When Olive Schreiner says "work," she means it. She does not refer to the makeshifts which masquerade under the term of "social usefulness." She means work done with the hands and the brain, work done for money, work that sets the individual free from dependence on any other individual. It is a theme worth all her eloquence. For work and love, and not either of them alone, are the most important things in the world--the supremest expressions of individual life. H. G. Wells on America I came to America balancing between hope and skepticism. The European world is full of the criticism of America; and, for the matter of that, America, too, is full of it; hostility and depreciation prevail--overmuch; for, in spite of rawness and vehemence and a scum of blatant, oh! quite asinine, folly, the United States of America remains the greatest country in the world and the living hope of mankind. It is the supreme break with the old tradition; it is the freshest and most valiant beginning that has ever been made in human life.--_The Passionate Friends._ Paderewski and the New Gods MARGARET C. ANDERSON I shall keep always, as my most unforgettable memory, the thought of a certain afternoon during Paderewski's tour this year when he walked quietly back across the stage, in response to an encore, and played Schumann's _Warum_. It was somehow heart-breaking. It was a more poignant questioning to me, than Arnold's "unquenched, deep-sunken, old-world pain-- Say, will it never heal?" Nothing that I have ever heard or seen has given me so vivid a sense of being in the presence of an art that is immortal. It seems to have become hideously "popular" to love Paderewski. The critics will tell you that it's only done in America; that Europeans have any number of idols they put before him; and that we who persist in calling him "the greatest" are simply under the spell of an old hypnotism. There was a time, they'll concede, when he came like a conqueror, royally deserving the flowers we strewed. But now--there's Bauer, there's Godowsky, and Hofman, and Gans, and Busoni! One local critic has even gone to the length of saying that since the American public has sat at the feet of these men and learned sanity in piano playing it has no enthusiasm for Paderewski's "neurotic, disordered, incoherent" music--"his woeful exaggerations of sentiment and hysterical rhapsody." I should say some unpublishable things to that critic if we should ever discuss the subject.