We have all worshiped at the shrine of material achievement--in America with the riot of young strength. England, like old King Amfortas, is now bleeding from the sins of her youth and calling in vain for some Parsifal to deliver her from their penalty. She has built her rich civilization on a morass of exploited millions, and her Nemesis is that in her hour of peril her sodden millions strike and drink and feel no imperative urge to give their lives for an England that sucked her prosperity from their veins. In the race for commercial supremacy the Latin nations--Italy, Spain, and France--have been deemed inferior to Germany, England, and the United States, because they were less tainted with the lust of possession, less materialistic in their reading of life, less powerful in their grasp upon economic opportunity than their rivals. In the Latin countries industry yet remains largely on the small scale, which is economically wasteful, but which does not build up fabulous wealth at the expense of the individual worker. The great corporation designed for the rapid creation of wealth has not found that congenial home on Latin soil which it has on ours, or on German soil. And this fact accounts for the touch of handicraft lingering in the product of Latin industry, for the strength and health individually of their working classes, for their fervor of devotion to the national tradition. The Latin has never forgotten the claims of the individual life: democracy to him is more than the right to vote. Therefore, pure art, pure science, pure literature--also the world of ideas--has a larger part in the life of Latin peoples than with us in the eternal struggle with the materialistic forces of life. To the Latin living is not solely the gratification of the body. He reckons on the intelligence and the spirit of man as well. * * * * *