A common instance of the insidious power of _milieu_ is afforded by the transition from university education to getting a living. At a university one finds himself, if he has any vigor of imagination, in one of the widest environments the world can afford. He has access to the suggestions of the richest minds of all times and countries, and has also, or should have, time and encouragement to explore, in his own way, this spacious society. It is his business to think, to aspire, and grow; and if he is at all capable of it he does so. Philosophy and art and science and the betterment of mankind are real and living interests to him, largely because he is in the great stream of higher thought that flows through libraries. Now let him graduate and enter, we will say, upon the lumber business at Kawkawlin. Here he finds the scope of existence largely taken up with the details of this industry—wholesome for him in some ways, but likely to be overemphasized. These and a few other things are repeated over and over again, dinned into him, everywhere assumed to be the solid things of life, so that he must believe in them; while the rest grows misty and begins to lose hold upon him. He cannot make things seem real that do not enter into his experience, and if he resists the narrowing environment it must be by keeping touch with a larger world, through books or other personal intercourse, and by the exercise of imagination. Marcus Aurelius told himself that he was free to think what he chose, but it appears that he realized this freedom by keeping books about him that suggested the kind of thoughts he chose to think; and it is only in some such sense as this implies that the assertion is true. When the palpable environment does not suit us we can, if our minds are vigorous enough, build up a better one out of remembered material; but we must have material of some sort. It is easy to feel the effect of surroundings in such cases as this, because of the sharp and definite change, and because the imagination clings to one state long after the senses are subdued to the other; but it is not so with national habits and sentiments, which so completely envelop us that we are for the most part unaware of them. The more thoroughly American a man is the less he can perceive Americanism. He will embody it; all he does, says, or writes, will be full of it; but he can never truly see it, simply because he has no exterior point of view from which to look at it. If he goes to Europe he begins to get by contrast some vague notion of it, though he will never be able to see just what it is that makes futile his attempts to seem an Englishman, a German, or an Italian. Our appearance to other peoples is like one’s own voice, which one never hears quite as others hear it, and which sounds strange when it comes back from the phonograph.