Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 65, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 March 1910 — SIMPLY A MATTER OF CLOTHES. [ARTICLE]

SIMPLY A MATTER OF CLOTHES.

Th* new Sultan of Turkey must be • good man. He Is never mentioned. As th* price of shoes goes upward At meets scarcely anything worth mentioning coming down. It takes a bold bandit to wreck a train. but it requires a cunning financier to wreck a railroad system. A French scientist claims to have discovered a substitute for beef. Wonder if there are any bones in it? Gold has been discovered In the Congo country. Belgium may as well get ready to turn the Congo over to England. It is said that one Columbia University professor sings in eleven languages. Otherwise his habits are above reproach. The Seine fell five feet in one day, tent that’s nothing. We have heard of men who fell seven stories in less than four seconds. Dr. Wiley says that the only way to tell a fresh egg is to watch the hen lay It Still there s another way almost as sure. Try to eat it Miss Marjorie Gould is going to marry a Philadelphian. This is a more severe blow to the English lords than the Liberals have thus far been able to hand them. Boston theosophists think that young Bidis, Harvard’s mathematical prodigy, la a reincarnation of Pythagoras. Why not go right back to Adam, who was . the original multiplier? City consumers have decided that the farmer is their friend, and the cold storage manipulator their worst enemy. Look at the present prices of butter, eggs, apples, meat, potatoes, etc., etc., etc., etc., they say. The official who wisely refused to accept two months’ salary because he had been out of the city and had not attended to the duties of his position, will never make a politician If he lives 100 years.

King Edward has given orders that Lady Constance Richardson, formerly a dourt favorite, must never again appear before him. Lady Constance has recently been dancing in her bare feet. This is another serious blow to art. Being optimistic we refuse to believ* that the experience of the New York man whose wife refuses to live with him because he had his beard shaved oft will cause other men who have been clinging to whiskers to sacrifice them. The English radicals propose, if they are returned to power, to provide a scheme of insurance against unemployment Dusty Rhodes, Weary Willie, Sauntering Sim, Itinerant Ike may be expectec} to at once become conservatives. The electric fan, which adds much to summer comfort, is far from useless in the winter. Shopkeepers have found that the circulation of air which It creates is the simplest and cheapest way to keep their show windows free from frost An electric fan used to treat* a forced draft in a furnace decreases materially the time necessary to heat the house in the morning, and in winter even more than in summer It may prove a useful adjunct to ventilation. The story of the widow’s cruse of oil Is almost outdone by the experience •f Northwestern University. In 1853 the university bought a tract of land In Evanston, 111., for a campus, and paid twenty-five thousand dollars for it. Several hundred thousand dollars' worth of land haV& been sold from the tract, and the amount left is worth two and a half million dollars. The same year it invested eight thousand dollars in Chicago real estate, and the plot of ground is now worth about two millions. Although the total amount of gifts received has been,, only three millions, the assets of the university now amount to nine millions. If we can only have our souls attuned to the higher things of life and rise above what is sordid and commonplace there will be no difficulty in shuffling off much of what is vulgarly troubling. We will not have to worry about how many of the things which now hold us down to animal planes. A teacher of the better life told her students in New York that physical weariness could be put off until we would divest ourselves of all unnecessary garments, in one’s room, of course, and rest the tips of the fingers on the top of the head, imagining as we do so that that place is the lower end of a cord by which angels ire swinging ub to and fro. It is only among the coarsest organisms, she said, that food or sleep at regular interval* was necessary. A finely attuned parson can easily work eighteen hours without food and be none th* worse for it. This will settle th* cost of food without the aid of congressional commissions. Get yourself Mtfrly attuned and let the trust go In the day of the great metaphysical skeptic, David Hume, psychology, especially the new psychology, was not invented. Nevertheless the Scotchman stated with Asarvsteu lucidity seme

of the laws or fallacies to which the * human mind Is subject, and he showed how upon those fallacies, the superstitions which affright the human imagination are based. Here, for instance, are thousands casually connecting the terrible floods in France with the por- I tent of the comet, although the scien- I fists affirm that the two things are in I no way related. A little of Hume’s . philosophy may.. serve to dispel the frantic fear of the woes the comet will occasion to our planet, even if it does not bump into us at last. -The things that happen in any one instant of time are multltudious. If the human perception Were to be aware of 1 per cent of all the occurrences, the sensatory nerves would be shattered and our brains would go mad. Fortunately we perceive mainly that to which our attention is called, and the phenomena which are inconsequential to us, are not registered by our perception. Therefrom arises the frequent fallacy. Out of a million happenings the mind picks two which It chances to note, and if both are unusual the mind assumes that the two are dependent, the one upon the other. A comet flames into our skies, Paris is drowned in floods. The coincidence must have a meaning, it is not mere chance. Hence the conflict is responsible for the floods. Hume says it is a law of the mind to note the one cofncidence and to disregard the thousand non-colncidences. In a universe wherein a million things are happening at once. It would be passing strange if coincidences did not occur. In fact, they must occur. But coincidence is not cause and effect. If the comet Is responsible for floods in France, it is responsible for the birth of a baby in a Pullman car. A comet roamed the heavens those Ides of March on which great Julius fell, and the superstitious Romans saw in the flaming visitor the departing soul of Caesar. That comet was as truly the soul of Caesar as this comet of ours Is cause of the Seine’s inundations. Comets, as well as planets, suns and all the heavenly host, have other business than materlaizing great men’s souls or bursting Parisian sewers. Life has existed on this planet millions of years. In all that time this sphere has revolved and rotated regularly and never been malignly Influenced by forces out of the void of space. Life’s troubles here have all proceeded from forces within the aerial envelop. The heat and light and electricity that have reached this globe through the etherhave been entirely beneficent. Therefore the probability that Earth will continue unmolested Antil she cools amounts fb" mathematical certainty. Besides, the astronomers assure us that collision with a comet would not scorch the hair of a single creature. t

Involution in the Progress from Flu Leaf to Worth Creation. Would any man, bachelor or benedict—if the latter may be so dignified —have the full significance of evolution brought home to him—rightly appreciate the meaning of human progress? Let him with me meditate a moment upon this awful fact, says Harry Cowell in Smart Set: Laboriously, my brother, have we come, every painful step by the way, from a fig leaf to a creation by Worth! A creation by "Worth contains—ah, my poor brother, what does it not contain? Behold in a creation by Worth all there is of beauty and wonder in the world, and learn by heart how far we have traveled toward perfection. ’Tis, my word for it, a by no means inexpensive education. The man who holds that ther* is nothing in dress, that dress doesn’t amount to anything, must have either a very small imagination or a very large bank account, or both, or else be in that state of blissful ignorance possible only to single blessedness. That dress makes the man. want of it the savage, is untrue. But that Worth makes the woman, want of Worth the fright, is undeniable. And yet that dress, with its concomitant art of concealing art. is the mother of much ugliness, goes without my saying it. Would that, with my saying it, the ugliness might go! A fool and his money are soon parted for clothes for himself; a wise man and his money sooner for clothes for his wife. A wise man’s time being more than money, he knows better than to spend his time in vainly trying to save his money from the thousand and one deft hands that go to the making of the modern woman, whose glory is the work of others.