are content to find it in a single cause, it would be the breach
with all old ways of life and all old social relationships. Indeed, the
psychology of the stranger in a new land may easily be explained by
reference to this one supreme fact. His clan, his country, his people,
his state, no matter how deeply he was rooted in them, have now ceased
to be realities for him. His first aim is to make profit. How could it
be otherwise? There is nothing else open to him. In the old country he
was excluded from playing his part in public life; in the colony of his
choice there is no public life to speak of. Neither can he devote
himself to a life of comfortable, slothful ease; the new lands have
little comfort. Nor is the newcomer moved by sentiment. His environment
means nothing to him. At best he regards it as a means to an end--to
make a living. All this must surely be of great consequence for the rise
of a mental outlook that cares only for gain; and who will deny that
colonial activity generates it? "Our rivulets and streams turn mill
wheels and bring rafts into the valleys, as they do in Scotland. But not
one ballad, not a single song, reminds us that on their banks men and
women live who experience the happiness of love and the pangs of
separation; that under each roof in the valleys life's joys and sorrows
come and go." This plaint of an American of the old days expresses my
meaning; it has been noted again and again, particularly by those who
visited America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The only
relationship between the Yankee and his environment is one of practical
usefulness. The soil, as one of them says, is not regarded as "the
mother of men, the hearth of the gods, the abiding resting-place of the
past generations, but only as a means to get rich." There is nothing of
"the poetry of the place" anywhere to check commercial devastations. The
spire of his village is for the American like any other spire; in his
eyes the newest and most gaudily painted is the most beautiful. A
waterfall for him merely represents so much motive power. "What a mighty
volume of water!" is, as we are assured, the usual cry of an American on
seeing Niagara for the first time, and his highest praise of it is that
it surpasses all other waterfalls in the world in its horse-power.

Nor has the immigrant or colonial settler a sense of the present or the
past. He has only a future. Before long the possession of money becomes
his on