THERE are some aspects of our American life which I tried to hide from my guests. I kept as many of our national family skeletons as possible in their closets, and made sure that the doors were securely locked.

I was glad that the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin were to leave this country before our insane Fourth of July, which we are endeavoring to make sane. I did not care to have them here on Thanksgiving Day from which, through the superabundance of turkey and cranberry sauce, the element of Thanksgiving has been almost eliminated. I was profoundly grateful that during their visit there was no election day with its sordid partisanship, its ballot box, not yet sacred enough to make beautiful or place nobly in some civic temple; but we did urge them to remain over Commencement day, that most happy, sweetly solemn occasion, unspoiled as yet by rich display. It is the great festival of our democracy, shared by town and gown, when we open the gates to rich and poor, to common opportunity and duty.

We made no mistake in thus planning. The town wore its holiday air. From farm and village, from many states, on every train, parents were arriving, walking proudly beside their sons and daughters, in academic garb.

“Old Grads” were being welcomed back by Alma Mater, grateful to her for having helped make life rich, and sweet, and worth living. They hoped to place under her care their children and their children’s children, whom they had brought there to give them a foretaste of joys to come.

It was a wonderful experience for the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin to meet them. They were fÊted and feasted; they wore class and college colors, and entered into the spirit of it all as if they, too, had been the children of Grinnell College.

Among the graduates they met editors, lawyers and doctors who had come back from the great cities; professors who had won academic renown, and are serving the great universities; teachers who had carried into the public schools the spirit of their college; preachers who have gained prominence, and those who minister in humble places, faithful in their obscurity and proud of their chance to serve. There were missionaries who came back from the ends of the earth where they had started centers of education, places of healing and temples of hope.

They listened to stirring messages from pulpit and platform, to the young dreams of minor poets who sang the lay of their class; to historians who reviewed the four college years as a great epoch closed; to prophets who predicted failure and success, and a golden day of jubilee to the whole weary world, when this particular class got back of it.

On Commencement day they watched the dignified President conferring the degrees of Bachelor, Master and Doctor.

At noon they attended the college banquet and suffered through the after dinner speeches.

That night on the crowded campus they enjoyed the Glee Club’s joyful songs, and then, worn to the last shred of their highly emotional natures, walked home with us while the last strains of the Alumni Song faded away into the night.

The Herr Director talked until after midnight, telling of the many things which pleased him. The religious dignity, the fine simplicity, the natural, sweet, pure relationship between men and women; but above all else, the democratic spirit from which these other things emanate.

He had an apt way of singing snatches of German song of which he seemed to command an unlimited supply; and as he mounted the stairs to his room he sang: “Ach, wenn es nur immer so bliebe.” (Oh, if it would only remain so always.) Then followed the sad note which is the major one of the German lyric: “Es war zu schÖn gewesen, es hatt nich sollen sein.” (It was too beautiful and therefore could not be.)

I knew it might not remain so beautiful always; but if life is worth while at all, it is worth while struggling to keep it so.

I do not know what share one person may have in influencing the current upon which a nation is drifting; but I believe in the power of the individual, and I shall “fight the good fight”—and a hard one it is—and “keep the faith”—although it is not easy to keep it—faith in God and men and in the American Spirit.

Four weeks after the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin left us I received the following letter. I have had some difficulty in translating the involved and rather lengthy epistle into straightforward English, but have done so that I may share it with my readers.

My dear Friend:

We arrived home in safety after a rather stormy and uneventful voyage. On board the ship we met a number of Lake Mohonk acquaintances, and therefore the atmosphere which you tried to create for me surrounded me even in mid ocean, and consequently you ought to be happy and contented.

When we reached Washington half-cooked, for even your excellent provisions for our comfort were unavailing against your terrific summer heat, your friend and his automobile were at the station; just such a friend and such an automobile as met us dozens of times before.

If anything, this friend was a little more persistent than the other species, for we were taken up and down and in and out, to everything within fifty miles of Washington. We shook hands with half your congressmen some of them seem to be professional hand-shakers, and my hand aches at the thought of it.

State Secretary Bryan received me most affably and talked about his peace treaties. He didn’t give me much chance to do any talking myself. He seems so genuinely American; by that I mean simple and childlike in many things, and complex and difficult to understand in others.

He is neither a humbug as some of your papers say, nor a prophet as he thinks himself. His faith in humanity and in himself is pathetically colossal.

It is amusing to find that you Americans, and you are the most American of them all—you Americans who have invented cash registers and time clocks, those symbols of unfaith in humanity, are so full of faith in your relation to big, national and international problems.

Your optimism may, after all, be due to your ignorance, coupled with the fact that you are living in a land vast and isolated, which has not quite exhausted its resources and opportunities. The most materialistic people on earth in your relationship to each other, you leap into remarkable idealism in the sphere of politics and diplomacy. If it is true that “God takes care of children and fools,” then God is taking wonderfully good care of you Americans, who seem to me to be both.

In our country we would put a man of Mr. Bryan’s type in charge of an orphan asylum, and feel that the children would be safe with him at least till their twelfth year; and yet I know that he has done vigorous fighting, and I shall give him a chapter in my book about America, which as you know I intend to write and have already begun.

It was quite a change of atmosphere when I went from the Department of State to the White House. The President’s secretary seems to me a man of large calibre, kind, yet firm. A man to like and yet to fear; just the kind of person a great man needs as a buffer against his friends, and as a guard against his enemies. The atmosphere of the White House is dignified, yet not cold; democratic, yet reserved; you feel that it is a place of power.

Above everything else you have done for me I want to thank you for making it possible for me to meet President Wilson. He is not at all the type of man I expected to find. There is nothing pedantic about him and I do not know a man in any of our universities like him. He is not as easy to analyze as Mr. Bryan, he is by far the greater, more complex and stronger nature. He has the firmness which rulers should possess, and may be too unyielding when once he has made up his mind to anything. He knows more than Mr. Bryan but is not as dogmatic, not nearly as friendly, and yet I came nearer to that which I sought in him, and I think I understood him better. He let me do all the talking, but asked all manner of questions; yet he told me more that way than Mr. Bryan, who did all the talking.

If President Wilson is a politician, he is a new kind which I have never met before. I think he has made many mistakes, which of course is natural. There is only one of your presidents who never made mistakes, and that was President Roosevelt. He made blunders, which he had the pugnacity and the sheer physical courage to turn into political capital, and then blundered again.

President Wilson was in the midst of the Mexican muddle when I saw him, yet he seemed to me very well poised, and bearing his many burdens, not like a martyr or a saint, but as a really strong man ought to bear them.

Of course you do not believe that I took your eulogies of America “fur baare Muenze” (at their face value). There are two Americas and you are living in but one of them. Your America lies in the high altitudes of Lake Mohonk, Hull House, and Grinnell College. The other America which you tried to hide from me I saw, just because you tried to hide it. It is sordid, base, selfish, and above all strong; but that you do not seem to know.

You have modified my view of America, but you have not changed it. You are still a big experiment as a nation, and I am not sure that it will be a successful one. You have nothing to teach us in government, business or education. Just one thing I envy you—your faith in your unfinished country and in yourself as a force in its making.

As you know, I do not share your faith; especially do I not believe that one individual or many individuals can change the course of empires.

You think yourself citizen, king and priest; but you are merely an atom, a conscious atom of course, and in that and that alone, in that you are conscious, and know yourself a part of the whole and believe yourself an effective part of it, lies happiness. I enjoyed hearing you talk about the American Spirit; you talked about the soul of a country as if you had seen it and felt it and loved it.

My dear friend, you do not know your own soul, nor the stuff out of which it is made, and yet in your American conceit you talk about the soul of a country. It was an interesting psychological study to watch you, and it gave me much amusement as well as something to think about.

I enjoyed you most of all in your own little town, your college and your hospitable, beautiful home. I feared you would burst from pride and complacency as you interpreted the “American Spirit” from that little place; a speck, and not even a well-defined speck, on the map of your country.

You, a world traveller, have at last become a really narrow provincial, I should say a very happy one, as provincials always are. You wanted me to see your country through the June atmosphere of your Commencement; a democratic, peaceful, rose-laden America. I saw it through the smoke and grime of Chicago, the crowded tenements of New York, the injustice of your courts and the corruption of your politics.

Yet I am glad I saw your America, and I want to thank you for your ardent endeavor to show it to me as you want it to be, and not as it is.

My wife sends her thanks and greetings. She received more benefit out of her visit than I. I have had to promise to remodel the house, and put in another bathroom which is to be between our bedrooms. The new bathtub must be porcelain and we are to have an instantaneous heater. She still talks a good deal of the “gute cornflecks” and “grep frut” which we both enjoyed so much. Above all she remembers the courtesy of the men, and if the servant did not place her chair for her at table, I fear I should now have to do it.

America certainly is a Paradise for women, but it is “Die Hoelle” for men.

Remember that when you and any of your family come to Berlin you are to be our guests. I trust you will come soon, for conditions over here look dubious, and the war, “der grosse Krieg,” may come before we know it.

Herzliche Gruesse von Haus zu Haus.
Auf Wiedersehen.