I scored another victory for the American Spirit when I introduced my guests to Lorado Taft, sculptor, and the guiding star in Chicago's artistic firmament. In his rare personality, strength and purity, idealism and practical good sense blend, and his art reflects the man. He showed us some of his work and that of his pupils, and both elicited unstinted praise from my guests. The climax of our visit came when we returned to the entrance hall which we found crowded by public school children, all listening to an orchestra composed of certain of their number, and led by a young girl about fourteen years of age. It seemed to me a remarkable and beautiful combination. The marbles and pictures, the music, and, best of all, the children happily wandering about the place. When the program ended there was ice-cream for everybody, served by the teachers who accompanied the children. It was a real party, an American party, and we might have travelled long and far before I could have found anything which would have better reflected for my guests the American Spirit at its best. If I were an artist and a sculptor I should like to portray the spirit of Chicago as one feels it in this museum. I would model a group, with its central figure that same sculptor, the finely bred American, clean and wholesome, who longs to create, not only the city beautiful, but the city human. He should be surrounded by the children, happily looking at pictures and listening to music as we saw them in the Art Institute that day. But there must be another prominent figure in my group: the heartless, ruthless, twentieth century American, with clean-shaven face, jaws strong as a vise, and a chin like the base of an anvil. He is the man who "makes a good husband," and partly obeys the Scriptural injunction: because he provides for his own. He too should be surrounded by children; not his, but the children who work in his factories and have to live in his rickety tenements. The two men would struggle mightily for supremacy in the city's life; and I would set up my sculptured group in the busiest place, where all who passed it by might see, and seeing, help him who was struggling for beauty and for happiness. Dr. French, the Herr Director and I had a long discussion about my conception of the two natures contending within the city. The Herr Director argued that the merchant spirit, so prevalent here, when uncontrolled and uncurbed, is more dangerous to civilization and to our democracy than the military spirit of Germany, and that it needs to be overcome by a force greater and stronger than itself. The corrupting element he said has always been this same merchant spirit, and where ancient civilizations decayed, it was due to the fact that it debased kings and enslaved them by luxuries.