Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 February 1910 — PAPERS BY THE PEOPLE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

PAPERS BY THE PEOPLE

DOES THE DECALOGUE NEED ENLARGING?

By Austin Bierbower.

Those who most wrong us are the men who W'reck railroads and banks, thereby wiping out the fortunes of thousands; great corporations which monopolize the necessaries of life, raising prices and making it harder for the poor to live; politicians who levy extravagant taxes and squander them without public benefit; diplomats who plunge nations into war without due cause, etc These evils were un-

known when the decalogue was framed and ancient morality fixed. The people had not then gone to governing themselves, to voting franchises and undertaking great public works Immorality was private, as also morality. Only rulers could be immoral on a large scale, and they were few and thought to be incapable of wrong, so that immorality was practiced and confined to the common people. Morality is a larger subject than hitherto. Hence, I •ay, the new morality cannot be formulated in the old precepts and prohibitions. As men have new forms of business and conduct them with injury to their fellows, they must work out new ways of avoiding this injury. Morality is as varied as the vices operate, and the ways Of doing good as countless as the ways of causing injury. In learning a new method of achievement we should learn what new vice is involved in it.

WHY OUR PAST LIVES ARE FORGOTTEN.

By Annie Besant.

No question is more often heard when reincarnation is spoken of than: ‘ If I were here beforte, why do I not remember it?" Many people cannot remember learning to read, yet the fact that they can read proves the learning. Incidents ol childhood and youth have faded tioni our memory, yet they have left traces on opr character. Fever patients have been known to use in delirium a lan-

guage known in childhood and forgotten in maturity. Much of our subconsciousness consists of these submerged experiences, memories thrown .into the background but recoverable, ---— : ;1 When a philosophy or a science is quickly grasped and applied, when an art Is mastered without study, nfemory is there in power, though past facts of learning are forgotten; as Plato said, it is When we feel intimate with a stranger on first meeting, memory is there, the spirit's recognition of a friend of ages past; when we shrink back with strong repulsion from another stranger, memory is there, the spirit's recognition of an ancient foe. Not until pleasure and pain, however, have been seen in the light of eternity can the crowding memories of the past be safely confronted; when they thus been seen, then those memories calm the emotions of the present, and that which would otherwise have crushed becomes a support and consolation. Goethe rejoiced that on his return to earth life he would be washed

clean of his memories, and lesser men may be content with the wisdom which starts each new rife on its way, enriched with the results but unburdened with the recollections of its past.

DREAMER ALONE UNDERSTANDS LIFE.

By Ada May Krecker.

It is said by travelers that the inert, brutish folk of parts uncivilized chant their work songs in order to dissipate their lethargy. They find it almost as hard to begin to work as it is for us to cease. Yet even at this early point in their industrial evolution they evidently are possessed by the same notion of the desirability of labor that burdens us and eggs U 3 on to toilsome and marvelous achieve

ment. It is hard to furnish evidence sfor things unseen to our crass minds. And if anyone can do it, these lotus eaters can. For them work is a joke and dreaming a fine art. The only things they take seriously are "Arabian Nights” and castles in the air. We insist upon being alert, energetic, wide awake to opportunity, which, we declare grimly, knocks but once at our door and then leaves us to that sorriest of fates, indigent obscurity. And we forget the happy family where blissfully dreams the ragged slumberer. We say the Lord helps those who help themselves. But the waiter on Providence knows how the manna falls from heaven on those that are without bread. All the heart that is dried out of our gilded mechanisms of existence the slumberer and lotus eater keeps breathing and pure. While we are gaining the whole world he knows that somehow he is saving his soul.

GIRLS’ EXTRAVAGANCE HINDERS MARRIAGE.

By Rev. Dr. Madison C. Peters.

The mefl who made this country—Bo per cent of them —began their married life without a dollar. They began in an humble way, worked together, saved, reached up and grew up, and if the four millions of women in America who are now bread-winners became bread makers, and married for love of worthy jnen, and began their married life as our fathers and "mothers began, there would be few

bachelors, and fewer women compelled to work outside of their own homes. Our young women "won’t do housework." The majority of men on sala.ies paid them cannot keep a servant; besides, there are not servants enough to meet the demand, and the result is that we are rapidly becoming a nation of boarding houses and hotels, crowded with people who ought to be in modest homes of their own, and, like our parents, realize the dreams of their youth by working add rising together. What we need now is several million sensible women who realize that the mightiest institution on earth is the home, and who, instead of aping the vulgar rich and the silly -p.oor, will revive the old-fashioned virtues of thrift and domestic economy.