As a matter of fact, I found all these characteristics in North America, and they no longer offended me. They seemed to me necessary qualities of a society which sets out to conquer a boundless territory with machinery. Nevertheless, at this point, having solved the American problem, I was confronted with the European problem under a new aspect. If American progress, if machinery, if the quantitative criterion of perfection are necessary weapons for the accomplishment of the great historical work to which the United States have set themselves, how are we to explain the fact that in the states of Europe also machines are being multiplied, the American idea of progress is spreading, and the quantitative criterion of perfection is prevailing gradually? All of them except Russia, which in many respects resembles the United States, are countries of an old civilisation, live in small tracts of territory, and have not immense continents to exploit. At this point I saw hovering over Europe and America a new, vaster, and more general problem, which dominates the two worlds and bestrides the Atlantic like a great bridge: the struggle between quantity and quality. III MORE OR BETTER? It is an undoubted fact that Europe is becoming Americanised; that the American idea of progress—understood to mean the increase of wealth and the perfectioning of the instruments of production—is penetrating European society. No profound knowledge of European society is needed to recognise this. I would even go so far as to say that the only idea which in the last fifty years has sunk deep into the minds of the masses in Europe is this American idea of progress. I must, however, also confess that before I went to America I belonged to that group of Europeans, numerous enough, especially among the cultured and upper classes, which laments this “Americanisation” of Europe, and considers it to be a sort of mental aberration and decadence on the part of the Old World. The idea is fairly wide-spread in Europe. It may startle a good many Americans; but it will not seem paradoxical to those who spare a moment’s reflection for the history of European civilisation up to the French Revolution.