.-!
THB COURIER.
the American public. "The amount
required to effect Miss Stone's safety
is but a mere bagatelle compared to
the millions which have been spent
to maintain the officers of the Board
in their easy, extravagantly paid
posts." I know of no board in this
country which has boasted so much
of its accomplishments; but if Miss
Stone is murdered someother medium
will certainly distribute the money
for foreign missions gathered here.
And it is very likely that appeals for
foreign heathen from any board will
fall upon deaf ears if Miss Stone be
harmed. The conduct of the Board
is un-American, uuchivalrous, cold
blooded, unbusinesslike. The dis
pleasure of the American people is
already made manifest by the re
proaches aimed at the Board by the
secular presc. To America this wo
man's life and security is worth more
than the 130.000 heathen, men, women
and children, that in the ninety years
of its existence the board boasts of
having saved by the expenditure of
tens of millions of dollars. And if
.Miss Stone is not included among the
number saved the Board will never
have another million dollars to spend.
The Naval Trouble
Any opinion that we may have held
concerning the elevation of character
of admirals, commodores, captains
and lieutenant commanders, has been
dissipated by the naval inquiry. We
are an imland people. North America
is so large that the coast dwellers are
an inconsiderable part of the popu
Jation. Sailors, either common sea
men or officers, are an uncommon
sight. We think of them or we did
think of them before this investi
gation had progressed so far, as bluff,
hearty, generous, truthful men. De
catur, FnulJones, Nelson have made
the definition for all of us of sailors.
The investigation at Washington
makes it necessary to revise our def
inition. After this for a few years,
until the impression wears off, an
admiral must be a man who is jealous
Of all the officers under him, who in
case of war will send misleading dis
patches home, claiming victories be
did not win, or one who in pursuit
of a fleet is the last man to see the
masts of the enemy in a protecting
harbor and makes all sorts of excuses
to get away from the neighborhood,
only being kept there by repeated
commands from the bead of the de
partment. According to the new def
initions with which the investiga
tions have supplied us, there is a low
standard of truth among the higher
officers of the navy, and an officer
once out of favor with the depart
ment, at Washington Incurs the ill
will of all the officers on all the ships
of the American - navy. The dissipa
tion of an old ideal is unpleasant but
if it is so that the isolation of the sea
faring man makes him jealous and
more than ordinarily selfish, land
lubbers ought to know it so as to quit
expecting high-mindedness from those
who go down to the sea in ships.
jt jt
The "Cop."
Sir Thomas LIpton is a true sports
man. Just before the yacht races
were run, at the close of a dinner
served on board The Shamrock, he
said in reply to a toast: ''Let the
best boat win." After he had lost he
was satisfied that the races were fair
ly conducted and that the best boat
did win. As there were only two
boats, the sentiment was not gram
matical but the spirit of the wish was
eminently commendable, and the
spirit is more than grammar. Rot
many people know the name of the
owner of the boat which actually did
win. The glory is absorbed, with the
owner's full consent, by the New York
Yacht Club whose officers and mem
bers have been the patrons of yacht
ing, and have by undiscourBged pat
ronage of the sport kept interest in
It alive.
Per contra everybody knows the
name of Thomas Lawton, the man
from Boston who said he was going
to chop up his boat because it was
not fast enough to get into the race
at all. Kindergarten experiments
have discovered that children are
disciplined into the knowledge and
practice of good citizenship by the
games they play together and the
conventions they agree to abide by
during the progress of the games. A
kindergarten visitor is usually im
pressed only by the gayety of the lit
tle children in their play. The team
work which means concerted and
harmonious action is apt to be over
looked.
Yachting is a grown-up game and
is a means of discipline to the play
ers. Mr. Thomas Lawton, who is a
self-made man, and with all the faults
of a self-made man, wanted to play
the game because of the compliment
and conspicuousness likely to be be
stowed upon the winner. His motive
for building a yacht could, of course
have had no influence upon that
yacht's lines and speed, but when she
was distanced the country was sat
isfied. The impression obtained be
fore the preliminary trial races came
off that the management of the 27. Y.
Y. C. objected to the admission of the
Lawson boat because of its superior
lines, chances of beating the Colum
bia, and the relief when Lawson's
boat hardly showed at the horizon of
the race course-was perceptible.
Mr. E. D. Morgan, the responsible
manager of the Columbia, made him
self very inconspicuous. He is a
yachtsman of long experience. At one
time he owned, seven boats. His
grandfather was the war governor of
New York.
J jt
The Booker Washington Incident.
There are very few southerners who
are not troubled and in a way indig
nant because President Roosevelt
asked Mr. Washington to dinner and
actually dined with him. They do
not deny the fact that Mr. Washing
ton is a southerner and a credit to
the south. All men admit that be is
one of the most distinguished men in
this country and that bis birth place
and dwelling place are tbe more dis
tinguished for his presence. A north
erner cannot understand now, any
more clearly than in war times, just
the feeling that southerners have for
tbe darkies. Now as in the pre
, rebellion period black women nurse
white children. They hold them on
tbeirlaps, fondle them and kis." them.
They are excellent nurses for the
sick and the super-sensitive nerves of
aristocratic patients are not disturbed
by tbe necessarily intimate associa
tion with a black nurse. But if one
of these patients, recovered from a
sickness, were to be obliged to ride on
a railroad car with a negro, trouble
would ensue.
The south is proud of Booker Wash
ington. Southerners recognize his
good sense and have constant re
course to it. Somewhere, I tbink,
Mr. Washington himself has said that
he preferred southern intolerance
tempered by intimate understanding
of his race to northern patronage and
imperfectly concealed race-repulsion.
Topsy expressed the same thing to
Miss Ophelia. Miss Ophelia had the
conventional New England disap
proval of slavery and sorrow for the
slaves, but she could not bear to have
Topsy's hand touch hers. On the
other hand, the angel child Eva was
content to sit upon the floor near Top
sy and read the same book with her.
However much we northern people
may desire to ameliorate the condi
tion of the southern negro, we can do
so only by gifts of money to educa
tional institutions, such asTuskeegee.
The b'ack race is not tbe problem of
the people north of Mason and Dix
on's line whlch.in spite of oratory,still
exists. The black southerners must
work out their own salvation with
the white southerners. We can give
individuals of neither race absent
treatment for either ignorance or
prejudice. The blacks are in the
south. They are climatically fitted
to live there and there they are go
ing to stay. Industrial education, as
Mr. Washington says, will accomplish
their second and more significant
emancipation. From this distance
we can only hasten that self-manumission
by gifts of money to manual
training institutions. If President
Roosevelt's invitation to dinner has
in the slightest degree lessened south
ern prejudice against the race or
hightened the high respect of the
south for Mr. Washington, tbe whole
country is grateful to the President.
If ithas increased southern distrust
of northern intention and increased
the bitterness, in spite of which the
social condition of the negroes must
gradually improve, the invitation,
though given with the most generous
of motives from one great man to an
other was premature.
jt jt
Football.
The fascination which football has
for rich and poor, lettered and unlet
tered, athlete and pale clerk has not
been satisfactorily defined and ac
counted for. It is perhaps one of
those expressions of human feeling too
deep for words.but which when the oc
casion arises is overwhelmingly dem
onstrated in action. Baseball is more
intelligible to a crowd. Tbe players
are distributed over the diamond as
chess-men over a board, and the plays
are not often bunched, so that tbe
audience can keep track of the ball
and indentify the players by position
and characteristic action. But in
football there is only a heap of dusty
boys and it is occasionally difficult to
be sure that the heap is human. It
looks more like an octopus, a creature
of one body and many arms and legs.
Nevertheless in this mournful town
where everybody is still more or less
broke and where daily on every street
corner monuments of former opulence
meet and remind one of their depart
ed influence, somehow the inhabi
tants raised between twenty-five and
thirty thousand dollars to go to Min
neapolis and see the game of football
between the Minnesota university
team and the Nebraska university
team. The game lasted only two
"hours or so and Nebraska was crush
ingly defeated, but nobody seemed to
be sorry he went and the excursion
ists said as old Caspar said of Blen
heim that Is was a "glorious victory."
A committee is trying to raise in Lin
coln a few thousand dollars for a peal
of chimes to be placed near the cen
tre of the town and serve as a monu
ment to the memory of President Mc
Kinley instead of the triumphal arch
iiiat was nrsL proposed. The project
has not yet been received with suffici
ent response to insure its success.
Considering the strength of the spell
we are under if we could get the foot
ball team to give the chimes' fund a
benefit we could buy chimes worth
listening to; but there seems no easy
way of effecting the conjunction be
tween football and chimes. More
particularly because college men,
whether from reckless spending,
in.
are
the
- tu
which is rarely the case, or f
sufficient remittances from h-'
always hard up and need
money they can earn by admi
the arena.
jt jt
44 A Triumph's Evidence."
All of Mr. William Allen U lute's
stories have strong local color. Hi he
roes have a photographic reEem'. ance
to life. They are like a plaster cat
of a living hand whose owner ron
sented for a moment to allow it t be
covered with plaster. Whet, the
mold is filled up with the cwupusi.
tion, and finally chipped oil, ail the
fine marks that pertain to the human
hand and that never were and never
should be copied in marble, are there.
Although the lines and crosses the
intricate and innumerable dut- nod
dashes, which distinguish a real hand
from a marble or painted one, are
never duplicated, although every one
of the several billion hands in the
world is unique; whenever we ee a
copy of a hand containing these line
and crosses that we never saw before
we say "flow life-like!" Whereas
when we see a plaster copy of a per
fect band taken from a statue sculp
tured by an artist who knows how
an ideal band should be made, it
scarcely attracts our attention, it i
characterless and recalls no one hand
in particular in which we have eer
had any interest. The artist's ideal
has all the qualities of a hand with
out possessing a resemblance to any
one band.
There are characters in stories that
we agree are human enough, only we
mver saw anybody like them. 1
ued to ascribe my inability to iden
tify such characters to insularity and
non-cosmopolitanism, but latterly 1
hive come to believe that it is the
author's fault when his men and
women are strange, unfamiliar, stagy.
In constructing them ha has used too
many notes. His hero is a composite
and has tbe unfamiliarity of many
men with the aspect of one, like those
strange composite pictures of a gradu
ating class.
Mr. White's boys recall this boy
and that one I have known. There
fore I know he has reproduced mhiic
one boy of his own experience him
self proabably for his boys are drawn
from the inside.
In the October Scribner's, Mr.
White has a story called "A Tri
umph's Evidence." The scene might
have been laid in Lincoln, Nebraska,
at one of the two hotels or at the
state capital, and tbe time might
have been last winter, and the mo-t
prominent senatorial candidate in
Nebraska might have sat for the p r
trait of Mr. King. For instance
"The senatorial deadlock occurred
this way: Anything to beat Kinr.
the state chairman, was the desire
of forty-four legislators. Fifty one
were willing to do anything to elec
him. Six men voted patiently f- r
state senator Metcalf, day in and da
out, while three legislators insistcJ
that there must be a clean man r
there would be no nomination It
took fifty-three votes to nominan
In the last named group were su
senator Moulton, and two young w
Haff and Norris alumni of t
State university. . . . The gr p
was dubbed 'Ladies' Auxiliary.' K -'
was supported by the party niacin
and he held his men in bonds stron. r
than iron; the men opposed to 1
were the party malcontents, who I J
grievances against the party i r
sonal, vicarious, or imagined. I
anti-King men said that Joab . 13
ton, president of tbe Corn Belt r, -road,
whose name was comm
linked with scandal in state polu -was
furnishiug King funds. Wl
Myton arrived at the state capital
lounged through the upper cornri r
of the political hotel for an hour r
so during the morning, sifting a
weighing tbe gossip 1
personality of King waB the strong
force In the crowd. Everyone -
EEBBBHE2
