As regards our uniformity, fresh evidence could only endorse his first impressions. The vestigial remnants of what regional cultures we have had are rapidly being effaced by our unthinking standardization in every department of life. The railroad, the telephone and telegraph, the newspaper, the Ford, the movies, advertising--all have scarcely standardized themselves before they have set about standardizing everything within their reach. Not even our provinces of the picturesque are immune, the places and things we like to think of as “different” (word that betrays our standard sameness!) and glamorous of our romantic golden age. In the Old South, Birmingham loves to call herself the Pittsburgh of the South; our railroads have all but hounded the packets from the Mississippi; it is notorious that our apostles to the Indians, whether political, religious, or pedagogic, wage relentless war on the very customs and traditions we cherish in legend; the beautiful Missions that a kindlier evangelism bequeathed to them are repeated and cheapened in every suburb and village of the land, under every harsher sky; those once spontaneous fêtes of the plains, the “Stampede” and the “Round-Up,” have been made so spurious that the natives abandon them for a moth-eaten Wild West Show made in the East; and in only a year or two even New Orleans’ Mardi Gras will be indistinguishable from its counterfeits in St. Louis and elsewhere. As with these adventitious and perhaps not very important regional differentiations, so with the one fundamental demarcation our people have all along recognized as conditioning the give-and-take of American life. The line between the East and the West, advancing from the Alleghanies to the Rockies and then part of the way back, has never stayed long enough in one zone to be precisely drawn, but it has always been sharply felt. Since Colonial times the East has meant many things--wealth, stability, contacts with Europe, refinement, industry, centralized finance--and the West has meant many things--hardship and adventure, El Dorado, outlawry, self-reliance, agriculture, vast enterprise; but they have never been so close to meaning the same things as to-day. To-morrow they will merge. Even now the geographical line between them may be drawn anywhere in a belt two thousand miles wide, in which it will be fixed according to the nativity of the critic rather than by any pronounced social stigmata. East or West, there is a greater gulf between the intelligent and the unintelligent of the same parish than divides the intelligent of different parishes. East or West, Americans think pretty much the same thoughts, feel about the same emotions, and express themselves in the American tongue--that is, in slang. If the slang, the accent, the manner differ noticeably, as they still do, there are not wanting signs that another generation will obliterate these differences too. Publishing, to be sure, tends