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EDI*TORTA.E PAGE THE ATLANTA GEORGIAN Published Every Afternoon Except Sunday THE GEORGIAN COMPANY At 20 East Alabama St., Atlanta. Ga. Entered as second-class matter at postoffice at Atlanta, under act of March S. IS7S. Subscription Price—Delivered by carrier, 10 cents a week. By mail, Jo.oo a year. Payable in advance. W ilson’s Serene and Sober Democracy < Jovernor Wilson says he does not care to sit up all night on the .•th of November to follow the fragmentary returns. He would pre fer to go to bed—and read the papers in the morning. Here is a significant point in the character of the Democratic candidate. Whether he stays up to watch the ticker or not, his friends will testify that he is not over-anxious. He does not strain himself to be president. He is the least concerned of all the candi dates. This fact has an important bearing upon the quality of ■Wilson’s democracy. His eagerness for the power that other men can bestow upon him is checked by his knowledge that a man's greatest power is never given or taken away by majority vote. Hi is the kind of a Democrat that would rather rule a cabin made by himself than a kingdom that others have made for him. His democracy is of the old stock. He hates arbitrary and adventitious power. Such power as he now possesses he has won by absorbing him self in his own proper work. He can win more in the same way— whatever happens on election day. He will never be out of a job. However, there is no doubt that Wilson will be elevated, and there is no doubt that he will plunge with enthusiasm into the work of the presidency. Only the presidency must come to him as a sequence to what he has always been doing, and as a thing in tin: v course of nature. Wilson’s democracy has the serenity of the old Virginia type —of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. He is on their line. But he has traveled with the age. Wilson is by all odds the most progressive man in the presi dential lists, because he understands—as none of the rest do—that the energy of modem polities is in the organization of the working world. He knows that the way to make private business more pub lic in its aim and operation is to make public business more per sonal. more matter-of-fact and businesslike. He sweeps away the superstition that private affairs and public affairs can be conducted on different moral planes. Since he per ceives that it is impossible to maintain a higher moral standard in public life than obtains in average industry and trade, he insists that both standards must rise together. He is not going to knock the brains out of big business; on the contrary, he is trying to put brains into big business. ■ He is a terror to the bosses because he refuses to be one. They lear him by instinct: but the whole measure of his menace to them they simple souls!—do not yet fully comprehend. Wilson under stands. of course, that bosses live on the corruption of commercial ism. He will abolish the bosses by abolishing the corruption. Seeing that a feverish politics swinging a big stick—can not allay the fever of bad business. Wilson would restore the health of economics and the healt h of politics by reviving the spirit of free initiative aud local self-government—i. e., the Democratic spirit. He would strengthen the structure of government from bot tom to top—beginning with the foundations, where the people live. A vote for Wilson is a vote for a cool-headed captain, who is particular about his chart, his compass and his port. Be is a bold sailor, but he is prudent. And he is Imperturbable in storms. These are stormy limes—in Europe, in Asia and elsewhere. News of the disasters to Turkey brings the great powers of Europe to the verge of a wide vortex of war. Within the next four years Europe is likely to exhaust its economic strength in devastating military campaigns. A reaction toward militarism and absolutism in Europe will leave the Great American republic standing where it stood a century ago—the only competent and conspicuous cham pion of political freedom and industrial efficiency. Under such circumstances the United Slates may. within this decade, achieve an earth-gripping power, a mastery of material things, so sane and irresistible that it can dictate the peace of the world and impose the methods of its own prosperity upon the be wildered peoples of Europe. That is the kind of role that the great Democrats have always meant to play. It is the kind of thing Wilson cares about. He would organize the creative forces of the United States so that its science and industry should be more terrible to despotism than any ■"army with banners.” This is a great day for the trying-out of free government. It is a day to sit tight in the saddle of Democracy. Wilson sits tight. i Dress Reform for Men A German society for ‘‘the reform of male apparel” proposes to do away with the many garments with which man adorns himself. < ollars. shirts, waistcoats and hats are the more important ele ments of garb that will disappear if the society's program is carried out. In their place will come a blouse or smock, knee breeches and bare heads. All of which is well enough. But when the tinal article of progress is considered we find in it the seed of dissolution and death. Tim society plans that every man shall design his own clothes; that he shall select its fabric and cut. ornamentation and color. There shall be no tailors in the land to dominate the styles, for there shall be no styles under the society's rule. By this radical innovation the entire good program is spoiled. There is not a man among us but would gladly banish collar but tons and suspenders, starched shirts and high collars. But where is the man bold enough or brave enough to design his own clothes, who will spend the day in shopping for materials, or an afternoon matching up buttons or braid’.’ It nmy be that man will discard long trousers aud give them to his women folks to wear instead of the hobble skirt, but mere man will go back to the breech clout rather than become his own dress maker. The Atlanta Georgian The Price He Paid Drawn By HAL COFFMAN. § w ti \ > Ti ; 5 ’Tk I'll® ; : a M ■' ’■ f ' T ■ "7 2 !i ME —u ft.) -gfc „ ’ I F —- W> 'Or -1 ■ SB ■ - ini/l i A I Want I • I I A.. THE OLD MAN Gimme a whisky. i THE BARTENDER-Where's the price? In real life the Old Man slinks out of the saloon, and the young men drinking there laugh J at him. What the Old Man should say is this: • I; 'I have spent my youth, I haw spent my reputation, 1 have spent my prospects for whisky. ? < I have spent everything I ever had. Haven't 1 paid the price.’” < Then the young men might think. > € Writing Love Letters & By DOROTHY DIX. A< TNCINNATI professor advo cates teaching the art of writing love letters as a part of the public school curriculum. He thinks that the exchange of billet doux between the pupils would con stitute an excellent method of teaching literature. Well, did you ever! What makes this gentleman, who must be highly educated, suppose that love letters are literature? They aren't. They are plain, unmitigated slush. if two great poets like Elizabeth and Robert Browning simply went to pieces and became maudlin when they wrote love letters to each other, what, in heavens name, would happen when Mamie of the seventh grade and Tommy of the eighth grade tried to put their pal pitating heart throbs on paper? Ought To Be Taught. Go to, Professor, you are old enough to know better than to want to encourage such folly. The only love letters that have ever been written in the whole history of the world that any of us can read without a feeling of deadly nausea coming over us are those effusions that have been addressed individ ually to ourselves. And goodness knows they weren’t literature! The only possible Justification for introducing a course of love-letter writing into the public schools would be to impress on children in rheir early, formative years not to write love letters at all under any circumstances or provocation. The danger of it might be taught along with the danger of drink, and thus prove of untold value to the rising generation. Little boys in knickerbockers might have it drilled into their in ner consciousness that they must never, never write letters in which they would describe themselves as some female's "ducky daddle," or "popsy-wopsy," and tell how many million, billion kisses they inclosed in the envelope, or how many years and years it seemed since they saw their “lamble-love," or words to that effect. Thereby would these little boys when they grew to manhood and became trust magnates sate them selves from breach of promise suits and from heating the ribald laugh ter with which a cold and cruel world greets the love letters of a i ich old man to a chorus girl, ~»n the) tin read in court. Also the boy who ha« been taught in a hool FRIDAY. NOVEMBER 1. 1912. to regard a love letter as the ad- v dor that biteth and the serpent I I that stingeth, or any other peril along the pathway of life, will be preserved from leaving carelessly in his coat pocket one of those vio let scented, pink tinted missives that wives go sleuthing for. and i? i- ' | I ffl X -Jy & C* ll DOROTHY DIX that have resulted in Reno becom ing such a favorite resort with ladies. The writing of love letters, how ever. is a feminine and not a mas culine vice, and if the public schools, beginning with girls in the kindergarten, could inoculate them w ith a sufficient horror of commit ting this supreme folly to prevent them from doing it. then, indeed would a great reform have been accomplished. To teach a girl how not to write a love letter would do her more good than to make her mistress of all the arts and sciences. Foolish Women. The mania that women, and es pecially young girls, have for in criminating themselves on paper is one of the things that nobody can explain. They don’t even know why they do it themselves. But set a woman down at a writing desk with plenty of good white paper before her, and a pen that doesn’t scratch, and a man to write to, and she goes on a kind of Ink jag. and writes things that she never intended to. that she doesn’t mean, and that she blushes to remember the longest day she lives. Tb< most modest woman, the shyest and most reserved. the worn- !• an who wouldn’t think of telling a man she loved him if she was face to face with him, will write him the most sickening love letters. And she'll pour forth all of these mushy expressions, and put down in black and white' all of this die-away af fection. not because she is con sumed with an overwhelming pas sion for him, but because she thinks it sounds grand, and poetical, and toman tic. if any course of study could make girls see what folly it is to write such letters, how they cheap en themselves in a man’s eyes by doing it. and how idiotic and ridic ulous these poor little missives seem to other people, let us not only introduce it into the public schools, and every other school and college in the land, but make it a compulsory’ course at that. An Old Story. it' would save a lot of paper and ink. and future tears, if Mamie in her school days could hear the silly gush she has indicted to Tommy read aloud by the teacher, and have its washy poetry and mixed meta phors kindly but effectually dis sected. Take it from me that Ma mie’s hankering for writing love letters and slopping over a half a quire of paper with burning words of devotion, would be slain in that moment, and that when she was a grown woman her communications with all young men would be by word of mouth or a picture postal card. She would be like that admirable heroine in one of Rhoda Brough ton's novels who was a great flirt, but who was wont to boast that, no matter what she might have told a man, she thanked God that there was not one scrap of handwriting in the length and breadth of Eng land. There is an old story about a lit tle boy who wrote an essay about pins, in which he declared that pins had saved millions of lives by not being swallowed. If the Cincinnati professor's the ory of Introducing the writing of love letters into the public schools can be guaranteed to work in the same way it will be a long step toward the higher education, par ticularly of women otherwise it will merely confirm fools in their folly. \nd they arc plenty foolish as they are. THE HOME PAPER WINIFRED BLACK Writes on Modern Woman and Economic Conditions The Last, She Says, Is a Most Convenient Phrase and Is Likely to Mean Most Anything—Even Wages That Some Fol ks Can’t Get. DR. HENRY MEADE, nerve specialist and scientist in general, says that the new kind of American girl is fine for the men, but the worst sort of thing for the children. “The clever, brilliant, self-suffi cient, independent girl of today is m'aking over the men,” says Dr. Meade. “Men aren't the boyish animals they were a generation ago. They can’t be and keep up with women. But where are the children coming in? These clever women don’t want to stop being clever to have children until they are about 35, and then it is too late.’’ A Convenient Phrase. AU over the land Indignant “mod ern women” are rising to deny, with sound and fury, the impeach ment he has made of them, and in tlie nine hundred and ninety-nine replies I have read the one real thing the clever women say is— “economic conditions.” " “Economic conditions!” Where have I heard that phrase before? Oh. yes! It’s what they say when they want to tell why a woman kills her husband and runs away with another man. It’s the phrase they use when they explain why a man robs the man who pays him a salary. It’s what they say now adays when a little girl tells her mother to mind her own business and she’ll mind hers. “Economic conditions!” What a convenient phrase it is, to be sure! I wish I was quite positive that I know just exactly what it means. It can’t be that it is just the wages that people get—can it? 1 wonder just how much wages have to do with the “no children at our flat” fad just now? Not so very much, in my opinion—not half so much as some people seem to think. You can't stamp out a great primal instinct with a mere matter of wages. As a matter of fact, the poorer people are the more children they have. Mary Is Lonesome. I was talking wrth the finest old lady I know about it this very day, and she said: “Well, I used to think the woman who didn’t want children was un natural, but I’ve been visiting round among my daughters and sons and I feel different about it. "There’s Mary, John’s wife, the sweetest girl I know—or was when she married my son John four years ago. What Mary is now is a lone some, neglected woman, with a mouth turned down at the corners and a disposition turned down all around. I don’t wonder at it —I A Ballade of Fate By WILLIAM F. KIRK. THERE was a man who died too young— A handsome fellow, rich and gay, \ Loved by the men he walked among, Ever a winner, fight or play. They put him in the ground today While crying comrades stood apart; They did not know and could not say. The Master has it on His chart. There is a man forlorn, unstrung, Hopeless and homeless, bent and gray ; Who. when the sparrow’s song is sung. Leaves the park bench and limps away. Dreaming, perchance, of some old May That makes a tear unwelcome start. His course through life he can not stay; The Master has it on His chart. There was a girl by sorrow stung— A girl who could not whisper nay. She listened to a lying tongue And has her little debt to pay. What is the sentence? Tell me. pray— You with your sharp and slanderous dart. O’er Love and Life we hold no sway. The Master has it on His chart. ENVOY. Kismet. 0 Kismet! Though we stray Until the ceasing of the heart, Or join at once the vast array. The Master has it on His chart. By WINIFRED BLACK. did till I visited her, but now 1 don’t. “Mary has two children, lovely little things, and that’s all she has got—that and a man to pay the bills. She hasn’t any husband, not what I call a husband, at all. John belongs to three clubs, says Mary is so busy with the children all the time he has to have some com pany, and he has it—at the club. “Mary’s little John had the croup when I was there, and Mary and 1 sat up with him till 4 o’clock. John came in about 11 from the club, looked sorry for awhile and then said he’d have to get some steep, as he had a big deal on the next day. That deal wasn’t big enough to keep him at home resting, I noticed —just big enough to leave the lit tle boy to us all night. “ ‘What do you do, Mary, when I am not here?’ I asked, when little John was breathing easier and looked as if he’d drop off to sleep in a minute or so. “ *Oh,’ said Mary, T fight It out alone.’ Then I knew what made her look so down in the mouth all the time. "Fight it out alone! Most of the new kind of mothers seem to do that, and when I was young being alone was considered a kind of lonesome business —maybe it’s dif ferent now. Brought 'Em Up Together. “What's the matter with maij riage nowadays, anyhow? When I married we expected to be together —that's what we married for. My husband didn't go somewhere elsa for his fun; he took it home or took me with him. "Who would want to stay at home with the children while hus band goes out playing golf or beat ing some one at some champion ship billiard thing or other? it takes two to bring up a family, oi it did in my day, and those two have got to be close together all the time. "I had eight children and my husband and I brought ’em up to gether. We had our fun at home with the children, and every child we had was that much more fu» for us all. "If he’d been this new kind rd man that’s got to be ‘amused’ the time like some fretful baby j wouldn’t have wanted any suc| family as that, or any family at all "What do they want the women to do —be the old-fashioned while they don’t come within a mile of being the old-fashioned fa ther?” I wonder If there’s any truth in what the good old grandmother said. There can’t be—there wasn’t a word about "economic conditions” . in her whole discourse. -