The Brownsville daily herald. [volume] (Brownsville, Tex.) 1897-1910, 1909-10-08
Was the Quest Worth the Cost?

While the whole civilized world
! is talking about the discovery of the
North Pole, and the explorers and
their respective adherents and cham
pions have become involved in a re-
criminative and acrimonious cOntrO-
versy, there are certain thoughts
suggested by the subject which have
not been much elaborated.
While men do not withhold the tri-
butte of their admiration for any
display of intelligent bOldness, it is
in such a matter as the search
for the pole admiration for mere
brute courage and capacity to suffer
and endure terrible hardships
1t is not the sublimated and so
to speak, uplifting and exalted ad-
miration which is felt for the man
who dares and risks his life on the
battlefield in defense of his home or
his nations flag.
Perhaps Gilbert ChestertOn, in
late issue of the Illustrated London
News, puts it in too strong terms of
depreciation when he says nobody
cares a brass button whether the
North Pole has been discovered or
not, but there is no doubt that many
people think that, if Cook or Peary,
or both did in fact find the pole or go
to that point on the earth's surface
which is defined by that term, he has
not achieved any great good for hu-
mainly.
AS Mr. Chesterton says, it is
mere point. You can not put a pole
on it, or a flag You can not bring
1t back. You can not surely locate the
spot in a trodden waste of ice, yet
hundreds, maybe thousands of valu-
able lives have been lost for a point
that is not there when you get it,
as the fact has been quantity put.
Ships have been crushed in the ice;
millions of dollars have been spent;
the husbands of wives and fathers
of children have been drowned or
forzen or starved, and many a man
who might have been a valuable
member of society has lain down
AMID the indescribable desOlation
aid gloom of a frozen sea and
a rayless night to await inevitable
death, all for the sake of a quest as
wild and useless as would be that
for the center of the earth.
The best that Peary can say in
defense of his twenty-three years of
hardship and expatriation is that
while any part of the earth is IN
explored it is a challenge to man to
explore it
This means, if it means anything,
that man must not take a dare from
Nature, if he starves and freezes
and suffers worse than death for an
idea, an abstraction
There is yet another thought
which comes to many a man: Peary
and Cook both left wives and chill
dren to whom their first obligation
was due. Peary, at least, did not
have to go to earn money, because
he had comfortable salary and an
office of honor; but both appear
to have put the discovery of that
point which they calculated was the
pole above wife and children and
lived in condition of revolving
filth, and slept two or three togeth-
er in bags of skins, and spent weeks
and months in semi-darkness, and
ate seal fat, whale blubber and
frozen dog meat, and risked their
lives and took the chance of never
seeing wives and children again.
leaving them to suffer the anguish
of uncertainty, anxiety and fear.
This may have been heroic, but mil
lions of men who would charge a
thousand cannon and dance adown
the road to death as to a festival in
defense of their homes and friends
believe it was the supremacy of fol-
ly and would no more do it than they
would commit suicide Houston
Chronicle.