Which of our poets thinks any more of an adventurous song? Of attempting any more the unattempted in either prose or rhyme? It is as if everything had been attempted; everything dared; everything accomplished--the peaks all preëmpted. Politics or religion or literature, it matters not: the great days are gone, the great things are done, the great men securely housed in the Hall of Fame. Heaven offers us a League of Nations and we prefer the tried and proved device of war; a famed evangelist comes to town, we build him a vast tabernacle, and twenty thousand gather for the quickening message--“Brighten the corner where you are!” And in the corners, and over the walls of the nation, with poster and placard the “Safety-First” sign warns us not to hold our little rushlight over-high, or flare it over-far, for fear we set our brightened corner of the world on fire. But the whole world is on fire! And wherever an emperor has escaped the devouring flame, he is fiddling, as emperors do; and his poet laureate is writing free verse; and all of his faithful subjects are saying, over and over, “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” “We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it,” says Emerson. “Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.” I have not spoken lately with a man who seemed to think he was entitled to the world. That grand old faith has passed away. But I talk with no man lately who does not think he is entitled to an automobile. Great is Tin Lizzie of the Americans! Greater than Diana of the Ephesians. But except for our worship of the Ford we are not over-religious. The Ford is a useful little deity; she meets our needs to the last mile. The individual can skip and frolic with her, for she is distinctly the goddess of the plains and rolling country. Admirable to her winking tail-light, she is one hundred per cent American, the work of one of the supreme inventive geniuses of our time. She is the greatest thing in America, chugging everywhere but up Parnassus. Fool-proof, the universal car, she is the very sign and symbol of our antlike industry, the motor-minded expression of our internal-combustion age.