giving them just as many rights from the people, as they are the right
kind and the right size to handle for the people, it would be an
American government.

If there is one thing rather than another that an American or an
Englishman loves, it is asserting himself or expressing his character in
what he does. The typical dominating Englishman or American is not as
successful as a Frenchman or as an Italian in expressing other things,
as he is in expressing his character.

He cares more about expressing his character and asserting it. If he is
dealing with things, he makes them take the stamp of who he is. If he is
dealing with people, he makes them see and acknowledge who he is. They
must take in the facts about what he is like when they are with him.
They must deal with him as he is.

This trait may have its disadvantages, but if an Englishman or an
American is on this earth for anything, this is what he is for--to
express his character in what he does--in strong, vigorous, manly lines
draw a portrait of himself and show what he is like in what he does.
This may be called on both sides of the sea to-day as we stand front to
front with the more graceful nations, Anglo-Saxon Art.

It is because this particular art in the present crisis of human nature
on this planet is the desperate, the almost reckless need of a world
that the other nations of the world with all their dislike of us and
their superiorities to us, with all our ugliness and heaviness and our
galumphing in the arts, have been compelled in this huge, modern thicket
of machines and crowds to give us the lead.

And now we are threading a way for nations through the moral wilderness
of the earth.

This position has been accorded us because it goes with our temperament,
because we can be depended upon to insist on asserting ourselves and on
expressing ourselves in what we do. If the present impromptu industrial
machinery which has been handed over to us thoughtlessly and in a hurry,
does not express us, everybody knows that we can be depended on to
assert ourselves and that we will insist on one that will. The nations
that are more polite and that can dance and bow more nicely than we can
in a crisis like this would be dangerous. It is known about us
throughout a world that we are not going to be cowed by wood or by iron
or by steel and that we are not going to be cowed by men who are all
wood and iron and steel inside. If wood, iron, or steel does not expr