The fact that the new literature in America is contemporary with the wave of pessimism which has marked the last twenty years is not a mere coincidence. The two events stand very much together in a relation of effect to cause. Pessimism in the United States to-day has not yet affected the external aspects of American life. It has not made the average American less buoyant and confident. The sunny side of American life is still there. And yet, it cannot be denied that the age of jazz is more gloomy than the age of Roosevelt. There is a great deal of dissatisfaction in America to-day. The restless trend of life, the mad pursuit of material ease, the desertion of the home, the speed mania, the get-rich-quick impulse, are no longer the privilege of the grown-up. The contagion of material welfare and luxury has reached the young. It has lured them and led them astray. Educators, clergymen, sociologists, and, unfortunately too, criminologists, are much worried by the spread of the new paganism, and the growth of juvenile delinquency. American homes and colleges are swamped to-day with precocious supermen and superwomen eager to live their lives, as the saying is, without knowing how, except by aping their elders, by procuring expensive motor cars and jewels, or by securing for themselves road-house privileges. Juvenile criminality is on the increase. There is an epidemic of suicide among the young and the standards of morality are not much higher among the mature at large. No wonder that the American élite should be clamoring for a revaluation of standards. How can they win their fight? They are a handful in a mass of more than one hundred million people, led, the vast majority of them, by mob psychology and the tyranny of public opinion. This certainly is a pathetic and vexing problem. For a European observer the fight in the United States to-day is not so much that of good and evil, right and wrong. The economic and material standards of the average American are much higher than those in the Old World. The fight in America to-day is, at the bottom, that of the élite against the masses, the fight of quality _versus_ quantity. This problem lies far beyond the power of statistics. It cannot be coped with by economists or sociologists. It falls within the pale of the moralist, the mystic and the philosopher. A big nation, like a big army, cannot exist without a discipline and a strict subordination of the masses to their leaders. How can this be possible without setting limits to the rights of individual development? This problem is complicated in America by that of standards. How are the demands of the masses going to be gratified without a leveling down of the standards? Is not material comfort the most obvious and most accessible value for the greater number? And what has intellectual growth to do with material welfare?