Connecticut western news., 1876-09-15
Leo Miller-Strickland.

The pleasing people out in Minnesota who formed copartnership, terminable at will, in the business of matrimony and general produce, under the firm name of Miller & Strickland, have had their difficulties since. They have en- countered certain statute made for the express purpose of prosecuting ad- vanced thinkers on the relations of the sexes. It seemed to meet their case. We have already chronicled the addition of baby to the assets of the firm. They named him Leo, partly perhaps on the u,sus sed Leo principle current in Hsop, but mostly because Leo has good, mouth-filling, advanced thinker kind of a sound. They also set forth that his name is Strickland, and that it ought to be, because at present the mother gets no share in the nomen- clature of the infant, which is 8 cruel injustice. Strickland, it may be remem- bered, is the female me mber of the firm.
 This is great principle which an ad vanced thinker may probably be burnt at the stake for as we'll as auy of his other great principles. We hope that this hyphenated infant will grow up to be wiser and better man for being hy- phenated, and carrying around, in the slack of his name, so to speak, the germ of great truth. But if the great prin- ciple were to be carried out to it's logi- cal result, there would be some practical inconveniences. If MT. Brown forms connubial copartnership with Miss Jones; Felix Brown-Jones will do very we'll. But when he in his turn grows up and advances the pickets of human thought a peg or two, by making a loose and casual matrimonial arrange ment with Miss Smith Robinson, Secun- dus BrownAJ Jones-Smith-R Robinson would already be little unwieldy, and when we go 8 step further, and arrive at Paulo- Post Futurus- Brown-J -Jones-Smith Robinson Johnson-J Jenkins, there would be man to whom nobody would write letters, and whose acquaintances would be continually mixing up his bewilder ing terminology. Language" Dean Trench remarks, "is fossil history" but then if we are required to repeat a few chapters of fossil family history | whenever we speak to man, the man will soon cease to be spoken to, and he will have to sit up all night to enforce the great principle by writing his name.
 The advanced thinkers in Minnesota have foreseen this detail and avoided it. We regret to observe that they have avoided it by compromise unworthy of them. They are ordained that in the second generation the fathers name shall be dropped. This knocks family history altogether, for when Leo Miller Strickland drops the name of Miller for his own offspring and calls them Strickland-Higgins in the following gen eration, the name of Strickland will be "bred out" altogether, and there will thus survive no bearer of the name of either of the advanced thinkers who are now elevating mankind in Minnesota. This will be truly sad. But at the same time young Strickland may not turn out to be an advanced thinker. He may dishonor his father and mother by being ashamed of the arrangement of which he was result, and call himself Leo Miller, although a heartless and retrograde law declares that being tech nically J1l6aks saullius he has no right to call himself so, and that his name, if anything, which it probably isn't, is Strickland.
 Upon the whole the advance think CTS seem to us to have made two mistakes of some gravity. One is in supposine that concubinage can be dignifed by writing letters to the newsWapers about it, and shouting about it from the house tops, instead of taking precautions o1 secrecy, as is the custom of the more conservative practitioners of it. Another is in supposing that it is an entirely new invention.-NeaO York World.