de; it has an
admirable telephone system, with underground wires; and even its
electric trolleys get their motive-power from underneath, whereas in
Philadelphia the overhead wires are, I regret to say, killing the trees
which lend the streets their greatest charm. Altogether, Tammany or no
Tammany, New York cannot possibly be described as an ill-governed city.
Its government may be wasteful and worse; inefficient it is not. Even
the policemen seem to be maligned. I never found them rude or needlessly
dictatorial.

In one of the essential conveniences of modern life, New York is far
behind London; but the blame lies, not with the city, but with the
United States. Its postal arrangements are at best erratic, at worst
miserable. Letters which would be delivered in London in three or four
hours take in New York anywhere from six to sixteen hours. It was a long
time before I realised and learned to allow for the slowness of the
postal service. At first I used mentally to accuse my correspondents of
great dilatoriness in attending to notes that called for an immediate
reply. On one occasion I posted in Madison Square at 3 P.M. a letter
addressed to the Lyceum Theatre, not a quarter of a mile away,
suggesting an appointment for the same evening after the play. The
appointment was not kept, for the letter was not delivered till the
following morning! To ensure its delivery the same evening, I ought to
have put a special-delivery stamp on it--price fivepence--in addition to
the ordinary two-cent stamp. No doubt it is the universal employment of
the telephone in American cities that leads people to put up with such
defective postal arrangements.

But it is not only within city limits that the United States Post Office
functions with a dignified deliberation. The ordinary time that it takes
to write (say) from New York to Chicago, and receive an answer, might be
considerably reduced without any acceleration of the train service. It
sounds incredible, but it is, I believe, the case, that the simple and
eminently time-saving device of a letter-box in the domestic front-door
is practically unknown in America. I did observe one, in Boston, so
small that a fair sized business letter would certainly have stuck in
its throat. One evening I was sitting at dinner in a fashionable street
in New York, close to Central Park, when I was startled by a distinctly
burglarious noise at the window. My host smiled at my look of
bewilderment, and e