Show MENTAL NEARSIGHTEDNESS Above the threshold of er every enterprise enter-prise croakers have sat nnd In the dismal tones of Poes raven have monotonously repeated Nevermore A magazine before us tells cf the efforts ef-forts back in 1S49 of Asa Whitney to Inaugurate tho commencement of a railroad from the lakes to the west coast how he braved all ridIcule but sectional differences defeated his project What was a theme of ridicule ridi-cule then has materialized into five transcontinental lines the face of the dreary waste has changed into smiles and what but was a wilderness 5s now the seat of an empire more splendid in Its i equipments and more formidable In power than was Egypt under the Ptolemies In the thought of mankind in i general the purchase of Alaska as but i a foolish expenditure of I money for an iceberg and many were the silly I jokes aimed at Secretary Seward because l be-cause of his glacier reserve But now ships cannot be supplied fast enough to carry away the eager crowd that want lo challange fortune on ihe sands that the sea sweeps In below the eastern east-ern abutment of the gate that opens Into I the Polar sea Sailors in straining ineir eyes to eaten distant objects out at sea become longsighted The troublo with Insular people is their mental shortsightedness Not many people l have enlarged their horizons since childhood They take in a city or a State or a country but the world outside Is a blank to them While teaching a child geography if his seat faces the south and his organ of location loca-tion is good ever after that the world will be turned round and his geography geogra-phy will be like the cooking performed by l a Chinaman will be Just like thajof t the man or woman who gave him his first lessons In the art Explain Ex-plain to an Englishman who never left England until he reached his majority that either of half a dozen States of our Republic Is larger than all the British Isles put together and show him the figures to prove the truth of tho remark and while he can understand under-stand tho figures he will never comprehend com-prehend the fact In the same way to the average man the distance to the Philippines is really Incomprehensible To him It is on the worlds other side and that is enough Tell him that the distance can be compassed In a few days and while he understands you still his thoughts arc grounded by the mental nearsightedness oC his boyhood boy-hood l when It required three years lo make die round voyage The change from the whaler of 1830 to the steamer of 1900 makes no impression on him In the worlds advancement the mental men-tal nearsightedness of men Is a stigma stig-ma which no oculist sems able to cure The reason Aslor grew rich while his neighbor did not was because his mental men-tal vision was unclouded He heard the Columbia breaking on the bar In his sleep and he saw the Western woods peopled by furbearing animals He conquered the great river and caught the animals and succeeded The nearsightedness of the soul makes a man an Infidel ho cannot see through the splendors of the universe up to the great cause the nearsightedness nearsight-edness of the mind keeps a mortal I a mere plodder upon the objects his eyes Jlrst measured and this fact Is tho obstruction in the worlds progress It Is the Inertia of the ordinary brain which nothing can overcome |