A type of civilization is not easily changed. Only a Chinese general or a Nietzschean philosopher would dare to solve the problem of the masses by applying the remedy suggested, a long time ago, by the benign R. W. Emerson: Earth crowded, cries “Too many men.” My counsel is kill nine in ten. More than ten millions have been killed, within the last ten years, in Christian warfare, and _quality_ does not seem to have won yet over quantity. The polemics around the War have not solved but intensified the feud between the American élite and the masses. Immediately after the armistice of 1918, American radicals undertook a revaluation of war responsibilities. The American intelligentsia had never put its heart into the struggle. Conscientious objectors swarmed on all sides. The present economic, political and intellectual chaos through the world is largely the work of American nonconformists. They spared nothing to reverse the guilts, to confuse the origin and the issues of the war. The result of their efforts was an immense disarray of the world’s conscience. The actual misunderstandings about debts and reparations, the aloofness of the United States and their retirement within a narrow and obsolete Monroeism, the Americano-phobia abroad can be credited mostly to the exertions of American radicals. After they had lost their temper with Europe they began their intellectual civil war at home. Their target-practicing became suicidal. The glories of the American Hall of Fame were lampooned in broad daylight. American institutions and ideals were challenged. There was an orgy of self-exterminating criticism. While radical newspapers and magazines wasted much ink to blacken the lamb and to bleach the wolf, in international relations, critics at home, like Mr. Mencken, turned their ire against their own country. The “Magnalia Christi Americana” of Cotton Mather became the “Americana” of the _American Mercury_. In Mr. Mencken’s amusing magazine American glories and reputations were mowed down like daisies on a lawn. The churches, the colleges, the Federal Government were dealt with, at first hand and without much respect, and then appeared the indictment of American civilization as a whole by the thirty intellectuals. The confidence of the world in the United States and of the United States in themselves must still be very great, if one judges by the quick and informal dismissal into oblivion of this bulky indictment. As a result of all this, there seem to be two United States to-day warring with each other. On the one hand we still have the “Land of God,” a nation just as proud of itself to-day as it was in the best days of the Roosevelt administration. And then there are the discontented and self-criticizing United States, a land where every article of the old creed is contradicted by self-disparaging critics. Between the two, on a sort of No Man’s Land, wander not a few erratic souls in quest of an ideal. The late Henry Adams was their model.