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Nelvs of Interest Gathered Here and There
The Debasing Polver of Whiskey and
Cigarettes,
In view of the setting apart of June 30 as anti
cigare.te day in the Sunday schools of America,
the Sunday School Times asked a score of promi
nent business men, educators and others for opin
ions on the cigarette. The vigorous replies, includ
ing letters from William Jennings Bryan, Hon.
Benjamin B. Lindsey, of the Denver Juvenile
Court; Oiison Swett Marden, editor of Success,
and F. W. Ayer, of N. W. Ayer & Son, advertising
agents, are printed in the Sunday School Times
of June 15. One of the most striking features of
the symposium is this letter from John Murphy,
general superintendent of the Pittsburg Railways
Company, in explanation of an order recently post
ed forbidding employes to use liquor or cigarettes:
“Being an officer of a company that carries—
and, of course, is responsible for the safety of—
over 225,000,000 people per year, it becomes my
moral and legal, as well as my public duty, to use
all reasonable means to protect the lives and fur
ther the comfort of this large number of passen
gers. Having for some time back noticed that our
accidents were increasing, upon Investigating the
cause I satisfied myself that the standard of our
men who did not use liquor or tobacco (the latter
in the form of cigarettes) was much above that of
those who used either. I, therefore, deemed it my
duty to abate the evil so far as lay in my power
to do so, and tried to uproot it and cast it out
through discipline, but found this method inade
quate and ineffectual. I then went further, and
concluded the desired end could be attained only
by removing from the service or refraining from
employing all men addicted to the objectionable
habits alluded to.
“It is my aim and intention to pursue this policy
without abatement, since I have by it proved be
yond all doubt that it has raised the standard of
our men. I have been criticised for the stringency
of the order, especially the prohibition of the use
of cigarettes, but, on the other hand, I have the
assurance of our division superintendents (of
whom we have twelve), aided by my own observa
tions, that persons addicted to the use of cigar
ettes, especially young men, are the most careless
in their duties and less able to perform them than
men using liquor in moderation. I may also men
tion that in seventeen years’ experience as man
ager of public utility corporations I have had oc
casion to promote many of our men from the rank
of conductors and motormen to officers, and in no
case has a man using whiskey come up to the re
quirements.”—The Standard.
h n
Uncalled-Tor Sneers.
Within the last six weeks The Post has received
some thirty-odd communications commenting on
and asking The Post for comments on what one
of these correspondents calls the “astonishing
prevalence of sensational and often criminal con
duct among the clergymen.” Another of these let
ter-writers says that “scarcely a day goes by that
does not bring intelligence of ‘another preacher
gone wrong.’ ” Almost all of these communica
tions show an inclination to sneer and jeer. Not
one has undertaken a defense of the assailed pro
fession. Perhaps that is the best policy, for really
this temporary prominence of clerical scandals in
the news columns of the daily press does not place
the profession generally on the defensive. The
Post has consigned the sneering letters to the hos
pitality of an ample waste-basket. Were these re
ports of immorality and lack of discretion even
far more numerous, they would not implicate more
than a fraction of one per cent of all the preach
ers in the United States. It is the one clergyman
who goes wrong, not the thousands who go straight,
that gets into the disreputably scandalous news.
And he gets there simply because he is a clergy
man. A similar act to his performed by a member
of almost any other calling would, in nine cases
out of ten, escape public mention. The people
naturally expect a high standard of morals from
The Goilden Age for June 27, 190?.
“him who ministers in sacred things,” and that
expectation is justified if we test the clergy by
general average. While, in the course of a few
months, some twenty or thirty of the hundreds of
’thousands of American ministers disgrace their
calling, some of them deserting wives and children
and eloping with other men’s wives or unmarried
women, the great army of the faithful is quietly
pursuing its uplifting work all over the land. This
output of clerical scandals is nothing new. There
always have been hypocrites in the ministry, and
the millennium will have to get pretty near before
this liability will cease. So valuable an asset to a
scoundrel as a good reputation for sanctity tempts
some rascals to pose as very devout members of
the cloth. Instead of making this a theme for jokes
and gibes at ministers, it might be better for these
jokers to look up the facts as to vice, immorality,
and crime among the clergy and get themselves
astonished at the excellent showing which such an
investigation will reveal. —The Washington Post.
« *
The Woman Who Waits.
Suppose you’re a Kansas farmer’s wife. You
have driven into town for Street Fair Day in the
wilting heat of the prairie summer —your husband,
three small children, including the baby, under the
big yellow umbrella strapped to the wagon seat.
Shopping done, the wagon unhitched in a vacant
lot, lunch eaten in its shade, the man goes back
to the holiday street. The woman stays behind to
mind the children. She might go to a st re, to
be sure, where she would be in every one’s way;
well-meaning folks would give the children candy
until their little hands would stick to everything
they touched, including their mother’s skirts, and
there would be nothing to do but go out into the
streeet and walk, then return; and wait and wait.
So all that long afternoon she sits on the ground,
holding the baby, in the little pat cl) of shade. The
sun beats down, clouds of dust envelop them, the
children’s hands and faces become grimy; finally,
at six o’clock, the man returns, hitches up; they
watch the balloon ascension and start home. Then
what? Supper to get, milk to strain and put away,
dishes to wash, chickens to shut up, calves to feed,
and the tired babies to bathe ami soothe to sleep.
The woman had looked forward to this outing as
a much-needed change; when she finally gets to
bed she is too tired to sleep. Her holiday had been
spent under a wagon on a dirty vacant lot; the
shade of the trees of her own yard would have
been pleasanter. “This,” writes a woman from
Carbondale, Kansas, “is the condition in the aver
age town. There are numerous places where the
men are welcomed —where they can spend an hour
without a thought of being in the way. Should
not these busy women have a place of their own
where, when their shopping is done, they can take
their babies and visit and rest and go home re
freshed and strengthened rasher than utterly worn
out?” Is this a case for the restless plutocrat,
whom we urged recently to build good roads, or
should it be looked after by township or country?
And in what way? Suggestions—particularly from
women who have had similar thoughts—are so
licited. —Collier’s Weekly.
This problem has been solved in a most satis
factory and delightful way in many Georgia towns
by the Woman’s Clubs, which are establishing
“rest rooms” and libraries to fill just the want
described above. The stranger and the farmer’s
wife in town for the day, and with no business to
attend to, can thus comfortably, while away the
time. “What’s the matter with Kansas?”
* H
The Grateful Lioness.
The recent controversy between President Roose
velt and some nature writers in regard to the char
acteristics attributed to certain wild animals, has
been the cause of many facetious stories being re
lated in the papers. This, from the New York
Sun, is a fair sample:
“After all, John Burroughs’ story is the best,
and, as I saw it in the Sun, it’s true. A lieuten
ant of an English regiment stationed in Africa
was hunting for big game. He was fearless, but,
for some reason he hesitated to shoot at the great
lioness that approached. Nearer and nearer she
came, and was limping. The big-hearted soldier
took out the thorn that he saw was in her foot
and she limped away gratefully. And the Britisher
forgot the incident.
“Not so with her ladyship. She returned the
next night, looked over the roster of the regiment,
and ate every officer that ranked the lieutenant,
who, of course, by her act of gratitude, was made
a colonel.”
* " «
Opposed to Kissing.
Medical authorities are making a determined war
on kissing, and the subject was discussed by three
of the four medical associations in session this week
at Atlantic City. The Women’s Auxiliary of the
Anti-Tuberculosis League recommended that this
sign be put in every home: “Please do not kiss
the baby,” and the secretary of the New Jersey
Commission on Tuberculosis said that “all that the
state can do to protect the infant from tubercu
losis infection through an impure or diseased milk
supply can be offset by the avalanche of aunties,
cousins and callers who just must kiss the dear
little darling.”
Dr. W. 11. Mayfield, of St. Louis, head of a great
sanitarium, objected to “every caress known as
a kiss,” and declared that “next to the house fly,
the kiss is the most dangerously vital way of trans
mitting tubercular bacilli from the patient to heal
thy individuals. We can’t make the alarm against
unsanitary kissing too loud.”
The printed proceedings do not show that any
body objected to the fashion among women of
promiscuous kissing as a social form, yet this is the
least necessary and probably the least enjoyable
feature of the practice. Lovers must, or will, kiss,
all the bacilli in the woild to the contrary. The
mother and child must kiss. But why should every
lady feel called upon to kiss every other lady she
knows, even her dearest enemy, merely because
unreasoning fashion has willed that it be so?
It really would appear that the number of kiss s
might be cut down one-half or three-fourths with
out restricting either mothers or lovers —the only
persons who would, perhaps, greatly mind if the
caress were prohibited.
At the recent unveiling in Richmond, Virginia,
of the monument to Jefferson Davis, Gen. Clement
A. Evans, one of Georgia’s most distinguished vet
erans, closed a eulogy of Jefferson Davis with the
following words:
“He outlived obhquy; he saw deractim die
by its own sting; he saw vicious censures put to
shame; he beheld resentments of South and North
withering in stem and root, leaving no seed. He
was not faultless in judgment, but he was upright,
brave, fair and absolutely incorruptible. He is
entitled to the generous American judgment of the
present sober age, which will be rendered on con
sideration of the facts of his whole career.”
*
Adbice to the Court.
Uncle Eph was before the court on the same old
charge. After the evidence was all in, the judge,
with a perplexed look, said: “But I cannot com
prehend, Ephriam, how it was possible for you to
steal those chickens when they were roosting right
under the owner’s window, and there were two
vicious dogs in the yard?”
“It wouldn’t do you a bit o’ good, jedge, fer
me to ’splain how I cotched ’em,” said Eph, sol
emnly; “you couldn’t do it if yer tried forty
times, and yer might git a hide full of buckshot
de bery fust time yer put a leg ober de fence. De
bes’ way fer yer to do, jedge, is fer yer to buy
yer chickens in the market.” —Greenville Reflec
tor.
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