n years ago an able literary man said to me in London: "I am
wearied, here, by the necessity of continual aristocratic patronage.
Especially true is this," he added, "regarding all new dramatic
productions. Lord This and Lady That are more thought of as
potentially occupying stalls or boxes at a first performance than is
the presence of the most sapient judges." And then again, after a
slight pause, he proceeded: "But I hear it is very much the same thing
with you. I have often longed to go to America, just for the sake of
that social emancipation which it has seemed to promise. But they tell
me that in your big cities a good deal of the same humbug prevails." I
assured him that he was fatally right; but I did not proceed to say,
as I might have done, that our "aristocracy" rarely patronizes first
nights at theatres, holding most ladies, and gentlemen connected with
the stage in a position somewhere between their scullions and their
head footmen.

London laughs and sneers at New York when she thinks of her at all,
which is, on the whole, not very often. If London esteemed New York of
greater importance than she does esteem her, the derisive laughter
might be keener and hence more salutary. Imagine America separated by
only a narrow channel from Europe, and imagine her to contain in her
chief metropolis, as she does at present, the amazing contradictions
and refutations of the democratic idea which are to be noted now. What
food for English, French, and German sarcasm would our pigmy Four
Hundred then become! In those remote realms they have already shrank
aghast at the licentious tyrannies of our newspapers. England has
freedom of the press, but she also has a law of libel which is not a
cipher. Our law of libel is so horribly effete that the purest woman
on our continent may to-morrow be vilely slandered, and yet obtain no
adequate form of redress. This is what our extolled "liberty" has
brought us--a despotism in its way as frightful as anything that
Russia or the Orient can parallel. Is it remarkable that such
relatively minor abuses as those of plutocracy and snobbery should
torment us here in New York when bullets of journalistic scandal are
whizzing about our ears every day of our lives, and those who get
wounds have no healing remedy within their possible reach? Some one of
our clever novelists might take a hint for the plot of a future tale
from this melancholy state of things. He might write a kind of new
Mont