Can anyone point to anything in the world that America is accomplishing which is purely and simply calculated to serve the highest interests of the human race? Can you look upon her trusts, her general methods of finance, her social and industrial system, her bosses, her political parties, the administration of her law, her press, her religious mountebanks, her quacks and charlatans of all conditions, and pronounce them to be good? Is it not the fact that these, in common with pretty well the whole of the remainder of her institutions, are not only defective, but a great deal more defective than one’s right to expect in view of the exceptional natural resources of the country and her great energy and wealth? You are at liberty to answer these questions in any way you please; but the conviction of myself and a by no means inconsiderable number of other persons will remain the same. It is clear that if the Americans are going to take that exalted position among the nations to which they are for ever laying claim, they will be compelled to get rid of a great many excrescences of temperament which they seem now only too busy developing and emphasising by every means in their power. Is it possible for them, in the nature of things, so to disencumber themselves? Will they ever become a really free country, dethrone the millionaire and the boss and acknowledge honesty as a political virtue? Will they ever put silencers on the yellow press and elect a congressional committee to examine the gangrenous decay of their wit and the dropsical growth of their emotions? Will they ever make a point of keeping their women at home and give practical proof of their pride in the peaches by marrying them themselves? Will they ever learn the English language which was the best thing imported in the “Mayflower”? Will they ever get rid of the climatic influences that compel them to speak and sing through their noses? Will they ever quote their astounding President at anything but a discount or realise that he is their greatest national asset? Will they ever place a prohibitive tariff on noise and lynch sensation-mongers as they do niggers? Will their playwrights ever learn the difference between a phonograph record and a play and will their audiences ever learn to appreciate acting when they see it? Will they ever discover that sport is not merely a business of record breaking and that business and football, I class the two together, are not the sports of the stone age in which the vanquished was not only overthrown but subsequently utterly consumed? Will they ever give up pea-nuts? Will they ever cease from the blind cultivation of pork? I trow not.