Perhaps one of the most valuable extra dividends of history is the dawning knowledge that things are never quite as bad as they seem to be. Perhaps there is a toughness of fiber in people that enables them to stand ever so much more than rational judgment would suggest as the maximum. It may even be that our perennial American optimism is sometimes justified in spite of all logic.

For any examination of the byways of American history is bound to lead one, every so often, to the contemplation of ugly facts which seem to prove that the whole Amercan experiment is in a state of collapse so complete that nothing whatever can be done about it. The infinite promise of this brave new world is forever being belied by contemporary reality. There have been times when any thoughtful observer would be bound to conclude that things have got into a mess that can never be made right.

But the thoughtful observer can be wrong; usually is wrong, as a matter of fact. The imperfections in American society can exact a frightful human cost, on occasion, but we do seem to work our way out of them. It would be interesting to know just how and why we manage to do it.

All of this is brought to mind by a reading of Mr. E. J. Kahn’s new book, The Merry Partners .

Mr. Kahn is not trying to conduct an examination into the seamier side of American history. He is simply out to tell an entertaining story about a song-and-dance pair which came on the American stage in the post-Civil War era, made a sensational success, briefly impressed a set of songs, gags and comedy sequences on the American consciousness, and then faded off into limbo in the normal way, and he tells his story expertly, lightly, with gusto, and very amusingly. Yet his book is a little more than just a gay account of the lives and triumphs of two theatrical stars. It is also an indirect but revealing picture of the society that produced them.

This society, to be blunt about it, was totally deplorable. Ned Harrigan, the more gifted of the pair, came out of the worst section of New York at a time when New York’s worst was about as bad as anything can be. His background was Hell’s Kitchen, Five Points, the Bowery, Mulberry Bend—an area which, in the final third of the Nineteenth Century, offered a ferocious medley of misery, vice, crime and poverty so much more appalling than anything modern America can show that it is almost literally incredible.

Here were whole blocks of tenements so squalid that even a conservative description of them leaves one wondering how any resident managed to stay alive as long as one month. Here were streets where no man who appeared moderately prosperous