But in the Mystic Year, Springfield is rather to be discussed, for instance—as a convention center, which has at last evolved into the home of a perpetual World’s Fair. It is as of old, a travelling man’s home city, a retired farmer’s place of sleep, a state official’s paradise. Agricultural experts, coal mining experts, would-be statesmen of the middle west, have the same general relation to the city about them that they had in the ancient days of the horse-cars, and the Sangamon County Fair. The town has many of its ancient types. But they are overshadowed by the sculptors, the motion picture scenario writers, the motion picture directors and actors, and the prophets and sibyls of all the arts that go to make up a University Fair. The entrance examination for permanent residence in Springfield, except for the native-born, is the same as that for the Universities of America. The native-born, no matter how stupid or cranky, cannot be banished. There are so many extreme followers of the various local religious and philosophical sects that Springfield is as much a Hobby Horse Fair as University Fair, if we are to believe the wits and the laughing poets. One index of the hobby riding character of the place is the way the humorous columnist, Romanoff, in the _Boone Ax_ characterizes conspicuous people, even at the risk of suit. Today’s _Boone Ax_ contains a new epithet: “The Muttering Thibetan,” a name for the young architect and protege of St. Friend, the Bread Giver. This youth makes his acquaintances impatient by talking to the empty air as he walks the streets. The columnist names himself: “The Sentimental Romanoff.” He it is who named John Short, political rebel and painting teacher: “Sparrow Short.” He perpetually hounds the mayor with the nicknames: “Slick Slack Kopensky” and “Sims’ Bitters.” This last is because Mayo Sims is deemed the boss and Kopensky his dose to be administered to the town in regular spoonsful. The deathless industrial revolution that followed the war with Germany still rumbles along elsewhere, with strikes, boycotting, blacklistings, picketings, street barricades, dynamitings, massacres, and general annoyances and bedevilment:—advancing, retreating, and advancing again, through three generations and around the world. But, for the most part, the soreheads outside of Springfield, particularly those stewing in their own caldrons in Chicago, serve vicariously to set us free. We are wrestling with more up-to-date nuisances, with a brighter goal in sight. It is the dream of a human beehive far from the Marxian society. It is something on the newest New Harmony model, a Springfield that is democratic, artistic, religious, and patriarchal, and therefore following many of the most ancient forms and metaphors of orthodoxy, as an electric light may be softened and given its final character by the shell of an ancient horn lantern.