No other man has been so mighty to keep the pestiferousness of America alive in the minds of medieval Europe. As our representative citizen, he has romped our yankeeisms and cutenesses from Queenstown to Port Said and around. And so it has been for seventeen years since that Tampan camp, from party to group, from fame to notoriety, from brute-shooting and affidavits, to cocktails and new African rivers furnished with sworn statements, from woman’s suffrage back to bayonetism,—always in the sweat and heft of flesh, unvaryingly the animal man. They say that if a child is bred and born right, his earlier years passed in hands that start him straight—such a child will return to the beauty of his inception, if time and the world are permitted to work sufficient misery upon him; misery being the great corrective. These States of America were bred of a fair dream and born of a singular beauty. The hope of the world today is that as a nation, we restore the old dream, the old inspiration; not a turning back, for that is against the law, but turning to a finer dimension of that old passion which made us a refuge and a brotherhood. There has been fine living virtue in two recent actions of this government—two bits of high behavior. Through one of these, it seemed that a shaft of light poured down from the fatherland of the future—if day is ahead and not doom. I refer to the return of the Boxer indemnity to China.... It was like a fine moment in a busy life, and there was poetry in the answer from old Mother China.... There are men who love these States well enough to hate her many moments of unworthiness. The other figment of true national character is the determination of the part of Washington to keep her promise to Colombia.... I perceived that T. R. has risen against that, even since his book setting forth the needs of a new predatory impetus for our national life.... To anyone who asks a law to go by, for the good of the country and the rectitude of self, I would say, “Take the side that this man does not, and it will be impossible for you to lose.” [1] _America and the World-War, by Theodore Roosevelt._ [_Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York._] Maurice Browne and The Little Theatre JOHN COWPER POWYS