The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1909-07-27
RlDICULEFOR NEW YORK'S VIEW FROM HARRINGTON Viciousness Only Less Pro- nOunced Than it's Amusing Ideas Concerning Rest of World.
 Nation Cannot be Perverted by Views of City Where Provincialism Goes Hand in Hand With Open Vice.

Chicago, July 26.-Arraigning New York caustically for lack of old-fash- toned goodness or even decency, Booth Tarkington, playwright, author and 'Wornan's World' that the woman of the farm, town and small city now is the intellectual censor of the nation and adds: "In her hands the nations moral health will remain sound" For it's ethics, or lack of them, and its pro- vincialism New York's type is merci- lessiy f1ayed and cauterized, also rid iculed.
 ""The ethical and intellectual cen- sorship of the United States he says, ''1ies with the woman of the province the Country Girl she might proudly prefer to be called. The censorship is where it should be-in the hands of Molly Stark. While it remains there the nations moral health will remain sound. When it passes elsewhere it will be time to emigrate-for the chill dren'S sake.
 "A theatrical manager of my ac- quaintance will sometimes say of a play: It won't do for Chillicothe, Ohio. don't want it. He declares that Chillicothe gives his productions an audience of wider culture and keener intelligence than he finds in New York. Chillicothe, he asserts, still cares for Shakespeare. and he goes on to say that Chillicothe knows who Shakes peare was, which, in his opinion. oIOduWdy 0OSS hQl says this manager, has time to think! Broadway, he observes, will often crowd to an indecent performances: Chillicothe will not;-the women of Chillicothe won't let it. And the plays that he rejects because they won't do for Chillicothe, Ohio,' are the salacious plays, the cheap, the decadent and the stupid.
 Certain influences detrimental to the growth of mind particularly during youth) attend residence in very large cities, and the most potent is boule- vardism, or the concentration of the residents whole interest in the pass ing events of his own locality. It may be defined as neighborhood absorpt- ion without the neighborhood's rela- ton to the rest of the universe. Thus the boulevardier is a gossip-in-little- the Ioafer of the courthouse fence. "Outside of the Orient, Paris-of all great cfties-most limits itself to it's self: after Paris, New York. The New Yorker, like the Partisan. has little real interest in anything that does not affect what lies within his own field of vision. The New Workers ignor- ance of the United States is notorious. He is a mere .burgher land his town is a walled town. Within the walls, he keeps to his own guild, his own daily walk; he is suspicious and will not even take the air of an evening save in the company of tried friends he knows little of his own town. It Is only the stranger within his gates the tourist from Chillicothe-who studies the mint, the Metropolitan museum and the. Navy Yard Last year a rumor was floated that a na- tive of Manhattan had visited Bedloes Island: personally I cannot believe it. The New Yorker is a provincial even in his own province. Nay, he scorns a wider knowledge of it, and the in vestigatorS-rea1 travellers who ac- quire more information about New York in, nlr t6or, iv, e he names in derision, 'Rubbernecks' p That is the New, Workers name for us when we come seeking wisdom in New York;
 "He calls all of his country, outside of New York, provincial" and the piteous thing about that is: he honest ly believes it. If it were not for our mourning his condition, we might with undimmed joy accept the complaint, for it is not in the metropolis but in the provinces that the morality, the sane enthusiasm and the patriotism of a country lodge. It is the women of the provinces who make it so"