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Show '' - x r w: i1; ( i THE CITIZEN 6 simistic as the truth will permit. Tell the truth though the heavens fall and the anti-clincollapse, is his motto. We may not agree with the professor, but we must admire his courage. When all the rest of us are eager to believe the geologists who see oil wells, in every formation or no formation the professor universteps solemnly forth from the dim, religious light of the sity and bids us stop our cheering and put on full mourning. What the professors purpose may be we cannot tell. To our ' hopelessly lay mind the excitement about oil seems to be a sunny harbinger of joy for Utah. Even if we only discover of the oil wells we hope to strike wc shall have several thousand oil wells. Perhaps the professor docs not want us to risk our money. But we have risked our money on the profiteers for several seasons and lost. If we had sunk some of that gold in oil wells we would have been just as rich as we are today. If we take no risk we get no oil. Suppose, for example, that we search for oil only where Professor Pack says it is wise for us to do our searching. Even if we strike oil we may be unlucky, for if we do not search elsewhere we may be missing great riches. If there were no madness in the quest there would be no quest. Shall we submit our madness to the solemn referendum of Professor Pack and retire with him to twiddle our thumbs on the es j f one-ten-thousand- i i i .( i i , t, i .4 i i I ths campus of the university? A book of geology underneath a bough, A jug of grape and Pack of the high-broBeside us croaking all over the campus Would that not be hades enow? w i i It is well that men should have their enthusiasms, for out of their mad fervors comes progress. It is glorious curiosity and the lure of to many failures, but gold and adventure that send us forward-y-es, also to great successes. Men are but children of a larger growth, Dryden assures us. That, too, is well, for when we grow so old. so cold or so professorial that we no longer have our enthusiasms, and are a little mad in them we are not apt to furnish much oil for the wheels of progress. i I The Argonauts move on from well to well. Nor Pack nor any other college yell Can stop. their drilling for the golden oil; Nor all his tears wash out the oily smell. WAS THIS WHAT WE FOUGHT FOR? i li M If Germany had seized and held France what kind of vices would she have substituted for those which arc flaunting their bespangled and bedizzened vulgarity at the Auteuil race track? Bertelli of the Universal Service paints with bold strokes a picture of brazen nudity, animalism and heaven-defyin- g lubricity tricked out in all the fripperies that decadent art could suggest. It was French lubricity that nearly lost the war for the allies. Vice, disease and race suicide had worked such havoc in the four or five decades preceding the struggle of nations that France did not have the numbers with which to combat a sturdier and more fertile race. In England poverty and vice had done similar disservice to a race once noted for the stature of its men and the endurance of its armies. Nor had the Germans, at the beginning of the war, a higher morality, but they had not committed themselves to the vices of decadence for so long a period and poverty had been declining as a result of hard work, efficiency and a wonderful industrial development. Reading Bertcllis article one fancies for a moment that he is perusing a brief chronicle of the declining days of the Roman republic. Had it not been that the plain people of Rome retained the virtues of their ancestors a long time after the aristocratic and middle classes had given themselves over to every excess that their own passions and oriental effeminacy and degeneracy could suggest, the history of the empire would not have run through, as it did, the cycle of more than three hundred years of picturesque but delusive power. The struggle of nations demonstrated that there was more virtue in the European races than one was led to expect. The common people, as usual, were the bulwark of the nations and they fell by millions on the fields of slaughter. When we read the account; of the Auteuil orgy for we hardly can give it a more exact name whether it was not the great goddess Lubricity, to quote Mathew Arnolds phrase, that won the war. Spanish fashions, says Bertelli, introduced by Andre Bruel in the play, The Rose Man, in which a furore was caused by the appearance of three actresses entirely unclad, also made some headway on the brilliant throng. One woman appeared in a robe fashioned from a single Spanish shawl, bordered with jeweled sequins, the draperies revealing the lines of a perfect figure. Or again Crowds of mannikins from rival dressmakers paraded the latest styles. Most of them were wearing strings of barbarous jewels with skirts, just reaching to their knees. Their diaphanous which permitted glimpses bare legs were visible above the of toes bedecked with diamond and ruby rings. But the genuine sensation was furnished by an American woman entered the enclosure the Princess Rospigliosi of Italy. When-shall who beheld her were so astonished that they were positively thrilled because she was wearing an altogether unusual gown, in fact a moral gown, made at the Rue de la Paix Coutouriere from specifications laid down by Philadelphia pastors. Who would not be surprised by the appearance of a moral frock amid such bad companions. One is reminded of the lords and gentlemen of Boccacio, who, when the deadly plague was raging, withdrew to a villa near Florence was it Florence? to escape the scenes of death and to shut out the memories of. what they had seen and what they feared. Was it to dfcvote themselves to prayer and penance and preparation for the life to come? By no means. They regaled one another with the salacious narratives which prurient minds still rescue from the literary sewage of the rennaissance and pronounce high art. In some such ways the French seem to be reacting to the heroisms of the war. Perhaps it is because the degenerate women were unaffected by the conflict. While men died by the millions the pampered jades survived to curse the wars aftermath with their animalnder bell-shap- ed low-sanda- ls e ism. Much of the lubricity, which expresses itself first in stage nudity, has found its way to our country. Our people are learning to look with indulgent eye on the worst exhibitions of this goddess of Lubricity. In the Nin.teenth century Mathew Arnold was impelled by his reading of the popular French literature of his day to write : When one looks at the popular literature of the French at this moment and the life of which this literature of theirs is the index. one is tempted to make a goddess out of a word of their own, and then, like the town clerk of Ephesus, to ask, What man is there that knoweth not that the city of the French is a worshipper of the great goddess Lubricity. Shall men say that of America some day, applying the derision. net to one citv. but to all our cities? " As a member of the male sex, says Bernard Shaw, 1 prot.-sindignantly against the conclusion that all men are familiar with t We know that is true because very few abominable things. are familiar with Shaws later plays. in n The crime wave is due in part to the fact that juries have not the courage of convictions. The national motto of Germany appears to be Een though quished we will argue still. van- Germany loves the coo of the dove of peace, but not the bill. Gabc DAnnunzio isnt talking so much since he got married. The allies believe in the freedom of the seize. |