purveyor and not a creator of the real values of a civilization. If under his dominance the business philosophy indicated above takes—as it seems to be doing—increasing hold upon the universities, the churches, the professions, and the people at large, it may be asked how long shall we have any creators? If the fundamental idea underlying our civilization, its primum mobile, is to become that of a business profit, it is inevitable that we shall decline in the scale of what has hitherto been considered civilization as contrasted with barbarism in the Greek sense. The Harvard professor may[Pg 30] dismiss lightly the loss of the “arts and graces,” but if his doctrine of the valuation of social service in terms of income is to become established, is it not much more likely to be lost than the “arts and graces”? What becomes of the artistic spirit, of the professional spirit, of the pure scientific spirit? The American is apt to think of his own country as in the van of at least everything material and of Europe as negligible; but even in the things considered distinctly American we are falling behind. That we have recently lost the speed record both on land and water with that special darling of America, the gasoline engine, may not be important, but it will surprise most Americans to know that both the fastest and the average speed of all trains in England and some parts of the Continent are higher than in America. In aerial passenger routes America, in spite of the efforts to make it appear otherwise, is far behind Europe, where the whole continent is covered with a network of aerial routes used as readily as we use trains at home. I have touched at some length on architecture because it was not many years ago that we were hoping for a genuine renaissance that should have its beginning in America, and because we have, as I said, some absolutely first-class architects. The present renaissance, however, has come wholly in Europe from men like Le Corbusier in France, Gropius in Germany, or Oud in Holland, with their enthusiastic followers. We have had so little to do with it and are sharing so little in it that the most recent pronouncement on the new movement there dismisses the United States in three lines as offering nothing of theoretical value.