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Show Americans Are Drifting Into a Standardization of Mental Habit By JOHN DEINKWATER, in "American Notes." In many essential things America is magnificently right, but of its hundred and ten million people about a hundred and five the five million exception makes a sufficiently imposing artistocracy of the mind are drifting by some uncanny telepathic process into a standardization of mental habit. It should at once be said that the limitation is almost entirely one of thought, not of life. Life in America is vivid', immensly varied, full of achieving energy and sparkling with a natural wit that can hardly b found among any of the older and perhaps more tired peoples. And yet living as they do in this world of volatile and sharply defined experiences, and living in it with youthfully alert faculties, the hundred and five million mil-lion do, as any stranger at once observes, allow their thought to become curiously monotonous in contrast with the vigorous onset of their lives. Once -you get the individual American away from abstractions, you find that in about three cases out of four his life has been a romance. Not merely a romance of spiritual experience, but a real romance of external adventure. |