| Show CLEAR IF AOT COMFORTING Of course our morning contemporary does not like the Presidents message It hates the man and therefore dis pises all that he does and says But its comments on the message simply cause a smile It says ° In point of fact there is nor a clear thing about it To proie this our neighbor says it has not Ua comforting sentence Well a message may be very clear without being in the least comforting comfort-ing The man who was selected to break to a nervous woman the news of her husbands death and said Tom is smashed to a jelly and they are bringing in the corpse was clear enough hut not very comforting To show that in the message there is the same verbose and roundabout way of expressing ideas which makes the Presidents style so disagreeable our contemporary refers for instance in-stance to the Presidents remarlcs on the silver question and exclaime That is comfort to the west Thai is statesmanship for the webt Now what has comfort to the west to do wlth ua roundabout way of expression expres-sion Our neighbor inveighs again about verbose expression and gives more specimens of its own verbose cxpics sions in two or three columns than can be found in the whole message lengthy as it is running through a dozen columns of an ordinary newspaper news-paper It would puzzle an acute mind to make sense I of a number of longwinded sentences that contradict each other in the same columns of our contemporary which attempt to criti cise the Presidents diction Lack of understanding of the wording word-ing of the message indicates confusion of mind Every paragraph is easily tope to-pe understood The message is long not because it is prosy put because it touches on so many and so great a variety of subjects It is clear enough to an ordinary reader and is singularly singular-ly devoid of rhetoric and of obscure expressions The Presidents views as to silver or any other public question and his manner of verbal expression are altogether alto-gether different things Comfort and clearness are not absolutely essential to each other We fear that the very clearness of the Presidents views on several subjects is what gives such cold comfort to our contemporary and that in speaking of his manner it means rather his matter If those who live in glass houses Should be careful about throwing I stones those who reel of interminable I and turgid sentences the purport of which is difficult to discover should refrain from finding fault with the plain straightforward utterances of the Presidents message the chief criticism of the composition of which is its lack of ornament and absence of those rhetorical trimmings which so frequently obscure theasense in public documents Our morning contemporary II contempor-ary dislikes the man and so pitches into his paragraphs I u |
