The Tri County News

Howe About: Giving Good Advice

War

Those Who Paid

By ED HOWE

New York people have laughed at us farmers a long time because of our mortgages. O. O. McIntyre, a farmer from Missouri, is now in New York, looking up the records there, and has discovered so far that every building on Fifth avenue is mortgaged, except St. Patrick's cathedral and Tiffany's jewelry store.

The only rich man I know now recently called on me; he used to work in my shop for eight dollars a week, and I recall thinking occasionally it was too much. He is at present getting fifty dollars a week in the mechanical department of a big town newspaper.

His aim in calling on me was to get help in saving his little home. A building association has a small mortgage on it, and it obligates my friend to pay thirty dollars a month through a term of years, such payment to include his rent and a gradual reduction of the principal sum.

"Joe, I have long known you to be a good worker and an honest man," I said to him. "Do you mean to tell me that with wages of fifty dollars a week continuing over eight years, you have not been able to pay thirty dollars a month rent, when this sum included six dollars to apply on your mortgage?"

He thought awhile before answering, as men do when stumped, and I noticed that look of despair I have so often seen lately on the faces of other good men and good fellows.

"Well," he answered finally, "I didn't."

Many a good man has made the same reply, when he knew he was to blame; I have been guilty so often myself I hadn't the heart to say anything further, although I did ask him if he had never heard of the old advice to steadily save something for a rainy day.

"Yes," he replied. "I was brought up on it; mother always fussed at father about that, and I buried him."

It's another American tragedy; I don't know what to do about it.

There was excuse after excuse in this good man's case: for one thing, he had four daughters, and loved them devotedly, for they were good girls, and three of them married shiftless husbands. Still, excuses are usually urged for neglected duty: some of them are eloquent, and true enough but they don't count much when a mortgage is due.

I have often wondered what would have happened had Woodrow Wilson been a brave and true man before he entered the World war, and said: "We have not sufficient cause to engage in this conflict, which will cost us billions in money, and hundreds of thousands of tragical deaths. There has been popular expression on the question; the people elected me President because I kept them out of it. I will resign, but I will not enter the war in response to clamor of a mistaken minority."

Probably there would have been so much indignation from the mistaken that Mr. Wilson would have resigned; probably his successor would have plunged in.

But today Woodrow Wilson's memory would have been blessed by the majority as the memory of no President has been blessed in the history of the Republic.

In the early sixties Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, while sitting in his home in Boston, received a telegram saying his son had been shot through the neck at the battle of Antietam. The distressed father at once started for the battlefield.

The Atlantic reprints an account of the journey Doctor Holmes wrote while its events were fresh in his memory, and the horrors of war have never been more powerfully depicted. He walked through many hospitals looking for his son; inspected many wagons carrying dead and wounded; talked with soldiers who had buried unknown dead in long trenches like cattle; met other frantic fathers who were looking for dead or mangled sons; saw the wreck of the battlefield; heard the screams of wounded; wept at sight of thousands of good-looking boy soldiers horribly mangled.

All through my reading of the story I kept thinking, And the people who fought and paid for the war never wanted it, never asked for it: it was ordered by a few men who never suffered: some of whom profited by the carnage. Out of this unnecessary fighting came Abraham Lincoln, who was never in a battle, lost no sons; Lincoln as President issued the first call for troops.

Probably no man ever had a friend he did not hate a little: we are all so constituted by nature no one can possibly entirely approve of us.

I greatly admire the better class scientists, for this reason: There is no such thing as a first-class man of science who wishes to fool anyone; his ambition is to learn, and, through learning, make life more endurable.

These men are the one class who always wish to tell the truth: who always believe honesty is the best policy.

Statesmen, writers, doctors, preachers, lawyers, business men, occasionally wish to fool us, but the scientists never do: honesty is their trade.

© 1933, Bell Syndicate.-WNU Service.