started will, I hope, have become clear, that it
is idle to apply to them any of the tests which we apply to a European
civilization. For they have rejected, whether they know it or not, our
whole scheme of values. What, then, is their own? What do they
recognize as an end? This is an interesting point on which I have
reflected much in the course of my travels. Sometimes I have thought
it was wealth, sometimes power, sometimes activity. But a poem, or at
least a production in metre, which I came across in the States, gave me
a new idea upon the subject. On such a point I speak with great
diffidence; but I am inclined to think that my author was right; that
the real end which Americans set before themselves is Acceleration. To
be always moving, and always moving faster, that they think is the
beatific life; and with their happy detachment from philosophy and
speculation, they are not troubled by the question, Whither? If they
are asked by Europeans, as they sometimes are, what is the point of
going so fast? their only feeling is one of genuine astonishment. Why,
they reply, you go fast! And what more can be said? Hence, their
contempt for the leisure so much valued by Europeans. Leisure they
feel, to be a kind of standing still, the unpardonable sin. Hence,
also, their aversion to play, to conversation, to everything that is
not work. I once asked an American who had been describing to me the
scheme of his laborious life, where it was that the fun came in? He
replied, without hesitation and without regret, that it came in
nowhere. How should it? It could only act as a brake; and a brake
upon Acceleration is the last thing tolerable to the American genius.

"The American genius, I say: but after all, and this is the real point
of my remarks, what America is, Europe is becoming. We, who sit here,
with the exception, of course, of Wilson, represent the Past, not the
Future. Politicians, professors, lawyers, doctors, no matter what our
calling, our judgments are determined by the old scale of values.
Intellect, Beauty, Emotion, these are the things we count precious; to
wealth and to progress we are indifferent, save as conducing to these.
And thus, like the speakers who preceded me, we venture to criticize
and doubt, where the modern man, American or European, simply and
wholeheartedly accepts. For this it would be idle for us to blame
ourselves, idle even to regret; we should simply and objectively not