Life, 1898-03-24 · page 15 of 20
Life — March 24, 1898 — page 15: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains three distinct satirical pieces: **Top cartoons**: Two beach scenes mocking social pretension. The left shows someone attempting to teach another person proper etiquette; the right depicts "The Native" instructing visitors on mannered behavior—satirizing how people adopt artificial social personas at leisure. **Main illustration**: A "Rector's Wife" and young woman discussing Lenten sacrifice (Catholic/religious practice). The joke: the girl gave up *thinking* for Lent rather than food or pleasures—a barb at women's intellectual capacity or social frivolity. **Text snippets**: Several brief satirical commentaries. One mocks Boston's theological debate over whether Unitarians are Christians. Others ridicule patent office inventions (water filters), financial pretension (defining wealth as income minus spending), and absurdly loose patriotic credentials (Smith's ancestor merely *promised* to be sister to a Revolutionary War participant). The overall tone targets hypocrisy, intellectual laziness, and social pretense among the educated classes.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
To teach you OSTON has been interested in a newspaper discussion as to whether Unitarians are Christians. It is impos- sible to generalize on such a subject. The Native: Manners, meekness, and all that sort of thing, Isuppose. The symptoms of cach individual Uni- tarian must be ascertained and a diag- nosis made from them. S teaches that what a man says perience , What he thinks he is, what he professes to be, what his neighbors think him, and what he ought to be, considering the Chureh he goes to, may all be shadows, differing from the real man. It Fleaenwce= Scovm + 7+— Kector's Wife: AND WHAT HAS MY DEAR GIRL GIVEN UP DURING LENT! Dear ly WELL, YOU SEE IT WAS BU HARD FOR ME TO MAKE UP MY MIND, THAT { JUST gave up thinking. is suggested, as proper ‘| work for the highly educated unemployed in Massachuset pra the of the Boston at five dollars a head. Such work can- not be done by whole sale. HE Patent Ottice is deluged with in- ventions to filter fish and dirt and microb.s out of water. What the country really needs is a device that will filter the snakes out of whi OTROX: As Mi- cawber says, wealth is only the dif- ference between income and expenditure, SPeNptTuRIFT: So is debt. Still Another Order. es HAT'S this new patriotic order Smith has found- ed?” “Cou: of the Rev- olution. You see, Smith's greatgrandmother promised to be the sister of a man who after- yards fought in the War of Independence,” comicbooks.com