I can give, however, a few indications of what such an innocent mind might see and feel in Europe, this year of last breathless hush before the explosion. I concerned myself with getting, first, a clear impression of the physical body in which each country clothed itself,--the aspect of town and countryside, villages, farms, working-class quarters, factories, suburbs, plans of towns, styles of architecture, characteristic types and ways of living, of modern Europe; and, second, the attitudes, social and political, of various classes, the social psychology of the different peoples. Such acquisitions had, of course, to be the merest impressions. One could not get “data”; one’s tour could be little more than a perpetual “sizing-up.” The best one could do was to settle down in the various capitals for a few months, immerse oneself in the newspapers, talk with as many people as one could reach, read the contemporary novels and plays, attend political meetings and meetings of social reformers, go to church and court-house and school and library and university, and watch the national life in action. One could only cut oneself off from American interests, imagine that one had always lived in the foreign city, and try, by a reach of sympathy and appreciation, to assimilate the tone and spirit and attitudes of the people among whom one was living. Such an effort may result only in the most fantastic illusions. I am not trying to boast that I got any understanding of European countries,--a matter of years of acquaintance and not of months. I am merely indicating an attitude of approach. But it was an attitude I found none too common among American students abroad. Among the many who were conducting historical and political researches at the libraries, I was never able to find any student interested in the political meetings of the campaign, for instance, which I attended with so much ardor, as a revelation of French social psychology. The Americans I saw would have an enthusiasm for particular things, perhaps, that they were interested in, a patronizing attitude towards certain immoralities and inefficiencies that impressed them, but as for a curiosity about the French mind and the French culture as a whole, I could not find any interest that flowed along with mine. My curiosity, therefore, had to go its own gait. I seemed to have a singular faculty for not getting information. Unless one is fortunate enough to step into a social group, one must dig one’s way along unaided. By means of newspapers and magazines and guide-books, one hews out a little passage towards the center of things. Slowly a definite picture is built up of the culture and psychology of the people among whom one is living. There is no way, however, of checking up one’s impressions. One must rely on one’s intuition. Letters of introduction bring out only class or professional attitudes. Very few people are socially introspective enough to map out for you the mind of the society in