From my station here on the housetop my gaze wanders out over acres of roofs—­the leaded coverings of hotels, apartment-houses, and office buildings.  They rear themselves beneath and around me as the lesser peaks of the Himalayas seen from Mount Everest.  My eyes ache with the diversity of their shapes, the eccentricity of their styles, the irregularity of their altitudes.  No man viewing them can continue blind to the independence of the American citizen, to the ostentation of his right of personal selection, to his individual caprice.  They stand, a brick-and-iron commentary upon the competing ambitions of two generations of townsmen.

A hulking, twenty-story modernity stands side by side with a dwarfish, Dutch anachronism, but neither possesses any right of precedence over the other.  They are equal in the eyes of the proletary.  Classic and nondescript, marble and brick, granite and iron, unite to form the most heterogeneous collection of fashions the earth’s surface anywhere exhibits.  Even Milton’s blind eyes pictured nothing so fantastic as this architectural chaos of Manhattan, so hopeless of eventual order.  And yet are there not lacking signs that the quaint pot-pourri of whimsicalities will one day coalesce into a well-defined, artistic composition, a twentieth century City Beautiful.  God grant its attainment be not unduly protracted!

But it is with the insides of this vast confusion of buildings I am presently concerned.  As the buildings are, so are the inhabitants—­little and big, tall and short, honestly constructed and jerry built, old fashioned and up to date, aping the fashions of a dozen civilizations.  In any one of these great structures will be found the representatives of a dozen nations, born to a dozen tongues, yet all conversing in a common English, covering their motley nationalities with a common Americanism, united in their loyalty to the Republic.  In the diversity of its constituents lies the strength of the American nation.

No European section of the American community sufficiently preponderates over its fellows to affect the national sympathy toward foreign Powers.  Irish counteracts English opinion; German sonship is balanced by the filial sentiment of the Latin races—­the Slavs and the Russian Jews have no European predilections.  Consequently, American foreign policy is dictated by Americans for the benefit of Americans, without reference to the warring interests in Europe or in Asia.  The men who lead in the United States are men who, for the most part, have not voyaged beyond the confines of the United States.  All of their attention upon affairs of State is cast inward upon their own land, is absolutely self-centred.  The resultant national policy is the most selfish, but the most formidable in the world of nations.

American and Briton are alike co-heirs to the common Anglo-Saxon heritage, but they are brothers who differ as materially in temperament as in ambition and in creed.  The Briton is daily becoming more cosmopolitan, his outlook more world-wide.  The shadow of the village pump has departed from his statecraft, and his political horizon girdles the earth.  But the American remains intensely introspective, suspicious of foreign influence, interested solely in his world of the Western Hemisphere.