but even to some extent to surpass, English manufacturers and merchants in securing trade. Germany and the United States are the two competitors whom Great Britain has the most reason to fear even in her own islands, unless she can rid herself of all those antiquated methods and appliances which are doing much to impede her progress.

It has been long the habit in Europe to wonder at and ridicule the Americans for allowing themselves practically no rest whatever from the cares and harassments of business; and so far as this rule of conduct involves the mere health of the individual, the condemnation of the Europeans is fully deserved. The average American in every branch of business wears out his physical powers before his time; and only too often, under the self-imposed strain, his mental powers break down also; but the high pressure at which he works in the maturity of his strength, intellectual and physical, however bad for himself in the end, is very good for the community in which he lives. Thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands fall in their tracks, like soldiers in the fire and smoke of battle, victims of their own over-stimulated energies; but their places are promptly taken by younger men, animated by the same indefatigable and unfaltering spirit. The community is practically made up of men working at a white heat, and its progress is hastened by the very fact that this heat is so consuming that before it dies out in the average individual it injures if it does not destroy him.

What has been the result of this entire absorption of the American in business life, without regard to anything that can be justly called recreation? The United States to-day, though not yet a century and a half old, is rapidly moving to the first place in the very van of the world's commercial Powers. Her aggregate wealth is the largest of all the nations, though she is the youngest. Only one country is leaping forward in trade with the same inexhaustible and untiring energy as herself. This is Germany. With all his faults, the ruler of that great Empire is thoroughly in sympathy with the American commercial spirit, which is so lavish and even reckless of its own strength; restless, energetic, determined, farseeing, knowing clearly what he wants in spite of changing moods, he is justly winning the reputation of being the greatest of German Sovereigns in the later economic history of the Fatherland.

The commercial development of Germany, now in such rapid progress, is the most interesting side of the economic life of Europe in the present era. How enormous this development already is, is indirectly disclosed in the falling off in the volume of emigration in spite of the burden of the German military system. The room for employment has, so far, outgrown the expansion of the population, great as that has been; but the very impetus which increased opportunities for earning a subsistence will give to the growth of the

population will, in time, swell the number of inhabitants to such a figure that the tide of emigration will set outward again to an extent equal to anything observed in the past. The Emperor foresees this; he knows that when one of his subjects settles in the United States he is entirely lost to his native country; but if there were colonies to which this outflowing population could be directed, emigration, so far from weakening the Empire, would strengthen it, for not only would it enlarge the territorial domain of Germany, but also create new markets for German manufactures.

Where are the new colonies to be planted? In Africa? It is not likely that the climate will ever permit of a great development of the German African possessions. In Asia? Even should the Chinese Empire be partitioned, and Germany secure a share, there will be no room on that already overcrowded soil for any one but German commercial agents. South America, and South America alone, offers any field for German expansion. The German Emperor very probably sees this clearly; but he knows that German colonisation on that continent inevitably means a conflict of arms with the United States, all the citizens of which, irrespective of party, are determined to support the Monroe doctrine to the last ditch, as the only bulwark against European aggression in the western hemisphere. This is, perhaps, the chief reason why he made such an urgent appeal for a larger navy; and we suspect that it is also a partial explanation of his recent friendly attitude towards Great Britain. It would be only natural that, if he has any design upon South America, he should wish to break up any possible understanding between the British and American Governments, amounting practically to an alliance. No European nation will ever venture to go to war with the United States, if it feels sure that the latter can rely upon the assistance of an English fleet. Whatever the blandishments of the Emperor William, it is not probable that England will ever stand idly by and allow the Republic to be overwhelmed in the defence of the Monroe doctrine, for Great Britain is as much interested as the United States in its maintenance.

The impression prevails among the great body of the American people that the material growth of the European countries, in the course of the last fifty years, has been small in comparison with that of the United States. In a certain sense this impression is correct. There is nothing whatever in the modern history of Europe that is suggestive, in the slightest degree, of that wave of population which, almost in a single lifetime, has spread from the Western spurs of the Alleghanies to the slopes of the Pacific; nor does Europe furnish a counterpart of the growth of Cincinnati, St. Paul and Denver, and, greatest of all, San Francisco and Chicago, cities which have sprung up with the quickness of the prophet's gourd. The increase in the populations of London, Berlin, and

Vienna is, however, quite as good proof of a phenomenal material advance as the increase in the populations of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia; indeed, from some points of view, it is even more significant, for London, Berlin, and Vienna, unlike the American cities on the Atlantic coast, have had no virgin country of inexhaustible natural resources, in the course of rapid development, to quicken their expansion in wealth and population.

The European traveller who visited the older States of the Union in 1860 would not, on a second visit in 1900, be more struck with their enormous advance in wealth and population than an American traveller in Europe in 1900 would be with the advance of the leading European countries in the same direction, as compared with their condition as he had observed it forty years earlier. This growth would be chiefly due to the enlargement of every branch of manufactures, and to the extension of every department of foreign commerce. It would be reflected not only in the expansion of the towns, but also in the increase in the number of railways, and in the reclamation of waste lands, whether of marsh or forest, for the purposes of a highly improved system of agriculture.

Europe owes, in a purely economic way, comparatively little to the United States, while the United States owes incalculable benefits to Europe. The material growth of the European nations, as a whole, has never derived an extraordinary stimulus from the material growth of the United States except to the extent of a larger demand for European goods; the growth of the United States, on the other hand, has been vastly promoted, not only by the addition to its native population of millions of European emigrants, but also by the investment in American enterprises, especially in new railways, of hundreds of millions of European capital.

III

The American is deeply impressed with the unbroken continuity of the past and present in all the countries of Europe, including France, outside of Paris. Where does the Present begin? Where does the Past end? Such are the questions he asks himself as he visits each of these countries in turn, strolls through their temples and palaces, examines their sculpture, painting and architecture, studies the physical types of the people as they pass along the streets and highways, and observes their customs and national character. As he pauses in his walks, upon some commanding spot like Westminster Bridge in London, or Ponte di Carraja in Florence, and gazes upon the surrounding scenes, at once so ancient and so modern, he feels as if he were looking down a vista of time in which the remotest past is as close at hand as the present itself, owing to something phenomenal in the medium through which the vision penetrates.

In his own country, the American has no such sense of historical continuity; the past is vaguely associated in his mind with the general idea of material growth-with progress from very small to very great things of an economical nature alone. The spirit of the colonial age, the only part of his country's annals which has the true historical glamour, from the European point of view, is so repugnant to the spirit of the Republican era that he finds it difficult to believe that the colonial period really forms a part of American history. It seems rather a part of English history alone.

There have been but two really great periods in the annals of the Republic proper the war of the Revolution and the war of Secession. Had the theatre of these two mighty series of events been confined to an area as narrow as England, and that area had made up the entire territory of the United States, they would have done much to form that kind of vivid perspective which impresses the American so deeply, and which is largely due to the concentration of events within more or less contracted boundaries. The battlefields of the Revolution, however, are scattered over an extent of territory almost as wide as Europe itself, and in consequence they create no historical atmosphere common to the whole country; on the other hand, the greater number of the principal battlefields of the war between the States are situated in Virginia, but this is but one State, and necessarily widely separated from all the States not contiguous to its own borders.

In Virginia and Massachusetts alone there is to be found anything that even remotely resembles that historical perspective which the American is so conscious of in Europe. In Virginia, however, the continuity of the Past and Present is greatly broken. First, there was the colonial age when the people loyally supported King and Church; the Revolution came and the colonial institutions were torn up root and branch. Then followed the period of slavery and the large plantation under the Republican régime; slavery was swept away in the war of Secession, and the large plantation system perished under the stress of the economic changes which resulted. In less than one hundred and thirty years the whole framework of the economic and political affairs of Virginia and the older States of the South has been not merely shattered, but completely destroyed; France alone of the European nations can furnish a parallel to this, and France, unlike the Southern States, has reverted at least twice to its original form of government.

The national life of the United States has so far had but two world-conspicuous sides the political and the economic; it is only in the course of the last thirty years that it has begun to present, though still in a modified degree, other phases of almost equal interest to mankind at large. The finest works of art are still imported. That the American should still remain unequal to the European in the highest branches of painting and sculpture, or at

least unequal to his brother Anglo-Saxon in England, is the less explicable now that the American student, even of small means, has, from the comparative inexpensiveness of the Transatlantic voyage, all the galleries of the Old World in which to study; and is, in respect of opportunities for perfecting himself in the technical details of his art, practically on the same footing as his English, French, German, or Italian contemporaries.

In spite of the increasing number of American painters and sculptors of genius, the time seems still remote when the European millionaire will import works of art from the United States in the number that the American millionaire now imports similar works from Europe; nor are we likely to hear soon of European artists emigrating to the United States in order to enjoy the superior artistic atmosphere of Boston, New York, or Washington. The fact that American painting and sculpture have not been carried to the perfection of modern European is certainly not due to a lack of patronage, for no American millionaire considers his house complete in detail if a gallery is wanting. That is a part of his state; and he is always ready to pay tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars for any picture or statue, foreign or domestic, which the world agrees in rating as the product of extraordinary genius. No local supply of transcendent merit has really sprung up to meet the demand of these wealthy patrons, who would buy at home as quickly as they would abroad, if there were at home the same opportunity of making the most valuable purchases.

There is not much reason, at least at present, for thinking that the United States will ever be the seat of a great school of painting or sculpture thoroughly distinctive of the soil. This would mean an extraordinary devotion to the pursuit of beauty alone in a community in which the attainment of the useful is the almost exclusive aim of every aspiration, an aim that produces an atmosphere that chills the artistic spirit, in spite of the patronage which the owners of large fortunes are ready to extend. But in those lines which combine beauty with utility, the United States is quite equal to the countries of the Old World; thus in architecture the American is beginning to show as much genius as the modern European, although hampered by the fact that the background in all American cities is so new; or where that background is comparatively old, as in some parts of Boston and Philadelphia, it is trivial and uninteresting.

The growing tendency in the United States is, in private residences, to go back to the colonial style of architecture, an excellent proof of the steady cultivation of the national taste; on the other hand, the Capitol at Washington-massive, severe and plain, in imitation of its Greek prototype-is now recognised as the true model of all great American public buildings. How inappropriate such a structure as the English Parliament House would have appeared in its place! How