of the rag-tag and bob-tail of disconnected facts that might turn up with any stranger. There could be no more coherency among these than among the stray items one picks up by glancing through a popular magazine and a village newspaper. They kept the mind from eating into its own fibres, perhaps, but did nothing to train it as an instrument of thought. Moreover, to a great extent, America is still provincial and frontier. I am not speaking solely of the international aspect of this. For the most part, it is, of course, utterly ignorant of the rest of the world. I am speaking generally and not of select groups. It is one of the quaint anomalies of which I spoke above, that the nation whose public mind is the least international of any of the great nations, should publish the best journal dealing solely with international[Pg 228] affairs. That, however, has nothing to do with the case. The magazine is not self-supporting and has a limited circulation. The editor of several magazines of extremely wide circulation told me that they could publish nothing that did not directly deal with America, that their readers were interested in nothing else. The editor of another magazine, one of the best in the country, told me that, although for his own intellectual satisfaction he did occasionally publish an article on a foreign country, there was no reaction to it among his readers and as far as circulation went the pages might as well have been left blank. It is not, however, in this sense only that I mean we are still provincial and frontier. In this sense, America is still in the frontier stage and it is becoming questionable if it will ever be anything else. The difference between the Indian and the Englishman was that the Englishman wanted all the physical comforts of old England set up in the wilderness in his own generation as fast as they could be. He measured his own minimum standard of living by that to which he had been accustomed or which he had seen. The attainment of this absorbing all his energy, he let the rest go. Could the first settlers of Boston in 1630 have seen the comfortable town of 1800, they would have believed that a settled, orderly and comely cultural life must surely by then have been attained. The trouble is that America never has attained. This, I well know, is by many considered as a virtue and I am discussing it here only from the standpoint of the main topic of this chapter.