Judge — November 26, 1921 — page 17: what you’re looking at

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

that the first state-wide use of the recall in America should have resulted in the recall of a liberal State Government. But it is equally funny that the Conserva- tives, after denouncing the recall as a weapon of the mob, as an un-American attempt to Europeanize our politics, should have exhumed the recall from the ash heap of a discarded Roosevelt program to fight a Conservative war. Necessity knows no politics. And the recall being in the arsenal, the rules of war do not include a sense of humor; so the Conservatives grabbed the weapon which they once scorned and proceeded to recall Governor Frazier. Nor is this the worst. They used the initia- tive and referendum, the most abominable tool of the mobaucracy, to repeal some of the laws and overturn some of the institutions for which the Non-Partisan League is responsible. Von Diessell in Belgium and Sherman on his March to the Sea were not more greedy in their use of enemy goods than our good North Da- kota conservative friends were in turning the recall and the initiative and referendum to their purposes. War, of course, is only politics pushed Drawn by S. J. Woo.r. BRIDGE! to an absurdity. And war is hell, quoth Sherman. So politics had its temperature in Dakota. But as the initiative and referendum have been used and respectablized by both sides, the Liberalism advocating it and the Conservatives using it, perhaps these political contraptions may become like poison gas and airplane bomb- ing—not so horrible as they seemed when only one side used them and before the other side got around to them. WHILE PASSION PANTS IHESE are hectic days for the Boffins of Boffin’s Bower. “Passion,” for instance, which once was not mentioned in the presence of Mrs. Boffin, now is seen at the movies panting like a steam engine, and in books the word “‘passion”’ is as common as the word “love” was in the ancient Victorian days, and not nearly so thrilling. The other day in England the King’s Doc- tor, a certain Lord Dawson, got up at a church convention of the Established Church and made a speech saying that birth control was justifiable in many cases, and that unless the church got over the idea that marriage was in- stituted solely for the purpose of propagating the species, the youth of the land, which has other ideas about marriage, would leave the church. Certain things that once never were men- tioned in the presence of Mrs. Boffin are now the subjects of casual street car chat. And that not merely by Mrs. Boffin and the eldest Miss Boffin, but by Betty Boffin of the fifth grade. Little pants of passion, little yips of joy, make a bloomer lassie tough as papa’s boy. And Ma Boffin is writing papers about it for the club. Any old-fashioned mid- Victorian who believes in right and wrong, and Beethoven, and fine-cut chewing tobacco, and the Nebular Hypothesis, views this narrowing area of modesty with a consternation pleas- antly mingled with a morbid zest.