Many and various matters relating to Europe and America are discussed in this book. Still more various and diverse are the discussions in _Between the Old World and the New_, which presents a series of dialogues occupying the leisure hours of a two weeks’ voyage, in the course of which persons of different degrees of culture and diverse casts of thought discuss Hamlet and progress, machinery and Homer, the Copernican system and riches, science and Vedanta philosophy, Kant and love, Europe and America, Christian Science and sexual morality. These matters are discussed fitfully with mad rushes zigzag over the universe; and the fits and rushes have somewhat dismayed certain critics on this side of the Atlantic. “What a jumble!” they cry. “What an encyclopædia, what an enormity it is! What can Homer and machinery, Hamlet and America, Copernicus and emigration have in common?” In short, the perusal of _Between the Old World and the New_ in the original Italian has produced upon more than one critic the same effect as if he had come back to his house to find all his belongings, his letters, his furniture, his clothes, shifted and turned upside down. “What demon has been at work here?” he cries in dismay. Such critics are not altogether wrong from their point of view. Nevertheless, this demon, which is always urging man to turn his home upside down in the hopes of arranging it better, no adjuration will succeed in exorcising from our epoch. I hope that, when presented in the form of a book, these dialogues will produce a less alarming impression on America. Accustomed as she is to seeing such demons raging in her house, she should not permit herself to be prevented from taking breath in the satisfaction of having done well, by the ambition to do better. To be sure, between the so-called Homeric question and steam-engines, between the discovery of America and the tendencies of philosophy, between the troubles which torment us in private life and the French Revolution, between transatlantic emigration and the architecture of New York, there is a connection. It is a profound, an organic, a vital connection; for, in the last four centuries, little by little, almost imperceptibly at first, then with a speed which increased gradually up to the French Revolution, finally, at headlong speed from the Revolution to the present day, the world has changed in every part, in form, spirit, and order. And it has changed in form, order, and spirit, because it has changed the order of its demands upon man. In compensation for the liberty granted him in everything else, it has demanded of him a rapidity, a punctuality, an intensity, and a passivity of obedience in his work, such as no other epoch has ever dreamed of being able to exact from lazy human nature.