ze wanders out over acres of
roofs--the leaded coverings of hotels, apartment-houses, and office
buildings. They rear themselves beneath and around me as the lesser
peaks of the Himalayas seen from Mount Everest. My eyes ache with the
diversity of their shapes, the eccentricity of their styles, the
irregularity of their altitudes. No man viewing them can continue
blind to the independence of the American citizen, to the ostentation
of his right of personal selection, to his individual caprice. They
stand, a brick-and-iron commentary upon the competing ambitions of two
generations of townsmen.

A hulking, twenty-story modernity stands side by side with a dwarfish,
Dutch anachronism, but neither possesses any right of precedence over
the other. They are equal in the eyes of the proletary. Classic and
nondescript, marble and brick, granite and iron, unite to form the
most heterogeneous collection of fashions the earth's surface anywhere
exhibits. Even Milton's blind eyes pictured nothing so fantastic as
this architectural chaos of Manhattan, so hopeless of eventual order.
And yet are there not lacking signs that the quaint pot-pourri of
whimsicalities will one day coalesce into a well-defined, artistic
composition, a twentieth century City Beautiful. God grant its
attainment be not unduly protracted!

But it is with the insides of this vast confusion of buildings I am
presently concerned. As the buildings are, so are the
inhabitants--little and big, tall and short, honestly constructed and
jerry built, old fashioned and up to date, aping the fashions of a
dozen civilizations. In any one of these great structures will be
found the representatives of a dozen nations, born to a dozen tongues,
yet all conversing in a common English, covering their motley
nationalities with a common Americanism, united in their loyalty to
the Republic. In the diversity of its constituents lies the strength
of the American nation.

No European section of the American community sufficiently
preponderates over its fellows to affect the national sympathy toward
foreign Powers. Irish counteracts English opinion; German sonship is
balanced by the filial sentiment of the Latin races--the Slavs and
the Russian Jews have no European predilections. Consequently,
American foreign policy is dictated by Americans for the benefit of
Americans, without reference to the warring interests in Europe or in
Asia. The men who lead in the United States are men w