AMERICA’S MALADY.

Putaruru Press, Volume IV, Issue 126, 1 April 1926, Page 3

AMERICA’S MALADY.

ADULT INFANTILISM. An American Critic. In a recent number of Harper’s Magazine the Americans are once I more unriddled. All their peculiari- ■ ties are explained as symptoms of a ; disease prettily named Adult Infant- ; ilism. The diagnostician is Dr. Joseph Collins, a New York nerve specialist, whose book, “ The Doctor Looks at Literature,” has at least enough wit in it to keep it sweet. He begins with a stern shake of the head and wag of the forefinger, and is to be imagined bending forward across his desk or standing on his hearth rug, one hand behind his hack, while America sits apprehensively on the edge of a chair and blinks at phrases like “ conspicuous mal-development . . . social mal-adjustment . . . intellectual vag- [ rancy . . . disease, derangement or other disharmony of and body l . . . this blight . . . gregariousness and restlessness.” Having made his diagnosis, Dr. Collins, with a frankness that is literary rather than medical, exhaustively surveys the evidence upon which he bases it. Americans, he observes, are childish in their private and national conduct, in literature and art, and in their prejudices and beliefs. They are the worsteducated, least-cultured people in the world ; their religious prejudices pass the understanding of, Europe ; they have the most luxurious homes and the unhappiest domestic life in the world ; to get away from earth’s finest climate they post o’er land and ocean without rest—and all because, emotionally, they are infants ! They leave the harder and longer processes of thought to their leaders, as children rely on their parents. Their devotion to clubs and societies, their i “ rotariness,” as Dr. Collins calls it, I is simply the child’s love of company. ' American husbands are “ the boys ” to their wives, and they are “ the girls ” . to their husbands. Abroad they behave like children—eager for notice, naive, credulous, inquisitive without. 1 intelligence, talkative without sense or restraint. Children are self conscious and dare not behave or dregs differ- ! ently from others : no American dares to wear a straw hat after September the 15th ; and American thought is as limited by convention as the period within which a straw may be worn. Americans are at forty as indiscriminate in hospitality or sudden friendship as at four. When Americans take up first Coue, then Freud, first roller skates, then bicycles, then motor cars, ' first Mah-Jong, then cross-words, then radio, they are but children of a

larger growth, the same children that, mi twenty or thirty years before, were th fascinated by one toy only till a newer . ex superseded it. They are so restless j in prosperity that it is rare for a son to live in the house his father built, ! and for a New Yorker to live in the house where he was born is rarer still. --Dr. Collins lays the blame for all this on American parents. Their children remain children because they® are never allowed to grow up. The American home is a nursery for adolescent molly-coddles. Pampered physically, and mentally swaddled, many Americans grow up “ punies, parasites, perverts ” ; which strong lan-

guage, we had better remind readers, is not our own hut that of an eminent American, contributing, not to the yellow press, hut to a reputable American magazine. The over solicitude of parents fills the divorce courts. Men whd marry dolls and women who marry “ stuffed shirts ” a “ stuffed shirt,” according- to Dr. Collins, “ whistles tunelessly while shaving, blows soap hubbies while bathing, becomes panicky when his temperature rises above 102, and won’t play unless he can be the leader ” —speedily fly to the court to break their contracts, or break them without the court’s sanction. These childish people know nothing about the world’s affairs. They do not even understand their own governance, and would rather break a law than cooperate to get it repealed, or modified into something like common sense. They are megalomaniacs, intent on having the biggest possible size in ever-" i '-'ing, much as a child is gratified by the size of an apple too big to eat, or too coarse in flavour to be worth eating. They have no sense of proportion or degree, so that they are either atheists or religious bigots, drunkards or fanatical abstainers, and drive themselves as foolishly hard in sport as in business. This is childishness, for all children are extremists.