262 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



that there now are dangerous tendencies in American life which are indeed alarm- 

 ing. There are clouds in the national sky, white and high sailing, now perhaps, 

 but which if lowered must spread havoc and ruin among the ranks of men. 



In the evening of the nineteenth century we are abreast of the experience of 

 the world through all the past in the forms of government and yet there are those 

 among us who beHeve in a limited monarchy. In a government where the peo- 

 ple are the sovereigns we see ignorance among the masses. Super-refined ideas 

 of liberty are endangering that freedom which is the servant of law. Abstract 

 speculations concerning the rights of property, in the hands of the uneducated, 

 would unsettle all the laws of the ownership of lands. The landing of the May- 

 flower has become almost a myth and we have drifted so far from the policies 

 and practices of the pilgrim fathers that not a popular election passes without 

 witnessing the priceless ballot made an engine of corruption. The laborer is pro- 

 tected in his life, liberty and property, and yet with the granaries of the world 

 from which to draw our sustenance the red hand of commission has been thrust 

 more than once in the face of the law. With cereals rotting in the sun, values 

 are inflated. In the multiplicity of our industries, vocations await the choosing, 

 and yet capital is as merciless to our poor as an Egyptian taskmaster to the creep- 

 ing drudges that built the Pyramids by the Nile. With millions of tons of coal 

 andiron from which to manufacture the machinery of the world, thousands of hoarse 

 throats are demanding an increase of wages, and the tramp is abroad in a land of 

 plenty. The freedom of the press, established that the purest ideas of the best 

 men might stir a patriot's heart in time of peace, is now used to engender party 

 spirit, and sends forth the stories of the blackest crimes upon the wings of the 

 wind. There is profligacy and theft in high offices, patronage and spoils have 

 become the object of success, and the highest gratifications are sacrificed upon 

 the altar of party-supremacy. Religious freedom is guaranteed to everyone, but 

 the speculations of pseudo-philosophers threaten vitue itself, and would have us 

 disregard civil to say nothing of sacred laws. Social laws are being disregarded. 

 Divorce threatens the institution of the home, and, polygamy-Hke, a canker grows 

 upon the heart of the body-poHtic. Reforms, the delirium of an hour, sweeping 

 with the rapidity of a prairie fire, serve only to dry up the heart. Materialism 

 and Agnosticism threaten to loosen the soul from even its moral moorings. A 

 mad death-dance of new ideas unsettles all belief. A feverish unrest has taken 

 possession of the people, and the accumulation of wealth is made the sole end of 

 living. Aristocracies are growing and every decade more firmly establishes Plebeian 

 and Patrician castes. Luxury, ease, effeminacy, fashion, ostentation, the pursuit 

 of pleasure, title and rank and gold, are the moving spirits of existence, and the 

 centralization of power, the despotism of ambition, and the oHgarchy of wealth 

 threaten the stabihty of our institutions. 



The Parthenon and Panthenon are but the melancholy monuments of a glo- 

 rious liberty lost through the same influences which are about us now. All the 

 past is eloquent with the wrecks of nations. Shall we allow these insidious evils, 

 and they are menacing evils if there are any parallelisms of history, to creep upon 



