Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
To inscribe your name upon this volume, dear Madame, is to recall delightful memories of my year in France. Your sympathy encouraged me in the adventurous choice of a subject so large and simple for a course of lectures at the Sorbonne. While they were in the making, you acted...
To inscribe your name upon this volume, dear Madame, is to recall delightful memories of my year in France. Your sympathy encouraged me in the adventurous choice of a subject so...
2. Part 2'Finally, America is the home of materialism, a land of crude, practical worldliness, unimaginative, irreverent, without religion. But _per contra_, America is the last refuge o...
3. Part 3Undoubtedly there were large and striking differences between the grave and strict Puritans who peopled the shores of Massachusetts Bay, the pleasure-loving Cavaliers who made t...
4. Part 4The names chosen by the two parties--"loyalist" and "patriot"--were both honourable, and seem at first sight almost synonymous. But there is a delicate shade of difference in th...
5. Part 5I pass by the discussion of the reasons why this second trait in the soul of the people developed later than the first. I pass by the tempting opportunity to describe the absurd...
6. Part 6Let me illustrate this. In 1894 a law was passed by Congress taxing all incomes over a certain sum at certain rates. This was, in effect, not a tax based proportionally upon pop...
7. Part 7But, on the other hand, there is probably more good feeling, friendliness, plain human kindness, running around loose in America than anywhere else in the world. The sense of th...
8. Part 8Another effect of the direction of American energy to industrial affairs has been important not only to the United States but to all the nations of the world. I mean the powerfu...
9. Part 9It is a little strange, and yet it seems to be true, that for a long time America was better understood by the French than by the English. This may be partly due to the fact tha...
10. Part 10It has been said that the first instinct of the Americans, confronted by a serious difficulty or problem, is to appoint a committee and form a society. Whether this be true or n...
11. Part 11The result is that out of three hundred and twenty-five thousand positions in the executive civil service one hundred and eighty-five thousand are now classified, and appointmen...
12. Part 12In the next place, the friendly competition and rivalry among the States produced a tendency to unity in education. No State wished to be left behind. The Southern States, which...
13. Part 13But, generally speaking, you may understand that a college is an institution which gives a four years' course in liberal arts and sciences, for which four years of academic prep...
14. Part 14The art of literature which weaves these living threads into its fabric lies closer to the common life and rises higher into the ideal life than any other art. In the lyric, the...
15. Part 15The factors of strength, and the hidden elements of beauty, in the Puritan character came to flower and fruit in these men. They were liberated, enlarged, quickened by the stran...
16. Part 16PRESIDENT J. G. SCHURMAN OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY writes of this book: "I regard Mr. Croly's book as a serious and weighty contribution to contemporary American politics. A treatis...