A NEW MASTER OF ENGLISH PROSE 23 



and inasmuch as that contributor's arraignment of our "worship of 

 acceleration" and our "doctrine of progress" is nofiess quotable than 

 powerful, the reviewers and others will be sure to keep it before the public. 

 Herein, however, we should be erring grievously; for Ellis, although the 

 giver of the intellectual feast regards his attack as formidable, sits down 

 amid a "hubbub of laughter, approval, and protest, confusedly mixed;" 

 and a little later Sir John Harington, a gentleman of leisure interested 

 mainly in art, takes up the journalist's diatribe with the expression of a 

 strong hope that the better age for artistic interests may after all dawn 

 in America. But from neither journaHst nor artist should we accept 

 our essayist's own views, which may be best understood from his delib- 

 erate words in the introduction to the American edition of the Letters from 

 a Chinese Official : 



For it is impossible not to recognize that the destinies of Europe are closely 

 bound up with those of this country; and that what is at stake in the development 

 of the American Republic is nothing less than the success or failure of Western civili- 

 zation. Endowed, above all the nations of the world, with intelligence, energy, and 

 force, unhampered by the splendid ruins of a past which, however great, does but 

 encumber, in the Old World, with fears, hesitations, and regrets, the difficult march 

 to the promised land of the future, combining the magnificent enthusiasm of youth 

 with the wariness of maturer years, and animated by a confidence almost religious 

 in their own destiny, the American people are called upon, it would seem, to deter- 

 mine, in a pre-eminent degree, the form that is to be assumed by the society of the 

 future. Upon them hangs the fate of the Western world. 



One who did not know many sides of Cambridge would hardly be pre- 

 pared to hear this voice from her academic shades ; but, having heard it, 

 one feels no serious rebelhon against this other assertion about America : 



For a century past she has drawn to herself, by an irresistible attraction, the 

 boldest, the most masterful, the most practically intelligent of the spirits of Europe; 

 just as, by the same law, she has repelled the sensitive, the contemplative, and the 

 devout. Unconsciously, by the mere fact of her existence, she has sifted the nations; 

 the children of the Spirit have slipped through the iron net of her destinies, but the 

 children of the World she 'has gathered into her granaries. She has thus become, in 

 a sense peculiar and unique, the type and exemplar of the Western world. Over her 

 unencvimbered plains the Genius of Industry ranges imchallenged, naked, unashamed. 



With the spirit of these words from the aged university beside the Cam, 

 who shall quarrel ? Nay, is it not the best evidence of our strides toward 



