“Conduct is three-fourths of life”; 'and conduct in itself is an art; the art of right living. And value—that is, what makes for the real welfare of humanity —depends upon the wholesome things alone, beginning with healthy food; for man’s first art was the art of cooking; and ending in the art of making a beautiful house, a happy home, "tight teaching and right thinking for the children; and the enlargement of man’s nature in the higher freedom of the soul.It seems to be a tíme when the multitude is contemptuous of all this. Hod carriers are paid more than teachers; while as for thinkers, artists, ’poets, the world now seems to have no use for them. For five years it has devoted itself to the manufacture of mechanisms to destroy human life; only a tithe of its effort has been devoted even to the raising of food, to the things that have value, that have the power of giving life, life of the body or life of the spirit. And yet men are puzzled! They complain of the high cost of living, when for a lustrum men have not thought of living but of killing; they marvel that those things of real value, which the world has neglected to plant or rear, have grown so scarce. And in North America we do not yet seem to have profited by this lesson. Caliban has there no word for Ariel, and all that Ariel represents. They call him scornfully the “highbrow” ; that is to say, the man who has behind his forehead sight and thought for things that lie above and beyond immediate sensuous enjoyment. Sadly significant is the use of this scornful piece of slang—“highbrow” — for all that stands above what swine may trample with their feet.

Yet there have been voices, and voices since Ruskin, who have spoken in protest of all this. In Italy, Ferrero; in Uruguay, Rodó; Amado Nervo in Mexico; the poets of Colombia, and poets and publicists in Argentina. Why is it that so many of these come from South America, and all that I have mentioned are of Latin stock ?

South Americans have sometimes thought themselves unfortunate that they were so far removed from the great material movements of the day; that they spring from an ancient Latin race, not of lusty Northern blood, and that for three centuries since they have kept mainly to themselves by preserving the Spanish traditions of manners and of life. They have valued personal dignity as they have valued courtesy; personal liberty as much as State power; less interested in machinery than in the art of life; they have placed “la joie de vivre” above the making wholesale of “utilities fixed and embodied in material objects.” And possibly some of them have repined that they were weak countries, not strong materially, not bristling with navies or great armies. They have not seen—nor does the world yet sec —what a rare role they have to play. Of all the quarters of the world, this alone has been able to keep tranquilly burning the torch of civilization. Here they have had no dream of conquest, and no harsh necessity of protecting themselves. The war has been remote, even in those South American countries which engaged in it; and before the war the very fact that they were not countries of great material prosperity other than that healthy well-being which comes direct from the soil; that they were not dazzled by all the temptations of exploiting the masses in hived industries —enabled them to keep Caliban in his place. It is not a trivial thing that of all countries of the world the Latin-American ones are those where poets are most nu- merous and all that poetry stands for is most prized. It is not without significance that South America alone is almost free, so far as Americans are concerned, from the “I Won’t Worker” who would spoliate the labor of others and do without all but the grosser things of this world — and from the legislative meddler and from the Bolshevik. For the same reason, International Law, which is the shield of weak countries against the strong, has its natural home in South America; and many of its leading scholars live there. For if liberty be the great gift to the world of the Saxon civilizations, law is the lesson of the Latin. And bound together and protected by bonds of fraternity which shall forever guard them against foreign aggression, they have been able to keep this lamp burning undimmed. The spirit of Cervantes is still with them, as in that wonderful chapter wherein he talks on war. Long may it be before it is forgotten! The object of war is peace, as the object of life is joy; and joy cannot endure without the love of one’s fellow-men.

This work of Rodó’s, when it first appeared, some years since, lay in piles of popular editions in every bookstall in Buenos Aires and other South American cities. One can hardly hope for such a general reading here. But it is a typical message from South America; and, as such, well worth our attention. Spanish scholars will note that (in order to conform their way of writing to ours in English) I have a little simplified the style of Rodó, particularly toward the end. Barring this, I hope that it is faithfully reproduced ; and that in the process of translating, not all the beauty of the marvellous Spanish has been lost.

What would Rodó have said, had he lived to see our entrance in the great war for world liberty? And how much would he have altered or added to what he says of the United States in Ariel? Much, by very much. Indeed for several years before the war there had been noticeable a marked change in the feelings of intelligent South Americans toward their big brother, the erstwhile feared “Colossus of the North.” Although Manuel Ugarte in South America, with Zimmermann of the Berlin Foreign Office, tried vainly to keep it alive in the interests of Germany during the war, this distrust of us had been rapidly disappearing. That very spirit of ideality which Rodó in this book finds so largely lacking had shown itself powerful enough to lead us, with motives at least immediately unselfish, into the greatest war of history. For years before, ever since the Spanish War, in fact (which in its inception they had bitterly disapproved), our course, as shown in Cuba, in the Philippines, and, despite all our provocation, as to Mexico; in President Wilson’s Mobile speech; in the treaty making amends to Colombia; and finally in the reasons given in his address to Congress on declaring war—had met with South American approval.