Life — April 17, 1913 — page 13: what you’re looking at

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

Father Knickerbocker (to family skeleton): WH—WHERE THE DEUCE HAVE YOU BEEN? “CLOSETED WITH THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY.” pers, and hears the cries of the vari- ous combatants, he gets to feel that nobody is entirely wrong in all this melee, and nobody entirely right. Go kick an ant hill and see the excite- ment among the ants! So looks our distracted world, conscious of a vital disturbance and considerably unaware what has hit it. If we think it is ma- chinery that has hit it, that helps us a little to see in what direction the new order is to come from; not, of course, by the destruction of machin- ery, but by the assimilation and diges- tion of it. And the order that is to come will come out of disturbance and not out of repression. It will come not out of satisfaction, but out of bitter discon- tent. The still small voice came out of no glass case nor any treasure chest, but followed the strong wind that rent the mountains and the earthquake and the fire. Whether Asquith and Lloyd- George are pious men who do not know, but if they are, they might do worse than go down to the jail and hold a prayer meeting with Emmeline Pank- hurst for the betterment of all their understandings and such an clucida- tion of perplexities and attainment of heaven-sent patience as might enabie them all to see light in the same quarter. Re ys, OLONEL ROOSE LT says in the Outiook that he has given, first and last, a great deal of time and thought to forests, rivers and water power, and has views which may be nseful about the prevention of floods in the tributary valleys of the Mis sippi. He thinks such floods can be prevented. There was a big one last 773 spring, from Cairo to the Gulf, another last January and again last month enormous losses, especially in Ohio and Indiana. To control the floods the Colonel advises that it is necessary (1) to treat the Mississippi River as a unit with all its tributaries from source to mouth; for (2) the Federal Govern- ment to bring the levee system up to standard for its entire length and maintain it, (3) to protect it by ade- quate revetments (sheathing) so. the banks won't lose ‘earth and cave in, and (4) to supplement the levee-sys- tem by source-stream control, which will lower the crest of the floods in the Mississippi Valley and thereby re- lieve the pressure on the levee. These suggestions seem reasonable, and we presume the engineers will back the Colonel in all of them. But it will be a big, expensive job to carry them out. Not so expensive, however, as the floods have come to be. It seems as if all the choice we had in this matter was between doing about as the Colonel says, or giving the mid- Western country back to the Indians. In China, we believe, they do neither; but then there are no Indians in and, as yet, no Colonel. We suppose such a rainfall as there was last month would swell the source- streams beyond any possibility of con- trol, but that was a very unusual rain- fall. Provision must at least be made against ordinary floods. PARTICULARLY gross abuse of the “leave to print” privilege the issue from the government printing office of a lecture of the Hon. Richmond P. Hobson, entitled “The Great Destroyer,” and devoted to an exposition of the inexpediency of using alcoholic beverag The lecture is a wild rant about alcohol, having nothing to do with the business of the government or any question before Congress at the time of its publication. It is nonsense to permit the machinery of government and the taxpayers’ money to be used for the diffusion of literature of this sort. comicbooks.com