virtue and effort frequently go unrewarded, are facts to which, in America, one must shut one's eyes. Miss Columbia is very young, and her gold must be minted before she recognizes it; in the matrix it looks insignificant to her inexperienced eyes. Style is not manner, but personality. And the fact that our poets and story writers keep to the old forms and expressions proves (does it not?) that they have no inward urging which makes them find old molds too cramping. In a play of George Cohan's, Broadway Jones, you have the best of middle-class America--its good points and its limitations. Perhaps this is even better brought out in his other play, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. "Crude," you say; "childish!" Quite true, but entirely and absolutely America. For the United States is governed by the Great God: Mediocrity! The middle-class, or, as we call him, "the man in the street," rules. Neither the gaunt simplicities of the lower class (although we talk a great deal about the lower class), nor the simplicities of the educated and intellectually alert, can leaven the lump of self-satisfied commonplaceness. Not only don't we know, but we don't want to know. An American writer, who had lived in Europe long enough to forget the peculiar American temper, was sufficiently ingenuous as to propose to the editor of one of our best-known magazines a series of three articles on six contemporary French poets. They were refused, because his clientèle did not care to read of things of which they knew nothing. "They will know less than I," said the editor, "and I have only heard of two of these names." We are a little better off as regards our musical taste, because music is a universal language, and we can hear music in the "original," so to say. In music, again, our output is more in accordance with the spirit of the whole world. This does not mean that there are not good writers in America. There are. But most of them write "dans le goût d'avant-hier." I am only telling you that Miss Columbia is in her artistic 'teens, and is as unimaginatively conventional as is the human animal at the same age. And, again like the human animal, she was not so childish when she was a baby. Paul Revere, riding across the Middlesex Fells to rouse the minute men, was like any adult man on a job which he shrewdly suspects will change the fate of nations. Poe and Whitman were not exactly childish. But were Poe writing today, he would be told that his subjects were "unimportant" and that he "lacked social consciousness." For we in America are suffering from a pathological outlook on the world. Our activities function along the line of preventive medicine for communities. The richness and variety of personality is lost sight of in the lump. We forget that admirable truth set forth in the poem beginning "Little drops of water."