Slike strani
PDF
ePub

citizenship should be founded. Courageous legislators devise schemes innumerable to dam this flood of immigration, but they are powerless because these people are necessary to the revolutionary propaganda of the unions. Only Oriental exclusion is possible since the Chinese and Japanese prefer personal liberty to union domination. The European immigrants are eager to be naturalized, because they hope that the vote will somehow bring them power and riches.

That the outlook is very grave no one denies. As the only solution she can devise of her own pressing questions American has chosen her paththe increase of democracy, an ever widening direct control of the majority. More and more she is throwing into the hands of the people the decision of momentous questions. She is fearful of experts. She believes that only the people can make and interpret laws, and that a popular decision is most surely right when least influenced by those who have had experience; that only the people can reform legal procedure, determine what is and what is not class legislation, whether government or private ownership of public utilities is wiser; that the people only are competent to settle with fairness to all the grave conflict between capital and labor. When this program is complete America may be no less excellent. It will certainly be very different. It will be no longer an Anglo-Saxon nation.

So completely is this democratic remedy in the ascendant that those conservatives who dare to doubt its transcendant virtues are accused of lack of patriotism. Yet they are not alarmists. They cannot agree that the uneducated masses represent inevitably the national will. Therefore they do not consider it any lack of patriotism to criticise a government which caters only for this part of the population, carries out the will of this part only. They feel themselves, as patriots, no more bound to submit unhesitatingly to the dictates of what they believe an unrepresentative majority

than they would to bow before the rule of a single "hero." They disprove of such sudden, carelessly considered and radical changes as were brought about by the new tariff law, but in such a measure they see no national menace. Here and there an industry is destroyed which might have adjusted itself to a gradual reduction of the tariff, but, although unsettling to business in general, they realize that such local failures are not indicative of a national decline of credit. The wealth of the nation is not decreased. Capital must merely be readjusted and redistributed. What they really fear, and see looming in the distance, is a general government throttling of all business, the certain result of a long enough continued series of regulations which aim to benefit the man below by tying the hands of the man above. They see the rewards of his industry taken away from the industrious man and distributed among those who hunger and thirst after the wealth of others, but who are too lazy or too ignorant to build up a competence for themselves. They see success made almost criminal. In the meantime they watch the price of living climb higher and higher. Their own dividends are diminished year by year; they give freely to help the poor; and all the time they realize what the poor, who are the majority and therefore the lawmakers, are unable to understand, that so long as taxes rise to meet the growing extravagance of local and national governments, their own power to aid is diminished and the necessities of life grow no cheaper. They cry out the truism that to be great a nation must be prosperous, that no laws are remedies which are not the outgrowth of custom, that a nation can grow sanely and strongly only when it conforms to the changeless law of Nature, sets itself inalterably against vice and oppression-whether that oppression be exerted by an individual or by the masses, and acknowledges the sacredness of individual liberty wherever that divine right is honestly and honorably exercised.

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[graphic]

EEIN' THINGS
INAMERICA

Impressions of New York

By Richard Bret Harte

CHAPTER II.

"A Few Mild Experiences in the Big remember him as that type of Ameri

[ocr errors]

City."

T WAS over twenty years since I had last seen New York. I have no recollection of this visit for the very good reason that at that time I was engaged either in sucking a comforter or making idiotic noises in my nurse's arms. But now I felt a stranger in my own land.

I had begun to find myself very lost and lonesome when the New York Herald gallantly came to my rescue, welcoming me with open arms. The Herald Building had always attracted me with the antique dignity of its exterior, and as an example of the Italian Renaissance, it seemed so incongruously out of place in the heart of Broadway.

My good fortune came at the psychological moment, when, longing for a friend in whom I could confide my impressions of New York, I found a ready and appreciative listener in the person of Mr. J. S. Petty, then Sunday editor of the Herald. I shall always

[merged small][graphic][subsumed][merged small]

I can never forget the Sunday my impressions and caricatures were published in the Herald. It was the first time I had ever had anything published in America. I would have felt quite famous had it not been for the photograph which accompanied the article. The camera had caught me with a most illiterate grin that had about as much significance to it as a Scotch mist. It was the kind of photograph that might have illuminated an advertisement for a famous stomach-ache cure, depicting a cured sufferer whose life had been a tragedy of stomachaches from the very day of his birth.

The next morning I had the pleasure of hearing my article criticised by one of the manicurists at my hotel who had actually found a resemblance in the photograph. She was a girl of considerable wit and beauty, whose inviting scarcity of attire displayedamongst other things-a thorough knowledge of the prevailing mode.

"Well," she concluded, putting the final polish on the nail of my little finger, "well, it was some classy rot alright, but you sure know how to write it good!"

That was the best balanced criticism I ever heard.

During the time I was not writing and caricaturing for the papers, I was busily engaged in rambling over the city, studying the different phases of its cosmopolitan life, always discovering something new, and incidentally enjoying a number of delightful experiences.

It was through some of these random excursions that I nearly became a "Movie" actor, secretary of a photoplay school, a husband, and a traveling companion to a mysterious foreigner who always dined at Considines promptly at 8 p. m.

I was frightened out of the "Movie" career by the leading lady in a comedy picture, who, perceiving that the director had disturbed my equilibrium, soothingly assured me that he was merely a "damned mutt!" It was not so much her amazing knowledge of modern rhetoric that as

[graphic][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

duly beautified by various cosmetics, etc., all I had to do was to walk on, say "Good-bye," then kiss the lady and leave. Being such a difficult and exacting piece of "business," it had to be rehearsed three times, but I so thoroughly enjoyed it that I could have rehearsed it for a month without the slightest objection.

For three weeks after that delightful experience I entirely lost my appetite. Everything I ate had an embarrassing flavor of lip-rouge about it that went straight to my head instead of the precious void below.

The other adventures I had lacked any real romance, save perhaps the one which might have landed me in the serene oblivion (?) of matrimony. It happened thus:

We met in an Art gallery. She had lost her catalogue, and I had gallantly given her mine. In this horribly prosaic manner we became acquainted. The acquaintanceship first showed signs of developing "roseate hues" when I learned she was an art lover and she learned I was an artist.

Now I am not going to weary the reader by describing the sunset splendors of her hair, the demure fluttering of her eyelids, the lure of her lips, or any other part of her anatomy exposed or semi-exposed for the benefit, uplift and salvation of the opposite sex. I will merely state that she possessed all the powers required by a Robert W. Chambers heroine to turn a man's brain into that kaleidoscope of dreams and nightmares we fondly call "Romance."

Well, I saw her for three days at the same hour in the same gallery. Then she disappeared, whence or whither I never knew. The only information I could gather about her mysterious personality was from one of the attendants at the gallery. He told me that she was a frequent visitor, and believed her to be a wealthy widow, living somewhere on Riverside Drive.

I have since regarded the incident as one of those inevitable enigmas that form some part of the great riddle

R. BRET HARTE 15

"She was an art lover."

of Destiny. Perhaps, after all, a widow must enter every man's life. The least she can do is cultivate his curiosity.

Sightseeing in New York from an elevated train is very unsatisfactory. The only sights I ever saw were windows. In the early morning hours they were invariably adorned with all kinds,

« PrejšnjaNaprej »