"Different World"

Last week chuckling Communists drained the Samovars of Moscow's lower depths in steaming content. Wide faces waxed into full-mooned laughter. Behind the relentless mask of the Third International, beaked sardonic visages relaxed in a sour smile, as the Pravda, famed Bolshevist sheetlet, brought them welcome tidings of nauseous conditions beyond the seas. A joke, a Gargantuan jest, had just been found to be on someone else.

Said the Prwvda's returned Comrade Gulliver: "I saw (in New York City) 7,000,000 two-legged animals penned in an evil smelling cage . . . streets as unkempt as a Russian steppe . . . rubbish, waste paper, cigar butts, ends of lumber and general messiness. One glance and you know no master hand directs . . . Good Lord! anywhere in Moscow it is cleaner. I was choked by the fumes of gasoline . . . No wonder each room in the big hotels has a bath when the people must live in such an atmosphere!!! . . . New York, a stench!!!"

But it took more than New York to raise Comrade Gulliver's gorge. Steaming up the harbor he had noted the Statue of Liberty. "How puny it seems in comparison with the watery expanse which it pretends to dominate! How lacking in artistic beauty!" Then, on landing, he plumbed the bitter depths of hypocrisy for himself. He discovered that the statue was not solid; anguished he cried: "It is typical of the hollowness of the American capitalistic state!"

Yet even this disillusionment could not unseat the nice balance of Comrade Gulliver's judgment. He was able to keep his self-control on realizing that New York Postoffice guards carry revolvers: "What a dreadful idea that we can get a bullet in the throat, not in a furious insurrection, but simply for the safe transporation of money. Unmoved, he looked upon "railroad terminals . . . monuments to the capitalistic mammon . . . far less artistic than at Berlin."

Did nothing please Comrade Gulliver? Ah, yes! confessed "an unwilling admiration for express elevators. 'First Stop The Seventeenth Floor' a gigantic upward leap."

Triumphantly he concluded of Americans: "They speak a different language and have no ideas in common with us. Theirs is a different world."