*
r
The Conservative.
Human lives are
EX-PRESIDENT regulated by will-
PERKINS. power and the
capabilities for
success. The individual selects a call
ing , enters upon it during the early years
of responsibility and begins in it at zero.
Necessarily he rises or falls by his own
thoughts , words and acts. Ho remains
at zero , goes below zero or mounts to
wards , or to the maximum height in the
avocation which he has selected.
In December , 1868 , Ohas. E. Perkins ,
then a superintendent on the Burlington
system in Iowa ,
In 1868. visited Nebraska
City with Henry
Strong , then a solicitor and gen
eral counsel for the same corporation.
That was more than thirty years ago
and froni ihac date to this the editor of
THE CONSERVATIVE has known Mr. Per
kins. In all those years his character
istics , intellectual and moral , have been
of the highest , most admirable and
forceful type. And in every relation of
life he has been a model of loyal , cheer
ful , self-forgetting devotion to duty.
His career has been most useful and
practical. It has been such that the
most ambitious and affectionate parent
may commend it to a son as worthy of
emulation. And when one conscien
tiously after an intimate acquaintance
of more than a quarter of a century
declares that a man has character so
solid and sound that he would have his
sons pattern after it , further praise is
impossible.
Few men know how much , how
earnestly and efficiently Mr. Perkins
labored to open up
- For Nebraska. the resources of
Nebraska by build
ing the B. & M. lines. He antagonized
in his advocacy of the value and possi
bilities of Nebraska lands older and
more experienced men , among them
that great financial leader of investors
from Boston , James P. Joy , who declared
as late as 1866 , the lands in this state
absolutely valueless for agriculture.
But at last Mr. Perkins and the few
Boston men whom he could influence as
against the judgment of Mr. Joy , began
the building of the road from Platts-
mouth to Lincoln.
But in 1874 and 1876 the grasshoppers
came down upon the state and complete
ly destroyed the
Grasshoppers. crops in many
counties along the
western limit of settlements. There was
absolute hunger and freezing nakedness
confronting some of the pioneers , and
then it was that Mr. Perkins , more than
any other dozen men inspired the editor
of THE CONSERVATIVE to organize the
Nebraska Relief and Aid Society. He
headed the heavy donation lists with a
gift of five thousand dollars. The so
ciety had among its active members
Gen. E. O. O. Ord , E. B. Chandler ,
Judge Wakoloy , Alvin Saunders and
other responsible citizens , and during
its career distributed in goods and cashmere
more than two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars among the stricken
settlers. Without that aid families
might have perished , farms been aban
doned and the state reverted in part to
wilderness. Not one of the Nobraskaus
who has a recollection of those terrible
years and the trials and hardships then
entailed can fail to recall the great
and generous farsightedness and the
judicious management of Mr. Perkins at
that time. Under his orders all com
modities for the sufferers were carried
gratuitously over the B. & M. and in
thousands of ways he contributed to the
Nebraska Relief and Aid Society's use
ful activity and success. It was a
crucial period in the history of the
commonwealth. And now after a ser
vice of forty years he resigns from the
presidency of the Chicago , Burlington
& Quinoy road , leaving a nume synon
ymous with uprightness , honor , truth ,
and a record of persistent work which
even a mogul locomotive engine could
hardly duplicate. He is a man for those
who have ambition , love the truth and
admire honesty , to copy.
His successor is not wanting in the
elements which have made Mr. Perkins
so valuable an offi-
Geo. B. Harris. cer and so good a
citizen. Like his
lamented father , George S. Harris , who
managed the settlement of millions of
acres of Nebraska B. & M. lands , the
new president of the 0. B. & Q. is strong ,
honest and unflinching in doing right
and carefully and conscientiously guard
ing and promoting the vast interests
entrusted to his conservation.
The new popu-
REINCARNATION OF list combination
THREE IN ONE. for the pursuit of
p o 1 i ti o al offices
recently dined at Columbus , Ohio.
Croker of New York and Clark of Mon
tana were missed from among a lot of
prominent reformers. But the peerless
perpetual from Nebraska was present.
His speech connected Jefferson and
Jackson and Lincoln in a manner to
offend each of those patriots. However ,
the reincarnation of the three , the speak
er inferentially admitted , might have
been possible in the one man who was
then addressing the new combine.
Some commoner
NO GREASE. watered-stock , it
is said , is paying
the largest dividends of any aqueous se
curity in America. Ifc has no bottom
whatever. Nota press , not a font of
type , not even a keg of printer's ink.
It is by a trust , for a trust , in trust for a
beneficiary who will not allow kerosene
to be used where he is because he so
abhors the Standard Oil Company.
It is not the
DREADFUL. smallpox , typhoid
fever , pneumonia ,
nor diphtheria that Nebraska law-makers
are awed before , nor the possible
ravages of those terrible disorders that
make them tremble. The great calam
ity , the hideous disaster , the gigantic
evil that causes the average partisan to
howl with wretched anguish that is , too
much incorporated cash may crawl in
if not fenced out by fool statutes.
Just yell out "trusts" and the Ne
braska legislature turns as white as
slummed milk. The populists have the
"trust" scare in chronic form and are
emotionally insane for fear the dollar
will get above the man so far that the
man cannot pocket it. And many of
the republicans have intermittent types
of the same craziness so that they are
incapable of useful service as repealing
legislators.
The bouuced-out-
PAINED. of-the-pulpit
preacher who , in
the Lincoln Independent , exhorts for
populistic purity among public men ,
laments the exposure of the condition of
William V. Allen on the clay of the late
electoral vote count. The aforesaid
apostle of temperance thinks it very in
tensely awful that Curtis should have
intimated that Allen , in the senate , on
that occasion was too drunk to count , or
even to open and read a telegram. Who
will ever believe that William Vincent
Allen was ever drunk ? Will the laud-
lords at any hotel in Lincoln or Norfolk ?
Will Gen. Joe Hawley of Connecticut
or other United States senators credit
such a charge ?
In proportion to
LARGE RETURNS capital invested
ON NOTHING. if all accounts are
true the new
organ of Bryauarchy at Lincoln is
making bigger returns than stock in the
Standard Oil Company. The wells , '
machinery , ships , pipe lines , tank cars ,
lands , warehouses , and general plants of
the Standard Oil Company , at auction ,
will come nearer selling for what they
are capitalized at than will the fake
plants of the fake organ alluded to.
The men most
DIVIDENDS ON denunciatory of
WINDED STOCK. dividends upon
watered stocks
have nothing to say against dividends on
winded stocks. They make a living on
aerated flabbergast which they peddle
out as oratory.
Money is the
MONEY AND only thing which
SATISFACTION , men work and
struggle to get
that never gives them any satisfaction
until they let go of it.
