To speak seriously, it will be interesting to know just how the increasing Slavic element in our population will influence our country’s arts in general, and our self-contained art of sculpture in particular. When a teacher of art remarks, in some dubiety, “So many of our students have names that end in ‘sky’,” the only gallant retort is, “It is our business to be sure that they make no worse end than that.” Not the least of art’s problems here in America is that universal American problem of the unassimilated alien. Optimists and pessimists can unite in one opinion; that our latest immigrants, no less than those of the Mayflower, have certain native qualities that need alteration for the benefit of the human race. The Puritan has altered for the better. Later comers must do likewise. Some of these have a far harder task than the Puritans, with less ability to perform it; but they have infinitely more help. Mr. John Corbin, in one of his penetrating studies of dramatic art, has pointed out “two stages of American provincialism.” One stage rejects all foreign culture; the other embraces anything foreign, provided that it is abundantly subversive of domestic ideals and labors and attainments. Both stages are hostile to truth and to progress, and to the only freedom there is, freedom of the spirit. The first type wilfully stunts growth; the second invites destruction of growth already accomplished by costly effort. Surely American sculpture, which has borrowed eagerly abroad and developed soundly at home, should not fall into either of these degenerate modes of thinking. “_Quid quisque vitet_,” says Horace, with his canny Roman philosophy,--“What hourly to avoid is known by none.” What hourly to accept is our modern question. Since a man’s foes may be of his own household, what if our own home-grown materialism were after all the worst enemy of our art? It will do little good to fly feverish alien contacts if at the same time things of the spirit are allowed to languish at our own ancestral firesides. Sometimes the firesides themselves seem less frequent, as ancestors diminish in the world’s esteem. True, our tawdry and vehement self-advertising has its magnificent dreams, and our childlike faith in the dollar its occasional glorious hour of justification; we cannot help seeing that some of our transatlantic co-workers in art and letters come among us remembering those things. And it is a healing principle of civilization that we shall borrow our light from one land, and divide our loaf with another; even though loaves are wasted thereby. Every lover of our country will wish its culture to remain at once hospitable and self-respecting; both characteristics may dwell harmoniously together.