LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

EUROPE is an organic body, its life continues, its life has components
and nearly every damn thing that has made your lives worth livin’ up to
this moment, has had its ORIGINS right here in Europe.
Yes, we HAD some colonial architecture and 30 pages of Whitman
(Walt Whitman, not Whitemann) and then Whistler, and Henry James
left the country. In fact it warn’t no bed of roses fer authors and
painters. Though my generation allus thought we ought to plant
something or other, and try to git a new crop of somethin’ or other. The
idea of the Returnin’ Native was prevalent, except possibly to Thomas S.
Eliot who saw from the start that you folks weren’t episcopal enough to
suit his episcopal temperament, and he somewhat looked down on my
pagan and evangelical tendencies. Waaal, frankly, I allus though it
would be a good thing to come back and put some sort of a college or
university into shape to teach the young something. Not merely the god
damn saw dust and subsitutes for learnin’ and literature they git handed.
However, ca hold up the whole course of civilization. If you wanna line
up with bone heads, you will line up with bone heads.
And you will go on having conductors instead of composers and
European authors who have resigned.
But don’t get that Anglican attitude, of the old story, storm in the
channel called by the English, the English channel—the straits between
Calais and Dover—and the dirty old Times out with a headline
“Continent isolated.”
Nobody here is layin’ flowers on the tomb of Columbus, not this year.
But don’t go and run away with the idea that Europe is no longer here,
or that books aren’t being written. I mean bein’ WRITTEN, and that we
have no painters, or writers, or musicians.
I regret the personal correspondence of a small number of writers, who
mostly don’t write to each other. And I would like to see what Hillaire