heir harmful qualities. At
any rate this would seem to be the idea on which we are now proceeding.

We may now examine the effects of this tendency toward eclecticism in
quite a different field--that of morals. Among the settlers of our country
were both Puritans and Cavaliers--representatives in England of two moral
standards that have contended there for centuries and still exist there
side by side. We in America are attempting to mix them with some measure
of success. This was detected by the German lady of whom Mr. Bryce tells
in his "American Commonwealth," who said that American women were
"_furchtbar frei und furchtbar fromm_"--frightfully free and frightfully
pious! In other words they are trying to mix the Cavalier and Puritan
standards. Of course those who do not understand what is going on think
that we are either too free or too pious. We are neither; we are trying to
give and accept freedom in cases where freedom works for moral efficiency
and restraint where restraint is indicated. We have not arrived at a final
standard. We may not do so. This effort at mixture, like all our others,
may fail; but there appears to be no doubt that we are making it. To take
an obvious instance, I believe that we are trying, with some success, to
combine ease of divorce with a greater real regard for the sanctity of
marriage. We have found that if marriage is made absolutely indissoluble,
there will be greater excuse for disregarding the marriage vow than if
there are legal ways of dissolving it.

Americans are shocked at Europeans when they allude in ordinary
conversation to infractions of the moral code that they treat as trivial.
They on the other hand are shocked when we talk of divorce for what they
consider insufficient causes. In the former case we seem to them
"frightfully pious"; in the latter, "frightfully free." They are right; we
are both; it is only another instance of our tendency towards eclecticism,
this time in moral standards.

In some directions we find that this tendency to eclecticism is working
toward a combination not of two opposite things, but of a hundred
different ones. Take our art for instance, especially as manifested in our
architecture. A purely native town in Italy, Arabia, or Africa, or Mexico,
has its own atmosphere; no one could mistake one for the other any more
than he could mistake a beaver dam for an ant hill or a bird's nest for a
woodchuck hole.

But in an American city, especiall