People of Destiny: Americans as I saw them at Home and Abroad

e war was over, and the warriors were coming home with the triumph of victory as the reward of courage; but peace was still delayed and there had not yet crept over the spirits of the people t

of the living crowds surging there below them. In those decorations of New York I saw the imagination of a people conscious of their own power, and with a dramatic instinct able to impress the multitudes with the glory and splendor of their achievement. It was the same sense of drama that is revealed commercially in the genius of advertisement which startled me when I first walked down Broadway, dazzled by moving pictures of light, by flashing signs that shouted to me from high heaven to buy chewing-gum and to go on chewing; and squirming, wriggling, revolving snakes of changing color that burned letters of fire into my brain, so that even now in remembrance my eyes are scorched with the imprint of a monstrous kitten unrolling an endless reel of cotton. The "Welcome Home" of American troops was an advertisement of American manhood, i

night, as I drove down Fifth Avenue, I turned in the car to look back at the astonishing picture of that triumphal archway, and saw how the long tide of cars behind was caught by the searchlights so that all their metal was like burnished gold and silver; and how the faces of dense crowds staring up at the suspended necklace were all white-dead-white as Pierrot's; and how the sky above New York and the tall clifflike masses of masonry on each side of Fifth Avenue were fingered by the outer radiance of the brightness that was blinding in the heart of the city. To me, a stranger in New York, unused to t

t before I came, and, with two thousand bedrooms each, had no room to spare, and did not reduce the population of the Plaza, Vanderbilt, Manhattan, Biltmore, or Ritz-Carlton. I watched the social life in those palaces and found it more entertaining than the most sensational "movie" with a continuous performance. The architects of those American hotels have vied with one another in creating an atmosphere of richness and luxury. They have been prodigal in the use of marble pillars and balustrades, more magnificent than Roman. They have gone to the extreme limit of taste in gilding the paneled walls an

erks and their girls in London who pay eighteenpence for a meal in marble halls at Lyon's Popular Café and sit around a gilded menu-card, saying, "Isn't it wonderful ... and shall we go home by tram?" There are many rich people in New York-more, I suppose, than in any other city of the world-but, apart from cosmopolitan men and women who have luxury beneath their skins, there is no innate sense of it in the social life of these people. In the hotel palaces, as well as in the private mansions along Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive, all their outward splendor does not alter the simplicity and honesty of their character. They remain essentially "middle-class" and have none of the easy licentiousness of that European aristocracy which, before the war, flaunted its wealth and its vice in Paris, Vienna, Monte Carlo, and other haunts where the cocottes of the world assembled to barter their beauty, and where idle men went from boredom to boredom in

oney-lots of it-by hard work. They had taken a few days off, or left business early, to meet their soldier-sons i

rom 'over there'!

n their evening frocks the women were elegant-they know how to dress at night-and now and then the fresh, frank beauty of one of these American girls startled my eyes by its witchery of youth and health. Some of them are décolleté to the ultimate limit of a milliner's audacity, and foolishly I suffered from a sense of confusion sometimes because of the physical revelations of elderly ladies whose virtue, I am sure, is as that of C?sar's wife. The frail queens of beauty in the lotus-garden of life's enchanted places would envy some of the frocks that come out of Fifth Avenue, and scream with

r nations-a young Frenchman appealing to the great heart of the American people on behalf of devastated France, and dancing for the sake of people scorched by the horrors of war, to say nothing of the little American girl whose yellow fringe was on his Croix de Guerre; and young English officers belonging to the British Mission, and engaged in propaganda-oh, frightful word!-of which a thé dansant at Delmonico's was, no doubt, a serious part of duty. One figure that caught my eye gave the keynote to the moral and spiritual character of the scene. It was the figure of a stout old lady wearing a hat with a huge feather which waggled over her nose as she danced the one-step with earnest vivacity, and an old gentleman with side-whiskers. She panted as she came back to the tea-table, and said, "Say, that makes me feel young!" It occurred to me that she might be Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch on a visit to New York, and anyhow her presence assured me that afternoon dancing at Delmonico's need not form the theme of any moralist in search of vice in high places. It is not only respectable, it is domestic. Savonarola himself would not have denounced such innocent amusement. Nor did I find anything to shock the sensibilities of high-souled ethics in such midnight haunts as the Ziegfeld Follies or the Winter Garden, except the inanity of all such shows where large numbers of pretty girls and others disport themselves in flowing draperies and colored lights before groups of tired people who can hardly hide their boredom, but yawn laughingly over their cocktails and say, "Isn't she wonderful?" when Moll

k. They are no more a revelation of normal existence than boulevard life in Paris represents the daily round of the average Parisi

"Thirty-one." That was our first stop, and in the few seconds we took to reach this altitude I had a vision of this vast human ant-heap, with scores of offices on each floor, and typewriters clicking in all of them, and girl-clerks taking down letters from hard-faced young men juggling with figures which, by the rise or drop of a decimal point, mean the difference between millions of dollars in the markets of the world. Each man and woman there in this House of a Thousand Windows had a human soul, with its own little drama of life, its loves and hopes and illusions, but in the vastness of one skyscraper, in the whirlpool of commerce, in the machinery of money-making, the humanities of life seemed to be destroyed and these people to be no more than slaves of modern civilization, ruthless of their individual happiness. What could they know of art, beauty, leisure, the quiet pools of thought?... Out in Wall Street there was pandemonium. The outside brokers-the curb men-were bidding against one another for stocks not quoted on the New York Exchange-the Standard Oil Company among them-and their hoarse cries mingled in a raucous chorus. I stood outside a madhouse staring at lunatics. Surely it was a madhouse, surrounded by other homes for incurably insane! This particular house was a narrow, not very tall, bui

young business men and women with whom I sat down to luncheon in a restaurant called Robin's, not far from the Stock Exchange. These were the working-bees of the great hive which is New York. They were in the front-line trenches of the struggle for existence, and they seemed as cheerful as our fighting-men who were always less gloom

," said a young man with large spectacles. "All the little

" said a girl whose third fin

rly man so like President Wilson's portraits that he se

are say also that their work is not so strenuous as it looks from the outside, and that they earn more dollars a week than business men and women of the

e very spirit of the United States in those vast buildings which typify modern progress. In England a railway station is, as a rule, the ugliest, most squalid place in any great city; but in America it is, even in provincial towns, a great adventure in architecture, where the mind is uplifted by nobility of design and imagination is inspired by spaciousness, light, color, and silence. It is strangely, uncannily quiet in the central hall of the Pennsylvania Station, as one comes down a long broad flight of steps to the vast floor space below a high dome-painted blue like a summer sky, with golden stars atwinkling-uplifted on enormous arches. It is like entering a great cathedral, and, though hundreds of people are scurrying about, there is a hush through the hall because of its immense height, i

he private life of President Wilson, and things I wanted to learn about the experiences of American soldiers in France, the state of feeling between America and England, and the philosophy of success by men who had succeeded. It was a philosophy of simple virtue enforced

of the Argonne forest.... The powder was patchy on the nose of a tired lady whose head drooped on the shoulder of a man in evening clothes chewing an unlighted cigar and thinking, with a little smile about his lips, of something that had happened in the evening. Two typist-girls with their mothers had been

f thanks, so that one gets into actual touch with all kinds of people and their friendship becomes personal. In that way I made thousands of friends in America and feel toward them all a lasting gratitude because of the generous, warm-hearted, splendid things they said as they passed with a quick hand-clasp. The lecture habit in America is deep-rooted and widespread. Every small town has its lecture-hall, and is in competition with every other town near by for lecturers who have some special fame or knowledge. In New York there is an endless series of lectures, not only in places like Carnegie Hall and ?olian Hall, but in clubs and churches. Great audiences, made up of rich society people as well as the "intellectuals" and the professional classes, gather in force to hear any man whose personality makes him interesting or who has something to say which they want to hear. In many cases personality is sufficient. People of New York will cheerfully pay five dollars to see a famous man, and not think their money wasted if his words are lost in empty space, or if they know already as much as he can tell them about the subject of his speech. Marshal Joffre had no need to prepare orations. When he said, "Messieurs et mesdames" they cheered him for ten minutes, and when, after that, he said, "je suis enchanté" they cheered him for ten minutes more. They like to see the men who ha

Mr. Wilson; I became an honorary member of the Union League Club, hardly less conservative in its traditional outlook and having a membership which includes many leading business and professional men of New York City. It was here that I saw a touching ceremony which is one of my best memories of the United States, when the negro troops of a fighting regiment marched up Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm, and gave back their colors for safe-keeping to the Union League Club, which had presented them when they went to war. Ex-Governor Hughes, speaking from the balcony, praised them for their valor in the great conflict for the world's liberty,

ad a room when I wanted it, and the hall porter and the bell-boys, and the elevator-man, and the clerks in the office, shook hands with me when I went in and out, so that I felt at home there, after a splendid night when crowds of ladies joined the men to listen to my story of the war, and when a famous glee-party sang songs to me across rose garlands on the banquet table. The City Club has a number of habitués who play dominoes on quiet nights, and in deep leather chairs discuss the destiny of nations as men who pull the wires which make the

th eternal girlhood in her voice, while painters and diplomats, novelists, and wits, famous actresses and princesses of New York, were hushed into silence for a while, until, when the spell was broken, there rose again a merry tumult of tongues. In another room a group of "intellectuals," tired of talking about war and peace, played charades like children in the nursery, and sat down to drawing games with shouts of mirth at a woman's head with the body of a fish and the legs of a bird. In another house the King's Jester of New York, who goes from party to party like a French wit-the little Abbé Morellet-in the salons of France before the Revolution, destroyed the dignity of decorous people by a caricature of German opera and an imitation of a German husband eating in a public restaurant. I knew the weakness that comes from a surfeit of laughter.... I did not tire of these social adventures in New York, and I came to see something of the spirit of the people as it was revealed in the cosmopolitan city. I found that spirit touched, in spite

ama was at work again to make this enterprise successful, and their genius of advertisement was in action to put a spell upon the people. The face of a farmer was on the posters in many stree

tion the American people take in the new world that is now being born out of