The figures in Who’s Who are suggestive. That volume is supposed to list some twenty-six thousand Americans who have achieved enough distinction to win a place there. Of those twenty-six thousand, as I recall it, ten per cent were foreign born, but of that ten per cent one-half came to us from the British Empire, leaving only five per cent, or some thirteen hundred persons in all America, who have achieved distinction from among the millions of all other races who have been immigrants in the last generation. For the most part, we get the lowest and not the best from foreign countries, and, apart from a few notable individuals, their purely cultural contribution to American life has been small. The types of civilization evolved by various races all have their good and bad points, but each has been fitted to racial idiosyncrasies. The world would be poorer without either the Anglo-Saxon or the Latin; but, to mention only one point, when we study what the Latins have everywhere made of parliamentary government of the English type it is evident that it is utterly unsuited to them. It is not one of the least satisfactions of living in England that one is surrounded by English people. In America one is also surrounded by “Americans,” but “American” has utterly ceased to have any racial connotation. In the colonial days, in spite of a considerable admixture of Germans, Dutch, Scotch, and Irish, the social fabric was still English, and it is not surprising if an American of English descent whose family had been in America for many generations before the separation took place should still prefer an English attitude and outlook on life to that of the Semites or Slavs or Armenians, however interesting he may find certain aspects of their self-expression in literature or art. [Pg 271] I have mentioned the charm of the flowers in London, but the children, dainty and flowerlike, are no less charming, and these warm days the parks and squares and streets are full of them. As great numbers of the boys of the better classes are away at school, the girls are most in evidence, with their skirts so short as to be mere flounces on the bottom of abbreviated waists. One can study childish legs from ankle to hip here by the thousand, and one comes to the conclusion that they are among the most beautiful things the world has to offer. These youngsters, arrayed in a way to make Main Street gasp, have also a gentleness, a modesty, and a quietness of demeanor that are equally beyond the ken of that thoroughfare.