West Virginia argus. [volume] (Kingwood, W. Va.) 1877-1946, 1900-09-20
OUR PARIS LETTER.
The Great Exposition A Gaudy
and Expensive Show.
The Civil Service Should be Applied to
Our Consular and Diplomatic Agents

Our Consular and Diplomatic Agents
From our Regular Correspondent.
Paris, France, September Q, 1000.
"A multi-millionaire may lose
hundred thousand here and there
without feeling the loss, for the
majority of his ventures are profit
able and his balance sheet shows
net gains. 1t is thus with the United
States, the mightiest of the multi
millionaires at the Paris Exposition.
The Paris Exposition is undoubted-
ly losing side speculation for our
country. But we are rich and will
scarcely feel it. 1t would have
been better for us to have stayed at
home than to have appeared at this
feast without our best clothes. 1t
will not do to say we have better
clothes at home. Such an excuse
is not good form. Moreover we
Will not be believed except by our
home folks, and we must submit to
the popular judgment-that half a
score of pigmy nationalities, in
more splendid apparel than our
selves are, by these signs, our COM
mercial superiors. There are, of
course, those in every land who
know better, but this judgment was
and is an appeal to popular judg-
ment, and ifin the eye of the public,
who estimate country by its dis
play at this Exposition we fall be-
low Belgium and Denmark, to say
nothing of Austria and Germany,
our appearance in this field is a
failure.
1t is as easy to fix the blame as it
is useless to do so, for by the time
for the next Exposition the lesson
and the moral will be forgotten. A
new President and a new Congress
Will be ready to repeat the ex-
trayagance and the blunder. The
fault is radical in our shifting
changing governmental personnel.
1t is IN system which retires public
ofhcers as soon as they begin to
know their business; a system which
imposes little sense of responsibility
upon those who know their tenure
IS transient and who are answerable
only for the brief day of their in
cumbency. Our resources are in.
exhaustible because they are the
sources and forces of nature, but
another country and expanding as
lavashly as we do would be ruined.
There are those who will tell,
whose business it is to tell a differ
ent story about the appearance of
the United States at this Fair AS
a consequence there are some who
will never know the truth about ii.
There are doubtless some who are
incapable of seeing or believing the
truth, no matter how plain il may
be. am writing only for those
who want to know the truth because
II is wholesome even when dis
agreeable. The silliest patriotism,
like the silliest family pride, is that
which CLOSES and conceaIs, and re-
sents the criticism--the diagnosis
indispensable to a cure.
We have made ourselves ridicu.
lous by sending a great host of
Commissioners to this Fair, and
they in turn have made us and
themselves more ridiculous by in
sisting through official channels
upon social recognition. Many
OF them, too many, with their sisters
and their cousins and their aunts.
have got it and the way they WELD
and flourish and display it makes
the groundlings grin, the judicious
grieve. The fault is at home in the
vicious system which treats every
appropriation TO a worlds fair as a
| junketing function to which every
American has right TO 90 at
Government expense, provided his
Member Of Congress has pull enough
TO put him on the roll. Would that
this vicious system stopped At Paris