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Show 15he Hold-p Microbt-tShe Ogden Man is 'Philosophical. Ogden, Oct. 30th, 10.. "Good morning. Have you been held up yet?' Such is the commonplace greeting of one Ogdenite to another these days. We are living in a state of siege. The hold-up microbe got loose early in the month and its ravages have created consternation all along its tortuous course from the heart of the Democratic party to the tenderloin of the levee, finally reaching reach-ing the legs of the candidates running for office. Everybody and everything is being held up. The nominees on three tickets hold up the people and demand rates; the party manipulators hold up the nominees and appropriate the ccin; the dealers in salable electors hold up the politicians, and wives hold up their husbands. The question is a complex com-plex one and so far no light has bene shed on the vexed problem whether the poles hold up the electric wires or tho wires hold up the poles, but one thing is sure: the light company holds us all up. 0 c5 t5 But the pity of it all, viewed from a serious standpoint, is the practical deironstration of last week, that our so-called twentieth century education edu-cation is nothing but a thin veneer covering a latent lat-ent volcano of passion, prejudice and barbarism. We are corks tossed on the ocean of our own violence and primordial savagery. The smell of blood is sweeter to our primal senses than the scent of burnt offerings to the Aztec God. We are sensible beings only when that vascillating preceptor, pre-ceptor, called the mind, points true to the magnet of reason. The latterday system, like the former day system and the system of the ancients, is at fault. We have not yet succeeded in legislating mental equilibrium into the human race. And worse, we have not succeeded in acquiring it by any other process, so that in the hour that tries men's souls, we are sane, morally responsible mathematically sure, people. . K K In fact we are but one remove from the commune; com-mune; and two from St. Bartholomew. Given the time and place, not one out of a hundred of the best of us but would, in the exuberance of our primitive hereditament, mark history's page equally significant, as a witch burner at Salem, or Cambronne, hero of Waterloo. There is a whole lot of hell in all of us and the best that the civilization of the twentieth century can do Is to keep us on the reservation most of the time. We break out in unsuspected places. The rule seems to be the more faith, the less use we have for reason. Our strong men are our weakest. weak-est. In other words, the preachers and ministers, those who thrive by appealing to the mysterious to save us from the practical, are the first to disenchant disen-chant themselves by flying off on a tangent when it is the plain duty of all good citizens to walk round and round In a circle. IW iv tw That brings us to the front door of our story. Late last week we had one of those highly moralizing mor-alizing mass meetings for the purpose of doing something, or to blow off steam, or effervesce, or play politics; or get excited; or arouse the quiet, law-abiding citzens to a realization of strange faces and alarming conditions; or go up in the H air over nothing just because some cruel political H joker got the preachers on the scent of an ism H that made men violent at the mention of a hold-up. H The whole town turned out and the preachers H weie loaded for .bear, hold-ups, and neophlte. A B few animated addresses and the preachers had H tho mob ready for a call to arms. The speakers B all were sure that something was the matter some- B where, but not one of them knew that balm of B Gilead is not good for sores on the body politic. B Meantime the temperature of the meeting had reached fever heat. One of the few calm ones was Bill. Bill had an idea the whole thing was a deliberate scheme to cast odium on the administration, with an eye singular to putting him into a political hole. He insisted that if there were hold-ups, the Mayor and Chief of Police could do nothing more than they were doing to protect the people, and that all the mass meetings since Noah stopped to water the stock on Ararat, could not give the Mayor any more power than he now has, to deal with the situation. The meeting, however, was not for the purpose of appealing to reason, if there was any other course open. The hot air factory turned out PhiLlipics made to order and with tne torrid oratory the temperature of the meeting soon reached the boiling point. i,5w & ( To summarize: The town vas so 'wrought up by the fool meeting and the exaggerated newspaper newspa-per reports that no man considered he was safe unless he was a walking arsenal. Our firm sold two hundred revolvers in one week. People making mak-ing a social call would go armed and the host would designate a particular room where gentlemen gentle-men could leave their artillery during their stay in the house. Squads of hare-brained youngsters ambitious to acquire cheap notoriety, and the standing rewards, patroled the streets with double I barrelled shotguns. None but the bravest dared to leave the shelter of their own houses, and to this day pedestrians at night keep In the glare of the lamps in the middle of the streets. And so on ad lib. The fever did not abate till two policemen had been shot by a reputable citizen, who had taken a dose of the medicine prepared by the preachers and the agitators, and with that fatality the town came out of its trance. t5 Icr l2& The whole business was the annual recurrence, of jim-jams which most towns have occasionally under widely differing forms. It appears three ex-convicts ex-convicts from Idaho gave us a call and, by way of celebrating their advent in Billtown, held "up who ever came in their way till they had enough money to take them far out of town. The like might occur any day. In the meantime the police department has its troubles, of course. The murder mur-der of a young man a year ago and the finding of the body of another man, murdered for his money, gives the department some hard nuts to crack. It is only fair to say that this community does not materially differ, so far aa a general average aver-age goes, from any other city similarly situated, in regard to crime and defiance of law. "We have our spasms and our weaknesses, to be sure, but without the free advertising wMch the preachers and moral adjudicators give us, we probably could make clean enough showing at least to escape the preachers' Purgatory. |
