Although such a turn of events resulted in very much of an anticlimax, this fact should not make one forget the prophetic quality in his "Letters," nor should his failure to predict every aspect of modern life throw any shadow on the clearness with which he foretold some of the most important of them. It is true, of course, that he did not appreciate how tragic were to be the fruits of slavery; that he saw immigration only as a desirable supply of labor to a continent which could never be overpopulated; that, writing before the earliest chapter of the factory era, he did not dream of the industrial complexities of the present. But when he said that the American, sprung from Europe but here adopted into a new nation, "ought therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born," he was saying something that has been repeated with new conviction ten thousand times since the outbreak of the Great War. And when he declared that "the American is a new man, who acts upon new principles" he was foreshadowing national policies which the world has been slow to understand. The possibility of a nation's being too proud to fight at the first provocation, and the subordination of national interest to the interest of mankind--this is the language of the new principles that Crèvecoeur was invoking. It is nearly a century and a half since he tried to answer the question "What is an American?" Much has happened since then. Internally the country has developed to the extent of his farthest dreams, and in the world-family, after five great wars, it has become one of the greatest of the powers, fulfilling so much of his predictions that one speculates in all humility on what may be the next steps "for that new race of men whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world." BOOK LIST =_Individual Author_= MICHEL GUILLAUME ST. JEAN DE CRÈVECOEUR. Letters from an American Farmer. Written for the information of a friend in England. Edited by J. Hector St. John. 1782. =Available Editions= Letters from an American Farmer. Ludwig Lewisohn, editor. With prefatory note by W. P. Trent. 1904. W. B. Blake, editor. In _Everyman's Library_. =Biography and Criticism= BOYNTON, PERCY H. A Colonial Farmer's Letters. _New Republic_, June 19, 1915. MITCHELL, JULIA POST. St. Jean de Crèvecoeur. 1916. TYLER, M. C. Literary History of the American Revolution (1765-1783), Vol. II, chap. xxvii. 1897. TOPICS AND PROBLEMS Read the characterization of the American colonies in Burke's "Speech on Conciliation." Read the letter entitled "What is an American?" and see how far its generalizations apply to the America of to-day. Read Zangwill's play "The Melting Pot" in the light of this letter on "What is an American?"