60 H.P.

For the purpose of getting one's name into the papers, the acquisition
of a high-powered automobile may be recommended to the man who has never
given a monkey dinner; whose son was never married to a show-girl in a
balloon at 2.30 A.M.; whose son-in-law is neither a count, a duke, nor a
prince, and does not beat his wife; who has never paid $100,000 for a
Velasquez painted in 1897, or for a mediaeval Florentine altar-piece made
in Dayton, Ohio. The press, like the public, does not brim over with
affection for the motorist. From the newspapers it may be gathered that
when a man has been seen in the front seat of an automobile his family
prefers not to allude to the subject. Good men occasionally ride, but
as a rule only on errands of mercy, and always in a friend's machine. A
candidate for mayor will laugh when you accuse him of owning an opium
den, taking $10,000 a month from Mr. Morgan, or experimenting freely in
polygamy; but he throws up his hands when some one proves that he has
been seen in a garage.

To me this seems absurd. If people admit that the automobile is here to
stay, they must also admit that it is here to move from place to place
occasionally. Automobiles that did nothing but stay would obviously fail
in one of their principal aims. Not that the auto has no other important
functions. It is evident that motor-cars were intended for little boys
who squeeze the signal bulb and stick nails into the tires; for
Republican orators to cite as evidence that the American farmer does not
want the tariff revised; for foreign observers to prove that we are
developing an aristocracy; and for Tammany office-holders to snatch a
bit of relaxation after the day's long grind.

Motoring is not unmitigated bliss. The common belief that a body may be
in only one place at one time can be easily refuted by a woman with a
baby-carriage. Experience shows that such a woman, if she be put five
feet from a sidewalk, with forty feet of open road behind her for an
auto to pass through, will cover the forty feet backward with incredible
speed and propel herself right in front of the car. What would happen if
two cars came in opposite directions on opposite sides of a hundred-foot
avenue cannot be predicted. Either the woman would be accompanied by
another woman with a baby-carriage, or else, having propelled her own
carriage in front of the machine going north, she would proceed to give
her personal attention to the car g