44713,125,18 HARVARD COLLEGE OCT 2 1916 The Mitth Copyright, 1904, by PREFACE HIS book, originally written for the Germans in order to dis pel the superficial prejudices about America and the Ameri cans, would have given a rather incomplete view of the great nation if it had not spoken of the wonderful rhythm of forward movement, of the rapidity with which every day brings new impulses and new forms of life, new hopes and new programmes, new combinations and new leaders. Whatever the most careful author may report about America must necessarily be untrue before the printer's ink is dry upon the sheets. And now some years have passed since the book started on its pilgrimage. It was in the long bygone times will they come again to-morrow? — when Theodore Roosevelt was ruling in the White House, and Woodrow Wilson was reigning on the college campus of Princeton. It was a time it is hard still to remember it when the suffragettes and the automobiles and the socialists and the cabarets and the law-abiding trusts were rare, and the Pacific was separated by land from the Atlantic, and the sexual problems separated by decency from the public discussion. Yes, the changes have broken in rapidly. New physical and new moral canals have been built. The politicians have rushed into progressivism and out of it, the newspapers into anti-Japanism and out of it, the lawyers into Shermanism and out of it, the voters into anti-bossism and out of it, the educators into electivism and out of it, the magazines into muckraking and out of it, and only the Harry Thaw trial accompanies us unchanged all the time. Indeed, with us too much of the excitement of the noon fades before the sunset, and yet nobody can doubt that really great changes have come over the American nation in its political, its eco V |