o fit youths for life, above even
those possessed by Oxford or Cambridge.

[171:1] In 1906, under a stricter definition of the term "periodical,"
the privilege of sending as second-class matter books issued at regular
intervals was withdrawn.

[188:1] Rudyard Kipling, "The Sea Wife" (_The Seven Seas_).

[189:1] The Loyal Legion is the society of those who held commissions as
officers on the side of the North. The Grand Army of the Republic is the
society which includes all ranks.

CHAPTER VIII

A COMPARISON IN CULTURE

The Advantage of Youth--Japanese Eclecticism and American--The
Craving for the Best--_Cyrano de Bergerac_--Verestschagin--
Music and the Drama--Culture by Paroxysms--Mr. Gladstone and
the Japanese--Anglo-Saxon Crichtons--Americans as Linguists--
England's Past and America's Future--Americanisms in Speech--
Why they are Disappearing in America--And Appearing in
England--The Press and the Copyright Laws--A Look into the
Future.

Ruskin, speaking of the United States, said that he could never bring
himself to live in a country so unfortunate as to possess no castles.
But, with its obvious disadvantages, youth in a nation has also
compensations. Max O'Rell says that to be American is to be both fresh
and mature, and I have certainly known many Americans who were fresh.
The shoulders are too young for the head to be very old. But when a
man--let us say an Englishman of sixty--full of worldly wisdom, having
travelled much and seen many men and cities, looks on a young man, just
out of the university, perhaps, very keen on his profession, very
certain of making his way in the world, with a hundred interests in what
seem to the other "new-fangled" things--telephones and typewriters and
bicycles and radio-activity and motor cars, things unknown to the old
man's youth,--talking of philosophies and theories and principles which
were not taught at college when the other was an undergraduate, the
elder is likely to think that the young man's judgment is sadly crude
and raw, that his education has been altogether too diffused and made up
of smatterings of too many things, and to say to himself that the old
sound, simple ways were better. Yet it may be--is it not almost
certain?--that the youth has had the training which will give him a
wider outlook than his father ever had, and will make him a broader man.

In our grandfathers' days, a man of reasonable culture