Kansas agitator. [volume] (Garnett, Kan.) 1890-1905, 1895-02-01

$50 let It's hope and pray) to work out for them
selves and for those about them a better destiny.
l was at the state house this morning to wit
ness the Inauguration of the governor. What
struck me most in the speech made by him was
the growing space given to the subject of what
may be called the cooperative commonwealth.
He passed in review that subject, always para
mount in Massachusetts,, popular education. He
told of normal schools founded, and high
school education now offered by the state to
every child within its borders, and as he did
this, was saying to myself, eff this is good,
why not 90 farther and let us have technical
schools to furnish every child trade, to put in
to every hand an honorable bread-winning in
strument ?' When he described the elaborate
system by which the public highways are i'm
proved by reason of state action, l could but
think, ''What e. >pt superstition prevents the
people from seeing that to operate the high
ways is just as much for their collective good
when they are made of iron as of asphalt or of
macadam ~
Why should the postal system be accepted as
belonging to the people and not the telegraph
system, the telephone system, and that open let
ter, most important of all, the newspaper?
When he told of the great institutions for the
care of the defective, delinquent and dependent
classes, thought, "what, except prejudice,
holds the state from building tenements that
shall replace the slums, and renting thern as is
of tO
the same class of inhabitants ?" When he told
of the cattle killed by state authority, because
they were infected with tuberculosis, l wonder
when the application of the Golden Rule to the
aggregate population would cause the state to
destroy the dram-shops, whose virus flows out
into the body polite
When he said that the enforcement of exist
ing laws for the restriction of the liquor traffic
was more to be desired than the "feverish leg
islation" (by which he probably meant the
outlawing of the saloon), and yet had declared
a little earlier that ''persons were more impor-
tant than property" in their relation to the state
and closed his address with the words, "May
this be commonwealth governed by laws rath-
er than by men, ~ could but think that the
application of these principles which are but
corollaries of the Golden Rule, which is the one
great law, would give all that we ask or ever
have asked for the protection of the people and
the progress of the state.
But reformers find at last the futility of put
ting the new wine of a new kingdom into the
old bottles of an outworn conservatism. 1t is
not under the political parties of the present,
nor through the churches as now constituted,
that the Coded Rule will be applied to the new
conditions that are rushing upon us with the
force of gravity and the persistency of fate.
For my part, have for twenty years in vain
sought to enlist the great, fortunate, entrenched,
well-to-do class as an active factor in the meas
ures by which the Coded Rule shall, as l SOL
emnly believe, serve to bring in the Golden Age.
And believe that the noble women whom we
are met to honor has the same prescience OF
what the future is to bring. Ringing in my
ears for many day, nay, for many week and
month, has been that great utterance of the
apostle,
"T,urn we now to the Gentiles."
1t is not those who have achieved, but those
would achieve, through whom the Golden Rule
shall bring the Golden Age. 1t is not the COM
Portable and well-to-do who will ever carry un-
popular reforms to the climax of success. A
thousand times have we heard quoted, when
radicalideas andsocial questions were introduced,