New York and Boston tailors solicit custom among us semi-annually, but nothing is so stubborn as our provincial distrust of fine raiment. I looked with awe, in my boyhood, upon a pair of mammoth blue-jeans trousers that were flung high from a flagstaff in the centre of Indianapolis, in derision of a Democratic candidate for governor, James D. Williams, who was addicted to the wearing of jeans. The Democrats sagaciously accepted the challenge, made “honest blue jeans” the battle-cry, and defeated Benjamin Harrison, the “kid-glove” candidate of the Republicans. Harmless demagoguery this, or bad judgment on the part of the Republicans; and yet I dare say that if the sartorial issue should again become acute in our politics the banner of bifurcated jeans would triumph now as then. A Hoosier statesman who to-day occupies high office once explained to me his refusal of sugar for his coffee by remarking that he didn’t like to waste sugar that way; he wanted to keep it for his lettuce! I do not urge sugared lettuce as symbolizing our higher provincialism, but mayonnaise may be poison to men who are nevertheless competent to construe and administer law. It is much more significant that we are all thinking about the same things at the same time, than that Farnam Street, Omaha, and Fifth Avenue, New York, should vibrate to the same shade of necktie. The distribution of periodicals is so managed that California and Maine cut the leaves of their magazines on the same day. Rural free delivery has hitched the farmer’s wagon to the telegraph-office, and you can’t buy his wife’s butter now until he has scanned the produce market in his newspaper. This immediacy of contact does not alter the provincial point of view. New York and Texas, Oregon and Florida will continue to see things at different angles, and it is for the good of all of us that this is so. We have no national political, social, or intellectual centre. There is no “season” in New York, as in London, during which all persons distinguished in any of these particulars meet on common ground. Washington is our nearest approach to such a meeting-place, but it offers only short vistas. We of the country visit Boston for the symphony, or New York for the opera, or Washington to view the government machine at work, but nowhere do interesting people representative of all our ninety millions ever assemble under one roof. All our capitals are, as Lowell put it, “fractional,” and we shall hardly have a centre while our country is so nearly a continent.