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satin dress touched the former on the shoulder; she spoke rapidly in Spanish.

"Bueno," he remarked; "it makes no difference. You paid to Callao; you lose."

Her shoulders moved in a tired shrug. "No me importa nada—what of it?"

But it was evening before a passenger might be landed; thus was the day of quarantine fulfilled. There were only two, old Goya and Chiquitita. At the foot of the side-ladder a discarded ship's dinghy rose and fell on the long swells, fended by a pair of dusty, desert-blown natives. Old Goya descended, and carefully seated himself in the stern; he gallantly spread a gaudy poncho on the weather-beaten thwart beside him. Chiquitita stepped deftly aboard on a rising swell. Her face was inscrutable as she carelessly scanned the faces that lined the rail. If it softened, no one knew, for it was masked in the

gaiety of rouge and carmine, while the soft folds of the rebozo hid the sobbing play of the muscles of the throat, maybe.

From the upper deck the passengers watched them off. Between the koon-can player and the grandson of an archdeacon was a tiny baby figure against the rail, gay with fluttering ribbons and the fluffy clothes of Spanish childhood, while one hand bravely clutched a finger of the koon-can player. The pale, frightened little face was set, with tremulous lips and humid eyes, which followed a dusty, discarded ship's dinghy as it crawled across the long swells. What the baby eyes saw in that discarded dinghy and mellow evening glow only God knows.

But the rest of the upper deck saw nothing but a tawdry, yellow satin dress close to a fat little cacao-planter from back of Coquimbo who had money.

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DUBLIN

BY BRAND WHITLOCK

HAVE a friend, an intermittent philosopher, who in moments of reflective calm preaches contentment to those who live in dull provincial towns. The other evening he pleased himself greatly by striking out a rather fine phrase. "Peoria," he said, "is as big as New York, and a country cross-road 's as big as either."

He, however, lives in New York, and this expression of his taste, while it need not vitiate his large and profound generalization, indicates a distinction which mankind somehow persists in making.

There is, to be sure, a sense in which one city is all cities, since all have the same problems, all live and grow by the same general, though obscure, laws, and all at last come to the same end of death and taxes. But while fundamentally alike, cities, nevertheless, are individual, and among them there are those that impress us by a peculiar and fascinating personality; they have for us the interest which among men envelops great personages. In a more general sense they may be well governed and orderly, like the cities of

Germany; or picturesque, like the cities of Italy; or vivacious, like the cities of France; or heavy, like the cities of England; or nervous and bustling, like the cities of America: but these are only the broad and tentative beginnings of a classification which cannot, I suppose, be carried out with any scientific accuracy. It would not do to attempt to classify them according to their forms of government. The four or five large cities of my own State of Ohio, for instance, while governed by a uniform code, nevertheless by their local customs somehow burst the bonds of this law asunder, and each to a degree has its own informal and individual code.

And then there are curious paradoxes in cities. For instance, the German cities have, I suppose, according to the ideas of our own municipal reformers at least, about the worst form of government in the world, a cumbrous, complicated bureaucracy, centuries old; and yet they are undoubtedly the most efficiently governed cities in the world. But there is a quality which they lack, and by that one may dis

tinguish those towns he loves among the cities of his acquaintance. It is the quality of charm.

THE CHARM OF DUBLIN

Now, to me at least, Dublin possesses this rare and delicate property, and she is the only city among those I have visited in the British Isles that has it. London has an immense and fascinating interest, and Glasgow is marvelous in its realization of democracy in government, while Edinburgh, a reactionary and incorrigible stand-patter among municipalities, is distinguished by romance and beauty. But of them all Dublin alone has charm. It is a quality which the wise man, jealous of the illusions of which life is too eager to strip him, will not attempt to define; it is too rare, too delicate, too evanescent. Perhaps, if it could be defined, it would vanish with the illusion that creates it. It is with cities as with women, to whom the poets have sometimes likened those cities they love they have charm or they have it not. There is no accounting for it, just as there is no accounting for tastes: it is, or it is not; it exists for some and not for others. "I can't understand what you see in her," your dull and unimaginative companion will amaze you by exclaiming.

As the metropolis of a nation that no longer has a capital, Dublin expresses the various attributes of a race which for eight centuries has withstood the efforts of England to subdue and absorb it, and with an amazing vitality has retained its own characteristics; and it stands preeminent and unique among cities, since its lord mayor is the first citizen of his land. To see the sun break out of the clouds and flood with light St. Stephen's Green, sparkling with the rain that only a moment since was falling, is to have a visible symbol of its whimsical character.

"O Ireland!" exclaimed my poetic friend O'Farrell, glad to be home again, as we witnessed this pretty phenomenon, "always between a smile and a tear!”

Perhaps its charm is some mystic element of the pathos that has been inseparable from the tragedy of Irish history, the affection of a vague pity which the city would be the first to scorn, though the wit and humor and the careless freedom of its people contribute their part as

well. As is inevitable with any people who have felt the oppression of alien and extrinsic government, it thinks lightly of the laws it had no part in making, and yet it is a very shrine of reverence and devotion. Thus the spirit of Dublin is profound, as profound as the deeps in the native of this lovely land, the very eidolon of this sad and happy, this fierce and kindly, this bold and gentle, proud, humorous, sensitive, hospitable people. Do not their very songs, the lightest of them, all quaver off in the end to that weird and melancholy chord which once was swept from the five insufficient strings of the old Irish harp? Certain, too, it is that the atmosphere of this old town is filled with the haunting tragedy of her history; and yet in these times there is a new and wistful longing, the quivering new hope in the renaissance of the old land.

"Remain long in Dublin, if you wish to know her," to me said Mr. Thomas M. Kettle, one of the brilliant young men of Ireland, whose wit and humor are much missed these days from the Nationalist benches in the House of Commons. "Stop here three days, and you'll think you know her; stop a fortnight, and doubts will arise; and soon you will discover that a lifetime is all too short to understand her."

To an American who has known Ireland only from her pathetic story, the sentimental songs, the reminiscences of her immigrants, the witty sayings of her exiled sons, their astounding facility in politics, and the fine indignant enthusiasm of Irish meetings when the envoys come to speak of home rule, this Dublin must always have a singular and absorbing interest. He will behold in her the capital of that race which politically is perhaps the most efficient and brilliant in the world, and he will be stirred by memories and vicarious emotions as keen as though they were his own. Perhaps he will value her all the more because she is really so difficult of access.

I shall not forget my sensations that black night on the Royal Mail packet, plunging like a torpedo-boat awash through those angry waves, when suddenly I remembered that I was on the Irish Sea, and recalled how Phineas Finn had the immemorial dread of that rude

passage. He was not the man, or half so capable a representative of his country, as were the Irish M.P.'s I knew, -Redmond and O'Connor and McGhee and Hazleton, but I had known him earlier, and I could sentimentalize him and dramatize him until memories were too suggestive, and other sensations came, physical and, for a while one might almost say, mortal. But I had had my laugh with the others at the young man who came out of the cabin jauntily whistling,

"Come back to Erin, Mavourneen,

Mavourneen,"

and then, his song suddenly ceasing, collapsed on the rail in that cold, driving

spray.

But Dublin was worth such a passage, and would be worth it even were it as bad as O'Farrell would have made it had he his wish, for he declared that he would have had St. George's Channel so much wider and rougher that the English never could have crossed it.

Perhaps an American whose own ancestors, as far as he had ever heard of them, were all Scotch and English might have reserved his enthusiasms and his emotions for the soil of those lands; but he found himself an Irishman in spirit the very first thing on awaking the next morning and looking out at the jaunting-car that had a friendly air of waiting for him on the opposite side of the street. It waited patiently while he breakfasted with a screen between him and the grate fire the drizzling rain made necessary that autumn morning, and the jarvey welcomed him at last just as though he had been expecting him, and no other, all the while.

I could have lingered on the way between the gray walls of Dublin Castle and the brooding roof of Kilmainham jail, where Parnell and Dillon and Davitt and the rest had been imprisoned, or when, later, the sun came out in Phoenix Park, with the viceregal lodge back among its trees, and the window in plain view whence a lord lieutenant had stood one morning and seen some men scuffling, as he thought, in mere sport, until he learned of the murder that had been added to the long and tragic toll. Or I might have sauntered along Sackville Street, which

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the Irish still insist on calling O'Connell Street, -the very names of their streets were taken from them, it seems, and recalled the Great Emancipation, and Isaac Butts and Parnell, until evening came to invoke the weary ghost of Mangan from the shadows. But my excuse for being there at all was to study the government of the town, and I must be about my business.

In that professional mood, of course, there are certain aspects that strike the eye, those little things that are the first indices to the manner in which a town is governed the tenue of the policemen, the regulation of the traffic, the degree of cleanliness of the streets, the kind of paving. One looks, for instance, with the specialized eye of that barber who, the morning after the President had visited our city, and I asked him how the chief magistrate had impressed him, told me that he "noticed that his hair needed trimming."

ITS DIGNIFIED ANTIQUITIES

ALL such things are superficial, of course, though they are significant, too, when understood, of much that is fundamental. However, one should go to headquarters, and so in my own little quest for knowledge of Dublin government I went to the city hall, though the initiated will not always go to the city hall of a city to learn of its government, since its true seat of power is sometimes in another place. But this little old building, the stones of which have been darkened by the weathers of one hundred and thirty-four years, has its own proper dignity, and in its central hall its own beauty, for there are statues of Daniel O'Connell and Chantry's splendid figure of Grattan, and the images of others of the nation's heroes and the town's worthies, and even of an English king. Dublin is proud of these treasures, as of the memories they preserve, though in the case of O'Connell and of Grattan there is little need of the numerous memorials one sees in Dublin, since they live veritably in the thoughts and somehow in the very lives of these intensely hopeful people. Dublin is proud, too, of the little council chamber where the aldermen sit, with excellent portraits of O'Connell and the elder Dillon to stimulate the Irish flow of oratory, and an

hour-glass at the lord mayor's elbow to limit it.

There are other treasures of which they are proud as well, and these the town clerk guards more carefully in his vaults than did the warders lately the jewels in Dublin Castle. Here, for instance, is the original charter of the city, which the clerk displays with a fine civic pride. It is a little bit of parchment not larger than a man's hand, and on it there is written in the kind of Latin clerks used in England eight hundred years ago the concession to the inhabitants of the city of Dublin of the same liberties that were then enjoyed by the king's subjects in the city of Bristol, and depending from it on a plaited leather thong is the seal of Henry II, the wax of which has been hardening since 1171. Whatever rights those curious old characters and abbreviations record and testify were confirmed in the many succeeding charters that were necessary, since kings broke their word often; and of these the most interesting is the one granted by Elizabeth, a large and noble document illuminated in colors which the long sweep of time has hardly dimmed, and from this there hangs a silken cord and tassel which her Majesty was graciously pleased to take a moment in her royal hand in token of her assent to the document's provisions. The clerk will let you hold the great tassel a moment in your own hand if perchance you are subject to thrills and sensations to be derived from such possession.

DUBLIN'S USELESS CHARTERS

BUT the rights and privileges all these charters attested were no more real than the pinchbeck and tarnished muniments and ceremonies with which they were long ago bestowed, and Dublin to-day has such feeble municipal powers-not as many, indeed, as an American city- that even her granting of the freedom of the city bestows no real liberty. Yet it is a high honor, and the roll of those who were considered worthy of it is another of the town's precious possessions, and much more interesting than most autographalbums. There are not many names in it, and of these only two are Americans. One is that of General Grant, whose bold, familiar signature adorns the head of a page, and the other is an autograph

of such trembling and nervous characters that it is difficult to decipher, and then presently you make it out as that of a man who ruled the first of the cities of his adopted country so long that doubtless he knew how to value the honor that was done him when the freedom of the metropolis of his native land was conferred on Richard Croker. The honor was bestowed, I believe, in recognition of his services to the Irish cause in raising a large fund for the home rule propaganda, and it must have had its own meaning and significance to one who long before had left his sad native isle as an emigrant, and had then returned after many years to receive such distinction from the first city and the first citizen of Ireland.

It is an honor indeed that for a while was refused to the most distinguished, the most beloved, the most successful, and in a way the most tragic of Ireland's leaders, and the story of that refusal is the keynote to all of Dublin's government and to the politics which in that city, as do national politics in ours, prevent the realization of complete efficiency.

HOME RULE THE OBSTACLE TO ALL
OTHER REFORMS

THERE is of course only one public question in Ireland, and that is home rule. Every other matter waits on that, every other question hinges on that; it is as insistent as the "wet-and-dry" issue in the politics of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and, like that, short-circuits every other reform. Not only that, but it complicates English politics, and ever since Isaac Butts was worried into his grave, and the leadership of the Irish national party passed into the hands of Parnell, the policy of parliamentary obstruction which he instituted has imperatively put aside all other issues. It has tumbled out of power Conservative and Liberal ministers; Gladstone, Salisbury, and Asquith have bowed to its imperious authority, and in sheer despair of ever being free to deal with other problems England has resolved, or seems to have resolved, to let Ireland go, that she herself may be released from the obdurate thraldom of a perplexity that will not give her peace.

This work came from Parnell's hands,

and it is not strange, therefore, that no man, perhaps not even the great O'Connell himself, was ever loved more rapturously in Ireland than was Parnell in his lifetime. His visits to that island were like the progresses of a royal prince, his grave in Glasnevin, with its simple cross, Protestant though he was, is always covered with flowers, and visited as often as the grave of the great liberator, whose cenotaph is raised high above it, and they will point you out old women in Ireland who marched out of church that morning on which Parnell, after the tragedy to which his romance lured him, was denounced from the altar.

It was at that turbulent time, now thirty-three years ago, when the Irish question once more arose in its most exacerbated and bitter form to menace the government Gladstone had only formed. Michael Davitt had organized the Land League, and, with Parnell's recognition of the agrarian agitation it undertook, the Irish were united. Evictions, boycotts, misery, and distress were rampant; there were all sorts of intimidations and outrages. Parnell had just returned from a tour of the United States, and with welldisciplined forces and a full war-chest, when the general elections came on, he went in person to Ireland to direct the campaign. John Dillon went with him, and at Cork they had been tendered the freedom of the city. The Nationalists of Dublin, to which city they were on their way, determined to honor them with a similar, though more significant, dignity.

HOW DUBLIN GAVE THE FREEDOM OF THE CITY TO PARNELL AND DILLON

THE Lord Mayor of Dublin, at that time Mr., now Sir, George Moyers, was a Unionist, and that a man of his faith and politics could hold the chief elective position in a strongly Nationalist capital was due to the tolerance of Daniel O'Connell himself, who years before, just after Catholic emancipation, had worn the robes and gold chains of that office. He was the first reform lord mayor, as they say in Dublin, having been elected in 1841 under the Reformed Corporations Act, and no less in wisdom than in generosity after his great victory in freeing his countrymen and his coreligionists from the ex

ceptional laws that had oppressed them, he had declared that the two parties should alternately be represented in the office of lord mayor, a Nationalist to serve for a year, and a Unionist to serve for a year. His authority was such that he impressed this precedent on the city as though it were a veritable law, and down all the years for nearly half a century this custom prevailed, and this graceful forbearance was shown by a party that was always in control of majorities.

It was late in October, 1881, then, that Parnell and Mr. Dillon were coming up from Cork; there was little time for preparation, and, indeed, none, it was thought, was needed. A requisition, according to law, was sent to the lord mayor to summon a special meeting of the council for the purpose of conferring the honorary freedom of the city on the two leaders; but in a letter addressed to the town clerk on the twenty-fourth of October the lord mayor astounded the Nationalists by "regretting" that he "could not comply with the requisition, as he had a serious duty imposed on him in those grave times of political excitement, and that as chief magistrate of the city he wished to avoid interference with the acts of the Government, upon whose shoulders the responsibility for the government of the country rested." Then the Nationalists, under some provision of law, called a special meeting of the council for the next day, when it was moved by Councilor Edward Dwyer Gray, M.P., and seconded by Alderman Meagher, "That the honorary freedom of the city be conferred upon Charles Stewart Parnell, M.P., and John Dillon, M.P."

The question was put, and a division taken, when by the strange misadventure of the absence of Nationalist members there appeared twenty-three votes for the motion, and twenty-three against.

Then Lord Mayor Moyers, elected, according to the old rule of O'Connell, by Nationalist votes, completed his offense by giving his casting-vote against the motion, and declared it lost, and Parnell and Dillon, coming up to the capital of the nation of which they were the leaders, were humiliated by the refusal to show them the finest honor an Irishman knows.

The action of the lord mayor aroused all the anger of those angry times, and the

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