Life — August 10, 1911 — page 8: what you’re looking at

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

VOL.LVIIL AUGUST 10, 1911 No. 1502 Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY JA. MivonmLL, Pere. U7 West Thirty-first Street, New York. A. MILLER, Sey and Treat are ra, natural “TRA would, for rather subtle reasons of association, have been better, but he was quite right; we are. We believe a good deal that we hear and aimost everything we read. We do it in the tecth of ex- perience, which has taught us by daily lessons that most people and all news- papers are s, more or less, that w seldom either read or hear or relate anything precisely as it is. We ought to verify everything we read or hear before putting any trust in it, but that would be like testing all our food and drink before we let it go down. We could not do it. Life would not be possible on such terms, and, if possible, would not be desirable. We have to plug along about as we do, breathing in the news, inaccurate and misleading, and breathing out, or acting upon, opinions based on it, and only sound, at best, in so far as the news was true. We forget at these presents whence the news came that Mr. Morgan and the Guggenheims had usurped ail ap- proaches from the sea to the Alaska coal mines except a few pitiful rem- nants of the shore of Controller Bay Somebody said so, and there was testi- mony about it before a Senate com- niittee, and Mr. Wickersham was ac- cused of connivance, and Colonel Roosevelt wrote a piece ir the Outlook to say it was a prime shame and oughtn't to have been allowed, and we were getting ready to believe it—for, of course, the seven Gugs, let alone Mr. Morgan, would make nothing now of swallowing a small continent—when along comes President Taft and sends over word to the Senate committee that there wasn’t a line of truth in the story; that land had been released at his own to further the process of getting coal out; that every alternate cighty rods of the shore-front of Controller Bay was reserved to the Government, which also controlled the miles of mud flats between the shore and deep water, so that nobody could monopolize that harbor. Well, that is good, and, we hope, true, and though, of course, it may be contradicted by disclosures not yet made at the time of this writing, it is a relicf to believe it until then. Col- onel Roosevelt seems to have been mis- taken to the extent of about two col- umns of the Outlook, but, after all, two columns is not much of a mistake for a regular contributor to a weekly periodical, even a careful one, and doubtless the Colonel will have demon- strated before the date of this issue of Lire tl he was not mistaken at all. solicitation ROCEEDINGS to detach the con- trol of our civilization from the interests are rippling along very regu- larly. Congress at this moment of writing is discussing the wool tariff, but is not likely to do anything with it at this session. The reciprocity bill has been signed by our President and has gone to Canada to be endorsed and accepted if Mr. Laurier can accom- plish it. The enormities of the har- vester trust have the center of the stage, with the steel trust, the ice trust, the tobacco trust, the wire trust, the money trust, the shoe machinery mo- nopoly and many other performers waiting in the wings or competing ve- hemently for attention, Rates on West- ern railroads have been reduced enough by the Interstate Commerce Commission to make an outbreak of moderate scare headlines in the Sun, but the stock market has merely grunt- edand gone on. Disquictude prevails in Cuba and Mexico; revolution is active in San Domingo, and there is a sputter of European war talk over Germany's manners in a discussion anent M rocco, but there is good signing of arbitration treaties by Great Britain. France and ourselves. Melons are about as usual this sum- mer. Now you get a gocd one, and again you don’t. It is reassuring to find it so and makes one fee! chat the world and human life and ov institu- tions are less changed than the news- paper headlines suggest. NEWS reads: item from Washington An appeal for a $500,000 fund to defend J.J. NéNamara, ‘the labor_man. accused. of dynamiting, has been issued by Secretary Morrison, ‘of the American Federation of Labor, to the 2,000,000 members of labor unions. He suggests that cach member con- tribute 25 cents. Be on the safe side and make it fifty cents. If every member chips in, that will make a million dollars. Then hire all the talent and make a real effort. Nobody who has read in the August MeClure’s Harvey O'Higgins’s story of Detective Burns and the dyna- miters can help but feel that the three men under arrest for the structural iron workers’ dynamite operations are up a tall tree, and that it will be an unusually heavy job to get them down with unbroken necks. The item quoted, by the way, only speaks of John J, McNamara, he who is the secretary and treasurer of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, But, of course, the defense must include broth- er Jim McNamara and Ortie Mc- Manigle. It is important that all of them should have a conspicuously fair trial. If two million contributors can be organized for their defense, that surely will give them abundant back- ing. That is a very interesting trial that is ahead. We would like to know what is in the minds of the two million union workers; what proportion of this great body of American citizens and voters want a fair trial and a just verdict in this case, and what propor- tion of them feel toward men who blow up buildings in the supposed in- terest of the structural iron workers, as Russian revolutionists feel toward their comrades who throw bombs at the officials of the Czar. comicbooks.com