NEW YORK CONTRASTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3035, 15 May 1912, Page 75

NEW YORK CONTRASTS.

(Jiy toERXRCivE Kingston, m the Daily Mail.) And what a city of contrasts! From Broadway, where the garish illumination would make daylight look foolish, where ingenuity has invented a glare and a blaze that is hardly conoeiv-' able unless one has- seen it, where are such trophies in electric light as a negress’s head, smilingly winking her eye at you, or the face of a baby crying tears of light because "it cannot get what it wants of some advertised infants’ food—each and all proclaiming the virtues of some particular ware;.from Sixth avenue, where the thunder of the elevated railway overhead and the clang of the tramway car beneath make hearing difficult, you turn into the quiet of streets so still that a man may prefer to walk in the middle of tihe load late at night lest he be held up by some ruffian ambushed in the shadows of the stoops or high-front doorsteps. Strange contrast, again, to the soaring buildings of some 20 odd stories and more that rear up their tall height in the avenues or longitudinal arteries of the city are these solid stout,. Dutch-looking houses of the latitudinal streets with their steep flights of a dozen steps leading up to the hall-door entrance, quaint, clumsy legacy of the architecture of past ages introduced by the builders from Holland; Contrast yet again the hyper-luxury of within doors, with its central uniform heating,’ its continuous supply of hot water, its bathroom to each floor or room, with the clean glazed white tiles overhead and underfoot, its silver taps and looking-glasses let into the wall before which you wash and curl and anoint yourself, and then Out of doors the jolt, jolt, bump, bump as you drive to dinner over a road that your chauffeur would go many miles out of his way to avoid on a country road in England. Flung from side to side, you arrive at your destination with most t>f your hairpins lost and many coils of hair displaced—a victim to municipal disregard of the public comfort. Once more you may contrast the high price of the taximeter cab, on which the lowest sum registered is 70 cents (over half a crown) for the first few yards, and the utter disregard of cab-owners ns to tire character of the drivers to whom they lease their vehicles. It is common talk that over 100- cabs in New York are being driven by men recognised by the police as discharged prisoners, and women are advised to charter only those from hotels or from garages that are well known to them! The luxury of paying six shillings for any reasonable distance, as, let us say, from Victoria to Marble Arch, with the lawlessness of being driven bv an ex-convict who may cheerfully descend from his box-seat in some lonely corner of Central Park, and pleasantly ask you to hand over your jewellery to his care! There is, then, for a person of moderate means no alternative but to stay at home in the evening or to travel in public vehicles. Yet nothing deters the New Y T orker from his entertainment. All are possessed by the electrical driving power of the highly--charged climate, and are restlessly determined to fill ©very minute of their lives.

This once more produces the curious contrast of a people "crazy" for excitement and distraction without the leisure of the dolce far niente of the pleasureseeking society of an older civilisation, for, in spite of It all, Work —be it said to their honour and glory—Work comeis first and foremost in their day's programme. Everybody works and everybody would bo ashamed not to work and not to be thought to work. To be of the third genelation in the family of a millionaire may constitute a gentleman or even an aristocrat, but it does not absolve him from going down to the office, if even he only spends his time " studying finance" as the prices come out on the tape. ThJre is none of that rather snobbish hesitation about following in the father's footstep* that is tolerated in our youths

at home; none of that rather vulgar dislike of going down to th* paternal place of business that is the uitdi»ing. of young men in England and that swells the rank and file of failures all over the globe; there is no picking and choosing of what is or is not allowed to be a gentleman's profession, even for a younger son; in a word, there is no false shame about work in any branch or of any kind. A multi-millionaire will build and finance a huge hotel, and will have no hesitation in calling it by his name. A woman may set up a business off Fifth avenue and still hold her own in the most exclusive society of the world; for, strangest of all contrasts in a Republic that has the word democracy on its lips at every turn of public life, there exists a coterie that is as jealous of its privileges and as careful of its favours as any ancient regime of the Faubourg St. Germain.

Nor is there in New York any of the prejudice against women in business that exists with. us. There is none Of the. foregone conclusion that because " man is man and woman is woman" she can have no thorough grasp Of her subject that doubles and trebles her working driffioulties in England, where sho has first to convince the other sex that she knows what she is talking about before she is vouchsafed a hearing at all. It might also be said that where there is less prejudice against an idea there is also more sympathy for an ideal, because the American, for all his . hard hitting, curt, shrewd methods in business, has,, in the main, more imagination, and therefore more idealism. Somewhere, too, he cherishes an ideal for women. He may not give up has seat to her in the subway, but he does not cut down her wages so much- in the office; and nowhere else have I heard business men talk so kindly in praise of woman's services as in Wall street. He does not resent her right to work because she is forced by circumstances into taking part in the struggle for existence.

A rather quaint argument was put forward by an American in defence of their elastic divorce laws, which he said was the outcome .of the respect for women in hie country. "Our frequent divorces,” he explained, "are due to our New England morality and our admiration for women’s virtue. If we love a woman we do not care to have her break the Commandments nor do we want to expose her to a false position. -We desire to marry her. If there are obstacles in the way, we overcome them by divorce.” Quaintly upside down as is this morality with a topsy-turvydom that only a Gilbert and Sullivan would do justice to, it has a pin’s point of loyalty in it. The woman who is loved must be safeguarded, while the woman who is left suffers no social' disability through divorce, and is provided for by alimony. Ido not defend this custom of a facile cutting of knots while you wait, but it has certainly more honourable aspects about it than tne horrible state of divorce laws in our country, where the clean have to wade breast high through the mire in order to regain the liberty of being clean. So, looking-''care fully into the lights and shades that are thrown on to the canvas by the massive towers of New York City, there emerges presently a brutal strength of outline that is not to be found in the greys and the monochromes of sooty, smoky, solid, ancient London. The picture I see is crude in conception, not not cruel. Grim in tone, but not grimy. Over-luxurious in colour-, but not lymphatic. AYid though the composition of ic has the wasteful 5 and wilful bruahwork of a young artist, it has none of the attenuated, accustomed perfection of an "Academy,” and for this relief, for this freshness of treatment, much thanks.