The representative. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1893-1901, 1895-04-24
Evils
That Are Unfortunately
Brought About by Mod
ern Science.
They Are Slowly But Surely
Sapping the Foundations OF
Human Happiness.


beginning to think. Sometimes what they
think finds its way into the newspapers.
wren the newspapers will not print them
the things come out in book form. Scien-
tifc thought is slowly, but surely, sapping
the foundations of human happiness. 1t
Is knocking away our underpinning, to
speak, one stick at TING, until the day
seems not far distant WHEN nothing will
save us from humiliation but being born
again and starting fresh with physical
and mental constitution adapted to
newly discovered circumstances.
Some thousands of years ago, before
science had got foothold on earth, man.
kind passed a quiet, pastoral existence.
having great many wives and sheep, and
living in more or less physical mental and
moral rDeness to from 200 to GOO years of
age, says the New York Herald. AS long
as people believed the earth was fiat
as pancake, and that the sun went
around 1T every day, and were governed
in their daily lives by visions and dreams,
and there were no schools or scientific
gentlemen to spread pernicious doctrines
and incite disturbing Investigations, the
world appears to have got along all right.
They evidently knew what a good thing
they had in those days, too, for the man
who discovered anything was lost. He
was put to death.
When man reflects upon the good old
times, and then realizes what an awful
tangle modern civilization has got him
off the calling shackles and take to the
woods. Nothing really meets the emer-
gency but sleeping in the leaves, going
without a shirt or bath, and eating corn
off the cob We must go back to a state
of nature or cease to exist. We are on
the dOwn-grade under full steam, and
sharp curve and a high embankment
ahead. We must slow down or get off the
earth.
Science is at the bottom of all our trou-
bles. If it hadn't been for science we
might have worried along under the prin-
ciple that a man who doesn't know he is
hurt isn't hurt
Here were these terrible forest fires in
the Northwest, and up the state, and hun
dreds of innocent people burned alive, and
thousands financially ruined. Science and
human progress are directly responsible.
Civilization deprives of our immense
forests by encouraging building and manu-
featuring all sorts of things, mostly lux
uries, and the absence of timber land de-
prives us of the necessary rainfall, which
brings drought, famine, fire, misery and
death Most of this timber has been re-
moved for agricultural purposes, to raise
corn to make whisky and fatten hogs, and
Cincinnati and Chicago people, and the
land today isn't worth what the standing
timber would have been worth. These
same Northwestern people often have
grain to burn while the manufacturers
have money to burn
want of rain is due to the general employ
ment of electricity in every day life and
they want the dynamOS stopped everywhere
until it rains. They say that it is this
creation of artificial electricity that springs
general humidity and general debility and
drought on us. This is tough if So 1t must
be So because I saw it in the papers I
don't exactly know what artificial electric
ity is, or how this force in nature can be
either created or destroyed, but they say
UNLOVELY BACILLI
1t has been demonstrated beyond the
shadow of a doubt by the scientists that
every mothers of us is drinking and
eating and breathing the germs of disease
every hour of the day and night 1t
wouldn't be SO awfully bad to know this if
they hadn't taken the trouble to furnish
diagrams of the bacilli. But science is the
abrupt antithesis of the frontiersman's no.
tification of death-"The coyotes has ct
you sons head off'-for it goes into partic-
ulars with exasperating particularly. It
might not-I say might not-set me wholly
against the use of Croton water as a bev-
erage, because 1 am told there are all sorts
OF living, crawling, creeping and wriggling
things in it, long known under the compre-
hensive caption of animalculae, but l don't
care to be furnished with diagrams of the
creatures, accurate statistics of the num-
Der of legs, character of their bodies how
many revolutions they make per minute,
and how many of them occupy a cubic
inch.
We all know-and l for one wish we
didnt-that cheese is a state of decompo-
slt1On in which the minute particles are a
solid mass of living, moving animal life
but do you suppose I'm going to give up
cheese on that account? Still we'd be that
much happier if we didn't know so much
and no doubt would live just as long There
is no record that the waters of the Nile
mad to be boiled before being used inter-
nally. Moses never required the children
of Israel to boil their water before drinking
it. Nobody seems to have bothered with
bacteria and bacilli and disease germs in
those days
From these horrible discoveries in the
water drink the scientists plunged us
into the details of still more horrible finds
IN milk. They showed that we were
feeding our innocents on the germs of tu-
berculosis and using pleuro- pneumonia in
our coffee. Nobody safe except the
man who got chalk and water in his milk
can instead of the pure juice of the cow
Even the milk that might otherwise be
good is liable to contain disease and death
from the nearest spring or pump patronized
by the milkman. 1t is an even chance we
are told, whether you are getting tubercu-
losis or typhus fever.
WHAT SHALL WE DRINK?
Science has practically shut off our milk
and Waterfront those, at least, who would
live scientific life. Being one of the lat
ter, fell back on beer. Seeing around me
the splendid physical specimens of Teutonc
manhood and noting the fact that the Ger
man parent gives beer to the very small
est and youngest of his flock, with no APP
parent deterioration of the race 1 thought
beer the true and healthy beverage of the
times. But I hadn't been drinking beer
more than six weeks before a scientific
sharp filled the papers full of the statistics
of adulteration and blighting influences of
beer. He said most of it was made of rosin
and glucose, thinned with bad water and
ferminous grain. On looking into the mat
ter 1 found he was sustained by other sci
enlist who never would be guilty of drink
ing beer.
Beer destroys the kidneys, they said, and
eaturates the whole system with the mi
crobes of disease, which merely await a
favorable opportunity to keel a man over.
Beer drinkers, l found went off like sheep;
usually, it seemed to me, to get more beer.
] couldn't drink whisky. 1 had seen men
make whisky down cellar under a drug
store and knew what was in it. Nor gin.
for the same reason though I've known gin
drinkers to swear that gin is really the
only pure and unadulterated liquor made.
] really do not assume to discuss the mer-
its of liquors science might produce
them-it is only as they are concocted by
science that they are to be generally con-
demned and avoided.
As long as science enables man to get
$l00 for 81 worth of ingredients it will be
unsafe to drink gin or whisky or any other
spirituous liquors promiscuously. 1t isn't
whisky that kills people off and makes
of hn n