The Denver residential region is something unusual within general municipal possibilities, as it has unbounded territory over which to expand, thus permitting each home to have its own grounds, nearly all of which are spacious; and these, with the broad streets lined with trees, give to this part of the city the appearance of an enormous park. For miles these avenues and streets extend, all traversed by swift electric cars that so annihilate time and space that a man may live five, ten, or a dozen miles from his place of business and call it all joy. He insures himself pure air, beautiful views, and an abundance of ground. If the family desires to go into the city for evening lectures, concerts, or the theatre, the transit is swift and enjoyable. They control every convenience. These individual villas are all fire-proof. The municipal law requires the buildings to be of brick or stone, thus making Denver a practically fireproof city. Both the business blocks and the homes share the benefit of the improved modern taste in architecture. The city of Denver covers an area of eighty-nine square miles, and these limits are soon to be extended.
The Capitol has an enchanting mountain view; it also contains a fine museum of historic relics found in Colorado from cliff-dwellings and other points. A million dollars has been offered—and refused—for this state collection. The City Park, covering nearly four hundred acres, with its two lakes, its beds of flowers and groups of shrubbery; its casino, where an orchestra plays every afternoon in the summer, while dozens of carriages and motor cars with their tastefully dressed occupants draw up and listen to the music, is a centre of attraction to both residents and visitors. This park is to Denver as is the Pincian Hill to Rome, or as Hyde Park to London,—the fashionable drive and rendezvous. Great beds of scarlet geraniums contrast with the emerald green of the grass, while here and there a fountain throws its spray into the air. Far away on the horizon are the encircling mountains in view for over two hundred miles, the ranges taking on all the colors of fairyland, while a deep turquoise sky, soft and beautiful, bends over the entire panorama. From this plateau four great peaks are in view: Pike's Peak, seventy-five miles to the south; Long's, Gray's, and James's peaks, all distinctly silhouetted against the sky, rising from the serrated range which connects them. During these open-air concerts in the park there is a midsummer holiday air over the scene as if all the city were en fête.
The architectural scheme of Denver's residential region harmonizes with the landscape. The houses are not the palaces of upper Fifth Avenue and Riverside drive, or of Massachusetts or Connecticut avenues in Washington; but there is hardly an individual residence that has not legitimate claim to beauty. The tower, the oriel window, and the broad balcony are much in evidence; and the piazza, with its swinging seat, its easy chairs, and table disposed on a bright rug, suggest a charm of vie intime that appeals to the passer-by. Books, papers, and magazines are scattered over the table: the home has the unmistakable air of being lived in and enjoyed; of being the centre of a happy, intelligent life, buoyant with enterprise and energy, and identified with the social progress of the day. On the greenest of lawn a jet of water or, in many cases, a fountain plays, the advantage of an irrigated country being that the householder creates and controls his own climatic conditions. The rain,—it raineth every day when irrigation determines the shower; roses grow in riotous profusion on the lawn, and the crimson "rambler" climbs the portico; lilies nod in the luminous gold of the sunshine, and all kinds of foliage plants lend their rich color to these beautiful grounds that surround every home. To the children growing up in Denver the spectacle of dreary streets would be as much of a novelty as the ruins of Karnak. The line that divides the past from the present is not only very definite, but also very recent, as is indicated by the question of a five-year-old lad who wonderingly asked: "Mamma, did they ever have horses draw the trolley cars?" The mastodon is not more remote in antiquity to the man or woman of to-day than was the idea of horses drawing a car to this child. Between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries the gulf of demarcation is almost as wide as between the fifteenth and the nineteenth.
The streets of Denver are very broad, usually planted with trees, and the smooth roads offer an earthly paradise to the motor-car transit that abounds in Denver. One of the happy excursions is that of motoring to Colorado Springs, seventy-five miles distant, a constant entertainment. With the splendid electric-transit system, annihilating distance; with the broad streets paved after the best modern methods; with the wide and smooth sidewalks of Colorado stone and the almost celestial charm of the view, city life is transformed. Telephonic service is practically universal; electric lighting and an admirable water system are among the easy conveniences of this section, which is not yet suburban because of its complete identification with all other parts of the city.
The universality of telephonic intercourse in Colorado would go far to support the theory of Dr. Edward Everett Hale that the time will come when writing will be a lost art, and will be considered, at best, as a clumsy and laborious means of communication in much the same manner that the late centuries regard the production of the manuscript book before the invention of the art of printing. In few cities is the telephone service carried out to such constant colloquial use as in Denver. The traveller finds in his room a telephone as a matter of course, and there are very few quarters of an hour when the bell does not summon him to chat with a friend, from one on the same floor of the hotel to one who is miles away in the city, or even fifty or a hundred miles distant, as at Greeley, Colorado Springs, or Pueblo.
"How are you to-day?" questions the friendly voice. "Did you see so-and-so in the morning papers? And what do you think about it? and can you be ready at eleven to go to hear Mrs. —— lecture? and at one will you lunch with Mrs. ——? the entire conversation to be in Italian? and could you go at about four this afternoon to a tea to meet an Oriental Princess who will discuss the laws of reincarnation? and will you also dine with us at seven, and go later to the Woman's Municipal Club that holds a conference to-night?" All those lovely things fall upon one with apparently no thought of its being an unusual day—this is Denver! This is twentieth-century life. This is an illustration of what can be done when the non-essential is eliminated from the days and that which is essential is felicitously pursued.
When the Denver woman remarked to the Eastern woman sojourner within the gates that she was unable to be away that autumn on any extended absence, as the campaign was to be more than usually important, the wanderer from the Atlantic shore irreverently laughed. Her hostess endeavored (unsuccessfully) not to seem shocked by this levity regarding serious subjects. She remembered that there were extenuating circumstances, and that the Eastern women had really never had a fair chance in life. Their part, she reflected, consisted in obeying laws and abiding by whatever was decreed, with no voice allowed to express their own preferences or convictions. She remembered that a proportion of the feminine New England intellect consecrates its powers and its time to extended researches in the Boston Public Library and in the venerable records of the Massachusetts Historical Society, in a perpetual quest of information regarding its ancestors, who are worshipped with the zeal and fervor of the Japanese. The Boston woman, indeed, may have only the most vague ideas regarding the rate bill, the problem of the Philippines, the Panama Canal, or the next Governor of Massachusetts; but she is thoroughly conversant with all the details of the Mayflower and her own ancestral dignities. Recognizing the New England passion for its ancestry, a leading Boston journal offers a page, weekly, to open correspondence on the momentous question as to whether Winthrop Bellingham married Priscilla Patience Mather in 1699 or in 1700, and a multitude of similar questions concerning the vanished centuries. The Denver woman realized all this and was discreetly charitable in her judgment of her friend's failure to recognize the significant side of the political enfranchisement of women in Colorado. For despite some actual disadvantages and defects of woman suffrage in the centennial state, and a vast amount of exaggerated criticism on these defects, it is yet a benefit to the four states that enjoy it,—Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming.
In a majority of the states of the entire nation there is a conviction (and one not without its claims) that women are adequately represented and protected in all their rights, as things are, and that it is superfluous to increase the vote.
The anti-suffrage argument suggests many reflections whose truth must be admitted, and this side of the controversy is espoused and led by some proportion of men and women whose names inspire profound respect, if not conviction, with their belief. Still, the fact remains that when woman suffrage is subjected to the practical test of experience, the advantages are so obvious, its efficacy for good so momentous, that their realization fairly compels acceptance. In the entire nation there has never been a man or a woman whose clearness and profundity of intellect, moral greatness, and sympathetic insight into the very springs of national and individual life exceeded those of Lucy Stone, the remarkable pioneer in the political emancipation of women, whose logical eloquence and winning, beautiful personality was the early focus of this movement. Mrs. Stone surrounded herself with a noble group,—Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and others whose names readily suggest themselves, and with whom, in the complete companionship and sympathy of her husband, Dr. Henry B. Blackwell, she successfully worked, even though the final success has not yet been achieved. Other great and noble women—Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton—consecrated their entire lives and remarkable powers to the early championship of woman suffrage. The present ranks of women workers—the younger women—are so numerous, and they include so large a proportion of the most notable women of both the East and the West, that volumes would not afford sufficient room for adequate allusion. In Denver the leading people are fully convinced of the responsibility of women in politics. Although the ballot has not been generally granted to women, the very movement toward it has resulted in their higher education and their larger freedom in all ways. The situation reminds one of the "subtle ways" of Emerson's Brahma:
"If the red slayer think he slays,