There is no need to wonder, therefore, if many Europeans regret the Americanisation of the old continent as a kind of grievous madness. Europe—especially its upper classes—lives a great deal—it could hardly help living—in its past history. I have already said, that I, too, when I undertook my journeys to America, was more or less of this same cast of thought. But in America, confronted with this frenzy of desires and of works which has attracted from all parts of the world and fused into one people so many millions of souls, has created so many cities and produced so much wealth, it was no longer possible for me to shut my eyes to the fact that so vast and profound a phenomenon must depend on causes much more complex and grave than a simple mistake or mental aberration. For what reason was Europe ready to destroy even her secular tradition of art for the sake of emulating that rapidity of execution and audacity of enterprise which I was then witnessing in the New World? This was the problem which presented itself to me, after I had grasped the meaning of American progress; and which I succeeded in solving with the help of my wife’s investigations into the history of machinery. “Christopher Columbus,” says one of my characters, in _Between the Old World and the New_, “not only discovered America, but re-endowed man with the globe which God had already given him, inasmuch as he enabled man at last to know it.” Europe had remained content up to the fifteenth century to live in her little territory, ignorant of how great the world was. That earlier limitation, however, only increased the force of the impulse, given to man by the discovery of America, to scour and ransack the oceans, with the object of discovering and possessing the whole plane. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, then, Europe saw the world expanding around her. With the expansion of the world, however, came an increase in the longing to possess it, to master it, and to exploit it. How was Europe to do so, with means so scanty, and under the sway of the ancient ideas, which said to man, “Dare not!” which taught him to change as little as possible the order of things under which he had grown up, and not to yield to the temptation of over-ardent desires and of over-lofty ambitions?