kind of thing that I want to suggest to you is something that is coming of itself, or at least it is capable of coming of itself, more or less independently of the whole questions of socialism and individualism as they used to be debated. As I say, it is not easy to get a name for it. I suppose that the very simplest name for it is "vulgarity"; but, as I shall point out in a moment, that word itself, especially in its derivation, may mislead us. I do not know whether it would be safe in such a connection to whisper the word "America," now by far the wealthiest of States and, in the degraded conditions of our day, therefore the most influential. But even that is much too crude a simplification. There are a great many different sorts of Americans, and there are a great many of them who are not in the least vulgar. When we talk about the opinion of America, for instance, it would not occur to everybody to immediately associate it with the opinion of Henry James. You know the old joke of the man who said, "Columbus did not discover America. It had often been discovered before, but it was always hushed up," which is, I believe, historically fairly accurate. I can imagine no person more qualified than Henry James himself for the purpose of hushing it up. But to call this tendency vulgar or to call it American is only, as I say, a very loose and crude way of attempting to define it, and I am not at all sure that it can be properly defined. Like most other things that are difficult to define, one has to approach it first by a kind of process of elimination, or, in other words, by negatives.
First of all, when I say that I am afraid that
