AMERICA INTENSELY WORTH HAVING

Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 41, 12 November 1919, Page 7

AMERICA INTENSELY WORTH HAVING

' Mr. H. W. Massingham, the editor of the' "Nation," has just returned from his visit to'the United States, He says:— "Who will set bounds to American improvement? No one can view the American at home, and see how the best character is nurtured there into high thought and vigorous effort for tho perfection of tho common life, without becoming conscious of a strain of fineness and delicacy, of faith and energy of humanity, which is lacking to our own. "Sometimes I do not think that we can grow men like Mr. Hoover, Colonel House, Mr. Bullitt, and some of the younger publicists and officials with whom I have come in contact, or at least that we grow them in insufficient mimberß. Tho best American seems more in Jove with life than our man of culture. Even the American money maker is not so unimaginatively and selfishly restful about money as is our own leisured class. Money is made with enormous zest, hut less for the sake of keeping things than of continually making and remaking them ; "And self-criticism grows. .Young America has done with the shallow optimism of Press and platform. It sees America as she is, not as she likes.to be talked to. Of race pride and nffectionateness, .it has at bottom a sufficiency; but it views America's power in the light of America's unpreparedness. Both are colossal, and yet the stranger in sympathetic and admiring mood, or in critical and doubtful one, is continually drawn fo the conclusion that America is intensely worth having for herself and for the human race, and that no other existing society is so important to it."