SENSATION MAD.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19905, 27 September 1926, Page 12

SENSATION MAD.

America, despite her many virtues, despite licr humanness and virility, is, today, a sensation-crazed country. Out of this kaleidoscopic continent, which revels in a luxury unknown to Babylon, and in an insatiable craving for sensation of which even Rome never dreamed, two :c----turcs stand out. They are New York and Florida —the Alpha and the Omega I of the loom of pleasure along which the flying shuttle of American life rushes to and fro. Magnificent Pullmans, furnished with everything that money can buy, from a barber’s shop to an alligator pear, rush backwards and forwards, day and night, between New York and Florida. The millions made in New York are sent flying info Florida, there to be scattered with the hand of a Fortunatus; and the millions made overnight in Florida “real estate” arc, sometimes, taken back to New York, there to be poured out in a golden stream in an unceasing round of that sensation, which itself is the only antidote to sensation that the pleasure-driven American knows. Superb liners, some of them 25,000 tons, laden to the bulwarks with a heterogeneous mass of millionaires and ministers; bootleggers and senators; Congressmen and “confidence men”; women of both worlds; speculators and society debutantes; the finest chefs and the most perfect cuisines to be had for money; "million-dollar” bands with music that might lure the angels out of the starspangled skies above, steer spaciously through the night to the throb-throb of the propellers, and the throb-throb of the ukulele and the drum—Florida-bound! From out the hell that is modern New York, with the grind and ir of the Underground Subways and mazy streets on the Manhattan Rock to which the city of seven millions is clamped, pour an unending stream of human beings to the El Dorado of the South, where fortune and pleasure beckon. From all over America tired men and harassed women, with little children dragged at their tails, are hurrying Ford flivvers, by train, even on foot, to Florida. This trek after money and the pleasure that money can bring is going on all over the money-mad continent day and night —although in to-day's America there is no night, at least not in the cities, where the glaring electric §uns turn night into day. I have seen the blackbirds in Pershing square, Los Angeles, uncertain when to roost, because of the pitiless glare of the electric suns that ring the garden at night.—Shaw Desmond, in the London Magazine.