To be sure, a new country must at first borrow its culture from somewhere. One does not come by such a thing instanter and out of a silk hat. Still here is a nation now three hundred years old; it has one hundred and twenty millions of people, if not more; it has as great, and in their way forceful, cities as exist anywhere on the globe; its architecture is already most imposing and fast attaining a splendor hitherto never equaled by any land; a far better and more satisfying mechanical equipment is here than in any nation elsewhere. We have, in so far as material facilities are concerned, more and better opportunities for genuine culture than are now available to the mass anywhere. Then, why are we so bent, I should like to know, upon more money, and, when not that, upon idealistically misinterpreting life? The few genuine thinkers that America has thus far produced are taboo: Poe, Whitman, Twain. Only in one field, finance--not in war, politics, the arts and sheer intellect--do our essential individuals compare favorably with those of other lands. In the main we are too idealistic or illusioned in all but our material affairs. But why all the delusion in re the ordinary intellectual facts of life? No single nation has more of wealth, courage, industry, or more impressive varieties of scenery, be it of mountains, lakes, valleys, the coast. We should be, and for all I know are (although the signs are not numerous), at the opening of an era of art and letters such as the world in none of its great periods has surpassed. Yet in spite of all this, and in so far as the mass and its ostensible leaders are concerned, we are intellectually dull and unperceiving in regard to all the basic facts of life. All men are still honest, kind and true (or should be) in America; all women pure as driven snow (or should be) in America. The Sermon on the Mount is our real Constitution; the Ten Commandments our only laws. We all do justly, think kindly, and it is only bad men from the world without, strangers and evil-thinkers, who come from heaven knows where--for our intellectual and spiritual cosmogony does not admit them--to cause us trouble. America in its own good time may come to a great end. And again it may not. It may be--who knows?--a mere money machine, a honey-gatherer like the bee, a material welter like Rome, without the slightest vision as to what to do or how to act once it has its great store. Other and shrewder nations, far less able financially or physically, may yet lead the giant by the hand, pull him around by the nose. He may be psychologically the same as the wealthy heir to whom life’s pains and doubts are and remain unknown, who, being pulled in upon expensive pleasures or the ventures of others and given a superficial reason, is cheerfully willing to pay the bill and depart.