The Advantage of Youth--Japanese Eclecticism and American--The Craving for the Best--_Cyrano de Bergerac_--Verestschagin-- Music and the Drama--Culture by Paroxysms--Mr. Gladstone and the Japanese--Anglo-Saxon Crichtons--Americans as Linguists-- England's Past and America's Future--Americanisms in Speech-- Why they are Disappearing in America--And Appearing in England--The Press and the Copyright Laws--A Look into the Future. Ruskin, speaking of the United States, said that he could never bring himself to live in a country so unfortunate as to possess no castles. But, with its obvious disadvantages, youth in a nation has also compensations. Max O'Rell says that to be American is to be both fresh and mature, and I have certainly known many Americans who were fresh. The shoulders are too young for the head to be very old. But when a man--let us say an Englishman of sixty--full of worldly wisdom, having travelled much and seen many men and cities, looks on a young man, just out of the university, perhaps, very keen on his profession, very certain of making his way in the world, with a hundred interests in what seem to the other "new-fangled" things--telephones and typewriters and bicycles and radio-activity and motor cars, things unknown to the old man's youth,--talking of philosophies and theories and principles which were not taught at college when the other was an undergraduate, the elder is likely to think that the young man's judgment is sadly crude and raw, that his education has been altogether too diffused and made up of smatterings of too many things, and to say to himself that the old sound, simple ways were better. Yet it may be--is it not almost certain?--that the youth has had the training which will give him a wider outlook than his father ever had, and will make him a broader man.