Life — July 13, 1893 — page 4: what you’re looking at

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

- LIFE: “OWhile there's Life there's Hope.” VOL. XXII. JULY 13, 1893. No. 550. 28 West Twenty-Tuir Street, New York. Published every Thursday. $5.00.a year in advance. Postage to foreign countries in the Postal Union, $1.04 a year, extra. Single copies, to cents. Rejected contributions will be destroyed unless accompanied by a stamped and directed envelope, HE sinking of the Victoria is an astound- ing demonstration of the truth of the tradition that it is dangerous to play with weapons. If gentlemen who keep revolvers in the house as a protection against burglars, will bury those instruments in their back yards, this terri wholly in vain. > warning will not have been There s a tale of a man whose whole family were murdered in his absence, and who, coming home and groping language adequate for the situation, in asping accents said it was perfectly ridicu- lous. To call the Victoria disaster ridiculous is really not to fire very wide of the mark. Grievous and deplorable it was, of course; but Heavens! how unspeakably absurd! To build and maintain large warships at immense cost, fill them with men, send them out to prac- tice and have them eviscerate one another in mere play, and all in time of peace—dear, dear, what an astounding procedure for bipeds who pride themselves on their sagacity! Let us mourn for the good men and true whom the Victoria carried down with her; but let us mourn also, and biush for contem- porary humanity, that having so much experience and so much gumption, it has not yet developed civilization to such a point as to make the costly, clumsy warship nuisance unnecessary. * . * ERY creditable to Mr. Walter Besant is his pious desire to visit the sacred soil of New England. He speaks of it as the soil that produced Hawthorne, Emerson, Long- fellow, Whittier, Lowell, Bryant and Thoreau. credits it with Washington Irvin He also , Whereat the eyebrows of all good Knickerbockers will go up. He does not speak of New England as the responsi great West. Per fe parent of Chicago and the man of letters, Nevertheless, some- ps that is because he is and the West does not yet interest him, one should coach Mr, Besant on that phase of New England He ought to know that she has not only. pre= vailed in the production of literature greatness. nd wooden nutmegs, but that she has been the aréda nutréix of that surprising race of hustlers, the fair blossom of whose endeavors he is to view at Jackson Park, — It is not enough any longer to go to Massachusetts or Maine to see New England. She shows, if not her best, at least her most astonishing phase, in Ohio and Illinois. When you find an adult Western man who doesn’t eak broken English, the chances are that if you scratch him deep enough New England blood will flow. . * . OE unto them that bow the head and shoulders and bend the knee to Bicycle. An English medical journal laments the narrow chests and rounded shoulders which already attest the prevalence of the bicycle habit. There is a new disease which the insidious bicycle implants in the human frame and which has been dignified by a terrifying Latin name. Parents will please inform themselves as to this disease, and refuse to provide their infant offspring with the means of catching it. As for older children and adults, the prospect of weaning them from “pneumatic safeties” and analogous abominations seems faint. In many parts of the country it is impossible to keep even innocent maidens from gadding about the streets astride of wheels. What sort of a creature the coming man will be if bicycling gains on the human race at its present rate, is something that, happily, we shall not be spared to see. ment is reit- * oo erated, by the way, that the coming man is going to live in town. ‘The Royal Statistical Society of London has been advised by a learned investigator, Dr. Longstaff, that he finds the same tendency citywards at work all over the world. The situa- tion, then, simply comes to this, that the population of Earth have determined with one accord that they like folks better than landscape and country air, and that they will not work in the fields so long as they can find anything better to do, HE an- nounce- WE observe that Professor Brander Matthews, who discourses learnedly in the July Harper's about The Function of Slang, says nothing about the word “holler.” “Holler” is a word that bears plain traces of corruption about it, but has it not fairly won its place and a good title to rank as good American? . * * V HEN the Vikings get to Chicago, the people hereabouts will want them to send back whether the crew of college men that they shipped in New York The opinion is openly expressed by well informed persons who have read the list of the volunteer college crew, that it will cost the Vikings many pailfuls of word as to did any work. perspiration to transport those veteran collegians to their destination. comicbooks.com