Culture, as we commonly use the term, may properly be allowed to pass as merely another aspect of the idealism “deep in the general heart of man” that we should like to believe to be one of the great assets of the West. Still addressing the Folks, my neighbors, I will temerariously repeat an admission tucked into an earlier chapter, that here is a field where we do well to carry ourselves modestly. There was an impression common in my youth that culture of the highest order was not only possible in the West but that we Westerners were peculiarly accessible to its benignant influences and very likely to become its special guardians and apostles. Those were times when life was less complex, when the spirituality stirred by the Civil War was still very perceptible, when our enthusiasms were less insistently presented in statistics of crops and manufactures. We children of those times were encouraged to keep Emerson close at hand, for his purifying and elevating influence, and in a college town which I remember very well the professor of Greek was a venerated person and took precedence in any company over the athletic director. In those days, that seem now so remote, it was quite respectable to speak of the humanities, and people did so without self-consciousness. But culture, the culture of the humanities, never gained that foothold in the West that had been predicted for it. That there are few signs of its permanent establishment anywhere does not conceal our failure either to implant it or to find for it any very worthy substitute. We have valiantly invested millions of dollars in education and other millions in art museums and in libraries without any resulting diffusion of what we used to be pleased to call culture. We dismiss the whole business quite characteristically by pointing with pride to handsome buildings and generous endowments in much the same spirit that we call attention to a new automobile factory. There are always the few who profit by these investments; but it is not for the few that we design them; it is for the illumination of the great mass that we spend our treasure upon them. The doctrine of the few is the old doctrine of “numbers” and “the remnant,” and even at the cost of reconstructing human nature we promised to show the world that a great body of people in free American States could be made sensitive and responsive to beauty in all its forms. The humanities still struggle manfully, but without making any great headway against adverse currents. The State universities offer an infinite variety of courses in literature and the fine arts, and they are served by capable and zealous instructors, but with no resulting progress against the tide of materialism. “Culture,” as a friend of mine puts it, “is on the blink.” We hear reassuring reports of the State technical schools where the humanities receive a niggardly minimum of attention, and these institutions demand our