a less valid claim on his attention than the collected writings of Voltaire. It is not too soon to declare that, if a choice must be made, the American student should choose to be familiar with the Federalist rather than the Letters of Junius, with Irving rather than Leigh Hunt, with Emerson rather than Carlyle, with Thoreau rather than Richard Jefferies, with Whitman rather than William Morris, with Mark Twain rather than Oscar Wilde, with Henry James rather than George Moore, and with. Theodore Roosevelt rather than Queen Victoria.
In every case that I have mentioned the preference of a native writer would also, I believe, be the preference of a greater personality; and, in such cases, the arguments in favor of an American choice are conclusive. It is only by using our native literature, by keeping it current, by making it saturate the national consciousness—it is only so that we can make our lengthening history serve and enrich and inform us, and give to our culture the momentum of a vital tradition. But suppose the choice to be between an English author of the first rank in his kind and an American author of the second or third rank in the same kind. Is it not an unsound "cultural" policy to select for study the inferior author? Most eminent American teachers appear to think so. Believers in intellectual free trade, they have long ridiculed the notion of "protected industries" in the field of letters, and have united with English critics in deriding "Cooper, the American Scott,"
