Life — September 5, 1907 — page 10: what you’re looking at

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

“While there is Life there's Hope.” SEPTEMBER 5, 1907 1297 Puldished by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY J.A. Mitchell, Pres't. A. Miller, Se 17 West Traery ries Steerer, New Yous VOL. L y and Treas “ATOINDIVIDUAL, no corporation, obeying the law has any thing to fear from this Administration.” So spoke our dent at Province town, Honest men, none the less, and men obedient to the law, kept on being scared to death, and wishing the Administration, whatever it does, would hold its blessed jaw, and let the owners of securitie: on them, get the nights’ rest their nerves so desperately need. “Now, watch me!” says the good President. Bless you, good man; any: thing but that. In Wall Street eves you are no brazen serpent set up to cure, but Medusa’s and borrowers the very snakes themselves head—the unhealthiest thing to watch that is anywhere in sight. Wall Street— poor, nerve-shaken Wall Street—watches, you and has fits whenever you open your mouth. And ‘Wall Street”? means every: body who needs money, or owes it, or has investe:] it in any kind of paper security. Tt is a shame that all this should be truc; a shame that so much mischief should be attributed to the President that he has not really done and may never do. But, after that he has sowed to reap. amateur in everything except practical Lut not so all, it is the kind of a shame He is an politics; a very clever amateur thorough nor so competent as a trained professional. He never even had to learn to make his living. His present oppor- tunities have resulted, under Providence, from his astonishing career as an amateur soldier, and since he got enormous credit for being what he neither was, nor seri- ously claimed to be—a competent mili- lary man maybe 1 is Poetical justice that he should incur enormous reprehen- = IE APEB sion for being the destroyer that he has neither meant to be, nor in truth has been. But he cannot set himself right, nor allay by anything that he can say the jeties of the public, because he does not know how. What he knows how to do is to hit the line hard. He knows the foothall methods, has practised, ex- pounded and preached them. Where they are serviceable, he is serviceable. Where the need of the hour does not happen to be to hit the line hard he is not so useful. IS full time that Wall Street means the responsible business end of the whole country--should take its eyes and thoughts off the Administration and bestow them on other concerns. Itis true that the Administration has not helped much to restore confidence, but it is the pinnacle of absurdity to make it respon- sible for all the collapse of stock values and shrinkage of credit that has befallen. It is just as absurd for Wall Street to blame its worst tribulations on the Presi- dent as it is for the President to attribute them to the plots of rich malef on bringing a pinch of fi that will discredit the policy of the Gov- ernment. Happily, at last a more justand sane conception of what is really going on in the world of creditors and debtors begins to obtain. “It is conceivable,” said the Evening Post on August 21, “that the market, convinced at last that the Administration’s attitude has not been the cause of the break in stocks this month, is now taking counsel to ¢ what the real cause was and how it is to Me which tors bent ancial distress iscover operate hereafter.” About time it did. Undoubtedly we have got a sharp money pinch on our hands, but every great commercial country in the world has got the same. In this country prosecution of the trusts and the railroads for rebating and the flood of unsound State railroad legisla tion have had to do with making it acute, but it is much too far-reaching and com- prehensive a phenomenon to have been produced by the Roosevelt administra tion. ‘Two vastly expensive wars, two costly and destructive earthquakes, im- mense extravagance in living, a lot of rot- ten financicring and an enormous tying up of capital in all sorts of construction— how are those for causes contributory to the scarcity of funds! MOREOVER, the pinch is showin, compensations. Not without some very valuable results has the line been hit hard by the Roosevelt administration and all the other reformers. It would be hard to find a disinterested observer who does not feel that the standard of business morality in the United States has been materially raised in the last four years And here is another consoling sug- gestion. The Wall Street Journal quotes a New York banker who has been motoring through New England as re- porting an increase of contentment amon; the country bankers and business men with whom he talked. ‘Two or three years ago, they told him, business men in small towns were restless because they were not in New York making great fortunes like the men they read about in the pape But lately, seeing the troubles of the rich, they are much more contented with modest profits and a modest way of living. his is a very significant report. The stories of the vast and easy gains of bankers and speculators in the recent flush times were very upsetting to the mental tranquillity of the average worker, and made the man who earned his modest living by his business or profession seem a poor drudge to whom fortune had been unkind. Butwork and modest living take on a more attractive aspect when pros- perity sags. oe. The Deceased Wife's Sister bill its second reading in the House of Lords yesterday.—Daily paper in August. ssed UR world hereabouts somersaults nd catapults so as to make us tolerant just now of conservatism any- where —pig-headed, bigoted, British- bishop conservatism though it might happen to be. Would we could have endured for old times’ sake to have the Bishops thwart the widower and his sister-in-law once more, but the law was absurd and it is a triumph of in- telligence to have it killed at last. comicbooks.com