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  ARE WE BECOMING "CIVILIZED" TOO RAPIDLY?
companionable and beloved fireplace. It is almost startling to be
reminded that so indispensable a comfort as the modern bathroom,
with its unlimited supply of hot and cold water, is really very modern
indeed. Linked by telephone to its neighbors near and far, and
invaded, at all hours, through the medium of the daily paper, by the
strident news of the outside world, the modern home has become less
a secluded haven, a place of intimate personal significance, than of
old. In the general bewildering flux of things we sometimes feel as
though its sheltering walls are becoming transparent, and its hearth-
stones as unstable as a will-o'-the-wisp. In the big cities-and they,
after all, focus and epitomize our civilization-the public restaurant
and the apartment hotel are helping us to forget the meaning of home
life. For the sake of the conveniences, the comforts, the luxuries,
we are willing to sacrifice the personal equation. Having built a
great impersonal machine for our convenience, we have grown de-
pendent upon it, and now pay unconscious toll to it in individuality
and independence. And we go on complacently reproducing our
mistakes in their own image. Thus having achieved a certain stand-
ard of lavish tastelessness in a great caravansary like the Waldorf-
Astoria, we can think of nothing better to do than to copy it in the
interior fittings of an ocean steamship like the Mauretania.
    The underlying effort of the age seems to be to find a highest
common denominator for all classes of mankind, and to grow rich by
catering to it. The attributes and tastes and idiosyncrasies which
differentiate one personality from another are disturbing factors
which complicate the age's problem in arithmetic, and as such are
to be ignored for the present, and in time eliminated. The influence
of this must be to make us more and more alike. The time was
when the followers of the various callings and professions proclaimed
themselves to the eye by distinctive features of costume. But the
spirit of the age has changed this, and our fear of "being different"
is reflected in a drab uniformity of dress.
ICTURE the consternation of an imaginative boy transplanted
     by some nameless magic from a New England farmhouse of a
     hundred years ago to the midrush of our present-day life!
Taking New York as the focal point of our civilization, the center
through which all the tendencies of an age pass in constant review,
we will imagine such a boy, under the guidance of a metropolitan
newspaper reporter, contemplating the multitudinous activities of
that city. His sensations, we may surmise, would partake of the
nature of a monstrous nightmare. We can picture him whirled
from one point of interest to another, smothered and deafened in the
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