“Do what good you can now, while it is unusual,
  and have the satisfaction of being a pioneer and an
  eccentric.”

It is the voice of the American tradition strained to the utmost to make itself audible to the new world, and cracking into italics and breaking into capitals with the strain.  The rest of that enormous bale of paper is eloquent of a public void of moral ambitions, lost to any sense of comprehensive things, deaf to ideas, impervious to generalisations, a public which has carried the conception of freedom to its logical extreme of entire individual detachment.  These tell-tale columns deal all with personality and the drama of personal life.  They witness to no interest but the interest in intense individual experiences.  The engagements, the love affairs, the scandals of conspicuous people are given in pitiless detail in articles adorned with vigorous portraits and sensational pictorial comments.  Even the eavesdroppers who write this stuff strike the personal note, and their heavily muscular portraits frown beside the initial letter.  Murders and crimes are worked up to the keenest pitch of realisation, and any new indelicacy in fashionable costume, any new medical device or cure, any new dance or athleticism, any new breach in the moral code, any novelty in sea bathing or the woman’s seat on horseback, or the like, is given copious and moving illustration, stirring headlines, and eloquent reprobation.  There is a coloured supplement of knock-about fun, written chiefly in the quaint dialect of the New York slums.  It is a language from which “th” has vanished, and it presents a world in which the kicking by a mule of an endless succession of victims is an inexhaustible joy to young and old.  “Dat ole Maud!” There is a smaller bale dealing with sport.  In the advertisement columns one finds nothing of books, nothing of art; but great choice of bust developers, hair restorers, nervous tonics, clothing sales, self-contained flats, and business opportunities....

Individuality has, in fact, got home to itself, and, as people say, taken off its frills.  All but one; Mr. Arthur Brisbane’s eloquence one may consider as the last stitch of the old costume—­mere decoration.  Excitement remains the residual object in life.  The New York American represents a clientele to be counted by the hundred thousand, manifestly with no other solicitudes, just burning to live and living to burn.

Sec. 6

The modifications of the American tradition that will occur through its adoption by these silent foreign ingredients in the racial synthesis are not likely to add to it or elaborate it in any way.  They tend merely to simplify it to bare irresponsible non-moral individualism.  It is with the detail and qualification of a tradition as with the inflexions of a language; when another people takes it over the refinements disappear.  But there are other forces of modification at work upon the American tradition of an altogether more hopeful kind.  It has entered upon a constructive phase.  Were it not so, then the American social outlook would, indeed, be hopeless.