wn Art. What America imports from Europe is useless to her. It
is torn from its roots; and it is idle to replant it; it will not grow.
There must be a native growth, not so much of America, as of the modern
era. That growth America, like Europe, must will. She has her prophet of
it, Walt Whitman. In the coming centuries it is her work to make his
vision real.

CONCLUDING ESSAY

The preceding pages were written in the course of travel and convey the
impressions and reflections of the moment. Whatever interest they may
have depends upon this immediacy, and for that reason I have reprinted
them substantially as they first appeared. Perhaps, however, some
concluding reflections of a more considered nature may be of some
interest to my readers. I do not advance them in a dogmatic spirit nor
as final judgments, but as the first tentative results of my gropings
into a large and complicated subject. I will ask the reader, therefore,
be he Western or Oriental, to follow me in a spirit at once critical and
sympathetic, challenging my suggestions as much as he will, but rather
as a fellow-seeker than as an opponent bent upon refutation. For I am
trying to comprehend rather than to judge, and to comprehend as
impartially as is compatible with having an attitude of one's own at
all.

Ever since Mr. Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous line it has become a
commonplace of popular thought in England and America that there is an
East and a West, and an impassable gulf between them. But Mr. Kipling
was thinking of India, and India is not all the East: he was thinking
of England, and England is not all the West. As soon as one approaches
the question more particularly it becomes a complicated matter to decide
whether there is really an East and a West, and what either stands for.
That there is a West, in a real sense, with a unity of its own, is, I
think, true. But it must be limited in time to the last two centuries,
and in space to the countries of Western Europe and the continent of
America. So understood, the West forms, in all the most important
respects, a homogeneous system. True, it is divided into different
nations, speaking different languages, and pursuing different, and often
conflicting, policies; and these distinctions are still so important,
that they colour our fears and hopes and sympathies, and take form in
the burden of armaments and the menace of war. Nevertheless, seen in the
perspective of history, they are surv