PASS YOUR PLATE

If the value of art lies in the universality of appeal, then the much-tormented Jiggs of the "funny pictures" must be reckoned among the significant figures of American art, for a poll taken among restaurant patrons shows that corned beef and cabbage constitutes the favorite dish. Those who have given up through a growing fastidiousness this succulent indulgence need no longer conceal their weakness or camouflage it by a French menu. Democracy has justified them, and from henceforth the great majority, washed or unwashed, will never be abashed by snobbish ecstasies over caviar or pulcinelli. The people have voted and cabbage is the king of the cafe.

George Bernard Shaw, far-famed as a bathing beauty, has a host of unacknowledged disciples, for the vegetable dinner more than held its own as against the aristocratic Virginian ham. And the Americanophobe novelists whose heroes invariably order ham and eggs in abominable French at the Dome Ronde must revise their next editions, for "ham and" has lost its place as peer, among American dishes.

It will be comforting to those who possess unlimited faith in the solvent power of American ideals, to learn that immigrants, however diverse their tongues and separate their races, turn at once with great and spontaneous enthusiasm to the culinary preferences of their adopted land. So long as the democratic spirit of the cafeteria reduces all classes to the lowly and patient condition of waiters upon the unhurried gods of the kitchen, so long as the savor of corned beef and cabbage waters the mouths of the multitude, so long the institutions and faiths of America will go on, uninjured by the inroads of French, Italian, or Russian menus or even by the jargonized Americanese of the aspiring Greek.