regulate the size of our families and the length of our book- shelves. Into their perilous barks shall a mere professor at- tempt to climb ? Ah, yes ! for the public is platform-mad just as it is airship-mad. It is the duty of all of us, that have even the feeblest gift of tongue, to sacrifice ourselves to thee, O sovereign Demos, lest, to paraphrase Homer, we all perish in thy anger at being deprived of wind : —
ὡς μὴ πάντες ὄλωνται ὀδυσσαμένοιο τεοῖο
The Cosmopolitan Outlook! That seems to imply that, even if we are not all cosmopolitans now, we have a chance of becoming cosmopolitans one of these days, and that Litera- ture will be affected by the change. Such an inference appears to be reasonable, but it would scarcely be safe to use it as the basis of any sort of discussion without previously answering many questions that naturally present themselves.
We Americans are a very composite people, but, in so far as a fusion of race characteristics has taken place among us, have we not tended to evolve into a people strongly marked by national characteristics of which we are exceedingly proud? We are great travelers — hence the talk one often hears of the American invasion of Europe — and we are very hospitable to strangers; but that these two facts involve the conclusion that in our ideals and our modes of thinking as a people we are true citizens of the world seems to me very doubtful. So far as my own studies and travels have led me to think about the matter, I have been left wondering whether one does not find among the educated Europeans of one's acquaintance more of that liberality and poise of thought, and more of that humanitarian idealism, which are or ought to be the fruits of a truly cosmopolitan spirit, than one finds among Americans. » Facile adaptiveness, and easy-going tolerance, and superficial acquaintance with what the world is saying and doing, are probably found in larger measure among Americans than among any other people,
