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Items of Interest Gathered Here and There
The Farmer to the Rescue.
The American farmer, with his all too crude
methods of tillage, is yet the dependence of the
country in time of stress. There is now on the
ocean steaming for this land a vast sum repre
sented in gold coin and gold bullion, to be applied
'to the payment of the balances in our favor cre
ated by exportations of cotton and tobacco, grain
and provisions.
The steel trust, the oil trust, and kindred com
binations are not in it with the farmers of Ameri
ca when it comes to making balances in our fa
for in international commerce. They have a mon
opoly of the home market and refuse to com
pete in neutral markets, except to dump their sur
plus to be sold for what it will fetch. It may be
said that the farmer, too, sends only his surplus
abroad, and that is true; but his surplus is deliber
ately created, while the surplus of the steel trust
is an accident.
For ten years the American farmer has been a
very prosperous man. From 1873 until 1897 his
cry was calamity; but the moment the coinage
question was settled the farm began to flourish:
the mortgage was lifted, additional buildings were
erected, machinery was purchased, live stock im
proved, and instead of being a debtor to the money
changers, the farmer is become a depositor in the
banks.
Prices have been high—too high —due to several
causes, not the least to our rapid increase of pop
ulation. While our birth rate is greatly in ex
cess of the death rate, we get accessions from
abroad to our population of about 1,000,000 an
nually. It is quite likely that the American farm
er will find 20,000,000 more home mouths to feed
in 1910 than he had on his hands in 1900, and
certainly that will be true, if the present wave of
immigration holds without ceasing.
If the American farmer practiced the economies
and the thrift that maintain in Belgium he could
feed the world, but he has drawn all too prodigally
on field and forest, and today he has his hands al
most full feeding our own people, compared with
the immense surpluses o£ food he sent abroad in
the ’7o’s.
But methods of tillage are improving and the
farmer is beginning to pay attention to seed se
lection, a matter wholly neglected for centuries.
Heretofore this country has been blessed with
cheap meat and bread, and that, more than all
other causes, made our marvelous growth as a na
tion. —The Washington Post.
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A Defeat for the King James Version, i
When the Protestant Episcopal bishops refused,
at the recent Richmond Convention, to concur with
the House of Deputies to make the King James
Version of the Bible the standard, it took one of
the most important negative steps of the session.
“The Churchman” (New York), in expressing this
view, appears to think that the Church would have
paid too dearly for what is justly regarded as
“the supreme English classic” if by making it the
“standard” they put up a bar to the scholarship
which is constantly aiming to ascertain the cor
rect text of the Holy Scripture. We read:
“Even the English Church has never done with
its own version what the House of Deputies re
solved to do, but what the House of Bishops saved
the American Church the humiliation of having
done. That Church, finding both the text and trans
lation of King James’ Version recognized as im
perfect, sometimes misleading, not infrequently
false, allowed the use of the Revised Version as
the best available. The English-speaking world
leaves its books to prove their rights to be called
classics, and the English Church leaves its versions
of the Holy Scripture to prove their worth as
versions. The attempt to create classics or stand
ard versions by law is contrary to the whole spirit
of both American and English practice and prece
dent. The evil of the standardization of a version
is not greatly relieved by the permissive use of
marginal readings, especially when that liberty is
limited to obviously imperfect sources. It is as if
The Golden. Age for November 14, 1907.
the General Convention were to say to the Church:
‘The law is that the ministers shall read and the
people shall hear false translations, recognized as
false. But if consciences are hurt by false transla
tions, the privilege is allowed of correcting some,
but not all, of these mistranslations.’ Except for
the fact of the action of the House of Deputies at
Richmond, it would have been unbelievable chat an
intelligent body of men should have today made
such a proposition. Evidently the deputies thought
they were defending the Bible, whereas they were
erecting a barrier to the fuller knowledge of the
Bible by making a standard of one of the many
versions that have marked the progress of the study
of the Bible. Thus they were indirectly attacking
/the 1 Bible itself In favor of an imperfect version,
though ostensibly their stand was made against a
scholarship which is endeavoring to ascertain, as
nearly as human power may ascertain, the text of
the Holy Scriptures in its integrity. The House
of Bishops deserves the thanks of all who believe
in the Holy Scriptures, and doubtless none will
come to thank them more heartily than the House
of Deputies, for having saved the American Church
from such a course.” —Exchange.
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7 he Spread of Temperance.
To drinking, says Lucky, must be attributed 'most
of the crime and an immense proportion of the
misery of his nation; and what is true of England
is true of the United States. “We drink,” said
an English writer of 1657, “as if we were nothing
but sponges.” In the following century retailers
were accustomed to hang out announcements that
their customers could be made drunk for a penny,
dead drunk for twopence, and could have straw
io lie on for nothing, and they furnished dens in
which they could recover sufficiently to drink again.
“Those accursed spirituous liquors,” wrote one ob
server from London, in the eighteenth century,
“which, to the shame of our government, are so
easily to be had, and in such quantities drunk,
have changed the very nature of our people.” And
as the beginning of most violent crime on a big
scale in English history is parallel with the spread
of strong drink, so in our country crimes of vio
lence, crimes of debauchery, political corruption,
the waste of wages, the ruin of families, all have
their home and origin in the ■’alcon. Civilization
will not be a success until the saloon is but a mem
ory of what men once endured. West and South
m the United States today the path of temper
ance is being followed with more determination
than ever in the histcry of our country. In more
territory is the saloon made illegal, and in a
greater part of this territory is public opinion suf
ficiently strong to make prohibition a success.
When it is a success, life will be brighter for the
wives and children of hundreds of thousands of
fathers and husbands.-—Culliei’s Weekly.
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Football.
Whether Harvard wins or loses in football this
autumn, Mr. Joshua Crane, the new football coach
should be thanked for introducing methods, of
which, more than anything else, our college ath
letics are in need. Mr. Crane has insisted that
there should be little or no secret practice, that as
many men as possible be allowed to play, and that
they make their playing fun instead of work. Most
of the difficulties of college athletics can be boiled
down to this one question: Shall they be conducted
for the greatest good of the greatest number, or
shall highly efficient teams of specialized perform
ers be perfected for the sole purpose of bearing
similar teams from rival colleges? From 1897 to
1904 rowing was the most popular sport at Cam
bridge. The Charles was crowded every afternoon
with eights, fours, and singles. The April races
between the Weld and Newell club crews were
events. The reason was that the varsity eight was
not picked until after May 1, and until that time
every man who could row felt that he had at least
a chance to make the crew. Yet, merely because
Yale won the New London race almost always dur
ing those years, each rowing season that ended
thus was considered a failure. There was nothing
like the interest in rowing at New Haveu that
there was at Cambridge. The Yale varsity was
practically picked the preceding autumn, kept to
gether, and perfected to the highest possible point
of development. None of the Harvard crews had
reached such perfection when they rowed at New
London. In 1904, merely with the idea of bearing
Yale and in spite of the fact that although de
feated in this one race, she had developed one of
the finest athletic systems ever seen in an American
college, Harvard returned to the old ideas and
hired a professional coach. As long as a season
which ends in victory is called a success, although
only a score or so of men have got any benefit from
it, while a season which has seen continuous good
humored competition between a large body of un
dergraduates, but which ends with one defeat, is
called a failure, just so long will our college ath
letics miss the end for which they are intended
and be overwrought and unwholesome. The time
will come when professional coaching will be abol
ished and intercollegiate contests restricted to one,
or, at most, a few, meetings at the end of the sea
son—after the inter-class and inter-elnb and all
the other good-humored contests that would then
be possible had been played. Most of the so-called
“evils” of the game cf football are the result of
unwholesome specialization. There is no reason
why, at Harvard, a thousand undergraduates should
not play football, instead of a few score. —Ex-
change.
Why Cigarettes Are Injurious.
Those who denounce the cigaret as deadly, or
merely object to it as unhealthful, do not always
explain clearly in what its use differs from that of
tobacco in any other form. This is done by a
writer on| “The Cigaret Habit” in The Lancet
(London, September 7). The author fears that
medical men in particular are adopting cigarets in
account of the saving of time and trouble by their
use, and he points out that it is precisely this ease
of use that constitutes their danger. After enu
merating some of the difficulties of the pipe-smoker,
he goes on to say:
“All these sources of trouble are avoided in the
cigaret. The cigaret is at once ready to smoke,
it only requires lighting, and, as a rule, once alight
it burns regularly. The smoker of the cigaret
reaches his aim more quickly and wuth less trouble
than does the smoker of the pipe, and if smoking
is to be a soothing habit, there must be nothing
mentally irritating connected with it. It is thus
that the cigaret habit is encouraged and eventually
established among medical men just as much as
among the public, and once that is so the habit
becomes confirmed and both cigar and pipe are neg
lected. The worst of the cigaret habit is that the
smoker consumes more tobacco in that form that
he would in any other. The cigar and pipe soon
satisfy the tobacco craving, the cigaret-smoker is
rarely warned in time of his excess. The cigaret
appears as a mild form of smoking, of which the
smoker never tires, and cigaret replaces cigaret
with practically little intermission throughout the
whole day. Few can deny that such a practice is
very injurious to the health, and the slaves to it
find it hard to break the chain which binds them.
The ready-made cigaret is largely responsible for
the enormous growth of this servitude, and to those
who are conscious of having acquired an injurious
habit of indulgence, which they honestly are anx
ious to reduce, if not to abandon altogether, there
is one piece of advice which we would urge upon
them —we have hardly knowm it to fail. Let the
inveterate cigaret-smoker give up the ready-made
cigaret; let him buy pure paper aid good tobacco;
let him make his cigaret just before he smokes it:
and he will find that he will smoke consequently
fewer cigarets, and be all the better for it. Such
a method, if honestly adopted, would make an end
to the ‘chain’ smoker who, w’hen he has nearly fin
ished a cigaret, immediately proceeds to light an
other from the expiring ember, and ends the day
with an appalling consumption of fifty cigarets or
more.” —The Literary Digest.
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