Judge — February 11, 1922 — page 20: what you’re looking at

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

LOVE AND THE TAXES T is high time that something should be done about love. It is getting too heavily into the taxes. St. Valen- tine’s Day furnishes the occasion for a frank discussion of the subject of love looking to some practical solu- tion of the problems presented in a complex civilization. Two or three epochs ago love was a simple and rather secondary matter in man’s relation to the cosmos—a foot-race culminating in a domestic establishment which required little police protection, and no plumbing, save that which the hillside afforded. Even an era ago love was only an exalted horse trade. But for two thousand years, as the church social has been rising in economic importance as the mainstay of organized religion, woman has been getting restive as a chattel, and has been demanding status as an individual. So love, like transportation, communica- tion, fuel, food, and the baser metals, is being affected by its public use. Thus love, in one way, gets into the taxes. Sooner or later we must establish numerous state love commis- sions in the more liberal and progressive States, like Wisconsin, California, Kansas and Massachusetts. After that the Cabinet portfolio for the Department of Love is the next step in the evolution of our attempt to establish the Federal control of romance. One can see it grow, this Federal Department of Romance, the bureaus of eugenics, the divisions of polemics and divorce, the comp- troller of the birth rate, the office of the superintendent of compatibility, supervising the application of the newly- invented kissometer, which will test the love power of infatuated couples to ascertain whether romance will have voltage enough to last until the first three children are past school age; the curator of the separator, which shall dispel romance by psychoanalysis in unsuitable couples! What a department it will be, and what an opening for the Maiden Aunt! Indeed, given the Federal Love Department and the Maiden Aunt becomes a career for women in itself! And yet, despite our beloved Presi- dent’s promise to take the Government out of business, something must be done to regulate and control love. Once it was simple enough, and no one’s business if Darby and Joan decided to tread the primrose path. If Mrs. Darby or Colonel John Q. Joan appeared in the path with the hardware necessary to puncture love’s young dream, that also was a private affair; once, but not now. The EDITORIAL By WituramM ALLEN WHITE housing problem enters into the idyl; also the corner policeman and expensive courts come in, and new patent sanitary jails, and high-salaried reporters, and newspaper space that should be devoted to the sale of oil stock and to editorials denouncing the agricultural bloc—and a lot of complications that go directly into the taxes and affect the cost of living. So we must put love upon a meter, declare it a public utility, and either control it in the public interest or socialize it for public use. Love that in the early days of Francis Wilson used to “come like a summer sigh, softly o’er us stealing,” now is a pathological condition, having certain definite symp- toms in blood pressure, blood count, respiration and other secretions and excretions of the body: a pathological condition most frequently found in adolescence. We are horribly scientific about what was once a vast mystery. Possibly the next generation will find a serum which will check love as it checks other infantile diseases. Pos- sibly the source of the infection will be located, bottled and for sale by all druggists, so that in the halls where once beer and light wines were dispensed to the thirsty multitudes, one can go in and get a shot of true love! But if that far millennial day dawns it will take taxes to pry up the sun, more taxes, lots of taxes. In the meantime, why not start a movement to abolish love, and pick babies off the trees? That seems to be the only way to get love out of the taxes. And with these mellow meditations we leave St. Valentine. “IN CLEAR DREAM AND SOLEMN VISION” ND so we come to Lincoln's birthday, one hundred and twelve years away. It is something over a half cen- tury now since his death, “when lilacs first in the dooryard bloomed.” In those years we have probably created a myth. It is unlikely that any such man as Lincoln is now pictured ever lived. The facts of his life are plentiful enough, Herndon, Miss Tarbell, Nicolay and Hay having collected the bits, which Humpty Dumpty might use in his Herculean task, but no one has ever put Lincoln to- gether again. Noone ever can. He died with his genera- tion, as he lived with it. That he was a kindly man, a homely man, a cautious man, and unlearned, but never a stupid man, no one can doubt. That he was a politician, who scrambled up from the bottom of the political ladder out of the muck and mire of it, and when he got to a certain rung began to be a statesman also is true. An ambitious man he was also most likely; not as Cassius, but at least as Brutus was. But the myth rather than the man is important.