For in his mind Americans can see themselves reflected in the light of what they chiefly need, that synthetic motive without which a secular and industrial race is as devoid of animating morality as a swarm of flies. This want, most obvious on the political and economic plane, is indeed fundamental. Wells has grasped it from many different angles but never with more point than in his essay _The American Population_. Consider this passage, where he takes as a text one of Arthur Brisbane's editorials in the "New York Journal": It is the voice of the American tradition strained to the utmost to make itself audible to the new world, and cracking into italics and breaking into capitals with the strain. The rest of that enormous bale of paper is eloquent of a public void of moral ambitions, lost to any sense of comprehensive things, deaf to ideas, impervious to generalizations, a public which has carried the conception of freedom to its logical extreme of entire individual detachment. These telltale columns deal all with personality and the drama of personal life. They witness to no interest but the interest in intense individual experiences. The engagements, the love affairs, the scandals of conspicuous people are given in pitiless detail in articles adorned with vigorous portraits and sensational pictorial comments. Even the eavesdroppers who write this stuff strike the personal note, and their heavily muscular portraits frown beside the initial letter. Murders and crimes are worked up to the keenest pitch of realization, and any new indelicacy in fashionable costume, any new medical device or cure, any new dance or athleticism, any new breach in the moral code, any novelty in sea-bathing or the woman's seat on horse-back, or the like, is given copious and moving illustration, stirring headlines, and eloquent reprobation. There is a colored supplement of knock-about fun, written chiefly in the quaint dialect of the New York slums. It is a language from which "th" has vanished, and it presents a world in which the kicking by a mule of an endless succession of victims is an inexhaustible joy to young and old. "Dat ole Maud!" There is a smaller bale dealing with sport. In the advertisement columns one finds nothing of books, nothing of art; but great choice of bust developers, hair restorers, nervous tonics, clothing sales, self-contained flats, and business opportunities.... Individuality has, in fact, got home to itself, and, as people say, taken off its frills.... The "New York American" represents a clientèle to be counted by the hundred thousand, manifestly with no other solicitudes, just burning to live and living to burn.