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land, while I doubt if you will find anything like the same number of people who speak good English. As for the English of the Back Bay, it delightfully recalls that of Westminster Abbey, the London stage, and the Houses of Parliament, though a marked difference remains. To my ear, the Back Bay speaks more charmingly. So I acquit New England of verbal affectation and perversity, just as I acquit her of wholesale madness and unpardonable over-intellectuality. Chicago, not Boston, "made culture hum."

With equal cordiality I acquit New England of aristocratic exclusiveness. No one has "wanted to know who my grandfather was." Far from indicating a worship of ancestors, the "Transcript's" genealogical page indicates a tardy and unexcited reaction against a long neglect of ancestors even in the district peppered over with tablets, statues, monuments, and memorial edifices. Unearthing an ancestor at the Genealogical Library, one no more boasts of him than a Virginian boasts of belonging to a "grand old Southern family." Why, bless 'em! they all do. Nevertheless, there is some pertinence in the observation that a New-Englander dreads being "introduced to any one he has not already met," and squirms when a stranger approaches. In hotel lobbies, what silence! Address a New-Englander across a restaurant table, and, nine chances in ten, you salute a box-turtle. But there are abundant reasons for this. All the adventurous New-Englanders went West. Pioneer life, which breeds a sense of interdependence among mortals and therefore a free-and-easiness sometimes indelicate, vanished from New England generations ago. A stationary population removes the impulse to court new friends lest old friends move away. A New-Englander finds it an undertaking to keep up with those he already has. Yet see how these "exclusive" New-Englanders behave if take along an Airedale or a fine fouryear-old boy. Actually, they pick you up.

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Shyness, not pride, makes them appear cold. "Their faces are masks," said a San-Franciscan, unjustly enough; later

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came the fire, and San Francisco thanked Heaven for warm hearts in New England. "They lack bounce," said "Cyclone" Ellis, who has since been fairly. lionized for his ebullience, his originality, and his captivating, cantankerous WildWesternism. New-Englanders adore flavor. Not long ago there arrived in Boston a gentleman brigand, with cavalry legs, a sombrero, a Belgravia accent, and a habit of barking, "Caramba!" "Me plan," he explained, "is to take Bolivia, smash Ecuador, move upon Peru, and South America is mine. I shall not be king, but I shall be the power behind the throne." Once I heard him remark, "When I see a pretty girl in a window, I simply buy the house." A questionable person, very; yet New-Englanders, for the sheer prank of it, clasped him to their bosoms, wined him, dined him, and bewailed his too sudden departure. Secure in their positions, they could afford to. For real "exclusiveness," armed to the teeth and shaking in its boots, apply to the parvenus of Middle Western cities; for real democratic cordiality, to New-Englanders of blue blood, a formal exterior, and some remnant of the celebrated New England conscience.

"Ah, that conscience!" sighs the American. "How Puritanical!" Mistaking facts for truths, he finds evidence unlimited. In Massachusetts, cow-boy swearwords deleted by censor from a play by Mrs. Beulah Dix Flebbe. At New England book-stores no Boccaccio. At her picture-shops grim memories of Bouguereau and of a dealer heavily fined. In a minor city the Y. M. C. A. debating, "Is bowling a Christian game?" In Connecticut hardly a train on Sunday. And yet, if I myself may substitute facts for truths, there is hope for the New-Englanders despite all this. Under pressure, they make capital smugglers and nimble enough taxdodgers. Few surpass a New Hampshire farmer at "deaconing" a "caow." Here and there some scapegrace New-Englander turns bandit. Observing the streets of Boston, a philosopher gasped, "These people seem morbidly Puritanical about everything but their vices."

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Farm-houses, eaveless or gambrel-roofed and mossy"

New England laughs when you quote from the school-girl's composition, "During that year Whittier made many fast friends. The fastest of these were Alice and Phoebe Cary." Yet are her daugh

ters all Alices and Phoebes? One, alas! turned a somersault in Copley Square. Another kicks the chandelier. Two more disguised themselves as old ladies and visited burlesque shows. A poetess (name

omitted) smokes a pipe. At the shore a Puritan maiden appeared in the one-piece shocker worn by Trouville demi-mondaines. Says an acquaintance of mine, "I was quite a prig in the West, but New England has taken it out of me."

I report these highly exceptional phenomena because belief in a frightfully overworked pervasive New England conscience is a sorrow to many and dies hard. Mrs. Wiltshire of Pittsburgh, who has a villa in New England, sends napkins to be laundered as soon as they have been used once. Mrs. Abner Sykes, her New England laundress, irons them without washing, and returns them with bill. Tell this to Mrs. Wiltshire, and it will not alter her idea of the New England conscience. Summer boarders cling tenaciously to that idea, fleeced though they are. It is an idée fixe, originating, perhaps, in the fame of New England reformers. Some queer, queer reformers she has at present. In spare moments I my self have reformed things, so I can speak freely.

After signing, but not reading, a petition, a reformer beheld it next morning in the newspaper, where it began, "We, the parents of colored children." Reformers still belaud prohibition; how wisely you

may judge by a recent despatch from Portland, Maine: "As the Republican state convention is in session here, the mayor has ordered the chief of police to close all saloons at five P.M." When a distinguished anti-imperialist was chidden for possessing few facts concerning the Philippines, he replied: "We don't go much on facts. We flatter ourselves that we have got hold of some eternal principles."

In his autobiography the late Charles Francis Adams, who magnificently represented New England in the uprightness of his character, and misrepresented it outrageously with his pen, quotes a letter in which Lowell observed, "The Adamses have a genius for saying even a gracious thing in an ungracious way." Instead of resenting it, Mr. Adams returned thanks for the moral and esthetic gratification it afforded, and there are reformers, I suspect, who glory in their "disagreeable goodness." When a new administration comes in, they "hope for the worst." Cheerfully they protest, "Whatever is, is wrong." Forgive them. They inherit reform from bygone generations. It runs in their blood. By comparison, it runs thin; hardly a great social movement but originated in New England, hardly a

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great social movement but has progressed more triumphantly outside New England than within it. So a quest of the New England conscience leads to Oklahoma or Kansas, if reform gives the clue, and truth to tell, reform is of many clues the least enlightening. I know a hundred better; let me cite only one.

Not long ago a transplanted Westerner in New England went insane, developing a homicidal tendency along with others as unpleasant. Thereupon a New England Unitarian took the lunatic into his own house. They were friends, it is true, but not intimates. No special responsibility prompted the measure. It was an affair of gratuitous, deliberate, and, as the world views such things, wholly uncalled-for benevolence. Nothing I have ever observed in New England has seemed so representative of the New England character at its best. Show me a New England conscience, and I will show you a sensitiveness to obligation and a courage in fulfilling it that are rare upon earth and as splendid as rare. The same Lowell who twitted the Adamses wrote elsewhere, "Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work-this is the short formula in

which we may sum up the teachings of the founders of New England." Multitudes are still loyal to those teachings. Charities teem in New England. So do all good deeds. If occasionally her reformers seem a bit wrong-headed, their hearts are right.

Watching New England for twentyeight years, what have I seen? A bluestocking? The lady who reads Plato in trolley-cars and whose favorite amusement is puttering with calculus came to New England from Iowa. An aristocrat? On the contrary, a democrat. A prude? The national uprising against "Une matinée de Septembre" originated not in New England, but in "gay" New York. A saint? Yes, there is sanctity in New England, if by sanctity you mean devotion to the fine, brave, wholesome ideals of Minnesota, Maryland, Ohio, or Missouri. Also, there is villainy, just as everywhere. There is less ignorance than elsewhere. There is vulgarity, a trace of it. Where is there not? Take her "by and large," as the New-Englanders say, and you find her-American. Strange, then, that a race that fought and bled to vanquish secession should have secession thrust upon them! It amounts to that. Outsiders

they are, aliens in their own country. New England's "barefoot boy with cheek of tan" no longer hopes to be President. America no longer considers New England. To the West she represents the "effetest East." To the South she is occasionally a plague, the rest of the time a myth. Only by courtesy, not to say chivalry, do we include her in "the United States of America and of New England."

Then is hers a painful plight, and are Americans justified in intoning, "From battle, murder, sudden death, and being a New-Englander, good Lord, deliver us"? For her own part, she is "nicely, thank you," unaware of her isolation, and, in the main, unaware of America. At intervals she visits an overgrown trading-post called New York. Twice in a lifetime she visits Washington. Occasionally she is reminded of the West by the arrival of Mr. Bryan or "101 Ranch" or dividends from some cañon, gulch, or coulée in Nevada. To paraphrase her playful humorist, "Ignorance of America is one of the branches taught in New England's public schools." When she thinks of America, as happens now and then, she marvels at its extreme provincialism. One might imagine her a suburb of Europe, facing east, not west. She goes abroad because she believes in "seeing her own country first." Far from considering herself a Brittany, lost in a forgotten corner of America, New England has rather the sensation of being a Britain, apart from the mainland, praises be! and "a durn sight" better. Happy New England! When I asked an English girl how it felt to be English, she said with warmth, "It feels jolly good."

So here. And yet New-Englanders have their anxieties, some merely illusory, some based upon conditions little short of alarming. With age comes decay. After ten generations a community begins to fear that "the stock has run out," and in certain districts of rural New England it would appear that precisely this has befallen. It is less a question of abandoned farms than of abandoned farmers. While no one pretends that such instances are at all broadly representative, there are fish

ing villages where in forty years no marriage has occurred, and farming villages where couples separate without divorce and form new alliances without the aid of clergy. Here and there inbreeding results in deformity, idiocy, and criminality. This has gone so far that the problem today is, "How to protect the cities against the country?"

Says President Hyde, "Poor land and rich water make New England a manufacturing community." Her hill towns, now decadent, ought never to have been built. Those rocky, infertile upland fields. forbade the use of agricultural machinery and presupposed slave labor; that is, boys compelled to work for their fathers without hire. When that ceased, ruin began, increasing as the West outrivaled New England in raising cattle, sheep, hogs, corn, wheat, and what-not besides. Railroads developed her valleys, depleting her hills. Great towns grew up, and thither fled her peasantry. In formerly prosperous rustic hamlets the weak and stupid remained, to breed a race of poor whites. This continues, though optimists have pointed to many a hill town still thriving, and feign to believe that modern innovations-bicycles, trolley-cars, automobiles, telephones, graphophones-will somehow rescue the others.

But what New England faces is not decadence, primarily; it is transition. "If you will have an omelet," said Napoleon, "you must break some eggs," and when poor land and rich water turn a vast farm into a vast mill, some incidental tragedies will occur. For a time, that is; then applied ingenuity steps in. A federation of railroad presidents, bankers, governors, economists, and industrialists has recently undertaken to mend the broken eggs.. If poor land exists, so does rich land, with a hopeful outlook for intensive farming. Why dread transition? Like Henry James, New England is "all transitions," and has mostly braved it through.

At New Bedford, note the familiar cartoon: two pictures; a group of whalemen, a group of mill operatives; caption, "Spinning Yarns, Old Style; Spinning Yarns,

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