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EDITORIAL PAGE THE ATLANTA GEORGIAN Published Every Afternoon Except Sunday By THE GEORGIAN COMPANY At 20 East Alabama St., Atlanta, Ga. Entered as second-class matter at postoffice at Atlanta, under act of March 3, IST, S ibscrlptioti Price—Delivered by carrier, 10 cents a week. By mail. ,5.00 a year. Payable in advance. The Garnishment Laws of Georgia Should Be Revised V * » There Is Little Justice in Them as They Now Stand on cue Statute Books and the Sooner They are Changed the Bet ter. The garnishment laws of the state of Georgia are fearfully and wonderfully made. They should be revised upon an equitable and common sense basis; and only such persons should be held answerable to them as may be brought within their scope in such wise as Io inflict no unnecessary humiliation or hardship upon anybody . As they stand today, they are little understood by the people affected, and from this condition has grown a practice in Geor gia that is thoroughly mean and reprehensible, and utterly with out warrant in law. Here in Atlanta, as elsewhere in Georgia, it has been the common custom for a considerable number of creditors know ingly to garnish the wages of persons clearly exempt, upon the idea that they, rather than go to the annoyance and expense of a lawsuit, and more especially to escape complications and em barrassments with their employers, will settle the garnishment in the creditors’ favor, often regardless of the real merits of it. Technically, the law furnishes a measure of protection against that sort of thing, in that it permits damages because of illegal garnishment. But that protection is very slight, as a matter of fact, because the amount of damages a prosecutor is able to show generally is small, and the expense attending the suit for recovery’ of the same seldom pays in results obtained. That creditors do take advantage of these facts, to push their garnishments illegally and most unfairly, is shown abund antly in the records of such garnishments frequently brought. There should be a heavy penalty, and one easily determined, prescribed for the creditor who knowingly and deliberately orings a garnishment against a debtor exempt, from the operation of the garnishment law, and particularly when it is brought with the evident purpose of embarrassing that debtor with bis em ployer. Honest debts should be paid but even honest debts ought not to be capable of collection) through mean, illegal, and unnec essarily humiliating process. Long ago, people could be crushed, harrassed. and shamed by imprisonment for debt. That time has ceased to be- and ihere is no red-blooded, fair-minded, manly man nowadays who s not glad of it. Collecting debt through unworthy invocation of the gar nishment laws should be. equally as impossible as collecting them through imprisonment, or through threats of the same. 't he garnishment laws of Georgia should be revised, cleared up. ami made absolutely definite. And then those who appeal to them should be held rigidly accountable for their application. How Do Men Think? M M r. What IS Thought—Life's Great Mystery. We human beings possess just two things—this earth with its material wealth and material forces, AND THOUGHT. With the earth for a basis, and thought the developer and improver, we have acquired all of our wealth. We owe as much to that mysterious power called thought as we do to the earth itself with all its wealth. Put your thought upon THOUGHT ITSELF. What have you got that you do not owe to thought? The coal was in the mine. Only thought could get it out and make use of it for power. The ocean is full of water. Only thought could change it into steam and run the engine that moves the train. Thought changes the sheep's wool into the cloth upon your hack, the cotton’s fleece into the shirt, or sheet. Thought is a cannibal and lives upon thought. Your thought is fed by other thoughts bound up in books. Thought, breeds thought. The spoken thought of your friend starts and stimulates your own thinking. Niagara’s power. PLUS thought, is changed into electric light, moving machinery, flying electric cars WHAT IS THOUGHT? We do not pretend and shall not try to answer that question. It is as old as man. J'be savage, thinking in a dull way. slept at night ami found his dreams a mass of thought, distorted, strange, unreal. From .hose thoughts came his ideas of ghosts and devils, and of innumer able gods, kind or wicked—at least, so scientific men tell you. In thought our minds see many divisions, many mental forces . i work. In the great soldier we think we see the lighting force, m the painter or poet, artistic thought; and Arkwright's brain, that gave us the spinning jenny Io clothe our bodies, we call the inventive thought. .May it not be that there is only ONE kind of thought. ONE great thinking force, complex, infinite in power, which works through us human beings here, producing certain little results here, and greater results through glorious intellects on greater planets, or on great suns? The problem of the engineer who uses the electric current is to .MAKE BETTER MACHINES through which that current may act. He has the perfect current in quantities unlimited. His ear may' go ten miles an hour, a hundred or a thousand miles. The power will do it if the machine he right. Humanity is the engineer, whose, business it Is to utilize here lhe earth’s power of thought, the cosmic force that regulates the universe. . Is it not our task on this earth to produce better brains. BET TER THINKING MACHINES, through which the perfect power of force may’ work? Nothing could be more inspiring than the thought that man kind is to work out its problems through affection, through good ness. creating through the highest conceivable moral human rela tionship the perfect brain through which perfect uniiersal thought may act. The Atlanta Georgian Diogenes Enlists—For a Few Moments ( ' Copyright. 1912. International News Service. < ( / c ( ’ ( J I c /Sir. I am Major \ /Sir i am RelucwvuyA IWO66LSJPOOH or the) /09uc>€DToTeli. You That I . \Nors*ialk GUAfcPS \ AMtRICAN /This l*> .H£ WAS >1 Station /Ga \ bought that ma ( /st V \TOY STORE. HE WAuT& / _ \TuRKS. Coutp) \ tHRtE Dollars To < 4 mfife zi. | fl |J f-/ -X & £H| w/< • a a* 11 T x r i ' 1 - Nearly lands important bunch of coin. Again queered by Honest Mon! scene fol- | lows! Again philosopher beaten up! Also gets black eye! Woman Asks Equal Standard of Morality » woman's cry is the • I loudest thing in the world today,” said T. P. O'Con nor; “yes, and the most notewor thy.” Hkd the Irish genius of observa tion pursued the subject he would doubtless have added that, like the infant’s, the woman’s cry would not cease until she had obtained that for which she cried. “What is the trend of feminine psychology?” demanded a lawyer. "Men know that the entire sex is in a state of unrest and disquiet and dissatis faction. but we don’t know what is in their minds because they won't tell us. They don’t seem to want us to know.” That eminent lawyer is further from the truth than he has ever been in all of his long and brilliant career. A woman may not choose, when she is in the sulks, to tell her husband or father or brother that she craves a new hat or gown. Per haps she has learned, through many household scenes, that the subject is a sore one. Or she may not con fide in him the secret that she has quarreled with her neighbor, and her reticence is justifiable, for such mistakes and tumults of soul belong to the sacred reserves, if she wishes there to place them. Men do not vaunt their weakness nor advertise their mistakes, and if Mrs. Brown does not wish to tell that she has had a back-fence argument with Mrs. Smith, that is her own affair Idea Is Overworked. But the idea that women are sub tle and secretive, that they are be yond understanding and past find ing out. has been overworked. In trivial matters, the purchase of a purple flower for her mother's bon net. or adding to the allowance of her son at college a few dollars from her own, she may be a bit se cretive. Granted, for sake of argu ment. that woman is something of a magpie in hiding secrets of this sort, usually they are of no more consequence than the bits of col ond/ghuis the non-committal bird places In a dark < orm and ■ overs 11mu prying eyes. lit aalii to th< ug» t'S . > of FRIDAY. NOVEMBER 8, 1912. By ADA PATTERSON. • her life a woman wants to be frank, and is. The woman’s cry, that threadlike soprano piercing the chorus of all the other cries of the twentieth century world, is for a larger, more rounded and useful life. The sum of all her demands is to be an individual of more worth to her family, more value to society and more satisfaction to herself, A Woman's Wishes. To the end of this desired state her cry is for a full right to her own property, whether she has earned it by her own effort or has earned it by helping and urg ing her husband to save it, or whether it has been hers by the accident of inheritance. She re bels against the right which exists in some states in this otherwise glorious Union of a husband who may have subsisted upon her prov idence«all their married life to pre vent her withdrawal from the bank of her own savings account, or her sale of the' house she has builded by her own efforts, or to bequeath his unearned half of the increment to his own relatives or friends, or even the woman for whom he has given her cause for jealousy , if the possibility of it still exists in the heart long before emptied of all love of him. Such instances, not uncommon, add volume and poign ancy to the cry of woman. The cry of woman is for an equal standard of morality "for the sexes. She is tired of fractional decency’ of living. She does not want to bear alone the white banner of chastity. She wants to see the man of her affection marching beside her in the path of purity. She wants to wreck the foolish old traditions of license in conduct for the other sex, to overturn all the barricades of privilege and prerogative by which he has defended his dal liance along the broad way. Her cry is for simplified living, that she may have time for mental growth. She welcomes the de vices that make housekeeping a briefer and easier task. Sin wants v housekeeping to become not an ab sorbing, exhausting occupation, but ■' a pleasant, daily incident. She wants the kitchen to be a subor dinate element, not the hub around which the household revolves. She wants plainer eating and better thinking. She cries for this because it will give her more time to read, time to reflect, time to talk with her family about more vital mat ters than beeksteak and fried po tatoes. She wants a half hour or more every day for contact with other minds. She cries for the stimu lus of association with other wom en who are doing home work and World work. She wants to develop the new art for women, self-reli ance. She begs the right to think instead of to echo the thoughts of others. She wants sex to be subservient to mind. Siie wants to so regard it that she may become a friend of another woman, not look upon her with savage enmity as a possi ble rival in the interest of some male human. She wants to be a friend of women, not only in the collective but the individual sense, and to do this she declipes to long er honor sex as supreme. She wants to remain single if she thinks she is against matrimony, and this without odium or the fear of poverty in old age. She wants to earn such wages as will enable her to make provision for her old home. Wants to Be Comrade. If she marries she wants to be treated as a comrade and business partner, instead of a plaything or household servant. She wants her opinions to be treated with respect, not tolerance nor ridicule. She wants to be a leader for her chil dren. not an awed follower in their educated steps. She wants to extend her house keeping talents into the world's housekeeping, for the world's good. She cries for the right to be guided by the trained mind, instead of tacking to the Impulses of the vagrant heart. The woman's cry is to bo allowed to transmute the clean, lint-, high ideals of womanhood into the reali ties of the world I THE HOME PAPER Dorothy Dix Writes on I Playing With [ /, Fire Thoughtless Girls, She Says, Are the WL 1 Ones Who Amuse z Themselves by 7 I Flirting With Married Men to Annoy T heir Wives. — _ | By DOROTHY DIX NOT iong ago 1 heard a pretty - and foolish young woman boasting of her flirtations with married men and laughing over what fun it was* to make their wives turn pea green with jealousy. "You should just see the wives.” she gurgled with delight; "fat frumps or skinny skeletons, with grizzled hair, and no complexions, and so mad that they could have bitten a tenpenny nail in two when I walked off with their husbands to look at the moon or sit in a palm sheltered corner, or something. My, but 1 wouldn’t be one of those men when gets him home, and have to hear the things he’s got to ' listen to, for a house and lot. But that’s the fun of flirting with mar ried men. Outwitting his wife puts ginger into it, and, anyway, I al ways fascinate married men, so I’m not to blame.” Paints Distress of Wife. Not to blame for doing her best to entice a married man away from his home and family? Girls do plenty of wrong and silly things that can be excused by their youth and inexperience, but nothing on earth condones the crime of the woman who encourages a man in being faithless even in thought to his marriage vows. As for a young girl finding amusement in watching the help less suffering of a wife who sees her husband ' being enticed away from her. the women of old who diverted themselves by watching wild beasts tear people to death in the arena were no crueler than she. It does not take any imagination to paint the agony of the middle aged wife who sees her husband Ijeing fascinated by a younger woman, who compares her dull eyes with the girl's bright ones; her heavy figure with the girl's light grace: her faded, cheeks with the girl’s fresh roses; her dead hair 1 with the girl’s glossy locks: her weary and jaded spirit with the girl’s effervescence of youth, and who realizes, above all, that the girl has the allure of the new and unknown while she has grown as tedious to her husband as a twice told tale. Very likely the woman has burn ed her beauty out over the kitchen stove cooking for her husband. Very likely her hands have grown knot ted and coarse working to make him comfortable and to help him get a start in the world. Very likely her eyes have grown dim nursing his children. Very- likely she is frow sily dressed because she is trying to save his money; but women know with pitiless certainty that men seldom remember what a wom an has done for them. They only know how she looks at the present moment, and so no wife puts any faith in her husband's gratitude to her keeping him faithful to her. That is why it is so easy for any young girl to make a middle-aged wife jealous. It's Poor Sport. But it’s poor sport, girls; as poor sport as to shoot the broken-winged dove that is hovering over its nest. If you want to amuse yourself bv making anybody jealous, play in your own class. Pick out a rival as young and good-looking as you are, and try to get her admirers away from her. Then yc.o will, at least, have a toemun worthy of your - steel. You won't be taking candy away from a sick baby. Os course, the husband who waiting around for some pretty girl to make eyes at him, and who jumps up and follows the first . who looks over her shoulder at him, isn't really worth his wife’s worry ing over. Don't Be Responsible. However, such as he is, he is all that she has got. He is the father of her children. He is the fnan she gave her young heart to and that she’ll see through a rosy mist of illusions as long as he lives. Sh< bears his name, and his disgrac will be hers and her children’s. Hi presence and his earnings keep th roof over her head and her babie and therefore she grows desperat at the thought of his being entice away from her. Don’t you have a. hand In break ing up this home, little sister. Le the woman keep her poor make shift of a husband. Don’t have another woman’s tears, nor the black sin of having had any part it rendering little children fatherless, on your soul. Don’t forget that retribution nev er fails. Some day you, too, will' marry. Some day you, too, will grow middle-aged, and homely, and see younger and fairer women hov ering about your husband, and then you, too, will suffer pang for pang the misery that you inflicted on an other woman. Also bear this in mind, that the girl who flirts with a married man plays with fire. Sometimes she, hurts her own heart worse than she does the wife’s, for the man who is married to one woman dnd makes love to another deals dishonorably by all women. In a worldly sense he is "safe," as being married lie does not have to marry the girl, nor can he be sued for breach of prom ise. Furthermore, the girl hersGf has broken down the wall that man’s chivalry has erected about the innocent and modest young gi. l, and so what started as a flirtation is xjery apt to pass into something which spells disaster for the girl. Chickens Will Come Home. And don’t forget this, either, you girls who think it fun to flirt with married men. The girl who en gages in that pastime cuts her own throat, socially and matrimonially. You may laugh at the jealous wives, but it is the wives who issue the invitations to balls and parties and who give the house parties, and once let a girl get the reputa tion as being fond of married men, and her name is dropped from every invitation list. Wives no more encourage a flirtatious girl around their homes than a shep herd does a wolf around his sheep fold. Nor do young men, the right sort of young men, want to marry the girl who has affairs with marries men. She is a little too wise. Sl.e is too sophisticated. Always ai inevitably the smell of seam! - hangs about her skirts. It may b" undeserved, but it’s there, and y can't argue with an odor. Therefore, girls, in humanity other women, and In Justice m yourself, don’t flirt with other wom en’s husbands. The man may be very fascinating. It may be trie that his wife doesn’t appreciate him, but just remember that y don't hold the office of public com forter Thus shall you save you, seif and your sister woman much trouble.