The American contribution to the characteristics of nations is hurry, and it is so contagious that the whole world has caught the infection—the whole world is in a hurry!

The modern man has as much emotion and variety crammed into a year of his life as would have sufficed to leaven generations of lives two hundred years ago. Now as we can only eat so much with comfort, in the same way our brains will only assimilate so many impressions, and our hearts will only bear a certain amount of emotion. If we have too many impressions we go mad, and if our hearts are too full they break, only we are told there is no such thing as a broken heart. But there is.

It goes without saying that impressions, both on the heart and the brain, which are as rapid and broken as the biograph, must be of infinitesimal duration. It is therefore a foregone conclusion that the modern man is not only in a perpetual hurry from his cradle to that final rest where all hurry ceases, but his memory, being limited to a certain number of photographic plates, while the impressions are unlimited, has but an infinitesimal space for each. The appeals made to our understanding in those limited years we call a lifetime are simply maddening. We have the entire daily history of the world dished up hot for a ha'penny innumerable times a day, and when it is a day old it is ancient history fit only to do up bundles with or light the fire.

It is perhaps not one of the least terrors of life that the world is growing so small, cruelly linked together by the copper coils of the cable, that before long there will not be left a nook or cranny where the soul can escape to solitude. There will be nothing left to discover in this little world, and if the astronomers do not come to our aid where will the outlet be for eager adventurers?

The world expects so infinitely much, that what constituted a great explorer fifty years ago and set the world talking, is the common experience of numberless young fellows, with much money and leisure, who go to darkest Africa in search of big game, and hardly think it worth while to mention it.

Everybody does something; the world is on a tiresome level of universal ability! Everybody writes books: whether they are read is a secret no publisher will disclose. Art is pursued with frantic haste, but is being rapidly overtaken by the biograph. Music stuns the air and machine music proves its superior ability, and in the United States education has developed into a kind of decorous mental orgie. Even religion we get in a rush when, as a stray sinner, we wander into a hall and are tossed into a possible harbour on the crest of a rollicking hymn. Peace to the soul that finds a harbour, however gained, only the fact remains that it is often gained in a desperate hurry.

Statistics prove, we are told, that human life is longer now than in the past, what with the new hygiene and better nourishment; and yet the working days of a man's life have so pitifully shrunk together that a man of forty is shelved in these electric days as he once was at sixty. No wonder then that the world is in a tearing haste, seeing how soon a man gets over his practical usefulness, which means how soon he gets to the end of his life, for life is work; after that it does not count.

It is the new creed, and it comes from America along with the hurry. It is the creed of a people who in their mad haste are losing their sense of humour, for if a man has a touch of humour certain phases of American life must, in the vernacular, "tickle him to death."

Minerva is undoubtedly the patron goddess of America; did she not spring full panoplied from the head of Jove? She took no time to be born; she had no leisure for celestial teething nor whooping-cough. Education, under her fostering care, does not come by degrees.

Yesterday the great grubbing material city was intellectually a desert; to-day it possesses a university in full swing, endowed with millions, boasting the last "cry" of the most modern of brains. Hastily elbowing its way along the path which the old universities trod in impressive silence for centuries, it arrives shoulder to shoulder with them, still rather fresh in the way of varnish because it is so new, breathing hard because of the speed, and wanting only what is, of course, of no earthly consequence—tradition and the memory of what was both good and great. This seems to be the only thing with which a university cannot be endowed!

All over the States universities spring up like magnificent mushrooms—over-night—and what with the men's universities, the women's colleges, university extension lectures and Chautauqua, not to mention educational schemes of a more modest nature, the United States may be said to be getting educated by electricity.

It takes a stranger in America some time to get accustomed to the mental pace. I shall never forget the German director of a rather famous Art museum there, who came to us in a towering rage and blurted out his indignation. He had been in America only a few months and the sober methods of the Fatherland still clung to him.

"These Americans, O these Americans!" and he tore his long hair. "I haf a letter this morning from a young man, and he ask me—Gott im Himmel, is it conceivable?—he ask me can I—I—I—what you call it?—guarantee—that he can became a portrait painter in three months! It is to grow mad!"

But not only the Fine Arts. A young doctor was explaining to me how thorough and broad his medical education had been (he was from the West), and as impressive and conclusive evidence he added, "I've even taken an extra term on the eye." Now a term is three months.

Alas, it is all owing to the electric age. Why will inventors invent so many time and labour-saving machines? Heaven forgive them! The more intelligent the machine the more machine-like the man who runs it, or is run by it, if the work it leaves him to do is limited and monotonous. Inevitably his outlook on life must become very narrow, and he must lose all ambition, all sense of mental responsibility. Think of spending the days of one's life making eyelet-holes! Many people do.

What good is all this deadly haste to the world? What real good is it doing the labourers and the lower middle-class men, of whom the world mostly consists, if cables and wireless telegraphy make them, so to speak, the next-door neighbours of an estimable yellow man in China? What help to them if they know the daily tragedies of the uttermost corners of the earth the same day rather than never? What use to them the knowledge of how to murder their fellow men scientifically in a war with all the modern improvements? What help to them if a million inventions make their patient hands useless, but provide them with luxuries they cannot afford?

Every day thousands of new companies are promoted to exploit inventions that have for their end and aim the doing of something in the greatest possible hurry with the least possible aid from mere men. Some day the lower classes will become perfectly unnecessary, like 'bus horses. The world will then be full of the only people who really count, and who can afford to be in a hurry: kings and queens, the rich and great, and above all, those golden calves the world worships, who rule the trusts, who in turn rule and ruin the world.

The question is, will the world be as well off if it has reached the summit and apex of hurry? In those days there will be no more contentment, for the electric age is, of all things, the enemy of contentment. Yes, by that time the whole world will be discontented, and the universal characteristic of nations will be that they are tired—tired—tired. Then, of course, men will die in their early youth, worn out and old, for, after all, they are only men and not gods. Besides, have not the gods always had a bad reputation for jealousy, and have they not always punished the presumptuous mortals who tried to steal their divine fire?

Even the Electric Age cannot escape its Nemesis.