To me it is a thing for laughter, if not for tears; one hundred and twenty million Americans, rich (a fair percentage of them, anyhow) beyond the dreams of avarice, and scarcely a sculptor, a poet, a singer, a novelist, an actor, a musician, worthy the name. One hundred and forty years (almost two hundred, counting the Colonial days) of the most prosperous social conditions, a rich soil, incalculable deposits of gold, silver and precious and useful metals and fuels of all kinds, a land amazing in its mountains, its streams, its valley prospects, its wealth-yielding powers, and now its tremendous cities and far-flung facilities for travel and trade--and yet contemplate it. Artists, poets, thinkers, where are they? Has it produced a single philosopher of the first rank--a Spencer, a Nietzsche, a Schopenhauer, a Kant? Do I hear some one offering Emerson as an equivalent? Or James? Has it produced a historian of the force of either Macaulay or Grote or Gibbon? A novelist of the rank of Turgenev, de Maupassant or Flaubert? A scientist of the standing of Crookes or Röentgen or Pasteur? A critic of the insight and force of Taine, Sainte-Beuve or the de Goncourts? A dramatist the equivalent of Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, Hauptmann, Brieux? An actor, since Booth, of the force of Coquelin, Sonnenthal, Forbes-Robertson or Sarah Bernhardt? Since Whitman, one poet: Edgar Lee Masters. In painting a Whistler, an Inness, a Sargent. Who else? (And two of these shook the dust of our shores forever.) Inventors, yes; by the hundreds, one might almost say thousands; some of them amazing enough, in all conscience, world figures, and enduring for all time. But of what relationship to art, the supreme freedom of the mind?