Judge — January 30, 1926 — page 15: what you’re looking at

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

Editor, Norman Anthony, “Helen Keller reads President Coolidge’s lips” —News- paper headline. Her supreme achievement! 2 2 ey rd Pussyfoot Johnson has come back with the message that Prohibition is “up to the people.” This is news to the Anti-Saloon League. On With the Dance! 'S WRONG to suppose that politicians are always looking for live issues. More often than not they are dodging them with all the agility and cunning can muster. Our two-party system gives them both an incentive and an advantage in this respect. An advan- tage, because normally anything with the party label on it can be counted on to go down with the bulk of voters in either the Republican or Democratic partie: incentive, because, this being the case, why should they rouse the animals with issues that excite popular passion and threaten, as all such issues threaten, to split their docile flocks? So, whe: foundly stirs the public interest, political prudence whi pers +, straddle, don’t start anything whose finish you can’t fores The Republicans at Albany are about to provide us with an apt illustration. The Republican Party in New York State is recruited largely from the dry upstate rural districts. But it is also dependent for an important minority element on the wet cities. If it could, therefore, it would remain utterly silent about Prohibition. But into this situation marches the Anti-Saloon League with the demand that the Republicans reintroduce into the Legislature the State enforcement bill de! This will be done, and then, unle fail, the following and an sver a question arises that pro- | prognostications The Assembly, Senate, ’ it. That is to say, four or five Republic nators, hailing from wet districts, are expected to vote with the Demo- crats as they did last year, so that next fall the Republicans can go before their city constituencies and say, “You see, we helped kill it”; while upstate their spellbinders will be arguing, “We did our best to put it through.” T"s game is worth watching because it isn’t going to last very long, anywhere. Prohibition, as it hap- pens, is the livest political issue in this country to-day. No matter how we may joke about it, in disobedience af {ssoriate Editors, William Morris Houghton, William Edgar Fisher, Phil I the Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Publie Morals, there is no other issue that so closely touches the daily life of every one of us, that comes so near being a universal topic of conversation, that so quickly provokes contro- versy or kindles feeling. Talk about the apathy and in- difference of the voters toward the exercise of their fran- chise, the Prohibition issue, if and when an election turns upon it squarely, will bring tumbling to the polls the entire population of voting age; it is charged with dynamite. Sooner or later, therefore, it will force itself to the front in such a manner that evasions and straddles of the sort we are witnessing in New York will no longer be possible and the country will line up, wet against dry, in a death grip as shattering to old political cleavages as the Civil War. Even now the politicians of both parties can see it coming and they're hopping about like popcorn on a hot griddle to avoid its consequences. Let ‘em hop, and pop! The Road to Success T GRIEVES us to read that John D. Rockefeller is still leading the youth of the country astray with mistaken advice. At his age it will be hard for him to reform. “Save your money,” he is quoted recently as telling his caddy. “Be Don't buy anything you don’t need,” the implication being that habits of this sort would help make him a rich man. We’ doubt it. Such a recipe may have been of value once when farm punctu mortgages were the main form of wealth and everybody was poor but the skinflint country banker. But to-day there are too many other avenues to wealth that com- pared with this one look like parkway boulevards beside shioned dirt road. And to travel them requires eticism but self-indulgence. an old- not a. Spend your money, with discrimination, of course. Spend it on self-improvement, experience, good clothes, au can of the things that will help you to keep your feet in faster com- pany. Don’t make a fetish of punctuality, lest you render less punctual people uncomfortable and less likely, therefore, to give you tips on the market or to introduce you to their rich friends. And finally, by all means buy what you don’t need. The only way to whet your appe- tite for prosperity is to tickle your palate with the luxuries within your grasp. Self-denial often breeds unworldliness and that’s fatal. The more you have the more you'll want and the more, therefore, you'll get. fashionable acquaintance, on as many Desire, pas- sionate, keen, unremitting, possessive, is the mother of riches. Without it you'll never be a real go-getter, never! W. aL i. comicbooks.com