tivity of the artist. Typical utterances of our
writers are Jack London's "I want to get away from the musty grip of
the past," and Frank Norris's "I do not want to write literature, I
want to write life."

The soul of the West, and a good deal of the soul of America, has been
betrayed in words like those. Not to share this hopefulness of the
West, its stress upon feeling rather than thinking, its superb
confidence, is to be ignorant of the constructive forces of the nation.
The humor of the West, its democracy, its rough kindness, its faith in
the people, its generous notion of "the square deal for everybody,"
its elevation of the man above the dollar, are all typical of the
American way of looking at the world. Typical also, is its social
solidarity, its swift emotionalism of the masses. It is the Western
interest in the ethical aspect of social movements that is creating
some of the moving forces in American society to-day. Experiment
stations of all kinds flourish on that soil. Chicago newspapers are
more alive to new ideas than the newspapers of New York or Boston. No
one can understand the present-day America if he does not understand
the men and women who live between the Allegheny Mountains and the
Rocky Mountains. They have worked out, more successfully than the
composite population of the East, a general theory of the relation of
the individual to society; in other words, a combination of
individualism with fellowship.

To draw up an indictment against this typical section of our country is
to draw up an indictment against our people as a whole. And yet one who
studies the literature and art produced in the great Mississippi Valley
will see, I believe, that the needs of the West are the real needs of
America. Take that commonness of mind and tone, which friendly foreign
critics, from De Tocqueville to Bryce, have indicated as one of the
dangers of our democracy. This commonness of mind and tone is often one
of the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a levelling down instead of
a levelling up.

Take the tyranny of the majority,--to which Mr. Bryce has devoted one
of his most suggestive chapters. You begin by recognizing the rights of
the majority. You end by believing that the majority must be right. You
cease to struggle against it. In other words, you yield to what Mr.
Bryce calls "the fatalism of the multitude." The individual has a sense
of insignificance. It is vain to oppose the general current. It is