Life — March 8, 1894 — page 4: what you’re looking at

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

‘LIFE: + OMhile there's Life there's Hope.” VOL. XXIII. MARCH 8, 1894. No, 584. 28 West Twenty-Tuirp Street, New York. countries in ihe Pontal Unita, Stag 2 Fe ejtre Single conto Socents, Rejected contributions will be destroyed unless accompanied by a stamped and directed envelope. F we are to have an income tax, let us do what we can to mitigate its objections. It tends to promote deception and fraud. Let us take pains then to tell the truth absolutely about what our neighbors have got. It is a tax upon the few for the benefit of the many. Let us then, with a sincere spirit of self-sacrifice, strive to be of the few who pay the tax rather than of the many whom circumstances enable to evade it. Let us, every one, mantully endeavor to get at least four thousand dollars of income every year that the tax lasts. So shall we con- tribute our due share to the national expenses, and avoid all risks of pauperization. . . . HERE is a_ well-known propensity of medical specialists to find in all symptoms the indications of the particular disease which it is their province tocure, Other specialists besides doctors are that way, too, as was illustrated the other day in a highly amusing degree by the Evening Post, when it pro- . claimed that the poisoning of a \\_ colored cook at Ithaca by chlorine gas, diffused by Cornell Sophomores, was a natural result of the over-develop- ment of athletics and the foot-ball craze. "Any educated man, the Post averred, could have predicted that just such disgraceful outbreaks as this recent one at Cornell aad would result from the foot-ball craze. Much zealous inaccuracy is to be forgiven to a newspaper with a hobby, especially when the hobby has some sense on’ its side, but when the Post makes inter-collegiate athletics responsible for a case of a Menest Wea) MAN chlorine poisoning, it simply makes itself ridiculous. For years past, Freshmen and Sophomores at Cornell have made asses of themselves annually, and the fact that this year some of the Sophomores were more stupidly silly than usual, has nothing more to do with college athletics than Richard Croker has with editing the Post, The movement for a proper restriction of inter-collegiate athletics bas much reason behind it, and the Pos?'s efforts to promote it would be much more effectual if they were a little more sane. . * . RESIDENT ELIOT'S recommendations on the subject are too sweeping to be carried out, but at least they are rational, and being definite, they will form a useful basis for discussion and action. The foot-ball rules will be amended so as to make the game less violent, the number of inter-collegiate matches will be still further limited than now, and will probably be restricted to college towns. The athletic energy of individual undergraduates may perhaps be somewhat further restrained, and other fit measures taken to vindicate the claim of our universities that they are places primarily for the training of the mind and only incidentally for the development of the body. But such measures will not extirpate the spirit of deviltry in Sophomores and Fresh- men, That is a job by itself, the handling of which is com- plicated by the fact that there is a fresh crop of youthful foolishness to tackle every year. But whatever the difficul- ties are, the job must be handled, and achance for exemplary handling will be lost, and there will be a lamentable lapse of « justice besides, if the authors of the murderous prank at Ithaca do not spend a period of repentance behind iron bars. . * . S it not nearly time that some restriction was put upon the disposition of sur- geons in this town to slice open their fellow-creatures in the interest of the complaint called appendicitis. That late absurd and lamentable operations have cost the lives of useful citizens, will strengthen our opinion, which begins to be pretty generally current that appendicitis is epi- demic in the minds of the metro- politan surgeons, and that human life would be safer in New York if the operation was forbidden except by order of a court. The public knows altogether too much about appendicitis, and the doctors altogether too little. Two-fifths of the genuine cases result from scare in the patients, and one or two more fifths of all the cases exist only in the imaginations of the surgeons. The cure of such legitimate cases as are left is not worth what it costs. Appendicitis is played out. The invention of the operation for it has changed a very rare malady into a common and dangerous disease. comicbooks.com