It was now or never with the armies in the field, with the men training in the camps, with the coal miners, the shipbuilders, the food savers in the kitchens. It is just as much now or never with the poets, the novelists, the essayists--with the workers in every line, although they may not see so distinctly the immediacy of the hour. Everybody saw the necessity of doing things to win the war; many can see the necessity of doing things that will constitute a sort of winning after the war. There is always something to be won. If it is not a war it is an after the war. “Peace hath its victories no less renowned than war” is a fine sounding line customarily recited without the slightest recognition of its real meaning. The poet did not mean that the victories of peace were as greatly acclaimed as the victories of war, but that the sum total of their renown was as great or greater because they are more enduring. 4 Now for the cases. It is the duty, the opportunity and the privilege of America now, in the present hour, to make it impossible hereafter for any one to raise such a question as Bliss Perry brings up in his book _The American Spirit in Literature_, namely, whether there is an independent American literature. Not only does Mr. Perry raise the question, but, stated as baldly as we have stated it, the query was thereupon discussed, with great seriousness, by a well-known American book review! We are happy to say that both Mr. Perry and the book review decided that there _is_ such a thing as an American literature, and that American writing is not a mere adjunct (perhaps a caudal appendage) of English literature. All Americans will feel deeply gratified that they could honorably come to such a conclusion. But not all Americans will feel gratified that the conclusion was reached on the strength of Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Whitman, Poe and others of the immortal dead. Some Americans will wish with a faint and timid longing that the conclusion might have been reached, or at least sustained, on the strength of Tarkington, Robert Herrick, Edith Wharton, Mary Johnston, Gertrude Atherton, Mary S. Watts, William Allen White, Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, Edna Ferber, Joseph Hergesheimer, Owen Wister and a dozen or so other living writers over whose relative importance as witnesses for the affirmative we have no desire to quarrel. Mr. Howells, we believe, was called to the stand.