of Nature he saw--dimly enough even then, it must be admitted--what he has not even yet digested; that Nature has no strict and God-given rules, that nothing is really fixed; anything may arise, and that within the bounds of an unknown arc of equation anything may happen--anything. But it took a world horror to crack the armor of smug, ignorant self-sufficiency which has covered the average American from crown to sole. And has he learned? Does life really mean any more to him than it did before? I wonder. As some one else has brilliantly said: “The fierce, rudimentary mass mind of America, like that of some inchoate, primeval monster, relentlessly concentrated in the appetite of the moment, knows nothing as yet apparently of its own vast, inert, almost nerveless body encrusted with parasites. One looks out to-day over the immense vista of our society, stretching westward in a succession of dreary steppes, and one realizes what it means to possess no cultural initiative or tradition, filling in the interstices of energy and maintaining a steady current of life over and above the ebb and flow of individual necessity or animal appetite or purpose.” Money, money, money. To build, build, build, in order to make more money, to make a show, to be better than thou--financially only. It is told of the quondam Russell Sage that he kept near him in his office a strongbox containing $78,000,000 in what he called “gilt-edge” securities, the which, whenever he wished to prove how wonderful he was and how great his life had been, he brought forth and exclaimed: “There--there isn’t a man in America who can show that many first-class stocks and bonds! Not one!” And there wasn’t, perhaps. But what of it? He died, and not knowing what to do with it (splendid testimony to the American financial intellect), left it all to his wife; who, old and ignorant herself and not knowing what to do with it, but fearing its senseless distribution, left it, after various benefactions to sectarian schools and much influence brought to bear, to the Russell Sage Foundation. And the Russell Sage Foundation, not knowing exactly what to do with it, has been “investigating,” and re-investigating and re-re-investigating ever since, this, that and the other, with a view to finding out what it should do with it, what one thing, if any, to help. And what great thing, if any, has the Russell Sage Foundation done? Well, America, in its own peculiar and interesting way, may find itself intellectually. As an old char-woman who worked for me remarked, “I’m not so dumb than I look.” So, possibly and probably, America.