Judge — April 18, 1914 — page 4: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Pork Barrel FOREIGN relations may become strained and wars may impend, but nothing can militate against the one great institution in American politics known as ‘‘the pork barrel.”” There is a pork barrel in every legislative body. Some of these barrels are compara- tively small. One may be found standing unassumingly in the corner even of an aver- age aldermanic chamber. It is a larger barrel in a State Legislature, and it reaches its maximum in size in Congress. The national pork barrel usually mas- querades under the name of a bill pre- tending to conserve, dredge, deepen or otherwise meddle with rivers and har- bors. A congressman who has no creek in his bailiwick that needs government money is quite a curiosity. Sometimes, if he has no creek to make navigable, he has some scheme quite as impressive, and he is apt to get money for his neighbor- hood in some way. Congress in this mat- ter is really a co-operative body. One congressman will help another, on the theory that the other will help him, and this is a combination hard to beat. There is some jocularity in Congress— and especially in the House—whenever the lid is taken off the empty pork barrel and the process of filling begins. Members who have no constituents to placate with an appropriation—and they are rare birds —or who have been unable to put their EXPERT ADVICE T O R J wishes over are apt to be facetious at the expense of others who have been lucky. Thus the other day in the House, when anitem in the river and harbor bill ap- propriating $47,000 for the Kissimmee River in Florida was reached, Repre- sentative Callaway, of Texas, laughed and remarked that he had been informed that the water in the Kissimmee gets so low at times that people along its banks have to insure it against fire. And when an item for $164,000 to improve the Ar- kansas River was reached, Representative Murdock, of Kansas, wished toknow what it was for. Representative Sparkman re- plied that the money was to enable an engineer to pull snags out of the river, whereupon Mr, Murdock responded that the water was ‘‘generally so low that you couldn’t raise snags in it if you tried.’’ Truly, the river and harbor bill affords moments of relaxation in the House. It offers a great opportunity for congres- pest Swat. But do persons who do not live contiguous to creeks or other local streams that may or may not be made briefly navigable by virtue of ap- propriations regard the subject as really facetious? sional come: 5 A L Improving the Mind OUR mind, of course, is all right; but suppose it were not, and suppose you wanted to improve it? What would you do? Fish, they say, is brain food; but what is mind food or mind medi cine or mind antitoxin? It isn’t enough to draw a quick analogy and say that exercise improves LF: the mind, just as exercise =O. improves the body. We do lots of things to the body besides ex- ercising it. We feed it and bathe it and rub it and shelter it and adorn it and rest it. But even if it were solely a question of exercise, there would still remain the question of the kind and the amount. The ‘‘mind curers’’ know how to use the mind for improving the body, but not how to use the body for improving the mind. In short, there is no royal road to mind improvement. If there were, we should see pictures of well-developed minds advertised in the magazines, with exhortations to send for booklets. . What's the Answer? IN SEATTLE, where they have the re- call, initiative, referendum, woman suffrage and all up-to-date ideas in gov- ernment, the voters recently re-elected ona non-partisan ticket the same mayor they ‘‘recalled’’ two years ago. Now, who has reformed in these two years— the wicked mayor who had to be recalled? Or have the voters who recalled him? comicbooks.com