ABSTRACT
America and Britain and their cultural dependencies share a common religious heritage, a common history in large part, a common pattern of law and politics, and a common body of great literature. Grim symptoms may be discerned of an absolute decline of the higher culture in both America and Britain, and also symptoms of a decline of the ties that have joined the English-speaking cultures on either side of the Atlantic. In the Anglo-American culture, the study of great literature has pursued an ethical end through an intellectual means. The culture from which Anglo-American culture developed extends back more than three thousand years, to Moses and Aaron. Arnold Toynbee instructs that cultures develop, and civilizations arise, by the process of challenge and response. The ideology called multiculturalism might benefit American society, after all—in the sense that it is a challenge to the friends of America's inherited culture.
