Life — March 4, 1897 — page 4: what you’re looking at

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

> LIFE: While there is Life there's Hope.” XXIX. MARCH 4, 1897. 19 West Tuirty-First Street, New York. Published every Thureday. $5.00 a year in advance. Postage to foreign countries in the Postal Union, $1.04 a year extra. Single copies, 10 cents. Rejected contributions will be destroyed unless accompanied by @ stamped and directed envelope. The illustrations in Lire are copyrighted, and are not to be repro- duced without special arrangement with the publishers. VOL. G* 2CE wants : Crete, and the Cretans are anxious that she should have it. The transfer ne- cessitates the throw of Turkish rule in Crete, Greeks and Cretans are now trying hard to accomplish. Here's hoping they urs now since over- which may succeed, It is some fifteen hundred y the Cretans have been allowed to boss their own island. They were conquered by the Romans after a hard fight, and one marauder or another has been on their backs ever since. Itis high time that they were allowed to work out their theory of life, and see what they can Platt-ridden New York feels for them, and ion of its fervent sympathy. make of it. sends them the expre: iS OW astonishing is the ascendency of the after- dinner speech in this, and almost every other American community! That a company of intelligent men, who have paid for and eaten a good dinner, and want to with another, under two converse one should sit’ silent or three hours of stated oratory, and go home weary, but without resentment, is in a certain triumph of civilization. sense a The , natural man is not so endur- ing as all that, unless, per- haps, he happens to be a North American Indian. The true way to give a suc- cessful public dinner is to = . gather the diners at one hotel and the stated orators at another, and let the diners have fun, and swap sentiments unstifled by oratory, while the stated orators edify one another elsewhere, and have their deliverances printed in the morning papers. The after-dinner set speech ought to be disciplined. Its merit is overrated, its inconvenience ignored. How it maintains its ascendency is one of the things that no fellow can find out. There is hardly a living man who will admit that he does not abhor to make it, and the average diner, if allowed to exercise his real preference, will eagerly elect not to sit under it. As an instrument of discipline it has its value, but considered as a social institution it is crucler than suttec, and has fewer inci- dental compensations than cannibalism. * HE despaired - of has happened. Harvard and Yale have got together and made a five years com- pact to row races and play baseball and football, one with another, as they did for so many years before an occurrence which is now forgotten It is a good thing. They like to play together, and people like to see them, and there no good reason why they shouldn The new agree- ment provides that all games shall be played on college grounds, which is right, and will help to keep the interest in these competitions within bounds, as well as perhaps, to effect a wholesome reduction in the pecuni- ary profits of them. The arrangements for the race at Poughkeepsie thi year are most edifying. Yale has consented to join in the race which had been arranged between Harvard and Cornell, and Cornell has consented to permit her to do so. We shall see three crack crews in line on the Hudson, and it has all come about as though it had been arranged by gentlemen anxious to please and accommo- date one another, and to overcome obstacles to sport. If this spirit, so different from that which obtained when Harvard and Yale fell out, can only be kept up, the sore trials of that dispute may be joyously remem- of doing bered as precursors cf peace and a better w: O one had anything that was not kind to say of Mr. St. John. His old friends and business associates appeared at his funeral, and some of them carried him to his grave. The opinion is general that his death was due to conscientious devotion to theories that he believed to be sound, It was a deplorable sacrifice. His belief in bi- metallism was so strong that he swallowed | the Chicago platform, hide, horns and hoofs. The loss of confidence in his judgment tha followed was inevitable. In January three banks dropped him from the lists of their directors; but that was not persecution, but a natural result of a conflict of judg- ment. Poor gentleman! He was not less a martyr from being a martyr to a cause that, we trust, is lost.