to concentrate in the East, though without impoverishing the West, since all notable circulations have to be national to survive. The very fact that the country’s publishing can be done from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston demonstrates our national unanimity of opinion and expression. Before it overleapt the geographical walls, this national unanimity had wiped out every class distinction but one, which it has steadily tended to entrench--the money line. Families may continue to hold their place only on the condition that they keep their money or get more; and a moderate fortune, no matter how quickly come by, has only to make a few correct strokes, avoid a few obvious bunkers, and it will found a family by inadvertence. The process is so simple that clerks practise it during their vacations at the shore. Besides money, there is one other qualification--personal charm. Its chief function, perhaps, is to disguise the essentially monetary character of American social life. At any rate, Americans are almost as uniformly charming as they are uniformly acquisitive. For the most part it is a negative charm, a careful skirting of certain national taboos: it eschews frank egoism, unfavourable criticism, intellectual subtlety, unique expressions of temperament, humour that is no respecter of persons, anything that might disturb the _status quo_ of reciprocal kindliness and complacent optimism. The unpopular American is unpopular not because he is a duffer or a bore, but because he is “conceited,” a “knocker,” a “highbrow,” a “nut,” a “grouch,” or something of that ilk. We do not choose, as the Martian suggested, to be as similar as possible; we choose _not_ to be dissimilar. If our convictions about America and what is American sprang from real knowledge of ourselves and of our capacities, we should relish egoists, disinterested critics, intellectuals, artists, and irreverent humourists, instead of suppressing them when we cannot mould them. That we do not relish them, that we protect ourselves from them, is evidence that we fear them. What reason should we have to fear them save a secret distrust of our asseverated convictions? Our unanimity, then, would seem to the Martian to be an artificial substitute for some natural background we lack but should like to have; and a most dangerous wish-fulfilment it is, for it masks our ignorance of what we are and what we may reasonably become. Far from being self-knowledge, Americanism would seem to him to be a hallucination, an article of faith supported only by our determination to believe it, and to coerce others into believing it. The secret of our uniformity would be a stubborn ignorance. At which point our critic would have to re-examine his earlier impressions about our “passion for education,” and strive to understand the uses to which we actually put our educational establishment, to appraise its function in our life.