If, on the other hand, the word ‘benefit’ is to be taken in a wider sense than simply that of creative achievement, I can at once answer the question in the affirmative, without (thank heaven!) having to confine myself to artists and authors. One does not come readily to know these expatriates of the best sort. They are isolated individuals who value their isolation. (It is the rose-garden people who at first acquaintance press you, with a pathetic wistfulness, to come to tea or dinner at their villas). But some, to my good fortune, I do know, and I hear quiet rumours of others--individuals scattered here and there, not all of them by any means writers, painters or composers, but solitary absorbed students of this or that period or local fragment of a period, or even only (_only?_) of the intense modern life about them. Useless? I do not think so. Being, necessarily, of independent means (though it is astounding on how slender an income they are often content to live), it is not essential for them to go on making money. Yet that, if they had remained in America, is probably what the force of public opinion would have compelled them to do. Instead of studying the development of the Commedia dell’ Arte or the annals of the Medici or the history of the Risorgimento or the development of co-operatives in pre-Fascista Italy, they would have been selling bonds or juggling with real estate. It is not probable that one would have found them useful members of more serious professions, since it was precisely for that study of the Commedia dell’ Arte or co-operatives that their minds were really fitted. And even if the bits of curious knowledge that they dig up are of no external value, or, though of some small value, are not passed on to others, individuals of this sort are not without use both to their adopted country and to the one they have deserted. In their infinitesimal way they help toward the distant mutual understanding of two races. They spin one thin spider’s thread across the Atlantic. For they respect and partly understand the people among whom they live, and are respected and partly understood by these. Some day, if the world lasts that long, a vast number of such threads, entwined, will make a cable that will bind two countries together as no governmental treaties or commercial agreements or grandiloquent speeches by distinguished momentary guests will ever bind them. It is not without significance that on the outbreak of the war Americans living in Germany sided with the Germans, Americans in France with the French. It indicated that through daily intercourse such Americans had begun to see into the hearts of another people, and had found them individuals like themselves. Given enough of this peaceful interpenetration among all nations, war would surely become more difficult.