Life, 1917-02-08 · page 17 of 42
Life — February 8, 1917 — page 17: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**The courtroom cartoon** (top left) satirizes judicial corruption and jury incompetence. A defense lawyer cynically tells jurors they'll vote to hang his client out of laziness—wanting to leave quickly to check on their cattle. Absurdly, the jury returns "not guilty" and recommends the defendant for governor, mocking how arbitrary and ridiculous verdicts can be when jurors aren't paying attention. **The bottom cartoon** depicts witness testimony as unreliable. It shows various courtroom figures (judge, lawyer, witness) around "NOTHING" and "POPPYCOCK," illustrating how contradictory or absurd testimony becomes when filtered through different perspectives—a joke about the unreliability of eyewitness accounts. **"New Psychologies"** (right column) mocks academia's trend of rebranding old ideas as "new psychology," suggesting ambitious scholars simply relabel existing concepts to appear innovative. It's satirizing intellectual pretension and academic faddishness.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
tlemen of the jury, you will take this case into your hands. You will pass back into the jury room where you will light your cigars, chew your tobacco, and wonder whether any of your cattle have died since your departure from home. Then, in order to get out quick- ly, you will all vote to hang my client, grab up your hats and rap on the door for the sheriff. I have but one hope, gentlemen, and that is that one or two. of you, through pure stubbornness, will vote for acquittal and thus hang the jury—hang it until it will be like the sentence to be passed on my client— until it is dead, dead, dead!” In ten minutes the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty,” and with a recommendation that the accused be requested to run for governor at the next election. Wallace Chadman. The Future of Our Country cr is now agreed by all the highest authorities that this country has a future, perhaps a considerable one, al- though very little is known of its characteristics, its predilections or its etiology. Our bacteriologists, our astronomers, our philosophers, our perorationists and others have been most diligent. They have peered into the future in every possible way, microscopically, _ telescopically, patriotically, romantically and so on, but the revelations are extremely meagre. Not even its limits are known. Of course, roughly speaking, we may say that the future of our country be- gins about now and that its end lies somewhere in that vast nebulousness which extends from the utmost to the ultimate, but beyond that we are in the FAIR PLAY AT LAST dark. It won't even do any good to wait and see, for no matter how long we wait our future will still be before us. It is the paucity of our informa- tion in this regard which makes it impossible ever to settle the argument between the optimists and the pessi- mists. E.0. J. OWARD: Do you believe in signs? Cowarp: Well, I don’t know! The fire alarm went off three times while the minister was preaching Wildways’ funeral sermon. WHAT YOU REMEMBER—IF YOU'VE BEEN A WITNESS New Psychologies E not misled by the frequent an- nouncements of “The New Psy- chology” with erudite comments there- upon. Psychology is a fashionable word in modern Academia and so ev- ery time some ambitious neophyte gets an idea he never had before, he is prone to dress it up and call it “ The New Psychology.” Of course it is nothing of the sort. If there were really as many “new psychologies” as the proclamations would have us believe, we would have to spend all our lives psychologizing. The safest thing, therefore, when you hear of another psychology is to smile knowingly and opine that it is not another psychology, but only another psychologist and probably a poor one at that. Extremes EPORT says a revival has broken out in the Unitarian Church, a sympathetic consequence of Billy Sun- day in Boston, Fine! And no danger! on the ice is always safe. A bonfire comicbooks.com