LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

grandfather’s papers. B.A. at turn of century was nevertheless a bit
elated by the contemporary elation of the U.S., the period of great
combines, of the new efficiency of combined (or trust) organization. He
felt that America, by which word all U.S.’ers meant the U.S. of North
America was expandin’, and that the U.S. of A. was headed for imperial
destinies. He saw it with mercantilist eye, shall we say, as material
tendency.
He noted that in 1870 a chief source of British prosperity had been
agriculture, but that already a Bagehot had been writing about how
British money circulated round via Lombard Street, saving British
landed gentry, almost as that used in discounting bills from British
industrial areas. That Bagehot’s words were hardly in print, before a
shift of the world equilibrium had set in.
Mr. Adams noted the apparently meager accumulation of POPULAR
SAVINGS in England and that during the Boer war you seemed to be
relying on foreign bankers. I don’t want to insist unduly. But let us take a
date five years later than the publication of Mr. Brooks Adams’ The New
Empire, say he meant the American empire. The great American
reorganization WAS complete in 1897; a decade later almost any
average American arriving in London would have been full up with
ideas of PROGRESS. He would, if he had met an intelligent British Tory
(the two words COULD at that time be joined in at least a few cases
without being ridiculous) he, the imaginary, homme moyen sensuel,
average American, young or middle aged, would have encountered
something absolutely new TO him, something unknown, and I think
undreamt in America. Namely the conSERVATIVE view, the utterly
surprisin’ idea that things weren’t gettin’ better, and that you, meaning
England of course, but being an Englishman, the English Tory would
have applied it to the universe, on which the British eye never rests. Well
that people, mankind, etc. better go slow, better not agitate, better let
things stay in status quo. I believe that any and every American who