Of course the Middle West has to pay for its social responsiveness in a failure to create, at least in this day and generation, very vigorous and diverse spiritual types. An excessive amiability, a genius for adaptability will, in the end, put a premium on conformity. The Westerner sincerely believes that he is more averse to conventionality than the Easterner, but the latter does not find him so. The heretic seems to have a much harder time of it in the West. Classes and attitudes that have offended against the “folks’” codes may be actually outlawed. When there are acute differences of opinion, as in the war, society splits into bitter and irreconcilable camps, whereas in the East the undesirables have been allowed to shade off towards limbo in gradual degrees. When hatred and malice, too long starved by too much “niceness,” do break out from the natural man, they may produce those waves of persecution and vindictiveness which, coming from a so recently pacifist West, astonished an East that was no less densely saturated with aliens but was more conversant with the feeling that it takes all kinds of people to make a world. Folksiness evidently has its dark underlining in a tendency to be stampeded by herd-emotion. “Social conscience” may become the duty to follow what the mob demands, and democracy may come to mean that the individual feels himself somehow expressed--his private tastes and intelligence--in whatever the crowd chooses to do. I have followed Mr. Nicholson in his speaking of the Middle West as if he thought of the region as a unit. He does speak as if he did, but he does not really mean it. Much as he would like to believe in the substantial equality of the people in the Valley of Democracy, he cannot help letting us see that it is but one class that he has in mind--his own, the prosperous people of the towns. He protests against their being scornfully waved aside as bourgeoisie. “They constitute the most interesting and admirable of our social strata.” And he is quite right. Certainly this stratum is by far the most admirable of all the middle classes of the world. It is true that “nowhere else have comfort, opportunity, and aspiration produced the same combination.” He marvels at the numbers of homes in the cities that cannot imaginably be supported on less than five thousand a year. And it is these homes, and their slightly more impoverished neighbors, who are for him the “folks,” the incarnate Middle West. The proletarian does not exist for him. The working-classes are merely so much cement, filling in the bricks of the temple--or, better, folks in embryo, potential owners of bungalows on pleasant suburban streets. Mr. Nicholson’s enthusiasm is for the college-girl wife, who raises babies, attends women’s clubs, and is not afraid to dispense with the unattainable servant. It is for the good-natured and public-spirited business man, who goes into politics because politics in the Middle West has always been concerned