Seven Hundredth

One hundred and fifty thousand buyers and the agents of 10,000 dealers in everything from caviar to coke foregathered at Leipzig during the week for that city's 700th annual fair. From the U. S. alone came 1,500 buyers. At Leipzig they mingled with oleaginous Armenian lace vendors, stalwart Norwegian goat cheese merchants, shrewd Jugoslavian toy whittlers. When the week of chop, swop and barter closed, over 50% more business had been done than in the previous record year, 1914.

While the narrow streets and peaked-roofed buildings of Old Leipzig were crammed all week with fair goods, there was space and leisure in the sumptuous modern quarter for the pulse of cosmopolitan life that beats nowhere more strongly than in Leipzig at fair time. It is well said that "Leipzig is the only German city"-- the only city in which Germans lay aside their individual nationalities as Prussians, Hessians, Bavarians, Saxons, Swabians or what not.

Commerce, the great leveler of national and even racial animosities, brought Jew, Mohammedan and Christian once more into friendly contact with Negro, Caucasian and Nordic last week. Meanwhile many a Chamber of Commerce was vexed by the 700-year-old success of the city fathers of Leipzig in making of their fair the annual conflux of traders from 50 nations.