Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 December 1884 — American Reassertion. [ARTICLE]

American Reassertion.

mi > t The average American citizen is peculiar in that, on being knocked down, his first impulse is to declare himself only slightly hurt, and to immediately return to the combat confidently and courageously. He is very slow to admit defeat. The reporter encounters many examples of this spirit. If a great manufactory burns down in the height of a busy season, the first statement of tho proprietor is that of a determination to build again, before he knows whether his loss is great or small. If a hank suspends it is always with the intention of ultimate resumption, while all the other banks of the city with one voice declare they are not injured by the failure, and it very frequently requires many years to convince their respective directors that they were crippled at all. Some of the most successful dramatic enterprises began in failure. Mahy great railroad undertakings have a continuous history ©f triumph over misfortune, and many politicians have found that the defeats of to-day may cause the victories of the morrow.

The American finds hope in the fact that no man can tell what the morrow may bring forth. He does not despair because of the uncertainty. It may be that tli is is the hope of the gambler, but his optimism, with its attendant blessing of inspiration and consequent renewal of courageous activity, is ever assertive and ever saving. He refuses to don saokcloth and declines to sit in ashes. The of one political party’s committee, said the dispatches, concedes 5,000 to the other side, while the latter claim 20,000. There’s the American optimism. Both sides were looking at the situation through rosecolor. When the next dispatches showed that a miscalculation had been made, and that the former were viotors, the official who ! had conceded 5,000 how claimed 10,000, and he who had claimed 20,000 conceded only 500. There it was again. But when the campaign was over, the defeated forgot their disappointment, and when the next was on there was a renewal of the old fight without the slightest diminution of hopefulness. Pope said, “Man never is but always to be blest.” An American revision would read, “Man is always bound to be blest.” The American has the happiest faculty of forgetting liia misfortunes and losses. The republic lias survived the fiercest civil war of history, tho commercial world the Jay Cooke panic, and the Government the political crisis of 1876. Foreigners, coming to these shores, would find it difficult to follow the track of the war, which closed only nineteen years ago ; the terrible financial crash of 1878 is regarded as a good lesson, and the Electoral Commission furnishes an occasional paragraph for a newspaper humorist, while the doctrinaires in Congress, forgetful of the dangers in the present method of electing a President, dally over the once warmly urged propositions to remove them. The republic sails on serenely, the country grows richer and richer, and “The Government at Washington” still lives. A day is an eternity of time to the American. Events of interest succeed so quickly and sharply that one sensation treads upon another’s heels, so fast they follow. The croaker of one day is the cheerful prognosticator of the next. It may be that the croaking was based upon a sound philosophy, but the true American philosopher is quick to recognize new and brighter conditions. The republic has continued on a line of rapidly increasing prosperity, through wars and financial crises and political revolutions from the very beginning; and who, therefore, shall say that, the campaign of 18&4 being closed, the rule of the majority is the distress of the nation?— G. C. Matthews, in the Current. - —i.