Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 170, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 July 1910 — NOT ALTOGETHER BAD. [ARTICLE]

NOT ALTOGETHER BAD.

Good Tiling:* About tbe Street Car That Are Worth Considering:. It is time the sleeping car woke up. Muckrakers are upon it. They accuse it of extortion and inquire why the dickens we must pay as much to sleep in a coffin—called a berth since opposites suggest each other—as in a commodious hotel bedroom. They think that when a sleeping car can pick up a profit of 500 per cent just by bumping around the country somebody is beipg fleeced. Still, there are many kind words due the sleeping car, the “Clerk” in the Boston Evening Transcript thinks. For one thing, it teaches us the fallacy of the germ theory, since, if germs were injurious, those that teem by millions in the stuffy curtains and detestable cushions would have killed us oft long before this. In the next place, the sleeping car proves the beneficence of carbonic acid gas. Why do you burst with vitality after a night on the rail? Simply because you have breathed the same air 7,000 times over. Besides, think of the educational advantages. Where but in the sleeping car do we acquire the arts of laJdder-climblng, of parading half-clad and of keeping our tempers when the train men outside wakes us at every stop by loud swearing? Finally consider the employment afforded to the unhappy lunatics who, but for the occupation of inventing names for sleeping cars, might die of boredom.

Well, there is some merit in the muckrakers’ investigations, nevertheless, and the clerk honors them for showing us a way to get even with the porter. Porters, it seems, are required to pay for toilet articles, abstracted from the car. Beloved, let ue remember this. When the Ethiopian shuts up the bunk with us inside it, though we piteously implored him to “put us off at Buffalo,” let us not depart empty handed. Rather let us take with us the soap, the towels, the brush and the comb. Thus shall we render both justice to the porter and a service to public hygiene.