Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 142, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 June 1910 — Editorials [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Editorials

Opinions of Great Papers on Important Subjects.

• • • • THE PICKPOCKET AND HIS VICTIM.

MAN from whom a sum of money has A been stolen and who has caused the arrest of a suspect receives an offer of the —return of the money taken If he will drop • UmE the prosecution. Desiring the return of his money more than the punishment of the thief, he consents. The money Is re-

turned and he notifies the police and the court that he has no charges to make. Whereupon the orders the release of the man whose guilt Is practically confessed by the return of the money. What are the moral aspects of such a case as this? The vietlm of the thief Is naturally eager to get his money back, but is he justified In letting the thief go? Is he not, In fact, compounding a felony when he agrees to such a settlement? What right has he to save the thief from Imprisonment and to set him free, so that he may prey on society? Such questions often confront citizens against whom crimes are committed. The temptation to recover the valuables and the repugnance for being mixed in court proceedings frequently lead to such settlements. There can be no doubt, however, that they are against public policy and, In point of fact, indefensible. One may go farther and question the wisdom of the judge who will let a prisoner go under such circumstances. It would seem better to secure the attendance in court of the accuser by whatever means may be necessary, so that a trial of the matter could be held. The offer and acceptance of the return of the stolen money would be strong corroborative evidence of the guilt of the accused man. Pickpockets are dangerous* persons to be at large. When caught red-handed -they ought to be prosecuted to the limit, whether the victim gets his money back or not. —Minneapolis Journal. COAL TAB PRODUCTS AND HEART V ATT,TIRE.

S— > O MANY people suffer from sleeplessness and other real or imaginary affections of what we call nerves; and so many who think they suffer also think they find relief in a certain cycle of hypnotic drugs, that the permanent effect of these drugs on health is a matter of even more popular

than medical interest. The drugs In question are derived from the by-products of gas making and oil refining, coke burning and the like. Science has utilized these unpleasant mineral smells as it has utilized the animal smells of the packing houses. These compounds are grouped together for the chemist by the fact that they approach the highly complex formulas of organic chemistry and for the vulgar world of apothecaries and patients by the fact that the names of most of them end in al. They differ from the opiates or narcotics formerly used to produce sleep in their direct effect upon the brain and nerves through the circulation. This effect is produced through an influence upon heart action against excess of which medical men warn patients and which observing patients are able to detect. This effect varies In different preparations and in different patients, according td their condition and susceptibility, all the way from a slight depression of Vitality

• • • • e to complete heart failure and stoppage of life. Some drugs seem to affect one person in this way and some another, but few persons are immune to all of them. It appears that medical men in the East are proceeding from Individual warnings in relation to the use of drugs to an organized campaign against any resort to .them except on a physician’s order and under his direction. They resemble other remedies In the respeet that Injurious results follow their abuse. Whether these results are so uniform and certain as, to make (t necessary to pay a doctor’s bill every time one takes a dose appears still to be a matter of dispute.—St. Paul Dispatch. WHY MEATS ABE HIGH.

THE schemes of “civilization” to put food materials (mixed with some materials that are not food) through various complications that greatly Increase the price arid hencp the profit to the mixers, and jMgSgMK that capture trade by putting out a product jj ag a different appearance, color.

odor or taste from the same thing in a less expensive form, are entirely based upon qgir anthropoid curiosity. In the case of meats, for instance, the farmer takes grain worth a cent and a half a pound and feeds it to a steer who completely consumes fourteen out of fifteen pounds of it, and deposits in his carcass, together with the fifteen pounds of grain, two pounds of water. Now this steer the farmer sells to the packer at a rate high enough to pay for all his feed, labor and the loss from animals that did not thrive. Next the packer turns 40 per cent of this steer into fertilizer and fusses and fixes the rest of it up and passes it on to us through the hands of a dozen storage men, wholesalers and retailers; finally It reaches the consumer a pitifully meager of the original food grown on the farm, and hopelessly loaded with the product of the steer’s physiological economy and the packer’s chemical laboratory. When one considers the waste and folly of the whole proceeding, instead of being surprised that meats are high, he wonders that they are so low.—Physical Culture. BACK TO THE LAND

SNE HUNDRED years ago human society was essentially rural. Since then the great collective interests have developed, and the thought of the world has become largely urban. The present interest in country life is the rising of a tide. It is an unconscious expression of the sent!-

ment lying back in the human mind that society must be neither predominantly rural nor predominantly urban. We are now beginning to see that the most fertile civilization must be the result of the attrition of the two great means by which human beings express themselves —as individuals and as collective or aggregate units. Country life typifies the Individual selfacting unsyndicated means; city life typifies the associated consolidated and corporate means.—National Magazine.