Life — April 13, 1911 — page 8: 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.” LVI. No. 1485 PRIL 13, 1911. Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY JA. MiTeMELt, Pret, A. MILLEM, Sey and Treas, 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York F° LLOWING the horror of the Shirt Waist Factory fire came, in last month’s closing week, the deep disgust of the burning of the New York State Library at Albany and a considerable fraction of the Capitol that contained it. There is very little sentimental re- gard for the big Albany State House. It cost a vast deal of money (about twenty-four millions), and was more or less smeared over with jobs and swindles, and legislatures meddled with the plans of its architects, not to the building’s advantage. Never- theless, there was, and is, some beau- tiful work in the building and marks on it of the minds of Richardson and other good architects, however marred by changes of plan and political and legislative interventions. And in the library there were exceedingly inter- esting relics and records, some. of which were saved because they had been put ina safe, and a good many that cannot be replaced, were burned up. It is a sad story, though not quite so sad as first reports made it. No- body seems to have suspected the fuel qualities of the library rooms and their fittings and contents. The building was “fireproof”; its contents were not. The library was regarded as a safe storehouse. The facilities for putting out a fire seem to have been not merely bad but non-existent. As after the Shirt Waist Factory fire it was immediately admitted that thou- sands of other factories were liable to a like calamity, so the burning of our State Library has brought disclosure from all parts of the country that hundreds of other collections and de- positaries of irreplaceable records are quite as liable to burn up as those that were burned at Albany. Some things are in safes to-day that were not so ‘legislation, *LIPE* protected last month, and a general overhauling of building laws and fac- tory ‘aws is proceeding which may do some good. Of course, the burned part of the Albany Capitol will be rebuilt, but the State Library ought not to go back into that building. It should have a building of its own. I Milwaukee, having got things fixed so that the voter can have a say on all questions, they are having trouble because he won't sufficiently disclose his honorable wishes. They had a big noon indignation meeting of the City Club there on March 25, and made speeches and used epithets because so large a proportion of the voters stayed away from the polls, Only thirty per cent. of the registered voters had turned out for the primary to nomi- nate the school board. Nearly a third of the voters stayed away when the Mayor was elected last year, and in Tg908 seventy-seven per cent. of the voters skipped the elections for judi- cial and school officers. The City Club speakers reviled the non-voters and called them hard names, but their defection is not sur- prising The mass of the people are not going to do very much voting. They have neither time nor inclina- tion to be active in politics. They want representative government. They prefer that it shall.be honest, econom- ical and efficient, but they want to em- ploy suitable persons to see that it is so. They will chose between men and between parties. You can stir them up to say which side they will trust or to turn out a group that they have learned to mistrust, but they won't study politics ‘all the time nor study That is a work for ex- perts, and. by experts it will be done. Nevertheless, we should be thank- ful for the enterprise of the younger Western States, not yet with large families or responsibilities as heavy as they will be, for their enterprise and energy in trying out political experi- ments. We don’t need a New Zealand to be our political laboratory. Ore- gon or Colorado or Oklahoma, and Arizona, when she gets her chance, are ready to try anything that the Fed- eral Constitution allows, and that has not already been sufficiently tested in s All the younger States are al laboratories nowadays: Wis- consia, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas and such reborn States as Alabama. With all this experiment going on with the minimum of risk, surely ‘we ought to gain wisdom in politics, Out in Oregon they have an extraor- dinarily fine set of new political im- provements — direct everything and referendums and recalls and initiatives and the political jupe culotte. The Portland voter last November had to choose for various offices 45 candidates out of 131, and had, besides, to give his views “on 32 distinct projects of direct legislation, 11 of them involving amendment of the State constitution.” The voters passed nine of the laws and rejected twenty-three. But what an absurdity! What are our lively friend Jonathan Bourne and his co-opera- tors thinking of if they imagine that a State can be run with the machinery of a town meeting? N March 31st there came the break in the Senatorial deadlock at Albany, and it turned out that Mr. Sheehan’s Senatorial aspirations were not among the properties rescued from the State House fire. Judge O'Gorman will come to the Senate highly recommended as an able man and an excellent judge. He is soothing to Mr. Cohalan’s denomina- tional sensibilities. Our friends who wanted an Irishman believe there is a strain of Celt in him. He has long been a Tammany member and has been head sachem, so that Murphy can point with pride to n; but the late Insurgents believe he is a man of independent judgment and as good as any one they could have got. Mr. Sheehan’s friends mourn that he did not win. Mr. Shepherd's friends grieve that his great abilities should be sejected. We can't help it. Measured up with recent New York Republican Senators—Miller, Hiscock, Platt, Depew—O’Gorman looks full sized. comicbooks.com