Life, 1907-01-31 · page 10 of 24
Life — January 31, 1907 — page 10: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains six satirical cartoon panels depicting various working-class occupations labeled as "At Life's Cooperative Trust Farm." The cartoons mock different trades: - **"Jack of All Trades"** and **"Laundry Man"** show workers in their professions - **"Nurse"** depicts healthcare work - **"Footman"** and **"Stables Boy's"** reference domestic service positions - **"Stoker"** shows industrial labor The accompanying text discusses how people have grown desensitized to repeated disasters—earthquakes in San Francisco and Kingston, railroad accidents—through media overexposure. The satire suggests that working people, hardened by constant hardship, become indifferent to tragic news. The cartoons visually reinforce this theme by depicting various laborers as worn down by their occupations.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
‘LIFE: ences iF ‘ AT LIFE’S COOPERATIVE TRUST TARM Too Frequent Shocks FARTHQUARES have worn out their welcome. There have been four within a year—at Formosa, San Fran- cisco, Valparaiso and now at Kingston— with serious loss of life and immense de- struction of property. We mourn for Kingston, but we are getting blasé about earthquakes. They do not interest us as much as they did. We know just how they work, and, given the size of the shock, we can work out most of the de- tails in our heads, including the supple- mentary devastation by fire. We sympa- thize with the sufferers, but we are begin- ning to yawn a little over the details. ‘That is not nice, but it shows how easy it is to get hardened to anything that does not urgently impair our own comfort. It is very much the same with railroad accidents. ‘There have been somany, and such bad ones, that when there is another we hardly read beyond the headlines, un- less we have personal reasons for wanting to know all. This Uncertain Life MBBS. SLUMMER: My poor woman, does your husband always drink like this? Mrs. Hocan: No, mum. Sometimes T gets out of work. | 'HERE’S no such thing as an omniv- orous reader, any more, in any sense of the term. People who read everything eat nothing but predigested cereals, and people who eat everything read nothing but newspapers. comicbooks.com