We celebrate to-night the memory of a great man of Letters. What strikes me most about that glorious group of New England writers—Emerson and Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, Thoreau, Motley, Holmes, and Lowell—is a certain measure and magnanimity. They were rare men and fine writers, of a temper simple and unafraid. I confess to thinking more of James Russell Lowell as a critic and master of prose than as a poet. His single-hearted enthusiasm for Letters had a glowing quality which made it a gu

On the mutual understanding of each other by Americans and Britons, the future happiness of nations depends more than on any other world cause. Ignorance in Central Europe of the nature of American and Englishman tipped the balance in favour of war; and the course of the future will surely be improved by right comprehension of their characters. Well, I know something at least of the Englishman, who represents four-fifths of the population of the British Isles. And, first, there exists no more un

I wonder whether you in America can realise what an entrancing voyage of discovery you represent to us primeval Anglo-Britons. I prefer that term to Anglo-Saxon, for even if we English glory in the thought that our seaborne ancestors were extremely bloodthirsty, we have no evidence that they brought their own women to Britain in any quantities, or had the power of reproducing themselves without aid from the other sex! Can you, I say, realise how much more enticing to my English mind America is,

I do not know what your chief thought is now; for me the overmastering thought is that of Creation—Re-creation. You know when we look at a bit of moorland where the gorse and heather have been burned—swaled we call it in Devon—how we delight in the green, pushing up among the black shrivelled roots. I long to see the green pushing up, the creative impulse at work in its thousand ways all over the world again; each of us on both continents in his own line doing creative work; and not so much that

A doubter of the general divinity of our civilisation is labelled ‘pedant.’ Anyone who questions modern progress is tabooed. And yet there is no doubt, I think, that we are getting feverish, rushed, complicated, and have multiplied conveniences to such an extent that we do little with them but scrape the surface of life. We were rattling into a species of barbarism when the war came, and unless we check ourselves shall continue to rattle now that it is over. The underlying cause in every country

Standing here, privileged to address my betters—I, the least politically educated person in the world, have two thoughts to leave on the air. They arise from the title of your League. I wish I did not feel, speaking in the large, that politics and education have but a bowing acquaintanceship in the modern State; and I wish I did feel that either education or politics had any definite idea of what they were out to attain; in other words, had a clear image of the ideal State. It seems to me that t

It is of the main new factors which have come into the life of the civilised world that I would speak. The division deep and subtle between those who have fought and those who have not—concerns us in Europe far more than you in America; for in proportion to your population the number of your soldiers who actually fought has been small, compared with the number in any belligerent European country. And I think that so far as you are concerned the division will soon disappear, for the iron had not