Life — February 17, 1910 — page 25: what you’re looking at

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

Huh! T'S easy enough to be honest when life flows along like a song, but when you're out of work and the rent is duc and your wife is ill and the children are hungry and you see something you want and there’s nobody looking and you've got to a point where you don’t much care if there is some one looking, be- cause a warm cell is as good as a cold pavement—why then: TION Would his’ Stare ¢ societies : gone with for debating Lincoln have “WHAT IS IT, A BOY OR A GIRL?"* “AT IS NEITHER; IT IS A COUNTRY. YOU ARE THE FATMEROF YOUR COUNTRY. “cet a Horse!” The Muck-Rake Stories oO» who likes to read a bit of something that will take his mind off of his own cares just before he goes to bed, used to look in the magazines or read a piece of a uvely novel—something easy to follow with a tired mind. But now he says he finds himself at cleven o'clock looking around for a muck-rake story, or search- ing headlines for a new malefaction of the trusts. These current compositions he finds to be as good as anything to change the current of his thoughts, take him out of himself, instill in him a sense of the brotherhood of man, and send him cheerful to bed with a stimulated heart and a comforting sense of high resolve and comparative self-approval. We must not get improperly fond of muck-rake stories. At present they are one of the few forms of tragedy that the American mind scems to like. Of course there is a popular appetite for divorce stories and newspaper tales of crime generally, but those tales are of a difier- ent order from the muck-rake stories and produce a different effect. In a way the muck-rake stories that are really good have something of the effect of purging the passions that Aristotle says is the business of tragedy. The good ones, compounded intelligently and truthfully and in the right spirit, stir not nearly so much animosity against individuals or groups of men as disgust with hoggishne: and all the greedy and dirty schemes to get some- thing for nothing or beat the public out of its rights and property. One of the lessons that is being taught for a nice story, Jawlessne: just now in this country is that it is wrong to grab even what belongs merely to the public. That a whole community has an interest in franchises, that the whole people has an interest in public lands and minerals, and that it is mean to beg those things, is almost a new idea The muck-rake stories have done a vast deal to diffuse that idea. We owe them a great deal. And yet man cannot live by them alone, and should not feed mind on them exclusively. If we do that, we shall be for ing the dog because there are fleas on him. The big work in politics for years to come will be in the line of checking privilege, restraining corporations from ownin;; and ruling the country, and getting the worker and the taxpayer his dues. The problem is to do all that without killing off individual enterprise his. busy Stung, But Unaware F the plain people don't know they've been betrayed it's their own fault. They spend all their time reading the murders on the first page and don’t get in where the editorials arc. And if they knew, there probabiy wouldn't be anything done about it, party spirit being what it is. That's what parties are for, to keep the masses, to their proper economic function of pulling chestnuts from the fire for the politicians and their friends. By their instrumentality it becomes pos- »le to fool enough of the people erough of the time so that a tariff by Rhode Island and for Rhode Island need not perish from the earth. RB. comicbooks.com