THE AMERICAN SYSTEM.
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��ality, intelligence or civility, unless ac- tion be wrested from them by the strong arm of individual or local necessity. Ap- parently unable to comprehend citizen- ship, they call this a "free country," and hug their " independence," unmindful of the hinderance society incurs by their steadfast indifference to all true social interests.
Society in America suffers from a mis- construing of the royal privileges of na- tional citizenship. The conception of the rights of free citizens is distorted into an apprehension of the wrongs of all cit- zens. The conception that free citizen- ship does not mean a free defiance of all the laws of true citizenship apparently fails of a residence in the minds of many aspiring to prominence in our social af- fairs. The idea that it is practically im- possible fora person to assume the duties of public use, except for an absolutely private end, is too painfully prevalent in America. The sensitiveness of the truly loyal citizen is often shocked by re- marks betraying the wide-spreading dominance of the ascription of abject selfishness to all public acts. To the pub- lic apprehension it seems to be unhap- pily true that the public servant is a thief, and the thief cometh not but to appropriate the revenues and destroy the reputations of others. The unfortunate state of mind portrayed can be encour- aged by no other means than the irrational attitudes and acts of public men who have turned royal freedom into servile license.
Our American social intelligence is in- toxicated with a false notion of the laws of real development. A fungoid exhala- tion is mistaken for a gigantic growth. The many moral and intellectual perfec- tions, the tedious developing processes of which are all unseen by the indolent observer, are not only estimated as pro- ducts of a single day's creation, but are imitated and substituted by the frailest forms the soul's evolving agencies can afford. As the fnngi spring rapidly from accumulated heaps of fertilizing mate-
��rial, so vapid thoughts and feeble things arise profusely from the rich fields of moral and intellectual production laid open by our local system of free cultiva- tion. Because of the possession of free- dom, men have apparently concluded that greatness can not only be effected speedily, but in practical ignorance of the constructive laws which wisdom has always held inviolable throughout the historic past.
We do not feel adequate to an exercise of the faculty of prescience sufficient to state in emphatic detail the future of our common country. We know it is in its infancy, toddling in its first steps. We feel sure its fulfilled life will be distinc- tive. Life in America can never be just what it is anywhere else. As the indi- vidual man is endowed with a person and features that are uncopied in the form of any one else, so this nation will have a constitution and executive policy unlike that obtaining in any other political realm. The distinctive life of our Amer- ican nation will be unitary in expression. Potentially, it is so now. The Ameri- can citizen cannot now go abroad with- out betraying his nationality by his dis- tinctive personal bearing and address. It only remains for the American people to actualize their unified identity in the deeper consciousness of their souls, to make it a bond of permanent social unanimity. But the unity of our nation will be composite in character. Human nature cannot do less than material — assume an organic form. While our American system will leave out nothing coming within the legitimate circle of its influences, it will embody all in a struc- ture of harmonic national proportions. Its strength will make every man ac- knowledge his obligations to society, its judgment will make men forbear their abuse of its royal privileges, and its wis- dom will effectually dispossess its sub- jects of presumption and folly in the as- sertion of their individual moral and in- tellectual aspirations.
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