The breath of the nostrils of all these big institutions is crime--that is the long and short of it. We must thank God for America; and hold fast to every advantage of our position. Talk about our corruption! It is a mere fly-speck of superficiality compared with the rooted and permanent forces of corruption that exist in the European states. The only serious permanent force of corruption in America is party spirit. All the other forces are shifting like the clouds, and have no partnerships with any permanently organized ideal. Millionaires and syndicates have their immediate cash to pay, but they have no intrenched prestige to work with, like the church sentiment, the army sentiment, the aristocracy and royalty sentiment, which here can be brought to bear in favor of every kind of individual and collective crime--appealing not only to the immediate pocket of the persons to be corrupted, but to the ideals of their imagination as well.... My dear Mack, we "intellectuals" in America must all work to keep our precious birthright of individualism, and freedom from these institutions. _Every_ great institution is perforce a means of corruption--whatever good it may also do. Only in the free personal relation is full ideality to be found.--I have vomited all this out upon you in the hope that it may wake a responsive echo. One must do _something_ to work off the effect of the Dreyfus sentence. I rejoice immensely in the purchase [on our behalf] of the two pieces of land [near Chocorua], and pine for the day when I can get back to see them. If all the same to you, I wish that you would buy Burke's in your name, and Mother-in-law Forrest's in her name. But let this be exactly as each of you severally prefers. We leave here in a couple of days, I imagine. I am better; but I can't tell how much better for a few weeks yet. I hope that you will smite the ungodly next winter. What a glorious gathering together of the forces for the great fight there will be. It seems to me as if the proper tactics were to pound McKinley--put the whole responsibility on him. It is he who by his purely drifting "non-entanglement" policy converted a splendid opportunity into this present necessity of a conquest of extermination. It is he who has warped us from our continuous national habit, which, if we repudiate him, it will not be impossible to resume. Affectionately thine, Mary's, Aleck's, Dinah's, Augusta's,[24] and everyone's, W. J. P.S. Damn it, America doesn't know the meaning of the word corruption compared with Europe! Corruption is so permanently organized here that it isn't thought of as such--it is so transient and shifting in America as to make an outcry whenever it appears. _To Miss Frances R. Morse._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _Sept. 17, 1899_.