be regarded
as fairly favorable. For the moment, caught between the headiness of
working folk, the din of doctrinaires, and the wiles of corporate
activity, the lot of the middling rich is not the most happy imaginable.
But they seem better able to weather these flurries than the windy,
cloud-compelling divinities of the hour. From the survival of the middling
rich, the future common weal will be none the worse, and it may even be
better.

LECTURING AT CHAUTAUQUA

To render any real impression of the Chautauqua Summer Assembly, I must
approach this many-mooded subject from a personal point of view. Others,
more thoroughly informed in the arcana of the Institution, have written
the history of its development from small beginnings to its present
impressive magnitude, have analyzed the theory of its intentions, and have
expounded its extraordinary influence over what may be called the
middle-class culture of our present-day America. It would be beyond the
scope of my equipment to add another solemn treatise to the extensive list
already issued by the tireless Chautauqua Press. My own experience of
Chautauqua was not that of a theoretical investigator, but that of a
surprised and wondering participant. It was the experience of an alien
thrust suddenly into the midst of a new but not unsympathetic world; and,
if the reader will make allowance for the personal equation, some sense of
the human significance of this summer seat of earnest recreation may be
suggested by a mere record of my individual reactions.

I had heard of Chautauqua only vaguely, until, one sunny summer morning, I
suddenly received a telegram inviting me to lecture at the Institution. I
was a little disconcerted at the moment, because I was enjoying an
amphibious existence in a bathing-suit, and was inclined to shudder at the
thought of putting on a collar in July; but, after an hour or two, I
managed to imagine that telegram as a Summons from the Great Unknown, and
it was in a proper spirit of adventure that I flung together a few books,
and climbed into the only available upper berth on a discomfortable train
that rushed me westward.

In some sickly hour of the early morning, I was cast out at Westfield, on
Lake Erie,--a town that looked like the back-yard of civilization, with
weeds growing in it. Thence a trolley car, climbing over heightening hills
that became progressively more beautiful, hauled me ultimately to the
entrance of what the c