] to which I have referred.
It is that want, in the valley, of appreciation of the value of leisure
and of its wisdoms, it is that worship of what the son of Sirach called
the "wisdom of business," or busyness, it is that disposition not to
listen to the voices of the invisible multitude of spirits of the past
(who after all help to constitute a nation no less than the multitude of
spirits of the present, and of the future), it is that inability to credit
disinterested, materially unproductive, purposes and pursuits, and fit
them into the philosophy of a perfectibility based on material prosperity
--it is all of these that intimate the shortcomings of that life of the
Valley of Hurry.
I saw another great and, as it seemed, non-university audience in the same
amphitheatre in Paris listening just after midday to a lecture on
Montesquieu, and I had not sufficient imagination to picture such an
audience as near the Stock Exchange of Chicago as the Sorbonne is to the
Bourse--in that western city where men take hardly time at that hour of
day to eat, much less to philosophize.
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