I should say, one of the most encouraging phenomena of the score of years that has elapsed since Mr. Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” appeared, that we have grown much less conscious of the crushing weight of the mass. It has been with something of a child’s surprise in his ultimate successful manipulation of a toy whose mechanism had baffled him that we have begun to realize that, after all, the individual counts. The pressure of the mass will yet be felt, but in spite of its persistence there are abundant signs that the individual is asserting himself more and more, and even the undeniable acceptance of collectivist ideas in many quarters helps to prove it. With all our faults and defaults of understanding,--populism, free silver, Coxey’s army, and the rest of it,--we of the West have not done so badly. Be not impatient with the young man Absalom; the mule knows his way to the oak tree! Blaine lost Indiana in 1884; Bryan failed thrice to carry it. The campaign of 1910 in Indiana was remarkable for the stubbornness of “silent” voters, who listened respectfully to the orators but left the managers of both parties in the air as to their intentions. In the Indiana Democratic State Convention of 1910 a gentleman was furiously hissed for ten minutes amid a scene of wildest tumult; but the cause he advocated won, and the ticket nominated in that memorable convention succeeded in November. Within fifty years Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois have sent to Washington seven Presidents, elected for ten terms. Without discussing the value of their public services it may be said that it has been an important demonstration to our Mid-Western people of the closeness of their ties with the nation, that so many men of their own soil have been chosen to the seat of the Presidents; and it is creditable to Maine and California that they have cheerfully acquiesced. In Lincoln the provincial American most nobly asserted himself, and any discussion of the value of provincial life and character in our politics may well begin and end in him. We have seen verily that “Fishers and choppers and ploughmen Shall constitute a state.” Whitman, addressing Grant on his return from his world’s tour, declared that it was not that the hero had walked “with kings with even pace the round world’s promenade”;-- “But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings, Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio’s, Indiana’s millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the front, Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round world’s promenade, Were all so justified.”