thousands of poor players, as well as hundreds of thousands of poor
laborers, are out of employment, and the winter threatens to be one of
dire misery. Yet you would not imagine from the smiling face of things,
as you would see it in the better parts of this great city, that there
was a heavy heart or an empty stomach anywhere below it. In fact, people
here are so used to seeing other people in want that it no longer affects
them as reality; it is merely dramatic, or hardly so lifelike as that--it
is merely histrionic. It is rendered still more spectacular to the
imaginations of the fortunate by the melodrama of charity they are
invited to take part in by endless appeals, and their fancy is flattered
by the notion that they are curing the distress they are only slightly
relieving by a gift from their superfluity. The charity, of course, is
better than nothing, but it is a fleeting mockery of the trouble, at the
best. If it were proposed that the city should subsidize a theatre a
which the idle players could get employment in producing good plays at a
moderate cost to the people, the notion would not be considered more
ridiculous than that of founding municipal works for the different sorts
of idle workers; and it would not be thought half so nefarious, for the
proposition to give work by the collectivity is supposed to be in
contravention of the sacred principle of monopolistic competition so
dear to the American economist, and it would be denounced as an
approximation to the surrender of the city to anarchism and destruction
by dynamite.

But as I have so often said, the American life is in no wise logical, and
you will not be surprised, though you may be shocked or amused, to learn
that the festival of Thanksgiving is now so generally devoted to
witnessing a game of football between the elevens of two great
universities that the services at the churches are very scantily
attended. The Americans are practical, if they are not logical, and this