Life — November 19, 1925 — page 18: what you’re looking at

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

NOVEMBER 19, 1925 VOL. 86. 2246 “While there is Life there’s Hope” Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY $98 Madison Avenue, New York Cuartes Dana Greson, President R. E. Suearwooo, Editor F. D. Casry, Art Editor YER Nix if mind we do not get much coal now, there will be more left for next summer, which, some of the forecasters say, is going to be a very inferior article considered as a season, They tell us we will have a repetition of the summer of 1816, when it snowed every month in the year and crops were very disappointing. Maybe, but this is a good deal larger country than it was in 1816 and there are more crops in more parts of it, and, possibly, if we have a sum- merless year, our tropical portions can be put to raising plain food like potatoes. But after all that may not happen, though last month was cold enough to justify arctic anticipations. But con- sider the problems that are really here —what to do with the motor cars? what makes some of the young people so bad? how to make a better man of Borah? how to settle the debts Europe owes us without incurring an immoral amount of payment? All these matters are difficult and are actually in our hair. At this very writing the Italian Commissioners have come to talk a little finance. Heaven help them! As to the bad boys and the bad girls, and particularly the bad boys who turn into gunmen, a New York magistrate says that one considerable reason for them and their badness is the current system of public education which concentrates on the mentalities of pupils and does not prepare them for self-support. The magistrate says the boys come out of the schools with Cratr Maxwett, Vice-President Lancuorxe Ginson, Secretary ond Treasurer lively minds, accustomed to a compara- tively polite life including good clothes, the movies, and more or less motor car exercise. These new necessaries re- quire money, but these boys have not been trained to earn money. They have no trades, and feeling the need of in- comes commensurate with their tastes and habits, some of them turn robbers. HAT explanation may be worth something, but the reasons for young gunmen are complex. The war taught the use of firearms to four or five millions of young men, and the boys that immediately followed after them got much of the same knowledge. The motor cars multiplied, and provided a convenient means to get robbers to the scene of crime, and to get away after its commission. Prohibition, involving a vast deal of law breaking, has had no doubt a bad moral effect upon a good many of the younger generation, and enforcement of it has diverted both the courts and the police from timely con- centration on robberies and crimes of violence. All the same, the fights be- tween the gunmen and the police make wonderful reading and keep the pre- vailing insecurity of life and property constantly in the public mind. Our current civilization is pre- dominantly a product of machinery. When the experts have offered us such suggestions as they can for its amelio- ration, most of them fall back on the remark that the only real cure for the world is religion. What they mean by religion they do not define, but what they want is something to bring better minds to the froward. Every Monday the papers print half a page or so about what the preachers said the day before and from that you can get at their various and often conflicting ideas of religion and its office. What most im- presses one is the variety. ca——w! WE really do not know much about the state of the world we now live in. We see that we are living by mechanisms, but we do not realize what they are doing to us, and have very little notion how to medicate them so they won't destroy us, or medicate our- selves so that we can stand them. Re- gard the motor car problem in cities and thickly settled neighborhoods like those parts of Long Island and New Jersey that are close to New York! There is a problem that engages many minds and much money. solved? Very slightly. It will have to solve itself. Most of the problems of mechanism will in the main have to solve themselves. If people can't live in cities as they are they will have to move out of them. Does it tire you to go in the street in town where every time you cross an intersecting street you have to watch out and see that you are not killed? If it does, go to the country and climb a tree, The mechanisms are wonderful. One cannot imagine giving them up, but there is proceeding an immense job of adjustment to them the details of which still belong to guesswork. Is it being HE verdict of the election in New York was that, on the whole, Tam- many nowadays is about as good as anybody. One compared Judge Olvany with Mr. Koenig, and Senator Walker with Mr. Waterman, and the election figures tell what the conclusion was There are a great many able Tam- many men in office and it does not look expedient to turn them out. Give city government a better direction, and it ought to go on pretty well without any drastic changes in the rank and file of the workers. The election of Walker is a very different matter from what the election of Van Wyck was. Governor Smith is a winner among others and that is important. E. S. Martin. comicbooks.com