Here in Italy there is some worship of to-day. There are times and times when it is enough to be alive; and there are times when the light glows magically and the whole body and being of a man melt into it, thrill in worship, and then, however old he be, however burdened with Time's tricks of the flesh, in his heart there are songs and dancing. In England we cling to the past, we never know to-day, we never dare open the storehouse of tomorrow, for we are all trained in the house of Mother Hubbard. I have loved England dearly since I have lived away from her. I can begin, I think, to understand. She is weary, maybe; she has many hours of boredom. She is, alas, a country where grapes grow under glass, where, I sometimes think, men do not grow at all. She is a country of adolescents; her sons seem never to be troubled by the difficulties which beset the adult mind; they rush ahead, careless of danger because they never see it; their lives hang upon a precarious luck: they are impelled, not, I believe, as other nations fancy, by greed or conceit, but by that furious energy which attends upon the adolescent hatred of being left out of things. A grown man can tolerably gauge his capacity, but the desires of a youth are constantly excited by the desires of others; he must acquire lest others obtain; he must love every maiden and yield to none; he must be forever donning new habits to persuade himself that he is more a man than the grown men among whom enviously he moves. He is filled with a fevered curiosity about himself, but never dares stay to satisfy it, lest he should miss an opportunity of bidding for the admiration and praise of others which he would far rather have than their sympathy. Sympathy he dreads, for it forces him back upon himself, brings him too near to seeing himself without excitement. . . . So far, my observations, carefully selected, take me. There have been grown men in England, wonderful men, men all strength and sympathy and love, with powers far surpassing the intelligence of other races: but mark how the English treat them. They set them on a pinnacle, give them the admiration they despised, take none of their sympathy, raise horrible statues to their memory, and, to protect themselves against their thought, the mighty force of truth in their souls, breed dwarfish imitations of them, whom they adore and love as men can only love those of their own moral race. No other country less deserves to have great men, and no other country has gotten greater. This astonishing phenomenon has produced that complacency which is the only check on the fury of England's adolescent energy. Without it, without the Brummagem dignity in which such complacency takes form, she would long ago have rushed to her destruction. With it she has a political solidity to which graver and more intelligent nations can never aspire.