We have, of course, retained European ideals, but they have been conditioned by circumstances and we have not kept pace with Europe or even followed the course of the great art-movements until they were almost or quite superseded abroad. Our distance from the centres of ancient and modern culture on one hand, and the needs of building up the new continent on the other, combined to make our people lose interest in art, which, indeed, had never found a propitious soil among our British forebears. The case of literature is different. The love of it is an abiding one with the Anglo-Saxon race, and as Shakespeare and the Bible could be read in the frontier cabin almost as well as in London or Dublin, there was not the loss of knowledge of literature, the break in the production of it that we find in the case of the plastic arts. It is easy to exaggerate on this score, however, forgetting that the art-instinct accumulated in a race for centuries is not to be lost by a period of neglect. When he goes to the museum, the American recognizes the same masters as does the European, but the smaller opportunity here to know the classic past has the double effect of keeping art-lovers in America in a far more reduced minority and at the same time of weakening the authority of tradition. Not to speak of 17th or 18th century conditions, nor even of those of the 19th century, one need only consider the America of to-day to realize how little opportunity our people has to know art. In all but a few cities, Americans can learn only from reproductions and books, though even these are an immeasurably safer guide than the bad original works which are usually the first to arrive. When one thinks of the European countryside and the numberless small towns of all the old countries where there is no museum, one may be tempted to ask whether art conditions are so very different there. But they are different. There will be an old church, or some houses of a good period, or some objects in the houses, or--on the walls of the inn--some old prints handing on the tradition of the great religious pictures (such things were made quite commonly until recent times and have not entirely ceased to be produced); a tradition of construction and of colour makes the modern houses fit in quite acceptably with those of the past. The centuries have built up a sense of fitness and beauty in the making and wearing of costume; there will be some form of folk-singing or other collective action of an artistic character, and thus the exceptional individual, born with a strong instinct toward art, has surroundings and a foundation that are lacking here. A striking proof of the difference between the two continents is the effect of the war on art-interest: whereas in America public attention has been turned away from art to a most marked degree, Europe is producing and buying art with a fervour that can only be explained by the desire to get back to