Mass-production in America, the use of advertising to standardize the desires and taste of the public and so standardize production, the consequent lowering of production costs and the increase in wages, have all created a stupendous rise in the scale of American living from the purely material standpoint. With a population of over a hundred millions, undivided by tariff barriers, with most of the raw materials produced at home, with a people singularly lacking in individuality, more than willing to live and have everything exactly like everyone else, the leaders of industry have been able to achieve their ideal of standardized production. But the achievement of this result has brought about the surrender of certain values that the European still thinks of vital importance. What the cultured European desires above all else is to be an individual, to be able to express his own unique personality in work and play. The dreary sameness of American life throughout an entire and vast continent appalls him. Of what use to travel three thousand[Pg 283] miles from New York to San Francisco if for the most part one sees only the same sort of people, reads the same comic strips and syndicated news columns, talks the same “shop”, and sees the same city architecture? In Devonshire the other day I was looking from my window at a bit of new garden wall, already beginning to weather and take on beauty in the damp climate. Most skillfully, and without any sense of patchwork, various materials had been put together in it—some gray stone, some of the red Devon sandstone, concrete, and different sorts of brick, with the effect of variety and interest. An American might have done if more “efficiently” of one material, but then no one would have cared to give it a second glance. The old cottages also gain much of their charm from the variety of materials employed—brick, old oak, stucco, shingles, and clapboards. That evening I happened to read that the American Department of Commerce, coöperating with manufacturers in the interests of “efficiency,” had reduced the varieties of bricks to be produced from sixty-six to seven, two hundred and ten different shapes of bottles to twenty, and so on, and that the suggestions had been received “with enthusiasm.” Nothing could better display the difference in the ideals of the two countries. After all, if we are all to have more and more things, but only on the condition that they shall be exactly like everyone else’s, what becomes of the joy of individual living, of expressing your own personality—provided you have one—in work and play? Is it worth while to gain the whole material world and lose your own soul?