This country having fallen into the errors to which I have referred;
into the hands of mediocre and incompetent legislators, without even a
single statesman among them all; into the times of small minds and
smaller measures that do not look beyond the day in which they are
proposed; into industrial, financial and commercial ruin, with one half
the wealth-producing power starving in idleness and no one seeming even
to think what the end of this must be; having fallen into all these
ills, this country needs that a giant mind shall spring into its
councils, or else among its legislators, a captain which shall be able
to grasp the helm of the ship of state now floundering hopelessly in the
trough of the industrial sea, and put her before the wind again; a mind
that shall have the wisdom and the courage to show the puerility of
those who occupy the posts of honour, and, by the mere force of will,
lift them into the right path; show them that beneath the surface of
that which they seem to think is peaceable enough, there is a raging,
seething volcano ready at the slightest occasion to burst forth and
overwhelm everything in its path; a master mind which shall compel
Congress by active measures to guide its powers rather than by inaction
to provoke an eruption. This country needs that God shall send a
law-giver; one who shall understand what has led to the present
situation; what the exigencies of the people demand, and who shall have
the ability to propose and the power to enforce the needed remedies—a
Lycurgus to give a new code of laws that shall be the incarnation of the
principles of the Declaration of Independence, which alone of all
principles have any influence to mould the people, and from which they
draw the characteristics which distinguish them from the other nations
of the earth; and a Bonaparte to sweep out of the way the accumulating
_débris_ of years of vicious legislation and in its place inaugurate
that code; needs a Lycurgus with his code of laws; a Bonaparte with his
genius to command, and, combined with these, the vehement power of a
Demosthenes to rouse the people to a sense of the danger in which they
stand and, whether they will or not, lead them through a peaceable,
rather than permit them to plunge into a bloody, revolution. Let this be
done, no matter in what form this power may come, and a change of
greater magnitude for good to this people than that proposed by Lycurgus
for the Spartans, or that instituted in France by Bonaparte, will be
inaugurated here.
But what has been done socially? Much of which I have not the time to
speak, but this, as to what I would have for the social condition:—