OCR Text |
Show . K'JL'fK- -; . iJ cr . ' THE CITIZEN thought; it fathers disharmony. It taints the atmosphere of. the ' university with a subtle poison because' it expresses the spirit of little, prejudiced men and women. .There are such men in all churches and all so cities., Whatever their spirit tquches becomes narrow and . illiberal, and, so to say, sunless. . , , j We trust that the liberal spirit which we believe to n. among the regents will not capitulate to narrowness and that liberal spirit will express itself in-- the , choice of a- president of character we have attempted; ihough somewhat' vaguely, :to deft . . - , j I I' Vi- iVi -' BERGDOLL MADE LAUGHING U S. ARMY CHIEFS That Bergdoll succeeded in making fools of the highest officers in the United States army has been developed by the congressional inquiry. To his dying day he will chuckle at his smartness and at the stupidity of our army. Bergdoll set out deliberately to make fools of the America which should have been his country but which he hated because it went to war with the kaiserland to which he and his family owed soul allegiance. .. his cleverness in evading arrest. With boastful was of Bergdoll him it was a demonstration of superior Teutonic astuteness. It was Germany Uber Alles. It was the superman dealing with mere man, the despised and contemptible Yankee. His capture did not lessen his' confidence in himself or his theory, ' It was simply such a setback as sometimes comes even to a superman. Immediately he set his mind at work to putwit his captors and he employed a particularly humiliating device to make a laughing stock of some of our highest military officers. It appears that Secretary Baker was not one of these, for .the rejease of Bergdoll to hunt for a mythical pot of gold was ordered without his knowl. ' L edge. Apparently the responsibility goes back to General March, who was then, if our memory serves us, chief of staff. Next in order of dignity was Major General P. H. Harris who sanctioned the release which had been applied for by General S. T. Ansell, who seems to have been the chief blunderer. It was he who swallowed Bergdolls yarn whole. He told his superiors that Bergdoll had buried about $150,000 in gold and he urged that the prisoner be released upon the golden quest. ' Merely by- telling a fairy story such as carries illusion onlyj1 the smallest, of children Bergdoll outgeneraled the generals andi caped to Germany. There has been a sinister suspicion that a real pot of was used for bribery and, no doubt, Bergdolls own lawyer henchmen were well paid. That any of our army officers wasl'jp. volved in corruption does not appear. It is unlikely! But, if wej Mr use a bit of expressive slang, the escaped-prisonehas the lau on our army chiefs. Nor did those Americans who sought to recover BefgdollJ If1 r kidnapping him in Germany show themselves more perspicacious tkN our army officers. That was a feat which :only success could Tim and it was a miserable fiasco. Once again Bergdoll escaped he had the additional- satisfaction of seeing the abductors placed prison instead of himself. It is an uproarious, yet painful, comedy of errors. It 'butts pride of all Americans that' this traitor was able to outwit captors and make good his- escape. Nor does it salve the vottf5Sr1 to know that part of what he accomplished was achieved by the e of money. Bill Nye concluded one of his screaming parables by Savit What we are to learn from all this, my dear children, I1 really not know. The moral of the present narrative may probably! expressed best in that form. There may be a plainer moral late for the investigation may develop something worse than officfW ole h blundering. - r -- ; a: - - nan IS THE DRY EAGLE DRUNKENER THAN THE WET LION? ! i i i i Under the heading, Remarkable Remarks, we see two statements that are remarkably contradictory. Pussyfoot Johnson, since he was the victim of an atrocity in London, sees with only one eye, but he hears with two ears. And it is quite to be expected that his ears are attuned to the praises of prohibition. Some of the biggest men have told me that wet England cannot compete in the commercial world with dry America. One of the biggest men who made some such remark is General Booth, who, returning to England from a tour of the United States, said : A drunken lion cannot long compete with a sober eagle. Hearing these remarkable remarks our drys will perspire with to many of us as to be enthusiasm. There is nothing able to count our virtues in dollars and cents. But hark to this remarkable remark by Municipal Judge Seidel of Columbus, Ohio: If we brought in all the people who are making brew in their of the. people in jail.. homes wed have of our people making home brew and another fourth sating their thirst on wool alcohol, moonshine and other frantic liquors with another heavy proportion taking to drugs, we are mystified to know how sober the eagle was when the head of the Salvation Army last saw him. The truth probably is that the lion cannot compete even when sober with the eagle, drunk or sober, but it may be only a part of so-inspirin- one-four- th One-four- th to to !bl pire A m the truth. In a little more than a century we have bepame t richest people in the world and much of the time the eagle has pt fumed himself with alcohol. The eagle probably can, ,with one-f- a tied to his wings, the lion in the commercial race. But we are constrained, for the sake of truth, to tell anothi .1 1 out-distan- ce truth. id It probably was a bit of drunkards luck. The cost of British world-wid- e trade has been prodigious. S! has paid heavily for her imperialism. Her ships have pone to climes to bring home the raw materials that we dig out of ro own hills or grow in our own fields and haul to adjacent mills ar n factories. A race of zanies, of course, could not have achieved milt lac with these resources. V! efficier The American business man and laborer has been more tic da and energetic than the Englishman and doubtless this has been at least in some measure, to the fact that they have1 been more solx than their English brethren. In our wet days our moralists were prone to exaggerate a alcoholism. In every glass' of beer they saw the D. T.s and in cvc: lo glass of whiskey a broken home. But, sooth to say, the American was one of the soberest of inf Aiid he was growing'morc sober all the time despite the saloon. tl ' And now, mayhap, lie is growing drunkencr despite prohibit1'!1 hi and with a strange', mad sort of drunkenness. Soon the dry eagle may be drunkencr than the wet lion. fc ' |