windows of a vast dry-goods store on State Street was fitted up as a
dentists parlour; and when I passed a young lady was reclining in the
operating-chair and having her teeth stopped, to the no small
delectation of a little crowd which blocked the side-walk.]




LETTER IV

Absence of Red Tape--"Rapid Transit" in New York--The Problem and its
Solution--The Whirl of Life--New York by Night--The "White Magic" of the
Future.


NEW YORK.

Whatever turn her fiscal policy may take in the future, I hope America
will keep an absolutely prohibitive duty upon the import of red tape,
while at the same time discouraging the home manufacture of the article.
The absence of red tape is, to me, one of the charms of life in this
country. One gathers, indeed, that the art of running a Circumlocution
Office is carried to a high pitch in the political sphere. But there it
is exercised with a definite object; it is a means to an end, cunningly
devised and skillfully applied; it is not a mere matter of instinct,
inertia, and routine. The Tite Barnacles of Dickens's satire were
perfectly honest people according to their lights. They were sincerely
convinced that the British Empire would crumble to pieces the moment
its ligaments of red tape were in the slightest degree relaxed. Their
strength lay in the fact that they represented an innate tendency in the