Down here at my feet the American is engaged in his nation-building somewhat less satisfactorily than out in the wide world beyond.  A nation compounded of a dozen alien races may unite on matters of foreign policy, but in that is no warranty of harmony at home.  Domestic strife is as bitter here as in Germany or Britain or France.  I watch from my housetop men marching in processions of protest; I read of strikes; I hear of an infinity of rude wranglings, of senators battling on the floor of the forum, of disputes in the sacred halls of Tammany.  Not yet has the Irish lamb lain down with the Virginian lion.

It were strange were it otherwise in a land where the city man has destroyed the home.  The American has shown no great genius for the domestic virtues.  He has hauled down the homes of his ancestors, has builded in their stead vast apartment-houses and tenement buildings—­steam-heated Towers of Babel.  Into each of these he has packed the population of a European market-town, has left the children to grow up on the roofs and staircases, the babies to find a blessed release through rickety fire-escapes.  When a fit of reform has touched him, he has stirred up the garbage of the Tenderloin and the Red Light District, has spread it broadcast over his cities to poison his wife and his daughter.

No, the American has still much to learn of domestic politics.  Let him sit with me here any night on my housetop and he will see the sad effects of sectarian reform and newspaper hysteria.  He will see the creatures of the Tenderloin at home on Broadway and Fifth Avenue where, twelve months ago, their presence was unknown.  He will see the policeman on the beat neglect the broken lock of my house door that haply he may learn something of the doings of his fellow constable.  He will see a whole civil service turned into a bureau of information, a department of espionage.  He will see the entire machinery of city government made ineffectual in the sacred name of Reform.

It was an American who made immortal the simple phrase:  “There’s no place like home.”  Verily, one must take a long day’s journey from New York ere he discover a place in any essential comparable with the home of our childhood’s prattle, the home with its mother and its mother love, its rosy boys and its sweet faced lasses.  That home has been handed over to the house-breakers, to make way for modern buildings, for improvements on the surroundings that made our mothers and our wives.

Sitting here on the housetop, one wonders if those residential skyscrapers are indeed rooted in the foul pit of Acheron.  If built in the proportions of the iceberg, they must reach well into the bowels of Tophet and thence derive the evil that is in them.

RogerSkirving.

=Lady Betty’s Comment=