of Roman historian to prepare my course of lectures and gave no further thought to the book on America which I had promised to write. On November 1, 1908, I sailed for New York, and a three months’ course of the intense life began again for me; rapid journeys, incessant visits, interviews with journalists, hundreds of conversations, banquets, receptions, speeches, and inquiries. I visited schools, hospitals, universities, prisons, law-courts, factories, banks, and co-operative enterprises. I made the acquaintance of millionaires and artisans, industrialists and professors, lawyers and journalists. I managed to get a peep into the wealthy abodes of the rich families of the great cities of the East, and into the little houses in which the middle classes drag out a crowded and pinched existence. I witnessed the frenzy for work, the incessant activity, the unending agitation which wears out every class in America. Most important of all, however, I saw reappear before me—and this time in gigantic form, monstrous, unrestrained, almost sublime in its savage energy—that demon of American progress which had impressed me so much in Brazil and Argentina, comparatively small though it had there appeared to me, and which in Europe seemed to me to have almost melted away. Was it not this which imbued everything American with that startling air of novelty, extravagance, and grandeur, which stunned and almost frightened me? So I devoted myself not only to the accumulation of impressions, informations, and recollections in profusion; I also set to work in the tumult of American life to think again about American progress. I made an effort to dive deeper down into the nature of this strange phenomenon, to guard against its melting away from before me when I got back to Europe. And at last, one day, I really thought I had found the clue.