Do we not, amid a general malaria of fogs and vapors, our day, unmistakably see pillars of promise, with grandest, indestructible indications? There are signs and awakenings here very plain to me.

While all is drowned and desperate that the government has had to do with, all outside the influence of government, (forever the largest part,) thrives and smiles, and all the needed work goes on. The sun shines, corn grows, men go merrily about their affairs, houses are built, ships arrive and depart.

America illustrates birth, muscular youth, the promise, the sure fulfilment, the absolute success. Take the average of men—take measure of the great qualities in what is called the mass of our population—and you find in fact an elevation never achieved before—and this despite all the acknowledged bad, the evils, the poisonous tendencies. I don’t mind little bothers and exceptions and some hoggishness.

Look to the young. Today, ahead, though dimly yet, we see, in vistas, a copious, sane, gigantic offspring, specimens of the rising generation—soon to confront presidents, Congresses, and parties, to look them sternly in the face, to stand no nonsense. It is from the young of our land, the ardent and generous hearts, that these things are to come. Though it may not be the majority, it promises to be the leaven which must eventually leaven the whole lump.

Nor is that hope unwarranted,
The best specimens among us, the young population growing up, copiously appear now,
With resolute tread, in good time, for they were needed,
Forming a hardy, democratic, intelligent, radically sound, good-natured, and individualistic race.

Hardness, crudeness, worldliness—absence of the spiritual, the purely moral, esthetic, etc.—are in democracy here. The hard, pungent, gritty, worldly experiences and qualities in American practical life also serve—they prevent extravagant sentimentalism—and are much counterbalanced and made up by an immense and general basis of the eligibility to manly and loving comradeship, very marked in American young men.
American boys are very companionable, the friendliest in the world. American youths, more than any other, are possessed of that high quality and gift, comradeship. I know no country anyhow in which comradeship is so far developed as here—here, among the mechanic classes.

The young men will be clear what they want, and will have it. They will follow none except him whose spirit leads them in the like spirit with themselves. Any such man will be welcome as the flowers of May. Others will be put out without ceremony. 

If anyone suppose I am at all alarmed about the prospects of business on this continent he misunderstands me, for I am not. The main basis of civilization is the certainty of boundless products for feeding, clothing, and sheltering everybody, infinite comfort, personal plenty, and intercommunication. The body must precede the soul; the body is the other side of the soul.

It is said reproachfully of America that she is material,
But that to me is her glory—
How grand this oceanic plenitude and ceaselessness of domestic comfort,
Factories, machinery, the mechanical forces, all certainties,
The results of perseverance and industry,
The great cathedral sacred industry, no tomb,
A keep for life for practical invention.
Somewhere within their walls shall all that forwards perfect human life be started,
Tried, taught, advanced, visibly exhibited.

Not nature alone is great in her fields of freedom and the open air, in her storms, the shows of night and day,—but in the artificial, the work of man too is equally great—in this profusion of teeming humanity—in these ingenuities, streets, goods, houses, ships—these hurrying, feverish, electric crowds of men, their complicated business genius, (not least among the geniuses,) and all this mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry concentrated here.

The advent of America has been the first general aperture and opening-up to the average human commonalty, on the broadest scale, of the eligibilities to wealth and worldly success and eminence, and has been fully taken advantage of; and the example has spread hence, in ripples, to all nations. To this limitless aperture the human race has tended, en-masse, roaring and rushing and crude, and fiercely, turbidly hastening—and we have seen the first stages, and are now in the midst of the result of it all, so far.
So it gives glow and enjoyment to me, being and moving amid the whirl and din, intensity, material success here. These things I do not expect to see less of but more—with mental and ecclesiastical freedom.

Notwithstanding all set-offs, the great capitalists and masters of private enterprise have, in America at least, been useful. I have myself had all along a tender feeling for cooperation, but for that doubt whether a committee or an elected person could or would do the work. But we must grow generous, ungrasping masters of industry. Absurd as the idea would seem to most nowadays, I believe that is the upshot of what is going on.

On a great democratic scale the present and here are probably ahead and better than all time past—and this, too, as applying not only to worldly situations, conditions, but what we call gifts, benefits, of mind, the spiritual endowment. The movements of our time in science, religion, and sociology are toward a loftier conception of the human thought and constant upward tendency, stamping an optimism on the age. That satisfies me—that general unmistakable certain trend does. That’s what America is for.

Things are about as good as they can be under present conditions,
Today is what it must be, and America is,
And today and America could no-how be better than they are.
At the first view it may not be so creditable,
But go on, explicate still more, and still more, and still more behind all that,
After a while you see why it must be so in the nature of things—
There are leading moral truths underlying politics,
As invariable and reliable as the leading truths in geology, chemistry, or mathematics,
These truths are the foundation of American politics.

As in all departments of the universe, regular laws (slow and sure in planting, slow and sure in ripening) have controll’d and govern’d, and will yet control and govern, the growth of our republic. Its politics and religion, whatever they are, are inevitable results of the days and events that have preceded the nation, just as much as the condition of the geology of that part of the earth is the result of former.

Of course in politics man can always change the conditions. America, robbed, gnawed at the vitals, lived upon by a mass of corrupting political fraud, exceeds all in her power to outlast her evils. Only here in America has at last arisen, and now stands, what never before took positive form and sway, the people—and that view’d en masse.
While fully acknowledging deficiencies, dangers, faults, this people—inchoate, latent, not yet come to majority, nor to its own religious, literary, or æsthetic expression—yet affords, today, an exultant justification of all the faith, all the hopes and prayers and prophecies, of good men.

There are two sets of wills to nations and to persons—one set that acts and works from explainable motives—and then another set, perhaps deep, hidden, unsuspected, yet often more potent than the first, rising as it were out of abysses, refusing to be argued with, resistlessly urging on speakers, doers, communities, unwitting to themselves—the poet to his fieriest words—the race to pursue its loftiest ideal.
The paradox of a nation’s life and career, with all its wondrous contradictions, can probably only be explain’d from these two wills, sometimes conflicting, each operating in its sphere, combining in races or in persons, and producing strangest results.

Let us hope there is—indeed, can there be any doubt there is?—this great unconscious and abysmic second will also running through the average nationality and career of America. Let us hope that it alone is the permanent and sovereign force, destined to form and fashion men and women more noble, more athletic; to gradually, firmly blend, from all the states, with all varieties, a friendly, happy, free, religious nationality—not only the most productive and materialistic the world has yet known, but out of whose ample and solid bulk, and giving purpose and finish to it, conscience, morals, and all the spiritual attributes, shall surely rise, like spires above some group of edifices, firm-footed on the earth, yet scaling space and heaven.

You unseen moral essence of all the vast materials of America,
You endless base of deep integrities within, timid but certain,
You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould the New World,
Adjusting it to time and space,
You hidden national will lying in your abysms, conceal’d but ever alert,
Age upon age working in death the same as life,
You past and present purposes tenaciously pursued, maybe unconscious of yourselves,
Unswerv’d by all the passing errors, perturbations of the surface,
You vital, universal, deathless germs, beneath all creeds, arts, statutes, literatures—
Here build your homes for good,
Showing the democratic conditions supplanting everything that insults them or impedes their aggregate way,
And carrying our experiment of democratic freedom to the very verge of the limit,
With that vehemence of pride and audacity of freedom necessary to loosen the mind of still-to-be-form’d America from the accumulated folds, the superstitions, and all the long, tenacious, and stifling anti-democratic authorities of the Asiatic and European past.

Freedom, lag’d’st thou so long? shall the clouds close again upon thee?
Ah, but thou hast thyself appear’d to us—we know thee,
Thou hast given us a sure proof, the glimpse of thyself,
Thou waitest everywhere thy time,
The soul of the nation also does its work; no disguise can conceal from it,
It rejects none, it permits all. 

So I still have my faith. I retain my heart’s and soul’s unmitigated faith in the essential bulk of American humanity, through thick and thin, to the last. Our American people after all have enough sense to revise themselves when there is need for it.
In the end my faith prevails,
I see the genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal,
Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand,
To build a grander future.

Then why myself and all drowsing?
I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these states sleep, for reasons,
But south, north, east, west, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake;
Belief I sing—and preparation.

NEXT: AMERICA’S FUTURE GREATNESS

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