When the average American deserts his home--and he does it often, on business or pleasure--innumerable refuges take care of him. He is never left alone. Every good American is affiliated with one or more associations. Masonic lodges in particular abound. There, he is able to create many contacts. The spirit of solidarity, what he calls “service,” is very strong in him. In his lodge or his club, the average American (let us call him Babbitt with Sinclair Lewis) finds many practical advantages. If he wants to borrow, sue somebody, or invest money, be advanced in politics, he finds there a platform and a market. Even the welfare of his family is attended to when he dies. A Mystic Shriner, a Rotarian, an Elk, a Kiwanian, an Odd Fellow, a Forester, or what not, every average American is subject to sudden mobilization for a convention or a parade. He is the prisoner--a happy prisoner, we must believe--of his clan. A quiet, and even a shy person at home, he is spontaneously transformed into a rather frolicsome person among his friends. Then he likes noise, demonstrations and escapades. He no longer conceals his passion for eccentricities of all kinds. The French proverb that _le ridicule tue_ does not apply to the average American when he parades, several thousand strong, through the streets of a big city disguised as a Turk, an admiral or a Spanish bullfighter, among the din of brass bands. This sociable spirit follows him in business. Nobody knows better than he how to make friends with a banker, an insurance agent, a broker and the innumerable agents and peddlers who continuously besiege him to insure him and to improve his well-being. Then, if he is in quest of an education for his sons and daughters, he can find around him a myriad of educational opportunities, universities, colleges, schools, libraries, agencies of all sorts. If he must “work his way through college,” the simple and democratic character of American life is such that he can do so without loss of self-respect. From the religious point of view, the American scene is not less attractive. Spirituality has become so attenuated in the United States that the most hard-boiled agnostic may go to almost any church. No sect, outside the Catholic Church, bothers much about the four final ends of man nowadays, and the churches are too busy with this world to pay much attention to the hereafter. American theology has exorcized the devil long ago. Prophylaxy, citizenship and hygiene have just about replaced the teaching of the Bible. The Church has become an annex to the home, the university and the club. It is, first of all, a center of social and moral action.