Judge, 1911-08-05 · page 10 of 27
Judge — August 5, 1911 — page 10: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous short story illustrated with a satirical cartoon showing airplanes crossing mountains (parodying famous Napoleon paintings). **The Joke:** Two men, Dullwitz and Bisbee, observe railroad excavations. Bisbee laments the enormous expense of lowering tracks to avoid a grade crossing. Dullwitz cheerfully suggests it "evens out" when they later raise the tracks elsewhere—displaying spectacularly flawed logic. The expense simply repeats; money isn't saved. **The Satire:** The piece mocks people who rationalize wasteful spending through circular reasoning. Bisbee's silent response—throwing a coupling pin at a scarecrow resembling Dullwitz—expresses exasperation at such obtuse thinking. **The Title Cartoon:** References Napoleon crossing the Alps, humorously reimagined with early aircraft, suggesting ambitious but impractical undertakings. **The Moral Couplet:** Concluding aphorisms about men/women and their abilities to build successfully or fail.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
NAPOLEON CROSSING THE ALPS—IF R. DULLWITZ was out for his usual Sunday afternoon walk with his friend Bisbee, a member of the en- gineering staff of the railway system that passed through the little suburban town in which Dullwitz was a shining light. Coming to a section of the rail- road where great excavations were be- ing made for the lowering of the tracks to avoid a grade crossing, Bisbee paused and gazed down into the huge cut with a look of grief on his countenance. HE COULD ONLY A Reasoning Mind. “1 tell you, Dullwitz, old man," he said sadly, “it eats into the spare cash of the railways like thunder to do things like this. It costs a pile of money de- pressing tracks like this,’’ “I suppose it does,’ said Dullwitz sympathetically; ‘‘an awful pile. But,"” he added cheerfully, as an optimistic thought flashed across the substance that he used as a substitute for gray matter, ‘‘it evens itself up, don’t it, when you come to raise the tracks HAVE WAITED. 80 as to cross overhead farther along?"’ But Bisbee said never a word, con- tenting himself with shying a rusty old coupling pin that lay on the roadside at a scarecrow in a neighboring field that in the distance did not look unlike Dull- witz in the general outlines of its figure. OME men make houses, and some women make homes. Some men make flats, and some women make flat failures. comicbooks.com