Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 February 1910 — AN UNKNOWN HERO. [ARTICLE]

AN UNKNOWN HERO.

Maa Trying to Aholi«h th* New Slavery la Knlogised. For many long, terrible years the United States has been sweltering under the yoke of the tyranny of servants. With waiters, parlor car porters, cooks, maids and even barbers in their present advanced condition, what man has not felt the mailed hand of the mighty? Walters have withered us, porters have petrified us, barbers have bullied us, maids have mystified us and cooks have cooked us until all the fight has been taken out of us. And until now we have been looking for another Lincoln in vain. Hope, however, has come at last. A hungry patient of a Chicago restaurant became impatient the other day at the slowness of the waiter. Ah, how many of us have felt that impatience and remained supine, the Washington Post says. But this Chicago man was made in heroic mold. He did not beckon timidly to the waiter and feebly remonstrate. He did not send for the head waiter, who would have given him an icy reproof. He did not send for the proprietor and go through the usual argument. None of that for this man. He was a hero, a pioneer, a Harriet Beecher Stowe, only his way the way of deeds rather than words. He simply proceeded to “clean out" the place, throwing dishes at the waiter, knocking chairs to right and left, kicking the head waiter in the shins, and giving the proprietor a cuff on the neck for luck. And in the police court the next day the magistrate, with the light of a zealot in his eyes, regarded the prisoner as the leader of a great and wondrous movement out of darkness. He leaned over the bench, listening sympathetically to his story. He nodded in appreciation, punctuating the dramatic recital with ecstatic, "ahs” and “ohs.” And at the end he drew himself up in his ch'air on the bench and sonorously decreed: “It is hot necessary to wait longer than a reasonable time for an order to be filled.” To such men as this magistrate and the Chicago diner the world owes a tremendous debt. To such a man as Senator Stone, of Missouri, who actually cowed a Pullman porter, the world should take off its green plush hat and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They are the leaders in a great national movement toward the abolition of the new slavery. Who will say now that the twentieth century may not breed a man with courage to outface a cook?