Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 November 1908 — Beyond the Last. [ARTICLE]

Beyond the Last.

It has often struck me as a curious thing that in all the countr.es I have nhabited shoemakers should generally have been Socialists, says a writer in the Nineteenth Century. What. I wondered produced this odd phenomenon? It was hardly to be supposed that souls wiui socialistic tendencies incarnate oy preference in shoemakers as they could further their views just as well in other walks of life. It therefore became clear to me that there was something in the fact of shoemaking which favors this form of belief. At one time I thought I was on the right track and it was the handling and the smell of leather that did it. •

The terms “colony” and “colonial” have no place in the lexicon of American political administration. Yet the Mot that we have a little collection of insular possessions, noncontiguous territories, a leasehold in perpetuity in Panama, a right of intervention in Cuba and an object of disinterested benevolence in Santo Domingo, to say nothing of what the fates may yet pitch into qur windows or leave os our doonrteps, makes those terms convenient and they are appearing more and more frequently.