However that may be, one cannot help thinking how interesting it would have been if in New York or elsewhere any one of the above-mentioned men had in his day troubled to gather about him in some private court a representative group of intellectual and artistic personalities, for the sole purpose of testifying to his interest in that side of life, if nothing more. After all, the living individual is worth something, and any one of our financiers might have done what no American of wealth, as far as I know, has as yet done: invested some of his boundless wealth in personality. Or he might have endowed a wholly independent magazine or newspaper or theatre, of which there is at present not one, or a school of special learning free from dogmatic interference, or a publishing house, or a university which should have been a true university and not one devoted to the economic or social or religious theories or moods of any particular period. The strangest lack or flaw in the American organizing financial temperament, in so far as I can see, is or has been, hitherto, its inability to see either character or significance in anything save movements which tend to further the most material financial aims: railroads, butcher-companies, electricity, gas, typewriter and other purely mechanical or material organizations. Yet possibly, up to the present time, the land has only needed things of this kind. And perhaps the next generation will make amends. Who knows? Thus far there has been little if any tendency to invest in anything save such art or art forms as have been heralded by time.