begin to enumerate the elements in our society that contribute to form a selection constantly working against the survival of the creative type? By cutting off the sources that nourish it, by lending prestige to the acquisitive and destroying the glamour of the creative career, everything in America conspires to divert the spirit from its natural course, seizing upon the instincts of youth and turning them into a single narrow channel. Here, of course, I touch upon the main fact of American history. That traditional drag, if one may so express it, in the direction of the practical, which has been the law of our civilization, would alone explain why our literature and art have never been more than half-hearted. To abandon the unpopular and unremunerative career of painting for the useful and lucrative career of invention must have seemed natural and inevitable to Robert Fulton and Samuel Morse. So strong is this racial compulsion, so feeble is the hold which Americans have upon ultimate values, that one can scarcely find to-day a scientist or a scholar who, for the sake of science or scholarship, will refuse an opportunity to become the money-gathering president of some insignificant university. Thus our intellectual life has always been ancillary to the life of business and organization: have we forgotten that the good Washington Irving himself, the father of American letters, thought it by no means beneath his dignity to serve as a sort of glorified press-agent for John Jacob Astor?