ke A---- C----, like chisels, adzes, saws,
scoops. You talk with them, and if you talk about anything except
scooping and adzing, you are not talking with just a man, but a man who
is for something and who is not for anything else. He is not for being
talked with certainly, and alas! not for being loved. At best he is a
mere feminine convenience--a father or a cash secreter; until he wears
out at last, buzzes softly into a grave.

An Englishman of this type is a little better, would be more like one of
these screw-driver, cork-screw arrangements--a big hollow handle with
all sorts of tools inside.

Is this man a typical American? Does he need to be?

What I want is news about us.

All an American like C---- needs is news. His eagerness is the making of
him. He is merely eager for what he will not want.

All he needs is the world's news about people, about new inventions in
human beings, news about the different and happier kinds of newly
invented men, news about how they were thought of, and how they are
made, and news about how they work.

I demand three things for A---- C----:

I want a novel that he will read which will make him see himself as I
see him.

I want a moving picture of him that he will go to and like and go to
again and again.

I want a play that will send him home from the theatre and keep him
awake with what he might be all that night.

I want a news-book for A---- C----, a news-book for all of us.

* * * * *

I read a book some years ago that seemed a true news-book and which was
the first suggestion I had ever received that a book can be an act of
colossal statesmanship, the making or remaking of a people--a
masterpiece of modern literature, laying the ground plan for the
greatness of a nation.

When I had read it, I wanted to rush outdoors and go down the street
stopping people I met and telling them about it. Once in a very great
while one does come on a book like this. One wants to write letters to
the reviews. One does not know what one would not do to go down the long
aimless Midway Plaisance of the modern books, to call attention to it.
One wishes there were a great bell up over the world.... One would reach
up to it, and would say to all the men and the women and to the flocks
of the smoking cities, "Where are you all?" The bell would boom out,
"What are you doing? Why are you not reading this book?" One wonders if
one could not get a coloured pa