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 nance and the modern cult of efficiency. It will be long before these become so sacrosanct as to disallow a laugh.

The worst that has been said of legitimate American humour is that it responds to every beck and call. Even Mr. Ewan S. Agnew, whose business it is to divert the British public, considers that the American public is too easily diverted. We laugh, either from light-hearted insensitiveness, or from the superabundant vitality, the half-conscious sense of power, which bubbles up forever in the callous gaiety of the world. Certainly Emerson is the only known American who despised jocularity, and who said early and often that he did not wish to be amused. The most striking passage in the letters of Mr. Walter Page is the one which describes his distaste for the "jocular" Washington luncheons at which he was a guest in the summer of 1916. He had come fresh from the rending anxiety,