No, the American has still much to learn of domestic politics. Let him sit with me here any night on my housetop and he will see the sad effects of sectarian reform and newspaper hysteria. He will see the creatures of the Tenderloin at home on Broadway and Fifth Avenue where, twelve months ago, their presence was unknown. He will see the policeman on the beat neglect the broken lock of my house door that haply he may learn something of the doings of his fellow constable. He will see a whole civil service turned into a bureau of information, a department of espionage. He will see the entire machinery of city government made ineffectual in the sacred name of Reform. It was an American who made immortal the simple phrase: "There's no place like home." Verily, one must take a long day's journey from New York ere he discover a place in any essential comparable with the home of our childhood's prattle, the home with its mother and its mother love, its rosy boys and its sweet faced lasses. That home has been handed over to the house-breakers, to make way for modern buildings, for improvements on the surroundings that made our mothers and our wives. Sitting here on the housetop, one wonders if those residential skyscrapers are indeed rooted in the foul pit of Acheron. If built in the proportions of the iceberg, they must reach well into the bowels of Tophet and thence derive the evil that is in them. ROGER SKIRVING. =Lady Betty's Comment= In opposition to the familiar precept of a patriot touching the price and preciousness of liberty, femininity, scorning to be free, exults in shackles. We hesitate over our own taste, and turn rather to the crowning of some courageous male, with a liking and a talent for notoriety. The duties of this gentleman being irksome and his reward being ridicule, it is perhaps amazing that we stand in no nearer danger of lacking a leader for want of aspirants than does the nation of begging for a President. Once guided by a master mind the most exotic may come frankly forth to meet and struggle with the daily weariness of dinner giving and dinner eating: may look towards a triumphant overthrow of those problems on what forks to use, what jewels to adopt, what mannerisms to affect and what fads to uplift. As our persons are no more sacred than our habits we feel that our vanity is never safe; and our present despot, who owns a Turkish taste in femininity, and insists on the fashionableness of fat, unhappy is the woman who, like Mrs. Spottletoe of Chuzzlewit fame, is lean and dry and errs on the side of slimness. * * * * *