Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 135, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 June 1918 — THEY NEVER KNEW LUXURIES [ARTICLE]

THEY NEVER KNEW LUXURIES

Shakespeare never drank a cup of tea, never tasted coffee, never sipped a glass of cocoa, never ate a potato and never smoked a cigar. Yet he managed to lead a variegated life and write plays that you still go to see, “Girard" writes i n the Philadelphia Ledger. Napoleon, who died ninety-seven years ago, never saw a steamboat nor a railroad train nor even a gas light, but he ruled all Europe. Lincoln never saw an electric light, nor talked through a telephone, but he freed 4,000,000 slaves. I doubt if William McKinley ever rode in a motor car. Certainly U. S. Grant never knew of the wireless. They both rose to fame and went to the white house.

The finest piece of known architecture on earth was erected at Athens by men who never saw a newspaper. - St Peter’s cathedral was the product of Michelangelo’s brain, but he never read a book that come from a printing press or saw a mechanically type staged. Raphael painted his immortal madonnas, but he never ate a com muffin. Cleopatra never wore a velvet gown, and even if Helen of Troy was so beautiful that she caused a ten year war, she never owned a pair of leather shoes. George Eliot never beheld a movie, but she wrote “Adam Bede,” which is a somewhat more important thing to have done. I presume that of all the women who ever lived in the world not five of them contributed more to the pleasure of a greater number of other women and men than the wife of a Chinese emperor. Forty-six centuries ago that empress discovered that a worm could make silk and she started the silk industry for this entire world.