THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
MARCH, 1912
To a Citizen of the Old School
Our talk last night set me to thinking. It was the first time during all the years of our acquaintance that I had ever heard you speak in a discouraged tone. You have always been healthy to a fault, and your good-humor has been contagious. Especially has it been pleasant to hear you talk about the country and its Manifest Destiny.
I remember, some years ago, how merrily you used to laugh about the ‘calamity-howler,’ whose habitat at that time was Kansas. The farmers of Kansas were not then as prosperous as they are now. When several bad years came together they did n’t like it, and began to make complaints. Their raucous cries you found very amusing.
The calamity-howler, being ignorant of the laws of political economy and of the conditions of progress, did not take his calamities in the spirit in which they were offered to him by the rest of the country. He did not find satisfaction in the thought that other people were prosperous though he was not. Instead of acting reasonably and voting the straight ticket from motives of party loyalty, he raised all sorts of irrelevant issues. He treated Prosperity as if it were a local issue, instead of a plank in the National Platform.
Now, all this was opposed to your good-natured philosophy of progress. You were eminently practical, and it was a part of your creed never to ‘go behind the returns.’ As to Prosperity, it was ‘first come, first served.’ In this land of opportunity the person who first sees an opportunity should take it, asking no questions as to why he came by it. It is his by right of discovery.
You were always a great believer in the good old American doctrine of Manifest Destiny. This was a big country and destined to grow bigger. To you bigness was its own excuse for being. Optimism was as natural as breathing. It was manifest destiny that cities and corporations and locomotives and armies and navies and national debts and daily newspapers with their Sunday supplements and bank clearances and tariffs and insurance companies and the price of living should go up. It was all according to a beautiful natural law, ‘as fire ascending seeks the sun.’ Besides these things, it was manifest destiny that other things not so good should grow bigger also, graft and slums and foolish luxury. They were all involved in the increasing bigness of things.
Sometimes you would grumble about them, but in a good-natured way, as
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