Life — January 2, 1913 — page 8: what you’re looking at

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

JANUARY 2. 1913 LIFE IA. Mrvene, Pree 17 West Thirty-first Voglish Ofices, Cannon House, Breaims Wden.. EOPLE _ gen- erally will ) admit that these thirty years that Lire has lived have been a_re- markable period of time. It is to wish there was available a competent historian philosopher to tell us, in a capsule, what has been going on. This world that now buzzes past the win- dow is not at all the world of the early eighties. The changes are not the mere wear-out-and-replace of thir- ty years of man and his works; they are enormous revolutionary changes. Look at New York! Who ever it was that found Rome brick and left it marble did a less radical exploit than these last thirty years have seen done in New York. They found it four or five stories high, and they have left it largely in the clouds; they found its shopping district below Twenty-third Street, and they have shoved it up the hill and along:two miles of Fifth Ave- nue; they have brought to it in its livelier part an astonishing physi- cal reconstruction, tearing down the-old, much of which was good, to replace it by new, much of which is magnificent; they have brought us the telephone, the electric light, the trolley car, the typewriter, the cash register, the bicycle, the Bos- ton garter, the subway, the grapho- phone, the Kodak, the moving pic- tures, the aeroplane and the auto- Published by PUBLISHING COMPANY VOL. 61 No. 1878 A. MILLEN, Sey and Treas New York Londoa, E. ¢ mobile; they found the business offices of the town full of men, and they have left them full of girls; they found beef fifteen cents a pound, and they have left it twenty-eight; they found cooks at sixteen dollars a month, and now you pay thirty-five dollars, if you have so much, for a somewhat more complished artist and wish you could afford a better one. What has happened in New York has happened more or less in all the cities. A great many people have been busy. The population of our country has nearly doubled in these thirty years, increasing by about forty-five millions. That increase alone is about a third more people than there were in all the country at the opening of the Civil War, and so late as when Lire ac- WELCOME started there were only fifty-four mil- lions. Even that limited population, however, sufficed for the support of this paper in its infancy, and as its needs have increased, there have heen steadily more people to minister to them. Besides that, they have been able to do an enormous amount of building; to extend the railroads to a degree which we will kindly not pause to define; to build over the citi build school and college buildings in- numerable, as well as vast industrial plants of all sorts. penditure has finally begun to penetrate even into the more fortunate of the rural districts where the necessity of selling auto- mobiles to the farmers has compelled a considerable and increasing disburse- ment for good roads. CESSSSOe O it is a world very greatly changed in its material aspects that Lire looks out on on its thirtieth birth- day, and one that gives no sign of being finished yet. The ma- terial expansion and reconstruc- tion goes on as fast as ever, pushed ahead by the pressure of an increasing population that wants a great deal more, man for man, than its fathers did. The ma- terial progress in three decades has been wonderful. Also a little tire- some. But that is not the whole story. Great changes in the thoughts of men have come along with it. This country, as a residence for people, is not anywhere near fin- ished yet, but still in many particu- lars it has doubtless come a good deal nearer to a condition of physi- cal stability than it was thirty years ago. A great deal has been comicbooks.com