volved, we are still dealing, after all, with but one aspect of the still wider phenomenon of the general diffusion of EurAmerican culture over the entire world, and the still broader questions to which this fact gives rise. For, quite apart from the great colonization experiments which we have been discussing, modern EurAmerican culture or its products have in the last century penetrated in some degree among all peoples. One of the broader questions growing out of this world-wide spread of our culture arises from the dual character of the effects of diffusion. As has been already stated, diffusion acts to preserve cultural traits, so that to its operation much of the continuity of culture is due. But if diffusion thus plays the part of Vishnu as the Preserver, it has also the rôle of Siva as the Destroyer, for it destroys by the replacing of one cultural trait, or even whole culture, by another. The process is familiar enough in history, where one great civilization after another has diffused itself, peaceably or by conquest, more or less widely over its neighbors. Only rarely, however, does such diffusion wholly destroy or replace the older culture of the peoples thus absorbed in the newer and generally higher civilization. The material culture may be virtually transformed, the social and religious life be profoundly affected, but there survives always a considerable residuum of the former modes of life and thought, to give the resulting culture a distinctly local hue. In this process again, of course, environment and national or racial habit of mind play their part, subtly moulding and selecting, and ultimately shaping, a culture differing as well from the old as the new. Yet, as a result there is nevertheless a reduction in cultural variety. The former clear-cut differences and contrasts are somewhat levelled, the picture becomes a little blurred, the color values toned down.

The most striking and tremendous example of this process is that of the diffusion of Eur-American culture to which we have just referred. Where colonization has occurred on a large scale the new culture has largely destroyed and supplanted the old; where it has penetrated chiefly along the lines of commerce, or as a result of missionary activities, its effects, though

less drastic, have been none the less sure. The manifold cultures of the western hemisphere, slowly evolved through millennia in isolation from those of the Old World, and culminating in the civilizations of Middle America and Peru, have been destroyed or completely transformed. The only exceptions are to be found among a few amazingly conservative groups, such as the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, or the scattered primitive tribes isolated in the remoter parts of South America. The lowly but strikingly characteristic culture of the Australian natives has been wiped out, and a whole continent integrally incorporated into a new cultural world. It is a commonplace how universally elsewhere our civilization has reached even the remotest peoples in some degree, breaking down little by little their native cultures, modifying their ways of life and thought, and taking from them something that was theirs of individuality. We believe that what has perished, what is changing, is replaced by something better and higher; that what we are witnessing is a phenomenon for which we should be profoundly thankful. The Australian Commonwealth is surely of far greater value to the world than a continent sparsely peopled by primitive savages. This is as unquestionably true as the process is inevitable; yet one cannot but feel a certain regret that so much of the colorful variety in culture, which existed so recently, has passed and is doomed to pass away. One cannot help feeling a slightly wistful longing for the old pageantry and romance which are being ruthlessly eliminated from our increasingly standardized life. It may, indeed, be convenient and an evidence of the world's progress, to be able to buy one's accustomed brand of safety-razor blades in Samarcand or Assouan, in Fiji or Cuzco, as easily as in New York, but the fact takes something of the flavor and bouquet out of life!

There are, however, other significant aspects besides this of the triumphant spread of a culture which threatens, for the first time in the world's history, to become a world-culture, embracing or at least influencing in some degree all peoples in all lands. For what is happening is that on a scale quite unprecedented a

type of culture developed in the main in one environment (that of western Europe) is spreading into every kind of environment, from the arctic to the tropics, from the stark deserts of the Sahara to the languorous strands and scented valleys of the South Seas. In marvellous fashion this culture, as already pointed out, shows itself able to dominate environment, to build a Kalgoorlie in the heart of a pitiless desert, or carry the luxuries and sanitation of New York into the feverish jungles of Panama. By sheer force of determination, invention, and mechanical skill we may now largely override the barriers which environment has hitherto imposed, and are thus increasingly able to free ourselves from those environmental urges which in the past have served to develop local cultural types, whose strength and permanence have in large measure rested upon that very accord between culture and environment that we are increasingly free to disregard. Further, the very ease and rapidity of communication, the extensive migrations, and the multiplicity of contacts that have enabled our EurAmerican culture to diffuse so widely, have likewise served, as previously pointed out, to bring to us a myriad traits from every corner of the world and every culture, enriching our whole civilization with a wealth which is incomparable.

All this is trite enough, but one cannot help but wonder whether perhaps this marvellous domination of environment is not accomplished at a price; whether the unprecedented richness of our civilization may not, after all, contain a menace. For if the strength of culture lies largely in its warp, in those traits arising through reaction to the environment, are we not weakening our civilization perhaps unduly by just so much as we free ourselves from this control? And may we not, by over-enrichment of the weft, sacrifice clarity and beauty of pattern for a mere surface iridescence? There is indeed a certain danger here, and a menace which might be more grave were it not for two facts of importance.

The first is that, phenomenal as has been the spread and enrichment of EurAmerican culture during the last centuries, it has been accompanied, as previously noted, by a parallel and equally amazing

development of invention. The fabric of culture has thus been strengthened even as it was being extended and enriched, but strengthened, be it observed, in a fashion relatively new. For the countless inventions, great and small, have been in large measure of a type dependent on universal rather than on local factors. The marvels of steam, electricity, and chemistry are not tied to any special environment; we can build and use railroads and steamships, set up telephones and radio, or manufacture dynamite or automobiles almost anywhere, if we wish. We are thus not only counteracting an unprecedented spread into strange environments by a parallel amount of invention, but these inventions, being largely independent of environment, serve not only to strengthen the fabric of our culture wherever it may extend, but also, by virtue of the very universality of the factors involved, tend to make that culture more and more a true world-culture.

The second fact is that, in spite of the extent to which our modern civilization is able to free itself from environmental control, it is far from having escaped completely from its influence. In common with all its humbler predecessors it is being slowly but surely modified by local conditions as well as by national and racial differences, as has already been noted. In other words, it is stretching new warps fixed to the local environments, which constantly add to its strength.

We may look forward thus with confidence to the rise of new and striking variants of our present-day culture, as a result of its world-wide spread. Yet these cultures of the future will differ, in one respect at least, from those of the past, for they can never be as sharply cut, as individual. For good or ill, privacy is becoming more and more impossible for peoples as it is for persons; the rapidity and vast range of modern means of communication have made impossible the degree of individuality which in the past a culture protected by natural or artificial isolation might attain. No future generation may hope to thrill with amazement at the discovery of a new culture as startlingly unique and strange as that of the Inca, or as curious and intriguing as that of Japan.

In one sense the cycle of culture-build

ing seems to have come full round. In the beginning of his history man spread widely over the earth, carrying with him the more or less uniform and very simple culture which marked him off as man. Little by little differing environments and other causes led to adaptations and improvements, resulting in countless local cultures, each of which gradually and in varying degree became enriched by the process of diffusion, which brought exotic traits evolved elsewhere. From time to time, now here, now there, great civilizations, stronger and richer than their neighbors, arose, and by conquest and diffusion came to dominate great areas. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome, India, and China, in the Old World, the Maya and Inca, in the New, are familiar instances of these great cultural empires of the past. Yet, great as they were, no one of them included even a single continent in its grasp. To-day our civilization is penetrating. into every corner of the entire world. We spread, as did our first human ancestors, essentially one basic type of culture, but one incomparably stronger, higher, and more complex. Yet, although thus in a sense the cycle may seem to repeat, there is an all

important factor now present that was absent before. For modern civilization spreads, not as at first over a world empty of human culture, but over one filled with a multitude of varied cultures, some of which it may only influence, though others it may dominate or even supplant.

We live in a three-dimensional world, and human culture is built in accordance with it. It is not linear and one-dimensional as the extreme Diffusionists would have it; it is not a mere two-dimensional surface of contrasted habitats, as the Environmentalists might be said to describe it. It is rather a solid structure, set firmly on a base whose breadth lies in the variety of environment which the world affords, and whose length is the sum of all diffusion throughout the whole of human history. The height to which it rises is varied, and is measured by that elusive something, compounded of intelligence, temperament, and genius, possessed in differing degree by every tribe and nation and race. We of to-day have builded high indeed, but upon a base so extensive that those who come after may well build far higher.

VOL. LXXXII.-23

HE various systems of collegiate education in this country have been under the fire of criticism for some time past, and although instructors, alumni, and even members of the various undergraduate bodies have all had their say regarding methods of instruction, he who has never enjoyed the benefits of a college education, and must perforce judge by results instead of methods, has yet to be heard from. It is as one of these uneducated ones that I wish to lift my voice, and I shall confine my remarks to the few special courses of study whose results are visible in the callings with which I have been associated during the greater part of my life.

The main fault that I find with the collegiate method of instruction in those now conspicuous branches of learning, playwriting and journalism, is that it tends to inspire students with hopes of fame and money-getting destined never to be realized, and neglects to inform them regarding the many obstacles that lie in the path to success. The student of law, for example, will acquire exhaustive information regarding the tricks and devices of swindlers, fraudulent bankrupts, and other malefactors, from financiers to yeggmen. The student in medicine will be taught to recognize the existence of disease in its manifold forms.

Not so he who has taken one of the courses of which I propose to treat. These courses do not, like medicine, law, and finance, rest upon a solid foundation, but on the taste and prejudices of an illiterate public that does not know its own mind from one day to the next. Never before have the operations of the predatory

classes been viewed with such tolerance and indifference by a public engrossed in pleasure or selfish money-making. And never before have propagandists, working through press-agents, exerted such power in sinister mouldings of popular opinion.

It seems to me that a college should give some instruction that will acquaint the undergraduate with present conditions of the demoralized world he is preparing to enter.

Journalism and play-writing, which must appeal to current thought and opinion, have a prominent place in the curriculum of more than one of our great universities, and I have been told that even in the writing of stories and poetry, instruction is furtively imparted by a system of so-called "home-study" that bears a suspicious resemblance to that great atomizer of superficial knowledge, the correspondence school.

Some years ago a newspaper proprietor of great renown and commensurate talent endowed with liberal hand a now famous College of Journalism, and very recently a gift of a million dollars made possible the course in play-writing, to-day a conspicuous feature of the curriculum of one of our greatest universities.

As all roads are said to lead to Rome, so do the courses I have indicated lead to the theatre, and they are presented to ardent youth in such fascinating colors as to share with money-getting the goal on which the eyes of the younger generation are firmly fixed. It was not thus in my early days, when very few of us regarded the playhouse as anything but a source of entertainment, and when the desire to write plays or dramatic criticism was not the wide-spread craze it became when electricity began to light up Broadway with its baneful glow. Play-writing

was then a serious matter, a craft understood only by a few experts, and schoolboys were not led to believe that it could be mastered by any youth, no matter how inexperienced and ignorant of the world, who could follow the rules laid down for him by a college course. But the nightly display on Broadway and in the streets of the contiguous "roaring forties" has changed all that.

I deplore the growing popularity of the play-writing course, not because I cherish any of the absurd prejudices against an ancient and honorable calling which break out now and then from sensational pulpits, but because the whole theatrical profession is so hopelessly overcrowded that it is hard for a newcomer, whether actor or playwright, to get a look in.

The common belief is that the writing of plays is the most lucrative of all professions, yet I have estimated as carefully as possible the earnings of our dramatists, near dramatists, and far dramatists, and have found the average to be less than ten dollars a year. But despite these depressing conditions, every graduation day sends its hordes of hopeful young dramatic students to swell the numbers, clustered like moths about the bright lights of the theatrical_district. In this great mob are persons of every class.

The rush from the college gates to the bright lights of Broadway continues with unabated vigor as the graduates from the literary courses lose themselves in the mob, their eyes fixed on the bright lights above them, their minds absolutely unconscious of what lies beneath.

One thing these embryo dramatists have in common, and that is supreme hope in the future in the full sense of their mastery over their souls. And among them all none is more eager, self-confident, and hopeful than he who has just graduated from a play-writing course and stands on what moralists call the "threshold of life," which in his case means the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street.

This trusting young neophyte is the favorite pupil of his instructor in play-writing; he has come direct from the college gates to the favored spot on which he now stands, the approving pats of his comrades still warm upon his back, and the hearty wishes of those who have speeded

him on his way ringing in his ears. He has brought with him the manuscript play on which his hopes are centred, and his mind is already busy with thoughts of the bright, gay life that is about to open up before him as soon as he has disposed of his play, for far stronger than the lure of the bright lights is his long-cherished desire to go behind the scenes of the theatres and become acquainted with the players. In imagination he sees himself recognized in public places by the most famous and attractive actresses. So vivid and compelling is this will-o'-the-wisp of theatrical life that it often takes years of battering against playhouse doors, with unsold manuscript in hand, to dislodge it from the brain.

It makes me heart-sick to meet some victim of this illusion, hurrying blithely up Broadway, and pausing only long enough to tell me that he has written six plays since he came out of college, that Belasco is reading one of them now, that an actor told him recently that his work showed unusual promise, and that a wellknown actress, whom he dared not name, had begged him to write a play for her. It is this "jollying," which is raised to the nth power of demoralization in no calling save that of the theatre, that keeps this unfortunate young man on the tramp up and down Broadway years after his case is known by every one to be hopeless.

The graduate of the college of journalism who betakes himself to Park Row as the gates of his alma mater close behind him asks nothing better than a job as a reporter, which he believes will bring him into contact with men and women of distinction and also enable him to familiarize himself with every phase of metropolitan life, and thus obtain ample material for the plays and novels which he hopes to write later in life. And if he be an earnest and thoughtful young man, he sees himself in the editorial chair of a powerful journal, swaying the minds of thousands, with brilliant pen.

Little does this earnest youth dream of what his postgraduate course in Park Row is to teach him. All thought of swaying the popular mind will fade when he realizes that the most widely circulated papers in the town are the tabloids, which