46 MY AMERICAN FRIENDS

tain/' " boss " and " brother/' as, indeed, hap-
pened to me not long ago when making the very
inquiry I have just mentioned. But this mixture
of terms seems to indicate that he regards me,
not as a person of equal importance with himself,
but as a person of no importance whatsoever.

Whether the equality which consists in bringing
all men down to the zero level of value makes a good
foundation for democracy is a question on which I
have often meditated both on the sidewalks and
in the subways at the rush hour, where my status
as a thing is even more obvious than on the side-
walks and, I may add, distinctly unpleasant. I
am inclined to think the foundation is a bad one,
and in this many of my American friends agree
with me. New York, they tell me, is not peculiar
in this respect. The crowding in great cities has
the same tendency everywhere—that of cheapen-
ing humanity and making human beings of little
value in each other*s eyes. " As you mingle with
the crowd on the sidewalks," said one of them
as we lunched together in the Faculty Club, " you
get the impression that all of us, like the cars
in the roadways and the goods in the shop-windows
,, have been turned out from a mass production
factory, men and things boiled up together into a
seething chaos called * traffic * or * business '
—with over-production going on all round, the
supply exceeding the demand for human beings
as well as for commodities, and a consequent fall
of values in both departments. But surely," he