Indianapolis Times, Volume 39, Number 155, Indianapolis, Marion County, 7 November 1927 — Page 9

Second Section

Pull JLeased „ wlrß Service s! the United Press Associations.

GREAT ‘BEAT’ ON PICTURES

Piloted by the man who taught Lindbergh how to fly, an especially chartered, NEA Service plane brought back to New York City late Saturday, the first direct word that had come to the outside world from Montpelier, Vt., since a roaring flood swept down on that capital city of President Coolidge’s home State three days before. Needless to say, it brought back simultaneously the first pictures of Montpelier’s misfortune, some of which you see on this page. Thus another chapter in the history of NEA enterprise was written. Thus another big NEA beat was recorded for The Indianapolis Times. Newspaper men in automobiles and airplanes strove to reach the beleaguered capital, but in vain, until—- “ Let’s go,” said W. A. Winstoit, Curtiss pilot with ten years’ experience to his credit, at the first streak of dawn Saturday morning. He was talking to William B. Springfield, NEA Service photographer, at Curtiss Field, Long Island. They went. They went through fog, rain,

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The Connecticut River is seen roaring through Bellows Falls, Vt., wrecking industrial plants and inundating portions of the city, in this splendid New England flood picture. Tne buildings in the background, being hammered by the torrent, include the plants of the Babbitt Paper Mills and the . Northeastern Power Company.

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Massachusetts, too, was ravaged by the floods which swept over New England. Here is an air view of Westfield, in the central western portion of the State, where some of the first Massachusetts deaths Were reported and some of the heaviest property damage was done. The inundation routed scores from their homes.

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When Montpelier grocerymen found their stores in a mighty bad fix because of the twelve feet of Water that had swept through the city, they simply moved tables and counters out on the sidewalk | and proceeded with business as usuaL

[ dense clouds, more fog, over mountains and I dense woods. They reached Rutland, Vt. There Springfield made some splendid shots from the air. They shoved on, and finally Montpelier hove in sight. Pilot Winuton located a designated landing field. It was so soggy that to come down on it would be suicidal. Winston skirted about the inundated town. He found a farm with a stretch of clear ground. He landed. Springfield called on the farm’s owner to drive him to Montpelier, five miles away, in the family flivver. The farmer agreed. Did Montpelier welcome them? It did. Springfield got his pictures. They flivvered back to the farm, and took off. As night came they reached New York after riding out more rainstorms and fog. Montpelier’s story was singing out over telegraph press association wires soon afterward. The NEA Service fliers were credited with having been the first to obtain it. See the pictures. They are first! They are excl isive!

The Indianapolis Times

INDIANAPOLIS, MONDAY, NOV. 7,1927

MVI imTION y IJI/ DR.WILL DURANT

Editor’s Note:—Three hundred and four years after the first squat cabins were built on the shores of Manhattan wc look around us with puffed-up chests and Jerk our heads skyward like blinking owls at the towering terraces of the new sky-line artltecture. We say to ourselves:—"Ah, this Is Civilization!” . . . We pick up a phone and talk through the air far across the seas. . . . We fire great guns at an Imaginary enemy thirty-four miles away. . . . We build better and better airplanes. Gigantic industrials are grinding out products which all the world reaches hungrily for. "Ah. this Is Civilization!” we shout, pitying old age ... old forms . . . yesterday's accomplishments. But do we know all that has gone on in the world since the beginning? All that men. from the earliest ages, have accomplished and thought? Amidst this rush of twentieth century business we are pausing In this column every day to turn back the pages of the World and outline the Story of Civilization from the earliest dawn of mankind. Will Durant, whose "Story of Philosophy" Is one of the best-selling and most widely read books of the present generation, will take you from the beginning of civilization up to the present moment, with a chapter each dav written especially for the Indianapolis Times. BY DR. WILL DURANT

I f order, economic provision, |V* I moral development and cultural creation. The order and provision are the soil in which the flowers of art and consideration grow. Rulers and governments are not civilization except as they promote security, co-ordinate industry, encourage education and spread by example the couretsy which once came from courts. Labor is not civilization unless It leads to leisure; and wealth without art Js barbarism. Religion is not civilization if it Is mere faith with out works, weakening the spirit with compensatory dreams; but let it make a passion of perfection, and pour an animating fire into the cold commandments of morality, let it lift our eyes and thoughts from the ground with reminders and exemplars of unselfishness and sanctity, and it achieves a grandeur and nobility acknowledged by even the earthliest mind. These, then, are civilization: the synthesis of liberty and order, the multiplication of goods and powers, the spread of cooperation and decency, the coming of philosophers and saints, the growth of libraries and schools, the encouragement of invention and research, the grace of poetry and the sweep of prose, the irradiation of life with color and form and harmony, the marriage of beauty to every useful thing. And these are history; here in these is the development of our race; and notlilng else Is vital to the biography of man.

A Montpelier National Guardsman watches over a butcher shop which was badly damaged by the flood. See the chicken?

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They weren’t amphibian automobiles, and their owners had to scurry to safety when the three cars shown in the upper picture were engulfed by New England flood waters. Below is a bridge at White River Junction, Vt„ with the wreckage of another bridge piled against it—one that washed out at Hartford, Vt., a short distance up the White River, as the flood hit with full force.

EET US watch civilization grow. Perhaps we shall grow a little with it as we write and read. And let us begin as far from home as chronology will permit, so that we may build the completed perspective in which at last we find ourselves. No one can say whether civilization arose first in China, or in Egypt, or in Mesopotamia; we shall not stop over learned disputes; if we give first place to the Chinese here, it is because their culture Is so alien to our own and does not, like that of Egypt or Assyria, enter into a sequence which links us with it in one chain. And yet how shall we interest ourselves in a people so distant from us in space and time and so strange in customs and character, so scornful of us and all the West as immature barbarians that live by the ledger and the sword? How can we capture in an hour even the outlines of a culture that has lasted with hardly an interruption for almost five thousand years? And how shall we find order and focus for the hundred elements that go to make the greatest civilization of the East?

. V '3E SHALL remember that \ly man is the center of civilization, and that genius is the apex of man. We may admit the menial economic basis of all history, but standing on it we shall try to see its highest human growth and gather all the rest about that peak. We shall make it a principle of our inquiry to ignore whatever has small relevance for our own place and time; we have little interest in ancient things for their own sake, and history shall be for us only the illumination of the present by the past. Wherever there is wisdom to be learned, or beauty to be honored. we shall go and sit silent before it. Finally, we shall sharpen our vison, in the present case, by remembering that our national destiny is involved beyond severance with the future of the Orient, and that all the West may have its fate decreed by that turbulent renaissance which is now transforming the oldest civilization in the world.

SHIS is China, the Leviathan of the nations, broad back of giant Asia, larger than all Europe, and as populous. Look at the map and see how puny Europe is, how precarious and unstable geographically; consider Russia as Asiatic (which it was till Peter, and may be again), and Europe becomes but a jagged promontory, the tentative fingers or pseudopodia of the greatest continent. Those plains at Asia’s center may have been the birthplace of civilization. In 1903 Prof. Raphael Pumpelly found at Anau, near Askabad, buried remains of a human culture dating from 9000 B. C.—2o centuries earlier than the oldest relics of Egypt or the land of Ur. These ancient Asiatics raised barley and wheat, bult houses of brick, and domesticated the ox, the pig, the camel, the sheep and the dog. This center was a volcano of men in periodical eruption; humanity poured from it like torrents of inexhaustible lava. Before and after these lands were dried up by diminishing rain they sent out vast migrations that populated Europe, Africa, Oceanica, even (through the Indians) America; and when the great flood was over there were still 900,000,000 left in Asiamore than half the population of the world. In China the human stream followed the great rivers that run for almost 3,000 miles from west to east; in the north a stern and industrious pepole spread along the Hoang-ho (or Yellow’ River); into the south, along the Yang-tze-Kiang, a more leisurely and artistic race developed; and the history of China, to this day, has been an irrepressible conflict between the sensual south and the Puritanic north. As in Europe and America, the north tends to win, but the south never yields. • • mN THESE fertile valleys the Chinese multiplied with almost protozoan fertility. By 300 B. C. they numbered 13,000,000; by 156 A. D„ 50,000,000; by 1743, 150,000,000; by 1919, 330.000,000. What kept them together was only their language—a unique mixture of music and speech. Nowhere do we find another tongue so laconic, so monosyllabic, so concise, so subtle to vary the meaning of identical sounds by the rise or fall of the voice. As in every people, the language broke up into dialects; but the written form of it remained everywhere the same, as if the French, the Spanish, and the Italians should now have one written and living tongue common to them all. What made this possible was the ideographic character of

Occupants of this Montpelier, Vt., home found a badly smashed steel highway bridge on their front porch when they awakened the morning of the flood. Ever see anything like it before?

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This remarkable view is of a flood-swept spot in R utland, Vt. It was taken from the air, a general view of the Rutland railway yards, with two bridges washed out.

Second Section

Entered m Second-clue Matter at Postoffice. Indianapolis.

DR. WILL DURANT

Chinese script: 1. e„ it wrote not letters or syllables, but pictorial symbols of the things. Hence the spoken word for any object or idea might vary from age to age, or from place to place; but the written sign remained unchanged. Here, perhaps, some part of the stability and unity of Chinese culture had its source. This script, read from top to bottom, and from left to right, is strange and anomalous to us, and we are inclined to accept the Chinese legend that writing was Invented by a four-eyed gentleman who took the Idea from observing bird-tracks on the earth. Actually it Is the most beautiful of all forms of writing, and the Chinese properly consider it an art. Every educated Chinaman ornaments his home with specimens of fine handwriting; it is for him a kind of painting, full of beauty and significance. His country's culture has been preserved with unequaled continuity and completeness by this handsome script.

ry^ 1 1 HINA is the “paradise ©f | I historians,” rhh in records 1 SgH | that go back with fair rellaomty to 760 B. C., and, with legendary enbellishments, to the second millennium before Christ. We are told that Panka, the first man, hammered the world Into shape with an adze millions of years ago (which should please the geologists more than our cramping myths); that the earliest “celestial” emperors reigned 18,000 years each; and that the Emperor Fu-hi, In 2852 B. C„ introduced family life Into a chaos in which children had known only their mothers and never their fathers—a condition which Strindberg did not consider exclusively ancient or Chinese. (To Be Continued) (Copyright. I It” 7, Will Durant) Lenders at Richmond Bu Time* Special RICHMOND, Ind., Nov. 7.—'The twelfth semi-annual convention of the Indiana Industrial Lenders Association will be held here Wednesday, the organization's first meeting In the eastern part of the State. Several speakers will be heard following a luncheon at noon.