Life — November 26, 1896 — page 4: what you’re looking at

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

* LIFE: VOL. XXVIII. NOVEMBER 26, 1896. 1g West Tuirty-First STREET, New York. Published every Thursday, $5.00 year in advance. Postage to foreign countries in the Postal Union, $1.04 a year extra. Single coples, 10 cente, Rejected contributions will be destroyed unless accompanied by a stamped and directed envelope. The illustrations in Live are copyrighted, and are not to be repro- duced without special grrangement with the publishers. "THE President’s Thanks- giving proclamation, issued the day after election, gs). bids us all stop work on the 26th of November and go to church, and thank God—"' Who has 2 shielded us from dire disaster "—for our pres- ervation as a nation, Mand for divers blessings that we enjoy. It makes the untoward grin to see a Demo- cratic President proclaim the propriety of national thank- fulness so hot on the heels of a huge Demo- cratic defeat, but Mr. Cleveland is not, and as never assumed to be, the kind of Demo- — J crat who was defeated. It is many a long year since the American people have eaten their Thanksgiving turkey with so near an approach to pious minds as a large majority of them will have this year. They have been scared, and nothing makes us poor humans appreciate Providence so much as a sound fright. Fallto, brethren. Mark Hanna might have scared up votes enough to elect McKinley, but even he could not have compassed that ely rise in wheat and the inflow of gold to buy it. That was where the Lord seemed to line up on our side. ie 2 has been a Horse Show in New York. It went off about as usual. There were a good many horses, a num- ber of people who knew a horse from an elephant, and were interested in horses, and a great lot of people who knew one another, more or less, and were inter- ested in people, manners and clothes. Milliners and dressmakers make it their business to goto the New York Horse Show because of the opportunity it gives them to compare and scrutinize the current achieve- ments in their line of industry. It is an amusing exhi~ bition, and is always worth the price of admission to a contemplative observer. It must grow tiresome to the people who sit in the boxes all the week and make the show, but they are tough, and bear up well. They did their duty this year as sturdily as ever. . . . T is proposed that the Aldermen of New York shall presently be in~ vited to pass what is known as the curfew ordinance, a municipal law which pro- vides that children under sixteen years old shall not be allowed in the streets after eight o'clock in win- ter or nine o'clock in summer, un- less they are in charge of some authorized elder. This curfew ordinance originated in the same city which gave the Popocrats their late candidate for President. It is said to be in force in as many as two hundred Western towns and cities. A law that presupposes that children are best off at home in the evening may bea useful ordinance in a Western village, and still not be helpful either to the health or morals of children in th® tenement-house districts of New York. There are sound objections to such laws as the curfew ordinance, in that they are meddlesome and restrictive of liberty, and make the pub- lic assume responsibilities that should fall upon parents. Such objections are not necessarily conclusive, but an ordinance that is open to them should show very clear and important advantages if it is to be justitied. . . . Me. GEORGE FRED pl WILLIAMS, of Massa- chusetts, has gone to Jamaica for rest. It is good to know that Mr. Williams can be spared for a time from the Bay State, but it seems a pity that he » Should not have rather taken his vacation in Hayti than Jamaica. He has exerted himself during the past three months in the endeavor to turn the wheels of civilization backward in New England. In Hayti he would have found a society in which the pro- cesses he favors have been perfected. Civilization has been running backwards there for several gencrations, and the results could not but have been edifying to Mr. Williams. comicbooks.com