Evening star., 1927-09-01
BACKGROUND OF EVENTS
BY PAUL Y. COLLINS.

live longer in peace and silence than
in a neryeracklng hubbub.
1t is amazing how one may get
used to noises and shut them out
of his conscious attention. Yet they
still tap his nerves. An officer in
the late war was billeted directly
across a narrow street in French
village, opposite a railroad track on
which one of those French switch
engines was strutting up and down
the track all night, every night. and
all it's steps were marked by shrieking.
ear-piercing screeches of its whistle
But the tired soldier slept through the
sauealing as if it did not exist. Later
he was in the vicinity of air raids, and
an exploding bomb, miles away
was enough to bring him outstanding
out of sweet slumber and reaching in
the dark for his uniform and the exit.
There never was a more startling 81
lence in all the world than that which
followed IL o'clock on Armistice day,
when one was impelled to wish for
the peace OF renewed cannon roarS-
so soothing 10 strained nerves. How
uncanny it is to have the thrOb of a
ships engines cease in the night in
midocean! Silence is awfully trying.
Yet Boston and New York demand
silence. They may get it in Winter,
with half-inch-thick glass in siX-inch
panes. They might get some of 1t by
burying their elevated railroads and
muffling their hOnking trucks. But II
1t comes too suddenly it will drive them
mad. People in apartments, too. even
In placid Washington, should beware
of sudden improvements with blanket
ed walls. stopping all the gayety OF the
neighborhood gossips and making 1t
really difficult to understand what the
neighbors are saying to one another.
Might as well be in an airplane $4,000
feet high as to live in such muff1ed
stiffness.
How dreary is the silence of des-
ert or prairie! What would this world
be without it's bird songs and crickets
and frogs? What so soothing as the
roll of waves upon a long beach or
the sigh of the winds in the trees?
What SO merry as the pre-daw., con-
cert of the birds in the forest? Just
a few days ago some misanthrOpe ar
gued that there Is no melody in bird
warbling fit for music. Poor fellow;
He's fit for treasons, stratagems and
spoils.
X y
In 1920, the House of Representa-
tives called in experts to devise RENE
dies for the miserable acoustics Of the
House chamber-the Rotunda, now
used as Statuary Hall, in the Capitol.
Henry Clay was chairman of the COM
mittee, and when he reported that 1t
would cost $1,000, Congress refused
to make the appropriation of so ex-
travagant sum just to hear states
men when they talked.
, But acoustics, the battling mystery
for modern architects. was well under
stood by ancient Greeks. Twenty five
hundred years ago. in a Greek audi.
torium, next to the Acropolis. in
Athens. Demosthenes spoke to 10000
and all heard every syllable. There
were no electric amplifers in those
days. and the auditoriums were all
open to the sky. There Draco gave
his laws, Solon presented his Consti-
tuition, Aristides the Just and The
mistocles reused the patriotism of the
Greeks with their stirring eloquence.
Today, no hall seating a third OF the
ancient Greek audiences Is able to
deliver the sound of an orators
speech without electric amplifiers, and
they were invented less than a decade
{ ago.
Copyright 1927 By Paul " Collins,