Life — July 13, 1922 — page 16: what you’re looking at

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

“While there is Life there’s Hope” Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY Vol. 80. 2071 London Offices, Rolls House, Breams Bldgs., London, E. C. ONAN DOYLE has gone home after contributing con- siderably to en- tertainment in Sata this country and possibly something to knowledge. He talked a great deal and was widely reported. Many people wanted to hear what he had to say, and many more were glad to read it in the pa- pers. He has great gifts as a pub- licity man and a long recognized talent for being interesting. In the concerns of spiritism he has abundant belief, not always as discriminating as it might be, but obviously sincere. That sincerity and the gifts which have made him such a popular story teller make him a good hand to talk in public about the invisible world and the various communications which he believes are coming out of it. Before people think to much pur- pose about the invisible world and its relation to us, they have to get used to the idea that there is one. Sir Conan is excellent in imparting that idea and getting persons to whom it is a novelty, over the first shock of it. Indeed, he may be said to be the leading shocktrooper of spiritism. He slams in, makes a breach, and the more skilful prac- titioners follow. nN examination of the invisible world is the more welcome in these times because the visible world is so perplexing and disturbing. The visible world is loaded up with dis- satisfied people and where there are great masses of dissatisfaction, every now and then something unseemly breaks out of them. The mine mas- sacre in Illinois was extremely un- seemly; as shocking in its details, though on a small scale, as anything we read about in the Great War. 598 Madison Avenue, New York Twenty or thirty men were murdered who had done nothing wrong, and so far nothing at all adequate has been done about it. The same week Field- Marshal Wilson was murdered in London on his own doorstep, and Walter Rathenau in Berlin. These last two were political assassinations, but the mine murders in Herrin, Illinois, were not so different. They were the fruit of hatred bred in or- ganized quarrels. The mine murders were so abom- inable that they may bring the coal strike to a head. It is time it was cleaned up. Three-fourths of the accumulated coal has been used up and what is left is less than the nor- mal surplus. The striking miners have lost many millions of dollars in wages, and unless they get to work soon, or allow someone else to mine coal, there will be trouble next winter. The great trouble about current coal mining is that there are too many miners. The industry is over- manned; too much labor has gone into it and it seems almost impossible to get enough miners out of it to in- sure continuous employment at fair wages for those that are left in. It is not clear on what basis those trou- bles are to be settled, but with winter expected at about the usual time, there ought to be active brains enough in the country to get the coal mines running, and even to devise a solution of coal troubles that may be permanent. WHILE ago a lady from Chile put it up to the National League of Women Voters to say who were the twelve greatest women in the United States. The papers have printed many lists in answer to this inquiry and one finds in them very distinguished ladies ; settlement work- ers like Jane Addams; leading suffragists like Mrs, Catt; college presidents like Miss Thomas; singers like Geraldine Farrar and Mary Garden; novelists like Mrs. Whar- ton, Mrs. Burnett, and Mrs. Deland; writers and lecturers like Miss Tar- bell; poets like Miss Amy Lowell ani so on by the score, and all well known and undoubtedly eminent. But no body knows who is the greatest woman nor who are the twelve great- est women. They may all be ob- scure people who do not advertise, and live their lives mainly out of print, for through women certain things come to the world that do not come through men and the chief among them is human life. There is always a competition for a woman between raising a family and doing something else. The women that are in the lists of the twelve greatest are mainly women who have done some- thing else, but it is entirely possible and not unlikely that certain women who have borne and raised remark- able children are more important and really greater. The leadership of the world comes chiefly from mothers. Fathers have to do with it, of course. There are men, plenty of them, who have de- voted to raising families and educat- ing children, time, thought and work that might have brought them more glory and more advertising if other- wise expended, but in the main that is a woman’s job. She makes the man; also the girls; and she has ‘kindred capacities that men mostly lack. Spiritual news in these days seems to come chiefly through women. Joan of Arc was a woman. She got some indispensable news. In our day the woman of greatest accom- plishment in a spiritual sense was possibly Mrs. Eddy, who started a ball rolling that still rolls on and makes people wonder how important it is and where it will bring up. E.S. M. comicbooks.com