s peace, they forge tributes to their own excellence which they
put into his mouth, thereby treating their own land which they profess
to honour as a quack treats his pills. If he speaks--but you shall see
for yourselves what happens then. And they cannot see that by untruth
and invective it is themselves alone that they injure.

The blame of their city evils is not altogether with the gentlemen,
chiefly of foreign extraction, who control the city. These find a people
made to their hand--a lawless breed ready to wink at one evasion of the
law if they themselves may profit by another, and in their rare leisure
hours content to smile over the details of a clever fraud. Then, says
the cultured American, 'Give us time. Give us time, and we shall
arrive.' The otherwise American, who is aggressive, straightway proceeds
to thrust a piece of half-hanged municipal botch-work under the nose of
the alien as a sample of perfected effort. There is nothing more
delightful than to sit for a strictly limited time with a child who
tells you what he means to do when he is a man; but when that same
child, loud-voiced, insistent, unblushingly eager for praise, but
thin-skinned as the most morbid of hobbledehoys, stands about all your
ways telling you the same story in the same voice, you begin to yearn
for something made and finished--say Egypt and a completely dead mummy.
It is neither seemly nor safe to hint that the government of the largest
city in the States is a despotism of the alien by the alien for the
alien, tempered with occasional insurrections of the decent folk. Only
the Chinaman washes the dirty linen of other lands.

St. Paul, Minnesota.

Yes, it is very good to get away once more and pick up the old and ever
fresh business of the vagrant, loafing through new towns, learned in
the manners of dogs, babies, and perambulators half the world over, and
tracking the seasons by the up-growth of flowers in stranger-people's
gardens. St. Paul, standing at the barn-door of the Dakota and Minnesota
granaries, is all things to all men except to Minneapolis, eleven miles
away, whom she hates and by whom she is patronised. She calls herself
the capital of the North-West, the new North-West, and her citizens
wear, not only the tall silk hat of trade, but the soft slouch of the
West. She talks in another tongue than the New Yorker, and--sure sign
that we are far across the continent--her papers argue with the San
Francisco ones over rate