Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 June 1892 — Page 4 Advertisements Column 2 [ADVERTISEMENT]

those gentlemen soon to meet In MinJ neapolis and Chicago and offer enticing promises to captivate the uncertain voter. The party that can promise to wipe out the coal monopoly without fail will stand in position to win popular favor.

A ridiculous craze is reported to be spreading in sections of Michigan, growing out of a desire to raise money to pay off church debts and for other charitable purposes, which consists in women performing all kinds of work to which they are not adapted, to obtain money. The wife of a bank president in one town peddled a fragrant brand of soft soap and scrubbed the floor of the hotel elevator; another sold pop-corn on the streets; a third went about blackening stoves. The wife of the station agent disguised herself and got the job of giving the depot a spring cleaning. In another town a band of girls went about the streets blacking boots and washing windows of the shopkeepers. These are samples of the absurd things which are reported to have been done to raise money for churches. There is reason to suspect that* an unnatural desire for notoriety has had quite as much influence in leading women to perform such service as devotion to the church. It seems not to occur to such people that they are depriving a class of people who do such work of the means of self-sup-port. At last reports the craze was spreading. May it be kept within the borders of Michigan.

States learn by experience alono the limitations which they should apply to the will-making power. The disposition of the Astor millions, and the growing tendency to perpetuate large fortunes in one name by handing them down directly in the male line, almost entirely to the exclusion of the female relatives, is giving New York State a large stock of experience which may dictate new legislation. It is significant that France, the country which has already solved so many social problems over which other nations are still puzzled, should no sooner have freed itself a little from the shackles of the old aristocratic and feudal regime than it at once limited the will-making power. There is nothing in the whole French code which more completely illustrates the passion for fraternity and equality than the article which says: “Children or their descendants inherit from their father or mother, grandfathers, grandmothers, or other elders, without distinction of sex or primogeniture, and even though they are issue of different marriages.” And the inheritance is by equal portions without respect to sex. It might be well for New York State, the home of so many archi-milllonaires, to copy a leaf out of the Code Napoleon, and thus to provide against the dangerous growth of fortunes in one name. By equal division among the children of any financial magnate, his fortune will slowly find its way back to tho masses, where it belongs.

One of the great industries of Chicago is the live-stock interest in all its ramifications. The city has maintained prominence in this line notwithstanding menace from various Western points. The receipts and shipments of live stock have steadily increased year by year, and the provision business has gone steadily forward. That this should have been the case while many of the persons engaged in this industry have been at difference indicates clearly the vast advantage which Chicago possesses by reason of converging lines of transportation as a place of receipt and shipment. For several years there has been what may be described popularly as a stock-yards war. Packers have been arrayed against packers, and projects for new yards have not only been broached but have actually taken the form of land purchases, both at points in Cook County and beyond the State line. It was not for persons engaged in other lines of business to interfere in this internecine strife, yet Chicago, whose prosperity is so largely interwoven with this vast meat industry, saw with regret that the differences were such as might eventually lose the city its prominence in this line. The war has been bitter. It is gratifying now to learf! that it approaches amicable settlement. The terms of peace are not material to others than those engaged immediately in the business of receiving and disposing of live stock, but the announcement of the fact that peace has been reached will be received with no little satisfaction the country over. It is not probable that for another generation at least there will be material disturbance of the great packing industries.