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Show Howe About: i Forgiveness Wedded Happiness Suspicious Characters . Boll Syndicate. WNU Service. By ED HOWE TACKING a long life certain persons have been so unfair and unreasonable unrea-sonable with me I am not able to forgive for-give them ; I cannot again trust or associate as-sociate with them. I have adopted this policy as the easiest and best way. If I had opportunity oppor-tunity to punish them, I should not do so. I do not talk about them, or think of them when I can help It. I believe In all decency, but this Is the best I can do with my enemies. Any suggestion that I love them is plainly silly to me; I cannot so much as forgive them. The best I can do Is to let them alone. In 1S1G a Frenchman made an estimate esti-mate as to happiness of husbands and wives In England. Out of every hundred hun-dred thousand population, he concluded, conclud-ed, only thirteen of the married were fairly happy. Of those passing for happy, he estimated the number at 8,325 per 100,000. Of those living In open hostility, he found 17,345; 13,279 of the secretly discontented, and 58,406 of the materially Indifferent. Nearly 8,000 ran away or were divorced during dur-ing the year. . . . Conditions are better in 1932 than in 1816. In my section sec-tion there is a city of 500,000. I do not believe only 05 married persons In It are only fairly happy. In my own town there are 15,000 souls. According Accord-ing to this estimate, we have something some-thing like one and a half married persons per-sons who are fairly happy. I am certain cer-tain we can do better than that. . . . Here Is more criticism of marriage far beyond reason or fact. I know a man who married a second time. Within a day or two his wife began regulating him. "Now looky here, Alice," he said, "we might as well understand each other. I have recently recent-ly secured, at great expense, trouble and humiliation, divorce from a woman wom-an who nagged me. I specially dislike nagging ; I regard it as an insult, and It specially humiliates and angers me. If you cannot' resist the temptation, let us part now, that I may avoid the life of shame from which I lately fled." Every criminal is under suspicion in his community before he engages In crime. Every man who will be arrested arrest-ed next week is labeled as a probability proba-bility for arrest this week. People wonder how he makes a living; his habits are not the normal habits of the steady men of the community. We must tighten up on suspicious characters who have no visible means of support. Of my acquaintances I can mske an accurate list of those liable li-able to be arrested ; so can you. The cost of crime to the worthy majority is enormous and burdensome. I see men on the streets every day who should be promptly arrested as vagrants, va-grants, as a precautionary measure; they violate the law as loafers, dead beats and adventurers. Occasionally a written sentence Is so wise and true as to be worthy of a place in the permanent philosophy of every fairly Intelligent and honest man. I know of no- American who may be credited with a greater number of such rare exhibitions than Abraham Lincoln. And the sentences I admire were east in almost perfect form ; nothing can be taken from them nothing added, without harm. Yet Lincoln was not a professional writer. He almost never went to school ; of young men of today not one in a hundred hun-dred had as poor a start as Lincoln. Of all Americans of large equipment I regard Ralph Waldo Emerson as perhaps per-haps the ablest writer. Lacking Emerson's Em-erson's enormous technical education, Lincoln was timid, and wrote sparingly. sparing-ly. I can point out many specimens of folly in Emerson's writing ; none in Lincoln's he intended for the public. Some of his private love letters were foolish, but these were intended for the fire. And no one should be criticized for folly In love. "Before the gates of excellence," wrote Hesoid, "the high gods have placed Sweat. Long Is the road thereto, there-to, and rough and steep at the first; but when the height Is achieved, then I there Is ease, though grievously hard ! in the earning." Probably seven out of ten people have grumbled about the moving pictures pic-tures and thought they could write better plays, but they have not done I so. . . . The mechanics of the pic-; pic-; ture theaters have been Improved until I they are little short of marvelous, but authors and producers show less im-1 im-1 provement. (Science always does bot-' bot-' ter than the philosophers or intellec-! intellec-! tuals who claim to know more than ; mechanics). Great men are largely those who have managed to do a good deal of J work at odd times while greatly bothered both-ered with love affairs. Ibsen had a bad start: at eighteen he had a serious affair with a hired girl, and came near going to the devil hefove she and her child were disposed of, but Ibsen managed to survive. In i way. Books are canned gossip, and rarely ns interesting as gossip fresh from the homes, the streets, and other places of yesterday. |