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Items of Interest Gathered Here and There
The Grand Canon of the Colorado.
Five times the Grand Canon of the Colorado has
been traversed by parties of white men. The last
time was this winter, when Mr. Charles S. Russell
and Mr. E. R. Monett, mining prospectors, went
through. They started on September 20 of last
year and came out on February 8, after many
escapes. The first trip through the canon
of which there is any record was that made by Maj.
J. W. Powell in 1869. The next was made by a
surveying party of the Denver, Colorado Canon and
Pacific Railroad Company, led by Mr. Robert B.
Stanton. It started in May, 1889, and came out
in April, 1890. Two men went through in 1896 and
another tw 7 o in 1897. These are all that have trav
ersed the whole length of the gorge. Major Powell,
however, made a second expedition in 1872 from
the upper end as far as the mouth of the Kanab
•wash, and Lieutenant Wheeler in 1871 went up the
canon from the lower end to Diamond Creek. Mr.
Stanton in a recent statement discourages adven
turers from risking their lives in the rocky gorge
hunting for gold or anything else. —Exchange.
Going to the Source.
The practice of celebrating the birthdays of
great men not only fosters a sentiment that is whole
some and ennobling, but also occasionally gives
birth to suggestions of great practical value.
Governor Hughes, one of the speakers at the
recent Lincoln-day dinner of the Union League Club
of New York, after a review of Lincoln’s life and
a eulogy of his character, said:
“I think I have read every word that Lincoln
ever "wrote. I would not ask anything better for a
young man who desires to enter political life than
to do the same. In the study of a profession or the
preparation for a public debate, or political oppor
tunity, a course in John Bright, a course in Glad
stone, a course in Lincoln, and direct familiarity
with their speeches and the platforms upon which
they stood and the methods which they brought to
bear upon the exigencies of the day would be worth
volumes of rhetorical study to reinforce their moral
strength, and bring to the community that great
power which is needed in the regeneration of our
affairs. ’ ’
The suggestion is full of wisdom, and has the
force of practical experience. It is a belief of many
persons of middle age that the school Readers of a
generation ago performed no greater service than
the stimulation of interest in great political leaders
by quoting eloquent examples of their mental and
moral grasp of the problems they had to face.
The present is a time when every literary counter
contains predigested mental food. There are so
many interesting magazine articles about great men,
and so many handy little pocket editions of “choice
selections” from their works, that the fashion of
going direct to the fountain-head is neglected. The
loss is serious. The young man who follows Gover
nor Hughes’ advice will have provided himself with
a political education and equipment that not even
an ordinary college education now supplies.—The
Youth’s Companion.
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The Problem of Prebentable Disasters.
It seems universal habit to take for granted that
what we would not have happen will not happen.
Most of our calculations are based upon the expected
continuation of the normal, few upon interruption
by the abnormal. Accordingly it is the unexpected,
whose terrors we can easily foreshadow in imagina
tion, which finds us unprepared, easy victims of the
rebellious forces of man or nature. Few disasters
to children in the mass parallel the holocaust in
Cleveland’s suburb, North Collinwood, Wednesday,
March 4. One hundred and seventy children, be
tween six and fifteen years of age, blameless and
helpless, wards of all the community, perished in a
sudden fire. It is all a most pitiable catastrophe,
with attendant agonies which few happily can
appreciate. About eighty children escaped, the
remainder perishing because the community in
The Golden Age for March 19, 1908.
question was not sufficiently educated to make a
possibility an improbability. The schoolhouse was
of brick, two stories and attic. It had one fire
escape, and two doors, both opening inward. The
fire drill had not been unknown in this school;
indeed, it had been much practiced, but always the
drill had contemplated exit by the front door only.
In this instance the little ones thought only of the
front exit, while had they sought an ordinary de
parture by the back door this might have been found
locked.' Such were the simple conditions for disaster
unlimited. The furnace originating the fire adds no
complications to the problem. Might this horror
have been prevented, and will it happen elsewhere?
Its gravity might have been mitigated; occurrences
like it are destined to happen elsewhere, but there
will be less fatalities just like this one because of
the lesson of this one. Rigid moral discipline cannot
be expected in children; nor in child-like adults;
nor, indeed, in any miscellaneous crowd such as
facilitated the ways of death in the burning of the
public hall in Boyertown, Pa., and of the Iroquois
theater in Chicago. History has shown it possible
to conceive of rigidly disciplined bodies of men
meeting death stoically, but in the presence of un
controlled fire, panic in a mixed assemblage rises
to madness. Yet panic is a problem in religious,
medical and mental science, and susceptibility to it
can surely be minimized, although this is a complex
matter in which education would require generations
in which to prove its influence. Meanwhile hordes
of nervous people are daily congregating in com
bustible buildings, with inadequate fire-escapes,
stairways and outlets; nevertheless all over the
country greater precautions will now be taken in
schools, and those responsible for every new school
building will, up to the limit of their means and
intelligence, seek to make the present disaster
impossible of repetition in their own experience.
Accordingly there will be less disasters just of this
kind. Every calamity forbids responsible humanity
to permit recurrence in its way. —The Standard.
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The Mothers 1 Congress.
In ancient and medieval times, in fact, down to a
recent period, the world jogged along very com
fortably without conventions and conferences. To
be sure, judged by our way of looking at things, the
pace was slow, and intellectual movement was
sluggish and insignificant, but there were no such
things as causes abroad in the land which needed
associations and gatherings to forward their objects.
Now they have sprung up like mushrooms, and there
is hardly a day in the year 'when there isn’t some
kind of a convention sitting somewhere on some
subject. These associations are of every imaginable
character, covering all branches of labor, business,
and trade; of education, science, charity, and
religion; of temperance, and all sorts of reforms,
and of benevolent, social, and patriotic organiza
tions. Aside from the question of the importance
or wisdom of their objects, or the advance they
make toward attaining them, they are useful and
beneficial in many ways. They serve to bring to
gether, and make acquainted, people from all parts
of the land; they promote good feeling, and broaden
the outlook of their members, and produce a sense
of unity throughout the country, and their various
discussions stimulate intellectual activity.
When the Congress of Mothers was first heard of
it seemed as though it were simply a new and rather
superfluous manifestation of the congress craze, and
that congresses of fathers, brothers, and sisters
would be equally useful and appropriate. Second
thought, however, recalls the fact that the mothers
stand in an exceptional relation to the children, and
so to the future of the country. More than schools
and churches, more than all other influences com
bined, they are molding the rising generation, and
whatever the country becomes, they will have made
it. It is said that the mothers have a peculiar claim
on our attention because if it'were not for them we
would none of us be here. That may be so, and it
may be, too, that if there had been no mothers there
might have been some roundabout way of landing
us here. However it may be, we are all grateful
for their love and unselfishness, and appreciate that
among them lies by far the largest portion of the
goodness and sweetness that keeps this old world
from going headlong to the bow-wows. So it is a
good thing for them to get together and exchange
views and experiences, and Washington is pleased
to have the Congress of Mothers in her midst. The
program indicates that we are to be told about
the children in many different countries. No one
ever tires of hearing of them, and we know that
whatever the mothers decide to do about them will
be wise and for the best. Such a congress must
recall impressively to all the mothers of the country,
and to those who may become mothers as well, that
such as they make themselves, the children of to
day and the men and women of the future will be.
It would be hard to think of anything the mothers
could ask for as mothers that the rest of us will
not gladly join to give them. —The Washington
Post.
It It
Faded Dreams.
Those unsophisticated American girls who looked
with envy upon the “good luck” of that New York
heiress whose alliance with a Hungarian nobleman
Avas supposed to have brought her a splendid title,
the highest luxuries of European life, and associa
tion with royal personages in surroundings w’hich
the envious ones probably thought of as “gorgeous”
need no longer nourish that envy. Let them, rather,
give its place to pity, and let them hug themselves
with joy because it was she and not they to whom
has come the bitter moments of disillusionment.
The “ancestral castle” has turned out to be a
commonplace and crumbling old farmhouse, not more
imposing than some American barns; in lieu of the
superb bathing appartments of modern American
houses, this delicately reared New York girl will
find a wooden vat, into which she will have to climb
with the aid of a ladder, when she finds its use
necessary. There is no piped water in the house.
It is all “toted” from a well by servants. There
are no gas or electric lights, no telephone communi
cation with the outside world. The luxuries to
which she was accustomed in her American home
will be superseded by a rudeness of life and
primitiveness of appointments in some respects be
yond that of the commonest tenants on her own
home estates.
And she wall probably find the exterior surround
ings of her new 7 life in close analogy with the
interior. She will not any longer be a queen, mis
tress of the homage of all the men of her acquaint
ance. She will not any longer be the untrammeled,
independent American girl whom American men
have permitted to encircle them with social chains.
She will be merely —a woman. There are many
parts of Europe in which a woman is still something
less than a man-servant, except in rank. Her hus
band is her master and holds his dominion over
her, land and body and will. She will no longer be an
individual with equal rights and superior privileges
to the male members of her social acquaintance; :,he
will be but a woman, the wife of her titled lord.
The truth is that American ideals, American
standards of living and the material comforts of
American life have not yet reached very far into
certain of the kingdoms of Europe. The well-nur
tured, luxuriously-reared American girl who plunged
from the refinements of her western home into a
civilization foreign to every ideal which she has
known is not to be envied. She is to be pitied.
She is entitled to the sympathy of all her country
women, —Exchange.
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Gray hairs are a crown of honor,
When they mark the progress
Os increasing wisdom.
So wrinkles are an adornment
To every face in which they are
The crystallized smiles that have beamed
From a loving, generous heart. — J. L. D. H.
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