ulation of a European market-town, has left the children
to grow up on the roofs and staircases, the babies to find a blessed
release through rickety fire-escapes. When a fit of reform has touched
him, he has stirred up the garbage of the Tenderloin and the Red Light
District, has spread it broadcast over his cities to poison his wife
and his daughter.

No, the American has still much to learn of domestic politics. Let him
sit with me here any night on my housetop and he will see the sad
effects of sectarian reform and newspaper hysteria. He will see the
creatures of the Tenderloin at home on Broadway and Fifth Avenue
where, twelve months ago, their presence was unknown. He will see the
policeman on the beat neglect the broken lock of my house door that
haply he may learn something of the doings of his fellow constable. He
will see a whole civil service turned into a bureau of information, a
department of espionage. He will see the entire machinery of city
government made ineffectual in the sacred name of Reform.

It was an American who made immortal the simple phrase: "There's no
place like home." Verily, one must take a long day's journey from New
York ere he discover a place in any essential comparable with the home
of our childhood's prattle, the home with its mother and its mother
love, its rosy boys and its sweet faced lasses. That home has been
handed over to the house-breakers, to make way for modern buildings,
for improvements on the surroundings that made our mothers and our
wives.

Sitting here on the housetop, one wonders if those residential
skyscrapers are indeed rooted in the foul pit of Acheron. If built in
the proportions of the iceberg, they must reach well into the bowels
of Tophet and thence derive the evil that is in them.

ROGER SKIRVING.

=Lady Betty's Comment=

In opposition to the familiar precept of a patriot touching the price
and preciousness of liberty, femininity, scorning to be free, exults
in shackles. We hesitate over our own taste, and turn rather to the
crowning of some courageous male, with a liking and a talent for
notoriety. The duties of this gentleman being irksome and his reward
being ridicule, it is perhaps amazing that we stand in no nearer
danger of lacking a leader for want of aspirants than does the nation
of begging for a President. Once guided by a master mind the most
exotic may come frankly forth to meet and struggle with the daily