citizens is only worthy of men who are superfluous in modern civilization. Certainly, Nicaraguan Liberals everywhere have approved unanimously the arrangements of Tipitapa and are grateful for the efforts of General Stimson toward peace. At first there was surprise and hesitation; but sober thought brought faith in the promises of the personal representative of President Coolidge, considering that they involve the honor of the whole Nation founded by George Washington. We prefer officers of the American Navy to supervise the Nicarguan elections, because they are educated in the tenets of honor and probity. They are more representative of their country than civilians would be. Through more than a year's contact with them I have found them to yield to none in discipline and respect for public liberties and in the discharge of their duty. By the present law, called the Dodds Law, there are five hundred and thirty electoral polling-places, of which more than half are in the rural districts, where their supervision is difficult. The worth of the election in Nicaragua depends now on the manner in which the arrangements of Tipitapa are carried out. If they are carried out honestly, as I believe they will be, due to President Coolidge's word, the elections will be made with entire equity. In general, Nicaragua stands in need of republican education. This end can be achieved in a period of twelve or more years under the supervision of the American Government. The passing of every four-year period will see this need diminished, for the National Guard will be organized under the direction of American officers and trained to respect the law and the national institutions; the National Congress will be composed of better men, because they will have been freely elected by the people; the judicial power will be composed of honorable magistrates, austere and patriotic in their actions. We want the independence and sovereignty of our country, and the more we want it, the better government we will build, granted we may live under the ægis of peace and labor. The watchful eye of the United States can be no better employed than in this noble cause. The very Monroe Doctrine compels the United States in that direction, for that Doctrine postulates for the New World the fullest realization of republicanism and democracy. Because we have had no peace, because our national income diminishes or is used up by war, and the fields lie uncultivated, our great duty is to do away with war. Any sacrifice is small to achieve this objective. The voice of peace that sounded in our ears was so tremendous that it was impossible not to yield. It is to the good General Stimson and the just that I believe the Washington Government this time, in the case of Nicaragua, is laboring. It was unjust, no doubt, to stop us on the road to victory; but peace is as great as victory, and liberty is as great as peace. Our country needs a profound peace. If bad government continues to prevail in Nicaragua, if Liberals and Conservatives persist in warring for power, obeying personal ambitions, no nation will be found to extend a friendly hand to us or to treat with us. Capital is a great necessity in Nicaragua for the development of the country's progress. We have neither railroads nor highways. We are out of communication with the civilized world. The construction of the railway to the Atlantic coast is very urgent, to bring us nearer to the United States and to Europe. We need more American capital, and it is our first duty to seek it here, for we are obliged to do it by the close relationship that binds together the countries of America for their mutual defense. The interest of the United States in the affairs of the Caribbean Sea is a vital interest. If it renounce the vigilance of that sea and its bordering countries, it places its very life in jeopardy, or at least exposes itself to terrible responsibilities and wars. This interest of the United States is equally beneficial to our countries, for they are thus defended from all aggression of Powers foreign to the continent. In this all the countries of America share a common interest and a common destiny. OPINION, I am told, is divided in the United States as to the policy that has been followed by the Department of State. We Nicaraguans think that we have acquired an explicit right, and that the United States has bound itself to an explicit duty. We Liberals fought to place our country once more under the full authority of the Constitution. In exchange for peace and free elections, we Constitutionalists agreed to disarm, and we who signed the agreement have lived up to our duty. If a few armed bands remain active in the north of Nicaragua that is a natural consequence of our civil wars. After these promises, it must be established in full justice that if the Monroe Doctrine is to be abrogated, that must not be done before the United States has discharged its duty as to the 1928 elections in Nicaragua, which should be rendered impartial by its influence. Let every Nicaraguan citizen without distinction of color or political creed, vote freely, and let power pass into the hands of the representatives of a true national majority. When it comes, that day will witness the birth of true democracy in Nicaragua, the first day of genuine republican life-an occasion of rejoicing for all sincere pa triots. Those that accuse the State Department of supporting President Diaz in obedience to the pressure of bankers and for mean reasons of internal and foreign policies fail in logic when they attack the agreements of Tipitapa and the su pervision of the next election by the marines. They know that, upon the premature withdrawal of the marines. power would remain with Diaz or Chamorro, and Constitutionalists would lose all hope of liberty and democracy. This would be a tremendous injustice. There is talk to the effect that a move will be made at the next Pan-American Congress against interference by the United States in the affairs of Nicaragua and other Caribbean countries. If it is accepted by the Washington Government, we Nicaraguans will demand that it be put into effect after January, 1920 --that is, after North American mediation has effected an entirely fair election in Nicaragua. I may add that my opinion on the Monroe Doctrine and the (Continued on page 477) T The Disappearing Cowboy HE first frosty morning of the fall I loitered by the stove in a crossroads service station in the New Mexico highlands which, for the convenience of tourists and neighboring ranchers, also was attempting to function as quick-lunch counter, soft-drink stand, staple-groceries market, and elementary dry-goods emporium. Outside a burly Mexican mechanic tinkered gingerly with some spark-plug trouble. Inside a flamboyantly Nordic youth of eighteen summers moved with leisurely importance about his duties as head waiter, hot dog chef, lingerie connoisseur, and proprietor's deputy. With his corn-colored hair, brick-red sunburn, and spread-eagle freckles crowning a flannel shirt of gorgeous plaid and a flapping waistcoat drab from harsh service, he might appropriately have stepped out of a Frederick Remington canvas intoning, Oh, bury me not on the lone prair-ree. His smallish blue eyes had the far-away fixation of the ranges, his expression was so set in the cow country's severe whimsicality that one instinctively awaited from him some outburst of humorous philosophy. His drawl, when he took my order for coffee, was the perfection of hesitant, country-bred politeness. His khaki pants and store Oxfords were slight anachronisms, but an impressive Stetson hanging from a nail on the refrigerator made partial atonement. So as a few acquaintances of his own age in equally impressive Stetsons dropped in on various errands it was quite in the picture that he should greet each one with "Howdy, cowboy. What'll you have?" Then almost instantly the film clicked and the actors stepped out of character. Instead of spurs and riatas, the young gentlemen would have "cokes," chocolate milk-shakes, store cigarettes, phonograph records, a spare Ford part or two, or breakfast foods and bakery pies for mother's ranch pantry. One would have nothing at all, but abstracted from the magazine rack a fly-specked copy of "True Confessions" and pored over it with a cow country imitation of a scholar's stoop. Another whistled dolefully, but the tune was about a "red-red-robin" instead of a "lone prair-ree." They fell into gossip as the store re By DUNCAN AIKMAN verted to its social functions; but not the gossip of cow prices, round-up vicissitudes, or the meanness of their respective broncs. They deplored the unreasonable credit requirements in the region's second-hand Ford markets. They discussed dating arrangements for a coming dance at the county woman's club. They debated how long the crabbedness of the new commercial course teacher in the county seat high school, twelve miles away, should be endured. They broke up at last-one to climb into his bakery truck and continue his deliveries, five to drive off home in motor coupés and on motorcycles, and one to mount his cayuse. "So long, cowboy," said the proprietor's corn-haired deputy seven times. Later, when I had paid the mechanic for his experiments and was releasing the brake, the corn-haired boy signaled me from the doorway. plunged off, usually as a well-grown adolescent or a mature man, into a wilderness that was also a man's world. Or, if he happened to be born a rancher's son fifty years ago, he grew up in such a world, shut away from all other sophistications and sophistications and traditions, often barely literate. Three or four, at most half a dozen, times a year he saw some straggling cow country trading post with its general store, post office, and three saloons. Once a year, at the end of the trail drives, he saw this magnificence magnified a hundred times in some shipping point of gaudy delights like Abilene, Kansas, or pre-Rotarian Fort Worth. For women he saw the rancher's overworked wife, if the rancher had a wife; more rarely, the rancher's grown-up daughters or visiting feminine relatives; perhaps a district school-teacher or two; and such women as there might be in "Say, mister," he questioned, "you one or two respectable cow town famfrom El Paso?" I did not deny it. แ 'Cause if you are, do you know of any store jobs a feller could git down there? I've had lots-a experience." I advised him somewhat vaguely to write to the Chamber of Commerce. "Thanks, cowboy," he grinned, expansively. . "So long!" Half the day I motored over range country sweet with drying grass and frosty odors, but sadly cowless. In midafternoon I encountered a veteran ranch friend mending a fence at a far corner of his 50,000 acres, and told him of my morning's entertainment. "Yep," he commented, sententiously. "The word cowboy around here is getting pretty close to a figure of speech." THIS accurately describes the situa tion for three reasons: Few, if any, cowboys are doing their work under the social conditions which made the old-time cowboy a figure of piquant, often picaresque, individuality. Fewer still are doing their work by old-fashioned methods which gave the color of daring and romance to the traditions of the job and to many of its most routine operations. Finally, comparatively few young men of the old cattleman stock in the West are content to do cowboy's work at all. The old-time cowboy, for instance, ilies. More casually and to less subjective result he saw occasionally the floating hetæræ of cow village night life. For other contacts the ranch house or a "queer" buddie in the bunk-house might have a book or two, but the true cowboy probably did not read them. Perhaps a stray copy of a city newspaper came into his hands occasionally, but when it did his running knowledge of events was so slight that he could hardly understand what its news was all about. At most he followed with some regularity some distant county weekly serving as best it could the parochial curiosity of a district several hundred miles square. It was an aloofness tempered with sociability, for both in the bunk-house and at work the cowboy had plenty of companionship with his own kind, and there was more going and coming between ranches than seems possible in an age when paved roads and faultless carbureters are necessary to rural travel. But it was an aloofness, nevertheless, which almost perfectly shielded the cowboy from the standardizing pressure of the mannerisms, the diversions, and the traditions of other social groups. Men of intelligence and character so isolated inevitably developed a highly individual introspective philosophy, distinctive codes of morals and group loyalties, "quaint" tricks of speech, mannerisms, sports, and even folk-lore and folk poetry. Since it took a rarely alert practical intelligence and not a little character to handle wild cattle, the cowboy did develop all these things-not precisely in the manner celebrated by the New Jersey schools of Western romantic fiction, but essentially in the manner chronicled by Will James. As an exotic of American group individualism the cowboy has scarcely been exaggerated. It is simply that as a two-gun swashbuckler and a self-conscious knight errant of virtuously virile adventures he has been misdescribed. But, whatever his glamour as a social and as likely as not is learning to play botching two or three simple minor opercontract bridge. He may call his mates, and even strangers, "cowboy," for at present this is a rather swanky bit of regional slang. But he is nearer in the spirit to Broadway than his cowboy father or grandfather was in the flesh to Atascosa. He may go back to the ranch and the cow business, but every Saturday night he will motor into town for "movies" or other urban social diversions, and he will no more be a cowboy, old style, than he will be a priest of Osiris. eccentric, it was a nineteenth-century A phenomenon, and is fast passing now. 1 As he grows up, he attends a rural or a village school with a fairly standardized curriculum, usually including some of the same supervised sports which other youngsters of his age are playing in their school gymnasiums on Manhattan Island. Later he and half a dozen of his contemporaries in the neighborhood pool their summer's earnings, or their parents' generosity, in the purchase of a used Ford, in which they travel daily for a year or two, or possibly for four years, to the county high school. Or perhaps the ranch boy gets a parttime job in town and lives there during school terms with his Uncle Henry, who practices law or works in an office. In either case, however much or little his high school course does for his mind, the youngster has spent several years steeping himself in town sociabilities and sophistications. He plays football or basket-ball, dabbles in high school journalism, goes to dances, takes town girls to the movies or to church or to roadside petting parties. He bets his quarters, not on round-up performances, but on how Western Conference or even YalePrinceton games will come out. He has a line of small-town wise-cracks, partly derived from the snappy magazines and the funny papers, but remarkably like big-city wise-cracks. He dances, not the buck and wing, but the black bottom, s a matter of fact, he could not be if he tried. His boss would not let him. For the technique of handling cattle has changed since 1890 almost as much as the social environment of the ranges. Part of this is an old story. The fenced ranch had quite displaced the open ranch thirty years ago, and by so much the old specialist in cow-wrestling has submitted to the indignity of becoming a fence-mender under orders. With ations. With the rise of these progress ive ranchers, the cowboy famous for his roping, steer-throwing, and bulldogging feats disappears from the range landscapes-into the professional rodeos. He More and more the man who takes his place becomes a mere farm-hand. not only mends fences, but he spends many days of his working year straightening out stream courses, building dams and reservoirs. As the gentled, fenceconfined herds require less attention, his boss insists that, if he will eat vegetables, he must keep a garden. Worst indignity of all, the ranch and the "cowboys' table must have milk, so the farm-hand becomes, in chore hours, the milker and drover of dairy herds. On many a ranch today the old-time cowboy's proud professional stand that he was there to handle beef cattle in the traditional way and to touch no other work under God's footstool would be as ill received as an I. W. W. demonstration. the coming of the fences the round-up W lost its most thrilling complexities. Once it was preceded by an immense drive which gathered in cattle by tens of thousands over perhaps a 200-mile sweep of territory. At the end came the grueling and complicated business of separating from one another "cutting out"-the herds of perhaps twoscore different ranchers. Now the round-up is simply a drive between a single ranchman's fences, which rarely includes a sweep of twenty miles. Yet this is only the beginning of decadence. When the modernist round-up reaches the branding stage, all of its traditional acrobatics-the roping, throwing, and dragging of calves to the branding pits are missing. The calves and their mothers are simply shunted tactfully from the herd into a large outer corral, and there gradually but still more diplomatically the calves are separated from the cows and urged into an inner pen, where the branding irons are warming. Two or three stalwarts on foot throw them as tenderly as possible, the branding is done, and the dehorning and sterilizing operations are carried out by a foreman who has learned his business from a veterinary. Twenty-five years ago the more progressive ranchers discovered that it did not pay to break a calf's bones with violent rope work, to tear him half to pieces dragging him at the end of a lasso through thorny mesquite and cactus, or to make him a weakling for life through HAT kind of men, then, are staying on the ranches to become farm-hands? Not, to any appreciable degree, the sons of the old American cowboy and cowboy-rancher stock. Up on the remote ranges of Wyoming, Montana, and eastern Oregon, where town life is hardest to get at and old range methods and traditions die hardest, the glamour of the cow business as a kind of wage-paying sporting life still holds a few in their aloofness. Elsewhere the cowboy's son or the rancher's son who has seen a few years of high school or even a few movies is usually done with cattle-tending. Curiously enough, the vocation which he might have inherited goes back where it came from. The Mexican vaquero is so good a cowman that he taught the American nearly all that he ever knew about his profession even in his great days. Nowadays he will work for $60 a month and found, without grumbling about the food, about doing work that is beneath the Nordic cowboy's profes sional dignity, or about the boss's outlandish ideas of coddling cattle. The town has not yet seduced his sociabilities. Already in south and west Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California he occupies four-fifths of the bunk-house, and even in Montana there are few cow counties where he is a stran ger. Look for more of him next season, and for fewer cowboys of the old pattern ev cept as to clothes. HERE are two ways of looking TH at A. A. Milne's latest play. You may view it merely as a fanciful dramatic play of the mediæval Court of King Perivale. . Or you may consider it as moving a piece of poetic truth and beauty as you are likely to see --cast in the form of the fairy tale of "The Ivory Door." A fairy tale, you scoff? Well, in the sense that Shaw's "Joan of Arc" is a fairy tale during that unforgetable moment when Joan tells what prison will mean to her. "Never to hear the wind in the trees" Milne's play is a fairy tale in the sense that any play is, where poetry and fancy weave a tapestry whose final pattern is truth. It is, let us say, a Gobelin which might equally grace a mediæval castle wall or a new Long Island country house. It tells the story equally of today or yesterday and moves the spectator to view all humanity as one man. It is one of those plays wherein the characters do not make the drama. It is Legend which plays the villain. And Fear who is the Lady Macbeth. For in King Perivale's Court it seems there is an Ivory Door behind which lurk devils and spells and the specter of certain death. Whosoever goes through this door to discover the truth of the passage behind it is never seen again. King Stephen went -and never was seen more. It is a door best left locked. Everybody says so. It is fact that is undeniable; it is legend. And yet youth is never satisfied. On the day of his marriage to the Princess Lilia young King Perivale braves allincluding his faithful servant and his Chancellor and penetrates the secret. He finds merely a long dusty passageway, leading to the real world outside. The whole thing has been simply an old wives' tale, to frighten silly people. Returning to his castle courtyard, a trifle dusty and disheveled, and dressed in common clothes, Perivale nevertheless is a little taken aback to have his claim to his own identity roundly hooted. Why, the King is asleep in his bedchamber! There are but two ways the King could have gone forth-this castle gate (and he has not passed this way!) or the Ivory Door, through which no man has ever passed and returned. How can he be the King? Lights Down A Review of the New York Theatre "The Ivory Door" To be brief about it, Perivale's proofs and claims are ridiculed and he is on the point of being put in a dungeon as an impertinent fellow when the discovery of the King's disappearance sets the castle in an uproar, and, most curiously enough, increases the uncertainty of his own position a thousandfold. For, since the King has disappeared and he claims Our Own Theatre List "Broadway," Broadhurst.-Life back-stage in a Broadway cabaret. Done with vim, rum, and pistols. "The Road to Rome," Playhouse.-A slightly Rabelaisian take-off on history which might have been a great play if genuine emotion had been substituted for wisecracking. An amusing evening, as it is. "The Shannons of Broadway," Martin Beck. -Vaudeville and melodrama, with vaudeville taking the tricks. "Burlesque," Plymouth.-Back-stage drama in the small towns, with maternal emotion making a success of an otherwise ruined actor. "Escape," The Booth.-Strung on a thin thread, but the most satisfying play on Broadway. "Porgy," Republic.-A folk-play of South Carolina Negro life along the Charleston water-front. "The Good Hope," Civic Repertory Theatre. -A slow tragedy of the men who comb the sea for fish and the women they leave behind. "Trial of Mary Dugan,” National.-Evidence turned inside out, in an expert and engrossing mystery murder trial. "An Enemy of the People," Hampden's Theatre.-It's bitter; but it's Ibsenand true. "Coquette," Maxine Elliott.-A tragedy of youth and small-town life in the South. Musical Shows "Hit the Deck," Belasco.-Louise Groodyand a fast show. "The Five O'clock Girl," Forty-fourth Street Theatre.-Has nearly everything. "Good News," Chanin.-We haven't seen it, but our friends like it. "The Mikado,” Royale.—Our old friends Gilbert and Sullivan excellently represented. "The Merry Malones," Erlanger's.-George Cohan-and everybody dances. "Manhattan Mary," Apollo.-Ed Wynn. "Funny Face," Alvin Theatre.-The Astaires dramatizing Gershwin's rhythms. Musical comedy at its best. What more? to be the King, he is considered to be in the pay of the devil behind the Ivory Door. He is not the King. Instead, he has killed the King and returned to impersonate him. So his very resemblance damns him. Danger presses very fast then. His Chancellor fears to believe he is really the King. He is unable to prove himself the greatest swordsman and painter, or measure up in reality to any of the qualities which legend has always attributed to a king-and once the final test is devised for him, he knows he is lost. According to popular legend, the Prince and the Princess have always been secret lovers before the royal mar riages are announced. The reality is, of course, that he has never seen the Princess he is to marry. State marriages in Perivale's Kingdom are always arranged thus. But the populace will not listen to this. No. For Princess Lilia is about to arrive. Since she has been his sweetheart for many months, she will know whether or not he is really the King. If he is not, he shall be put to death. With the arrival of Princess Lilia at this point, there enters as flawless and poignant a bit of drama as we have seen this season. It makes no difference now that Mr. Milne is pointing an ancient truth with the utmost poetic skill and ability. Yes, you admit hurriedly, it is true that the Ivory Door leads to reality, and the truth of yourself, and there is no chocolate cake at the end of the rainbow; and when a man comes to himself often even his best friends think the devil has changed him; and it could not be otherwise. For if truth is found in defiance of legend, the very finding necessarily proves the crowd is made up of fools, and no one likes that "I denied you, your Majesty," cries poor old Brand, his servant, "because they would have only tied me up there with you"Ah, yes 1 But what will Princess Lilia say, and will she ever return from the Ivory Door herself? And will they believe she also has not been changed by the devil? Well, the night that Peter denied his Master, and the day Judas sold him, and the words, "And the truth shall set you free" You will think of all these things in Perivale's ridiculous, tinsel, theatrically lighted castle in Charles Hopkins Theatre. For to our mind only its audiences, not its critics, have sensed the value of this play. We make abject apology for not getting to see it before. And we believe any one who calls it muddled is himself the All Muddlest. As for the moment when the Princess returns, after two hours spent in the passageway finding out if Perivale speaks truth or lies-this moment when she returns to save him and the crowd cries, "Ah, but how do we know she is the same Princess who went through the Ivory Door? Is not she the agent of the devil?" Well, yes, we like it. A On a Highly Desirable State MAN who has been studying the effects of prohibition in a hand-picked group of States in the West and Southwest tells me that the conclusion of his quest for reliable statistics is simply: "There are none." He did report a few disquieting minor discoveries. Hip flasks were for sale in Kansas cigar stores. Forty thousand gallons of Jamaica ginger were shipped into Texas in 1924-5; the normal consumption is estimated at about three hundred gallons. (I am told that Coca Cola fortified with Jamaica ginger makes a drink with a powerful kick.) In Oklahoma he saw the can of malt with the familiar legend telling the customer what not to do or fermentation will take place. But trustworthy studies on a scale that would show a relation between the Eighteenth Amendment and bank deposits, or crime, or public health, were not available. "Well," I said, "suppose you had come back with a car-load of prime figures. What then? What have bank clearances to do with this issue?" I was serious; but he seemed to sense flippancy and refused to argue. 'HE drys know what I mean. It is TH the wets, it seems to me, who contribute most to the present confusion. They are skirmishing about with such arguments as that the legal sale of light wines and beer will quench the thirst for whisky. That is questionable; in fact, it is not true. Climate determines alcoholic content; races of the higher latitudes always have craved, probably always will crave, the more potent cup. The American, breathing the dry, stimulating air of his native land, is peculiarly prone to strong and excessive drinking. They the wets-say they do not want the saloon to come back. They needn't worry. But what, precisely, do they want? Government control of distribution? I see a million orators rising to smother that proposal. Subjects: Shall Old Glory Wave O'er the Demon Rum? Shall Uncle Sam Be a Dram Seller? They talk of the disrespect for the law that is encouraged by unpopular and unenforceable legislation; of the invasion of individual rights, of graft, of the high-handed acts of enforcement officers, By PARKHURST WHITNEY and of good citizens ruined by bad gin. I don't mean to sneer at their arguments or their statistics; but when will they match the honest belief of the drys with an equally honest belief in the harmless, even beneficent properties of alcohol? "I want the law modified," I should like to hear a wet spokesman say, "because there are times when I need a drink. Life isn't invariably a cheerful business. There are days when I like to look at it through the bottom of a glass. Do you mean to say that makes a sinner? Don't be silly! It makes a better man of me, more tolerant, more companionable." Unless they do believe just that there is no real strength in their opposition. Their cause is a tree with many branches and no root. And unless they do speak their minds frankly what is one to conclude? Is prohibition a moral issue, after all? Are the wets themselves haunted by the thought that alcohol is in itself evil and the drinking man in danger of hell fire? I shouldn't be surprised. muscles, inflames the stomach, injures the nerves, retards the digestion, diseases the liver, affects the brain, exhausts the strength, and shortens life." Do you remember your catechism, reader of forty, or fifty, or sixty? Tobacco was evil. I see the earnes ladies of the Loyal Temperance Legion using the blackboard to prove to us some of the solid benefits accruing to non-smokers. "If a man doesn't smoke three five-cent cigars a day, in twenty years he will save-let's see, children— $1,095." Round dances were evil. The list is capable of expansion. In brief, the world was evil. Little boys and girls who wanted to become good men and women must watch their steps. The good life was not so much lived, s denied. A YOUNGER generation may snicker at those interdictions. The mature American will admit, I think, that they were imposed with such force, and at so many points, as to make an indelibl PROHIBITION appeals to the employer impression. His moral instruction was for reasons that are economic and obvious. It has derived animus from the anti-alien, Americanization movement. The drys will use figures, as they will use any club to beat the devil; but you can confound their figures and still find that you have a fight on your hands. There is one position from which they will not retreat. So much is platitude; or should be to any American who was a boy, as I was, in an American village twenty-five years ago. Blue Ribbons and White Ribbons. "Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine." The signing of pledges. "Touch not, taste not." The Band of Hope. "Ten Nights in a Bar Room." The Loyal Temperance Legion. The Temperance Catechism. Temperance Rallies. The resolute faces of the women whose lives were long since dedicated to the defeat of the Demon Rum. Can any American of my generation, or earlier, contemplate a cocktail without seeing the serpent in the glass? Can he adopt a hedonistic attitude toward any human activity? Alcohol was evil. It "weakens the not left to his Sunday-school teacher; it began at home, got into his public school readers and histories, colored his literaturc, and studded the speeches of his heroes. If my experience. was typical. and I believe it was, his youthful thoughts, and those of his sister, were often fixed on a state known as moral perfection. So when a man of my age or older tells me, with a highball in his hand, that prohibition is a good thing for the coun try, I am not so ready as some to cry, "Hypocrite!" Strictly speaking, the hypocrite sees clearly and dissembles to his advantage. The man I have in mind is certainly no dissembler; he is plainly. and pathetically muddled. But what can you expect? What is moral perfection, anyway? I don't know. I used to brood about it as a boy, because I knew it was a highly desirable state; but my imagination never went beyond catalepsy: or, at the best, a sleep-walking that enabled one to move through life not touching and not touched by it. (Continued on page 477) |