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VOL. XV., NO. XXXVI II
Si .f. r -
ESTABUlbhtD IN 1&
PRICE FIVE CENTS
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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
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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?
