Woodruff County news., 1901-11-30


 Now, come to speak of the con- quests of the pen. This is the sym bol of all intellectuality. The paint CTS pencil and the sculptor's chisel and the philosophers laboratory are all brothers to the pen, and there fore this may be used as a symbol of intellectual advau ucement. There are those disposed to decry every thing American. Having seen Mel rose and Glastonbury by moonlight, they never behold among us an im- pressive structure; or, having strolled through the picture galleries of the Louvre and the Luxembourg, they are disgusted with our academies of art. It makes me sick to hear these people who have been to Europe come home talking with a foreign accent and aping foreign customs and talk ing of moonlight on castles by the sea. I think the biggest fool in the country is the travelled fool
 But, considering the youth of our nation and the fact that compara- lively few persons devote themselves entirely to literature, I think we | the progress of our American litera- ture. As historians have we not had in the past such men as Bancroft and Prescott, as essayists Irving and Emerson, as jurists Story and Mar shall and Kent, as theologians Ed wards and Hodge, as poets Pierre pont and Sprague and Longfellow and Bryant, as sculptors Powers and such men as West and Cole and h. man and Kensett? And among the living Americans what galaxies of in- tellectual splendor and power! Ed ward Eggleston and Will Carleton and Mark Twain and John Kendrick Bangs and Marion Harland and Mar garet Sangster and Stockton and Churchill and Hoplinson Smith and Irving Bacheller 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 others, some of them fixed stars and | some meteors.
 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 intelligently discuss political topics long before they have seen ballot box or, leased by some poetic muse, can compose articles for the newspapers. Philosophy and astronomy and chem istry 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 more practical knowledge than in the 400,- 900 volumes of ancient Alexandria, and education is possible for the most in- digent, and no legislature or congress for the last 50 years has assembled which has not had in it rail splitters and farmers and drovers or men who have been accustomed to toiling with the hand and the foot.
 The grainfelds 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 crowd ed with breadstuffs. Hark to the rush. ing of the wheat through the great | Chicago corn elevators! Hark to the rolling of the hogsheads of the Cincin- natl 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 1 everything for man and everything for beast.
 Lift up your eyes, o nation of Gods right hand, at the glorious prospects, Build larger your barns for the har- vests. Dig deeper the vats for the spoil of the vineyards. Enlarge the warehouses for the merchandise. Null tiply galleries of art for the pictures and statues. Advance, nation of Gods right hand, but remember that national wealth, if unsanctified is sumptuous waste, is moral ruin, is magnificent woe, is splendid rotten ness, is gilded death. Woe to us for the wine vats if drunkenness wallows in i them! Woe to us for the harvest if greed sickles them! Woe to us for the merchandise if avarice swallows it! Woe to us for the cities if Inisrule walks them! Woe to the land if God | defving crime debauches it! Our only | safetyisin more Bibles, more churches, more free schools, more good men and more good women, more consecrsted printing presses, more of the glorious | Gospelof the Son of God, which will get extirpate all wrongs and introduce all blessedness.
 But the preachers on Thanksgiving