Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 November 1893 — TOPICS OF THESE TIMES. [ARTICLE]

TOPICS OF THESE TIMES.

TRADE AND THE FAIR. The effects of the World’s Columbian Exposition on the business of the country at large are questions on which authorities disagree. Mr. Henry Clews, the famous New York financier, has publicly expressed his desire for the indefinite prolongation of the Exposition because he believes that the Fair has been a great factor in preventing the most disastrous consequences which otherwise would have surely followed the great business depression through which we have been passing. Mr. Clews holds that millions of money have been put in circulation throughout the land’ on account of the Fair that under other circumstances would have remained hidden in vaults or other inaccessible hiding places. From the inception of the enterprise to this day it has furnished employment to myriads of men. Every iron beam and wooden joist and piece of glass and block of stone that has been merged into forms of beauty in the great structures of Jackson Park has been the product of American artisans and workingmen, of American mines and quarries and forests. Every railway throughout the land has felt the added impetus of increased travel on account of the tide of humanity that flowed to Chicago, and in a majority of cases increased equipment and increased number of employes has been the necessary result. That the railways did not profit in a largerdegreewasdueto their own parsimonious policy at the beginning of the World’s Fair traffic. Nearly every visitor to the Fair has bought dry goods and wearing apparel that they wonld have done without under other circumstances, thus adding largely to the general volume of trade at a time when traffic was practically stagnated. On the other hand the country tradesman in all the territory within three hundred miles of Chicago is fully convinced that the Fair has been directly antagonistic to his interesta in every particular, and the one great cause of the financial troubles in the world at large. Taken in the sense meant by Mr. Clews there is no doubt but what the Fair has been beneficial to many lines of industry, but in the broad and comprehensive view of the political economist it must be reckoned as an extravagance, or rather an unneccessary outlay —as a holiday, beneficial as other holidays are, but still drawing on the resources of the country at large as a holiday at all times does upon the purse of the private citizen. Let us not delude ourselves with the vain idea that because the expenditures for a protracted series of fetes and jamborees have helped many people to put bread into their mouths that it is financial wisdom to continue the program until< the Day of Doom. “A man can not lift himself by his boot straps,” even a little bit, and it is a very old proverb and a true one that “They who dance must pay the fiddler.” We have danced and we have paid the fiddler, we have had a “time” to be remembered and our pocketbooks are sighing and some of us are crying for the wealth we squandered on Midway,and we’re glad the “dooks” and critters and the palaquins and litters are going or have all gone away. Now if we will all stay at home and “saw wood” we doubtless can make up for lost time and perhaps save enough to go again to see the Court of Honor next fall, as it is already practically settled that that grandest of architectural aggregais to be indefinitely preserved.