hese also are means, like buying and
selling. In scholarship, as in commerce, money is still the measure of
success. Dr Muensterberg, a well-known professor at Harvard, has recorded
the opinion of a well-known English scholar, which, with the doctor's
comment, throws a clearer light upon the practice of America than a page
of argument. "America will not have first-class scholarship," said the
Englishman, "in the sense in which Germany or England has it, till every
professor in the leading universities has at least ten thousand dollars
salary, and the best scholars receive twenty-five thousand dollars." Dr
Muensterberg refused at first to accept this conclusion of the pessimist,
but, says he, the years have convinced him. Scholars must be paid
generously in the current coin, or they will not respect their work.
It is not greed, precisely, which drives the American along the road
of money-getting. It is, as I have said, a frank pride in the spoils,
a pride which is the consistent enemy of light-heartedness, and which
speedily drives those whom it possesses into a grave melancholy.

This, then, is the dominant impression which America gives the
traveller--the impression of a serious old gentleman, whom not even
success will persuade to laugh at his own foibles. And there is another
quality of the land, of which the memory will never fade. America
is apprehensive. She has tentacles strong and far-reaching, like the
tentacles of a cuttle-fish. She seizes the imagination as no other
country seizes it. If you stayed long within her borders, you would be
absorbed into her citizenship and her energies like the enthusiastic
immigrant.

You would speak her language with a proper emphasis and a becoming
accent. A few weeks passed upon her soil seem to give you the
familiarity of long use and custom. "Have I been here for years?" you
ask after a brief sojourn. "Can it be possible that I have ever lived
anywhere else?"

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