  The Required Reading in The Chautauquan for the month of October ends on page 20, with the article on “Temperance Teachings of Science.” Mr. Henry Bergh, who has done a good work for horses in New York, and tried to do a good deal of work not absolutely good for other animals (cats for instance), has one quality of a successful reformer; he can use strong language. He denounces M. Pasteur as “A Jenner in France who now crawls to the earth’s surface and begins the fiend-like and disgusting work of polluting the bodies and flesh of the lower animals.” Mr. Bergh does not believe in inoculation for small-pox. It is a pity he does not confine his benevolence to horses and their sorrows, a subject which he understands. Constant gains characterize the uses of electricity. Recently a message was sent from Australia to England in twenty-three minutes, over 13,318 miles of wire. French experiments in the use of electricity as a motor are making rapid progress. Telephone messages have been sent 1,200 miles, from Cincinnati to Baltimore, and we are not certain that this is the best record. Bulwer’s “Coming Race” did everything by just touching buttons and setting automata at work. Perhaps that race is really “coming” after all. What is in a name? The cholera is no worse, nor any more curable, by calling its cause a microbe (literally minute life, meaning microscopic insect). It does help us, however, to emphasize old truth. The diseased are usually victims, Dr. Koch says, of the microbes. If the digestive organs are impaired, the microbe attacks them with more success. Still, we are thus far not very much wiser for the terms microbe and bacillus. Meanwhile, Dr. Koch’s first practical rule, that “dry heat is fatal to the microbe,” is contradicted by the well-known fact that cholera in Asia is very much at home in the dryest heat known on the globe. The papers report that a colored man having married a white woman in Indiana has been tried for the crime and sentenced to five years in the penitentiary. We can not discover any use in such proceedings. As we have remarked once before, the mixture of races is not brought about by legitimate relations of the sexes, but by illegitimate. Indiana punishes the wrong people. For one mulatto born in marriage there are a thousand born out of wedlock. Besides, it has not been proved that the moral quality of a crime attaches to marriage by persons of different races. It is highly speculative morals, at all events. The New York financial troubles of May have, as we anticipated, led to no general disaster. In New York the business community is well over the panic, stocks have recovered astonishingly, and general trade is active and good. Credit lines are closer than they were; but this is a good result. A large harvest gives the people assurance of cheap food, and stimulates enterprise. The shock in May has proved a blessing. We need to be reminded often that honesty, diligence and prudence are necessary to business success, individually and collectively. Do not play with it; in the language of the boys, “it’s loaded.” We refer to the theory that impure private life is something relatively unimportant in public life. Vote as you judge proper; but don’t corrupt public morals by public apologies for lechery in any form; it is dangerous business. A respectably-sized body of unrespectable Americans have recently emigrated to Canada—made up of defaulting bank officers and other trust-breakers. There is a defect which ought to be remedied in the extradition laws. Canada does not wish to be colonized by this class of thieves, and we prefer to house and feed the rascals in appropriate residences at home. It is, in fact, a scandal to civilization that this class of thieves can escape punishment by crossing the suspension bridge. It has settled into custom for the President of the United States to take a long vacation in the summer. We owe the custom, a wholesome one, to General Grant. It was criticised severely when he as President began to travel about in the summer. His successors have improved the practice by roving more widely and extending their acquaintance among their fellow-citizens. President Arthur has traveled a good deal in an unostentatious way this summer, and we have not seen a word of criticism. It is good for the President’s health, it extends his knowledge of the country and the people, and it gives his fellow-citizens an opportunity to see and know him. The cholera in Europe drove Americans home this year in midsummer, and gave us an unusually large contingent of the English tourist, who, shut off from the Alps, has been trying our Rockies and the Yosemite. A new feature of our own summer travel is a considerable stream of pleasuring flowing toward Alaska. Perhaps when the seals are killed off Alaska may pay as a summer resort. One of the new blossoms of the “Chautauqua Idea” is a summer school maintained by the “South End” churches of Boston. Our correspondent, the Rev. E. E. Hale, is one of the active managers. Its session this year lasted six weeks, and was devoted to popular instruction in kindergarten and housekeeping subjects. The aim is to help the poor to knowledge in practical matters. The world’s stock of wit is increasing. We Americans are the principal inventors of it, and are especially strong in the hyperbolical variety. A recent specimen worth preserving is the story that a Florida man recently killed an alligator, in whose stomach he found a hen sitting on a dozen eggs. The exaggeration turns upon the capacity of an alligator for swallowing, and the equanimity of the sitting hen. Another example is the statement that Puget Sound oysters often weigh sixty pounds apiece, and are not served on the half shell, since “nothing less than a flatboat will answer the purpose.” A good collection of American hyperboles would make a very marketable book. “Turning a howitzer loose on a June bug” is a fresh specimen which we find in a daily newspaper. A “funny editor” having to report that locomotives have fallen from $15,000 to $8,000, adds: “We would not advise our readers to lay in their winter stock of locomotives just yet; they may go lower.” The preachers who indulge in vacations are not allowed any peace. The New York Examiner has found a new tender spot to thrust a pin into. A resting pastor, it thinks, has no business to work or study. He is defrauding his church if he does. But then the Examiner rubs the sore spot it has made by the more athletic remark that it is a sin to grind all the year through. Yes, fifty-two days of rest are required of us all. It is pleasant, by the way, to read that “the pastors are returning to their flocks,” a statement which lets out the fact that the flocks did not take a vacation. A new thing under the sun this year is the meeting of the great British Association for the Advancement of Science on American soil. The Montreal meeting was still further novel in the presence and participation of distinguished United States Americans. “Greater Britain” will doubtless more and more take part in these annual gatherings of British science. The success of the Montreal meeting will provoke the emulation of Australia, New Zealand, and British India and Africa. Vegetarians object to eating meat because animals must be killed to supply such food. One of our quick-witted exchanges has discovered a counter argument, or rather an ad hominem of the you’re another variety. “According to some scientists vegetables feel and perhaps think.” The London Graphic suggests that “the blushing carrot is susceptible of tender emotions, and that the retiring ways of the truffle are due to a well-reasoned aversion to the wickedness which is to be witnessed above ground.” “Perhaps” this is rather speculative. It has been a dry summer, but it has rained financial scandals. The heaviest part of the clearing-off shower—we hope it is clearing off—fell on New Brunswick, N. J., where first the cashier and next the president of a bank committed suicide in the midst of the ruin they had wrought. That is awful, but it is morally more satisfactory and healing than the flight into Canada. When financial wreckers are hurt to the point of remorse and suicide, the horrors of the crime of genteel stealing will begin to be realized. That sin is dangerous, too. Let us thank God and take courage. Dr. McCosh has been re-visiting the Old World, and at a breakfast party in Belfast stated an interesting fact. “In my early life,” he said, “I applied for many positions which I did not get; but I never applied for the positions which I have since held.” There is plenty of good wholesome use for the motto: “Let the place seek the man.” It is the rule for the good places, as the case of Dr. McCosh shows. Perhaps it is more generally the rule for other places than men suppose it to be. John Bright continues to excel in strong quotable phrases and descriptions. The House of Lords being once more in the way of reform, Mr. Bright declares that House to be filled with “the spawn of the blunders, the wars and the corruption of the dark ages of our history. They have entered the temple of honor, not through the temple of merit, but through the sepulchres of their ancestors.” The last clause will probably be as lasting as his “Cave of Adullam.” A notable saying easily forgets its parentage. It is too much trouble for a busy world to remember who said this or that first. An expression passes into currency, and after that it is no matter who coined it. It was, we are now told, a Harvard professor who said not of Edward Everett, but of the Rev. Dr. Huntington, that his prayers were the most eloquent ever addressed to a Boston audience. The Dr. Huntington referred to was then a Unitarian of Boston, but is now Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Central New York. The Christian at Work is our authority for the precise facts. We do not advise any one to try to remember them. The French have brought about a state of war in China, by a series of aggressive measures which seek the aggrandizement of France at the expense of the territorial rights of the Chinese empire. There is not the least justification for these proceedings; nor can we hope that good will come of it. The French are successful at home and failures abroad. The French cry out that England has done even the same; but that charge, if true, would not excuse France. England has, in all recent instances, had the protection of Englishmen or some other fair pretext. Even the jingoism of Beaconsfield could make some respectable covering for its brutality. The French simply want some land and mines in Tonquin “for the glory of France.” Science gets a footing everywhere. The loss of the United States steamship “Tallapoosa,” by collision with a schooner, has led to an investigation to ascertain whether the officers and men on duty are afflicted with color blindness. We have a notion that in this case the old-fashioned word carelessness is more scientific than any term used by optical learning. One of the fine points of superfine theology is that Adam was the first member of the Christian Church, and was taken in immediately after the fall. We see it—the fine point reproduced in a religious paper. It is a pity that theology should be strained in men’s eyes by such uses—especially in view of the pressing wants of the living descendants of Adam. The making of mortgages is one of the most fascinating of employments. It is like picking up gold in chunks. Paying mortgages is another affair, a most refined species of torture which takes away and returns nothing. But people who do not expect to pay have all the pleasure and none of the pain. The semi-civilized government which owns Panama proposes to mortgage its share of the earnings of the Panama Canal for $15,000,000. Considering that the canal may never be finished, and that it may never earn anything at all, it must be pure fun to make that mortgage. Public debts grow large easily because no particular person expects to pay any one of them. Selling such mortgages is picking up nuggets of gold—getting without effort—hence public borrowing needs conscience as a restraint. It is a satisfaction to know that the best horses have been taken out of the hands of gamblers. Mr. Vanderbilt recently sold the queen of horses to Mr. Bonner, editor of the New York Ledger. On this side of the Atlantic, at least, fast horses are improving in reputation by keeping good human company. The cholera of Asia is in Europe again after a long absence—since 1868. It has been a topic of great interest all summer, but its ravages have been comparatively insignificant. After a short period of general prevalence in Marseilles and Toulon, the unwelcome visitor went on its travels in search of dirty places in France and Italy—finding some good food in the latter country. Dirt is the delight of this scourge. Sanitary science easily handles it, keeps it within moderate limits, and stamps it out after brief duration. A renewal of the epidemic in the savage forms of 1832 and 1848 is not to be feared. The world is cleaner. The cholera has raged fiercely in Italy, especially in Naples, because sanitary reforms have made slow progress there. The people change their habits there with great reluctance, and all travelers know that Naples is the filthiest city in Europe. Wherever good sanitation prevails, cholera is checked with comparative ease. A fine use of royalty is shown by the visit of King Humbert to the afflicted towns and their hospitals. The New York Evening Post irreverently refers to the Emersonian philosophy as a “mixed American drink.” It is more prosaic in suggesting that the Concord School of Philosophy is not a school, and has no philosophy of a clear type, but is a continuation in summer of the winter lecture platform—a summer lyceum. We suspect that the Emersonians will not accept the amended title. Switzerland has investigated the liquor question and found that more alcohol per head is consumed by the Swiss than by any other people in Europe. That little country spends $30,000,000 for drink, and yet the commission which reports these facts, also declines to advise any restrictive legislation and makes a fervid eulogy of the habit of social drinking. “Public houses,” they say, “foster intellectual activity, and are a remedy against misanthropy, vanity and egotism.” This report is probably the most remarkable document ever produced by a committee. It gives the size of the evil in bold lines and then splashes on the gay colors with reckless prodigality. |
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