Of these historic memories the average Kipsian is ignorant, quite contemptuously ignorant. Far livelier realities occupy his thoughts. In the heart of modern Kips Bay there are slums, stables, hospitals, asylums, and model tenement houses, five features ranged in an ascending order of precedence from the neighborhood’s point of view. Kips Bay is keen on this order of precedence. No lady of the White House giving her first State Ball could well be keener. Slums rank lowest in the neighborhood’s appraisal because they are the natural or routine habitat of the human species there. Stables go a peg higher, not because they are dirtier, or because artists frequently turn them into studios but because they serve as club houses for professional gangsters, and because a crack gunman is at once the pride and the terror of his district. Hospitals outclass the stables by the same law of human nature that makes an extra holiday outclass a Sunday. For the hospital is a sort of haven in which the true-born Kipsian expects, now and then, to spend a furlough from the ravages of alcohol, from undernourishment, or merely from the wear and tear of the industrial machine. In their turn, the hospitals yield the palm to the several asylums which, adjoining the hovels of the destitute, provide the infirm, the defective, or the insane with all the comforts and luxuries of the rich. Easily the handsomest buildings in the neighborhood, the asylums stand unrivalled in aristocratic prestige. And this is not due to a Kipsian gratitude for charity, nor to the growing artistic cultivation of the masses. It is due to an inborn respect for plutocracy, a respect that persists in the heart of every Kipsian, no matter how loudly he may applaud the labor agitator who assures him that an asylum is at once a monument to the uneasy consciences of donors and a sepulchre for those soldiers of industry who do not perish in active service. It would be as difficult for the Kipsian to explain to the outside world why his model tenements outrank asylums as for the outside world to explain to the Kipsian why a civilian Secretary of the Navy can give orders to the uniformed Admiral of the Fleet. In either case, the simplest course the perplexed brain can pursue is to accept the facts on faith.