IV WILL-POWER, WORK, AND WEALTH THE Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities, energy. This is supposed to be so vast, so abnormal, that it overwhelms and obliterates all other qualities, and acts almost as a blind force, driving the whole nation along the highroad of unremitting toil for the development of physical power and the accumulation of material wealth. La vie intense - which is the polite French translation of "the strenuous life" is regarded as the unanimous choice of the Americans, who are never happy unless they are doing something, and never satisfied until they have made a great deal of money. The current view in Europe considers them as a well-meaning people enslaved by their own restless activity, bound to the service of gigantic industries, and captive to the adoration of a golden idol. But curiously enough they are often supposed to be unconscious both of the slavery and of the idolatry; in weaving the shackles of industrious materialism they imagine themselves to be free and strong; in bowing down to the Almighty Dollar they ignorantly worship an unknown god. This European view of American energy, and its inexplicable nature, and its terrible results, seems to have something of the fairy tale about it. It is like the story of a giant, dreadful, but not altogether convincing. It lacks discrimination. In one point, at least, it is palpably incorrect. And with that point I propose to begin a more careful, and perhaps a more sane, consideration of the whole subject. It is evidently not true that America is ignorant of the dangers that accompany her immense development of energy and its application in such large measure to material ends. Only the other day I was reading a book by an American about his country, which paints the picture in colours as fierce and forms as flat as the most modern of French decadent painters would use. The author says: "There stands America, engaged in this superb struggle to dominate Nature and put the elements into bondage to man. Involuntarily all talents apply themselves to material production. No wonder that men of science no longer study Nature for Nature's sake; they must perforce put her powers into harness; no wonder that professors no longer teach knowledge for the sake of knowledge; they must make their students efficient factors in the industrial world; no wonder |