HATRACKET

Morality will continue as long as there is conversation. And the world will remain divided between those who are moral and those who are unmoral as long as there is the need of a subject for conversation. Students of ethics will beg or smile as the case may be but tabloids and bromides will define the morality of the future even as they do the morality of today, and some will buy "True Stories" and others will read "American Mercuries" while the Transcripian mind still understands that the ultimate cause, the efficient reason is a benificent Santa Claus with butter on his bib.

Morality will continue and magazines will continue. So not alone will the subway sensual glean his grit from pink periodicals of dubious editing, but the uniformed saviour of souls and director of difficulties, moral, matrimonial and vehicular will find some journal of the haute monde of cleverness and thin satire on which to base his belief that the movies are right, that sin sits in high places. There will be times when other papers, with even less to damn them than "Hatrack" and less to sell them than Mencken, rest in naughty niches safe from the gaze of the Bostonian and the blessed.

But there will be such magazines. Just as there are copies of Voltaire and of Rabelais and of the countless others who have written with a bit of salt in their ink. For that is an angle of life. And to live some people must see life from all of its angles, just as others must refrain from seeing it from any angle. "Hatracket" will arise whenever Bostonians find their bucolic boundaries crossed by realism or by candor. And the same race which maintains the limits of Boston culture will frown upon those who jibe at the rouged tip of its saintly nasal organ even as they add more millions to those already heaped upon the altars or Bernar McFadden.

Indeed, all will be quite the same. Even the little man on Beacon Hill who doesn't want his friends to read such filth will cry out against corruption by cleverness, or, if he has gone to his ultimate morality, another little man will take his place. So there will be just enough "Hatrackets" to make Boston realize its existence to appreciate its morals. And above the dome of the State House and over the dome of the Mother Church and high above the accordian pleated sincerity of each honest urban heart will smile an unknown god who moves in a pillar of wisdom--and the god's name? Meredith called him the Comic Spirit.