464
but now this curve is approaching if it has not already attained its summit. The colonization is 
complete. People are beginning to jostle each other. Europe can no longer pay for her produce. The 
absence of moral unity is creating class conflict. The problems of politics are too vast and varied for 
even genius to grasp; the apparatus of order, both moral and physical, is showing signs of an 
imminent breakdown. The interests of the five principal sections of the country become more 
obviously incompatible. Any serious setback might cause disaster in a dozen different directions. 
They talk of the melting pot. The metaphor is not bad. For the last sixty years they have pitched 
into it indiscriminately everything that came along. They protest passionately that the product must 
be that perfect gold, the "one hundred per cent. American", which may be defined as the wish 
phantasms of a Sunday School superintendent, a romantic flapper, an unscrupulous usurer, and a 
maudlin medium, worked up into a single delirious nightmare. More likely the interaction of all 
these formidable forces will result in an explosion. My faith in the future of the States is fixed on 
{734} 
some rational reconstruction after revolution. The present attempt to amalgamate this fortuitous 
hotch-potch, neither calculating probabilities nor observing actualities, but asserting an amiable 
postulate as if it were axiomatic, is born of an illusion invented by despair of acting with 
intelligence; and when the moment of awakening arrives the disillusionment may shock them at 
first into insanity. Nothing less is likely to show them that human nature is a stubborn reality which 
no amount of humouring, befooling and bullying will alter. 
These preliminary speculations set forth, I will now try to justify the diagnosis by exhibiting the 
salient symptom. For convenience I have classed my observations under a few principal heads. I 
shall show how America differs from Europe in its attitude towards law and order. I shall give 
examples of the unfathomable ignorance which prevails even among the most highly educated 
people, not merely of well established facts of what in Europe is called common knowledge, but of 
the most elementary principles of nature, that is to say of facts which quite illiterate Europeans 
would know instinctively without having to learn them. I shall give examples of the impotence of 
their extravagant idealism to preserve them from outraging European convention of honour and 
good manners. Lastly, I shall illustrate the callousness and cruelty which characterize the people as 
a result of their fanatical faith in absolute standards of rectitude and definition of duty to one's 
neighbour as espionage and tyranny. I will ask the reader to analyse each incident in order to 
discover the simple and radical motive which underlies the overt action. I hope thus to make it 
clear that even the most absurd and atrocious abominations are, so to speak, accidents caused by 
the impact of facts with which the American is unfitted to deal, owing to his childlike ignorance, 
inexperience and lack of all sense of proportion; so that to every crisis he can bring only the intense 
impulsive energy of instinct. 
In 1912 I took it into my head to write three essays on American art and literature, past, present 
and future. I only completed the first, which is published in the English Review. It aroused a 
hurricane across the Atlantic and, hard as it is to believe, the echoes have not yet died away. 
Within the last twelve months it was violently attacked by one of America's best poets, Robert 
Haven Schauffler. I make a point of mentioning the fact. He accused me of prejudice and 
unfairness, ignorant of course that my essay was but one of three and that my plan had been to 
express the friendliest faith in the future. As it stands, my judgment is no doubt severe, but I see 
little to modify. 
Poe and Whitman are still in my opinion the only first-rate writers until very recent years. I still find 
Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Emerson, Bret 
{735} 
Harte, Mark Twain and the rest devoid of any title soever to rank among the sons of genius. I might 
admit that they possessed great talents, but that is foreign to the question. I had been prevented 
from writing the other two essays partly because the editor, following his invariable rule, broke his