Life — December 24, 1903 — page 4: what you’re looking at

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

‘+ While there ts Life there's Hope.” VOL. XLIL DEC. 24, 1908. 0. 1104 19 West Tuiety-Fixst St., New Yore. Pablished every ‘Toorsday. 1.00 a year in a vauce. Postage to foreign countries in the Post Union, $14 a year extra. single current copies, W cent: Back numbers, ater three months from date of publication, 23 cent No contribution will be returned unless accompanied by stamped and addressed envelope. The illustrations in Live are copyrighted, and are not to be reproduced. Prompt notification should be sent by sub- scribers of any change of address. A LL the ~” “Christ- mas num- bers” are out, ali the Christ- mas _ books are pub- lished, all the Christmas trees are cut and in the markets, all the Christmas turkeys have yielded up their natural contents and their feathers, and are on their way to the Christmas cooks. Most of the Christmas gifts have been bought, most of the Christmas preparations made. Pies are making or made; schoolboys are at home; city people who have available country homes have gone to them; green wreaths are in the windows; industrious church- workers are busy with the adornment of the churches, and the Salvation Army kettles hang from their tripods on the street corners. Dear! dear! What a vast labor of preparation ! What should we do without Christmas to round up the year? It is lucky it comes just when it does—a week before New Year’s—and lucky New Year’s comes along just a week after it, so that those of us who have been prostrated in mind, body or estate by the heartiness of Christmas-keeping can pick ourselves up and take a fresh start with the new year. It is an ex- cellent thing for us to be jolted out of our several ruts at least once in the year. Christmas is a pretty serious jolt—expensive, laborious, penetrating. Nevertheless, we like it. We like it in spite of the fact that it is good for us. LIFE We enjoy it in spite of its troublesome- ness. If the Christmas spirit hangs fire in us, we don’t dare blame Christ- mas; we blame ourselves; and if there is any grace left in us, we struggle to feel as we ought to feel, and do as we should do. To everyone life in the course of years becomes extremely habitual. Habit saves time and thought and strength, and, within proper limits, is highly profitable. But it is the great merit of Christmas that it is not habitual. It is an occasion that we rise to, and the stranger the atmos- phere of peace and good will seems to us, and the more we flop on unaccus- tomed wings, the surer we may be that we had groveled too long and needed a lift. 'T'HE rectitude and political ex- pediency of our dealings with Colombia and Panama are still under- going the scrutiny of our most eminent political moralists. The Erening Post is fully persuaded that we are disgraced again ; Senator Hoar has asked for searching details of information, and Senator Morgan, lavish as usual of language, characterizes the negotiation of the new treaty as “a most wretched, a most abominable and a most horrible transaction."’ We would not put it so harshly as that. We would merely call it a business transaction. Any business transaction is accounted suc- cessful in these days which accom- plishes the purpose sought without embarrassing the transactor more than the job was worth. The acquisition of the Third Avenue Railroad in New York some years ago is an interesting instance of a successful business trans- action, and the Shipyard combine is an instance of the other sort. The Golden Rule in business is, as Mark Twain says, ‘‘Do unto the other man what he is going to do unto yon, and do it first.” It is a pretty low-down, dis- gusting rule, and makes modern business distasteful to many decent people, bat there itis. Colombia was careless with the isthmus and left it out over night where anyone could find it. And, after all, it is a very peculiar piece of property, like the North Pole, or the Zodiac, or the Straits of Gibraltar, which seems to havo been intended for the general use of mankind, and in which the rights of a proprietor incompetent to improve it must always be incomplete. Bar A LAW passed by Congress last March prescribes that no person shall be permitted to enter the United States who disbelieves in, or is opposed to, organized government. It was passed in order to exclude anarchists, Under its provisions John Turner, a newly arrived, English, philosophical anarchist and labor agitator, was ar- rested while beginning an address on trades unionism in New York, and held for deportation. His case has been carried into the courts to determine the constitutionality of the law. A mass meeting of highly respectable people was held early in December to protest against the law as un-Ameri- can, and improperly restrictive of free speech and free opinion. Emma Goldman, a particularly pestilent and dangerous anarchist, sat on the plat- form with Turner when he spoke, and the man was to have delivered an address a week later on the Haymarket anarchists, A blatherskite of this sort is surely a more mischievous acquisi- tion to this republic than a poor Russian Jew with sore eyes, or an immigrant lacking means of immediate support. In so far as Turner himself goes, there is no occasion to worry over his deten- tion. Nevertheless, we don’t like the wording of that statute. Has our population come to have so large an admixture of dangerously ignorant and stupid people that the opinions of in- coming fanatics must be investigated at Ellis Island? The really dangerous anarchists will disguise their opinions to evade such a law. The statute of March 3d, as it stands, seems pretty sure todo some harm, while it is doubt- ful whether it will do any good. It seems advisable that Congress should take another very careful look at this law, if, indeed, the courts do not demolish it. A comicbooks.com