724 THE DRAMA 



years, I could not help feeling myself in the presence of immense 

 forces that are gradually shifting the foundations and changing the 

 drift of Anglo-American civilization. I could not help feeling that 

 the sceptre of material prosperity is slipping from our hands in your 

 vigorous, remorseless grasp. I could not avoid the uneasy presenti- 

 ment that in a few generations the centre and seat of whatever sys- 

 tem of Anglo-American civilization may then be current will be 

 irrevocably fixed on this side the Atlantic. That cannot be other than 

 a saddening, chilling thought to an Englishman who loves his coun- 

 try. I cannot but think it will bring some sympathetic regret to 

 many Americans. Yet, after all, your chief feeling must be one of 

 pride and triumph in your young nation, and you will chant over us 

 your Emerson's ringing notes : 



The Lord is the peasant that was, 

 The peasant the Lord that shall be; 

 The Lord is hay, the peasant grass, 

 One dry, one the living tree. 



But the Empire of Mammon sucks after it other empires; perhaps 

 in our modern commercial world it will suck after it all other empires, 

 all arts, all interests, all responsibilities, all leaderships. Yet we 

 must still trust that in the days to come, as in days of old, it will 

 not be the sceptre of material prosperity that will finally hold sway 

 over the earth. Granted that, in a short time as reckoned by the life 

 of nations, we shall have to hand over to you, with what grace we 

 may, the sceptre of material prosperity, shall we not still hold that 

 other magic wand, shadowy, invisible, but more compulsive than 

 sceptres of gold and iron, the sceptre of literary, intellectual, and 

 artistic dominion ? Or will you wrest that also from us ? May we 

 not rather hope to see both nations united in a great array to build 

 one common monument of graceful, wise, beautiful, dignified human 

 existence on both sides of the Atlantic ? Your nation has what all 

 young nations have, what England is losing, the power to be moved 

 by ideas and that divine resilient quality of youth, the power to be 

 stirred and frenzied by ideals. 



If a guest whom you have honored so much, if your most fervent 

 well-wisher may presume to whisper his most fervent wishes for a 

 country to whom he is so deeply indebted, he would say : " As you 

 vie with us in friendly games and contests of bodily strength, may 

 you more resolutely vie with us for the mastership in art and in the 

 ornament of life; build statelier homes, nobler cities, and more 

 aspiring temples than we have built ; let your lives be fuller of mean- 

 ing and purpose than ours has lately been; have the wisdom richly 

 to endow and unceasingly to foster all the arts, and all that makes for 

 majesty of life and character rather than for material prosperity and 



