The San Francisco call., 1898-06-26


 contractor and the laborer. Far from being lost. it keeps on it's course, buy ing luxuries for the well-to-do and necessaries for the poor. Architecture is a beautiful art, worthy of all en- couragement The capitalist with mill lions to spare may live in a shanty if he choose and count over his gold, or put it out at interest, and be called miser. If a man elect to own palace and pay for the making of one he has done a substantial as we'll as an ethical good If to dwell therein with comfort he keep an array of servants, so much the better But he can close up the place and go to Europe, or even die, without taking from the city the bene- fit of his liberality. However, l am not advocating extravaganza. For the or dinary journalist the $50000 domicile is good enough. But the man of many millions could not be extravagant in expenditure, for in expenditure lies his opportunity to do good.
 Among the things I freely confess an inability to understand is why certain papers that praise Roosevelt for going into the army condemn Bryan for hav- ing done the same thing. I do not doubt that they are both good citizens and will both make good soldiers, but there is no reason for supposing the New Yorker in the matter of patriotism to be in any manner superior to the Nebraskan.
 Doubtless the sentencing to the peni- tentiary for life of a young hoodlum of 19 will strike many people as too harsh. He had been found guilty of robbery by violence that might well have been murder Every day there is in the courts melancholy demonstra- tion of the fact that imprisonment does not reform this class of offenders. If they do not devote life to serving one long term they merely break it into series of shorter terms, the intervals being given over to the commission of crimes whereby society is troubled.
 Perhaps enough has been said about the wretched trick of the Examiner in printing the bogus Hobson letter, but to allude to it cannot be amiss. It shows the disreputable character of that paper under it's present manage ment so clearly as to be useful as a warning. There are other sheets, un- happily, which fail to draw the line at fakes, but they would demur at an ab- solute stupidity. It appears that the Examiner lacks both character and in- telligence.
 An Eastern paper remarks sagely that a good soldier has nothing to do with politics. If this is true the con- clusion is inevitable that the army con- tains many officers of recent creation who are not good soldiers.
 While the introduction of an auto matic hello" machine into the tele- phone business is doubtless an indica- tion of progress, there will be a nat ural pang of regret at the vanishing of the animate charmer who for years has been helloing from central. Many times she is an irritation. She is per- haps deliberate, and when a subscriber betrays the fact that he is in a hurry. | goes into state of torpor from which | she is with difficulty aroused. She pro- | vozes to profanity, and objects to be- | ing sworn at She demands a nickel | for switch and then calmly informs | the waiting patron that the line he | wants is busy, and invites him to call | again, which he can do at the expense of another nickel. Yet the girl at central is apt to have pleasing voice. possibly a lisp. Her tones suggest beauty. So long as she is reasonably | prompt to get angry at her would be repellant idea. It is easy to imagine that she is young and fascinating, the | only support of a widowed mother, and | to strike up long distance acquain- tance with her. Perhaps the romance would be spoiled but for the interven- ing wire. It may be that she is her self a widowed mother. Anyhow she | will soon be succeeded by mechanical | contrivance no more alluring than the | wheels of a six-bit alarm clock. This | is a practical age.
 I humbly trust that to take excep- | tion to a sentence in a late letter of | Richard Harding Davis will be deemed | no irreverence. I would not go so far as to pronounce the sentence faulty, | and yet it lacks the power to soothe or awe: "It was a historical moment in | the history of Cuba" Perhaps it was; indeed, in all likelihood it was, and | yet, and yet--If history be carefully | scanned it will be found to be made up largely of moments of the sort. How l ever, I never expected MT. Davis to go to the trouble of specifying the char acteristics of one of them in just the | way he did The thought occurs that he intended to say hysterical instead of 1 historical.
 
 The German papers are funny. They view with horror the prospect that the United States may one day own the Philippines. The plan seems to them wicked. A great nation absorb those defenseless islands? Never, if the Teu- tonic editor can help it, and he as- suages his wrath in measures of cool ing beer. Having assuaged he returns to his work and by few strokes of his pen makes beautifully clear the fact that for Germany to take the islands is nothing less than a sacred duty. And meantime that man Dewey acts as though he did not care ration what the Journalists of Berlin were instruct ing him to do.