Russia and America are the Eastern and Western poles of thought. Russia is evolving as the greatest artistic philosophical and mystical nation of the world, and Moscow may be said already to be the literary capital of Europe. America is showing itself as the site of the New Jerusalem, the place where a nation is really in earnest in its attempt to realise the great dream of human progress. Russia is the living East; America is the living West--as India is the dead East and Britain is the dying West. Siberia will no doubt be the West of the future. For one who knows Russia well America is full of a great revelation. The contrast in national spirit is so sharp that each helps you to see the other more clearly. The American people are now on the threshold of a great progressive era; they feel themselves within sight of the realisation of many of their ideals. They have been hampered badly by the trusts and the "bosses" and the corrupt police, but they are now proving that these obstacles are merely temporary anomalies, caused by the overwhelmingly sudden growth of population and prosperity. A few years ago it could with truth be said that material conditions were worse in the United States than in the Old World. But it has been clear all the time that the corruption existent in the country was truly foreign to the country's temper. The common citizen is becoming the watchdog of the police-service. Tammany has fallen. Women are getting the suffrage, state by state. The nation is unanimous in its cry for a pure state, a clean country, and an uncorrupted people. All diseases are to be healed. Couples who wish to be married must produce health-certificates. The mentally deficient and hereditary criminals are to be segregated. Blue-books, or rather what the Americans call White-books, are going to form the Bible of a new nation. The day is going to be _rationally_ divided into eight hours' work, eight hours' pleasure, eight hours' sleep--or rather, eight hours' looking at machinery, eight hours' pleasure, eight hours' sleep, for machinery is going to accomplish all the ugly toil. Everybody is to be well dressed, well housed, comfortable. America is raging against drink, against the exploitation of immigrants, against the fate of the white slave, against any one who has done anything immoral. It will nationally expel a Russian genius like Gorky. It makes great difficulty of admitting to its shores any one who has ever been in prison. It is so in earnest about the future of America that it has set up what is almost an insult to Europe--the examination of Ellis Island. Any one who has gone through the ordeal of the poor emigrant, as I did, going into America with a party of poor Russians in the steerage, and has been medically examined and clerically cross-questioned about his life and ethics, knows that America is a materialist and progressive country, and that she is no longer a harbour of refuge for the weak, but a place where a nation is