The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1913-09-27
Festivals.
This is the age of cities.

by James Watts steam engine, by modern sys-
TENS of communication, transportation and n.y.
giene. Such cities as we have about the earth
were never dreamed of until hundred years ago.
Cities have changed the complexion of the world,
they have transformed politics, industry and Sc
cial life
When George Washington took his oath of Of
flee only four in every hundred lived in towns of
ten thousand or over; today every other man is
q town tweller.
When Lorenzo the Magnificent built Florence
over into the modern Athens" the richest and
most cultured city in the world was so insanitary,
disease ridden and plague stricken, more citi-
zens died each year than were born Consequent
ly the city was constantly compelled to recuper-
ate itself from the country. To live in town was
to carry ones life in ones hands. Cities were
spawning places of vice, crime and corruption.
No one stayed long enough to know anybody else
or to learn to think of the town as his home. He
was either a traveller or a transient in almost
every
In all ancient lteratures cities have served
as the very symbol of vice and crime Babylon,
Nineveh, Tyre and Rome; these very names carry
with them the suggestion of all that perverts and
ruins. The city was the rotting spring of corrup
ton which sent it's venal blood, poisoned, i'm
pure and polluting throughout the fabric of So
ciety; the country sent back fresh arterial blood
carrying freightage of health and strength.
The vast multitudes of the race lived under
the skies close to the rocks and primitive soil.
They kept companionship with the stars and
learned to familiarize with wild things breth-
rem. The ever recurring cycles of the seasons
kept them in constant remembrance of the ever
lasting flux of the world and barred before them
the stern but kindly powers of Nature.
Out of mans gratitude for harvest for
cape from peril, for happy families and growing
children, out of his of the vastness of the
universe about him sprang the Festival. Festi-
walls were the expressions of the poetry of life
and the joy of simple people.
Country jewellers made festivals; expressions
of overlooking emotions; city dwellers made
shows and pageants, expressions of pomp and
vanity.
When the Nineteenth Century dawned the
millions who, through an evolution in society be-
yond their CONTROL found themselves driven in
to the city with its roof of smoke, it's fever and
it's everlasting uproar, missed above all things
the poetry the mystery and the peace of the age
old country life The passing of the seasons ceas-
ed to interest them, time and harvest came
and went unnoticed. All over the civilized world
poets began to chant the death of poetry, ro-
engulfed all that had fed. the soul of with
romance and made the world place of and
wonder.
Men began to say that while God had made
the country man had made the city and had made
ILL.,
But today everywhere change COM
ing Modern science has created sanitation. 1t
is found that smoke filled atmosphere, reeking
and garbage filled alleys, impure water, cpl
denies, vice, crime and corruption not neces-
sarily part of city life at all. And because of
modern hygiene the city man has caught up with
the country man in vitality and health. No long
er is the city driven to the country for recruits
to fill up its plague decimated ranks. Families
are taking root growing, gaining ground and
propagating themselves in the thickest areas of
the greatest cities.
The result is that the city dweller is no long
er transient in the big town. The big town has
become his home He has taken root there.
1t is chiefly because man has become at home
in the city that we are seeing all over the world
the movement for municipal reconstruction and
good city government. City government no
longer merely affects our business interests, it
affects our lives and our families and our homes
And life rooted in the town is beginning to
flower forth into poetry of old. Romance is
not dead. City lie mas It's own poetry, Its own
mystery, its own revelation of the awe and Won
der of life. Sirius glows down upon us here as
well as upon lonely mountain tops Spring flows
along paved streets a swell as along meadow
brooks. Autumn burns maple foliage as
brightly as the beech covered hillsides. We are
becoming acquainted with each other, becoming
acclimated to the town. and beginning to find all
the interests of life blossom out here.
The Fall Festival is a revelation of the JOY
and poetry of city life. It is prose poem OF