The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1873-07-04

nified splendor beside which the modern
dazzle is fashy and superficial. He declares
that Independence speeches then were speeches
worth listening to, and that the annual pro
cession was one which the war-scarred
veteran could contemplate with tears of
honest pride. The advanced thinker" is
not less pertinacious and exasperating. He
maintains an attitude of calm and amiable
supremacy, and behaves with the rasping good
an irritable child. His magnifed imperturba-
bility is the result of his science, his investga-
ton, his abstraction and his theories. His
forehead beetles with crags of thought He
tells us that we live in an age of progress, of
new ideas, and that we have reached an i'm
reminds us that now is the hour to discard
the follies and foibles which link us to our
quadrumanous ancestry Clancy q pre-Adamite
ape letting off Roman candle y and to plant
our feet firmly as we stride onward to the fu-
ture. Hence he tramples on all our most
cherished Fourth of July traditions. Hewants
an intellectual an aesthetic, scientific COM
memoration of Independence Day He ban
ishes the small boy to maps and aliases and
puts a damper on all the gunpowder in
Christendom. The pinwheel he informs us,
is a relic of barbarism; the Bengola light links
us to o past of which, as men of intellect we
should blush to think Tear up the flags and
bunting, send home the militia; let us have
Fourth of July dedicated to Darwin, Huxley,
Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte.
Against these arguments our juvenile friend
opposes his own, and we do not know but that
he has the best of the encounter. He re-
minds us that the 6re-cracker and the pinwheel
and all the explosive and gorgeous parapher-
MALTA of the traditional Fourth are an honest,
straightforward, unaffected expression of the
average sentiment of the hour. At least this
is the direction in which the majority of his
arguments tend, though we do not know that
they are distinguished for luxury of rhetoric
or for subtle fnesse of diction. He tells us
that there is no sham sentmentality, no as
sumption of intellectual supremacy or philo-
sophical self-poise in their pleasures, but that
they are simply what they profess to be-the
spontaneous outcome of the occasion He
pleads that the number of holidays in the
American workingman's life is too few to rem
der it reasonable or compassionate to lessen
them, and he represents that the quantity of
pleasure created by the annual explosion of
Independence gunpowder intellectually coun-
terbalances the accompanying pain. And
then, aside from the particular associations of
the hour, what boy emerging from adolescence
does not have particularly soft place in his
head dedicated to the memory of the wooden
pistol and the miniature cannon? They take
their place among the first pair Of pantaloons
and the initiatory long coat, and form q bright
opening in memorys tunnel And, what
ever you do. you cannot divest the
small boy of the conviction that George
Washington would have done Just the same
as he does. AS was intimated at the beginning
of this article, the very nature of the facts pre-
cludes your quenching the exploits of Young
America by citing the example Of the Father
of his Country. Fate has been particularly
kind to American boyhood in this respect.
We shall not do more than touch at present
upon one aspect Of the Fourth Of July ques-
ton, and that is the light in which possibly
it is regarded by the advanced woman"
The very name of Independence" Day must
be sharp thorn in her chaste, progressive
side, associated as it is with the remembrance
of her immemorial dependence upon the
monster man. With six thousand years of
slavery goading her to madness, with the
wrongs Of unnumbered millions of her sex
believing through the centuries and stimu-
lating her to vengeance every pinwheel must
be torture to her, every rocket-stick an arrow
perforating her tenderest sensibility, cele-
brating as they do the personal and national
freedom Of man, her congenital foe. How
yearningly she must look forward to q female
Independence Day, some feminine Fourth of
July, when an Amazonian militia shall add
subtler picturesqueness to the ensemble at
Union square, and her righted sex, clad in the
mail of woman's suffrage and panoplied in
sense of equality with man, shall look with
anticipating eyes toward the Presidential
chair and ecstatically dream of guiding the
ship of state! In what for future lies the
actually of this vision we will not venture to
predict, linked as it must be with the vanish
ing figure of the last small boy and the final
cracker.
The Explorations OF the Sanitary