The trouble with Mr. Lewis’s Carol Kennicott was that she really had nothing to offer Gopher Prairie that sensible self-respecting people anywhere would have welcomed. A superficial creature, she was without true vision in any direction. Plenty of men and women vastly her superior in cultivation and blessed with a far finer sensitiveness to the things of the spirit have in countless cases faced rude conditions, squalor even, cheerfully and hopefully, and in time they have succeeded in doing something to make the world a better place to live in. This is not to say that Carol is not true to type; there is the type, but I am not persuaded that its existence proves anything except that there are always fools and foolish people in the world. Carol would have been a failure anywhere. She deserved to fail in Gopher Prairie, which does not strike me, after all, as so hateful a place as she found it to be. She nowhere impinges upon my sympathy. I have known her by various names in larger and lovelier communities than Gopher Prairie, and wherever she exists she is a bore, and at times an unmitigated nuisance. My heart warms, not to her, but to the people in Main Street she despised. They didn’t need her uplifting hand! They were far more valuable members of society than she proved herself to be, for they worked honestly at their jobs and had, I am confident, a pretty fair idea of their rights and duties, their privileges and immunities, as children of democracy. Nothing in America is more reassuring than the fact that some one is always wailing in the market-place. When we’ve got something and don’t like it, we wait for some one to tell us how to get rid of it. Plunging into prohibition, we at once become tolerant of the bootlegger. There’s no point of rest. We are fickle, capricious, and pine for change. In the course of time we score for civilization, but the gains, broadly considered, are small and painfully won. Happiest are they who keep sawing wood and don’t expect too much! There are always the zealous laborers, the fit though few, who incur suspicion, awaken antagonism, and suffer defeat, to pave the way for those who will reap the harvest of their sowing. There are a hundred million of us and it’s too much to ask that we all chase the same rainbow. There are diversities of gifts, but all, we hope, animated by the same spirit. III