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534 out Washington. For the town that gets into the clutches of the reformer, I feel much as Whistler did for art—"What a sad state the slut is in an these gentlemen can help her." A town, like a woman, should cultivate good looks and cannot be too fastidious in every detail. But that is no reason why it should confuse this decent personal care with a moral mission. There is too much reform in Philadelphia just now for my taste, or its good. The idea of the new Parkway; with fine buildings like the new Free Library and the new Franklin Institute, along its route through the town; with the City Hall at one end and the fine new Art Gallery in the Park at the other; promises well, and I suppose that eventually the silly little wooden pergolas will disappear and the new buildings go up in their place. But though I know it sounds like shocking heresy, I should feel more confidence if its completion were in the hands of the old corrupt government we never tired of condemning, which may have stolen some of our money but at least gave us in return a splendidly planned and thoroughly well-kept Park, one of the most beautiful in the world. I believe that not only this monumental, but more domestic experiments are in view, the workman this time to profit—our old self-reliant American workman to have a taste of the benevolent interference that has taken the backbone out of the English workman. Rumours have reached me of emissaries sent to spy out the land in the Garden Cities of Germany and England. But what have we, in our far-famed City of Homes, to