Evening times-Republican. [volume] (Marshalltown, Iowa) 1890-1923, 1906-12-03
WHO WOULD GO BACK EIGHTY YeARsa

WHV WUUlU w ONON e'u'
An old banker in Springfield Missouri
reviewing his eighty-hine years OF lire
concludes that he would like to go back
eighty years and live under the condi-
lions that then obtained. He declares
that cooking nowadays Is far inferior
to the cuisine of that older time, that
& wives we're better, young people more
polite, old ones more accommodating
and men more honest. Wives were
better trained and kept buster. satan
who finds employment for idle hands
& was forestalled by necessity in the
good old days when women were SO
busy tina, the devils job.was a sinecure
Old Mr.. Holland is Disguised with the
world as it is and says he wants to
go back
Old Mr.. Holland Is precisely where
& his grandfather was eighty-nine years
ago and where his great great grand
father was ninety years before That.
He Is looking at the world thru eyes
y
whose vision has not expanded with
the expansion of the world. He is old
and out of it it, He sees younger men
taking by strength and right of son-
quest the place he took in the strength
of his youth and it grinds. IT Is easier
for q king to die than to abdicate his
throne. And old Mr.. Holland has been
forced to abdicate. He is honest but
he sees things as they were, not as they
are. His point of view is that OF tho
t.iscrowned king.
HIS is mistaken also about what he
wants to do He doesn't want TO go
back to the days of hand looms and
fireplaces and COW hide boots. He Is
old and Graves comfort. The radiator
s in his bed room is an ever present joy.
The warm underwear and sheltsring
overshoes that were denied his youth
are things he couldn't get along with
tout now. He would die of pneumonia
before the week was out. The free
schools that educated his children and
are building up citizenship, the state
institutions that are caring for the I'M
fortunate and helpless, these and half
Hundred other things that were scarce
ly dreamed of when Holland was nine
years old are part Of what he must lose
for himself and humanity when he
would swing the world back eighty of
Its annual revolutions.
In those days poorhouses were hells
and insane asylums torture cham bersa
Then working man toiled from sun to
sun for -four shillings or bushel OF
wheat The corn and cattle and hogs
thar have made Missouri and the then
unknown Trans Mississippi would have
lived out the ordinary course of nature
and died by the wayside before they
reached the eastern markets. Mr. Hol-
lands kick on existing conditions. that
m ght be read in California and Maine
thirty hours after it's publication. would
have been week reaching st. Louis
and two months from Maine It would
have been read at night by the lights
of a taliow candle. Go3to. Mr.. Holland,
you would be the first to kick it you
We're obliged to live as your parents
lived.
Mr.. Holland and the other men who
profess to believe that honesty has
vanished are wrong in their conclu-
sion. There is more individual hon.
esty today than ever before in the his
tory of the world. This is big world
with more rogues but with more hon
est men to catch them. The great pulse
of the people beats true. We are more
charitable, more humanity. helpful, mora
honest and wiser than our forbears.
otherwise society would fail and per-
ish and government cease to endure.
The world can not stand still.
No one wants to go back to the con-
ditions of hundred years past What
is, the matter of old Mr.. Holland is
that he wants to live eighty years more
and knows he can't do it.