Life — September 24, 1908 — page 6: what you’re looking at

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

Se y “While there is Life there's Ho, VOL.WI | SEPTEMBE Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY TAL MITCHELL, Prestte A. MILLER, See'y and Treas 17 West Thirty-first Street, New Yor BAKE No. 135. E may be on the % eve of some late- born political excitement in connection with the Presidential campaign, but still at this writing public interest clings to baseball and flying ma- chines, particularly flying machines. Orville Wright's two hour-long flights in his aeroplane at Fort Meyer on September 9 made a very definite impres- sion on the public mind. Count > Zeppelin’s airship was truly 2” enough a remarkable craft, but ballooning, however perfected, is not flying. Whereas the Wrights, and the other successful aeroplane persons really do fly. The difference is the difference between swimming on blad- ders and swimming without. The Wrights have not got aviation on the Pullman car basis yet, out they seem to have got far enough along to be en- titled to say “ This is how to do it!” That is an immense distance to have progressed from the Darius Green stage, when the very idea of a flying chine was a joke, and people had very much the same feeling about ex- perimenters in them that they still lave about experimenters in spiritism. The Wrights seem to be the best man-birds in the business, their per- sonal skill in flying being as remark- able as their machines. That is what the French experts seem to admire Wilbur Wright, and handsome and generous have been some of the French reports about him and his experiments, notwithstanding he had come over seas to compete with Frenchmen. That the Wrights will perfect a war- machine of practical usefulness seems That is a great deal most in very almost assured. LIRR: to do. From that to the great passen- ger-carrying air-cars that Kipling and Wells like to imagine and the story book illustrators like to draw is a long, long ways; but mankind seems to have a great deal of time left in which to do things, and it keeps doing them, so that now it takes a bolder prophet to say what won't happen in aerial navi- gation than what will. Dr. Simon Newcomb out of his great erudition made some guesses about it in a maga- zine article a while ago, but they are only guesses ‘0 one can do more than guess. SS HE funniest thing in the political campaign is the attacks made on Taft because he is a Unitarian. They are probably too silly to amount to anything, though not too silly to get Senator Burkett of Nebraska into the ridiculous scrape of making public de- that Taft is a Unitarian. Maybe he is not, but he thinks he is, his parents being so tagged, and his own persuasion coming by direct inherit- It all makes one begin to have prickings of curiosity to read the elec- tion and see how various groups of voters voted and learn why they voted as they did. There seem to be more undercurrents than usual in this campaign, and some of them may turn out to be stronger than is ex- pected, As heretofore expounded, the whole country has partaken bounti- fully for the last five years of Roose- velt’s intoxicating bowl, and of other bowls quite as prejudicial to sobriety, and the voting may show very curious results of all those stimulants. returns I seems more‘ valiant than wise of Taft to take the stump against Bryan, whose great specialty is speech. But perhaps the Western voters need the evidence of their senses that there is a real man running on the Republi- can ticket. Mr. Taft can talk excel- lent sense, but speechmaking is with him a supplementary accomplishment, whereas with Brother Bryan every- thing else is supplementary and speech the main exhibit. The substance of Brother Bryan’s remarks makes very little difference. He can make any- thing go in a crowd by his skilful manner of imparting it, a fact that gives him an advantage over Brother Taft, who must use considerable dis- cretion about what he says. The Re- publican party and platform being what they are makes it seem some- what like egg-dancing to say much about them, but so long as Mr. Taft can talk about himself he will be safe, sand as a visual exhibition he is sure to impress and gratify the largest crowds, EN ri é fe be N antl om EE & BOUT forty-five million dollars is wanted for schools for next year by the Board of Education of the City of New York. This includes a bond issue of about twelve million dollars for new school buildings. The appropriation, when it is made, will take care of between 550,000 and 600,000 pupils, including about 25,000 high school pupil It will include $3,600,000 for increase of teachers’ salaries. Leaving out the money to be borrowed for building, the figures in- dicate a cost of from $50 to $60 apiece for instructing the young minds of the metropolis. Besides the instruction thus paid for by taxation, thousands of other pupils are taught in private schools and church schools, especially the schools of the Roman Catholic Church. Is there not something in these dry figures that would make edifying read- ing for some of our Western ob- servers who think of New York chiefly as a town whose inhabitants ride in automobiles, devour lobsters late at night in restaurants, drink and gamble profusely, riot in wealth easily obtained in Wall Street, and practice in their short hours of labor to get unearned money away from the rest of the country? How different, how very different from all that is the real New York, with its back bent to this great task of keeping upward of a million children at school. comicbooks.com