The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-06-06
MODERN TEMPLARS.

From the N. Y. World.
New York has become accustomed to
strange sights. The great metropolis of the
West proves its metropolitan character yearly
more and more decisively by its growing in
difference to spectacles the most startling and
the most varied. With hospitality for all,
with amazement for none, it Welcomes COM
pany after company from all quarters of the
earth, and turns an equal gaze of transient
attention upon Chinese ambassadors and
Fenian captives, Japanese daimios and Bri-
tish princes. The newspaper is thought to
be a tolerably complete mirror of the daily
life of communities; but no newspaper can
possibly reflect with impartial accuracy the
life of genuine metropolis. New York,
like Paris or London, has many sides,
and is made up of diverse camps
each other, much more completely
than in London and more completely even
than in Paris, by language, by customs, by
habits of life and labor, by social ties, and by
personal tastes. 1t is physically and morally
out of the question that any abstract and
brief chronicle of the time should really repro
duee with general truth and with truth of
details the complete daily being and doing of
such capital. There will be exaggeration in
this direction, inadequacy in that; falsehood
of proportion, of foreshortening, of light and
shade, to speak the jargsn of the painters,
are inevitable. You take up your paper
to-day and read to your profound astonish-
ment that the city was yesterday stirred
to its depths by some criminal catastrophe
or tickled to death by some social or political
comedy of which you had not 50 much as
heard. If you are man of the world and
addicted ito the pomps and vanities, you
stumble upon the flaming narrative of some
wedding in high life" in which the splendors
of Oriental opulence combined with the
charms of Occidental taste to illustrate the
social distinction of some brilliantly 'fash-
ionable" family whose very existence you had
not till that moment 80 much as suspected
A man may live in New York, as he may live
in London or in Paris, for long years, sur
rounded by an extensive circle of friends, and
enjoying all the delights of activity in his
calling and of cultivated intercourse with his
associates to find in the course of some tour
in foreign parts or of some soiourn at q
watering place that the very street in which
he lives teens with families as accomplished.
as busy, as prosperous as any within the
circle of his own acquaintances, whose names
are yet as strange to his and his name as
strange to their ears as if they lived in Gin
cinnati or he in San Francisco.
The New York newspapers of Sunday.
for example, read in Chicago or New Orleans
would lead the people reading them to sup
pose that the whole city was thrown into a
state of excitement over the parade through
its streets of an astonishing procession of
knights Templar escorting some forty OF
fftv of their comrades to an ocean steamer
in which these were to embark for Europe
Asa matter of fact we venture to say that not
one man in ten out of the whole city popula
tion SO much as heard the music of thi:
strange procession, or knew OF its existenes