that was the privilege solely of those who, having proved themselves superlatively "smart," were able to take it, as it were, by force. If you could out-pioneer the pioneers, you could wrest the possession of your own mind: by that time, in any case, it was usually so soured and warped and embittered as to have become safely impotent. As we can see now, a vast unconscious conspiracy actuated all America against the creative spirit. In an age when every sensitive mind in England was in full revolt against the blind, mechanical, devastating forces of a "progress" that promised nothing but the ultimate collapse of civilization; when all Europe was alive with prophets, aristocratic prophets, proletarian prophets, religious and philosophical and humanitarian and economic and artistic prophets, crying out, in the name of the human spirit, against the obscene advance of capitalistic industrialism; in an age glorified by nothing but the beautiful anger of the Tolstoys and the Marxes, the Nietzsches and the Renans, the Ruskins and the Morrises--in that age America, innocent, ignorant, profoundly untroubled, slept the righteous sleep of its own manifest and peculiar destiny. We were, in fact, in our provincial isolation, in just the state of the Scandinavian countries during the European wars of 1866-1870, as George Brandes describes it in his autobiography: "While the intellectual life languished, as a plant droops in a close, confined place, the people were self-satisfied. They rested on their laurels and fell into a doze. And while they dozed they had dreams. The cultivated, and especially the half-cultivated, public in Denmark and Norway dreamed that they were the salt of Europe. They dreamed that by their idealism they would regenerate the foreign nations. They dreamed that they were the free, mighty North, which would lead the cause of the peoples to victory--and they woke up unfree, impotent, ignorant." Yes, even New England, the old home of so many brave and virile causes, even New England, which had cared so much for the freedom of the individual, had ceased to afford any stimulus or any asylum for the human spirit. New England had been literally emasculated by the Civil War, or rather by the exodus of young men westward which was more or less synchronous with the war. The continent had been opened up, the rural population of the East had been uprooted, had been set in motion, had formed habits of wandering. The war, like a fever, had as it were stimulated the circulation of the race, and we might say that by a natural attraction the blood of the head, which New England had been, had flowed into those remote members, the Western territories.