I

Having lived of late in a part of Europe where there is very little doing in the way of English, I went for many months without reading a word in my own tongue. By working in a different set of sequences so long, my mind got a bit away from the familiar ones; it rather slacked off on the English-reading habit, as I suppose any mind that has any flexibility is bound to do.

I

We are becoming more or less familiar with the assumption that our immediate cultural prospects are not good. It is the motive of most of the “literature of revaluation,” or, as Mr. H. L. Mencken prefers to call it, the Katzenjammer literature of the period. As far as the fact is concerned, we may face it frankly.

I

There are conventions, as well as tricks, in all trades. Every department of social activity being governed chiefly by convention, it is not surprising that the most powerful and far-reaching conventions are the least talked about. We know them, and obey them, but do not speak of them. In Gascony, probably, people do not talk much about gasconades, nor did the citizens of Gath have much to say about Philistinism. Thus the fundamental conventions that govern our American educational system are never discussed.

I

When I was seven years old, playing in front of our house on the outskirts of Brooklyn one morning, a policeman stopped and chatted with me for a few moments. He was a kindly man, of a Scandinavian blonde type with pleasant blue eyes, and I took to him at once. He sealed our acquaintance permanently by telling me a story that I thought was immensely funny; I laughed over it at intervals all day. I do not remember what it was, but it had to do with the antics of a drove of geese in our neighbourhood.

I

For my sins I had to spend a good deal of time in London lately, while an east wind was blowing; and under these depressing circumstances I had some notion of showing cause why the much-touted understanding between the English people and ours can never really exist. In spite of the Sulgrave Foundation, and of all the perfervid buncombe fired off at Pilgrims’ dinners about cousinship, hands across the sea, common tradition, common ideals, and what Mr.

I

American history has been of late so largely rediscovered and rewritten that one would hardly imagine there were many left to share the late Mr. Harding’s amiable illusions about the Founding Fathers. Yet there must be some, for in the campaign of 1924 I was present when one of the candidates got a rousing hand of applause for telling his audience that the Fathers had established a government of the people, for the people, and by the people!

I

One afternoon last December as I was passing by a café in Paris I got a jovial hail from an old friend whom I had not seen for years. He was about the last person in the world that I should have expected to turn up in Paris, for I thought he was in Russia, where, indeed, he had been for two years, and was but just out; he had come straight from Petersburg to Paris the week before.

I

When I was a boy the American millionaire and his impulsive prodigality were already good stage-properties; his generosity towards everything he believed in was as great, as easily touched, and often as spectacular as it is now. Nor was he behindhand in patronizing the fine arts, at least for the embellishment of his own surroundings.

ON DOING THE RIGHT THING

and Other Essays by

Albert Jay Nock

Set in linotype Caslon Old Face drawn from the original designs by William Caslon as preserved in the punches that are possessed by the present successors to his original foundry. Type design by A. W. Rushmore. Linoleum block cover and end leaves by Prentiss Taylor.