“Hades gets most of its paving material from the American metropolis, Apollyon having been given a perpetual contract by the Board of Aldermen. In New York there is such a multiplication of conveniences that an electrician, a telephone girl and a plumber have to occupy one’s flat day and night to keep things in order. It is the antithesis of Philadelphia and of Venice, whose streets are never torn up every second day for subways or to insert more pipes. So disgustingly peaceful is the Quaker City that one can lean out of the window in his pajamas and dip up water for the morning bath without waking up the policeman on the beat; all is so quiet along the Delaware to-night that no sticks of dynamite are piled on the front doorstep and no sky-scrapers are being erected between twilight and dawn to be demolished for something else as soon as the tenants have been elevated to the twentieth story. “This is the land where the captain of industry is he whose pockets so bulge with other people’s money that the door of the prison is not large enough to admit him; where the golden calf is worshipped as a god and the church is used as a waste-basket for unuttered prayers and for good resolutions, newly born; where to be virtuous is to be a crank, and to be honest is to be lonesome; where the citizens sit on the safety valve of conscience and throw wide open the throttle of energy; where the seat of intellect is in the stomach. “The principal product of this remarkable country is girls, who tolerate rich papas only until they can buy a duke or a prince at the reigning market quotation. The American girl divides her attention between picture hats, chewing gum and ice cream sodas, beginning the day with an orange phosphate at ten A.M., and finishing it and the pocketbook of her steady company at twelve P.M. with a menu of soft-shell crabs, lobsters and Roman punch eaten without a qualm of conscience or a disordered stomach! “America is a country where to look after the interests of capital is statesmanship and to do anything for labor is socialism and anarchy; where politicians before election orate upon the identity of interests of the capitalist who lives on The Avenue and the laborer who is kept in the back alley: a point which becomes so obscured the day after election as to require the help of the police and the militia to make clear. It is a youthful, boasting nation which forgets the aphorism that children should be seen and not heard, whose every citizen holds a firecracker in one hand, a Fourth of July oration in the other and wears Declaration of Independence chips upon his shoulders in perpetual challenge to the world.