the onset of new york was extraordinarily stimulating to me. i write onset. it is indeed that. new york rides up out of the waters, a cliff of man's making; its great buildings at a distance seem like long chinese banners held up against the sky. from sandy hook to the great landing stages and the swirling hooting traffic of the hudson river there fails nothing in that magnificent crescendo of approach.

and new york keeps the promise of its first appearance. there is no such fulness of life elsewhere in all the world. the common man in the streets is a bigger common man than any old world city can show, physically bigger; there is hope in his eyes and a braced defiance. new york may be harsh and blusterous and violent, but there is a breeze from the sea and a breeze of fraternity in the streets, and the americans of all peoples in the world are a nation of still unbroken men.

i went to america curious, balancing between hope and scepticism. the european world is full of the criticism of america, and for the matter of that america too is full of it; hostility and depreciation prevail,—overmuch, for in spite of rawness and vehemence and a scum of blatant, oh! quite asinine folly, the united states of america remains the greatest country in the world and the living hope of mankind. it is the supreme break with the old tradition; it is the freshest and most valiant beginning that has ever been made in human life.

here was the antithesis of india; here were no peasants whatever, no traditional culture, no castes, no established differences (except for the one schism of color); this amazing place had never had a famine, never a plague; here were no temples and no priesthoods dominating the lives of the people,—old trinity church embedded amidst towering sky-scrapers was a symbol for as much as they had of all that; and here too there was no crown, no affectations of an ancient loyalty, no visible army, no traditions of hostility, for the old defiance of britain is a thing now ridiculous and dead; and everyone i met had an air as if he knew that to-morrow must be different from to-day and different and novel and remarkable by virtue of himself and such as himself.

i went about new york, with the incredulous satisfaction of a man who has long doubted, to find that after all america was coming true. the very clatter pleased me, the crowds, the camp-like slovenliness, a disorder so entirely different from the established and accepted untidiness of china or india. here was something the old world had never shown me, a new enterprise, a fresh vigor. in the old world there is change, a mighty wave now of change, but it drives men before it as if it were a power outside them and not in them; they do not know, they do not believe; but here the change is in the very blood and spirit of mankind. they breathe it in even before the launch has brought their feet to ellis island soil. in six months they are americanized. does it matter that a thing so gigantic should be a little coarse and blundering in detail, if this stumbling giant of the new time breaks a gracious relic or so in his eager clutch and treads a little on the flowers?