decent candidate, or to send fifty grafting legislators to jail for an
average term of three and a half years. The same specialist has worked
out the formula that the average married man's usefulness about the
house varies inversely with his fondness for violent exercise. Smith's
dumb-bell practice, for instance, leaves him no time for hanging up the
pictures. After his long Sunday's walk he is invariably too tired to
answer his wife's questions concerning the influence of the tariff on
high prices.

By this time it will be plain that I am no passionate admirer of the
gospel of salvation by hygiene. So many things that the world holds
precious have been developed under the most unhygienic conditions.
Revolutions for the liberation of mankind have been plotted in
unsanitary cellars and dungeons. Religions have taken root and prospered
in catacombs. Great poems have been written in stuffy garrets. Great
orations have been spoken before sweating crowds in the foul air of
overheated legislative chambers. Lovers are said to be fond of dark
corners and out-of-the-way places. It is not by accident that children,
said to be the most beautiful thing in the world, are so inordinately
fond of dirt. Every great truth on its first appearance has been
declared a menace to morals and society; in other words, unhygienic. And
yet one would imagine that truth, from its habit of going naked, would
appeal strongly to the ardent fresh-air practitioner.

VIII

SOME NEWSPAPER TRAITS

At Cooper's house last winter I met Professor Grundschnitt of Berlin,
who has been making a study of American newspaper methods in behalf of
the German government. For some time after the professor's arrival in
this country, he told me, he found himself completely at sea. American
newspapers, it appeared to him, were written in two languages. One was
the English language as he had studied it in the writings of Oliver
Goldsmith, John Ruskin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In America it seemed to
be used chiefly by auctioneers, art critics, and immigrants. The other
was a dialect, evidently English in origin, but sufficiently removed
from the parent stock to be quite unintelligible. The professor spent
many painful hours over such sentences as "Jeffries annexes the Brunette
Beauty's Angora," and "Sugar Barons hand Uncle Sam a lemon." This
dialect, he found, was extensively employed by truck-drivers,
playwrights, and college students.

It did not take the pr