The statesman who is busy about his tariff and his reciprocity, and his endeavor to raise money like potatoes, may little heed and much undervalue this advent of candor into the world as a social force.  But the philosopher will make no such mistake.  He knows that they who build without woman build in vain, and that she is the great regenerator, as she is the great destroyer.  He knows too much to disregard the gravity of any fashionable movement.  He knows that there is no power on earth that can prevent the return of the long skirt.  And that if the young woman has decided to be severe and candid and frank with herself and in her intercourse with others, we must submit and thank God.

And what a gift to the world is this for the Christmas season!  The clear-eyed young woman of the future, always dear and often an anxiety, will this year be an object of enthusiasm.

THE AMERICAN MAN

The American man only develops himself and spreads himself and grows “for all he is worth” in the Great West.  He is more free and limber there, and unfolds those generous peculiarities and largenesses of humanity which never blossomed before.  The “environment” has much to do with it.  The great spaces over which he roams contribute to the enlargement of his mental horizon.  There have been races before who roamed the illimitable desert, but they traveled on foot or on camelback, and were limited in their range.  There was nothing continental about them, as there is about our railway desert travelers, who swing along through thousands of miles of sand and sage-bush with a growing contempt for time and space.  But expansive and great as these people have become under the new conditions, we have a fancy that the development of the race has only just begun, and that the future will show us in perfection a kind of man new to the world.  Out somewhere on the Santa Fe route, where the desert of one day was like the desert of the day before, and the Pullman car rolls and swings over the wide waste beneath the blue sky day after day, under its black flag of smoke, in the early gray of morning, when the men were waiting their turns at the ablution bowls, a slip of a boy, perhaps aged seven, stood balancing himself on his little legs, clad in knicker-bockers, biding his time, with all the nonchalance of an old campaigner.  “How did you sleep, cap?” asked a well-meaning elderly gentleman.  “Well, thank you,” was the dignified response; “as I always do on a sleeping-car.”  Always does?  Great horrors!  Hardly out of his swaddling-clothes, and yet he always sleeps well in a sleeper!  Was he born on the wheels? was he cradled in a Pullman?  He has always been in motion, probably; he was started at thirty miles an hour, no doubt, this marvelous boy of our new era.  He was not born in a house at rest, but the locomotive snatched him along with a shriek and a roar before his eyes were fairly open, and he was rocked in a “section,” and his