Meanwhile, it may well be maintained that the repulsive swagger of self-assertion sometimes seen here is a less evil than the degrading servility and stagnant spirit of caste often seen elsewhere. The desideratum is to construct out of the alienated races and classes of men here thrown together, jarring with their distinctions and prejudices, yet under conditions of unprecedented favorableness, a new type of character, carrying in its freed and sympathetic intelligence all the vital and spiritual traditions of humanity. There are but two methods to this end: one, the intermingling of the varieties in generative descent; the other, the personal assimilation of contrasting experiences and qualities by mutual sympathetic interpretation and assumption of them. This latter process is the very process and business of the dramatic art. The true player is the most detached, versatile, imaginative, and emotional style of man, most capable of understanding, feeling with, and reproducing all other styles, best fitted, therefore, to mediate between hostile clans and creeds and reconcile the dissonant parts of society and the race in its final cosmopolite harmony. Consequently, among the public agencies of culture destined to educate the American people out of their defects and faults into a complete accordant manhood--if, as is fondly hoped, that happy destiny be reserved for them--the dramatic art will have an unparalleled place of honor assigned to it. The dogmatic Church, so busy in toothlessly mumbling the formulas of an extinct faith that it loses sight of the living truths of God in nature and society, will be heeded less and less as it slowly dies its double death in drivel of words and drivel of ceremonies. But the plastic Stage, clearing itself of its abuses and carelessness, and receiving a new inspiration at once religious in its sacred earnestness and artistic in its free range of recreative play, will become more and more influential as it learns to exemplify the various ideals of human nature and human life set off by their graded foils, and presents the gravest teachings disguised in the finest amusements.