Is It a Benefit to Humanity?
Is It a Benefit to Humanity?
BEYOND a doubt Mr. Roosevelt's motives were laudable. He earnestly desired to serve the cause of humanity by bringing to an end the fearful waste of human life and energy in Manchuria. But to the Russian masses the cost of his benevolence is incalculable. In the abasement of the autocracy alone lay the assurance of liberty for the people. By his personal intervention Mr. Roosevelt rescued the czar from deeper humiliation and disaster, and snatched from the hands of his subjects their most effective weapon. It was a stroke of high statesmanship on Mr. Roosevelt's part. No ruler in Europe dared undertake what he carried through with dazzling success. His prestige has been immensely augmented. But whether he consulted expediency or loftier principles, the effect of his mediation is nothing short of calamitous to the Russian people. By no single act has Mr. Roosevelt ever done so much toward perpetuating despotism and preventing liberty. Despotism would not yield except through terror. In its hour of peril it was comforted and fortified, and instead of being ruled by the laws of human rights, Russia is again left at the mercy of a self-willed and capricious czar.7 Well-meaning as Mr. Roosevelt was in his policy of peace, he served absolutism as none of the czar's servants had been able to do.—New York World. Another Fight against Graft.
MILWAUKEE is in the midst of a fight against the municipal graft, and much remains to be done if it is to be made a successful one. The grand jury has reported indictments against twenty-four persons, who are accused of various forms of public corruption. It declares that civic corruption and bribery have been rampant in Milwaukee, and that most outrageous perjury was committed by witnesses who gave testimony before that body. It is to be hoped that the prosecution of those who have been brought within the range of the courts will be thorough and searching. One good feature is that there have been indictments for perjury, as well as bribery, in connection with a street railway franchise.—Springfield Republican. WHY and whence we come, why and whither we go—we can not answer. Religion alone can free men's minds from doubt, worry, and the strain of a questioning effort that can bring no response. Science tries its wisdom and fails. There is talk of chemical combinations that “produce life automatically,” and further talk of destructive organisms within the organism that end, eventually, the life that they have protected. Energy and matter, the childish scientists tell us, produce life in some more or less accidental and inevitable way. They simply talk pseudo-scientific drivel around the puzzling questions of existence. They know nothing, and can tell nothing.—S. F. Examiner. England's New Lock and Key.
WHILE spending a week at Gibraltar, Britain's key to the Mediterranean, watching the coming and going of her mighty ships, says Mr. Buckley of the Christian Advocate, we were impressed that England was then the mightiest power on the globe. Now she is constructing a naval station at Singapore, which Admiral Fournier, of France, says gives her a strategic base sufficient absolutely to prevent the passage of naval forces within the China Sea, and which is capable of suppressing commercial communications between China and Europe. IN a neighboring city, says the Christian Advocate, the city clerk died. Resolutions of respect, appreciation, and condolence were adopted by the council and spread upon the minutes. A short time after his death he was found to be more than nine thousand dollars short in his accounts. At the next meeting of the council the chairman of the committee which prepared the eulogistic resolutions made a motion, which was unanimously carried, instructing the secretary to expunge the eulogy from the records. Henry Ward Beecher, standing by a coffin one day, said, “I seldom speak definitely on funeral occasions, but the community will sustain me in saying that if ever there was an honest man this man was honest.” In less than three weeks the most fearful defalcations, carried on for a series of years and which wrecked several institutions, came to light. Most happy should any man be who on his deathbed is tortured by no fears that post-mortem revelations will break the hearts of his friends.