Even our educational institutions disseminate the English superstition and neglect the great men of America; for nowhere in the United States will you find the spirit of narrow snobbery so highly developed as in our colleges and universities. Recently an inferior British poet came here, and, for no other reason apparently save that he was English, he was made a professor in one of our large universities! Certainly his talents did not warrant this appointment, for there are at least a score of American poets who are undeniably superior to this young Englishman. Nor has he shown any evidences of scholarship which would justify the honor paid him. But an Englishman, if he seek favors, needs little more than proof of his nationality, whereas an American must give evidence of his worth. England has shown the same ruthlessness and unscrupulousness in her intellectual colonization of America as in her territorial colonizations; and she has also exhibited the same persistent shrewdness. What is more, this cultural extension policy has paid her lavishly. English authors, to take but one example, regard the United States as their chief source of income. If it were the highest English culture—that is, the genuinely significant scholarship of the few great modern British creators—which was forced upon America, there would be no cause for complaint. But the governing influences in English criticism are aggressively middle-class and chauvinistic, with the result that it is the British _bourgeois_ who has stifled our individual expression, and misinformed us on the subject of European culture.