The modern world [says another of my characters] has crowned quantity at the expense of quality—which is, after all, an eternal law. For I can make in a certain time things of a certain quality, that is to say, resembling a certain model of perfection which I have before my eyes or in my mind. But in that case, I cannot make any quantity of it which I may require. I must rest content with that quantity which I can manage, working with all my zeal. I can say, on the other hand: I want so many things of a certain quality. But in that case, I can no longer prescribe the time necessary to finish them as my fancy bids me. Or again: I wish in so much time to make such a quantity. Very well; but in that case, I must put up with the best quality I can get. So that whoever wants to increase the quantity, and to curtail the time must abate his demand for quality. And that is just what we are doing to-day in this civilisation of ours, in which quantity reigns supreme. In the light of this idea that decadence in art, and in so many other refinements of life, which many Europeans impute to America, seemed to me no longer the effect of an aberration on the part of the masses, but a sort of compensation. We pay, and we ought to pay, for the rapid fortunes so commonly made nowadays. We pay, we ought to pay, for the speed of the trains, the motor-cars, the aeroplane, the telegraph; and the price is the mediocrity which pervades everything. We cannot have, we must not want, everything in this world,—railways as well as beautiful pictures, aeroplanes as well as the marvellous furniture which the great French artists used to make in the eighteenth century, speed as well as good manners. For among the reproaches hurled at America by Europe is that of having banished from Europe by the example of her democracy the good manners of our ancient ceremonial, and substituted for it a rather over-simple and over-casual cordiality. But can we expect the polished form, for which the eighteenth century was famous, to survive in the social relations of a civilisation which, like ours, is always in a hurry? Among men, who live between the train, the motor-car, and the telephone?