Life — October 6, 1904 — page 14: what you’re looking at

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

326 husbands?" and accept the simple answer, ‘‘Yes."". The American girl is an enthusiastic idealist, who marries man, not for himself, but because he is the magic key to the door of her air-castle. He it is who, in return for love and kisses, is going to materialize her dream life of wherein she can pursue her fads and tence is forever going to be of the “ darling- you-are-mine , that the climax of each popular novel (ending where it ought to begin) has made more real for her. But instead, on her return from her wedding trip around the castle of her hopes, she is met by the grim giant, called “Prosaic Monday Morning,” who apologet- ically explains to her that, owing to the manners and customs of the twentieth century, there are demands upon her strength, good nature and pride, that increase in number and severity until life becomes a mundane, humdrum routine of cares, that soon obliterate the blissful moonlight, woodbiney, tootsy-wootsy days. ‘Please, dear,” is laid aside for * Way don't you?” and so it is that beneath the society smile and the best tailor-made of more than three out of five of the American wives, gnaws the awful fact that the matirlg was not such as could most hap- pily have met grim reality. Signed, ‘An Old Maid Who Has Made a Study of the Subject. harmonious theorie a Pa SWe Finance’s Faithful Friend. THe joyous Democratic party, which specializes the Downtrodden Masses and the incubation of trouble, cyclones, phraseology and addled eggs, assembled during the heated term to nominate a P3 lential candidate who could simultaneously placate the whiskered friends of silver, tickle th aven face of gold, soothe our infant industries, please reciprocity, tranquilize free trade, exhibit the pearls of expansion and the perils of imperialism, and who was an n accomplished enough to ride from two to a dozen horses. Under the guidance of David B. Hill, a simple country lawyer, with the advice of August Belmont, a guileless Wall Street farmer, and by the aid of Patricio McCarren, a rugged, rustic Brooklynite, the grand old party of Jefferson, jawbone and gin-rickies, hatched out a platform that was a mosaic and a candidate who was to be a Moses, ‘The candidate, Judge Alton B. Parker, is a plump, suave, smooth citizen of Esopus, N. Y., with the dignity of stout- *LIFE- ness and the wisdom of reticence; a man reputed to be a good mixer, a refined hand-shaker and familiar with the law and the profits. A judicial candidate and a judicious judge, his golden mien acquired a silver polish in the polite school of rural New York politics. The Judge has all the historic qualities of the true Ameri- can Presidential candidate. In youth he was a farmer's boy; he can differentiate beans from haysced and hogs from hard-boiled eggs ; he can milk a cow or a client, and shoe a horse ora hen; he can cut cordwood after breakfast, hay after dinner, coupons after supper, and ice between meals ; and he has never been too blamed haughty to serve his native land in a salaried job. Personally, he is mild, bland, astute and bald ; he raises onions and broilers; rides a horse like a Boston Lancer; takes to water like a Wall Street syndicate ; has invented a stove-polish and patented a woodchuck trap ; and he is the firm friend of Dave Hill, American Labor and ten-year-old Bourbon, In the early days of his candidacy he earned the admira- tion of the patriot financiers of Wall Street and the paternal patronage of the sainted and oil-scented Rockefeller, those rugged patriots pronouncing him safe and sane; safe be- cause they knew the combination, sane because he had beaten a crank; safe because he said he was for honest money, sane because they knew he was for casy money. “Here,” they exclaimed, husky with emotion, ‘Here is Finance's Faithful Friend; here is a conservative force to protect industry and thrift from the Man on Horseback, and preserve intact those Christian philanthropies—Anthra- cite, Kerosene, and Financial Irrigation." As the summer waned and the autumn waxed the Down- trodden Masses grew torpid and pined for hot stuff ; Parker as the prophet of the Party of the Dago and the Decalogue lacked ginger; while the Party of the Dollar and the Dinner Pail was doing stunts that the Plain People could grasp. Moreover, it became evident that it was easier to keep Judge Parker in the eye of the Sunny South than to keep Judge Lynch out of the eye of the Frigid North ; and the enthusiasm of Willie Bryan and Willie Hearst was failing to inspire the hearts of the Common People. When vulgar sports spoke in withering tones of Theodore Roose- velt Jeffries and Alton B, Munroe, the judicious grieved and the skeptical laughed. Judge Parker, however, has hopes ; he is comforted and consoled by the joyous youth, engaging candor and capa- cious check-book of his skittish partner, Davis of West Virginia, who is a kitten at eighty-one, and quoted as a winner in every Old Man's Home inthe Republic. Thus wrinkled youth and blooming age, Parker and Davis, face the fiery and undaunted Rough Rider. Parker spells wisdom, and Davis, like the lady of the Haggard literature, spells eternal youth; and if the wise Judge be ** It," the frolicsome dodo of West Virginia is ‘* She."" Wisdom tells this story: Age and jurisprudence are weighty in council; youth, energy and pugnacity are potent in battle. If an election be a council or a battle, be guided in season when you bet; and remember the Wall Street proverb, ‘The crawfish is a bird of passage, which knoweth how to fish and how to craw."* Joseph Smith.