The Dillon herald. [volume] (Dillon, S.C.) 1894-????, 1911-06-15

Possibly there was not so much
graft and corruption in the early
days of the republic, but bear in
mind that most of its early citizens
were banded together against enc
mics; that they had just begun to
see real liberties ahead, and, furth-
er. that the biggest of the early
people as compared to some of the
orergrown towns towns of the pres
ent
Could such men as Benjamin
franklin and Thomas Jefferson have
had the advantage OF knowledge
that has been presented as a gift
to the young men of the present
generation they would have been
far greater men than they were
They built a nation not because of
the good old days.
You will notice that the gentle
men who really lived before the
telephone and telegraph are not in
the least slow about making use of
them.
No father, however strong he
may believe in the superiority of
the past, will sit idly by and see a
child die of diphtheria when he can
get doctor to come with the anti
toxin that will save the child's life.
And in the future while there
may be many who will look back
upon these days of ours as both
old and good, they will all avail
themselves of the aeroplane when
they want to take a pleasure ride
or to journey swiftly and safely
across the continent.
Here and there out of the past
stands an occasional colossus like
shakespeare man whose work
has never been approached by a
modern. But great genius is a
thing apart from ordinary human
achievement. 1t makes it's own
laws and is not indebted either to
the age in which it exists nor the
people that surround it.
Shakespeare was not Shakes
peare because he lived in the days
Elizabeth. Had that same mind
been given to a man of to-day the
thoughts that it produced would be
as wonderful. Shakespeare could
have written as powerful of Napol-
con or of Washington as he did of
julius Caesar or Richard the Third
lie could have put men in battle
ships and rIade them as interest
ing as the soldiers he mounted on
horseback. A captain of industry
would to him have been as enter
tanning a rascal as Falstaff 1t was
less than hundred years ago that
the commandant OF Fort Dearborn,
on the site of the present wonder
full city of Chicago, wrote to the
secretary of war that the country
round about was incapable of main
tanning any considerable population,
and requesting that the fort be
abandoned. Those were the good
old days. Ask any Chicagoean if
he would prefer them to the pres
ent.
whether we want to or not, we
of the present must go ahead. There
is to be no turning backward. We
may read and study the past, we
may profit by what it has accom-
plished, but only because it gives
us an understanding of what is to
be done in the future
When the irrigation systems of
the West have brought life and
wealth to the dead deserts and
when billions of dollars have been
found in resources now undreamed
of, there will still be those who
bark back TO other times and who
speak of civilization, as we know
it now, as all that it ought to be.
Civilization as We know it now!
With men and women and chill
dren dying in tenemnets for want
Of the necessities OF life, working
girls crowded into fire traps where
no intelligent business man would
even store goods, with many dis
eases still so little understood that
all the best physician can do is to
sit by and let them take their
course, while the PATIENTS vitality
decides whether or not he shall pull
through.
There are many things that are
wrong with our civilization-many
that seem almost as bad as those in
the brave days of old.
Yet read history and you will
discover that we have advanced
marvelously that we no longer
hold human beings in slavery that