THE COUH.-i.i.
rill be no Immoral shows and no gain-
ling.Clnef of Police Holland 1ms ex
rcssed himself in no uncertain terms
bearding his opposition to gam
ling and the men who try it will run
rcater risks than under the late
Iraham administration.
Nebraska Enthusiasm,
is the battle Hags whipped into fringe
ly the Luzon winds came in sight
ivory man wished his neighbor would
llicer for his own throat was choked.
it is true that the First carried their
tolors through a silent throng on
Thursday, and it was not because the
uoplo were not enthusiastic, but be
pause the actual presence of the men
ho have done more fighting and
larder lighting than any other rcgi-
lent oast or west in the Spanish-
kinerlcan war was suddenly and un-
cpectedly over-powering and the
yjllng was. too deep for cheers. Then
line of the boys limped and some had
ran faces. And there was an on-
resslvc sense of the absent ones and
the mothers and fathers who had
nit the doors on the. sound of the
lartial music. Therefore the cheer-
lg was only occasional and faint not
cause tlio crowd was apathetic, but
ecause more than on any oilier pub
ic occasion in the history of this
Ittle town, the people wore deeply
loved-
As the slalwait, happy looking men
mug along together in the stride
lliey have kept for sixteen months,
veil the small boy whose tin horn
as arrested half-way to his lips, felt
Ihat the glory of the country was
lassing by, that there in those young
len who had made the First Nebras
ka famous, was the final element of
the strength of the nation and oven
kbc small boy became rcvereut and
regarded his tin horn doubtfully.
It is not to ho denied that .the
jrby Guards was an anti-climax.
me very young girls In uniform and
caring red-banded sailor hats
lunched along in school girl fashion.
?liey did not keep step nor stand up
right and as a memorial to the
rave Captain Forby they were, (to be
Host charitable) inadequate.
None or tue soldiers can say too
inch in praise or Captain Forby. Ho
ms a brave man and a good officer.
'lion no was brought into the hos
pital from the battlefield, the surgeon
klunced at Ills wound and tied it up
vitiioub a worci. 'mere was nothing
o be done for him, and when the
Iglit faded out of his eyes two days
Iftcr he iiad not groaned or com-
flained or regretted his enlistment.
THE BABY-
You can't think what happened
one late summer morn,
A dear little damsel '
with blue eyes was born;
Blue eyes and brown hair
now what could we say
To this sweet little damsel
one late summer day?
She looked all around
when she opened her eyes,
And, I'm sorry to say,
gave a few baby cries,
But what with the colic,
and hunger, and heat,
What could .you expect
of our dear baby sweet?
With little hands seeming
to grasp at the air,
And a little head
covered with long, dark hair,
And little feet helplessly,
kicking around,
Was the baby, that late
summer day that we found.
We wanted to give her
a nice name, and so'
We all searched our brains
for a name that would "go,"
But we couldn't find any
that sweet enough were,
So we let them all rest
and just Babied her.'
Mas Fay Hartley, nine years old
Jto this Doetu welcoming her little.
lutor und celebrating her arrival Eu.j
"n mi mi
5T11U TASSllNU 811UVV
W I LLA GATHER
MM
MMIMIIIHMM
THE WAN WITH THE HOE.
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world,
Who made him dead to rapture and de
spair; A thing that grieves not and that never
hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down his brutal
jaw,
Whose was the hand that slanted back this
brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within
this brain?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this
Man?
How answer his brute question in that
hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the
world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with
kings
With those who shaped him to the thing
heis
Whenthis dumb Terror shall reply to
God
After the silence of the centuries?
Edward Markham.
Now that the Dreyfus matter is ended
or at least one stage of it, the one man
who will Btand out pre-eminent above
all the great and little men who have
figured in the matter is Emile Zola,
perhaps the greatest mind in France
today. It is the man's first appeal to
the popular sentiment, tho first time
that the eye of the world has taken
stock in him seriously. Yot tho courage
of tho hand that penned the "J 'accuse''
letter bad been demonstrated long be
fore when ah author, poor, young and
comparatively unknown, he took upon
himself the great task of writing the
twenty volumes of Itoiigon-Macquurt,
a series of novels which should com
pletely depict one epoch of French
society, which is, as he himself has
said, "a world, a society, a civilization."
Certainly it took much less courage to
attack the French army in behalf of
justice than to challenge the whole
world in behalf of a theory of art. M.
Zola'H greatness as a man has not al
ways been to his advantage as an artist.
He is a theorist and the artist has never
quite mastered the theorist. In his
novel Germinal, ho fever, the man and
the artist are in perfect unity and per
fect balance, all that is best in his mag
nificent geniu9 and Titanic power gos
to make this the greatest of labor
uovels. In Germinal we reach the
third generation of the Rougona; we
have Gervaise drink hersalf into the
gutter and die of starvation in an attic
in Paris; we have seen her daughter
Nana, rise from the streets to the
theatre, from the theatre to noblemen's
houses, we have seen how she wrecked
tho oldest families and squandered the
largest fortunes in France, how the
forestb of Brittany were cut down t) fill
her wardrobe, how, leagues from Paris,
minors toiled in the black bowels of the
earth to buy her jewels, how she drove
a whole city mad and corrupted an en
tire civilization. Now it is to Etienne
that the master turns, Nona's elder
brother, who went to work in the
Voreux mines, Germinal 1b more than
a novel, it it the epic labor. Nowhere
are the forces of master and workmen
arrayed in bo tremendous a drama.
Ett'enne is a socialist without the power
of reasoning, an uneducated man who
reads Ruskin and Darwin and reads
thorn just as the eon of Gervaise who
drank herself to death. His blood wbb
heated and his reason distorted before
he was born, he was crippled before tho
fight bojan. His brain is firod by a
RasBian exile who had boon implicated
in a plot to kill the Czar and who had
seen his wifo hanged in the streets of
Moscow. Etionne incites the miners
to revolt and the strike which follows
is tho raison d'etre of tho book. What
can a revolt of labor under the presont
conditions of society moan, and how
must it ond? That is tho problem
which M. Zola takes up. The strike is
beat followed through the fortunes of
the Mahuo family. Father Mahue is
the best workman in tho mi no, sober,
orderly, law-abiding, industrious. His
ancestors have boon minors for con
turiofl, they have lain on their bellies
pecking at the coil until they have
hewn out gallery after gallery, under
mined tho country mile upon mile. All
of them, men and women have lived in
the darkness, in the foul air below the
surface of the earth, where nature
buries her dead of the ages and hides
the secrets of her pist. They have been
covered with the grime of the minea
and marked with soft soap until the
hair of the race has become bleached
and the s'in diBcolorod. Mahuo's old
father, who worked for fifty years in
the mines, still lives with him, and
Mahue himself has seven children,
most of them too young to work. The
comeliness and intelligence of the family
are in the daughter, Catharine, who
tills a car in the mine. The family haB
run a little into debt and owes a hun
dred boub and cannot pay it. Every
pay day their immediate necessities
swallow up their earnings, leaving noth
ing for the debt. Wages are cut, de
spair siezes father Mahue, and he joins
the strikers. Then comes the Btep from
half a loaf to no bread. Every want
and necessity is reduced to one, bread.
The Mahuee, who were once so self
reliant and proud, send their children
out to beg upon the highway. Mother
Mahue pawns her betrothal gifts, the
little ones' clothes, the cooking utensils.
Nothing is left in the home but the
colored picture of the Emperor on the
wall. The children steal from each
other and one boy becomes a precocious
criminal. One of the girls die9, but the
Mahues nearer weaken. Wne'n the
strikers charge on the soldiers mother
Mahue, with her child at her breast
taunts her husband with cowardice
when he lags behind. He is shot down
at her feet. Then only the young,
helpless children and the mother are
left, and the old, old man, who has
witnessed so many tragedies and seen
the mine swallow up ' generation after
generation of his race. In every other
family in the village the ravages of the
strike are equally terrible. Etienne
stands appalled at the desolation of the
hurricane of revolt he had raised, heart
sick at the ruin of the Mahues, whom
he loved. Still mother Mahue eiti by
her dead, famished, and curses Cath
arine who bejs to bo allowed to return
to'the mine to earn bread for the little
children, Then, in the midst of all
this misery, it dawns upon Etienne that
when capital and labor war, capital
can wait, while labor starves. That is
what capi al meanp; something ahead.
He recalled the words of his Russian
friend, Jouvarine:
"Increase the salaries, Why, they
are fixed by an inexorable law at the
smallest possible sum, just enough to
allow the workmen to eat dry bread,
If they fall too low, the workme J dies
and the demand for new men makes
them rise again. It they go up too
high, the losses' are so much greater
that they drop again. It is the equilib
rium of empty stomachs, the perpetual'
condemnation to a fate like that of the
galley slave."
Then Catharine Mahue,whora Etienne
had long loved but who bad married
big Cboval another miner, returned
.abuBed and deserted by her husband
and turned to him for help, That
sw(ng6 the scale. Tie problom of lifo
took on another form, and a new duty
prossed closer than tho old. He could
starve himself, but he could not see tho
woman ho loved go hungry. lie bowed
to the inexorable necessity which has
dofoatoJ every revolution, tho necessity
of men for love. Together he and
Catharlno sot out for tho mine. On
their way they mot the Russian who
started to warn Etionne that tho strik
ers intended to wreck tho mino and kill
their comrades who returned to work.
Thon he looked at Catharine and under
stood why Etienno had recanted.
"When there was a woman in the heart
of a man, the man was finished, he could
die. Perhaps he saw in a quick vision
his mistress who was hung at Moscow,
the last link broken, which left him
free as to tho life of othors or his own.
He said simply, 'Go'!"
After Etienne's moral defeat and hlB
return to the mioe.tho perspective in the
groat novel narrows, like the galleries
of the mine itself. Everything is then
concentrated upon tho strugglo of tho
man and woman for life and for each
o'her, which of course is the immediate
ciuse of all labor problems and the
origin of labor itself. Etienne and
Catharine are cut off in the mine,
buried in the same gallery with Oheval,
the woman's brutal husband. There,
in the darkness, these men, already in
the grave tight a duel to the death for
the posession of this woman who is
already the bride of Death. There Is
something awesome about that combat,
something of the savagery of the stone
age. So, when the world is cold, the
two last survivors of their race .may
fight for the last woman in the world.
Etienne is the victor, 'and Cheval's body
falls back iot the water that rose from
the broken pumps. For nine days
Catharine and her lover lie there in
hungor and madness, ' listening to the
picks of the rescuers from above. The
water rises and brings them company.
The body of big Oheval fldata back to
Catharine's feet. They push it away
frantically, but always it floats back
and rocks there in the water, jostling
against them. He even floated between
them in his obstinate jealousy. When
the rescuers arrived, Catharine 'was
dead.
It might aem that this ii climax
enough for any book, but Zola follows
it by a greater and a nobler, a climax
that would be almost unendurable, like
some of Hugo's, were it not tempered
by a simple and almost gentle approach.
When Etienne recovers from bis long
illneBS in the hospital, bo gose to the
mine to bid farawell to his old comrades
and asks for mother Mahue, mother
Mahue who had been the strongest o
them all, who had seen her children
beg and die and cheared her husband to
his death, who had cried deti ince still
when he lay dead before her.
"La Maheu, in blouse and pants, her
hnad in a beguin, bad arrived from the
waiting room lamp In hand. It was a
charitable exception that the company
took pity upon her miserable condition,
and bad allowed her to descend at the
age of forty years, and as it would have
been difficult for her to roll again they
set her to working a little ventilator
which they had set up in the north gal
lery, in that hell-like region under' la
Tartaret where the air was bad. For
tea hours, with bent back, she turned
her wheel at the end of a hot opening,
her akin parched by a high degree of
heat, and for this toil she earned thirty
sous.
When Etienne perceived her, pitiful,
in her man's clothing be could not find
words to tell her that he was going "
"t
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A
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