Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/168

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the things that lie nearest us the divine idea, and we shall pass in due time from the love of sensuous to the love of supersensuous beauty."

"Will you? That is precisely the question," rejoins a skeptical voice from somewhere east of Buffalo. "Go and communicate to the farmers your passion for sweetness and light! In all seriousness, are you approaching the possibility of doing that? Does that possibility lie in the line of your march? We do not doubt your ability to pass from triumph to triumph in your conquest of the material world, and indefinitely to improve your technical processes and increase your economic efficiency. Yet to us your absorption in agriculture, business, and engineering does not seem to prophesy a new generation of more genial, humane, and conversable men but a second generation of Carlyle's 'bores,' speeding on safer railroads through richer fields to bigger business, and sitting down of an evening in more admirably constructed dwellings, better heated, better plumbed, and better lighted, to read the stock quotations and meditate more profitable investments. We do not see the provision in your scheme of higher education for shunting the people to a line of progress issuing in a society that is an end in itself. We do not see at what