Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 101, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 March 1918 — PHILOSOPHY OF WALT MASON [ARTICLE]

PHILOSOPHY OF WALT MASON

I’d hate to be a miser (tightwads there are, to spare!) and try to beat the kaiser by handing out hoi air, _W’e dorv’t need long orations, or eloquence profound, to help our allied nations from losing hard won ground. Our Uncle loudly hollers, but not for phrases fine: he needs a stack of dollars, such bones as yours and . mine. He’d visit retribution upon a brutal foe, but high class elocution and ringing words won’t go. The scad, the plunk, the shilling, the kopeck and the yen, will keep the soldiers drilling, and arm our fighting men. The wheel, the rock, the guilder, for which our Uncle yips, will help the master builder turn out some needed ships. The iron man, the washer, as sure as you are born, will paralyze the josher who laughs our might to scorn. But words won’t whip a German, or make a Teuton flee; you cannot use a sermon in place of snickersnee. It is the punkest fiction that human lips have said, that you, with stately diction, can break a Prussian’s head. And so I think him traitor who deals in phrases big, who works his windy crater, but won’t consent to dig. The man who gives his nickel is better far than one who does not cease to pickle and salt away his mon.

Gasoline was made to clean gloves and then was used to try starting fires in the kitchen stove till a few hired girls were blown through the roof; then tried a few other ways, till today you can go 150 miles an hour in the air, 80 miles per hour on the ground and six feet Into the ground with the greatest ease. A gallon of gas will do more work in one hour than a team of horses in a day and It doesn’t need feed when night comes. It will run an auto twenty miles an hour and while doing it will cause four run-aways, a collision, a $25 fine for speeding, a divorce suit and an inquest. One gallon of gas makes more noise, speed and trouble than anything of it* size in the world, and still it is only kerosene doctored up a little. —Albert Lea (Minn.) Tribune. Shortly after the war started we were informed by the manufacturers, shopkeepers and milliners, that since: dyes could no longer be imported from Germany, no colors could be warranted to be ‘‘fast.’ But since then we have learned of three colors made in the United States that positively will not run. Those colors are Redj White and Blue.