Hope has not vanished from the East, but it has long since ceased to be our daily diet. Europe has infected us perhaps with some of its world-weariness. The East produces more skeptics and spiritual malcontents than the West. For the Middle West seems to have accomplished most of the things, industrial and political, that the East has been trying to do, and it has done them better. The Middle West is the apotheosis of American civilization, and like all successes it is in no mood to be very critical of itself or very examinatory as to the anatomy and physiology of its social being. No Easterner with Meredith Nicholson’s human and literary experience would write so complacently and cheerfully about his part of the country as Mr. Nicholson writes about “The Valley of Democracy.” His self-confidence is the very voice of the Middle West, telling us what it thinks of itself. This, we say as we read, must be the inner candor which goes with the West that we see with our eyes. So we like Mr. Nicholson’s articles not so much for the information they give us as for the attitudes they let slip, the unconscious revelations of what the people he is talking for think important. It is not a book of justification, although he would rather anxiously have us take not too seriously the political vagaries like Bryanism and Progressivism. And he wishes us to miss none of the symphony orchestras and art institutes that evidently now begin to grow like grasshoppers on the prairies. He treats himself rather as an expositor, and he is explicitly informational, almost as if for a foreign country. He sometimes has an amusing air of having hastily read up and investigated Western wonders and significances that have been not only common material in the Eastern magazines, but matter of despairing admiration on the part of those of us who are general improvers of mankind. He is naïve about the greatness of Chicago, the vastness of agricultural production, the ravages of culture among the middle classes. He is almost the professional Westerner showing off his prize human stock. Mr. Nicholson does well to begin with the folksiness of the West. No one who has experienced that fine open friendliness of the prosperous Middle Westerner, that pleasant awareness of the alert and beneficent world we live in, can deny that the Middle West is quite justified in thinking of itself as the real heart of the nation. That belief in the ultimate good sense, breadth of vision, and devotion to the common good, of the “folks back home,” is in itself a guaranty of social stability and of a prosperity which implies that things will never be any different except as they slowly improve. Who can say that we have no Gemüthlichkeit in America, when he runs up against this warm social mixability which goes so far to compensate for the lack of intellectual _nuances_ and spontaneous artistic sensibilities?