Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 131, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 June 1910 — TABLE FORKS FOR TURKEY. [ARTICLE]

TABLE FORKS FOR TURKEY.

Soldiery to Be Famished Implement That May Inspire Mutiny. Salih Pasha, the boss of the Turkish war department, has just placed an order with a German manufacturer for 1,260,000 table forks for the use of the Ottoman army. At present the fork is an implement rarely honored by the Moslem high private, the Balti-

more Sun says. Like the sturdy burgher of Switzerland, the earthling of Sweden and the honest peasant of New Mexico, he employs the knife, for ail gustatory purposes. His favorite blade comes from Damascus and is dull along one edge and ground to razor keenness along the other. With that one knife he slays his horned cattle, shaves himself, opens his mail and derricks his food. We have no doubt whatever tlia" when those German forks are issued to the Turkish soldiers and they ure ordered to use them there will be mutinies in all the barracks, followed 0y the usual massacres of Armenians. Our sympathy goes out, not alone to the Armenians, but also to the soldiers. The eating fork is a dangerous and useless instrument. Foppishness, true enough, has invested it with a certain glamour, but what have-sim-ple Moslems, or any other honest folk, i-o do with foppishness? We always envy and respect, indeed, that man who is strong enough to eat boldly with the knife in the face of social ostracism and fastidious sneers. It was not until the seventeenth century that the table fork began to drive out the protean rapier of the ancients. William Shakespeare, when he went to dine at the Devil tavern, employed but two weapons at table—the spoon and the knife. The fork would have provoked his snickers. The immense battery of fantastic fish forks salad forks, prune forks, stew forks and goulash forks which burdens the modern dinner table and tortures the untutored diner—at sight of that preposterous armory of cutlery we would have roared.