In those days the Smiths presented a picture before which one might be pardoned for lingering in admiration. I shall resent any suggestions that I am unconsciously writing them down as American _bourgeois_ with the contemptuous insinuations that are conveyed by that term. Nor were they Philistines, but sound, wholesome, cheerful Americans, who bought their eggs direct from “the butterman” and kept a jug of buttermilk in the ice-box. I assert that Smiths of their type were and are, wherever they still exist, an encouragement and a hope to all who love their America. They are the Americans to whom Lincoln became as one of Plutarch’s men, and for whom Longfellow wrote “The Children’s Hour,” and on whom Howells smiles quizzically and with complete understanding. Thousands of us knew thousands of these Smiths only a few years ago, all the way from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. I linger upon them affectionately as I have known and loved them in the Ohio Valley, but I have enjoyed glimpses of them in Kansas City and Omaha, Minneapolis and Detroit, and know perfectly well that I should find them realizing to the full life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in many other regions,--for example, with only slight differences of background, in Richmond, Virginia, and Burlington, Vermont. And in all these places some particular Smith is always moving to Chicago or Boston or New York on his way to a sanatorium or Bad Neuheim and a German specialist! Innumerable Smiths, not yet so prosperous as the old friend I encountered in Berlin, are abandoning their flower-gardens and the cozy verandas (sacred to neighborhood confidences on the long summer evenings) and their gusty registers for compact and steam-heated apartments with only the roof-garden overhead as a breathing-place. There seems to be no field in which the weary Smith is not exercising a baneful influence. We have fallen into the habit of laying many of our national sins at his door, and usually with reason. His hand is hardly concealed as he thrusts it nervously through the curtains of legislative chambers, state and national. He invades city halls and corrupts municipal councils. Even the fine arts are degraded for his pleasure. Smith, it seems, is too weary from his day’s work to care for dramas “That bear a weighty and a serious brow, Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe.”