The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1912-09-02
BY ESTHER GRIFFIN WHITE.

Boil it down and extract it's essence
And you may or may not find out
it's significance.
There's a lot of stuff handed out
over the chautauqua footlights in in.
stance.
But what does it mean?
Governor Glenn, of North Carolina
for example, yesterday afternoon.
Undoubtedly he said a number of
common sense things that were good
to be said.
It's good to get three or four thou
sand persons together and tell them
that the integrity of the nation de-
ponds upon the training of its youth.
To point out parental responsible,
ties.
And to arraign parental laxness,
neglect and disregard of domestic and
civic duty.
This was, and always is, one of the
best things that can happen to a
community.
For wholesome and sometimes un
palatable truths are rammed home
with force greater through it's means
of pleasant compulsion.
A dose of castor oil is not less
efficacious because it is administered
with orange juice.
And such discourses as those OF
Governor Glenn are none the less
effective because their drastic nature
is mitigated through the medium OF
humour.
What he said about the civic duty OF
the nation toward it's women and
children in his arraignment of those
modern industrial conditions which
menaced the physical and mental de-
velopment of succeeding generations
was fine.
For this evil social state cannot be
animadverted upon too often or too
insistently.
But some of his other utterances
savored of the merely oratorical.
And did not show indications of any.
thing but a surafce and conventional
examination into facts.
His remarks on the subject of di.
vorce, to illustrate, were ineffective
And banal.
1t is the easiest thing in the world
to get up on a platform and say, in
a portentous tone, that 1000 divorces
have been granted within a given
time.
And that it is because women want
to shirk the responsibilities of mar
riage and children.
That the modern woman is a para
site. An anomaly in nature. Trying
to sidestep the performance of her
function in the scheme of nature and
the part designed for her in the or
ganization of society.
You can hear this almost any place.
In churches for one, where a preju.
diced clergy pound the dust out of the
pulpit cushions to enforce their point.
A point based on false premises and
followed with misleading argument
1t might be asked in passing, by the
way, what the chautauqua orators and
the college professors and the preach
ers and the magazine writer's and the
sociologists and the psychologists
would do if it wasn't for the women.
For the latter are the stock in
trade of 'em all.
If they're not abusing and analysing
and arraigning the women, they're
sneering at and ridiculing and advis.
ing them.
And woman gets it on every hand.
Both coming and going, to use a
phrase of the street.
Anyway you fix it, the women get
it in the neck.
Glenn, yesterday, made a pretense
of putting the men through their rep.
rehensible paces-after he had skinned
the women with much neatness and
dispatch-but it was all a bluff.
Maybe he thought he meant it.
But he really didn't.
Because he's a man
And all men are at one in their
attitude toward the feminine factor.
No matter what they say.
To return, however
Governor Glenn's references to di-
vorce showed nothing but a desire to
make an oratorical climax and to