THE MODERN AMERICAN.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 98, 15 June 1911, Page 7

THE MODERN AMERICAN.

A CAULDRON OF NATIONALITIES “America is the supreme example ol’ internationalism in being; but; cue would almost imagine that the time had arrived when America 'plight ha vo boon expected to produce bpmCthing distinctly American,” writes Mr. Holbrook Jackson, in “Black and White.” “True, she has produced Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Edison, and the skyscraper—all of which are 'vmerican—but wo still await the awakening of the great American idea, and I doubt whether that will be forthcoming so long as Americans fasten their eyes in the ends of the earth. ‘ “The American of the immediate past thought of nothing but European antiquities, the modern American has certainly gone one better, he bows down before the celebrities of the old world, but Ids worship of European mandarins is, after all, a sign of poverty. Perhaps, however, it is still too coon to expect great originality of thought from the United States. America is still happy in contemplating her oldest tradition, which, as Oscar Wilde said, was Her youth, and in accumulating dollars. “One* of these days the Republic of the West will doubtless find-that she has fed herself with foreign ideas to repletion, and in that 1 day she will, of a certainty, return unto herself and bring forth the essential American idea cast in the form of the genuine national art of which Walt Whitman dreamed and chanted. At present America is not national because she is not a nation; at present America is still the cauldron of nationalities.”