Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[graphic][subsumed][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][graphic][graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[merged small][graphic][graphic][merged small][merged small][subsumed][merged small]
[graphic]

MAY 17, 1860.

[merged small][ocr errors][subsumed][merged small][merged small]

EVEN SO.

MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S impressions of New York

City, as published in the London Times, are well worth reading.

That we are a superior people is generally admitted by ourselves, and possibly the fact that we are happy in our filth and general corruption is not to our discredit. Being thus happy, it may be unwise to attach too much importance to outside criticism.

Here are some of Mr. Kipling's statements, and nothing truer was ever said of this extraordinary city:

"The more I studied it the more grotesquely bad it grew. It was bad in the paving of its streets, bad in its police management, and bad in its sanitary arrangements. No one that I talked to has approached the management of New York in a proper spirit, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance.

"In a heathen land three things are supposed to be the pillars of a moderately decent government. They are: Regard for human life; justice, criminal and civil, and good roads. Yet in this Christian city they think lightly of the first; their own papers, their own speech, and their own actions prove it. They buy and sell the second at a certain price, openly and without shame, and are apparently content to do without the third.

"The blame of their city evils is not altogether with the gentlemen, chiefly of foreign extraction, who control the city. These find the people made to their hand-a lawless breed, ready to wink at one evasion of the law if they may profit by another, and in their rare hours of leisure content to smile over the details of a clever fraud.

"There is nothing more delightful than to sit, for a strictly limited time, with a child who tells you what he means to be when a man. But when the same child-loud-voiced, insistent and unblushingly eager for praise, but as thin-skinned as the most morbid hobbledehoystands about all your ways, telling you the same story in the same voice, you begin to yearn for somebody finished-say, Egypt and a completely dead mummy.

"It is neither seemly nor safe to hint that the government of the largest city in the United States is a despotism of the alien by the alien, for the alien, tempered with occasional insurrections of decent folk."

[graphic]
[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[graphic]
[blocks in formation]

318

THE

[blocks in formation]

MULTUM IN PARVO.

HE editor of the Hawville Clarion made the following personal announcement in a recent issue of that paper:

We wish it distinctly understood that hereafter in our capacity as Justice of the Peace we will perform no marriage ceremonies without the fee, in We were driven to this decision cash or its equivalent, strictly in advance.

by an unpleasant incident which happened last week. After we had joined Alkali Cronk to Miss Dorky Partlow, the groom proposed that he defer payment for one week, at the end of which time he would return and pay us in proportion to his happiness. We cheerfully assented, expecting to receive a good fat fee. Instead, however, Mr. Cronk came back upon the following morning and mauled us almost to death. Hence, we insist upon payment in advance. Country produce, hoop-poles, old bones, pelts or soft soap taken same as cash.

ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES OF THE CIGARETTE.

[graphic]
[ocr errors][merged small]
[graphic][graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
« AnteriorContinuar »