The Republican journal. [volume] (Belfast, Me.) 1829-current, 1915-08-05
One Hundred Years of Profit
and Loss.

0llu LOSSs
Perhaps if the affair we're prospect in
stead of retrospect, the world of 1918
would not show so much better to that
world of 1875. Would that bygone date
be overawed or overwhelmed by the sur
passing beauty and sublimity of ours? If
1915 could speak to 1915. would it be in
terms of just subordination, spiritual or
material? Leaving out the long tale of
comforts and conveniences which this
western part of the world began~the tell
ing of and has carried forward to no
imaginable close, what have we gained
over that far-off date of 1915? Is it much
to brag of that after hundred years
Europe is again plunged in universal
war more hideous and atrocious than
that which it had just emerged from?
Is the German Kaiser an improvement
on the French Emperor?
We have not, indeed, got much beyond
Washington's ideal of neutrality. He
left Mr.. Wilson little to imagine of that
in circumstances of much greater diff
Guilty. But in those other matters, dearer
to the heart, our 1915 is far ahead of our
1915. Not only is chattel slavery an evil
dream of the past, but industrial slavery
is greatly tempered, and there are vision
aries who fancy our waking from it alto
gether. In the minor morals, which we
will suppose are the manners and GUS
toms, there is much, very much, to
choose between 1915 and 1915. A berth
in Pullman sleeper, especially one over
the trucks, is not unalloyed luxury; but
what about sitting up all night in stage
coach, floundering through mud and mire
from dark till dawn, and arriving at the
breakfast of wayside tavern? Surely
walking forward through at least five
coaches and furnishing till you can get a
place in the dining-car is better than that.
If the instance is too crucial, any reader
can supply an abundance of others. But
it is not in creature comforts so much as
in things of the mind and soul that 1915
can look back upon 1915 with complac-
ency.
1t NAV be contended with a great deal
of reason that in the matter OF public
men we cannot claim equality with 1915.
We have hardly any such statesmen as
that time could boast, but we have
great many more statesmen, and what
we want in quality we more than make
up in quantity. Generally speaking, our
public men do not write as good style
as the public men wrote then, but per-
haps a good style is not now so much
needed, general education having gone
SO far with us all that we are able to dis
pense with good style in them. We Tar
surpass 1915 IN the arts and letters, both
qualitatively and quantitatively. We
have, or have lately lost, far greater
sculptors and architects, if not painters;
and in the article of novelists there is no
possible comparison. We have rather got
past having great poets, but We are by
way of having them again, we believe,
and in 1915 they had in a manner none. In
the whole book-worlG they had only one
big-seller, such as we have or have had
by the dozen. Webster's spelling book
sold million or more, and it must be
owned that it was better literature than
most of our fiction. Webster's diction-
spelling went, the public mind seemed
ripper for it then than now. The good
Father Noah was able to stamp the out
of all the Latin forms where English
reverence for the misspelling of the Nor
man French had put it.
In religion we have no longer the wild
revivals of hundred years ago, but an
actual evangelist is able to repeat the
emotioning of the camp-meetlng in our
largest cities, and probably others could
do the like. In the meantime we have
got rid of the terrible unscriptural New
England Sabbath in New England itself
and we do not drink strong waters nearly
so much, or chew tobacco, in the North
at least. To be sure, some of our women
have tried to take up smoking cigarettes,
but that is not so bad as chewing tobacco
or rubbing snuff.
To turn again to our material superior
tiles, there was not one sky-scraper in
the whole length and breadth of the land
in 1915, not one building heated by steam
or lighted by electricity; and now look at
themi Our women in 1915 still felt the
Greek impulse of the French Empire in
their dress, and they did not totter about
on heels as high and as creative of callosl-
ties as those we now see martyrlzlng the
feet of fashion. Except in the Land of
Steady Habits, as Connecticut was called,
our actual divorce license was unknown,
and the marriage license was more fire.
quent. People married sooner if not in
more haste than now, and used longer
leisure in repenting; but whether this
was better, upon the whole, is doubtful.
Certainly people think, or at least talk,
more seriously about marriage in 1915
than in 1875; they seem not to have heard
of eugenies then, and our time, until al
Europe went about carrying off the
effects of them, seemed to hear of little
else. w. D. Howells in aarper's Maya.
zine for August.