“America?... Yes, I am an American. America is thirty-five, as I see her, and her passion is for the symbol of conquest, Dollars. America is self-tranced by looking into money, as those who gaze at crystal. The dollar-toxin riots in her veins. All the corrosion of the cursed Hebraic propensity for the concrete, appears to be the heritage of America. She is amassing as men never amassed before. She is lean from garnering, so terrifically beset with multiples and divisors that she has not even learned the material usages of money--how to spend gracefully. One night an American is a profligate prince; the next day a scheming, ravening, fish-blooded money-changer to pay for it. So busy is America collecting the symbols of possession, that she has little time to turn her thoughts to war, though she has by no means yet lost her physical condition. Having whipped England once, and purged herself with an internecine struggle, America now believes that she has only to drop her ticker, her groceries, and her paper continents, snatch up the rifle and cartridge-belt--to whip the world. Just a case of necessity, you know, and Grants and Lees and Lincolns will arise; labor turn into militia, and the land a sounding-board of trampling invincibles. But war is not the real expression of America in this young century. Financial precedence over one’s neighbor, vulgar outward flaunts of opulence, lights, noise, glitter, show--these are the forms of expression in vogue--concrete evidences of a more or less concrete accumulation. The excesses of America are momentary in contrast to the steady glut-glut of big-belted Europe. Of her glory I do not speak, of her humor, her inventions. It is this low present propensity--that is hard to bear. So rich still are America’s national resources that she has found no need of an India yet. May she put on wisdom and sweetness while the evil days come not--God bless her!...