The Washington herald., 1920-02-17
In the Linelight
By George Perry Morris.

Thomas A. Edison has about as
high percentage of admiration by
: his fellow countrymen as any man
can legitimately claim. Moreover
he Is a world-figure, about whose
policies, practices and aims few
| man dispute. On his seventy-third
birthday he rightly has received the
formal praise of the head of the
nation. Considered from only one
aspect. he long will remain the out
standing example in our national
history Of a discoverer and inven-
tor who was self-made and not the
product of the technical schools
Prodigious has been his capacity for
work. for concentration on the goal
| of his desire, and for application
of science to the industrial arts and
the increment of the worlds wealth.
No passenger en- route to New York
from Washington over the Pennsyl-
vania Railroad should fail to salute
mentally if not physically the viii
lage of Menlo Park, N. J., where
this wizard first gathered around
him his working STAFF. 1t was a
humble place comAared with the
vast present plants at Newark,
Schenectady and Lynn, but it will
have its place in history.
The more the history of the south
western region of the country is
studied. whether by archaeoIogists,
ethnologists, writer's on ecclesias-
tical art, delivers into political evo-
luton, and probers of social origins,
the richer the mine is found to be.
What went on in that region in the
political and social fields of activity
during the period between l74O and
1890 has been thoroughly investi-
gated by Archibald Henderson, of
the University of North Carolina,
whose reputation as a man of let
ters was long since made by his
books on G. Bernard Shaw and the
modern dramatic trend. He teaches
his pupils mathematics; but his
avocations are many, and one of
them he has followed in this valuable
monograph, soon to be published.
Together with other men of a
modern point of view on the faculty
of this university, he is making it
an outstanding vital, educational in
stitution of. the New South.
Still they come, the Britons who
want to fill our itching ears with
their opinions, and who in return
want our ducats. Onb day before
yesterday 1t was Lord Dunsany and
John Drinkwater. Yesterday it was
Gilbert Cannan and w. B. Yeats.
Siegfried Sassoon. Housman has
Siegfried Sassoon. Houseman has
been in the country before. but
Sassoon never. In some respects his
verse born Of the war and of the
days of futile reconstruction has
been the most UNUSUAL sent forth
by any man calling himself a Brit
ish subject. 1t drips with the waters
of disillusionment and burns with
the fires of hatred of militarism and
imperialism and the cannon fod-
der" theory of European statecraft,
a theory that he and the "Tommies"
and other fighters against Germany
by no means consider overthrown
by the outcome of the war or by
the conditions of the Paris Peace
Covenant.
The litigation which has arisen
over the film rights to reproduction
of Lew Wallace's Ben Hur" brings
into prominence the son OF that In
diana author and publicist. Out of
this vivid story of the historic past
the whilom diplomat and soldier
made for himself and his publishers
much money: and no one who has
read Ben Hur' can fail to perceive
the possibilities that it has screened
a movie of the spectacular type,
SURE from the start of the patron
agd of the hundreds of thousands
of readers who came under its spell
in the days of its unchallenged
vogue.