The Wallace miner. [volume] (Wallace, Idaho) 1907-current, 1922-07-13

gambled it all away seemed wonder
ful TO the boys who ignored a mat
ter-Of-fact stock raiser or dairy man
who could leave substantial portion
TO an his grandchildren.
Gold mining is a great industry.
The minis and the trades which EN-
ploy gold are important but to all this
must be added romantic effect. II,
according to the old saying, "all is not
gold that gltters," we may say that
some gold merely glitters, and does
nothing to increase the worlds leglt-
innate business or to add to the COM
fort OF man, woman OF child.
Faneiful Free Traders.
To a greater degree than is known
free trade writer's and speakers play
on the charm OF long distant shores,
of the great seas on the other side OF
the globe-they almost product the
ecect of the mermaid who sits upon
a rock TO comb her long tresses with
a golden comb. At times they cover
wild departures from reasoning and
lamentable collapses of fact with or
it seems that trade must prosper in
proportion to the distance traversed.
There is fanciful light that belongs
to the deep sea or the distant land.
that is to them what fireworks have
been to speakers who were uneasy
about their data.
Nearly every one likes to hear of
the man who goes down to the sea in
ships and of the vessel that walks the
water like a thing of life. A cannery.
a coal yard or a shoe factory has no
special interest save to those who
work in it or who expect to profit by
money invested therein. But a dis
tant ship is a poetic object and the
charm is never wholly lost although
ships are like terrestrial establish
ments their conditions, moral and
physical. may display almost infinite
variety Probably every child and
nearly every grown person is con-
scious of the fascination of an object
that has come from the antipodes.
This feeling will never die.
In the days of King Solomon the
ships brought gold, silver, ivory. apes
and peacocks; now they bring strange
things we never see except as part of
newly landed cargoes. Solomon did
not regard the temple as fifty adorned
until he had made a molten sea, ten
cubts from the one brim to the other,
and standing upon twelve oxen. In
poetry from the Greeks to Byron and
Tennyson the sea is always sound
ing Whenever man is thoughtful or
devotional some allusion to the sea is
likely to fall from his lips. The dawn
is more glorious, the sunset more ma
jestic, if we see it from the shore of
the great ocean
Always for the Foreigner.
A free trade speech is often made
up of abstract sentiment from a Ii
brary and concrete arguments in the
interest of British or German manu-
facturers. If the speaker is adroit he
insinuates, if he is audaciOus he as
serts that foreign commerce is prefer
able to home trade, and he may even
persuade some of his auditors that
money yields a larger return simply
because goods are sent abroad. Bitter
to his soul is it to reflect that the
greatest of all free traders Adam
Smith. was frank enough to say that
money invested in cargoes to be sent
to the far east might not return for
more than a year while the man who
deals with his neighbors may gain
repeated profits on the same capital
within a month.
For centuries it was safe to say
Land divides. and water connects"
The sea linked America with Europe
with the Alleghanies divided the east
from the west Modern transporta-
ton has joined the seaboard city with
the mountain village has bound the
prairie to the cotton belt and to the
Golden Gate. We have grown so used
to this that we do not wonder at it,
We take it for granted, and the ro-
mantle sixteen-ye ar-Old fancies that
the golden age of the republic was the
day in which all Salem or Newbury
port was excited because a ship had
come in with cargo of pepper. The
output of our factories and the freight
traffic of our railroads on the dullest
day of the year would have dazed the
seamen whom Buchanan Read saw in
the Mediterranean harbOr But the
speculative mind infers that gold must
mean wealth, and the free trader
passes over the possibility that a long
voyage may end in a typhoon and the
loss or all on board while a humdrum
at home may pay a modest
divided for twenty years running
Touched 4ba I,doa For . HALF