ica. In three minutes you have a friend; in six minutes, twenty. From the ends of the land they come, from the ends of the earth, even. The wild and woolly has vanished; to-day New York is the fron

tier.

"And cares only for dollars?" We have often heard this accusation. On the contrary, New York throws them away. The "el" hires one man to sell me a ticket, another to destroy it instantly; business houses waste floor-space, which is rent, which is money. Metropolitans pay colossal salaries without blinking. Some, hav

ing paid colossal salaries to themselves, now live abroad. Thanks to the general contempt for cash, mere editors grow rich. And yet it is true that literary prowess depends on its earning power; let your agent start rumors of seventeen cents a word, and the magazines wait in line outside your door. So in journalism. To accept less than a hundred a week is to accept undying shame.

Naturally, not every New-Yorker wallows in opulence, but all shrewd beginners pretend to, asserting, "The maddest. extravagance is economy," and spending

like lords where it shows. But their aim is not dollars, really; it is the triumph the dollars betoken. In the great American game they are determined to "win out." According to legend, they have never a moment to lose.

Whereas, behold the amazing metropolitan capacity for leisure: movies thronged during business hours, Polo Grounds reverberant with cheers for baseball from thousands of lusty "fans," and innumerable volunteer inspectors patiently overseeing the subway excavations that have given New York its fame as "the biggest mining-camp on earth."

At times, however, the "rush" is real. With a three-story street and a three

story river attempting to carry off simultaneous Aryan hordes from a congestion of thirty-story obelisks, what frenzies! It is war, and it is magnificent. But it is not New York. On the average, the city runs six stories high. With their "els," their subways, their trolley-cars, their bridges and tunnels, New-Yorkers traverse New York as serenely as Bostonians traverse Boston, though it takes a lot longer. Hence additional leisure, well spent. Where a Bostonian nibbles one editorial page, a metropolitan digests four. And whereas a Bostonian "beguiles odd moments by brushing up his Greek," the daily discipline of transportation enables many a New-Yorker to read Pidgin-Ger

man in Hebrew letters prowling from right to left, with the vowels omitted, or to engage in agreeable, and perhaps splendidly productive, meditation. No one accuses the Rockefeller Institute of thoughtlessness or Columbia University of shallowness, yet their savants all take part in "that brain-dizzying, nerve-wrecking, soul-destroying New York rush," which becomes second nature, unconscious because automatic. In fact, the faces that show strain are those beautiful, wan faces one observes along Peacock Row in the "church parade"-faces of women who never venture below Twenty-third Street, and ride always in their own limousines. Mr. Wenzell has pictured them to the lifelanguor, weariness, magnificence, and all.

metropolis-weariness at

such a price!" Which

would be a sapient reflection were not Gotham at once so buoyant and so cheap. The outsider pays four dollars for his breakfast and a small fortune for an undersized state-room fifteen flights up. He gets what he seeks, viceregal pretense, while just around the corner a spacious, quiet, inviting chamber would cost him a dollar a night. In any one of a dozen neighboring restaurants he would find a toothsome and soul-filling French or Italian luncheon at forty cents, wine included. Although comes relatively high in New York, everything else comes relatively low. Bargains abound, phenomenal bargains, bargains unheard of. I shall not describe them; I am reluctant to depopulate Topeka, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston, or to hasten the all too rapid growth of the metropolis. Every year

rent

New York adds to itself multitudes equaling the entire population of New Haven, Connecticut.

They stay. The women fret or become a little hardened, a little sharpened, and secretly, if not openly, worship New York. The men take root. They never feel at home in New York until they have a house in the country. Even then they never say, "We do thus and so"; they say, "New York does." But it is a lifesentence, for all that, and a welcome one. If a man tried to escape, no train can bring him back fast enough. To the end he may share with William Watson

An Italian luncheon

a doubt "whether guest or prisoner I," yet he is always aware of somehow belonging and of doing his bit. To put it more precisely, he is aware of aiding and abetting the national stepmother, who makes opinion, socially and politically, esthetically and intellectually, for all America. While she avoids extravagant outbursts of affection and remembers that at best she is only a stepmother, she is bringing the children up. They imitate "mother."

They will not resent my calling them a brood of toddling, babbling, miniature New Yorks. They glory in it. Small gain if they did not, for the stepmother

rules. Art, music, letters, the stage, and even the movies are hers. She censors our films. Her opera-twenty-six weeks of it, with Christendom's best virtuosiforms our musical taste. Her actors lead, sometimes securing their "one hundred. nights on Broadway" by letting in "deadheads," sometimes by sheer merit. With her Metropolitan Museum, her public monuments, and her world-renowned picture-mart, she trains our eye for beauty. With only three exceptions, all the nationally influential magazines are hers. She plays hostess to our Associated Press. Her newspapers dominate the country. By rewriting, by reprinting, or by direct syndication, provincial journalism echoes and reëchoes New York. Many a provincial reads the stepmother in the original text.

NEW YORK'S literary efforts display a remarkable versatility, I confess. Quoth a fair New-Yorker, "I do enjoy writing for 'Pugslie's'-they want nothing whole

some."

Yet New York goes in furiously for wholesomeness, as a rule, and the children wonder at times if she is in a position to pound the pulpit-cushions so canonically.

I recall the definition, "Character: what you are in the dark," and its paraphrase, "Character: what you are in New York." Yet what impresses me in New York is not her frivolity. It is her decency, her courage, her kindness. Of all great cities New York is by far the most moral outwardly, and who will fail to recognize the social value of even outward morality? Of all great cities she is by far the pluckiest. She breeds fighters like Riis and Rainsford, Abbott and Potter, Jerome, Roosevelt, and Hughes. She has tamed her police. She has taken a long, long stride toward abolishing the feudal system that centers in Tammany Hall. Big business behaves, or pretends to. Gamblers have ceased collecting art-treasures. District attorneys have outgrown the habit of bowing themselves in through the ceiling. Graft dwindles. Official complicity with Satan is both difficult and

dangerous. The tenement has improved. So has "Coney." Every advance costs a battle, and the end is not yet. New York realizes it. What with explosions, plagues, holocausts, "race wars," "crime waves," and strikes, there are warnings in abundance of more fights coming. Tammany's striped beast is not dead. It sleeps. The underworld is not banished; every few days a sociologist unearths new miseries. And, mind you, this same New York surmounted her Municipal Building with a statue of Civic Pride. She does not like the recrudescence of evil. But, such is her pluck, she takes it as a challenge, and retorts: "After a hundred fights, the hundred and first? Then lead me to it!"

And the pluck of individual NewYorkers! Some fail, and keep smiling. Aged business men, broken down and now doing office-boys' work, show a cheerfulness never to be observed elsewhere. In summer the whole metropolis is parboiled. On a torrid morning in July question the wretches who have slept out on benches. They chuckle. Or ask Avenue A's opinion of Avenue A. "Fine," you hear, "though it's cooler on Blackwell's Island, and we pay too much rent. But move away? Leave little old New York? Never!"

Parisians love Paris, though not in any such way as that. Half the Londoners hate London. In the British metropolis, as in the French, life is stationary. The submerged remain submerged. People at the surface are not climbing higher. Whereas in New York the superb phenomenon is this: millions helping more millions up, and themselves, too, and the whole community. To those above it brings a thrill of joyous satisfaction. To those below it brings faith in the active, aggressive kindness of their city.

Faith, I say, for only faith discerns a city's soul. And faith depends on mood. In a dismal mood one may see the squalor of New York, her misery, her shame. They are real. But it is something of an art to be dismal there. The more than crystalline brilliancy of the atmosphere,