The answer is, of course, that it will not wait. It must shoulder the gigantic task of putting into practice its ideals and revolutionary points of view as wholeheartedly and successfully as our great-grandfathers applied theirs and tightened the philosophy of life which imprisons the older generation. The shuddering fear that we in turn may become weary, complacent, evasive, should be the best preventive of that stagnation. We shall never have done looking for the miracle, that it shall be given us to lighten, cheer, and purify our “younger generation,” even as our older has depressed and disintegrated us. A MIRROR OF THE MIDDLE WEST No Easterner, born forlornly within the sphere of New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, can pass very far beyond the Alleghanies without feeling that American civilization is here found in the full tide of believing in itself. The flat countryside looks more ordered, more farmlike; the Main Streets that flash by the car-windows somehow look more robust and communal. There may be no less litter and scrubbiness; the clustered houses of the towns may look even more flimsy, undistinguished, well-worn; but it is a litter of aspiring order, a chaos which the people are insensitive to because they are living in the light of a hopeful future. The East has pretty much abandoned itself to the tides of immigration and industrial change which have overwhelmed it: no one really believes that anything startling will be done to bring about a new heaven and a new earth. But the intelligence of the West seems to live in apocalyptic sociological--not socialistic, however--dreams. Architects and business men combine half-heartedly to “save New York” from the horrors of the Jewish clothing-trade invasion, but Chicago draws great maps and sketches of a city-planning that shall make it not only habitable but radiant and palatial.