e have set ourselves with all the capacity and energy at
our disposal to create a world-wide common fund of ideas and knowledge,
and to evoke a world-wide sense of human solidarity in which the
existing limitations of political structure must inevitably melt away.

It was Gidding and his Americanism, his inborn predisposition to
innovation and the large freedom of his wealth that turned these ideas
into immediate concrete undertakings. I see more and more that it is
here that we of the old European stocks, who still grow upon the old
wood, differ most from those vigorous grafts of our race in America and
Africa and Australia on the one hand and from the renascent peoples of
the East on the other: that we have lost the courage of youth and have
not yet gained the courage of desperate humiliations, in taking hold of
things. To Gidding it was neither preposterous nor insufferably
magnificent that we should set about a propaganda of all science, all
knowledge, all philosophical and political ideas, round about the
habitable globe. His mind began producing concrete projects as a
fire-work being lit produces sparks, and soon he was "figuring out" the
most colossal of printing and publishing projects, as a man might work
out the particulars for an alteration to his bathroom. It was so
entirely natural to him, it was so entirely novel to me, to go on from
the proposition that understanding was the primary need of humanity to
the systematic organization of free publishing, exhaustive discussion,
intellectual stimulation. He set about it as a company of pharmacists
might organize the distribution of some beneficial cure.

"Say, Stratton," he said, after a conversation that had seemed to me
half fantasy; "Let's _do_ it."

There are moments still when it seems to me that this life of mine has
become the most preposterous of adventures. We two absurd human beings
are spending our days and nights in a sustained and growing attempt to
do what? To destroy certain obsessions and to give the universal human
mind a form and a desire for expression. We have put into the shape of
one comprehensive project that force of released wealth that has already
dotted America with universities, libraries, institutions for research
and enquiry. Already there are others at work with us, and presently
there will be a great number. We have started an avalanche above the old
politics and it gathers mass and pace....

And there never was an impulse towa