Our critics have often assured us that the dollar sign is the symbol of America. I am coming to the conclusion that our more characteristic one is the question mark. I have just typed them side by side on my Corona and have been looking at them. $ and ?. We may read the dollar sign as two parallel lines with a swirl trying to bring them together. One of these lines, as I see it, is expense and the other income. Parallel lines never meet in a Euclidean world. The S imposed on them represents the frantic effort of the individual to refute this geometrical finance. In this respect my present wanderings over a post-war world show me that there is nothing typically American about this symbol. The striving, the manifold tragedy, the wrung soul of an era concealed in this new swastika is universal. In England, France, Italy, Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, Holland, Belgium,—I find it wherever I have lately been, even when the expense line does not, as at home, insist upon describing a hopeless tangential curve away from its parallel. Once, however, one has finally escaped from the smoking room of the liner, landed at Southampton or Havre, Hamburg or Genoa and lost one’s self among the “foreigners,” one does escape from the question mark in its typical American repetitive usage. One does not, it is true, escape entirely. The mails still function, and a good part of this long sunny afternoon which should have been devoted to work on my book, a[Pg 222] stroll in the sunshine, or letters to old friends has been spent in my study typing answers to letters from strangers asking questions which any local librarian or even a little intelligent thought and work on the part of the questioners should have been able to answer for them. “Where can I find such-and-such a quotation?” “Ought I to encourage my son to become a teacher?” “What would be a good list of books to read?” “How can I make my boy take an interest in history?” As I respond as courteously as I can to this constant questioning from my native land, a usual part of my week’s chores, I wonder what sort of minds ask all these and innumerable other questions. (One thing I know, and that is, I shall never be thanked, for it is a sad statistical fact that in ten years of answering questions from American strangers I have never but twice had even the courtesy of an acknowledgement of my reply. But that is beside the present point.)