ALAS! POOR BARNUM

That bogey of liberty--"business efficiency"--is again stalking the land. Mr. Mencken accuses it of a well-assorted category of crimes. Its dastardly attack on the saloon has multiplied sentimental toasts and bibulous jokes. The Kansan prohibition of public smoking has become a subject of vaudeville humor. But the last and least expected of all its crimes is bound to provoke the usually docile American to revolt, instantaneous and complete.

The Retail Merchants' Association of Boston is inaugurating a movement to abolish parades. They interfere with business, and business is first, last, and always! It is impossible that the stolid merchants of Boston can have calculated the effect of their proposal. Do they not realize that a populace, deprived of its last amusement, becomes sullen and revolutionary? Do they not remember that the Roman emperors fell when they grew stingy with the circus? Let them consult their own memories and recall the blind anger which surged up in them when a tryant father kept them from the elephants and lions.

Present day parades are infinitely more amusing than a mere collection of well-worn jungle beasts. Elks, Eagles, Masons, Knights of Columbus, of the Fiery Circle, W. C. T. U. S. P. C. A., and other initialed and braided orders of butcher, baker, and candlestick maker fill the head with a whir at the complexity and beauty of American civilisation. And who would dim the lusty torchlights of Republicans and Democrats?

Nineteenth Century Americans might as well have banished Baroum.