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About The courier. (Lincoln, Neb.) 1894-1903 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 22, 1900)
I h '1 4b T- - : ; I r"sp!jfgr""- VOL. XV., NO. XXXVI II Si .f. r - ESTABUlbhtD IN 1& PRICE FIVE CENTS eSr ' ' - LINCOLN. NEBR.. SATURDAY. SEPTEMBER 22 1900. THE COURIER, Official Organ of the Nebraska State Federation of Women's Clubs. Kmtsudin thk rosTorncE at Lincoln as SXCOXD CLASS KATTEK. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY Bl -mmm mm md miiishu Office 1132 X street, Up Stairs. Telephone 384. SARAH B. HARRIS. Editor Subscription Kates In Advance. Per annum f 1 00 8ix months 75 Three months 50 One month 20 Single copies 05 Thx Cockier will not be responsible for vol antary communications unless accompanied by re-tarn pottage. Communications, to receive attention, must be signed by tne full name of the writer, not merely as a guarantee of good faith, but for publication if advisable. L OBSERVATIONS. 8 Use of Coal. There is probably not a hired girl in Lincoln wb'o makes a tire in tbe range for any meal, say for breakfast, which is tbe simplest, meal of all, with any reference to the amount of heat needed to boil the quart or two of water and toast a few slices of bread, or cook the other very, simple foods eaten by Lincoln families. The ordi nary, and even the extraordinary, girl makes a fire in the kichen range as though she were firing it up to haul a train of cars to Fairbury. In her preparation there is.no measuring or limitation of the energy to the work it is intended to accomplish. A woman who does her own work soon rinds out just how much coal or wood will cook a breakfast, and just how much is needed for luncheon and din ner. The hired girl never begins to apportion the wood to the energy needed until she gets married. Then she lias a revelation, or she studies physics, or she finds out that her hus band's wages allow of no waste, and that the limits of his temper include moderate fuel bills. She thinks of the way she has burned coal and wood and gas as a hungry mah thinks of ban quets where he has wasted enough in one gorge to keep a man satisfied for a week. Some understanding of the horror with which the lady of the house used to contemplate the red-hot lid of the stove comes back to her. The Japanese burn sticks and leaves, so precious is all fuel in that small island. America is supposed to have an inexhaustible supply of coal, but the price of it is fast making its lav ish use a wicked extravagance. But so Ion as servants are as they are, it is impossible to teach them economy. Notwithstanding that tbe price and value of real coal justify a consider ate use of It. Everybody is hoping that the time will come when household service will be as dignified and respectable as any other service. There are Indica tions in the establishment of training and cooking schools that household service may be performed in tbe fu ture by skilled labor and with scien tific adjustment of the energy of heat to the size of the meal. That future is still dim with distance, and nobody but an irresponsible, optimistic news-' paper editor dare predict its arrival with absolute certainty. Missionaries to the Chinese. When Chancellor E.Benjamin And rews was in London, he said that be heard Lord Salisbury address the British- public on the Chinese question. Lord Salisbury said that the Chris tian missionaries were largely respon sible for the vindictive feeling against foreigners felt and expressed by the Chinese. The missionary takes his grievance to his consular office and as an American, British, or French citi zen demands redress. As the repre---sentativeof America, Great Britain or Frapce the consul is obliged to do his best for the American, English man or Frenchman, though in apply ing extra-political authority to the relations between pastor and parish, those relations are seriously disturbed. Like the Chinese, Americans believe that they are the most intelligent race in the world. Suppose that Chi nese missionariesarrived in this coun try in great numbers and succeeded in making converts and overawing our own courts so that disputes be tween the Chinese missionaries and Christians were adjudicated by the Chinese consul, Wu Ting Fang. This country would not be a safe place for any sort of a Chinaman afttr the news got out.. This is exactly, accord ing to Lord Salisbury, what has hap pened in China. By bringing in the political author ity, the missionaries have increased the wholly natural and universal dis trust against the foreigner and the preacher of a new religion. If the modern missionary took his life in his hand, like St. Francis of Assisi, or Hudson, if, leaving everything for the sake of the news he had to communi cate, he cast in his lot without appeal with the men and women he consid ers himself sent to save in this world and in the next, the strength of his position woujd be largely increased. He would be no longer the bete noire of the consular office, nor the object of attack in every native uprising. Chancellor Andrews' address on the Chinese situation was listened to by a thoughtful audience of teachers. By his towering height, by his careful, exact phrasing, and by the occasional Hashing of a wit, genera.llysbea.thed, Chancellor Andrews' addresses are very much worth listening to. Com parisons are odious, but it is a relief to hear a man and a chancellor ex press himself frankly and without fear of this one or by the favor of that one. Withal the new chancellor seems a very modest man, only he is so given to speaking his own mind that, so, far, even the chancellorship has had no effect upon him. The Correct Reporter. A reporter on a metropolitan paper who should use an assignment to ex ploit his own ingenuity and impu dence in securing news would be dis missed immediately. A great news paper is supposed to print tbe news, and the news has no personality. A certain item may have been secured by a brilliant coup and super-human im pudence on the part of the reporter, but one article can have but one aim, and if it be the reporter's object to exploit his own boldness and ingenu ity, rather than to write down graph ically what has happened or what he has seen, the effect of the news is ob scured, and- only an impression of a somewhat disagreeable and insistent personality remains. The Courier, a fortnight ago, referred to an article in an evening.paperconceming-trouble in the Presbyterian church of this city. The reporter wrote his copy around himself. In effect, he said, that it was difficult to make the sim ple minded Presbyterian elders tell what had happened in the meeting until the very much more acute writer of the article, I criticised, hinted that be was hidden in the organ and heard the whole discussion anyway. The self-gratulation and confidence in his own alertness overbalanced the news he was employed to put into words. Much of such stuff in a paper eventually gives it the character of its reporters, and the character is not popular. Ihose few simple-minded elders, for instance, to whom the re porter applied for news, must have felt some chagrin when they read of the cheap trick and of the very ordi nary trickster that deceived them. All of which is very far from the inten tion of the publisher of any paper, however irresponsible and inefficient the reporters. A Room of Echoes and Cross-Lights. The high-school auditorium is a gallery of echoes and a miscalculated torture of blinding cross-lights. Just in front, or to the left, of the speaker, it is possible to hear distinctly, but elsewhere words are mixed with echoes of words spoken five seconds before. The noise In the streets is deafening, and when combined with the atrocious acoustic properties of the auditorium, the teachers and scholars who teach and recite there must be sorely disciplined before the year is over. In the evening an clec trict light, suspended over the centre of the dais, where the speaker stand, makes the light worse thau in the day time. To look at the speaker, it is necessary to be blinded by the light, and an hour of such eagle's work blinds the strongest human eyes. The unjaded, clastic strength of youth is uncritical, but it is mistaken economy, to strain, eye-sigh. tj and hear ing of teachers and taught by such acoustic and aural horrors, if they can be remedied. The delects may be deep-seated and structural, in which case the school-board is help less. One day and an evening in the room is tiresome to an adult, who l accustomed to comfortable and scien tifically constructed auditoriums. School DtsdpKae. Doubtless those who are interested in little children have expected too much improvement in the methods of teaching them, and too great a modification of the repressive rule that strap them into unnatural posi tions and prolonged quiet during the time they spend in school. It is long to wait for another regime, founded on nature. The winter is coming on and the able-bodied, full-grown citi zen shrinks from the sight of hun dreds of blue-lipped, shivering little children, standing helplessly and more or less humblj in a .long, pa thetic line, waiting for the doorfjof their warm prison to open, for trie bell to sound, when they can march, not sociably, bv twos, threes, or fours, but Indian file, one after the other, silently into the basement room pre pared for the instruction of happy childhood. The. sight is so familiar that it no longer means much to ux. The little child who stands outside has not sense enough to keep his fin gers out of his mouth when they are cold. Yet, since Lincoln was first laid out. and the brick school-house, now called the Central school, was built, this rule of unlocking the doors only at the time of opening the school haa been enforced. It may be that the ' parents need the discipline of start ing the children from home at exactly the. moment when, by hurrying, they can reacli the school just as the long line begins to wriggle into the school house. The rule takes no account of domestic emergencies or of children's caprices which keep them from being converted into a machine at home, though, because of the movement of the whole mass of children at schoci, individual resistance is of small effect. The discipline of the corps is bene ficial, and children who arc denied it by fussy, fastidious parents miss soni2 thing all their life long But if com plete uniformity were desirable, would there not be two blades of grass alike?
