The weekly Alaska citizen., 1918-04-08

Friday evening at Masonic Tenn. pie, as special feature during the Red Cross yarn fund dance, Mrs. Frank B. Hall appeared as the first woman Four-Minute speaker in Fair banks. While not delivering a speech in the common acceptance of the term, she delivered from memory patriotic and inspiring article by J. Keeley. published not long ago in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
 When Mrs. Hall was requested a few days ago to make a Four-Minute speech on subject of her own choosing, she was undecided on which of the very many important matters now being brought to the attention of the public to make an address. Glancing through maga- zines and newspapers she was at tracted by colored supplement- showing a small boy holding in his hand tin soldier and by his side a toy cannon. Perhaps it was be- cause her own little boy has tin soldiers that she stopped to read the article accompanying the illus. l tration. At any rate, when she had finished, she felt that it was as timely and up-to-date as anything she could handle, and at once con- mitted it to memory. Mrs. Hall re- ceived great ovation, and made a splendid impression with her clear, well modulated voice and faultless enunciation, and it is hoped she will soon again be heard in public.
 The article, entitled Dust Off That Little Tin Soldier" is herewith given in full as delivered by Mrs. Hall:
 Scour the rust and brush the dust from the little toy soldier. He has been standing patiently on the shelf for years and years, awaiting the day when the little boy would be al lowed to come and play with him again. It is time to square accounts with the neglected soldier.
 Time was years ago when the lit tie boy played with him constantly, naming him Napoleon, or Stephen Decatur, or General Grant, or Gen eral Lawton, but that was the time when his father and mother told him stories of soldier heroes and brave deeds and of gallant men dy- ing for their flag.
 One day a spectacled woman and learned gentleman in a frock coat and frown came stalking into the nursery and took the tin soldier away.
 Little Toy
 Soldier Couldn't Answer.
 "Shame!" they told his parents "Science and psychology will not permit you to give military toys to your child. Throw that horrid sym, bol of greed and blood away. If the child plays with it he will grow up into a cruel, bloodthirsty butcher You are educating him through his toys to be an arrogant, hard-hearted militarist He will be pugnacious vicious, depraved. Never bring that deadly token of cruelty into the nursery again"
 The little toy soldier couldn't speak He couldn't even console the little boy who wept bitterly and kicked stoutly at the scientific games and namby-pamby animal toys that the psychologists put down beside him.
 The soldier went on the shelf, and soon the dust had made gray the cheery cerulean of his coat and the brilliant orange of his trousers. For a generation as things went in the man-world he peeped out and saw strange toys beside the new little boys who came and grew up, won derful mechanical things that would make the child advanced" and "ef- ficient," the severe spinster and the frowning high dome" said.
 He was forgotten. Wars were dead. The world was past warning. The new order had set in. Industry and commerce were the watchwords. Heroism was naught but a barbarous, mistaken piece of foolishness. Patri- otism was piece of amiable idi- ocy, practiced by only the old-fash- toned, the simple and stupid ones. "No one progressive believes nova days in that nonsense about our flag being better than any other flag" he heard the scientists say one day, and his little tin heart dumped madly and he strained at his mold ing musket to have at them with his tiny bayonet. Bitter tears of helpless rage streaked his cheeks. But what could he do in great, rich, lethargic. pasty world?
 So he stood, faithful to Andy Jack son and Phil Sheridan and Marshal Ney and Lord Bobs" and Teddy"