What power is it which has worked this miracle? On this point, it is impossible to feel any doubt; the power is wealth. These plains and these mountains which look so deserted are tilled, mined, worked with intensest energy; and every year, with a generosity which seems inexhaustible, they yield to the men who have toiled over them prodigious quantities of cereals, tobacco, coffee, wool, gold, silver, iron, oil—an enormous torrent of riches which pours over the entire world. The great industrial cities of North America manufacture these raw materials with profits so large and swiftly won that to the Old World they seem fantastic. In these plains, in these valleys, in these mountains, in these cities, labourers receive higher wages, merchants and manufacturers make their fortunes faster, capitalists come into contact with mightier interests, landlords draw higher rents from this prosperity—all the sources of profit are more abundant than in Europe. And these conditions have made it possible for a few of Fortune’s favourites to pile up in the course of a single lifetime wealth whose vastness makes the brain swim. America has, in fact, succeeded in producing riches at a rate of speed that man has never yet attained elsewhere in the world. She has been the principal factor in the fabulous increase of the world’s wealth during the last fifty years. Her riches have become one of the historic forces of our civilisation, and one of the principal preoccupations of the European mind. Whence come these vast riches and whither do they go? How is it that America can grow rich so much faster than Europe? Is it thanks to far more fortunate physical conditions, which bear no relation to the deserts of man? Or is it in consequence of moral and intellectual qualities which are lacking in Europeans? And what will be the ultimate effect of this economic superiority? Riches may be the goal of an individual’s efforts; for a nation they can only be means to conquer the other good things of life which we call civilisation: glory, grandeur, power, beauty, knowledge, moral refinement. Can America, and will she, make use of her riches to rob Europe of the intellectual and moral leadership which the latter still possesses? Or will these riches, too swiftly won, exercise an evil influence simultaneously upon Europe and America, by making both continents more materialistic? * * * * *