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Items of Interest Gathered Here and There
Oldest City in the World.
Proofs of the oldest civilization known to arche
ology have been discovered by Dr. Edgar J. Banks
among the ruins of Bismya, in Mesopotamia, a
week’s journey to the south of Bagdad. The con
clusions of the explorer are that the remains un
earthed have an antiquity of not less than 10,000
years. Permission to excavate in this remote and
dangerous neighborhood—dangerous by reason of
the lack of water and the nearness of the tierce
Arab tribes—was obtained from the Turkish gov
ernment, only after long negotiations, and even
then it was only the presence of an American fleet
in Turkish waters that forced from the Sultan an
irade authorizing the archeologist to begin his
work, which he was Anally enabled to do on Christ
mas day, 1903.
From the outset it was evident that the ruins
were not of comparatively modern date, since the
potsherds on the surface of the mounds (consisting
of a series of parallel ridges about a mile long, and
half as wide) were obviously of great antiquity.
The walls of the tower of a temple were soon un
covered, and the first inscription was identified as
belonging to the period of the Babylonian King
Dungi (about 2750 B. C.). Further down were
bricks bearing the name of King Urgur (2800 B.
C.); a little lower was found a piece of gold with
the mark of Karam Sin (3750 B. C.); and just
below that level were the large square bricks pe
culiar to the time of Sargon, probably the first of
the Semitic Kings of Babylonia, who flourished
about 3800 B. C. In the last 11 meters through
which shafts were sunk remains of various periods
were found, the earliest of which is placed at about
8000 B. C.
A white marble statue was unearthed at the
base of the temple tower which has been identified
as the effigy of the Sumerian King Daud or David,
a pre-Semitic ruler who antedated his Hebrew name
sake by 3,500 years. This is the oldest statue in
the world, being of the period of Babylonia’s high
est. civilization (according to Dr. Banks), about
4500 B. C. The inscription on it gives the name of
the buried city as Udnun, and of the temple, also
the oldest yet discovered, as Emach. —Leslie’s
Weeklv.
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The Farmer’s Prosperity.
Who says the farmer is not getting all that is
coming to him? Let such an one read the Depart
ment of Agriculture’s report for 1907 and learn
of his error. The year’s products of the field sold
for $3,404,000,000, which was an increase of $428,-
000,000 over the value of the crops of 1906. If
the American farmer’s income keeps on piling up
at that rate we shall soon have an army of rural
plutocrats with two ears of corn, argent, crossed
on a field of oats, rustique, for their coat of arms,
and the sign of the hayseed will be a mark of dis
tinction. The corporation kings will be mere
canaille. With wheat averaging 88 cents per
bushel the year round and corn above 50 cents and
still soaring, the farmer can sow his seed with
automobiles and draw his plows with electric
engines.
All hail to the wealth of the farmer! His pros
perity means the country's prosperity, for on him
rest the burden of government, the development
of commerce and the growth of manufactures.
So long as he digs and reaps rich harvests and
gets good prices therefor, so long will the banks
have money to loan and the workman carry a full
dinner pail. No financial panic can cut deep into
the credit of the country or tie up her currency
long if the vast population of the rural districts
consistently turns up more and greater riches from
the soil. Nothing proves better than these evidences
the farmer’s prosperity the hollow-coughing, short
lived career of the present financial flurry, foolishly
spoken of as a “panic.” It was founded on excessive
speculation in the money markets, on the crashes
The Golden Age for January 16, 1908.
of insecure institutions, on the manipulations of
institutions which did not create any wealth them
selves, but merely exchanged one form of wealth
for another and lived on the difference in value
between them. Had long droughts or ruined crops
or the farmers’ broken credit caused the so
called “panic,” its results might have been far
more serious and remained with us much longer.
As it is, the plentiful produce of the earth and the
coin from the farmers’ pockets will sustain us all
till the crisis is forgotten.
The chief cause for the vast increase in the
agriculturists’ dividends is the use of scientific
methods in modern farming, exactly as scientific
methods are employed in mining and manufactures.
What the tiller of the soil used to do by hand he
now does with machines. Where the father sat
down and waited for rain to fertilize his fields,
the son turns the irrigating ditch upon them, and
where a past generation tilled two hundred acres
in lax fashion, the present generation cultivates
fifty acres intensively. We have not yet reached
the perfection of cultivation attained in France
and Denmark, where one acre of wheat, of the
same quality of soil, produces twice as many bush
els at harvesting as an acre with us. But we shall
reach it in time and feed all the world upon the
increase.—Exchange.
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Little Sermon.
Not all the elequent sermons of the world are
preached by learned divines from carved pulpits,
A convict preached one the other day, and in his
simple words there was a wonderful beauty, though
the eloquence lay in what they meant. He had
been in prison nearly half a century, had gone in
a boy and come out bent and old. All the years
he had dreamed of liberty, longed for it, and
wondered what it meant —he had almost forgotten.
But when it came, this dream, he was afraid; like
a man seeing a vision he dreaded it. He wanted
to stay in prison. They told him that New York
was great and ruthless, that in all its millions of
people there would be. none to remember him. But
then he said:
“I will go. I have a friend there, Mrs. Booth.”
Then h® added, “God bless her.”
Something had kept that man’s life sweet in
prison, and he came out of it so. What was it?
Any man who knows what the life in our penal
institutions is knows it was not due to the beauti
ful spirit of reform which does not pervade them.
The man had gone in with blood on his hands, and
he had forgotten the freshness and purity of youth.
Prison discipline could not have mellowed him.;
association for half a century with other criminals
could not have made him gentle nor brave to go
out and face the world honestly. No. It must
have been because he had a friend out there and
that friend was kind and gentle and good; a
friend that was going to trust him and give him
a helping hand. It made him feel a man again,
no more a convict. Thousands all over this country
know and love Mrs. Maud Ballington Booth, but
she will never have a finer tribute from the lips of
any man than the simple words of the poor convict.
Forty-seven years in a prison’s gloomy cell —and
to come out sweet! The famous prisoners of
history and poetry have not been so. The imagi
nation of genius has refused to depict such a thing,
as being almost impossible to the character of man.
Why have all these poetic prisoners, all these
historic languishes in dungeon cells, come out
embittered against mankind and craving life only
to taste revenge? Because they were liberated into
a world which had forgotten their very existence,
a world wherein no man thought or cared for them
except in fear or scorn. The seal of the felon was
set in their foreheads, and it went everywhere they
went. Men read it and raised hands against them.
Embittered, spurned, outcast, they had but one
course—to fight their fight against the world with
crime on crime.
But this man came out sweet. He had a friend.
And she welcomed him and sent him to her home
and put him to work in the open air among her
gardens. And by and by, when spring comes, he
shall work in the warm, free sunshine and coax
the flowers out of their winter beds and into the
perfumed blossoming time of happy eJune.
So this old, prison-broken convict has preached a
little sermon, and one that is beautiful. It is that
if we have a friend, one friend, we must keep life
sweet no matter how black the night in which we
spend it. God bless the friend, and God pity him
who has none. —Washington Post.
"Gerrymander. ”
In the last number of the Voter Editor Henry
Barrett Chamberlain drops into Massachusetts
history and tells “where the gerrymander was
born.” His version is as follows: “The word
gerrymander came out of Massachusetts during the
year these United States tried conclusions with
Great Britain for the second time. The apportion
ment act of February 11, 1812, suggested the name,
owing to the fact that some of the districts were
formed into fantastic shapes. Towns were separat
ed and single towns were isolated from their
proper counties. As a matter of history it stands
almost alone as the rankest bit of work of the
character ever attempted in American politics.
The redistricting of today is equitable and sin
cere as compared therewith. There is not a body
of politicians extant that would have the nerve to
even suggest the proposition which became a law
in those days.
“Nathan Hale, one of the editors of the Boston
Weekly Messenger, published a map exhibiting the
two Essex districts in the edition of his paper of
March 6, and the paper stated at that time: ‘The
county of Essex has been divided into two
districts * * * to which the ingenious carvers
have been unwilling to assign names. The districts
of which the extremes are Salisbury, on the north
side of the Merrimack River, and Chelsea * * *
may be properly caled by the name which children
give to a letter in the alphabet. “Crooked S,” or one
district may be denominated concave and the
other convex, as one of them fits into the other
very much as the half of a small egg may be put
into half the shell of a larger egg.’ The map was
displayed by J. G. Cogswell, afterward librarian
of the Astor Libary, at a dinner at Colonel Thorn
dike’s house in Summer street. Here it was ex
amined and discussed and some one remarked that
lhe outer district but needed wings to resemble a
prehistoric monster. The suggestion was at once
acted upon by the artist Elkanah Tisdale. Some
one called for a name for the figure, and a guest
proposed the term salamander. Another guest,
thought to be Mr. Alsop, quickly protested and
suggested that as Governor Gerry had signed the
bill and permitted it to become a law it should be
named after him —hence the word “gerrymander.”
This version differs widely from the story of
the coining of the word as told by John Fiske in
“Civil Government in the United States.” Mr.
Fiske’s account, which is drawn from “Winsor’s
Memorial History of Boston,” runs thus: “In
1812, while Gerry was Governor of the State, the
Republican Legislature redistributed the districts
in such wise that the shapes of the towns forming
a single district in Essex county gave to the dis
trict a somewhat dragonlike contour. This was
indicated upon a map of Massuchesetts which
Benjamin Russell, an ardent Federalist and editor
of the Sentinel hung up over the desk in his office.
The celebrated painter Gilbert Stuart coming
into the office one day and observing the
uncouth figure, added with a pencil a head,
wings and claws and exclaimed, ‘That will do
for a salamander!’ ‘Better say Gerrymander!’
growled the editor, and the outlandish name, thus
duly coined, soon came into the general currency.”
—Boston Transcript.
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