"LUNACY, NOISE. AND UGLINESS."

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 170, 20 July 1908, Page 6

"LUNACY, NOISE. AND UGLINESS."

Elbert Hubbard, editor of the "Philistine," one of the ablest and .most original of American writers has the following vivid impression of New York in a magazine article.—A city of stone and iron and glass, of miles of dark dungeons that are called underground railways, where the air is heavy with the sickening stench of narrow streete, with buildings so high on either side that the sun never strikes the pavement except at noon, where the sensitive pedestrian is gradually overcome by the subtle horror of momentarily exp_eriencing the terrible fate of the being in Edgar Allan Poe's tale, a city where noise is a god and ugliness a creed—is that a civilised city? Lunacy, noise, and ugliness—that is New York. People live so fast in N.Y. that they set fire to their clothes, and forget they are living, they are so intoxicated with, movement that they have forgotten all about direction. Motion is not progress. Four million people working day and night with fiendish energy constructing buildings almost as high as the Eiffel Tow,er, then tearing them down, digging hundreds of feet underground burrowing out their tunnels, and holes beneath the beds of rivers like moles, workers making quick apoplectic motions to one another that they call salutations, faces the colour of ashes in a fireless grate, with eyes that seem capable of boring a liole iii a stone,eyes that see everything but the beauty of sunlight and starlight and the tender blue of heaven—do such people live, or are they anything more than corpses, with a galvanic battery in their spines? No, they do not live; they are merely marionettes with a high fever.- Observe from a' central point of traffic in N.Y. city, and one sees what appears to be an endless black vomit coming out of what looks to be sewers. If a city where beauty, art, culture, and leisure count for nothing alongside of the question, "How many dollars can, I squeeze out of my heart and brain" is the last word that civilisation has to utter,-then civilisation is in no way superior to barbarism. . Civilisation means the experiencing of the best of everything. It is a great refining t>rooess, a method by which the dumb, brutish -soul."of the savage is changed into a beins: capable of mingling its inner self with all the choicest things in the material and immaterial universe. It quickens the apprehension of man's superiority to the "brute, and lends to his nature the fflamour of ideal aspiration. New York is but a shadow and a, vain show. Her flitter is not a reflection from the undying: flajrne that burns at the core of the civilising instinct, but is the sinister gleam seen on the sm'der's web. In closing, let me say Wiat I live in New York, but for the life of me I can't tell why.