Coming to this country a product of Germanic civilization, knowing intimately the Slavic, Semitic, and Latin spirit, the writer was compelled to compare and to choose. Yet he would never have dared write upon this subject; not only because it was a difficult task, but because he had been so completely weaned from the Old World spirit that he had lost the proper perspective. Moreover, of formal books upon this subject there was no dearth.
During the last ten years, however, he has had the advantage of being the _cicerone_ of distinguished Europeans who came to study various phases of our institutional life, and they brought the opportunity of fresh comparisons and also of new view-points in this realm of the national spirit.
These unconventional studies, most of which received their inspiration through the visit of the Herr Director and his charming wife, are here offered as an Introduction to the American Spirit, not only to the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin, but to those Americans who do not realize that a nation, as well as man, "cannot live by bread alone;" that its most precious asset, its greatest element of strength, is its Spirit, and that the elements out of which the Spirit is made, are so rare, so delicate, that when once wasted they cannot readily be replaced.
As the sin against the Holy Spirit is the one sin for which the Gospel holds out no forgiveness for the individual, so there seems to be no hope for the nation which transgresses against this most vital element of its higher life.
Inasmuch also as the Spirit is something which guides and cannot be guided, these informal introductions appear in no geographic or historic sequence, but are necessarily left to the leading of the spirit, of which "no man knoweth whence it cometh or whither it goeth."
I. THE HERR DIRECTOR MEETS THE AMERICAN SPIRIT 15
VI. THE HERR DIRECTOR AND THE "MISSOURY" SPIRIT 112
VII. THE HERR DIRECTOR AND THE COLLEGE SPIRIT 129
VIII. THE RUSSIAN SOUL AND THE AMERICAN SPIRIT 147
XI. THE AMERICAN SPIRIT AMONG THE MORMONS 199
XII. THE CALIFORNIA CONFESSION OF FAITH 216
XV. THE CHALLENGE OF THE AMERICAN SPIRIT 262
_The Herr Director Meets the American Spirit_
The Herr Director and I were sitting over our coffee in the _Café Bauer_, _Unter den Linden_. In the midst of my account of some of the men of America and the idealistic movements in which they are interested, he rudely interrupted with: "You may tell that to some one who has never been in the United States; but not to me who have travelled through the length and breadth of it three times." He said it in an ungenerous, impatient way, although his last visit was thirty years ago and his journeys across this continent necessarily hurried. I dared not say much more, for I am apt to lose my temper when any one anywhere, criticizes my adopted country or questions my glowing accounts of it.