ills; the operators, instead of girls from the hill-farms, are
Greeks, Lithuanians, Armenians, Italians. Whittier's drovers have gone
forever; the lumbermen and deep-sea fishermen have grown fewer, and the
men who still swing the axes and haul the frozen cod-lines are mostly
aliens. The pride that once broke into singing has turned harsh and
silent. "Labor" looms vast upon the future political and social
horizon, but the songs of labor have lost the lyric note. They have
turned into the dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed with the
swift and fierce insistence of the short story, illustrated by the
Kodak. In the great agricultural sections of the West and South the
old bucolic sentiment still survives,--that simple joy of seeing the
"frost upon the pumpkin" and "the fodder in the stock" which Mr. James
Whitcomb Riley has sung with such charming fidelity to the type. But
even on the Western farms toil has grown less manual. It is more a
matter of expert handling of machinery. Reaping and binding may still
have their poet, but he needs to be a Kipling rather than a Burns.

Our literature, then, reveals few traces of idealization of a class,
and but little idealization of trades or callings. Neither class nor
calling presents anything permanent to the American imagination, or
stands for anything ultimate in American experience. On the other hand,
our writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional loyalty. The short
story, which has seized so greedily the more dramatic aspects of
American energy, has been equally true to the quiet background of rural
scenery and familiar ways. American idealism, as shown in the
transformation of the lesser loyalties of home and countryside into the
larger loyalties of state and section, and the absorption of these, in
turn, into the emotions of nationalism, is particularly illustrated in
our political verse. A striking example of the imaginative
visualization of the political units of a state is the spirited
roll-call of the counties in Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia."
But the burden of that fine poem, after all, is the essential unity of
Massachusetts as a sovereign state, girding herself to repel the attack
of another sovereign state, Virginia. Now the evolution of our
political history, both local and national, has tended steadily, for
half a century, to the obliteration, for purposes of the imagination,
of county lines within state lines. At the last Republican state
conv