Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/177

Rh the days of cotton and corn prosperity. We are told that our whole industrial system, and the civilization of which it forms a part, must be torn up by the roots and cast away. We are told that the days of self-control and self-sufficiency are over, and that the people of this nation are really typified by the lawless bands rushing blindly hither and thither, clamoring for laws by which those men may be made rich whom all previous laws of God and. man have ordained to be poor.

In these times it is well for us to remember that we come of hardy stock. The Anglo-Saxon race, with its strength and virtues, was born of hard times. It is not easily kept down; the victims of oppression must be of some other stock-We, who live in America and who constitute the heart of this republic, are the sons and daughters of "him that overcometh." Ours is a lineage untainted by luxury, uncoddled by charity, uncorroded by vice, uncrushed by oppression. If it were not so we could not be here to-day.

When this nation was born, the days of the government of royalty and aristocracy were fast drawing to a close. Hereditary idleness had steadily done its work, and the scepter was already falling from nerveless hands. God said: "I am tired of kings; I suffer them no more." And when the kings had slipped from their tottering thrones, as there was no one else to rule, the scepter fell into the hands of the common man. It fell into our hands, ours of this passing generation, and from us it will pass on into yours. We are the common man, and you are his heir apparent. You are here to make ready for your coronation, to learn those maxims of government, those laws of human nature, without which all administrations must fail; ignorance of which is always punishable by death. If you are to hold this scepter, you must be wiser and stronger than the kings, else you too shall lose the scepter as they have lost it, and your dynasty shall pass away.

For more than a century now the common man has ruled America. How has he used his power? What does history tell us of that the common man has done? It is too soon to answer these questions. A hundred years is a time too short for the test of such gigantic experiments. Here in America we have made history already, some of it glorious, some of it ignoble; much of it made of the old stories told over again. We have learned some things that we did not expect to learn. We find that the social problems of Europe can not be kept away from us by the quarantine of democracy. We find that the dead which the dead past can not bury are thrown up on our shores. We find that weakness, misery, and crime are still with us, and that wherever weakness is there is tyranny also. The essence of tyranny we have found lies not in the strength of the strong, but in the weakness