k comes either from the outsiders or from the Great White
Way crowd. When you've seen Italians not only crowd in to the free
productions down here but have seen them put up good money to attend
the best theatres; when you've heard them whistle grand opera at their
work and save hard earned dollars to spend on it down town; when
you've seen them crowd the art museums on free days and spend a half
dollar to look at some private exhibition of a fellow countryman's,
you begin to think, if you're honest, that the laugh is on you. They
made me feel ashamed not only because I was ignorant but because after
I became more familiar with the works of the masters I was slower
than they to appreciate them. In many cases I couldn't. I didn't
flatter myself either that this was because of my superior frankness
or up-to-dateness. I knew well enough that it was because of a lack in
me and my ancestors.

Scarcely a week passed when there wasn't something worth seeing or
hearing presented to these people. It came either through a settlement
house or through the generosity of some interested private patron.
However it came, it was always through the medium of a class which
until now had been only a name to me. This was the independently
well-to-do American class--the Americans who had partly made and
partly inherited their fortunes and had not yet come to misuse them.
It is a class still active in American life, running however more to
the professions than to business. Many of their family names have been
familiar in history to succeeding generations since the early
settlement of New England. They were intellectual leaders then and
they are intellectual leaders now. If I could with propriety I'd like
to give here a list of half a dozen of these men and women who came,
in time, to revive for me my belief that after all there still is
left in this country the backbone of a worthy old stock. But they
don't need any such trivial tribute as I might give them. The thing
that struck me at once about them was that they were still finding an
outlet for their pioneer instinct not only in their professions and
their business, but in the interest they took in the new pioneer.
Shoulder to shoulder with the modern Pilgrims they were pushing
forward their investigations in medicine, in science, in economics.
They were adapting old laws to new conditions; they were developing
the new West; they were the new thinkers and the new politicians.

I don't sup