Time accentuated differences
till those who started together were millions of dollars apart. Failures
had no kinder fields for new trials. Democracy had now to govern not a
puritanical, industrious, sparsely settled Arcady but communities of
conflicting dynamic successes, static envies, and complaining despairs.
It met the new emergencies at first, one by one, with no other programme
than the most necessary restraints, encouragement of tariffs for the
dynamic, improved transportation for the static, and charity for the
despairful; but all with an optimism born of a belief in destined success.
To this has succeeded gradually a more or less clearly defined policy of
constructive individualism, under an increasingly democratic and less
representative control. The paternal absolutism of Louis XIV has evolved
into the paternal individualism of a people who are constantly struggling
in imperfect speech to make their will understood and by imperfect
machinery to get it done--and, as I believe, with increasingly
disinterested purpose.
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