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Show THE DEPARTURE OF SIR THOMAS. (Town Topics on Brother Kearns.) Sir Thomas Lipton will shake the dust of the United States from his feet tomorrow and scoot to his own country to settle up accounts. Though a loser in the game of yacht racing, he returns a big winner in his commercial enterprises. The notoriety he achieved by his challenge for the Cup, the judicious manner in which his every move was handled by his canny advertising agents, including the Roosevelt-Seawanhaka incident and his Chicago bellyache gave him bold advertisement adver-tisement and popular prominence that must have made his trade rivals turn a baleful, envious green. Since the days of the late lamented Bar-num Bar-num no such past master in the art of humbugging humbug-ging the gullible public of all nations has risen and shone with such effulgent lumihosity. He beats Barnum, and goes him one better in at least one respect. The great showman for the life of him could not help chuckling and giving himself away whenever he successfuly played the popu-M popu-M lace for suckers. Lipton, on the contrary, either I candidly believes that he is a sportsman and I philanthropist or is the finest actor that ever I lived. I It is comparatively esy to fool the British H workman, a boozy lout, smelling foully of strong ! shag tobacco, who grows enthusiastic and hysteri cal over two-penn'orth of Lipton's whisky, but to bam-boozle an American politician, experienced in the wiles and low cunning inseparable from his environment, calls for astuteness of the highest high-est class. Thus, when Senator Kearns, at Salt Lake, seemingly in dead and sober seriousness, actually suggested Lipton as the next Ambassador from Great Britain to the United States to succeed suc-ceed Sir Michael Herbert, the force of folly could no further go. Either Kearns is one of the able press-agents on the payrool of Sir Thomas, or else he is under the hypnotic spell of the Scotch-Irish Knight. Just fancy Lipton (the Glasgow grocer who began his shopkeeping career by yoking two white hogs together, and, after emblazoning them with red painted words, extolling the excellence of the Lipton hams, driving them through the streets) as Ambassador to these United States. Imagine him elevated to the peerage as Lord Chitterling, with the motto, Magnus est porcus et praevalebit, under his coat of arms, sitting in the House of Lords! What a spectacle for gods and men! |