Your second task, vaster and more distant, will be to form a fraternal link between these free individualities, to build a rose window that shall concentre their multiple trends, to compose a symphony from out their various voices. The United States is made up of elements drawn from all the nations of the world. Let the richness of the structure help you to understand the essence of all these nations, to realise the harmony of their intellectual energies!--To-day, in the Old World, we witness the deplorable and foolish antagonism displayed by national individualities, near neighbours and close kin, distinguished only by trifling shades like France and Germany, repudiating one another, longing for one another's destruction. Parochial disputes about which the human mind is eager to achieve self-mutilation! For my part I cry aloud, not merely that the intellectual ideal of a single nation is too narrow for me; I declare that the ideal of a reconciled western world would be too narrow for me; I declare that the ideal of a united Europe would still be too narrow for me. The hour has come in which man, truly healthy and truly alive, must deliberately turn his footsteps towards the ideal of a universal humanity, wherein the European races of the Old World and of the New will join hands with the representatives of the ancient and now rejuvenescent civilisations of Asia--of India and of China. A universal humanity with a common spiritual treasury. All these splendid types of mankind are mutually complementary. The thought of the future must be a synthesis of the great thoughts of the entire universe. America lies between the two oceans which lave the two continents; America is at the centre of the life of the world. Let it be the mission of all that is best in America to cement this fecund union! To sum up, we ask of you two things, writers and thinkers of America. We ask, first of all, that you should defend freedom, that you should safeguard its conquests and extend them: political freedom and mental freedom, an unceasing renewal of life through freedom, through this great and ever-flowing river of the mind. In the second place, we await from you that you should bring to pass, on behalf of the world, a harmony of diverse liberties; a symphonic expression of associated individualities, of associated races, of associated civilisations, of mankind at once integral and free. You have splendid opportunities: you have an exuberant young life; you have wide areas of virgin land. Your day has just begun. You are not wearied by the toil of a previous day. You are unencumbered by the heritage of the past. All that comes down to you from the past is a voice like the sound of many waters, the voice of a great herald whose work seems a homeric foreshadowing of the task that awaits you. I speak of the American master, Walt Whitman.--Surge et age. "Revue mensuelle," Geneva, February, 1917. XII FREE VOICES FROM AMERICA