nearly 70 millions. This curious fact may be interpreted to mean that people living within the city travel more, make many more trips daily than in 1914. They cannot keep still!

Paris and London, like New York, were pervaded by an almost village calm in 1914 as compared with to-day. In those cities is found much of this bewildering traffic, more people afoot, more automobiles, more strangers, more people going about, more crowds, with more traffic rules to protect the safety of the individual in the crowd from the crowd. At six o'clock in the evening life is equally unsafe in Piccadilly Circus, the Place de l'Opéra, and Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street.

But elsewhere

This international need and desire to go is creating gigantic traffic problems in every city and land. In 1914 the railways of the United States carried more than a billion passengers on an average journey of 33.25 miles. In 1926 they carried just under a billion passengers on an average journey of about 40 miles. The electric railways carried last year between fourteen and fifteen billion passengers, a slight relative increase over 1914. the traffic increase has been incalculable. In 1914 there were 1,625,739 registered passenger automobiles, each running its average of five thousand miles a year with an estimated average of two and a half passengers, running for pleasure or profit. In 1926 there were 19,520,000 registered automobiles, or roughly twelve times as many as in 1914, running their hundreds of billions of miles and carrying billions of people. Somebody going some

where all the time, night and day, rain or shine, the motor accommodating the motion spirit born of the war.

It was the war that brought in the motor-bus. As late as 1917 there were no intra- or inter-state bus lines. To-day there are 80,000 buses in use, operating on 232,000 miles of road as common carriers, competing with or replacing electric and steam railways, and used by schools, hotels, and excursion parties, in addition to their regular passenger services. On holidays, during the seasons of flight, in vacation time, the highways are crowded to the full, yet the total mileage of 3,000,000 has been increased by 500,000 since 1914, and on the surfaced mileage by 400,000. Significant of the nomad spirit is the fact that in 1925 there were 15,279,730 visitors to national forests, 3,000,000 more than in the preceding year.

The Romans built a few thousands of miles of roads, and they have been held up to the admiration of mankind for centuries. Right here we are spending more than a billion dollars a year on roads; our work in any one year would make the roads of Rome seem bridle-paths. We spend other billions on tunnels and huge bridges, with paltry millions on road signs and speed marks for the guidance of our crowds, and we think nothing of it.

We have not managed yet to get as many people together in a single place for a single purpose as the Romans, whose Circus Maximus in the fourth century accommodated 385,000 spectators to witness games and horse and chariot races. But we could if our amusement taste

demanded it. In New York we crowd on any given week-day winter night more than a million people into upward of five hundred theaters and pleasure places. Nowhere to go but out!

Our go spirit has resulted in building of more than ten thousand wayside motor-camps throughout the country, in providing many restcamps for hikers in our national forests and parks. It takes us to the sea in new thousands yearly, where there is more room, and is resulting in the building of unnumbered pleasure motor-boats and yachts for use in rivers, on lakes, bays, sounds. The number of luxurious passenger and tourist ships and sea-going yachts is increasing each season. Our eleven thousand or so millionaires and friends and families readily spend a few thousand dollars on cabins for a seven-day trip to Europe or the West Indies. To accommodate this trade, the British, the Germans, originators of the joy-ship, the French, the Italians, even the Spanish, so long silent on the seas, are building newer and larger sea sky-scrapers.

And there is the air. Nobody is afraid of that either. For profit or pleasure, commercial aëroplanes in the United States last year made 258,762 flights for 5,396,672 miles and carried carried 205,004 passengers. How many people would have been willing to fly in 1914?

versity, looking at it as a purely American phenomenon, has called it "the threat of leisure." "For a variety of reasons," he says, "we are less prepared for leisure than any people since the beginning of time."

That is as may be. What's happening here is happening in every land, more bridges, tunnels, roads, more automobiles, more hikers, more ships dotting the seas, more people going, with a round 1700 millions of people on earth, and the population figure rapidly rising each year.

The motion spirit is encouraged by governments through official travel bureaus, by tourist agencies, by banks, by the suggestion of advertisement, by books of travel, by hotels and resorts providing comfort for travelers. The money investment is so huge and so dovetailed that no estimate can be formed of the number of billions involved.

As opposed to this blind travel, never has the world seen so many travel expeditions for delving into the lost, forgotten, unknown places of the earth, expeditions to explore the seas, to bring strange animals out of the jungles, to study the past life of mankind. Such expeditions stimulate new ones, divert blind travel into definite paths. People are no longer content to read about strange places, listen to lecturers; they want to be actors in the great drama of beholding, finding.

most talked-of country, see its marvels of industrial equipment, its hospitals and educational institutions, whatever is commonplace to us but strange to them.

It may be that in retrospect this period will be compared to that of the Renaissance in Europe in the sixteenth century, one of the elements of which was the go spirit of geographical discovery.

"The great flood gates of the wonder world swung open.' So wrote Melville in his preface to "Moby Dick." He was writing of the lure of travel, of going, and as a sailor. In his day many thousands responded to that lure, since the war many millions; and some have seen more than Melville with their eyes if not with their minds.

That is the point. Literally, to travel is to go from one place to another. To-day people stride the earth with the ease of a Colossus. They may boast they have seen more than Columbus, who was rather a poor traveler in the light of modern conditions; he never got around the world. To-day that may be done inside of thirty days, and to-morrow perhaps in a few days. But what do the minds of these trippers see? "I know I can't see everything, so I prefer not to travel at all," I lately heard a woman complain. For so poor a mind, her decision was remarkably clever.

Perhaps the chief fruit of travel for the individual is health. Cage the lark and it dies. Travel gives one a mental and bodily shaking-up, leads to a readjustment of vision. It carries with it the opportunity to enjoy life to the full, and brings an

energizing thrill no other sport can offer. After all, there is something very personal about travel. "I saw"; "I went"; "I did this and that." It loosens the tongue. Therein comes one of its many delights. Travel gives rise to tales unnumbered. It brings the imagination into action, makes it playful. Those tales may tax the credulity of the listener, but as he could not be present, he could not contradict the recital. Also, as time and life go on, these plausible recollections are stimulated in an amazing degree.

Travel develops courage, confidence, makes one self-important, sometimes important in the eyes of others, say, when one has come safely and unafraid through a danger. Travel must always remain an amateur sport. There are no gatereceipts. It may be practised by the young, the middle-aged, the old, and by both sexes. One does not have to be expert in this business of getting about; and, if one travels in the right frame of mind, the mistakes of travel are the best part of the fun. The mistakes may be the real adventures of modern travel. Travel leads to dreams, dreams before the journey, dreams on the way, more dreams at its conclusion when any hardships are forgot. Travel should be a teacher, teach us that home is the grandest spot in the world and to stay there; but it rarely does, for once a traveler, always a traveler.

Another advantage of the sport is that one really doesn't have to go very far to enjoy it. Some of its best fun may be in camping out by a lake-side, going down to the seashore, and wading a few miles along the beach. De Foe, the author of

the great wander book, "Robinson Crusoe," which has sent so many on their travels, was never near any of the scenes of his story in a physical sense. His mind was too busy working on other things. He could hardly have approved of travel for pleasure. Among his many tracts was one stoutly maintaining that the only enjoyment in life comes through making money.

Travel leads to new companions, strange comrades, to wayside friendships, to the discovery of a faithful Man Friday. Travel gives occupation to those who have none. It is a boon to the old, to the idle rich; though indeed the happiest traveler may be the poorest. He does not expect very much and therefore cannot be too much disappointed. He has not the right to complain, as do so many of our Americans abroad, that flapjacks and corn-syrup are not on the menu, that in France so few people speak English in the understandable accent of the folks back home. Nor does he storm because there is no bath. He has the doughty pilgrim spirit of the happy tropical tramp who exclaimed, when a tornado blew the thatched roof off

his hut: "What an interesting country! I never saw that happen till now."

The right travel spirit is that which was described by Darwin, who, very grateful for the opportunity he had enjoyed, wrote at the close of a five-year voyage around the world: "The effect ought to be to teach him good-humored patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence. He will discover how many truly kindhearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested assistance."

This travel that puts so much. spice into life, until in the upper half of the hour-glass remain but a few grains of sand, also leads one to forget to remember.

If the World War had any compensations, the travel spirit is one of them. It awoke the instinct to try to be careless, to seek more freedom; and does not freedom ever lie over the hill, across the sea, somewhere else?

Let's go see.

T

HE STORY of American women in medicine opens humorously. Time: a morning far back in the Early Hoop-skirt Age. Place: Amphitheater of the Medical College at Geneva, New York.

Enter students, all men. They seat themselves as usual, tier above tier. Enter the dean, looking much troubled. With a letter in his hand, he mounts the platform, to make an unexpected and most sensational announcement: A woman, Miss Elizabeth Blackwell, has applied for admission to the college! She has made previous application at a dozen other medical schools and been refused. Geneva will refuse her if a single student so wishes. What do the men say? Shall she be received, or shall she not?

This was the dean's way out of an embarrassing fix, but the students, regarding the whole thing as a hoax perpetrated by some rival institution, returned a hilarious chorus of "Ayes," and, when the dean demanded to hear from those contraryminded, only one man cried, "No!"

Pandemonium followed. The ayes pounced upon that no and forced him to reverse his vote. Still not satisfied, they restored order and drew up a solemn document pledging themselves to welcome Miss Blackwell

with all courtesy and consideration.

To their amazement, she camethe first woman ever to study medicine in America. The men kept their word, and treated her beautifully throughout her stay; but the townsfolk were scandalized, some of them deciding that she must be insane, others thinking her disreputable, and the college declined to recognize her admission as having established a precedent.

That was a mild sort of snub by comparison with what happened much later in the Hoop-skirt Age when the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania had been in operation for nineteen years. On a day in November, 1869, a class from that institution ventured to attend a clinical lecture at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. According to a newspaper of the time, "the students of the male college, knowing that the ladies would be present, turned out a hundred strong, with the design of expressing their disapproval of the entrance of women into the medical profession. Ranging themselves in line, these gallant gentlemen assailed the young ladies, as they passed out, with insolent and offensive language, and then followed them into the street, where