Life — October 31, 1912 — page 10: what you’re looking at

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

2086 Scandalous UR womenkind in days of yore— A score of petticoats they wore nd bulged out in a frightful way— A huge circumference, they say. Since then, with every passing year, They've gone about with less, I hear. In great alarm on yesterday I saw them trouping from the play— T hope someone is keeping score, They’ve only got one layer more! Allen Ray. Conscience ONSCIENCE may be roughly di- vided into two classes: New Eng- land and Standard Oil. The New England Conscience is contemporaneous with the totem pole, the buffalo, and the belief in hell; and all these antiquities went out about the same time. Nothing is now left of the New England Conscience but a few scattered remains, which, like <mall patches of snow in dim shadowy places, have escaped the blinding glare of Harvard College. When the New England Conscience died, it did not go out suddenly, but little by little. Raised in England and on the Continent, it began its glorious career on starvation and scalp-lifting, was fed on hell fire, re- vivals, and Indian corn; and only be- gan to waste away under the Tar iff, Unitarianism, and the Church. “BLESSED WITH A SENSE OF HUMOR” OR Curkag, KATE! HERE I'VE DISCOVERED TWENTY- FOUR MORE RIBS! Any one still possessing a New Eng- land Conscience in a fairly good state of preservation, and who has no longer any personal use for it, should turn it over to the Smithsonian Institution, where historical relics are safely in- terred for the observation of the curious stranger. The Standard Oil Conscience is first cousin to Politics. It came in about the time the buffalo went out. The Standard Oil Conscience makes political platforms, tariff schedules. and Baptist creeds. It believes firmly in the law and the profits, and in or- der to establish the universal brother hood of man, it insists that the prof- its shall take care of the law. On the whole, it succeeds, Furnishing Employment THe object of the protective policy, said President Taft recently, “is not to shut out foreign manufactures, but to foster domestic manufactures and to keep the American workingman employed.” And a very. worthy object, to be sure, but why go about it in such an indirect way? The way to employ is to employ. If it is really desired to employ the American workingman, why not devise some scheme that works? The Political Machine AM the modern political machine. My business is to work night and day while others sleep. Men may come and men may go, but I throb on for- ever, I standardize the spirit of graft. Also I bring to a dead level the aver- age man. It is my business to keep decent people out of politics by making politics impossible for decent people. I celebrate myself because I am the supreme success of the century. Millions are working to maintain me, day and night. The poverty stricken mother who tramps back and forth daily with her pail of coal, and also the tired business man who prefers to go to the comic opera in the evening rather than to attend a caucus, where his presence is not desirable: all these are my minions. I regulate the tariff and the banks. And the moral sense of the community is based upon the sum total of all the politics that I turn out. Everybody despises me and fears me and tolerates me. I am the only patriotic American. ANAGER: Are you good at col- lecting money? Appuicant: Couldn't be better if I were a college president. comicbook $.com