Though my personal feeling once was that America was destined to take high rank, if not complete leadership, in the intellectual world, I am now not so sure. At this writing it looks as though it might retrograde, and that speedily, and give place to newer lands--newer in spirit, I mean. It may not, but the signs are somewhat against it. Our literature has plainly developed to the level of the best seller and then stopped. Our art is sporadic, and with a few exceptions lymphatic and strongly suggestive of older forms. The futuristic dream did not originate here. Our science--well, who are our American scientists anyhow? Loeb? Carel? Tesla? Bell? All foreigners. In architecture, markedly allied, I must say, to mechanics, in which we flourish, we have done better--yes, and in anything and everything which relates, or has, to mechanics, trade, commercial organization. In those things, indeed, we have appeared to do most astoundingly, although I am firmly convinced that the boundless and virgin resources of the land have had as much--more, in fact--to do with this than anything else. We have not had so much to create as to develop, and other countries and other financiers--their trade geniuses--have done quite as well if not better in some instances than have we. I refer to such concerns and individuals as the English East India Company, the Royal Dutch Shell, the Allgemeine Elektrische Gesellschaft, the Cunard, Allen and other such organizations, to say nothing of such individuals as Lord Strathcona, Baron Shibusawa, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Cowdray, Alfred Harmsworth, Sir Thomas Lipton, etc. Indeed the one thing I would like to point out most definitely in passing is this: that the by now ingrown idea in every average American’s mind that all of the most significant inventions and discoveries, mental as well as mechanical, of the last hundred years or more are entirely of American origin is not true by any means. Far from it. Those great prime movers--for instance, the steam engine, the electric motor, and the gas engine (as well as its natural child, the automobile)--came to us from abroad. So did the telegraph, the railroad, radium, X-ray photography and--what is most remarkable, considering that the ironclad came from here--every step in steel manufacture. The telephone was invented by a Scot who was twenty-five years old when he became an emigrant to our country.