The white race, too, is fearfully affected in its pretense at knowing more than it can know. We are all ashamed to say, “I don’t know!” I believe this applies more truthfully to women than to men. Since the era of the woman’s club, the gentle sex has been wild to accumulate knowledge, and sadly too often, it is content to _appear_ to have the knowledge rather than appear ignorant. One has but to look over the programs of a score or a hundred women’s clubs, as I have recently done, to see proof of this in the vast range many of them take _in a single season_. They crowd into an hour’s or two hours’ session what no person living can get a reasonable grasp of in less than from three months to a year of fairly consistent and persistent study. They jump from “The Romantic School of Music,” one week to “The Effect of the Renaissance upon Gothic Art,” the next, and the third week finds them swallowing a concentrated pill on “The Poets of the Victorian Era,” while on the fourth they completely master all that can be learned of “The Franciscan Mission Epoch in California and Its Influence upon the Indians.” Yet let it not be thought that I am not a believer in education for women, women’s clubs, and the like. I believe in everything that _really helps_. And if these clubs would compel mental exercise enough to give a fair grasp of _one subject a year_, they would be doing work of incalculable benefit. But this smattering of knowledge, this thin spreading out of scraps of information, feed no one’s mind, and the pretense that comes from an assumed knowledge does the mind and soul of the pretender more harm than a dozen clubs can eradicate in a lifetime. Hence, let us become simple-minded, as the Indians. They “don’t know,” and they know they don’t know, and they are willing to say so. There is another affectation to which I must refer. We Americans pretend to be democratic, yet we have a caste of wealth that is more disgusting, degrading, and demoralizing than the Hindoo castes, or the social scale of European aristocracy. We “kow tow” to an English lord as if he were a little god, and we bow and scrape and mince our words when we come in contact with the _nouveau riche_ of our own land, just as if they were made of different material from ourselves. The space given in our newspapers to the most trivial doings of Alice Roosevelt, both before and after she married Congressman Longworth; the recital of the actions of the “society” few,--the Vanderbilts, Astors, Goulds, Carnegies, Harrimans, Fishes, and the rest,--are proofs of our affected snobbism. I have not yet attained to the mental serenity and calm philosophy of the Indian, but I am seeking it, where I shall judge all men and women not by their exterior circumstances of wealth, position, dress, or birth, but by inherent character, perfection of body, force of mind, and beauty of soul. CHAPTER XXIV THE INDIAN AND ART WORK