Life — April 1, 1897 — page 13: what you’re looking at

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

A LINEAL DESCENDENT. EVEN SO. HE London corres- pondent of the N.Y. Tribune says: The provincial journals are more outspoken; the Newcastle Chronicle, {or ex- ample, mournfully describes McKinley's election as a vic- tory for trusts and combina- tions, which are not charit- able institutions, and pre- dicts that the new tariff, instead of replenishing the exchequer and upholding the gold reserve, will decrease employmentand increase the cost of the necessaries of ex- istence, deplete the Treasury and promote the election of Bryan in the near tuture. This view is also held by several millions of thoughtful but power- less Americans. LIFE himself, although he voted for this same McKinley, begins to fear that Bryan's chances for the presi- dency grow brighter with each succeeding week. * LIFE: A THREATENED DANGER. T is a season of alarms. Fresh appre- hensions greet us with every morn- ing’s newspaper, and our peaceful break- fast hour is darkened by a cloud of omi- nously disagreeable suggestions. We are doomed, it seems, to quarrel with England, to fight Spain, to struggle against social- ism and silver, to give no more balls and dinners. An afternoon tea, or an organ recital with fifty-cent tickets to buy flags for Cuban patriots, will be the only gayety of the future. And now comes along a fresh intima- tion of disaster. There is a beautiful, new, fat edition of Webster's International Dictionary, a book portly enough for placidity, and dear to every well regulated heart; for the pleasure of looking at its pictured pages, its long ranks of bugs and birds and flags and fishes, beguiled for all of us many a childish hour which might otherwise have been wasted over lessons. Yet, to the publishers of this gentle and admirable work Mr. Brander Matthews has written a commendatory note, grim with the most appalling possibility, What pleases him, he says, is that the diction- ary clearly recognizes ‘‘that the English 259 language belongs to us by right of in- heritance, and is not a loan to be recalled by the British at will.” I wish Mr. Matthews would forbear to send cold chills down one's spine by the horrid suggestion that the British are even likely to try and do anything of the sort—that they have any notion of wrest- ing from us our mother tongue, and leav- ing us mute and miserable. Surely the publishers would never have put all that money ina new dictionary, if they thought there was any danger of our having no words left to spell! What a frightful tragedy it would be if millions of Ameri- cans now peacefully speaking what is popularly, but of course crroneously, known as the Queen's English, should be suddenly deprived of this treasure and compelled to study Volapuk, or construct MR. BARLOW, THE YOUTH’S COMPANION. comicbooks.com