Well, there is a price for such lethargy. It is terrifying to read over the names of the judges and magistrates on the American Bench, and see how many are of foreign origin. Listen to the roll-call in any court-room. The Poppelfingers and Morinos and Sauerkrautzers predominate. Where are our first American families? It might be well to ask, indeed, where they will be in another generation or two. You and I walk along the streets and see a man suddenly stricken. A crowd quickly gathers about his pitiful form, stares into his countenance. A policeman calls an ambulance. A gong rings, and he is carried off to a hospital. You and I go our way, with perhaps a momentary tug at our heart. But it never occurs to us that the man in the street might have been ourselves. Such things happen to others--no, they could never, never happen to us. The lightning may strike a neighbor’s house or barn--but not our own. Death or disaster may come to the other fellow--never to us. “It never can happen” might be our national slogan. Thus has a stupid Pollyanna optimism penetrated our civic thought, our political consciousness, our spiritual being; and the false doctrine is screamed from every housetop from Manhattan to Gopher Prairie. Pretty little poems, printed in neat frames, greet us wherever we turn. They urge us to cheer up, that it is not raining rain, but only flowers, and that God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world--forgetting that Browning, when he penned his immortal line, referred to a particular morning for a particular man of vision, and by no means intended to be quoted out of his context, as a basis for the silly “gladness” of hoards of people who think they think. Our music-halls are crammed with comedians who sing, in loud voices, something about what’s the use of worrying, it never was worth while, and bidding us smile, smile, smile. And we clap and giggle and stamp our easy-going feet, and go out into the night, and are shoved and pushed into an over-crowded subway train, and still fondly cherish the delusion that we should keep on smiling, though a brutal train-guard’s boot is jammed into our reluctant back, so that we may become one more sardine in the steel box he is so expert in packing. It would all be very amusing were it not so serious. Sinclair Lewis, who is becoming the best photographer this country ever produced, has not given us a false picture of our towns and cities. He tells the brutal truth, bravely. But we read him, smile, and say that of course it’s all very well, and such localities may exist, but they are not those in which we dwell. And all the while, about us, are the very folk his deft pen has drawn. _Babbitt_--what a stupid old fool he is, and we may have seen him in smoking-compartments; but we never will admit that he is our next-door neighbor.