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PAGE TWO Public Opinion Throughout the Union THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF THE WIRELESS. For three weeks a New York paper has published in its Sunday edition a full page of dispatches from Eu rope carried by Marconi’s wireless system of telegraphy. This is the most significant and satisfactory dem onstration of its practical value that has yet been made; it shows the pos sibility of the invention as a factor in the work of the world. One can not form an estimate yet of its use as a daily means of news paper service, owing to the fact that the dispatches for the Sunday paper are probably received several days in advance of publication, and come in a more leisurely manner than the live news of the hour must be carried. But at least the fact is established that across the many miles of ocean etheric waves are bearing tidings of another hemisphere so consistently and intelligibly as to admit of their being printed for the eyes of a great newspaper’s readers. It is a most remarkable develop ment of modern science in its atmos phere of mystery. It seems to bridge the gulf between the visible and the invisible; to be one of those strange links of fact that are gradually being forged by men in various departments of research to unite the material with the psychic. Who knows but the day may come when every man will be his own wireless receiving and dis patching station, and the emanations of the brain cells will be carried on the tenuous medium of the ether as surely as those of the electric bat tery I — Louisville Herald. CAR FAMINE AND HARD TIMES. It is dillicult to imagine how hard times and freight traffic congestion can possibly go together, but that seems to be the situation at Buffalo, where there is more wheat than the railroads can move. There is not a district in the. county in which freight is moved promptly. There are not cars enough. There is a downright scarcity of locomotives, and, as for terminal tracks and even tracks in general, there are not enough to meet the transportation wants of the vast general business of the country.. The car congestion is so great in New York the public service commis sion of that state has cited the rail ways to show why they do not fur nish a shipper a car within four days of the filing of a request for one, and the railroads propose to answer that they are helpless and have resorted to the “embargo” as the only way to provide the maximum of service to the public. By the word “embargo” is meant a refusal to accept during a given time any shipments of wheat to Lake Michigan points. And yet the prices of railroad stock are “criminally low”; the scar city of the currency is felt, and the land is full of predictions of dull times for a short while. All this can be, and yet the railroads can not move the business that is offered them, and the country is full of great crops. The talk of hard times under such circum stance seems paradoxical, bat we will WATSON’S WEEKLY JEFFERSONIAN. have to take things as they come along in these strange contradictory days.—Age-Herald. INTERNAL NAVIGATION. Navigation has been opened on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, connect ing the waters of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, and the first steamer passed through last Friday. Plans are now under discussion to enlarge greatly this waterway so that ocean-going vessels will be able to pass through from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi and thence to the Gulf. This is only one of numerous simi lar enterprises for- the development of internal navigation that are be ing contemplated or prosecuted in dif ferent parts of the country. Wherever there is available w’ater, plans are being considered to develop and to utilize its resources, both for purposes of power and navigation. Our own great river is one whose potential resources have up to the present time been least developed; but our people are now rousing them selves to the great importance of the subject, and earnest efforts are be ing put forth to inaugurate a compre hensive system of improvement that shall extend from the mouth to the source of the James. At the request of the Upper James River Valley League, the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Com merce has called a special meeting of the Chamber, which the public is in vited to atend, for 8:15 o’clock to night. Incalculable as w r ould be the value of navigation and the development of water power on the James to the peo ple of the entire valley, Richmond, seated as she is at the head of deep water navigation, would necessarily reap the greatest benefits. She would be the market and exchange place foi the trade and products of the valley. Not only would agriculture and manufacturing industries receive a powerful stimulus from the cheap transportation that navigation would supply, but men would be encouraged to develop the undeveloped treasures of mineral wealth that are known to underlie so great a part of this sin gularly neglected territory. The natural resources of this valley, if properly developed, would be capa ble of maintaining in comfort a popu lation greater by far than that now contained in the entire State. The influence that such development would have upon the fortunes of Richmond can be at .least vaguely understood by the least thoughtful and reflecting. It is to bring home to us a better and clearer appreciation and realiza tion of this that General Hardin has been invited to address us to-night.— Richmond Journal. TIME AND ITS RESULTS. Time, the gauge of everything, is eternal. Now is but the morning of the countless ages to come. The world has lived but a moment if es timated by the never ending future. But the natural resources will not last forever. Yet how improvident has been the human race. With in creased education and better civili zation man has not grown less, but more, wasteful of the world’s re sources. Speculation and greed drives him on regardless of the result. The claims of posterity are ignored, as he ruthlessly wastes the iron, coal and timber, so necessary to the needs of man. The last and greatest steamship afloat, the Lusitania, which is a won der of success, croses the ocean from England to New York in four days and nineteen hours, at a cost of one thousand tons of coal per day. Just think of the thousands of steamers burning from fifteen to one thousand tons per ’day. Then add to that the locomotives and factories, and you can form a faint conception of the great amount of coal used daily. If one could see the hole made in the earth each day, he would have an ob ject lesson that would make the whole world pause and think. Today if you mention to the average man that we are destroying too fast the world’s resources, that we are buying progress at too great a cost, he will invariably answer that invention will supply something else in lieu of timber, coal and iron, when the supply has been exhausted, that it will last as long as he will. Such selfish impulses should not exist in man. While the material side of life is necessary to a certain extent, it should not be permitted to supersede the ideal. England, a small island, is mining all the coal possible and shipping it to foreign countries for speculative purposes. When you mention the subject to an English man, he will answer that coal extends under the British Channel and the At lantic Ocean, that old England’s sup ply is inexhaustible, and that there is no danger of the supply giving out. Well, in our time it will not be come exhausted. But should we not have some feeling, some consideration, for the generations that are to come after us? And just to thing of it, Such waste is called ‘ development. Our idea of development is to take a twig and by cultivation bring it to maturity; in turning the bush to a tree, and thus produce a value that did not exist before; in removing use less weeds and from seed produce something necessary to human life and happiness. We can not remedy the coal question unless we can find some way to use less. We can in part restore the timber. If the state, for example, would award three prizes to those who plant and cause to live the greatest number of young pine trees, in the following manner: $5,000 to the first, $2,000 to the second, and SI,OOO to the third, there would be more trees planted in one year than will be planted in fifty if the people are left to their own volition. We can think of nothing for which the state could spend money that would give such profitable returns. A few years ago our pine forests extended from one end of the state to the other. Today they are nearly all destroyed. Let us have some legislation for the restoration of our forests, and thus restore an attraction that has been lost to our State. —Polk County Record. PROHIBITION IN THE SOUTH. Alabama has now joined the rank of the prohibition states. After the election in Birmingham, which result ed in a signal victory for prohibition, the action just taken by the Alabama legislature most identically a repetition of the ac tion of the Georgia legislature last summer, when by a vote that lacked but little of being unanimous the sale of liquors in the state was outlawed. The action of the Alabama legislators was a little more conservative, giv ing the liquor and brewery interests a full year, besides the fraction of the year remaining, to wind up their affairs. This action of Alabama is not to be the end of the prohibition move ment. The lead set by Georgia will be followed by still other states. Ten nessee, South Carolina, North Caro lina and even Kentucky, not to men tion other states, are now practically where Georgia was just previous to the passage of the prohibition law. All these states have local option laws, and under this law one county after another has been voted dry un til now only the larger cities re main w r et. Prohibition sentiment has been constantly growing and is un doubtedly now shared by a majority of the people of these states. That prohibition bills will be introduced when their legislatures shall meet is certain, and that they will be passed by several is extremely probable. The prohibition sentiment which has been slowly but surely and stead ily growing in the South for the past twenty years has now assumed the proportions of a great moral reform wave. It has gathered strength with each local success, until the growing enthusiasm is making it irresistible even where formerly it had gained little foothold. Under the contagion of this enthusiasm it would not be at all strange if the spectacle of a solid South would soon be presented to the country on the prohibition question as it has long been on other questions. It is rather strange that while in the South the prohibition sentiment is making such remarkable headway, it should be making no apparent prog ress in other sections of the coun try. Maine in the East, and Kansas in the West, were pioneer prohibition states. Maine was made a dry state by law when there was not a single dry county in the South, nor any pro hibition sentiment. Yet in those sec tions prohibition sentiment has not spread. They are entirely unaffected by the great prohibition wave that is sweeping over the South, and from present appearances this condition of wet and dry will soon be another dis tinguishing feature between the North and the South. Whether prohibition shall remain as a permanent institution time alone can show. But at the present thia prohibition sentiment is constantly growing in the South, and it appears certain that thia entire section will become dry.—Augusta Herald,