Though I think I fully comprehend the absence of moral tone in our
current politics and business, and the almost entire futility of
absolute and simple honor as a counterpoise against the enormous greed
for worldly wealth, with the trickeries of gaining it, all through
society our day, I still do not share the depression and despair on the
subject which I find possessing many good people. The advent of America,
the history of the past century, 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 these eligibilities--to this limitless
aperture, the 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. But there will
certainly ensue other stages, and entirely different ones. In nothing
is there more evolution than the American mind. Soon, it will be fully
realized that ostensible wealth and money-making, show, luxury, &c.,
imperatively necessitate something beyond--namely, the sane, eternal
moral and spiritual-esthetic attributes, elements. (We cannot have even
that realization on any less terms than the price we are now paying
for it.) Soon, it will be understood clearly, that the State cannot
flourish, (nay, cannot exist,) without those elements. They will
gradually enter into the chyle of sociology and literature. They will
finally make the blood and brawn of the best American individualities
of both sexes--and thus, with them, to a certainty, (through these very
processes of to-day,) dominate the New World.