y Watterson, Reid,
Edmunds, and others, was printed in the _Century Magazine_ during 1913.

CHAPTER IV

THE PANIC OF 1873

"Are not all the great communities of the Western World growing more
corrupt as they grow in wealth?" asked a critical and thoughtful
journalist, Edwin L. Godkin, in 1868, as he considered the relations of
business and politics. He answered himself in the affirmative and found
comrades in his pessimism throughout that intellectual class in whose
achievements America has taken conscious pride. For at least ten years
they despaired of the return of honesty. James Russell Lowell, decorated
with the D.C.L. of Oxford, and honored everywhere in the world of
letters, was filled with doubt and dismay as late as 1876, at "the
degradation of the moral tone. Is it, or is it not," he asked, "a result
of democracy? Is ours a 'government of the people by the people for the
people,' or ... for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?"

It was not without reason that serious men were fearful in the years in
which military heroes dominated in politics, and in which commerce
struggled with its revolution. Had they foreseen the course of the next
generation, noted the progress of new ideas in government, the extension
of philanthropy and social relief, and the passion for education that
swept the country, they need not have despaired. Godkin, himself, could
not have made a living from his _Nation_, with its high ideals, its
criticism, and its despondency, in a land that was wholly rotten. The
young college presidents of the period could not have found a livelihood
in a country that was not fundamentally sound. At Harvard, Charles
William Eliot broke down the old technique of culture and enlarged its
range; at Michigan, James Burrill Angell proved it possible to maintain
sound, scholarly, and non-political education, in a public institution
supported by taxation; in a new university a private benefactor, Johns
Hopkins, gave to Daniel Coit Gilman a chance to show that creative
scholarship can flourish in a democracy. But the essential soundness of
the Republic was as much obscured in 1868 as its wealth had been in
1861, and for the present the objects on the surface, brought there by
violent convulsion, represented its less creditable part.

The years of Grant's Presidency were filled with unsightly episodes,
that were scandalous then and have been discouraging always. In his
first year of office, Jay Go