Life — December 20, 1906 — page 17: what you’re looking at

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

“DERE = The Trouble with New York Manners CORRESPONDENT of the Sun writes from Scranton, Pa., to make disparaging remarks on New York manners. He had in mind street-car manners, for it isin the street-cars that the public manners are most easily observed. He said he lived in New York five years and saw only two civil street-car conductors. It is true that the standard of street-car manners in this town is not high.. The cars are crowded; the conductors are sometimes rude, and rarely bland, and the passengers do not exhibit a high average of consideration for one another’s comfort. Most of the passengers are civil enough, but there are boors in every crowded car who fail to make the simple concessions to courtesy that the greatest happiness of the greatest number requires. The worst feature of our street-car service—next to the general crow is the herding of smokers on the back platforms. No effort is made nowadays to enforce the no- smoking rule. There is no doubt that street-car travel is more disagreeable than it was five years ago. Except for the war against the spitters, there has been no item of improve- ment. The smoking nuisance has increased and manners have degenerated. The conductors are no great shakes, but they are the product of conditions, not the creators of them. The con- ductor’s job is a long, hard, mean job, and the pay is about two dollars a day. A man fit to be a conductor and keep proper discipline and maintain a proper deportment in a street-car in New York is worth nowadays more than two dollars a day, and, apparently, can get it. The transit com- pany cannot hire fit men in the present state of the labor market for the wages they pay, nor can they hire enough tolerable men to run as many cars as they would like to send out. That is the trouble. The town is so prosperous, the demand for eff so great, wages are so high and there are so many people who want to ride that the street-car company, with its stocks full of water, doesn’t feel that it can afford to haul them otherwise than cattle fashion. All things considered, the conductors do pretty well. We can’t expect to have unbridled prosperity without some nasty drawbacks, THE KIND OF FACE A BOY WOULD LIKE To MAVE WHEN ME EATS Ms CHRISTMAS DINNER AR wainea- "YOUR INTENTIONS ARE GOOD, MR. SANTA CLAUS, BUT YOU ARE BEMIND TUE TIMES. CUT OUT THE NOAM'S ARK AND GIVE US AN AUTOMOBILE OR AN aixsuir.* Knot Necessary B ALL means let us cling to the old spelling. If the present style of spelling was good enough for our parents why not good enough for us? Take ‘“‘gnat,” for instance. Instead of dropping the g why not, if it is a good thing, use it more freely? Why not raise your ghat to a geat if she is gfat? And k—what harm in a little more of a sensible custom? If you have the knowledge why make a knoise? Knobody is knaughty. A knife is knever knice unless knecessary. And why should not a knave knail knapkins to knarcotics? And are knapkins better than gnapkins? Kno; decidedly krot! . A Letter HILADELPHIA, PA. DEAR Lire We all are willing to believe that our strenuous President is unequivocaily in favor of the “square deal,’ but isn’t he develop- ing symptoms of color blindness as to just what a square deal really is? Yours truly, S. S. Harpe: November 30, 1906. 221 Land Title Building. [XQuisITIVE OLD GENT (on depot platform to winded suburbanite): What is your pursuit in life? SubBuRBANITE: It depends upon whether I’m going or coming. It’s the 7.48 train in the morning, and the 6.12 at night. comicbooks.com