Part 5

The minister of the Church which comrade Hero attended heard of his munificent gift to the Town. His Reverence got in some fast legwork and ran down the modest philanthropist just as the aforesaid latter was ducking into his office.

The following Sunday morning when the congregation assembled for a quiet snooze, the Minister got up in the turret and announced the recent donation of a beautiful stained-glass window.

In due time the window was puttied in, showing a patriarch with a staff and a cloven hat. But when Old Sol turned on his spotlight, did it reveal the graceful and modest inscription, “Donated by A Friend?” It did—NOT. It revealed the full and complete name of the generous benefactor in letters about the size of a small barn. The price he paid for the complete job was left off, however.

Sometime afterwards the Town got the community development bug. Our Hero stood up on a vinegar barrel at a mass meeting and told the assembled whiskers that there was no reason on the face of God’s Green Earth why they shouldn’t be as big as New York, and that if every man would Put his Shoulder to the Wheel they could make Chicago look like a way-station.

When the cheers died down, Our Hero was made Chairman of the Might and Main Committee. He took off his Prince Al and got on the job.

For six months he worked like a Zulu wharf-boy, and through his Untiring Efforts the town copped several new industries, and was lifted from the 34th to the 24th city of the State in point of population and municipal purity.

New York did not exactly get jealous and call for a re-canvass of the Census, but there was no question about the enhanced Well Being of the community as a result of Our Hero’s unselfish public spirit.

When the next mayoralty election came around, one of the lesser members of the Might and Main Committee, who had attended but one meeting and slept throughout, put himself up as a Candidate and offered the Committee’s record of achievement as the reason why all Patriotic Citizens should toss their votes in his tub.

Doc Hero tried to cut in and tell the excited Populace who it was that did the Real Work of the Might and Main Committee but he could not break through the line. The candidate was elected by an “overwhelming majority,” to coin a phrase.

Whereupon Uncle Hero sat him down and quilled a Public Letter to Ye Editor in which he Regretted Deeply that his work was not Appreciated and that he got no Credit for all he had done for the Town.

Lesson for Today: When a man gets beyond the desire for personal praise he has got beyond the grave.

HOT SKETCH NO. 4

THE BIRD WHO BERATED BUSINESS ASSN’S

ON A hell-hot Saturday afternoon in August a certain American manufacturer sat in his executive oven mopping like a German chef.

The Cashier came in and spread before him the weekly Worry Sheet, and then chugged off for the week-end in his little threshing machine.

All the other Help had of course already gone, for it was about ten minutes before closing time.

The only man left around the Works was the afore-specified manufacturer. He couldn’t get off because he was the Boss.

Suddenly, without warning, prologue, or advance copy for the Press, he launched a vicious right-arm jab at two million flies that were mobilizing on his occiput, and then lammed out the following trenchant blank verse:

“Blankety blank my hide if I ain’t getting hankety-pankety sick of this blank country and its laws. Here I am, week in and week out, sweating like a Somali dock-hand to make both ends meet, and instead of being charted up as a useful, constructive factor in the country’s development, I’m hooted from the house-tops, shot at from ambush, chased up trees, and hounded like a pole-cat.

“The goods I make are clean, legitimate, honorable goods, and a public necessity. By their manufacture and sale, thousands of people have it soft on both the productive and distributive ends of the line. If it were not for this business, this two-spot town would be fanning for air inside twenty-four hours, and hundreds of happy homes would be hurdling to Hades.

“Not a week goes by that I’m not digging up for some Church, School, Library, Fair, Famine, Hospital or some form of wallet-puller. I pay more town, county, state and federal taxes than the whole loafing lot of Timber Tops at Washington put together.

“And yet every move I make, or don’t make, I’m yanked up before some inch-browed Investigating Committee to explain why I didn’t do what I did, or did do what I didn’t.

“First they fan me for maintaining prices and then for cutting prices. They lower freight rates so I can compete in a certain market, and then just when I’ve gone to the expense of advertising and traveling it, the State and Interstate Commissions get into a dog-fight and they shoot the freight rates up again.

“They charge me an Income Tax on what I make, and an Income Tax on what I lose. They compel me to fill out long, winding webbed-up Forms that they don’t understand themselves, and that would be sufficient to dam any Office Boy in the land for business incompetence.

“Out of the taxes that I and my impotent kind are soaked with, they send a lot of clerks over the globe to write high-school tracts on the Old Stuff about our Great Trade Chances Abroad, and then spring a Seaman’s Law joker that tosses American Shipping into the Discard and puts our goods at the mercy of ships of Nations that are out to stick tacks in the tire of American Trade.

“For twenty years sane men have been struggling to pull the Tariff out of the toils of Party Pilferers and give Industry a chance to tell where it’s at, and yet to this muggy day it is made the mule on which Boneheads in black fedoras ride in and out of Congress.

“I maintain that the backbone, brains and belly of this Nation is BUSINESS, and yet when it comes to enacting legislation, Business hasn’t the voice of a pink-eyed chigger. It is forced to operate under laws made by men that couldn’t hold a bill clerk’s job in a Brooklyn kiosk, and I for one am getting good and dam sick of the whole frowsy, fiddling farce.”

With this perorational explosion, Comrade Manufacturer slapped down the corrugated cover of his Roll Top, jammed his hat on a bent ear, and soled off home to take it out on The Folks.