The expectation embodied in the above comment is more fully realized perhaps than the writer of those words imagined; and the purpose of this book is to reveal the blundering and misleading information which would appear to be the distinguishing quality of the _Britannica’s_ articles on culture. Moreover, as I have said, and as I shall show later, few subjects are as “intensely distasteful” to the “uninformed and prejudiced” British critics as is American achievement. One finds it difficult to understand how any body of foreigners would dare offer America the brazen insult which is implied in the prodigal distribution of these books throughout the country; for in their unconquerable arrogance, their unveiled contempt for this nation—the outgrowth of generations of assumed superiority—they surpass even the London critical articles dealing with our contemporary literary efforts. Several of our more courageous and pro-American scholars have called attention to the inadequacies and insularities in the _Britannica_, but their voices have not been sufficiently far-reaching to counteract either the mass or the unsavory character of the advertising by which this unworthy and anti-American encyclopædia was foisted upon the United States. Conspicuous among those publications which protested was the _Twentieth Century Magazine_. That periodical, to refer to but one of its several criticisms, pointed out that the article on _Democracy_ is “confined to the alleged democracies of Greece and their distinguished, if some time dead, advocates. Walt Whitman, Mazzini, Abraham Lincoln, Edward Carpenter, Lyof Tolstoi, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Iceland, Oregon are unknown quantities to this anonymous classicist.” It is also noted that the author of the articles on _Sociology_ “is not very familiar with the American sociologists, still less with the German, and not at all with the French.” The article is “a curious evidence of editorial insulation,” and the one on _Economics_ “betrays freshened British capitalistic insularity.” In this latter article, which was substituted for Professor Ingram’s masterly and superb history of political economy in the _Britannica’s_ Ninth Edition, “instead of a catholic, scientific survey of economic thought, we have a ‘fair trade’ pamphlet, which actually includes reference to Mr. Chamberlain,” although the names of Henry George, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, John A. Hobson, and William Smart are omitted.