as filled with such a fierceness of insurrection
against labor conditions, such a hatred, blind and impassioned, as I had
never known before. Gidding remained with me there and came back with me
to Chicago, where I wanted to see something of the Americanization of
the immigrant, and my survey of America, the social and economic problem
of America, resolved itself more and more into a conference with him.

There is no more fruitless thing in the world than to speculate how life
would have gone if this thing or that had not happened. Yet I cannot
help but wonder how far I might have travelled along the lines of my
present work if I had gone to America and not met Gidding, or if I had
met him without visiting America. The man and his country are
inextricably interwoven in my mind. Yet I do think that his simplicity
and directness, his force of initiative that turned me from a mere
enquirer into an active writer and organizer, are qualities less his in
particular than America's in general. There is in America a splendid
crudity, a directness that cleared my spirit as a bracing wind will
sweep the clouds from mountain scenery. Compared with our older
continents America is mankind stripped for achievement. So many things
are not there at all, need not be considered; no institutional
aristocracy, no Kaisers, Czars, nor King-Emperors to maintain a
litigious sequel to the Empire of Rome; it has no uneducated immovable
peasantry rooted to the soil, indeed it has no rooting to the soil at
all; it is, from the Forty-ninth Parallel to the tip of Cape Horn, one
triumphant embodiment of freedom and deliberate agreement. For I mean
all America, Spanish-speaking as well as English-speaking; they have
this detachment from tradition in common. See how the United States, for
example, stands flatly on that bare piece of eighteenth-century
intellectualism the Constitution, and is by virtue of that a structure
either wilful and intellectual or absurd. That sense of incurable
servitude to fate and past traditions, that encumbrance with ruins,
pledges, laws and ancient institutions, that perpetual complication of
considerations and those haunting memories of preceding human failures
which dwarf the courage of destiny in Europe and Asia, vanish from the
mind within a week of one's arrival in the New World. Naturally one
begins to do things. One is inspired to do things. One feels that one
has escaped, one feels that the time is _now_. All America