where restraint is indicated.  We have not arrived at a final standard.  We may not do so.  This effort at mixture, like all our others, may fail; but there appears to be no doubt that we are making it.  To take an obvious instance, I believe that we are trying, with some success, to combine ease of divorce with a greater real regard for the sanctity of marriage.  We have found that if marriage is made absolutely indissoluble, there will be greater excuse for disregarding the marriage vow than if there are legal ways of dissolving it.

Americans are shocked at Europeans when they allude in ordinary conversation to infractions of the moral code that they treat as trivial.  They on the other hand are shocked when we talk of divorce for what they consider insufficient causes.  In the former case we seem to them “frightfully pious”; in the latter, “frightfully free.”  They are right; we are both; it is only another instance of our tendency towards eclecticism, this time in moral standards.

In some directions we find that this tendency to eclecticism is working toward a combination not of two opposite things, but of a hundred different ones.  Take our art for instance, especially as manifested in our architecture.  A purely native town in Italy, Arabia, or Africa, or Mexico, has its own atmosphere; no one could mistake one for the other any more than he could mistake a beaver dam for an ant hill or a bird’s nest for a woodchuck hole.

But in an American city, especially where we have enough money to let our architects do their utmost, we find streets where France, England, Italy, Spain, Holland, Arabia and India all stand elbow to elbow, and the European visitor knows not whether to laugh or to make a hasty visit to his nerve-specialist.  It seems all right to us, and it is all right from the standpoint of a nation that is yet in the throes of eclecticism.  And our other art—­painting, sculpture, music—­it is all similarly mixed.  Good of its kind, often; but we have not yet settled down to the kind that we like best—­the kind in which we are best fitted to do something that will live through the ages.

We used to think for instance that in music the ordinary diatonic major scale, with its variant minor, was a fact of nature.  We knew vaguely that the ancient Greeks had other scales, and we knew also that the Chinese and the Arabs had scales so different that their music was generally displeasing to us.  But we explained this by saying that our scale was natural and right and that the others were antiquated, barbaric and wrong.  Now we are opening our arms to the exotic scales and devising a few of our own.  We have the tonal and the semi-tonal scales and we are trying to make use of the Chinese, Arabic and Hindu modes.  We are producing results that sound very odd to ears that are attuned to the old-fashioned music, but our eclecticism here as elsewhere is cracking the shell of prejudice and will doubtless lead to some good end, though perhaps we can not see it yet.