How old, again, is Italy? From one point of view she is[Pg 246] to-day a new nation, throbbing with new life, occupied with the problems of a “new” country, developing a national consciousness and her national material resources, as “young” as America. From another, she was old when Cæsar lay in his blood. I have recently been in Czechoslovakia. As a political nation she is only ten years old. As I passed through her villages on the way from Dresden, they looked newer than Kansas, the whole countryside having been rebuilt while the peasants were afraid to put their money into anything but building on account of the steady fall in the currency. In Prague I was told that the nation was new, that the task of building it would absorb all the energies of its people, that the work of developing its resources was overwhelming, that for the present it “did not want learned men, artists, or writers, but business men, engineers, practical men. Later,” my informant continued, “the rest may come, but not now.” It was the New England voice “from the Oakes and Pines” of 1719. Yet here and there one saw on hilltops castles ten centuries old. In the fields one saw men in the furrows following yoked white oxen as in the days of Virgil. Is Czechoslovakia young or, from the standpoint of America, very, very old? Does age mean the accumulation of resources from the past—old buildings, cathedrals, picture galleries, and all the valuable opportunities to see and to study? All these doubtless help, but how much of all such did the common people of Athens have when they crowded as multitudinously to hear the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides as the modern hoi polloi of America crowd to see the latest sex film on the screen? In 1787 we were nearly a century and a half “younger” than we are now, but if we held a constitutional[Pg 247] convention in 1930 should we be able to send any better thinkers or more broadly cultured men than those who drew up our first constitution? Would the discussion and propaganda regarding a political problem to-day show any advance in maturity and power of thought on the part of both writers and readers over the papers of the Federalist? It may well be that not only an outburst of art and literature, such as has happened now and again in the world’s history, but the degree of a cultured civilization to which a nation as, say the French, comes to attain, have no ascertainable cause, that they come from combinations deep in human nature too inscrutable to be observed or predicted. That is probably the case, but if so why claim that they are the products or accompaniments of a given age, and that we cannot expect them before a certain period any more than in the human body we can look for puberty or the growth of a beard or the coming of the wisdom teeth?