The escape thus has its social aspect. America already has, probably, the lowest grade mental life of any of the great modern nations. It can ill afford to destroy what intellectual life it has and force all intellectual and artistic individualism into the mass pattern. At the end of that road lies an Assyria, a Babylon, a Carthage. Not only can a nation not continue to function humanely with a large part of its intellectual life suppressed, but it may be asked whether it can permanently continue to function at all. The rich may buy up all the old furniture and paintings in the world, but without new mind it would seem as though a machine civilization based on science must perish. All of our practical business men and inventors are now dependent in the last analysis on the pure scientist, the man whose thought and experiments bear no apparent relation to the practical life. The business man may consider the intellectual a crank and of no account in a practical world unless he submits to mass production and rolls up royalties that can be understood even by a realtor, but the intellectual life is all of a piece and it may be questioned whether a nation that gauges its values by purely material standards and yet at the same time reduces its intellectual workers below the economic level of a freight-car conductor can continue indefinitely to produce even the pure scientist. As M. Herriot said in an address to the students of the Sorbonne last July, “ne croyez pas à l’artificielle[Pg 190] distinction des sciences et des lettres.... Les faits sont innombrables et les formes infinies. Au-dessus de tout, il y a l’esprit, maître du monde.” Europe might supply us with ideas in exchange for dollars but I see no remedy for our own intellectual life except a gradually growing sense of the real values of civilization on the part of the people. If business men consider a railway conductor a more important person than a professor, they will, quite apart from the law of supply and demand, give him a larger salary, and provide for college buildings rather than for the men who alone can give the buildings any significance. The problem comes back, as most do, to what people consider the real values in life. If, in the overwhelming mass of the population, those values are material and not spiritual, one cannot expect the spiritual life to flourish.