The Brookings register. [volume] (Brookings, Brookings County, S.D.) 1903-1971, 1911-07-20
THE WEATHER..

It's bad enough, friends and fellow
citizens Of this sizzling Missouri val
ley, but stop for a moment and con
slider how much worse it might be.
We're worrying over the corn crop,
and the potato crop, and the pastures
and here in the city we're ever
worrying about our lawns and grow
ing bent before our time sprinkling
them.
But consider what We already have
in the way Of crops; not merely the
wheat and oats and alfalfa Of the
present year, but the accumulated
storings and transmutations of the
crops of a dozen years or more. We're
rich. Except for the very thin fringe
of poverty barely discernable in this
region, were beyond the danger of
want. If We of the Missouri valley
should go hungry then the whole
world would starve. We have com
Portable homes and we'll filled barns
and %granaries and more cattle and
hogs than We ourselves, by any gar
gantuan miracle, could possibly con
sumo. The partial loss of a part of
the crops for a single year means no
hardship to US; no deprivation; it is
simply the kind of loss that the pros
porous merchant endures when there
comes to him n bad year out of
twenty; that the successful gambler
suffers when he has four queens
beaten-a mere unpleasant incident of
the game. fortified against by prior
winnings and to be made good by still
greater future winnings.
Suppose some n or half dozen or
hundred of families of us had been
cast down on these same prairies a
hundred years ago, and that this same
pitiless sur were scowling down at
us from the anne pitiless skies! With
no accumulation of wealth, none of
the modern provisions for comfort and
protection, how cruelty different
would be our condition, What pri-
walton, what keenest suffering, would
be ours; how almost beyond hope the
future, With none of the defenses
modern civilization has erected, how
naked we would stand before Mother
Nature in her insane spell of fiendish-
ness! Where now we can, in a mea-
sure, defy her, then, with u families
and fortunes and futures, we would
have been literally at her mercy.
Civilization has done wonderful
things for us, and her b~enefactions
seem to be most in evidence in a sea-
son such as this. She has stored for
to insure against hunger. She has
converted other portions of those
crops, through the magic alchemy of
commerce, into cool and comfortable
homes-and cool and comfortable
bank accounts. She has given us
ice--a blessing beyond computation.
She has placed within our reach
electric fans. She has given us
plumbing and the life saving bathtub,
in even the humblest homes. She has
brought to us the cooling and soothing
|, fruits of the tropics--the melons of
, Florida and Texas and California,
She has given us screens, and taught
us the luxury of sleeping porches. She
has, through safe and speedy and
cheap transportation, brought the cool
places of earth within the easy reach
of scores OF thousands. She has
) taught us sanitation and hygienics
/ and sane living. With her brick and
stone and mortar and artificial venti
lation she has made 1t possible to be
: cool even when the thermometer reg.
listers los degrees Fahrenheit!
Mysterious providence may figure
/, that 1t is best to send an occasional
summer such as this IL only to remind
, us how exceedingly we'll off We are.
And II We are wise, instead OF spend.
ing these days Of binding heat and
blistering drought in despairful cater.
wauling. We will the rather take