To Horace Meyer Kallen
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 8, 1932
I have spent a pleasant hour sitting in the Pincio and reading “College Prolongs Infancy”. Your facts are probably accurate and your descriptions certainly pungent: but, alas, I am a lover of youth, and would like to see it prolonged through life pour réparer des ans irréparable outrage. But apart from preferences, don’t you think it would be safer to adjust industrialism to human nature rather than human nature to industrialism? And isn’t industrialism petering out anyway? If your ideal is that all boys and girls should earn their living, and marry, at 15, I am glad I was born before the millennium.
Always your old friend G. S.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Four, 1928–1932. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH