A negro who lived in a grass hut in the jungle had time to carve wooden sculpture, play music, weave legends, but the white man who wanted in a few years to make a European homestead out of a patch of the American primeval forest had no leisure or surplus[Pg 226] energy for anything else. On the other hand, the struggle against new conditions sharpened his wits just at the time that he was throwing overboard everything that they could work on. They began to be ingrowing. In these new communities there was practically no diversification of labor or interest. Everyone was doing everything for himself, and almost all were doing just the same thing. On the voyages across from the old countries in the eighteenth century, the food supply frequently ran out and in some cases the immigrants actually ate each other. In the new communities to which they came, the mental food supply also ran out. There was often no food for conversation. It is not strange that they ate the strangers, mentally. We thus have developed a working hypothesis as to where the question mark originated in American life. We will now consider its persistence. Why does it persist, and why, in the rich and diversified America of today, does not conversation takes its place? For one thing, there is the inheritance from the past. The man who lived in a clearing or even a small village with no public library, newspapers, magazines or scarcely neighbors in the eighteenth century had some excuse for not giving his mind good food, and letting it get so starved that it would chew on anything that came its way. There can be literally scarcely an American today who has any such excuse for mental under-nourishment; but habits were formed. The American mind is full of the quaintest and most curious anomalies. In business, for example, it is the most radical and innovating mind (within the limits of the capitalistic system) in existence. Politically it is eighteenth century if not earlier. In the same way, the average American youth[Pg 227] of either sex, though self-reliant socially to a marked and even startling degree, intellectually lacks, almost as markedly, all initiative. He, or she, studies his lessons and recites them, even in college, like good little grade boys and girls. The habit of wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and of self-reliance in satisfying it has been lost. The habit of asking questions has persisted. Everyone wants to be told what to read (mark the success of the book-clubs), what he should think, what is good and what is bad. Perhaps the most encouraging part of the Prohibition muddle is that it shows that at least he will kick and balk when told what he must drink. The first factor, then, is that the American mind has behind it no long habit of indulgence in intellectual curiosity, understood in the best sense. Through a long period it got out of the way of being interested in things other than those of the daily environment of work and play, or