The one least able to feign sleep.
XX
THE COMMITTEE ON THE WHOLE
A new plan has just been submitted for running the railroads. That makes one hundred and eleven.
The present suggestion involves the services of some sixteen committees.
Now presumably the idea is to get the roses back into the cheeks of the railroads, so that they will go running about from place to place again and perhaps make a little money on pleasant Sat.u.r.days and Sundays. But if these proposed committees are anything like other committees which we have had to do with, the following will be a fair example of how our railroads will be run.
The sub-committee on the Punching of Rebate Slips will have a meeting called for five o"clock in the private grill room at the Pan-American Building. Postcards will have been sent out the day before by the Secretary, saying: "Please try to be present as there are several important matters to be brought up." This will so pique the curiosity of the members that they will hardly be able to wait until five o"clock.
One will come at four o"clock by mistake and, after steaming up and down the corridor for half an hour, will go home and send in his resignation.
At 5:10 the Secretary will bustle in with a briefcase and a map showing the weather areas over the entire United States for the preceding year.
He will be very warm from hurrying.
At 5:15 two members of the committee will stroll in, one of them saying to the other: "--so the Irishman turns to the Jew and says: "Well, I knew your father before that!" Aha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! "I knew your father before that!""
They will then seat themselves at one end of the committee-table, just as another member comes hurrying in. Time 5:21.
One of the story-tellers being the Chairman, he will pound half-heartedly on the table and say: "As some of us have to get away early, I think that we had better begin now, although Mr. Entwhistle and Dr. Pearly are not here."
"I met Dr. Pearly last night at the Vegetarian Club dinner," says one of the members, "and he said that he might be a little late today but that he would surely come."
"His wife has just had a very delicate throat operation, I understand,"
offers a committeeman who is drawing concentric circles on his pad of paper.
"Bad weather for throat operations," says the Secretary.
"That"s right," says the Chairman, looking through a pile of papers for one which he has left at home. "But let"s get down to business. At the last meeting the question arose as to whether or not it was advisable to continue having conductors punch the little hole at the bottom of rebate slips. As you know, the slip says, "Not redeemable if punched here."
Now, someone brought up the point that it seems silly to give out a rebate slip at all if there isn"t going to be any rebate on it. A sub-committee was appointed to go into the matter, and I would like to ask Mr. Twing, the chairman, what he has to report."
Mr. Twing will clear his throat and start to speak, but will make only an abortive sound. He will then clear his throat again.
"Mr. Chairman, the other members of the sub-committee and myself were unable to get exactly the data on this that we wanted and I delegated Mr. Entwhistle to dig up something which he said he had read recently in the files of the _Scientific American._ But Mr. Entwhistle doesn"t seem to be here today, and so I am unable to report his findings. It was, however, the sense of the meeting that the conductors should not."
[Ill.u.s.tration: "That"s right," says the chairman.]
"Should not what?" inquires Dr. Pearly, who has just sneaked in, knocking three hats to the floor while hanging up his coat.
Dr. Pearly is never answered, for the Chairman looks at his watch and says: "I"m very sorry, gentlemen, but I have an appointment at 5:45 and must be going. Supposing I appoint a sub-committee consisting of Dr.
Pearly, Mr. Twing and Mr. Berry, to find Mr. Entwhistle and see what he dug out of the files of the _Scientific American._ Then, at the next meeting we can have a report from both sub-committees and will also hear from Professor McKlicktric, who has just returned from Panama.... A motion to adjourn is now in order. Do I hear such a motion?"
After listening carefully, he hears it, and the railroads run themselves for another week.
XXI
NOTING AN INCREASE IN BIGAMY
Either more men are marrying more wives than ever before, or they are getting more careless about it. During the past week bigamy has crowded baseball out of the papers, and while this may be due in part to the fact that it was a cold, rainy week and little baseball could be played, yet there is a tendency to be noted there somewhere. All those wishing to note a tendency will continue on into the next paragraph.
There is, of course, nothing new in bigamy. Anyone who goes in for it with the idea of originating a new fad which shall be known by his name, like the daguerreotype or potatoes...o...b..ien, will have to reckon with the priority claims of several hundred generations of historical characters, most of them wearing brown beards. Just why beards and bigamy seem to have gone hand in hand through the ages is a matter for the professional humorists to determine. We certainly haven"t got time to do it here.
But the multiple-marriages unearthed during the past week have a certain homey flavor lacking in some of those which have gone before.
For instance, the man in New Jersey who had two wives living right with him all of the time in the same apartment. No need for subterfuge here, no deceiving one about the other. It was just a matter of walking back and forth between the dining-room and the study. This is, of course, bigamy under ideal conditions.
But in tracing a tendency like this, we must not deal so much with concrete cases as with drifts and curves. A couple of statistics are also necessary, especially if it is an alarming tendency that is being traced. The statistics follow, in alphabetical order:
In the United States during the years 1918-1919 there were 4,956,673 weddings. 2,485,845 of these were church weddings, strongly against the wishes of the bridegrooms concerned. In these weddings 10,489,392 silver olive-forks were received as gifts.
Starting with these figures as a basis, we turn to the report of the Pennsylvania State Committee on Outdoor Gymnastics for the year beginning January 4th, 1920, and ending a year later.
This report being pretty fairly uninteresting, we leave it and turn to another report, which covers the manufacture and sale of rugs. This has a picture of a rug in it, and a darned good likeness it is, too.
In this rug report we find that it takes a Navajo Indian only eleven days to weave a rug 12 x 5, with a swastika design in the middle. Eleven days. It seems incredible. Why, it takes only 365 days to make a year!
Now, having seen that there are 73,000 men and women in this country today who can neither read nor write, and that of these only 4%, or a little over half, are colored, what are we to conclude? What is to be the effect on our national morale? Who is to pay this gigantic bill for naval armament?
Before answering these questions any further than this, let us quote from an authority on the subject, a man who has given the best years, or at any rate some very good years, of his life to research in this field, and who now takes exactly the stand which we have been outlining in this article.
"I would not," he says in a speech delivered before the Girls" Friendly Society of Laurel Hill, "I would not for one minute detract from the glory of those who have brought this country to its present state of financial prominence among the nations of the world, and yet as I think back on those dark days, I am impelled to voice the protest of millions of American citizens yet unborn."
Perhaps some of our little readers remember what the major premise of this article was. If so, will they please communicate with the writer.
Oh, yes! Bigamy!
Well, it certainly is funny how many cases of bigamy you hear about nowadays. Either more men are marrying more wives than ever before, or they are getting more careless about it. (That sounds very, very familiar. It is barely possible that it is the sentence with which this article opens. We say so many things in the course of one article that repet.i.tions are quite likely to creep in).
At any rate, the tendency seems to be toward an increase in bigamy.
XXII
THE REAL WIGLAF: MAN AND MONARCH
Much time has been devoted of late by ardent biographers to shedding light on misunderstood characters in history, especially British rulers. We cannot let injustice any longer be done to King Wiglaf, the much-maligned monarch of central Britain in the early Ninth Century.
The fall of the kingdom of Mercia in 828 under the the onslaughts of Ecgberht the West-Saxon, have been laid to Wiglaf"s untidy personal habits and his alleged mania for practical joking. The accompanying biographical sketch may serve to disclose some of the more intimate details of the character of the man and to alter in some degree history"s unfavorable estimate of him.