amply recognised
in other works. (_The King of Schnorrers_ was even read aloud by Oscar
Wilde to a duchess.) But he roundly denies that art is any the less
artistic for being inspired by life, and seeking in its turn to inspire
life. Such a contention is tainted by the very Philistinism it would
repudiate, since it seeks a negative test of art in something outside
art--to wit, purpose, whose presence is surely as irrelevant to art as
its absence. The only test of art is artistic quality, and this quality
_occurs_ perhaps more frequently than it is achieved, as in the words of
the Hebrew prophets, or the vision of a slum at night, the former
consciously aiming at something quite different, the latter achieving
its beauty in utter unconsciousness.

II

It will be seen from the official table of immigration that the Russian
Jew is only one and not even the largest of the fifty elements that, to
the tune of nearly a million and a half a year, are being fused in the
greatest "Melting Pot" the world has ever known; but if he has been
selected as the typical immigrant, it is because he alone of all the
fifty has no homeland. Some few other races, such as the Armenians, are
almost equally devoid of political power, and, in consequence, equally
obnoxious to massacre; but except the gipsy, whose essence is to be
homeless, there is no other race--black, white, red, or yellow--that has
not remained at least a majority of the population in some area of its
own. There is none, therefore, more in need of a land of liberty, none
to whose future it is more vital that America should preserve that
spirit of William Penn which President Wilson has so nobly
characterised. And there is assuredly none which has more valuable
elements to contribute to the ethnic and psychical amalgam of the people
of to-morrow.

The process of American amalgamation is not assimilation or simple
surrender to the dominant type, as is popularly supposed, but an
all-round give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched or
impoverished. Thus the intelligent reader will have remarked how the
somewhat anti-Semitic Irish servant of the first act talks Yiddish
herself in the fourth. Even as to the ultimate language of the United
States, it is unreasonable to suppose that American, though fortunately
protected by English literature, will not bear traces of the fifty
languages now being spoken side by side with it, and of which this play
alone presents scraps