Evening star., 1931-12-27

" " Wnter darkness OF next
Thursday night and all the
horns begin to blow, we shall
see the last of 1931-and few of us will
shed tears of regret upon parting with
this difficult guest
We've stopped telling each other that
in the new year things will come back
to normal" because We know now, in
our chaStened hearts, that if they'll
only return to two-thirdS of the nor
mal-to one-half of the normal, we
shall be content, and thank God.
Not one of us has escaped the dis
cipline of the past two years; not one
of us will ever feel the earth quite so
solid beneath his feet as he did in up
roariouS 1928. But only to small pro-
portion of us, only to a certain propor-
tion of even those millions who are out
of work as this New Year comes in, has
that meant actual hunger, want and
despair.
Remember that, when statistics
coming into your own secure little
kitchen, over the radio, sicken your
heart with sense of futility and ma
tional ruin. Three million Americans
unemployed doesn't mean 100000
gaunt and haggard fathers of young
families, condemned to watch their
children diSintegrating with slow star
vation. 1t did mean that, hundred
years ago, when only one person in
every family worked, and Mother and
the girls were helpless dependents all
their lives long.
Nowadays, in thousands of these
cases that paralyZe us when we hear
their sum total, it means merely that
while Dad and Tom and Minnie 60 on
working, Lucy is out of job, and Bill
seems to have slim chances of getting
Nnf VNla of~~.,& l.
not reaSSuring for those who are work.
ing, no; but not the old frightful thing
either, never the old days of which
Dickens and Mill, Reade and George
and London have written so tragically
ITO any one who can remember, as do,
l. the newspapers, the cartoons and
panicS and strikes and paradeS of
1893, there is tremendous hope to be
derived today from the new relation
ship that exists between the employer
and the employed, the new under
standing between labor and capital;
that understanding that so often merges
the two together. In thousands of our
greatest industries the actual workers
are the actual owners, and if it were
only for that one fact, we know that
We would emerge from this bad time
more quickly than ony other nation
could.
The solution, this New Year, is up to
the women of America, and I ask the
women of America to solve it. We all
think we could have been tremendously
heroic in WaShingtons day, or in the
picturesque hoopskirted and ringletted
days of the Civil War; we could have
met our exhausted warriors with brave
hearts and smiling faces, we could have
hidden our own griefS and fears as our
grandmotherS did.
Meet your own warrior with a brave
heart and smiling face when he gets
home tired from work tomorrow night.
Remind him that what we call hard
times most Europeans would call good
times. Remind him that your children
are still in school, that there will be
food enough, that prices have gone
down, If salaries have gone down, too,
and that your mother and father
started with much, much less and
thought themselves safe.
X
NONE Of us know what this new
year is going to bring. If 80 per
cent of our indications don't lie it must
bring better times, expansion and relief
and reinsurance. Unless you really
must worry, stop worrying, put on
brave face and compare what you have
to the much less you might have, to
what certain mothers and fathers in
little Irish and German and Italian
towns call enough; bowl of hot food,
a few warm clothes and place to
sleep. Plain food, potatoes or maca-
roni or noodles; dark, old, shabby
clothing and crowded rooms-but they
call that good times And when we
travel We don't pity the peasant homes
We pass, we don't come home wonder
ing why the small children of these
nations so easily, so readily beg in the
streets. We take it as calmly for grant,
ed as they do.
Our children are not begging in the
streets. They're still sure of their oat-
meal, their gingerbread, their school,
cones and weekly movie They always
will be. You know that, and know it.
And if your experience is the expert
ence of nine -tenths of American wives
and mothers, you and your John have
lots more even now than you thought
you'd ever have, when you took
chance and got married. Look back on
those scary early days, when you two
we're calculating what rent and gas and
food for two would total, and wonder
at yourself that you have lost so much
OF your old gallantry and vision.
X
WEARS ago, when 1902 brought a
time of deep depression, four of us
we're working-tWo brothers and two
sisters. During that year all four of
us were respectively fired by our diff
ferent employers, but not all at once
Ihree OF US were always working and