high finance who have the right on their side. Many methods employed by modern finance, useful as they are from an economic point of view, are for the above-mentioned reason none the less repugnant to a moral and slightly sensitive conscience. Detractors and defenders may dispute to the end of time. They will never understand each other, for they start from different premises, which never can be reconciled to each other. It is this continual confusion between quantitative and qualitative standards which prevents the modern world from steering a true course amid the gravest moral questions. Take, for example, the question of progress. Is there an idea more popular to-day, or a word more often repeated, than “progress”? And yet if to every person who pronounces this word we were to put the question, “What do you mean by progress?” few indeed would be able to answer with precision. There is a thing still stranger. In this century of progress, the whole world deplores ten times a day the decadence of all things. How can such a contradiction be explained? The answer is simply that the same act may be judged as a phenomenon of progress or of decadence, according as it is viewed from the standpoint of Quality or of Quantity. Set an architect and a locomotive builder to disputing about the modern world. The former will maintain that the world is reverting to barbarism because it multiplies cities, and hastily and hideously constructed villages without being able to create a single one of those marvellous monuments which are the glory of the Middle Ages. The latter will reply that the world moves forward, because the population, number, and size of the cities, the amount of cultivated land, the extension of railroads, increase without cessation. The interlocutors will never come to understand each other, just as two men who look at the world through spectacles of different colours can never agree on the colour of their environment. The riddle of America, which for some time past has bothered Europe so much, is merely another example of this permanent confusion of standards which characterises the age in which we live. * * * * * America is neither the monstrous country where men think solely of making money, nor the country of marvels boasted by her admirers. It is the country where the principles of Quantity, which have become so powerful during the last one hundred and fifty years, have achieved their most extraordinary triumph. An active, energetic, vigorous nation has found itself master of an enormous territory, portions of which were very fertile and other portions very rich in mines and forests, at the very moment when our civilisation finally invented the machine which makes possible the exploitation of vast countries and the swift creation of wealth: the steam-engine.