The Leon reporter. (Leon, Iowa) 1887-1930, 1901-12-05

among the living Americans what gal
axies of intellectual splendor and
power! Edward Eggleston and VIII
Carlton and Mark Twain and John
Kendrick Bangs and Marion Harland
and Margaret Sangster and Stockton
and Churchill and Hopkinson Smith
and Irving Bachelor and Julia Ward
Howe and Amelia Barr and Brander
Matthews and Thomas Nelson Page
and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Will
liam Dean Howells and score OF 9TH
ers, some of them fixed stars and soma
| meteors.
Some Marvellous Changes.
How things have marvelously
changed! We used to cry because we
had to go to school. Now children
cry If they cannot go. Many of them
can inteliigently discuss political top
les long before they have seen a ball
lot box or. leased by some poetic muse,
can compose articles for the newspa-
pers. Philosophy and astronomy and
chemistry have been SO improved that
he must be a genius at dullness who
knows nothing about them. On one
shelf of poor mans library is moro
practical knowledge than in the 400,-
600 volumes of ancient Alexandria,
and education is possible for the most
| INDECENT. and no legislature or con-
gress for the last fifty years has as
| sembled which has not had in it raif
splltters and farmers and drovers or
men who have been accustomed to
| toiling with the hand and the foot.
The per- which Moses dipped in the
light of the first morning and Jere-
miah filled with tears and Ezekiel
thrust in visions of fire and Matthew,
touched with the blood of cross and
st. John dipped in the splendors OF
beatific glory-that pen has wrought
marvels for all classes of our people.
Today your libraries and colleges and
schools and publishing houses and
churches celebrate the ever growing
conquests of the American pen, ana
our prospects are all the time bright,
ening.
The Glorious Prospects.
The grainfields have passed their
harvests above the veto of drought
and deluge. The freight cars are not
large enough to bring down the grain
to the seaboard. The canalboats are,
crowded with breadstuffs. Hank to the
rushing of the wheat through the great
Chicago corn elevators! Hark to the
rolling of the hogsheads of the Gin
einnati pork packers! Enough to eat
and at low prices. Enough to wear
and OF home manufacture. If some
have and some have not, then may
God help those who have to hand over
to those who have not! Clear the
track for the rail trains that rush on
bringing the wheat and the cotton and,
the rice and the barley and the oats
and the hops and the lumber and the
leather and everything for man and
everything for beast.
Lift up your eyes, o nation of Gods
right hand, at the glorious prospeets!I
Build larger your barns for the har-
vests. Dig deeper the watts for the spoiV
OF the vineyards. Enlarge the ware
houses for the merchandise. Multiply
galleries of art for the pictures and
statues. Advance, o nation of Gods
right hand, but remember that nation
al wealth, if unsanctifled is sumptu-
GUS waste, is moral ruin, is magnif:.
cent woe, is splendid rottenness, is
gilded death. Woe to us for the wine
watts If drunkenness wallows in thems
Woe to us for the harvest il greed
sickles them! Woe to us for the mer-
chandise if avarice swallows it! Woe
to us for the cities if misrule walks
them! Woe TO the land if God DEFY
ing crime debauches it! Our only
safety is in more Bibles more church,
es, more free schools, more good men
and more good women, more conse-
Grated printing presses, more of the
glorious gospel of the Son of God
which will yet extirpate all wrongs
and Introduce all blessednecc