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Show VO.'AEN THE FUTURE LORDS OF CREATION. When the annual convention of the International Association " of Factory Inspectors opened at Detroit the other dajv the last thins, to be expected was anything sensational. Ordinarily such a gathering would be a sort of perfunctory affair, with considerable speech-making, discussions on technical subjects of little interest to the general public and an election of officers in which the ambitious might .gratify in part their craving for honor, empty though it might be in short, just about such an organization as the Trans-. Trans-. Mississippi congress has, proved to be. But Mr. Bodine, the superintendent superin-tendent of compulsory education in Chicago, who. made an address x saved the session from this fa'te and has brought the meeting prominently promi-nently before the public notice. " . Chicago professors have long been noted for their startling theories. They aim to.be interesting, even at the expense of logic; dullness and not inaccuracy is the capital offense in their opinion. Mr. Bodine seems to have absorbed this sentiment. At any rate he made an address that instantly attracted attention. He advanced ' the theory, supported by figures, that man is on the decline, woman on the ascendant, and that the so-called weaker sex is ultimately to be the ruling force in industrialism. "Man, like the Indian," said the learned speaker, is dying out and is being driven out. In 1890 there were 3,914,571 women who were employed in gainful occupations in America. In 1890 the number had increased to 5,329,807. The birth rate among the female occupation is increasing and the death rate decreasing. Jt is just the reverse among the males. We are rapidly drifting to "the age of the eternal feminine, when man will be a back number and f orced-to return io the soil and those fields of labor where only his physical endurance will save him in the struggle for the survival." Discussing the competitive life for he leadership ip society, Mr. Bodine said: "Society is dying out at the top.' It is a crystal maze of glass houses, where no occupant dare to cast the first stone; the dangerous example; the .academy of divorce. Society has mothers moth-ers who are slaves to the siren calls of fashion and frivolity, wh look more into the faces of their mirrors than into those of their children. With a fashionable mother gadding about at .social functions func-tions and a fashionable father at his club, the result will be that in a decade the question of the neglected children of the rich will become be-come as great a problem as Jhat of the neglected children of the poor" It is now up to some Chicago university professor to coifi--pile statistics on the proposition presented by Mr. Bodine and prove it mathematicallv. ,. ' |