outside. A city of superb hotels and mean lodging-houses, of gaudy cinema shows, like everything else in this "City of Night and Day," "always open,' showing the body unbeautiful and unclothed, and of "Sons and Daughters of the American Volunteers," or some similar name, whispering behind closed hands dreadful secrets of the Los Angeles underworld and asking the passer-by for his dime, "to save our daughters from the Devil."

A city of saint and sinner, of poor glittering creatures that walk in the shadows of the palms of Pershing Square, and of the man and woman in one of the restaurants, with broken nails and dirty diamond-covered hands, who within twenty-four hours of the striking of "The Biggest Gusher on Earth," have been lifted from obscurity to the fame of an hour, before being hurled into outer darkness. A city of fortunes made and lost on the turn of a hand. A city in which the love troubles of Pola Negri and Charlie Chaplin make literature a thing to laugh at, and life one long pulsating story of passion and high adventure. A city as full of cranks and crooks, of artists and near-artists, of Holy Rollers and Holy Apostolics-the only difference between whom is that the former roll both on back and belly and the latter on belly only-as an egg is full of meat.

My adventures amongst the thirty-two sects of Los Angeles, in the bosoms of Hollywood and Pasadena, and along that fringe of stucco and green that runs the length of the coast from Santa Monica to Venice, alone would fill a book. But it would, I am convinced, be a book unbelievable, simply because no Westerner that I met, outside three really fine artists who live in Pasadena, had any more concept of the meaning of the Pacific coast civilization which Los Angeles and her sister cities are building up than a man thrown into the bowels of a marine engine has of the working of the machine.

But who has any concept of that vast complex of desert and mountain and sea, of granary, greenery, and garden, comprised in the fan-like sweep, far-flung in rays of a thousand miles from Chicago as the base, to those two cities, bounding the sweep and so strangely unlike, which

I visited-Seattle in the north and San Diego in the south? What son of man has the sheer brain and vision intangible to sense what is churning in those limitless stretches of sand and cactus in the desert spaces between Salt Lake and the seathose yellow wombs of new life, haunted to-day by coyote and rattlesnake, which to-morrow, under the gentle stimulation of water swishing in the cool channels made for it by the hand of the American engineer, may become a Western Garden. of Paradise?

Men write glibly of "Western America." But what man of them all can forecast even one hundred years of evolution in this "continent of countries," this continent which, a nest of Chinese boxes, carries civilization within civilization, and on its broad bosom a hundred races of white and black and brown and yellow?

Only the "Red" has vanished or is vanishing. Only the original man who trod these sandy wastes, drove his paddle deep into the silvery bosom of the shining rivers, or flung his piercing gaze upon the towering mountains-he only, of all the five races, he and his color alone, has passed. He has passed to leave upon the visitor from the Old World one dominant, insistent impression-the impression, whether in the icy wastes of North Dakota, the broad pine-clad hills of Oregon, or in the Garden of the Pacific itself, California, that the present inhabitants, white or brown or black or yellow, have but just fallen from another planet to scratch the surface of the soil with hoe and plough, but have not yet had time to "dig themselves in," to delve deep into mother earth and to become part of her.

But the White at least is already part of the new America of the West-the Brown and Black but incidentals of the landscape-and the Yellow-the Yellow a shadow, never an essential part, but always there.

In San Diego as in Los Angeles, in San Francisco as in Seattle, I found once more that strange, undefined fear of the Yellow Man. Nothing defined or definable as yet. Nothing tangible or determined. But always there.

The day I left San Diego by motor

coach, left that southern city with its mixture of race and type, of culture and of reckless gambling which to any European mind defies explanation, that mixture which one was so often finding on the Pacific-I saw overhead a wedge of twenty or thirty airplanes as they rose from America's Pacific Air Station, to turn and twist like shoals of giant fish in the cool ether.

As I looked at them there came to me once again the vision of the Yellow Man which throughout the West had never been far from me. There came to me the vision of "aerial navies grappling in the central blue," of little yellow men, with faces beady-eyed and mask-like, clawing in silent desperate struggle with their White opponents. I saw yet again the bland, almond-eyed Chinaman, smiling, sleek, but unfathomable, I had seen in Figuaroa Street, Los Angeles, gazing sleepily up at the blue sky, and, running through the riot of the streets of many Western cities, the little Japanese, smiling as his Chinese cousin, though utterly different. . . but always, like him, inscrutable. I saw Europe once more getting ready to fling the remnants of White Civilization into the melting-pot of the Greatest War of All, for which she is now preparing her "poison-gas" and "wireless dirigibles." And I saw the smiling, patient Yellow Man waiting for the day when America, simple idealist America of the West, hoping to save a civilization which cannot be saved, throwing herself

into the White Mêlée of Europe, gives the Yellow Man his chance.

But

Yet these be dismal thoughts. they are the thoughts which haunted the whole of my seven-thousand-mile journey through the West. Of the West I could not write without also writing of them. But, like all Irishmen, I am a hopeless optimist.

"God is still in his heaven," though all may not be right with the world. In the midst of my forebodings, there comes to me the inexhaustible vitality, the splendid youth of the West and of the Western American. There comes to me, sometimes apparently out of the nothingness, unconquerable belief in a race which has a "humanness," a virility, and a “naturalness" unique amongst the white races, a race that I, at least, love.

Man has but a life span in which to work and with which to measure. God has all eternity before him. And so with this America of the West. Give God a chance!" Give him five hundred years, itself but a heart-beat within eternity, five hundred years in which to work over and through and with the peoples of the Far West, and, perhaps when a little Yellow Man, instead of Macaulay's New Zealander, is sitting on the ruins of London Bridge to watch the rats scuttle over the wharfs of a vanished civilization, we may find the White Race, phoenix-like, rising from its ashes, out there in the America of the West-that West which is the Nursery of the Gods.