Excerpt from The Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. 18: A Quarterly International Record of Educational Literature Institutions and Progress, 1911

Suppose that you were asked to characterize the American people by means of a few broad generalizations. What would you say? It would depend upon your age and experience. If you were young and quick witted a few brilliant dashes of color would suffice to complete the picture, if older and more wary you would hesitate to take the brush in hand at all. You would perhaps recall the confession of our best informed critic, Mr. Bryce: "When I first visited America, in 1870, I brought home a swarm of bold generalizations. Half of them were thrown overboard after a second visit, in 1881. Of the half that remained, some were dropped into the Atlantic when I returned across it after a third visit in 1883, and although the two later journeys gave birth to some new views, these views were fewer and more discretely cautious than their departed sisters of 1870." If, however, without committing yourself to any opinion you merely attempted to recall what others had most frequently said on such occasions, "The Land of Dollars" or some such phrase could scarcely fail to present itself immediately. In spite of this you should not be too ready to plead guilty to the charge of unusual devotion to material interests. It is true, of course, here as elsewhere, that the world is too much with us and that we exhaust our energy unduly with mere getting and spending.

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