Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/53

 there never was a people in the world more anxious for men of talent to stay on the track and be true to the crafts than we Americans. We all know something is wrong with the flood of cheap work we are always getting. The literary clubs and the various kinds of culture clubs that spring up everywhere are perhaps rather silly in some of their gropings but they mean something. Often enough the man who spends all of his own life absorbed in money making would really like his wife and children to have something else as an end in life. I suspect that is the real reason there are so many young men and women in colleges who have no real interest in scholarship. They want something and their parents want something for them. Is it any wonder they do not know what they want?

At bottom Americans are kind. They are good natured. So anxious are we as