My joy in _Main Street_, the book, is marred by what I am constrained to think is a questionable assertion in the foreword, namely: “The town is, in our tale, called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Street everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told up York State or in the Carolina Hills.” Now I should say that there are very marked differences between Gopher Prairie and towns of approximately the same size that have drawn upon different strains of foreign or American stock. Mr. Lewis depicts character with a sure stroke, and he communicates the sense of atmosphere admirably. There are paragraphs and single lines that arrest the attention and invite re-reading, so sharply do they bite into the consciousness. One pays him a reader’s highest tribute--“That’s true; I’ve known just such people.” But I should modify his claim to universality in deference to the differences in local history so clearly written upon our maps and the dissimilar backgrounds of young America that are not the less interesting or important because the tracings upon them are so thin. Human nature, we are frequently assured, is the same the world over, but I don’t believe it can be maintained successfully that all small towns are alike. All manner of things contribute to the making of a community. A college town is unlike an industrial or a farming centre of the same size. A Scandinavian influence in a community is quite different from a German or an Irish or a Scotch influence. There are places in the heart of America where, in the formative period, the Scotch-Irish exerted a very marked influence indeed in giving tone and direction to the community life, and the observer is sensible of this a hundred years afterward. There are varied shadings traceable to early dominating religious forces; Catholicism, Methodism, Presbyterianism, and Episcopalianism each imparting a coloring of its own to the social fabric. No more fascinating field is open to the student than that offered by the elements that have contributed to the building of American communities as, for example, where there has been a strong foreign infusion or such a blend as that of New Englanders with folk of a Southern strain. Those who are curious in such matters will find a considerable literature ready to their hand. Hardly any one at all conversant with American life but will think instantly of groups of men and women who in some small centre were able, by reason of their foresight and courage, to lay a debt upon posterity, or of an individual who has waged battle alone for public betterment.