present generation of taxpayers will pay out of their own pockets, and not lay the cost up against posterity.

"This necessity has created some uneasiness among taxpayers, and yet it is placing the city's business on the most economical basis. Already the sum of $37,745,836nearly one-fifth of the annual budget-has to be paid by the taxpayers each year to meet the interest charges alone on the city's vast outstanding bonded debt. This is a per capita cost of $6.76 a year upon the city's whole population. This annual interest cost has risen in a decade from $15,188,951, a per capita cost of $3.89. This continuously increasing cost-148 per cent in ten years for the use of borrowed money alone must and will be stopped.

"The ideal of any municipality, in contrast with the wasteful system that has been allowed to grow up here, is to pay as it goes, and that is what we are working toward in New York."

While all three of these men have worked together, each has made his own particular contribution to the success of the administration. They are not of one mind politically, nor have they always agreed on points of city policy, but they have subordinated their personal and political differences so thoroughly in laboring for the welfare of the city that the public is seldom aware that the personal differences occur, and the average citizen has to be told that Mr. Mitchel and Mr. McAneny are Independent Democrats and Mr. Prendergast is a Republican. Although they have not resigned their party affiliations, they have refused to sacrifice municipal efficiency and economy to provide jobs for officeholders or to do other political favors.

Mr. Mitchel began his good work as Mayor before he was elected by declaring that, as he was being supported by Independent Democrats, Progressives, and Republicans, he believed that applicants for office from those three parties should receive recognition from him, but that the first requirement for any applicant would be ability, and that no one would get a job through political backing alone. And he lived up to his promise. He staggered the political leaders by establishing in his office immediately after election day a card-index system by which all applications for appointments, excepting, of course, those for commissionerships, were filed for investigation in regard to the ability and integrity of

the applicants. The result was that in the distribution of patronage, while the parties which supported him got positions for their followers in about the same proportion as the votes they cast, the plums were not given to political hacks, and no criticisms of inefficiency have yet been made to stand against any of the Mayor's important employees.

As late as October last Mr. Mitchel broke all job-giving rules by advertising for a man for the job of Third Deputy Commissioner of Charities. The political leaders had plenty of candidates for the five-thousand-dollar place, but none of them suited the Mayor. So he had advertisements inserted in the newspapers asking for applications for a responsible position as business manager. There was nothing about the advertisement to indicate that a city position was to be filled. As a result he secured the services of a man who had been head of the purchase and supply department of the United States Express Company until that company went out of business recently, and who had previously been chief clerk of the United States PostOffice Department, and the politicians got the shock of their lives. Conditions have assuredly changed at City Hall since the time when the Boss of Tammany Hall, Richard Croker, could stick his fingers into his vest pocket on inauguration day and hand the incoming Mayor, Robert A. Van Wyck, the list of his commissioners all made out and ready for him to appoint.

To prove that he was not talking economy just to get votes while campaigning Mr. Mitchel insisted that his department heads trim to the bone their estimates of running expenses for 1915. The result was the submission for the first time in the history of the city of departmental estimates totaling less than the allowances for the year in which they were made. The cut was nearly two million dollars. That was contrary to all precedents, for commissioners had been in the habit from time immemorial of asking for all manner of extras, on the basis that the Board of Estimate in cutting down the estimates would be bound to miss some of the "fat."

Mr. McAneny and Mr. Prendergast have labored equally hard and with equally satisfactory results to secure efficiency and economy in the divisions of the city government immediately under their charge, and so, in the main, have the Borough Presidents.

"T

HE civilization of Americans is more of a veneer than you think." Thus spake a widely traveled and highly educated East Indian to the writer recently. He had been arguing that the war would break down the civilization of Europe. The men of the striving lands being cut off in their most productive period, childhood would lose the guidance of the torch-bearers of civilization and the flame would go out. The Orient, as a result, would be called upon to carry forward the processes of human development. The remark quoted above had followed an observation and a question by the writer.

66

Many thousands of Americans have been in the habit of visiting Europe annually," I had observed. "Do you not think they have absorbed enough. to carry forward the banner if Europe lays it down?"

"You Americans do not go to Europe to learn," he said. "You go to Europe to spend a vacation."

He continued in tones that grew in energy as he proceeded:

"You go to get a rest, not as an observer and student. When I was in Rome, I joined a Cook's party for one day. It tried to see the galleries of Rome in two or three hours. I took my own guide the next day, went where I wanted to go, and spent as much time there as I chose."

The East Indian's point of view was that civilization is something more than the hurrying American's readiness to agree that art in the abstract is a good thing in its way. The test is an innate affection for those things that denote civilization: a love of beauty in its various forms and of sincerity, and a sense of personal injury when they are assaulted. I shall not attempt here to ascertain how far the assertion of the East Indian is well founded.

It was my good fortune recently to be among those invited to attend the celebration of the two hundred and seventyfifth anniversary of the founding of the old whaling town of Southampton, Long Island, the oldest English settlement within the borders of the present State of New York. On the afternoon of the day of my arrival I walked down the village street. front of the white, square-turreted old, but well-preserved, Presbyterian church I turned into a street quaintly named Job's Lane.

In

Passing the memorial library building on the terraced corner, I came unexpectedly upon a building that gave me a thrill, for it instantly translated me across seas to the hills of Tuscany and the courts of Venice. It was the sensation that comes to all those who have stood with hats off before the "magical and memorable abodes" of the fair land of Italia.

Elevated on the terrace a few feet back from the street stood the narrow façade of a one-story dull-red, mottled brick building. Before it was a court, brick paved and bounded by shoulder-high walls of Italian design. Long, gracefully curved, and easy steps invited one to enter the triple-arched loggia of the building or to pass through the arched gate on the left to the sunlit spaces of green beyond. In the angles of the court stood great garlanded vases flowing over with gay flowers brought from afar and yellowtinged evergreens in tubs. Through the gate - could be seen other vases filled with blossoming plants and fairy fountains whose needle streams sparkled in the sunlight descending in beams through the leafy canopy. In front of the columns of the loggia stood delicately turned Venetian pillars surmounted by busts and carved urns. Upon the walls of the loggia hung Italian terra-cotta reliefs in blue and gold and ivory. The impulse to enter the Art Museum, for that was what a glimpse through the wide-open door revealed it to be, was irresistible.

The building was long, being perhaps three hundred feet from the entrance to the large pipe-organ at the rear, but comparatively narrow. Through open doors letting out upon the soft, dappled lawn of the arboretum surrounding it the sunlight entered and lay along the floor in bars in a homely fashion. One almost expected to see a sleek tabby dozing away the long, lazy afternoon in the gentle warmth of the June sunshine. Bathed in this glow of light, tempered by the suffused and subdued illumination from the skylights, were finely modeled reproductions in plaster and marble of many of the best-known pieces of ancient and Renaissance sculpture. Upon the walls of one room were large photographs of Italian Renaissance paintings and architectural monuments, such as St. Mark's in Venice. There were original paintings from the hands of Italian Renaissance