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,

French-Canadian.

Save for Scotch-Cana

dian trained nurses, New England would die of her "never-get-overs." Hebrews increase and multiply; one hears of "Harvard Jewniversity." If Germans are rare, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians abound. The Children's Settlement in Boston attracts twenty-two different nationalities. Alien anarchists, hunted out of Paterson, New Jersey, took refuge in New England. Lawrence is a foreign legion, a Midway, a Babel; its device, "No God, no country." Thus far, however, only the Irish have come as conquerors. They are everywhere; as my friend Terence would say, “All the harps from here to heaven, an' divil a native dares touch wan av thim."

Of necessity Boston's mayor is Irish. Among the stateliest new churches in New England many are Catholic. The lovely new English Gothic tower on University Heights surmounts an Irish college. Socially, a vague barrier separates cultivated Irish families from cultivated New England families; it is vanishing; soon it will be no more. Once cross it, and you find the Irish spirit not only buoyant, but modest. In an old New England town, while dining with an Irish household, I spoke of my adventures in the steerage during a penniless trip abroad years ago. "Don't mention the steerage!" cried my hostess. "We're too near it!" There, in her dignified mansion, with all her cultivation and brilliancy and charm, she could say that!

New Erin is not impending. It has arrived. Yet, although stimulated somewhat by Irish jollity and pluck and tormented somewhat by Irish politicians, New England remains unchanged. Themselves conquered, the conquerors have become New-Englanders, and here and there the most devout conservators of beans and the broad a.

But meanwhile a subtler invasion proceeds from New York City. If Rhode Island has its Newport, the New England hills have a dozen. There are Bostonians whose dream is to dance in pink coats at a hunt ball. A new aristocracy,

with Fifth Avenue ideals, has sprung up alongside the old aristocracy of blue blood. Nor is this all. New York magazines and newspapers, New York plays, and New York fashions tend gradually to undermine New England traditions. Comic weeklies published in New York ridicule New England. Read once, the jokes prompt only some such retort as "You think so, do you? Then the laugh is on you." Read a hundred times, they breed a definite uneasiness. Moreover, renegade New-Englanders return from "the city," and jeer New England's conservatism. That cuts. It is dangerously near "twitting on facts."

True, New England's old-fogy stone walls are fast coming down, to make villas for outsiders. Her ancient farm-houses catch fire and are not rebuilt. Her ancient stage-coaches are being replaced by motors. The village "store," once crammed with everything from Bunker Hill chocolate-drops to beaver hats demoded in the days of Daniel Webster, has fallen victim to the mail-order atrocity. But deer now and then invade her towns. Rattlesnakes still lurk in her hills. Not long ago an owl spent a happy week on the flagstaff over Boston's city hall. Here and there a town-crier survives. Here and there a great, swollen population remains a village, with "selectmen" and an annual town-meeting. Cambridge has not yet outgrown its countless, clamorous firebells. Graveyards still cumber the business portion of a New England city. These picturesque antiquities, all told, are a shock and a grief to strangers visiting New England. Oh, logical strangers! Having come for glimpses of Plymouth Rock, Concord, Lexington, and the House of Seven Gables, they rail at a New England somewhat less than up to date and "classy." Logic or no logic, it strikes them that New England, the home of reformers, is of all American or pseudoAmerican communities the one most needing reform.

Well, perhaps. She treasures some comical enough railways, some scandalous prisons, and, in Massachusetts, a system