it?—this new public now swarming up the avenues of democratic opportunity; becoming prosperous, self-conscious, voluble; sunning itself in the great cities; reaching out greedily to realize its "legitimate aspirations." This latest generation of Americans, so vulgar and selfish and good-humored and sensual and impudent, shows little trace of the once dominant Puritan stock and nothing of the Puritan temper. It is curiously and richly composed of the children of parents who dedicated themselves to accumulation, and toiling inarticulately in shop and field, in forest and mine, never fully mastered the English definite article or the personal pronoun. It is composed of children whose parents or grandparents brought their copper kettles from Russia, tilled the soil of Hungary, taught the Mosaic law in Poland, cut Irish turf, ground optical glass in Germany, dispensed Bavarian beer, or fished for mackerel around the Skagerrack. The young people laugh at the oddities of their forbears, discard the old kettles, the Mosaic Law, the provincial dialect, the Lutheran pastor. Into the new society breaking without cultural inheritance, they derive all their interests and standards from their immediate environment, and gravitate towards refinement through more and more expensive gratifications of the senses.
The prettiest type of this swift civilization—and I must have something pretty to enliven a discourse on current criticism—the prettiest type is the jeune
