The Washington times., 1920-05-25

An Adopted Pet Child.
The Hideous Coverlet.
"PIker" Profiteering.
Take II Spiders.
By ARTHUR BRISBANE.

PopuC&u ruler. hnOx, once Dec
retsry Of State, 10 Pennsylvanis's
pct child. 20 Penrose says, and he
has ths political right to name the
When Pennsylvania voted re-
Gently with no names printed on
the tickets, those that wrote In
the name Of Hiram Johnson for
President were double those that
wrote the name Of Knox. II looks
as though Pennsylvania were in
ehned to ADOPT fsvorite child.
Teufelsdroeckh, in Csrlyle's
Sartor Resartus, locking down on
the sleeping city from his watch
tower:
"Oh, under that hideous cover
let OF vapors, and qualifications
and unimsginable gases, what q
fermenting-vst lies simmering and
hid! The joyful and the sorrow
3ul are there; men are dying there,
men are being born; men are pray
1ng--on the other side Of q brick
partition men are cursing; and
around them all is the vast, void
night In the condemned
cells, the pulse of life beats
tremulous and faint, and blood
shot eyes look out through the
darkness which is around and
within, for the light Of stern
last morning. Six men are to be
hanged on the morrow; comes no
hammering from the Rabenstein?"
II Teufelsdroeckh could lift the
'hideous coverlet" that hides the
inside Of Sing Sing prison, he
would see in the death house two
men waiting to be killed by cleo
trcity. Two in the death house
are dying Of tuberculosis. Two of
the three condemned have never
seen a visitor since they entered
the death house. One, Walter
Levandowski, asked as a special
favor that he be killed tomorrow,
Wednesday, because tomorrow
will be his twenty sixth birthday.
In your effort to understand
the strangest thing, human ma
ture, how would you explain
Levandowski? Because he has
had no visitors in his death cell,
he asks to be killed a day ahead
to make sure that on his birthday
two visitors will comc-thc cleo
trician and death.
Samuel Gompers was opposed
to any political labor party. Now
in the American Federationist, Of
fetal organ Of labor, he declares
that Congress must be overthrown
by labor's vote, because Of its fail
ure to legislate for the people. 1t
is an important announcement.
He mentions twenty-one great
corporations that have profiteered
to the tune Of four hundred and
1thirty-five per cent, which means
that each year they have earned
more than four times their entire
We talk of landlord 'profteering.
Suppose a landlord owning a
house worth one hundred thousand
dollars charged four hundred and
thirty-fve thousand dollars a
year rent. He would then be max
ing as much on his property as
the profiteer corporations are on
theirs.
You can boil down the high cost
of living proposition into few
words, "The middlemen steal too
much"
Railroad brotherhoods, in their
official report, show that a barrel
of flour for which a workman
paid $14.50 in 1917 cost
$3.50 after charging against it
not only what the farmer got, but
freight, interest, and all the ex-
penses of the miller. ca.
When a farmer gets $3.50 for a
bushel of wheat and somebody
else gets S. for rolling out the
barrel of flour there is something
wrong. Intelligent government,
if it would take its mind off Ar
menia and Mesopotamia for half
an hour, could do something to
remedy the situation.
Greeks are occupying Thrace,
the country that produced the
mother of Themistocles. No
wonder the Greeks want it. Bull
Carians and Turks that lived
there, peasants that have worked
the soil for generations, are turned
out and block the roads with their
Ox-carts.
In these days of possessing and
dispossessing, re-making boundary
lines and setting up of little ma
tions, it would be well for states
men Of Washington and Europe to
read again Guizot's History of
Civilization, and see what always
happens when too many little ma
tions try to live side by side.
Or statesmen might avoid read
ing Guizot's rather heavy style
by putting fourteen small spiders
in a bottle, returning at the end
. of forty-eight hours to find one fat
spider and thirteen dead ones.
Bolshevik Russia is registering
all men between sixteen and fifty
years of age, all women between
fifteen and forty. Each tells just
what he or she does by real work
to increase the wealth Of the ma
ton. Those who are not at work