proposed innovation is New Yorkish makes no appeal to her, while the fact that it is an innovation is the reverse of appealing. Among American cities above the half-million class, Baltimore is unquestionably the greatest harker back. Like the gentleman who was going to Bangor to get drunk, Baltimore is becoming a modern city, but, gosh, how she dreads it! With desperate tenacity she clings to every remaining fragment of antiquity. She still has lamplighters and alley saloons. Both diminish in number yearly, but Baltimore cherishes the few survivors. The last horse-car disappeared some years ago, but Baltimore still retains the old-fashioned overhead trolley-wires, which make the streets appear as if festooned with cobwebs. While the "bright, bitter cities down the West" are striving desperately to become spick-and-span and imitating the showiness, if not the magnificence, of Fifth Avenue, Baltimore sets her face steadfastly in the other direction. To say that she is an ugly city is to give altogether a false impression, for ugliness ordinarily is construed as a negative quality, the absence of beauty. The astounding, the incredible, the downright fabulous ugliness of Baltimore, on the other hand, is distinctly a positive quality. The amazed newcomer to the city is almost persuaded that she has studied ugliness, practised it long and toilsomely, made a philosophy of ugliness and raised it to a fine art, so that in the end it has become a work of genius more fascinating than spick-and-span tidiness could ever be.

The center of the town conforms to no sort of standard ever heard of

anywhere else. It is typical of America to the extent of having a group of vast office-buildings, but what buildings! Some of them are mere boxes, but several have achieved an architectural dizziness that makes the most eccentric of New York's look commonplace by comparison. Crazy angles, astounding cornices, dadaistic whorls and spirals mount insanely to a mad climax in a mighty tower, reminiscent of the Giralda, but capped by a patent-medicine bottle three stories high!

On the ground-level the effect is masterfully carried out. With one exception, the business streets are all narrow and most of them tortuous. Parking is permitted on both sides, thereby limiting the range of vision to right and left. Projecting signs, many of them of unbelievable hideousness, effectually interfere with any possibility of a vista along such streets as are relatively straight.

Within the last twenty years since factories have sprung up all around the harbor, and especially since the building of the enormous steel-mills at Sparrow's Point, countless smokestacks have been belching soft-coal smoke into Baltimore's atmosphere. Therefore the prevailing tone of the business buildings, originally red, or gray, or buff, or white, is now a uniform black, except for an occasional structure on which the sand-blast men have recently been at work, and which shines, for a few months, like the whites of a frightened Negro's

eyes.

Yet the total effect is not, as you might suppose, maddening. It is not even seriously depressing. The dull coloring of the city, its emptiness of stimulation, its lack of sparkle, make

for quiet, but not for melancholy. It is a slatternly city, but curiously easy, curiously comfortable. It does not spur one, but neither does it threaten. Nothing aspires in Baltimore, but nothing forbids.

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It is perhaps worth while to repeat that all this applies to the center of the city only. Baltimore has charming suburbs. Indeed, there is some foundation for the claim that the modern "development" was invented in the Maryland metropolis. Certainly Roland Park was one of the earliest of its type in this country. Now one finds miles of streets laid out according to the best landscape engineering and lined with houses the design of each of which has passed an exacting test. an exacting test. In these suburbs not even the editor of the "Ladies' Home Journal" could find a flaw. They are as impeccable as Mr. George F. Babbitt's model home in Zenith. But they are no more native to Baltimore than are their counterparts around every other American city. Overnight they might be detached from their present connection and attached to Cleveland, or Atlanta, or Kansas City, and no one would note anything strange the next morning.

What is typical of Baltimore, architecturally, is the famous red-brick block with white marble steps. The existence of extensive marble quarries just outside the city made such steps relatively cheap a few decades ago; and in the Victorian era the spotlessness of her steps was the basis of a housewife's reputation in the neighborhood. One shudders to think of the backaches those quarries have indirectly caused.

In those days old George Washington, standing on the top of his Doric column in Mount Vernon Place, could look over and beyond the houses of all the rulers of the city. To-day the monument is in downtown Baltimore, its simple loveliness an incongruous element there, while the rulers have retired over the hills and far away. More and more of the red-brick blocks each year are given over to the Afro-American, the Slav and the neo-Roman, none of whom wastes backaches on white marble steps.

Yet the evacuation is not accomplished with cheers and happy laughter, but with a sort of reluctance. Baltimore becomes modern, but morosely. She clings to her remnants of antiquity, such as, for example, the Camden Street Station of the Baltimore and Ohio and the Charles Street Station of the Pennsylvania. Go-getterism is not to her fancy; she accepts it, but with a certain disdain.

One who will walk in Charles Street at the proper hour on any fine afternoon may behold a marvelnamely, the spirit of Baltimore incarnate. It is a great lady, perhaps eighty years old, but still erect, taking the air as she has taken it in good weather these sixty years. When she began the practice, Charles Street was the promenade of the fashionable, and everybody who was anybody was seen there in the afternoon. To-day it is to the ordinary person a clanging, howling, screeching bedlam through which trucks, trolleys, taxis, horse-drawn vehicles and private automobiles fight their way, while along the sidewalks surge mobs drawn from all the four corners of

the earth. Hard-driven traffic cops fight valiantly for control, but at that, crossing Charles Street is frequently a hair-raising adventure to ordinary persons.

But a great lady of Baltimore is not an ordinary person, and you know it the moment she comes in sight. This one, in particular, is unmistakable. She is invariably clad in black silk, yards and yards of it and of the stiffest, with a touch of white at throat and wrists. Her one concession to Time is an ebony cane. It is her sole concession, to man or to nature. She is small of stature, and her countenance is certainly not formidable; but she has The Presence. When that small, black figure moves down Charles Street, it is as if the cathedral had suddenly started out for a stroll. She takes the road, all of it, and Charles Street instantly recognizes its place and gets out of her way. She strolls along the swarming sidewalks, and Serbs, Croats and Slovenes jostle each other into the gutter to clear her path. She saunters into the stream of traffic; and policemen, instead of exploding into picturesque blasphemy, whirl upon the charging monsters with white gloves uplifted. Motormen and taxidrivers slam on the brakes and pray. There is the squealing of tortured steel, the clangor of bumpers suddenly meeting; rubber slides hissing over the asphalt. But the great lady saunters through untouched, and (this is the miracle) nobody swears. For she is so obviously a great lady that all Charles Street knows she has always the right of way.

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Baltimore city is in some respects the great lady. She has her habits

which she disdains to alter merely to avoid being run over by a deplorably hasty and noisy world. But neither will she enter into vulgar disputation with any one. She simply holds to her course, supremely confident that the lesser breeds will scatter before her. Does the nation adopt an Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, contrary to Baltimore's notion of what is fitting and proper? She does not explode into vituperation; she merely shrugs and instructs her police officers to attend strictly to the business of enforcing the laws of the city and of Maryland, letting prohibition severely alone. Does the Ku Klux Klan rise to high tide on all sides of this, the colony founded by Catholic Baron Baltimore as a refuge for his coreligionists? She shrugs again and does nothing beyond seeing to it that nobody throws a brick at a Klan parade. Do the Catholics of New York rush en masse to the banner of Al Smith? Baltimore promptly elects a Methodist mayor over a Catholic, and meditates the possibility of seizing the Democratic nomination for the Episcopalian Ritchie.

The rest of the country, noting these peculiarities, arrives at the conclusion that Baltimore is the most tolerant city on the Atlantic seaboard, and begins to accept at face value the "Evening Sun's" designation of the commonwealth as the Maryland Free State. But tolerance is an effect, not a cause. The cause of Baltimore's tolerance is her towering self-sufficiency. She is so supremely confident of her ability to deal effectively with Catholics, Ku Klux, or prohibition enforcement agents that she can afford to be tolerant of them

C

ULTURE is the bouquet, the aroma, of experience. We connect it with education, yet we all feel that education is only a possible ingredient-not every educated person is cultured, not every cultured person has enjoyed, in any formal sense, a preliminary education. A witty Frenchman says that culture is what remains when you have forgotten what you learned; yet culture is more than a residuum-it is an active habit of the mind and heart. Without the activity it might still be a good thing to have, but it would hardly be a virtue.

The word is a farmer's image, suggesting rich ground, plowing, and crops. Cultivated earth owes much to the dead things which go into it, and much to the tilling, to the turning up into sunshine and rain; but we still should not call it cultivated if it produced nothing. The harvest must be a double benefit, helpful in an immediate way, but providing something in addition, which time will turn back into the soil.

It is this creative function which distinguishes culture from something which too often borrows its name. Some of us, healthy barbarians that we are, feel a resentful emotion surging whenever we encounter that false culture which is a barren man

ner, an outward resemblance to something which once, in some other time and place, was fruitful. When we hear the American boy, returned from Oxford, talking like an English boy, and simulating an English reaction to life, we have the conviction that all is not well. When we see in our churches or colleges an aping of some architecture which long ago had a natural expression of life, but which never of itself would grow out of American conditions, we suspect that some one or something has gone spiritually off the track. Is this culture? Should I be cultured if I could write like Arnold or Pater? It is just because the barbarian is healthy that he suspects this dead momentum of what was originally a vital present. The true culture would involve as much of the past, but it would but it would circle through the moment in which we now breathe, it would be a putting forth of modern energies, it would take the color of the earth out of which it is now springing.

Academic minds are said to cherish the false, echoing culture. I fear it is rather the general human mind which rests gratefully on the accomplishments of others, and refuses to pay the laborious and daily price of remaining alive. To be sure, the