Part 72

Judges on the bench, eminently respectable newspapers--by which we mean those newspapers representing the interests of men who think with their pockets--are expressing the most radical out-and-out socialistic ideas.

One of the mildest suggestions made by these respectabilities is that the Government should seize the coal mines and work them for the benefit of the people, setting aside the preposterous claims of the Coal Trust.

Papers like the Springfield Republican, the Philadelphia Ledger and other solemn organs of antiquity are advocating, without knowing it, ideas which mean inevitably universal government ownership of monopolies.

The Coal Trust as a public educator is an undoubted success, more of a success than it would like to be if it could understand the nature of its teachings.

If the Government has a right to seize coal mines and work them for the people, as respectability now declares, why has it not a right to seize railroads, telegraphs and all the other great industries whose value depends entirely upon the national population? ----

Many men in this world hated their teachers while they were being whipped in the old- fashioned way, but look back with gratitude later on to those same teachers and those same whippings.

Our national teachers, the trusts, are severe teachers. Their lessons are hard lessons, and they believe in very unpleasant forms of corporal punishment--inflicting hunger and cold upon their pupils.

This nation in time will look back with gratitude to the lessons and to the whippings of the trusts.

The trusts are teaching us inevitably that competition is antiquated; that organization is the real basis of industry. They are teaching us that it is feasible and necessary for the nation eventually to take possession of and manage its own properties, industrial as well as others.

A WOMAN TO BE PITIED

Why is it that comparatively few women find intense enjoyment in life after middle age?

Why is it that you cannot duplicate among women such careers in old age as the careers of Spencer, Gladstone, Huxley, or any of the great men whose interest lies in mental activity and mental achievement?

One reason is this: A great majority of women are inclined to accept and adopt without question the ideas formed for them.

THEY GIVE UP THINKING EARLY IN LIFE.

When a human being stops thinking, that human being's life practically ends.

All over the country you may see thousands and hundreds of thousands of calm, settled, placid-faced, middle-aged women.

They admire themselves and they are admired generally. They ought to be pitied.

They think now on all subjects just as they thought ten or twenty or thirty years ago.

They view with horror things which they know nothing about. They reject opinions which they don't understand; they have unlimited faith in matters of which they know absolutely nothing. ----

Every one pities a man whose existence and enjoyments are limited to the physical, sentimental side of life.

We all feel that a man of fifty, unless hard conditions and want have ground interest and vitality out of him, ought to be at his best. He ought to be active, alert, OPEN TO NEW IDEAS.

His mind is his one asset, and he should be constantly adding to his knowledge, to his observation, and therefore he should be constantly changing his mental point of view.

Many women suffer undoubtedly from the sentimental, physical and intellectual reaction caused by the cessation of the responsibility of maternity.

Such passionate affection, devotion and self-sacrifice are lavished upon the children that when they grow up nothing more seems worth while except to set them a good example.

Many other things are worth while: And as improving civilization frees women more and more from the endless cares of the petty household and the worries of poverty, the field for their mental development will steadily expand.

When woman shall have accomplished her greatest material duty, that of fully populating the earth, big families will no longer be known, not more than two years of any woman's life will be devoted to the worries of infancy, and then woman will have to do her share of the world's thinking and its original intellectual work. ----

For her own sake and for the sake of those about her, every woman, whatever her age, should realize that there is no old age for the brain well cared for.

Many men and women view with sentimental reverence the picture of a middle-aged lady, old before her time, sitting in her rocking-chair, knitting placidly, without one original thought in a month.