| OCR Text |
Show Science Discovers Hunger Germ Breeder of Bolshevism NT now comes the hunger germ ! Cabled reports from Vienna tell of a new bacillus which has been discovered dis-covered in Austria in the bodies of those who have died of starvation. The scientists who made the discovery have called it the hunger germ. Not, of course, that the germ is the cause of hunger; for hunger is a condition con-dition and not a disease. It is hunger which breeds the germ. It is hunger which kills. The germ is merely one of the evidences of what it was that has been the cause of death. To the living body, hunger is what lack of fuel is to the boiler. Indeed, if one ponder the matter well, giving due weight to analogies, coincidences and contrasts, it will be found that the identical process applies ap-plies to the body politic, that is, to nations and the world at large, as well as to individuals. What the hunger germ is to the starving individuals, Bolshevism is to the starving nations. The first instance of Bolshevism recorded re-corded in history is that of the withdrawal with-drawal of the plebeians from Rome, some 500 years before the birth of Christ. The event is one of the most interesting pages in the story of the human race. It is so well known that it needs an apology for repeating it here. The patricians, who constituted the plutocratic upper classes, had become be-come so arrogant and exacting that the plebeians, tired of being exploited, retired from Rome and decided to establish es-tablish a commonwealth of their own. Menenius Agrippa, who, although a patrician, enjoyed the confidence of the proletariat, went out to their camp and told them the following fable : "The limbs," he said, "once rose in revolt against the stomach. The lazy stomach, the arms and legs declared, de-clared, did nothing but eat and have a good time generally, while to them fell all the work, all the drudgery. They decided, accordingly, that the feet were no longer to procure the food nor the hands to carry it to the mouth. The stomach was to do it3 own chores if it cared to eat. If not, it could go hang itself far as they were concerned. The aid of the limbs having thus been withdrawn, naturally natur-ally the stomach soon began to feel the pangs of hunger; it languished and perished. And with it perished also the rebellious limbs." The plebeians saw the point of the fable and promp.tly returned, especially especi-ally as some concessions were granted which made their lot in the commonwealth common-wealth more tolerable. And, by the way, in this connection, it may not be amiss to call attention to the fact that the word proletarian, as a designation desig-nation of the lower classes of society, which is commonly supposed to be not much older than the French Revolution, Revo-lution, was in current use in Rome hundreds of years before the Christian era. Plautus, the comic dramatist, who flourished 300 B. C, makes use of the word in his comedy entitled "Menaechmi." And by a strange coincidence, co-incidence, it is in the same play that this ancient writer mentions a remedy for disaffection among those who labor which is not a whit less applicable at the present day. It is in the introductory intro-ductory part of the play where a Parasite, Par-asite, soliloquizing, says: People who secure captives with chains And put fetters upon the feet of runaway run-away slaves Act mighty foolishly, in my opinion ; For the wretched, if woe is heaped on woe, Will yearn the more to flee and act despitefully ; And, in one way or another, they'll escape the chains, And with a file will rid themselves of fetters ; Or drive out a nail with a stone : These are but trifles. If you really want to be sure of your man It behooves you to enchain him with food and drink, Tie his beak down to a well-loaded table. You'll easily hold him so long as you use this kind of chain; Tour victuals therefore are mighty pleasing fetters : The wider you extend them the faster they bind. Hunger is a gnawing caused by contractions of an empty stomach. Some lines translated by the poet Longfellow from the German, relative to the heart, are even more applicable to an empty stomach : "The millstone aud the human heart Are ever going round : If they have nothing else to grind They must themselves be ground." One of the manifestations of hunger is that it causes nervous excitement. Kven in the lowest forms of animal life this excitement has been observed. And in human beings it predisposes the mind to undertakings which the same person, properly nourished, would spurn as unworthy or utterly dishonest or even atrocious. When Jerusalem was besieged by Titus in the first century of the Christian era the famine in the city was so great that some parents are said to have eaten their own children. Toward the latter part of the Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century tiie same thing is said to have iiappened in several sev-eral parts of Europe. The hunger germ is the r-ist demoralizing bacillus in the whole range of bacteriology. Two things are so interwoven with the very existence of the human race that no one can with impunity seek to tamper with them sustenance and offspring. And, probably, as "self-preservation "self-preservation is the first law of nature," the more immediately important im-portant of the two is sustenance. No matter what lofty ideals of home, of country, of humanity, one may have, deprive him of sustenance, introduce the hunger germ, and you shatter all those ideals and make him see red. murderously red. There are exceptions, excep-tions, but they are rarer even than those of whom Hamlet says, "To be honest, as the world goes, is to be one man out of ten thousand." And, again to quote the same high authority, with Shakespeare's leave, instead of jn--"" : "The play's the thing To catch the conscience of the king," it may not be so very far from the mark to paraphrase it thus : Good food's the thing To blunt the Bolshevistic sting. |
