Judge — February 25, 1928 — page 5: what you’re looking at

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

Fes. 25 1928 Judge = Liberty Number Liberty! Liberty! How many crimes are com- mitted in thy name. —Madame Roland. COMPANIONATE MIRAGE E were sitting round our sanctum here. “Liberty Wit’ we call it—playfully, of course. We were wondering what to print next. It may surprise you, but sometimes we do have such a hard time deciding what you two million Libertairians want to read. We rack cur brains to make it easy for yours. There was once a high-brow on our staff. One of those birds that go in for heavy thinking. He proposed a slogan for us, something like “To please all your readers, find their most common denomination.” We transferred him right away to the advertising department. He gets on fine there. It seems advertising is sold nowadays by deep thoughts. And by long words. ‘“Consumer-accept- ance” and “distribution-conscious” were getting stale. Our high-brow. ex-editor invents a thirteen-syllable advertising phrase every week. And every new phrase sells another thirteen-page schedule. Meanwhile, we editors got up our own slogan: “Talk down, not up.” Then we once had a Red. He got on the staff because when he asked for the job we thought he was blushing. We like blushers. We try out stories on them. But this man was a regular Red. He actually urged us to print an article about liberty (small 1, of course). Did you ever hear of such sedition? We had him transferred to the circulation-getting department. “If you love the common people so much,” we said, “go out and mingle with the readers of this paper, but leave its editors alone.” So we were in conference. A new editorial topic was needed. Something to take up in a serious way. Not too serious, of course. But something that would come right home to the daily lives of every one of you dear, kindly, simp—simple people. Politics? Religion? Prohibition? No; there are too many differences of opinion there. We mustn’t tread on any noses or put any toes out of joint. What we needed was something on which you could all agree. A happy thought! Well—sort of happy. Marriage! Everybody is married. Or ought to be. (We don’t mean anything naughty by that. Merely that marriage, to put it emphatically, is nice.) So here goes. This nut Judge Lindsey is gassing about what he calls “companionate marriage.” Companionate mirage it should be. Very pretty from afar, but when you get close, it just vanishes. He says husband and wife ought to be companions. That would undermine the very foundations of Society. He says there should be divorce by mutual consent. Mutual indeed! Marriage is and was divinely intended to be, a gamble. Therefore the method of divorce should be the pari-mutuel. Lindsey favors public birth control. Pardon us for using so shocking a word as “birth,” but the time has come for plain speaking. We stand for self control. There, that cught to hold him for a while. Companionate marriage is no different from trial marriage. And marriage has always been man’s chief trial, anyway. As for the immorality which Lindsey talks about—did you ever read William Longfellow Wadsworth’s “Oh, the Imitation of Im- morality”? Read it. We always urge our readers to put in their spare time reading good books. It keeps them from comparing Liberty with other magazines. Now that we've settled Lindsey’s hash—pardon the modern slang—we'll have to hold another conference. Probably our next subject will be the Younger Generation. There’s a problem for you! But don’t be afraid. We'll reduce it to its lowest terms. And believe us, some of those terms are pretty low. As always, we shall argue for rec- titude. Liberty is not license, you know. IN OUR NEXT ISSUE N next week’s issue “Hobo” Goliath, the universe’s toughest hockey player, will tell “How I Broke Seven Guys’ Legs and a World’s Record.” Also Madame LUELLA, the notorious beauty-parlor impresario, will write “Face Lifting in the Dark.” We shall con- tinue our amazing disclosures of the “Secrets of a Wash- lady.” The next of Mr. Krpitno’s travel articles will tell how he walked under a ladder on Main Street, Guatemala, and what happened to him. There will be a new parlor game, “How to Tell Her Future by the Way She Pets.” There will be grueling short stories, each of which will take you only three minutes to read and three seconds to forget. And we shall begin a new serial, entitled “Tripe,” in which HOMER HATBOY, the millionaire mono- syllablist, sets up two straw men and knocks them down, puts a golden girl to the acid test and shows you that she is brass, and defies all the cannons of the modern psycho- analytical novel by posing the world-old question “Who's a-Freud if they’re only Jung?” JUDGE, Volume 94, No, 2417, February 25, 1928. Entered as Second. Matter, October 2i, 1881, at the Post Office at New York City, NON Mander act of March 3, 1879, "Additionst entry at Jamaican I. 1) « ¥j" $5.00 a year. | 1Se a coy... Pubilished Weekly by Judge Publishing Co.. Inc., 627 West 43rd Street, New York City, N. Y., and copyrighted 1938, hy" tin the Lee Sami Gree Brisas Bred I Rogan, President: Norman Anthony, Vice. residents Joseph T. Cooney, Secretary; 627 West 43rd St., New York City, N.Y. Particular attention is called ‘to the fact that crety article and picture appearing in JUDGE is protected under the provision of Section 3 of the Copyright Law of the U. S.