which they live. Only the French seem to have this self-consciousness of their own traits, and the gift of expression, and that is why France is incomparably the most interesting and enlightening country for the amateur and curious American student to visit. These considerations suggest the fact that I wish to bring out,--that my most striking impression was the extraordinary toughness and homogeneity of the cultural fabric in the different countries, England, France, Italy and Germany, that I studied. Each country was a distinct unit, the parts of which hung together, and interpreted each other, styles and attitudes, literature, architecture, and social organization. This idea is of course a truism, yet brought up, as most Americans are, I think, with the idea that foreigners are just human beings living on other parts of the earth’s surface, “folks” like ourselves with accidental differences of language and customs, I was genuinely shocked to find distinct national temperaments, distinct psychologies and attitudes, distinct languages that embodied, not different sounds for the same meanings, but actually different meanings. We really know all this; but when we write about the war, for instance, we insensibly fall back to our old attitude. Most American comment on the war, even the most intelligent, suggests a complete ignorance of the fact that there is a German mind, and a French mind and an English mind, each a whole bundle of attitudes and interpretations that harmonize and support each other. And each of these national minds feels its own reasons and emotions and justifications to be cosmically grounded, just as we ourselves feel that Anglo-Saxon morality is Morality, and Anglo-Saxon freedom Liberty. We do, of course, more or less dimly recognize these differences of national culture. We no longer think of other nations as “Barbarians,” unless they have a national scheme which is as much of a challenge to our own social inefficiency as is the German. We express our sense of the difference by a constant belittling. Foreigners are not monsters, but Lilliputians, dwarfs, playing with toys. We do not take other cultures seriously. We tend to dwell on the amusing, the quaint, the picturesque, rather than the intense emotional and intellectual differences. The opportunity to immerse oneself in these various cultures until one feels their powerful and homogeneous strength, their meaning and depth, until one takes each with entire seriousness and judges it, not in American terms, but in its own,--this is the educative value of a rapid, superficial European year such as mine. The only American book I have ever been able to find that deals with a foreign country in this adequate sense is Mr. Brownell’s “French Traits.” Almost all other writing, political, historical, descriptive, about European countries, must be read with the constant realization that the peculiar emotional and intellectual biases of the people, the