Contemplating the contrasts between foreign life and foreign history with our own one cannot help reflecting upon the yet more startling contrasts of ancient and modern religion and government. I have wandered not a little over Europe at irregular intervals for more than fifty years. Always a devotee to American institutions, I have been strengthened in my beliefs by what I have encountered.

The mood in our countrymen has been overmuch to belittle things American. The commercial spirit in the United States, which affects to be nationalistic, is in reality cosmopolitan. Money being its god, French money, English money, anything that calls itself money, is wealth to it. It has no time to waste on theories or to think of generics. "Put money in thy purse" has become its motto. Money constitutes the reason of its being. The organic law of the land is Greek to it, as are those laws of God which obstruct it. It is too busy with its greed and gain to think, or to feel, on any abstract subject. That which does not appeal to it in the concrete is of no interest at all.

Just as in the days of Charles V and Philip II, all things yielded to the theologian's misconception of the spiritual life so in these days of the Billionaires all things spiritual and abstract yield to what they call the progress of the universe and the leading of the times. Under their rule we have had extraordinary movement just as under the lords of the Palatinate and the Escurial--the medieval union of the devils of bigotry and power--Europe, which was but another name for Spain, had extraordinary movement. We know where it ended with Spain. Whither is it leading us? Are we traveling the same road?

Let us hope not. Let us believe not. Yet, once strolling along through the crypt of the Church of the Escurial near Madrid, I could not repress the idea of a personal and physical resemblance between the effigies in marble and bronze looking down upon me whichever way I turned, to some of our contemporary public men and seeming to say: "My love to the President when you see him next," and "Don't forget to remember me kindly, please, to the chairmen of both your national committees!"