The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-07-05
REAL 1NDrP EVIDENCE DAY

| AA4C RuASCAGn0 anu CAA4ONAOaAANoS AAiS torian will record that Independence Day, 1907, was in many marked ways an improvement upon any that had preceded it. The more or less common substitution of horns and bells at night while by no means a perfect solution of the problem did inject into the cele- bration a more joyous and humorous note. That fewer cannons disturbed the nervous, the tired and the sick suggests that the educational move ment which has for its purpose the rescue of the day from the domination of the reckless and lawless is pro- gressing finely. It is not too much to hope that in few years a rational ob- servance of the day will be the uni- versal rule and that in consequence the new corners among us will pot look at the older Americans as people with out poise.
 The Hartford Courant presents ex- cellently the point which we have at last succeeding in reaching in these words: For many years the Fourth of July literally bossed this country. It took us in hand for week before- hand, only to burst out on the Day It. self into a wild, unregulated, and very nearly unlimited saturnalia of noise, danger and destruction. We smiled through 1t all atably; hosts of us actually enjoyed 1t. We blew off our fingers and burned our buildings, and reckoned that our patriotism was still an estimahle asset In both meanings of that word. To the for eigner 1t was an amazing and almost unaccountable exhibition of childish recklessness; to us 1t was the Day of days, in which we did all the wild things that We had carefully abstalned from doing during the rest of the year. We ourselves simply went off, just as all the explosive things that we could lay our hands on did. That cor- ner has now been turned, and we have taken the Fourth of July in hand, as we have other things. The idea of doing things remains, but the idea of having things done by rule has come in. Definitions have been made more precise; we do not lump buildings burned and hands blown off on the Fourth of July as patriotism but reckon them to be social losses and private injuries, just as we do or other days"
 The satisfactory feature of 1t all is that this improved condition of things has come as a result of better under standing of the dignity of the country and the significance of the thing cele- brated. Making noise in any way that suggests itself does not appeal to the younger generation as 1t dId to the older, while the introduction of rapid transit as a means of enioving holiday outings has made the new en- 1oyment correspondingly attractive. The city of Middletown mis- understood this uplifting forcc Tor education when 1t uu- dertook to enforce a quiet and mora dignifed reception of the day. As consequence of the determination of the local administration to construe ,ltersI- " the laws of the State and to en- force indiscriminately the conduct they have in mind Mtddletown had the no,s- lest and most riotous night Independ- ence eve 1t has seen for wears. A peo- pie cannot be led that way to give up practices which have come down to them from the past They can be led to better conduct, as they have been unconseiously here, but the moment they are driven up go their fists and out go their feet This is a very hu- man people and the best way 10 care for them is to reason with them in a human way, whether the point at issue is the observance of Independence Dav | or the protection of the highways.