The Syracuse Journal, Volume 4, Number 1, Syracuse, Kosciusko County, 4 May 1911 — Page 6

Syracuse Journal W. G. CONNOLLY, Publisher. SYRACUSE, • - INDIANA. WHERE THIEVERY IS UNKNOWN Localities In Europe Where Honesty Is Simply a Matter of Fact <9 Part of Life. ’ Where In Europe does one find j really honest people? A traveler writ- I Ing in an Italian magazine says that | the Swiss canton of Ticino is inhabited by the most honest folk it is possible to imagine. In most of the Ticinese villages, the writer says, the oldest Inhabitants do not remember any case of thieving, however petty, within a lifetime. Any family that produced a thief would j not be tolerated in these Arcadian communities for a week. Lost articles when found must never be taken away; they must be left where they were dropped or placed in a conscpicuous position so that the rightful owner can find his property more easily. The case is cited of an American woman tourist who lost her purse on an excursion in the Vai Capriasca. The purse contained gold coin and a jeweled watch. Upon returning from her trip she found the purse with contents intact on a little heap of leaves, so placed that it could not fail to attract her attention. The Scandinavians, too, have a great reputation for common honesty. In lonely parts of Sweden and Nor- j way where medicines are not easily procurable, chests containing drugs, ; ointments, bandages and the like are i fixed on trees. No one ever thinks of ; using these articles without leaving money in payment for them In the cash box attached to ? the medicine chest. Often the money is not collected for weeks, but It is never touched. Fruitless Literary Endeavor. It has been estimated that out of every 10,000 books written only 100 are accepted. Working on this basis i and assuming that 1,000,000 books are . printed in England in any one year, it ■ follows that 99,000 books are doomed ; to remain hidden forever in their au- I thors’ locker or else be consumed by j [the flames. Each book has probably | 'taken six months to write, and at this ■ rate nearly 50,000 years of combined [ [work, for which not a penny is paid, | [has been spent in one year on fruit- j less literary endeavor. At the rate ■ of £1 per week, if the writers had joined the labor ranks, they would have earned over two and a half mil- ' lion pounds. And the lot of those who . have the good fortune of getting a j novel accepted is little more enviable. ■ i—Westminster Gazette. Canadian Canala. The only income received from Can- ! adian canals is derived from the sale of water powers. Tolls were abolished eight or hine years ago. The ■canals have never paid a- tithe of the (interest upon their cost. They are, hbwever, invaluable to navigation, and have been considered to furnish use- . ;ful competition to the railroads, and , to be valuable adjuncts to the trade of i (the Dominion. The Georgian bay canal while not really under construction, [ has cost the country a large sum of : .money for surveys, and other prelim- I inaries, and may entail the expenditure of a hundred millions of dollars. ' The Trent valley, and the Welland canal enlargement will also cost large sums of money. Rotten Row. Possibly the well-known fashionable promenade In Hyde park, London, derived its curious name, Rotten Row, from the soft material with which the road was covered. It has been suggested that It is a characteristic British corruption of Rattan Row, the Norman term for “roundabout way,” that ' is, the way corpses were carried to avoid more public streets. There were such paths in those old days of plague and Infection, and no doubt they were necessary. A commonly received explanation of the name is that of Camden —“Rotteran” way, that is “muster” way, because soldiers were mustered there. There is still in use the word “rot,” a file of six soldiers. Garden for Every Prisoner. Thirty long term prisoners in the Kansas City (Kan.) workhouse are to be given garden lots this spring In a tour acre tract adjoining the workhouse. They will be allowed to work In the gardens after working a certain number of hours each day on the stone pile. The prisoners will be allowed to choose the vegetables, and the products will be served in the prisoners’ dining room. Gardening will not be compulsory, but the prisoners who do not work in their garSens will spend that time breaking stone. Teach German Girls to Cook. Women cooking teachers with a full equipment of the latest and best cooking Implements, are being sent from village to village by the government of the duchy of Saxe-Meiningen, for the purpose of teaching German girts new methods and new dishes. The girts are said to be willing to learn how to make the new dishes and also to eat them, but their parents often refuse oven to taste any new dish. The Eternal Mall. Tommy—-Pa! I Par—Well, what is it now? Tommy—What’s "the woman question r* Pa—“ Did you mail that letter?"

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NE evening In the early summer of 1901 I stood, awed but keenly expectant, on the balcony of the EthI nology Building at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. By my side was a short, chubby man in an old suit of clothes, a negligee shirt and a string tie that had come undone and was flopping over his capacious chest. It was a warm evening, and he had removed his battered straw hat, which he held in his hand. The

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size of the hat was No. 8. The man was Thomas 1 A. Edisoh. us spread that dream in frozen music, the buildings fronting the esplanade, mall and plaza of the exposition. The twilight was done, and the had arrived for the night birth of that dream into splendor. For the first time in history architecture was to be made alive at night, more living than by day. Half a million Incandescent bulbs were hid along the transverse lines of the buildings. The current was turned on and they simultaneously bloomed. Ensued a spectacle for which a Caesar would have bartered a province—a joy that brought a gasp’ of ecstacy' from every one of the millions who I saw it. Edison, bare-headed, squinted his eyes. The poetry missed him. The gallop of scenic history over the verge of a new era missed him. The j glory or the spectacle itself missed him. Instead, he glanced shrewdly and carefully all around' on I the entrancing wonder, then cautiously into - his battered straw hat and said: “I could put every filament into that hat!” ; ■ Economics, mechanics —these obsessed him. j That brain, which required a No. 8 hat for covering. coiuld think only of the compressed fact i that all the space occupied by the vibrating, energizing and glory-working source of that gigantic spectacle could be replaced by about two pints ! of water—or a quart of human brain. Edison is a rare man. In his speech, of which I he is ds careful as of his filaments, he pulls the core from a field of ideas and thrusts it at you as If it l were a poniard. You think about whalt he says for a week, a month; and in years you don’t forget it. All of this is leading up to a consideration o* what the wizard-sage said a few weeks ago when a select audience sat in his studio and watched ' the first performance of the klnetograph, that ; fabulous instrument which is destined to reproduce plays, operas, public spectacles with' the ! actionj the color and the voice Intact. The great old inventor was gratified once ■ again. Another thrill had come into his Hfq. His | latest adventure into the unknown had prospered, and his friends and associates clustered ■ about him with congratulations, with questions, with assurances. For some time Edison was silent. He is grateful that he is deaf. Then he squinted from one to the other, and said: “Before long you’ll be working that in an aeroplane') for you’ll be able to pack it into a soapbubble!” A Rather a fragile packing-case. Rather a small compass in which to plice a grand opera. A ctfrlous comparison. Did Edison mean what he said? Did he know what he was talking about? Ever since I heard that Edison said that, I have been thinking of moving pictures in conneci tion with soap-bubbles. And not always in the way he meant bubbles in connection with the klnetograph. A poap-bubble Is cheap. It Is easy to make—if you know how. It Is fragile. It is very alluring. It reflects all colors, all forms. It appeals universally to children. Sages ponder over It. Poets celebrate it. Artists reproduce it. Conundrum.— Why is a moving picture like a soap-bubble? First, you find them everywhere. On the back streets of Reno I saiir the pictures of the bull fight at Guadalajara, Mexico, The Guadalajarans now look on the moving pictures of the prize fight at Reno.” At Punta Arenas, the southernmost port in the world, I saw Chileans applaud moving pictures of the Bowery and the New York water front. On the Bowery I saw pictures of the battleship fleet entering the harbor of Punta Arenas. On an Island 2,000 miles out in the Pacific Ocean the exiled lepers of Molokai gather dally before the flickering wonders of a world which before had been but .vaguely in their dreams. The Sunday evening young people’s class of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, looks in pity on the transplanted and resurrected life of Molokai which passes before their eyes—on the screen. A group of travelers In the luxurious saloon of an ocean liner study the lifelike pictures of the country for which they are bound. The beggars who line the pathways of the tourist imploring backsheesh give up their pennies to see the living presentment of their prey bounding to them over the ocean- wave. In Iceland excited Eskimos applaud the herbism of a cowboy who rescues a captured maiden from the redskins. Half-way round the world, in Northern Russia, tearful peasants sorrow over the pictured plight of a French lover; I The Bengalee moves down Mowrtnghee Road and gives up two pennies to see the funeral of King Edward—to see it actually move. The Moro in the alleys of Zamboanga goes without an extra shirt, that he may view the reception of Universal as Froth.

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Anywhere, everywhere, you find them. In the United States you will have to hunt a town of less than 2,000 inhabitants if you wish to escape the moving pictures. Five millions of Americans daily visit these shows. The exhibitors pay $18,000,000 a year for their films. The public pays $57,500,000 a year to see them. Mr. Edison has an average weekly royalty therefrom of SB,OOO. So it is a pretty big business, pretty thoroughly organized, quite universal in Its reach, soap-bubbly in its universality. The child of the poor, with a clay pipe and the suds from the weekly wash, can have just as good a time as any rich young fellow with an imported meerschaum and the best castile. So it is with the moving-picture shows. It requires little capital to run them. A long room, easily darkened, a nine-feet square patch of white cloth, some benches for the spectators, an operator at ten dollars a week, and a rented film, now takes the place of a company of actors, stage scenery, properties, lights and a properly equipped building. And the poor boy gets as much value for his nickel as the rich boy can get for any number of dollars. Yet, they run into dangers that no soap-bubbles can allure. Fire is of these the most patent. Os the moral dangers we will speak later. It is through the moral soap-bubble that" we can see more clearly the moving picture’s gossamer tinsel. Fire, however, is the. fir st and most vital danger. The Charity-Bazaar fire in P rls, in which so many women were trampled to death by cowardly men, was caused by the fall of a spark upon some celluloid moving-picture films which had been dropped into a basket. In Canton 600 men, Chinamen, were burned to death in a fire in a moving-picture show house. In Quito, Ecuador, fifty men and women lost their lives in a similar calamity. It speaks well for the widespread and constant vigilance of the fire departments of the United States that no great catastrophe has yet come to the moving-picture houses of this country. Lives have not been lost in the moving picture shows. have been lost through the movingpicture shows. Where bnce the dime and nickel novels suggested ways of crime to unbalanced youth the moving picture has come to make a more ready and more potent appeal. The printed word is never so ardent with an impressionable mind as the acted word. Several ways have been thought of to lessen these obvious evils. Charles Sprague Smith, late chief of the People’s Institute in New York, thought he had solved the problem when he induced the manufacturers of the moving pictures to agree to a national board of censorship. - The manufacturers, good trade diplomats, readily assented, and then saw to it that the board of censorship should be advisory and not antagonistic. The result is that many pictures that create havoc among youthful minds when shown on the public screens “get by” the national board of censorship. No. This bubble that Edison has loosed upon us will play Itself out just so far as the instincts of the whole people of this country will permit; no farther, no sooner. One night I went to a prize fight Only men were present. The casual observer might have said they were all tough men. After the fight a canvas was erected in the ring and an announcer said,. “An exclusive film will now be shown to the members of this club.” The picture proved to be of French manufacture and portrayed a vile situation in a dive. Instantly hisses and a storm of execration burst from the audience. The running of the film was stopped and the picture removed before it was all shown. Grim silence greeted the removal of the canvas. ' The crowd that gloried in the action of the

ring would not endure any pictured sexual depravity. To me that was a wonderful revelation of Anglo-Saxon psychology. Thus it will always be in our theater, whether the admission price be five cents or two dollars. American audiences want action; they want thrills; they want desperate courage and wild heroism; but they want it all clean. They want the good to triumph, the guilty to be punished, and wrong to be avenged. A Parisian manufacturer offered $200,000 for the right to make moving pictures of the Oberammergau Passion Play. His offer was refused. He went back to his studio, engaged a company of very skillful actors, rehearsed them carefully and reproduced the Passion Play, almost as well as it was originally done, and the cost was about a twentieth of what he offered for the original. This manufacturer had an eye on a new field for the moving picture. While his imitation will, perhaps, find a comparatively small market, it cannot hope to reach the class that would have purchased a guaranteed reproduction of the Oberammergau play; viz., the churches. For the churches have not yet come utterly under the sway of the moving picture, despite the fact that the Congregational and Presbyterian churches of Redlands, California, ‘showed moving pictures all last summer in their outdoor pavilion. Yet the moving picture manufacturers are devoting a lot of time and money to religious subjects. "Joseph Going Into Egypt,” "The Repulse of Herod,” “Jephthah’s Daughter, “The Relief of Jericho,” and “The Wisdom of Solomon” are a few of the subjects of moving-picture plays founded on Biblical accounts. While the moving pictures are battering at the doors of the churches they have already partially scaled the walls of the school-houses. Out of every seven subjects passed by the National Board of Censorship, one is classed as “pedagogical.” In the catalogues of the manufacturers one finds films that show lessons in “agriculture, aeronautics, animal life, bacteriology, biography, biology, botany, entomology, ethnology, fisheries, geography, history, industry, kindergarten studies, mining and metallurgy, microscopy, military and naval life, natural history, ornithology, pathology, pisciculture, religion, travel and zoology.” It looks like the catalogue of an educational publishing house. Yet it is only the list of films that may be and are ordered by “the trade." Subjects under these lists are shown daily in the 7,500 theaters that exhibit moving pictures in this country. They form entertainment, not Instruction. They have put the stereoptlcon out of business, not the schoolmaster. ( For the public schools have no more surrendered to the new and plausible invader than have the churches. Why? Why not teach children history by showing them scenes from the lives of great men, pageants from the great moments that are duly and laboriously recorded in the books. Why not sit and watch George Washington cross the Delaware on the moving picture sheet, instead of having to puzzle your head over the dry print that records it on unlivened page? Why not learn about the growth of flowers pleasantly, by watching a picture Instead of having to patiently dissect the Hower and then piece it together again under the instruction of a botany textbook? Such pictures can be and are constantly shown. Do they not mean the revolution of pedagogy? Not Idhg ago the New York Board of Education appointed a committee to investigate this subject, and find out if it were feasible to Install moving-picture machines in the various schools of the city. Superintendent Maxwell was on the committee. I saw him a few days after the exhibition. He was not very enthusiastic about the pictures. “A method will never be devised that will save aify human being the labor of learning," he said. “We learn only by taking thought, and that Is work, hard work. You cannot insert learning hypodermically. You cannot swallow it in tabloid form. There is but one way to take it, and that it the oldest way known. You will find after all of these wlll-o'-the-wlsps have vanished that it will be the newest way, too.” Which throws the moving picture right back where it belongs—in the theater. It can have no place in the church. It can have no real place in the school, though it may be auxiliary to either, or both.

BI WEDDING |i SUPPER I RUBY BAUGHMAN (Copyright. 1911. by Associated Literary Press.) The little Brown cottage, cuddled shyly away among the lilac bushes, humble and modest as its own mistress. Since the death* of her widowmother, Margaret had lived here alone. The tiny rooms had watched the years trace lines of departing youth on her gentle face, though their own trim neatness showed little evidence of the lapse of time The oaken chairs, the carefully- < dusted table, the brightly polished i stove, stood just where they had stood the dreary morning after the i funeral. The black walnut clock ticked the same cheerful warning of seconds passing away, its equilibrium assured by the same bit of pastei board tucked under one edge. The 1 rugs showed no wear from the soft . tread of Margaret’s dainty, unambl- ' tlous feet. Placid, habit-bound, solitary, the house and its owner has grown with the flying years. Into this measured seclusion the small village obtruded little interruption. With the chatter of village talk and the clack of idle gossip, Margaret had nothing in common. A slight deafness, quite imperceptible to less sensitive spirits than her own, removed her a bit further from- companionship. Her family, her mother’s people, finding her “queer,” slowly detached themselves from her. Gradually her life was absorbed into her books, her garden, her sewing and her household cares, until the world outside her own time-worn brown fence palings and the hedge of yellow roses, came to have the .unreality of a dream. True, dreams of the future had come tourer earlier moods; the feminine yearning for some one to share her life, for tiny fingers to disturb the monotony of orderliness that pervaded the house. But time and habit had swallowed these creations of her fancy. The events of human experience, death', love, pain; sorrow, fear, left her untouched, appearing to her lonely aloofness as unreal asT the human beings they blessed and cursed. Even Jacob Wilkins, in the big white house beyond the rose hedge, had long since lost the quality of actual earthly existence. He shoveled the snow regularly from her walk in winter: he sawed her wood and TT / "J ft. A Dirty Tramp Shuffled In. stacked it neatly in the tiny “leanto;” he trimmed her hedges and mowed the grass plot; but he never ventured into her garden or her sitting room. So even he, in time, grew to be as lacking in the human qualities as the elements he protected her from thus generously and carefully. To a sense, however, of his very genuine protection, Margaret’s awakening came rudely enough. A dirty tramp shuffled in one summer afternoon from the outer haze of things, within the range of Margaret’s nearsighted vision. Catching a realization of her lonely defencelessness, he demanded food and money, stepping threateningly along the stone walk toward the startled woman. Fear gripped her relentless, overwhelming fear, all the more dreadful for the long years of impunity it had granted to her inexperience. She could not scream, nor run, nor defend herself; she froze into a moveles image of fright. “You clear out of here quick, you ornery cuss!” Margaret’s eyes lifted to the smiling gaze of Jacob Wilkins. Even in her disarray of ideas, memories of sleigh rides, of parties, of picnics, of moonlight walks with the youthful counterpart of this man struggled for her attention, but the tremors of fright stifled them again. -With his usual unissertiveness, he ventured to take her trembling fingers, gently, slowly, into his big hands. “It ain’t right, Margaret, for you to live here alone like this. It ain’t safe for you,” he explained softly, as if he comprehended the shock to her awakened helplessness. She could only shiver with the passing of terror. She felt his anx-,

ious eyes reading her face for some sign. "Would you—do you think—don’t you believe —could you come over to the big house and live with me and let me look after you? It would be safer,” he added breathlessly. The abrupt invasion of the things of this world had left her powerless to think or to act. Her universe was crumbling to pieces, beneath her feet. All that he meant she did not comprehend. She knew only that his fingers were kind and strong, his voice tender and assuring. With the chill of alarm still shaking her voice, she whispered. “Ch yes, yes, yes.” “I’ll bring Doctor Brandon right up here and we will be married this very afternoon.” "Doctor Brandon? Married?” “Why, sure; you can’Ucome to live with me unless we are .Carried,” holding her fluttering hands in his persuasively tender palms. Before her unaccustomed thought could traverse the length df the new proposition, he went on: “I’ll be right up with him. I’m glad you’re wearing the white dress with the pink daisies in it, Margaret You had one like it years ago and it always looked to me like a wedding dress." With weakening knees and bewildered spirit, she sat down on the grass-edge beside the walk, to think things out with a brain that would not wrestle with this muddle of mundane affairs. Too brave to cry, she could only pick the green blades, one by one, and lay them in a-row on her pink-sprigged gown. Upon her troubled, inadequate pondering, broke the voice of Doctor Brandon. “I’m so glad to learn, Margaret, what Jacob has just told me. .Mrs. Brandon and James have come along as witnesses.” With a puzzled smile of greeting, Margaret rose with Jacob’s unobtrusive assistance. In a haze she followed his gentle leading to the llttje front parlor, where, In the presence of the silent companions of her twenty years of isolation, she stood beside Jacob and said to Doctor Brandon the words Jacob bade her say. Her heart warmed to the good will and gladness in the words of congratulation. Margaret had just begun to feel the weight of Jacob’s unaccustomed presence, when he said: "Let’s go over to see the big house." He led her from the little brown cloister to the house that stood close by the highways of men. Aching from the aloneness of the years, chilled with the strangeness of the big rooms, she looked over the new home and its master, her husband. She owned a feeling of gladness only when Jacob said: •\no tramp can frighten you here, Margaret mine.” Then as if he understood some tiny part of her struggle to adjust herself to the well-nigh unbearable lack of familiar things: “Run along, honey, to your garden, while Mirandy gfcts us our wedding supper." . With flying feet she sped from the proposed With clutching fingers she pulled down to her burning face the tall syrlngas and the ambitious climbers. By degrees the perplexing universe outside the brown fence slipped back into its desuetude and the joy in her flower friends soothed jangled nerves and troubled memories into forgetfulness. Snipping a twig here, kissing a blossom there, stopping to talk to the purple and gold faces in the pansy bed, she slowly made her way, just as she had so many summer evenings in the twenty years of solitude, to the little kitchen door. With the habitual repetition of her narrow round of conduct, she washed her hands in the tin basin and threw the water gently on the morning glory vines at the window. Turning to the pile of kindling wood beside the stove, she started a Are and set the teakettle to boll. Into the tiny brown teapot she dropped the usual pinch of tea v leaves and set it on the hearth. On the table she placed the tiny cloth; beside the blue plate she placed the napkin in the old silver ring and the blue cup and saucer; from the cooky jar in the pantry she took two seed cookies, as usual, and put them on a small blue plate in close conjunction with the white dish of strawberry jam. In reply to the tea kettle’s whistle of readiness she was pouring the boiling water from .its hissing spout when Jacob’s hearty voice broke the spell of two decades of seclusion. “Don’t you think a man ought to be invited to his own wife’s wedding supper?” with a hlnirat a chuckle covering an anxiety w’hlch touched even Margaret’s self-centered abstraction. A barrier seemed to break, a high wall between her and the joy of life seemed to crumble and set her free into a gladsome world whose beauties she had quite forgotten. With a sob that was not of sorrow, she pushed Jacob outside the door in which she turned the key. Placing the key and her hand in his eager palm she let him lead her through the rose hedge. The Main Thing. “No man can make himself great by getting upon a house-top and yelling that he is a wonder." “Perhaps not, but by doing so he can make a good many people think he is great, and that, after all, is the main thing.” Unreasonable. “Does he take a lively interest in the pure food crusade?” “No. You could hardly expect him to do that.” “And why not?" “He’s a baker.”