Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1923-02-27
-Four Times Ten Is Forty!

Four L mes en- is I orty!
WHEN the temperamental Byron was
w five years younger than The Journal
was on last Saturday morn he wrote,
despairfully:
My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are
gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!
Fancy a cub of five and thirty moping about
in that wintry mood! As for ourselves, this
forty-frst year of a newsful history finds us
in the vernal leaf, grateful for growth, and
glad of part in the adventures of wonder
full world Time as our good friend
Shakespeare used to say, travels in divers
PAGES with divers persons. I'll tell you who
Time ambIes withaI, who Time trots withal,
who Time gallops withal, and who he stands
still withal." Assuredly it is with newspa-
per that he gallops. And what eventful eras
has he covered, what crowded and gusty
nails left behind in these brief forty years
since The Journal saw the light
On February the twenty-fourth, 1888,
when the four-page, seven-column infant that
was then ourselves went futtering forth to its
gracious, godmothering community, there
were only some thirty-nine thousand souls in
Atlasta, and fewer more than fifty million in
all the United States. Telephones were"curi-
osities; the printing craft was pretty much as
Ben Franklin (hail to his blithe spirit!) had
left it, automobiles were well-nigh two dec
AIDES to the future; and had ye editor en-
boldened his imagination to write of flying
machines and radiophones, proper-minded
readers, gathered round the grocer's stove,
would have wagged their boards sorrowful-
wise and said, poor wretch, he's in his cups
gain"
If our Lord Tennyson was right in think
ing, Better fifty years Europe than cycle
Of Cathay," then certainly these last forty
years which it is The Journals fortune to
lave lived, have been richer, not only in me-
chanical development and material progress,
man life than was many century preceding.
Grim struggles and lofty benefactions, wars
terrible to remember, discoveries glorious and
filed with blessing, new freedoms, new aspir-
ings all have marked these little sands of time;
and high above them, like headland beacons
flaming seaward, fresh faith and fresh devo-
ton have been kindled. Occasions there have
been when it seemed to US that the world was
out of joint; no doubt it was, and will be at
many another juncture. The boil weevil has
bitten; clouds have Numbered and poured;
and sometimes in politics, we have seen it,
the heather have ragged and the people
imagined a vain thing. But as often as COM
monwealth and country have been lost, some
how or other they have been saved. Problems
have way of working to solutions of which
we never reckon in advance. Not infrequent-
ly they solve themselves because, as Uncle
Remus would remark, they're "jist 'bleeged
to''-which is but shorter way Of saying,
There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philoso-
phy''
Gentle readers all, great folk and little
folk, good friends to whom we go wherever
Dixie drinks the dew, whether your birthdays
be forty or fourscore, or only as the daffodil S
wind-futtered gold, The Journal greets you
in this dawn of its own New Year. May we
have millions and millions of good NOR
rows together.
Once in a great while we actually meet