the world. The
men and women of the common people, those whose want of interest in
artistic matters is often a trial to you, are mutes. Lacking power of
expression, they are ignorant of themselves. Become a voice for them. As
they hear you speak, they will grow aware of themselves. In giving
expression to your own souls, you will create the soul of your nation.

Your second task, vaster and more distant, will be to form a fraternal
link between these free individualities, to build a rose window that
shall concentre their multiple trends, to compose a symphony from out
their various voices. The United States is made up of elements drawn
from all the nations of the world. Let the richness of the structure
help you to understand the essence of all these nations, to realise the
harmony of their intellectual energies!--To-day, in the Old World, we
witness the deplorable and foolish antagonism displayed by national
individualities, near neighbours and close kin, distinguished only by
trifling shades like France and Germany, repudiating one another,
longing for one another's destruction. Parochial disputes about which
the human mind is eager to achieve self-mutilation! For my part I cry
aloud, not merely that the intellectual ideal of a single nation is too
narrow for me; I declare that the ideal of a reconciled western world
would be too narrow for me; I declare that the ideal of a united Europe
would still be too narrow for me. The hour has come in which man, truly
healthy and truly alive, must deliberately turn his footsteps towards
the ideal of a universal humanity, wherein the European races of the Old
World and of the New will join hands with the representatives of the
ancient and now rejuvenescent civilisations of Asia--of India and of
China. A universal humanity with a common spiritual treasury. All these
splendid types of mankind are mutually complementary. The thought of the
future must be a synthesis of the great thoughts of the entire universe.
America lies between the two oceans which lave the two continents;
America is at the centre of the life of the world. Let it be the mission
of all that is best in America to cement this fecund union!

To sum up, we ask of you two things, writers and thinkers of America. We
ask, first of all, that you should defend freedom, that you should
safeguard its conquests and extend them: political freedom and mental
freedom, an unceasing renewal of life through freedom, through this