Judge — March 22, 1924 — page 22: what you’re looking at

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

DOES YOUR HUMAN NATURE NEED A CHANGE? by Walter Prichard Eaton published, a book with the odd title, “You Can Change It (But You Won’t).” On the jacket is pictured a ladder leaning against nothing, and up this ladder a cave man is climbing after a man clad in creased trousers. The latter appears destined to fall off the top unless he succeeds in catching hold of a large question mark in the northwest corner of the page. The draughtsman- ship of this work of art is probably as bai anything ever seen outside the In- dependent | Exhibi- tion, It very nearly caused us to give the book to the pub- liclibrary without so much as opening it. Fortur didn’t. son’s O* Cnarves Lawson has written, and D. Appleton have ely, we Mr. Law- work has turned out to be entertaining — and stimulating, and (or because) subversive of many hallowed conservative notior A book subversive of hal- lowed conservative notions would feel pretty lonely in our public libs al- most as lonely as its author would feel in our town. Here’s a curious fact which you may have no- noticed: nowadays book after book gets written, solemn or satirical, question- ing the whole struc- ture of our civiliza- tion; the very air seems charged with intellectual doubt and conflict. Yet in your town and my town, whom do we actually meet who questions anything? Whom do we actually meet who isn’t horrified at the very idea of doubt, and who doesn’t consider the use of the intelligence in matters of religion, government, social and economic rela- tions, not only a sin against society, but worse yet, a darned nuisance? When we talk about an age of doubt, what do we mean? What’sa quorum? Out of a population of 110,000,000 how many dozen doubters does it take to make an age of doubt? Cogito, ergo sum, said the philosopher. But does the butcher, the baker, the United States Senator, the college trustee, the lawyer, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, say, “I don’t think, therefore I ain’t”? He does not. He merely chucks the thinker in jail, or tacks him up on a cross, or gives him a good salary to represent an oil company, and continues his job of perpetuating this thing we call civilization. Itty Flo Peep DADDY GOOSE RHYMES Ith loothing thleep, Flipths her tootsies and toddleths: Eveningths and nights, ’Neath gay bwight lights; And daytime poses and modleths. Sometimes, when you ask him just what his objection is to trying some better way of running affairs, he deigns to reply, pompously, “You can’t change human nature.” In the far off days when we cared enough about hu- man nature to want to change it, we used to go about from platform to platform demonstrating to our own satisfaction (and the satisfaction of those few in the audience who believed as we did), that of course you can change hu- nature. We had to adm man » how- ever, that the pro- cess was slow, and ultimately we aban- doned the attempt and took up raising dwarf apple tre But it is heartening to find Mr. Lawson returning to the charge. — His book, in spite of its ter- rible cover which his pub- lishers, not he, are to blame), and_ in spite of a flip style which suggests a professor of English trying to talk like a popular Rotary Club orator, is full of suggestive thought, keen ques- tionings, and — the high courage of youth, Anybody, of course, Who has been decently educated, college grad- an. prove the of the hoary old catch phrase (for “You cant change human Not everyone, lide ever, can do it in as sprightly a fashion as Mr. Lawson. The flippancy of his style is no doubt inten- nature.” tional. “You birds,” he would say, “who have been trying to wake a dormant intelligence in your fellow-citizens by making a noise like a lecture have got it all wrong. make a noise like an alarm clock. Brerrerrerrr.” And he’s off. “Society,” he says, “punishes the man who alters the face of a check about ten times as severely as it does the man who smashes the face of his wife or child.” This is apropos of the change in human nature which has been brought about by the accumulation of goods, “thing coarser brains to make money than to make anything els ) Mr. Lawson. T! n't put so well as Channing Pollock once put it. “God,” said the author of Professor Nathan’s favorite (Continued on page 27) You've got to I'm all set for 1924. and comicbooks.com