The July issue of THE CHAUTAUQUAN closes the fifth volume of the
magazine. In October the sixth volume will begin. The outlook for THE
CHAUTAUQUAN for 1885-86 is much brighter than ever before. We shall offer
our friends a much improved magazine. The place of THE CHAUTAUQUAN will
be taken in the summer by the _Assembly Herald_. The _Herald_ for 1885
will contain full reports of the work of the Assembly for the summer. A
glance at the elaborate program printed in this impression will convince
the reader of the value of a paper containing such a course of lectures
as that of the Chautauqua platform. Besides the lectures many suggestive
and useful reports will be printed, which members of the C. L. S. C. in
particular will find helpful. Those who may wish to subscribe for both
THE CHAUTAUQUAN and _Herald_ will find it profitable to take advantage of
our COMBINATION OFFER, found in another column of this impression.
* * * * *
The war rumors of a month ago have subsided almost as quickly as they
were aroused. The cries of “On to Khartoum” and “Smash the Mahdi” have
died out. Instead of running the frontier below the Soudan, the English
have been content to fix it at Wady Halfa. After all the excitement over
Afghanistan, peace has been established between Russia and England.
The Americans, most of them, have come home from Panama. Riel has been
captured. The comparatively easy settlement of misunderstandings between
nations is our best hope for the future. Each new victory of arbitration
over “bad blood,” even if it be at the sacrifice of a little of our pride
and possessions, is so much of a stride toward the millennium.
* * * * *
For the third time Mr. James Russell Lowell has been called upon to speak
in Westminster Abbey. This time at the unveiling of the bust of the poet
Coleridge. In summing up his remarks he said: “Whatever may have been
his faults and weaknesses, he was the man of all his generation to whom
we should most unhesitatingly allow the distinction of genius, that is,
of one authentically possessed from time to time by some influence that
made him better and greater than himself. If he lost himself too much in
what Mr. Pater has admirably called ‘impassioned contemplation,’ he has
at least left us such a legacy as only genius, and genius not always, can
leave. It is for this that we pay him this homage of memory.”
* * * * *
A series of statistics most suggestive to those interested in the
temperance question have of late been published. According to this
table there was drunk in the United States twenty-five years ago over
86,000,000 gallons of spirituous liquor, while now, with a population
almost doubled, the consumption is decreased by about 15 per cent. To
balance this comes in the enormous consumption of light liquors, nearly
six times as great as in 1860. But it must be remembered that a large
proportion of the latter is consumed by the foreign element introduced
since 1860.
* * * * *
The tragic fate of the town of Plymouth, Pennsylvania, is one more
melancholy example of the result of breaking Nature’s laws. There is
no doubt but that an epidemic of typhoid fever is a crime traceable to
somebody’s neglect. In Plymouth the refuse from a house situated at the
head of the stream which supplied the village with drinking water was
allowed to poison the water. This outrageous state of affairs is to be
seen in many other towns, and in parts of our cities. If after Plymouth’s
suffering a repetition occurs in any part of the country, public
sentiment ought to be strong enough to hunt down and punish the guilty
authorities that will hold human life and God’s law so lightly.
* * * * *
There is one sure way of securing sanitary reform in every city or town
with dilatory health board or indifferent council. Arouse the women. The
Ladies’ Health Protection Society, of New York City, has done work in
that community during the past six months, before which its large Board
of Health seemed perfectly helpless. If cleanliness and purity are not
to be secured by the civil authorities, there is no more suitable public
work for women than to constitute themselves the guardians of the health
of their home towns.
* * * * *
At the recent commencement of the Union Theological Seminary, of New
York, the alumni association elected as president an Indian of pure
Choctaw blood, now a pastor in the Indian Territory. His son was a member
of the graduating class of this year. We are growing broader.
* * * * *
The position that Mr. Phelps will take at the Court of St. James has
been agitating the English correspondent of one of our great dailies.
He finds that being a minister merely, Mr. Phelps must come in among
the ministers, after all the seven ambassadors; and that, alas! he
will be literally at the foot of this class of twenty-three. Ministers
take social rank according to the length of time they have held their
positions, so Mr. Phelps and the stars and stripes trot along after
Guatemala and Columbia and Siam and Hayti.
* * * * *
The teachers who tried Chautauqua last summer for their vacations, found
the spot so suitable for their uses, so delightful for recreation, that
they have spread abroad the rumor of her beauty, and in July of the
coming summer two State Teachers’ Associations—that of Ohio and that of
New York—will meet there.
* * * * *
There are very few people unfamiliar with law and its phrases, who have
not been bewildered over the complicated expressions and seemingly
useless repetitions found in almost all documents. This “iteration in
law” has lately been made the subject of some interesting computations by
David Dudley Field. By his counting every deed contains 860 superfluous
words, and every mortgage 1,240. The people of New York State, he
calculates, pay every year $100,000 for the recording of useless words.
The next reform in law should be rhetorical.
* * * * *
Mr. John Ruskin, of Oxford, and Prof. J. Rendel Harris, of Johns Hopkins,
have resigned their professorships in their respective universities
because, it is stated, vivisection is practiced in the institutions.
There is no reason in such hyper-sympathy. The abuse of vivisection is
quite probable, but that does not lessen the force of the fact that
vivisection has done much to alleviate human misery, and will in the
future undoubtedly do more. The question is, if man or beast must suffer,
which life is the more precious.
* * * * *
Houghton Farm, the headquarters of the Chautauqua Town and Country Club,
has an interesting history. Several years ago 1,000 acres of land lying
about nine miles from Newburgh, N. Y., were purchased by a Mr. Valentine
as an experimental farm. About thirty buildings, adapted to every kind of
farm work, were erected; the best of stock, the most skillful laborers
were secured. The farm soon became a kind of educational institution.
Farmers were invited to inspect its work, and to listen to lectures from
the learned managers; children had days set apart for their enjoyment.
Orange county has been educated by the Houghton Farm. Now its generous
hearted proprietor has extended the work by opening its advantages to all
those who will join the Chautauqua Town and Country Club.
* * * * *
The strange fascination lurking in dangerous feats which so powerfully
affects some minds, was never more forcibly manifested than in the case
of Robert E. Odlum, who jumped from the Brooklyn bridge not long ago.
For some time the thought had been a passion with him, and although the
police were watching to prevent the attempt, he escaped their vigilance
and took the fatal leap. His body was three and one-fourth seconds in
making the descent of 140 feet, thus corroborating almost exactly the law
of falling bodies. He breathed only a few times after he was picked up,
being inwardly literally “mangled to death.” His is only one more name
added to the list of those who, by their folly, may teach others lessons
of wisdom, and so, perhaps, have not died utterly in vain.
* * * * *
Although war-like preparations have ceased in the Soudan, and no
more troops are to be transported thither to help “smash the Mahdi,”
the railroad across the desert is progressing slowly but surely. The
correspondent of the _Times_ telegraphs the following: “The construction
of the railway is a curious and interesting sight. In advance is a
picket of cavalry, while far off on either side the videttes scout in
the bush. At the immediate head of the line is a battalion of infantry
echeloned, and advancing as the rails are laid. Streams of coolies carry
the sleepers from the trucks, and teams of four artillery horses drag up
the rails, two at a time, to the navvies, who lay them in a twinkling,
and drive the spikes. In the rear are gangs who complete the line, and
further back the ballasting parties.”
* * * * *
Visitors to Niagara Falls this summer will enjoy their trip as never
before. Everything that tends to mar the beauty of the natural scenery is
to be removed, and after July 15th, access to all points of interest is
to be free of charge. To bring about this happy consummation which during
so many long years past has been devoutly wished by all right-thinking
men, required a long and hard-fought battle against willful ignorance and
greed of gain.
* * * * *
General Gordon’s “Life and Letters,” recently published, prove him to
have one accomplishment of rare beauty and usefulness, but too often
nowadays neglected. He was a good letter writer, and that under
circumstances the most trying. Here is the picture his biographer draws
of the surroundings under which many of his letters were written: “The
temperature is over 100°; the ink dries on the pen before three words are
written; books curl, as to their backs; mosquitoes are busy at the ankles
under the table, and the hands and wrists above; prickly heat comes and
goes. How one realizes, for instance, the whole scene in the over-wakeful
traveller’s night: ‘I am writing in the open air by a candle-lamp, in
a savage gorge; not a sound to be heard. The baboons are in bed in the
rocks.’” The letters which the most of us write under the most favorable
circumstances are limited to the narrowest space possible. What we would
do in Gordon’s place it is difficult to say.
* * * * *
The most beautiful celebration of the month of June is Children’s day.
With every season Protestant churches give more time and money to their
preparations for it, and it bids fair to take rank in importance with
Christmas and Easter. Certainly no day comes at a season when it is more
easy to decorate, it being the very heyday of the flower season, and no
cause is more worthy our efforts than the children’s.
* * * * *
An important discussion has been going on for a few weeks in the New
York papers, concerning the advisability of closing the dry goods
stores on Saturday afternoons. Clerks have no day for recreation or for
improvement except Sabbath. The same is true of nearly all classes of
laboring people. The result is that the Sabbath, instead of being a day
of religious rest, is turned into one of pleasure, and often of extra
work. A half holiday would enable busy workers to prepare for Sabbath. It
is a reform in the arrangement of time that is worthy the attention of
Christian people particularly.
* * * * *
There is a capital hint in the following story, told by a lady prominent
in mission school work in one of our large cities: “We had some of our
Chinese pupils at a church sociable a few nights ago, and we had at
supper some candies which are rolled up in paper with printed couplets
inclosed—some of them extremely silly. The Chinese boys read them and
looked surprised, but were too polite to say anything. Soon afterward
they gave an entertainment, and the same sort of candies were provided;
but when we unrolled the papers we found they had taken out the foolish
verses and had substituted texts of Scripture printed on little slips of
paper.”
* * * * *
Here are a few of M. Bartholdi’s interesting figures about his great
Statue of Liberty: “The forefinger is 96½ inches in length, and 56½
inches in circumference at the second joint. The nail measures 17¾
inches by 10½ inches. The head 13¾ feet in height. The eye is 25½ inches
in width. The nose is 44 inches in length. About forty persons were
accommodated in the head at the Universal Exposition of 1878. It is
possible to ascend into the torch above the hand. It will easily hold
twelve persons.” Compared with other colossi it far outstrips them all,
being about three times the height of both the statue of Bavaria and
of the Virgin of Puy, and about 58 feet higher than the Arminius in
Westphalia.
* * * * *
The French Republic would not allow the remains of Victor Hugo to
be placed in the Pantheon until that celebrated structure was again
secularized. The priests were allowed just forty-eight hours to vacate
the sacred precincts which, as a church, they had held uninterruptedly
since 1877. This action plainly shows the position of the Republic toward
the Church. “French skeptics,” says _The Nation_, “are not content, like
English or German skeptics, with ceasing to go to church.… They insist
on proclaiming in every possible way their hostility to the clergy.” The
fact that the Pantheon is again restored to its primitive design as “a
last resting place for distinguished public men” can but be pleasing to
all.