AMERICA'S INTELLECTUAL PRODUCT 195 



rivals their richest possessions, their consent to unlimited aggression? 

 What is the power that moves the world to-day? No sooner is the 

 greatest warship of the world, the Dreadnought, launched by England, 

 than a still greater one, the Satsuma, is launched by Japan. Must we 

 exceed these in order to be a world-power? From the depths of my 

 soul I believe not. What matters it to history how many thousand 

 tons of steel or bales of cotton or bushels of wheat we export to 

 Europe ? Is not the question this, how many ideas do we export, and 

 is our product commensurate with our material greatness ? What care 

 we that Sparta was victorious in the Peloponnesian wars, if she has 

 left to our civilization no reminder of herself, while the ideas produced 

 in Athens will keep her remembered when both her temples and our 

 sky-scrapers shall have crumbled into dust. 



Certainly we have some fruits to offer to history. Poetry and 

 philosophy are to-day everywhere somewhat below par, but we have in 

 the one produced Lowell and Whitman, and in the other Emerson, all 

 redolent of the American soil. I do not suppose that I shall be 

 disputed if I express the opinion that we to-day possess no names to be 

 compared with those of Eostand in France, d'Annunzio in Italy, Haupt- 

 mann and Sudermann in Germany, Maeterlinck in Belgium, not to 

 speak of Ibsen, but lately gone, from Norway. To be sure, we have 

 novelists, and though Stevenson and Kipling were only sojourners 

 here, we have Howells and James, to say nothing of more ephemeral 

 writers. Still we have in no branch of literature such command- 

 ing names as in painting those of Whistler and Sargent, whom we 

 claim as Americans though they spent most of their lives in Europe. 

 The sense of the country for architecture has but recently been aroused, 

 but the enormous progress that has been made in this direction will 

 be admitted by those who remember the exposition buildings of the 

 Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia and compare them with those 

 of the Columbian Exposition at Chicago or the Louisiana Purchase 

 Exposition at St. Louis. We may now find scattered through all parts 

 of the country noble buildings, exemplifying models from Greece, 

 France and Italy, even if we have not been able to originate a national 

 style, unless our tall buildings are to be so considered. In the art of 

 painting we are now able to hold up our heads as a nation, having 

 distinguished exponents of its various branches, most of whom ob- 

 tained their inspiration in France, if indeed they do not, like the two 

 I have previously named, prafer to live there. Nevertheless the pos- 

 session of the undisputed preeminence of Sargent among portrait 

 painters and Whistler among etchers may reconcile us to their exile 

 from the land which claims them. In sculpture the same may be 

 said, in a less degree, as in painting, and the possession of St.-Gaudens 

 may reconcile us to his Irish birth and his French name. 



