During the next ten years there should be in America especially a revival of creative literature. If there is, or should be at any particular time, a lack of energy, or a lack of quantity or quality, in the American literary output, it can be merely temporary; for our condition is full of social, political, and industrial problems; life in the New World is replete with strenuous exertion of every kind, of picturesque contrasts, and of innumerable themes fit to inspire literary art. American life is rich in feeling and action and meaning. American life is richer many times over in feeling and action, and especially in meaning, than when Mr. Gilder penned these words. The intervening years have brought to the surface a myriad of surging currents of human desire and necessity and passion, then concealed, almost unsuspected, below the surface. It cannot have escaped any reader of ~The Century~ that we are living in a period of amazing achievement as well as of portentous social development. Yet any worker in the furrows of life may well be pardoned for failure to realize the detail and immensity of our achievement. Could one devote himself wholly to discovering the facts of modern accomplishment, it would take a busy life to get abreast of the mere news of it, and to keep there. Ours are times of such variety and complexity that none can be expected to grasp much more than the technicalities of his own work-bench. Like most prophesies, Mr. Gilder’s has been only partly fulfilled. Yet the eighteen years since he uttered it have proved at least that it was true, though its realization has been delayed by the extraordinary activity of these later years. The history of all human progress shows that the art of any period is, so to speak, the flowering of that period. The bloom appears only after stem and stalk have shot to their full growth, and leaves have expanded and darkened to their maturity. The bubbling sap of Mr. Gilder’s time is showing now in new and surprising growth, and our problem to-day is not so much to enjoy the flowering literature which he promised as to study and to measure and to comprehend as nearly as possible the wealth of scientific and social and political and industrial achievement which has amazingly developed.