Various

“ Freemasonry is confounded, and seeks to evade the blows of the valiant championess by denying her existence, and treating her as a myth. It is a pitiable shift, but Freemasonry can find no better refuge.” “Your pen and your piety,” wrote Monsignore Villard, October 15, 1896, “are predestined to demolish the foes of mankind. The good works of the saints have always met with opposition, and it is no wonder, therefore, that yours should be combated.” ”

“ All others must succumb to the pitiless law of the survival of the fittest. Efforts to escape taxation not sanctioned by justice, so common throughout the United States, are not, therefore, exhibitions of hopeless depravity; they are exhibitions of the natural desire for self-preservation that demands study and heed.
In New York State the efforts of taxpayers to escape this increasing aggression have had a deplorable effect. To still the voice of discontent and complaint, legislators have tried to lay on their burdens as lightly as possible. ”

“ The hatred of the rich, the denunciation of capital, the contempt for the Church, the bloody insurrections of labor, the general feeling of rancor, accompanied by an increase of the tyranny of trades unions and government regulations, are not the inevitable manifestations of envy, ignorance, and criminal instincts; they are the inevitable fruits of the perpetual aggressions in a thousand forms that spring from politics and war. ”

“ To compel officials to do their duty, countless expedients have been invented from time immemorial. In the face of proof mountains high that no legislative or administrative device can uproot the selfishness imbedded in human nature or reshape the conduct molded to this immutable fact, social quacks still continue to spawn their schemes to work the miracle. Slight as is Mr. Roberts’s sympathy with them, he is no exception. As a panacea for the dishonesty and incompetency of the county treasurers that mismanage court and trust funds, he recommends the substitution of State for local inspection. ”

“ The atomic theory, while replacing speculation in one sense, stimulated it in another. The human mind is always striving to get back of the known, to see what lies beyond the limits of visibility, and the conception of an element with its atomic weight opened up a field for the exercise of the imagination. What is an element ultimately? was an early question to ask. Are the elements really diverse, or do they manifest but one fundamental kind of matter? To such queries the atomic weights offered a promising line for investigation, and more than one mind began traveling along it. ”

“ But to minds more alert and penetrating, even if less congested with musty lore and fine intentions, the flight of the farming population to the cities is something besides “a great natural movement toward urban life that accompanies an advance in civilization”—it is a desperate but futile attempt to escape conditions that have become too hard to be borne. The swarms of impoverished and degraded humanity that crowd the slums to suffocation are not altogether the product of willful sloth and incapacity ”

“ Officials are usually so deeply impressed with the importance of their positions and so anxious to magnify the worth of their labors that they are prone to take the rosiest view of any part of the great clanking machine intrusted to their care. With the keenest pride they point to their achievements in furthering the work of human welfare. If modesty does not restrain them, they are certain to paint, with an artless faith in their own abilities, the still greater work that could be done with a slight increase of funds and a little more assistance. ”

“ What our State has done in this line can not probably be undone,” he says in a repetition of his warning, “but this tendency to expand and multiply and differentiate and segregate State supervision and regulation must cease, or the burden will soon become too grievous to be borne.”
But there is no warrant for the assumption that the more civilized we are—that is, the greater our self-control—the more are we in need of inspection and regulation. Such an explanation of the enormous increase in public expenditure is worthless. ”

“ The great revolution which the discovery of steel brought about is dwelt upon at length, and its far-reaching importance, not only in the iron industry itself but in all other industries and in the destinies of England herself, pointed out. In the early days of the industry it was held that the different qualities of iron were due to the different localities from which the ore was obtained, but late in the eighteenth century the great Swedish chemist, Bergman, of Upsala, clearly showed that carbon is the element to which steel and cast iron owe their distinctive properties. ”

“ The incentive to reform came from two sources. Physics, in the kinetic theory of gases, gave a new demonstration of the truth of Avogadro’s law, and led chemists to realize more clearly than before the distinction between atoms and molecules. Soon it was seen that the molecule was the smallest particle of matter which could exist as such, while the atom was the smallest particle which could take part in any chemical change. The metaphysical atom was really the modern molecule; the chemical atom was a new conception, due to the discoveries of chemistry alone. ”

“ To escape it, the owners of every class of property, no matter what their intelligence, their religious professions, or their social standing, resort to every possible subterfuge. With the cries of the tortured fowl ringing in sympathetic ears, complaisant officials refuse to assess real estate, as required by law, at its full value. ”

“ The housewife digs the dust out of her carpets and stirs it out of the quiet corners where it has accumulated, wearing an old dress and covering her head while she leaves her lungs exposed, then shakes her rugs in the yard, and the street sweeper transfers the dust he has charge of from the pavement to the atmosphere, where we can breathe our fill of consumption from day to day. ”

“ At this time many of the journals of civilization in the East, repeating the warnings that they persistently threw out following the discovery of gold in the Klondike, jealously guarded the secrets of the earth by doubting, or even denying, the claims to discovery, but, withal, wisely counseling against that haphazard and purseless rush which is one of the invariable accompaniments of gold announcements. ”

“ The student of food adulterations is an expert in the detection of starches, and, with his microscope and skill, is able to decide how much of one kind of starch and how much of another is offered in the product under examination. It is a matter of congratulation that Nature has set herself so strongly against fraud in food stuffs as to record the origin of each grain of starch in the grain itself. ”

“ The stock explanation of this growth of expenditure is that with the advance of civilization the cost of government must increase in like degree; there must be more regulation and supervision of the activities becoming more numerous and complex. But this means, if it means anything, that the more enlightened and humane people are, the more difficult it is to maintain order and enforce justice, the more inclined are they to attack and plunder one another—in a word, the more barbarous they are. ”

“ I am sure that we shall all leave the laboratory with our imagination full of thoughts of unknown movements in the air about us—thoughts of possible telepathic waves through space, conceptions of new ranges of nerve excitations, hopes of new lights, conceptions of the vastness of the electrical whirls in that elevated region where the molecules of the air, in their endeavor to fly into the abyss of space, are controlled by the earth’s forces and are endowed with electrical energy by the sun. ”

“ I propose in this article, by contrasting good and bad examples, to put before readers a few of the simplest elements of decoration. You can hardly fail to note the differences, and when once the eye has acquired the habit of discriminating there is no reason why there should not follow a growth in perception which will result in delightful and augmenting artistic enjoyment. No attempt is to be made to develop a system, nor, of course, to cover the whole ground of the subject. ”

“ But even if all the reforms in taxation that could be imagined were put in operation they would not meet the situation; they would not deliver the American people from the great and alarming evil of over-legislation and excessive taxation. An increase of revenue, like an increase of supervision, is almost certain to increase the injustice that it was designed to abate. The first year’s operation of the Raines law contributed more than $3,500,000 to the State treasury, yet the addition to the public expenditures that accompanied its enactment made a high tax rate necessary. ”

“ Already many of the departments of the State are in the hands of men supposed to have a special aptitude and liking for their duties. But Mr. Roberts finds that “leaving the department to expend the money as it deems best,” instead of appropriating it for a specific purpose, “is not in the interest of economy.” He says that “it absolutely deprives the Legislature of that judicial scrutiny of the necessity of appropriations” that “it should always exercise, and leaves to the judgment of one what could often be better decided if considered by several.” ”

“ To my mind the conditions exist for developing an electrical state in the earth’s covering of air, which is competent to explain the electrical manifestations of the air, the auroral gleam, and the mysterious effect on the magnetic needle which keeps it directed to the magnetic north. Can not we conclude that the study of the X rays bids fair to greatly extend our conceptions of the constitution of matter and of the action and interaction of Nature’s forces? ”

“ So humble a vegetable as the potato has gained its way into all lands of the more civilized peoples almost solely because it has a habit of storing away, in large underground stems, a vast amount of starch. Let this provident tendency disappear in this plant for a single season, and the crop growers would discard it from their list of remunerative plants, while millions of people would turn with dismay to some other source of a daily supply of starch. ”

“ Every good theory is prophetic; but few generalizations have been so strikingly verified in this respect as has the periodic law. In spite of some outstanding difficulties, yet to be explained, the law has served to great advantage in the classification of the elements, and it has had much to do with the late revival of inorganic chemistry. The latter branch of science, long comparatively neglected, has now gained new interest, and for it, in the near future, a great growth can be prophesied. ”

“ Few national diseases are more dangerous or harder to cure than burdensome taxation. Can any one charged with the responsibility of making tax laws,” he asks, profoundly stirred by the startling facts that have come under his observation, “afford to ignore the undoubted lessons of history or the manifest tendency of the times in the matter of revenue raising and expending?” ”

“ It is the infliction of an aggression that has no more warrant in a court of sound morals than the seizure of his property in disregard of the forms of law. Yet this evil has reached such vast proportions that Mr. Roberts was moved to protest against it. After speaking of “the tendency of the State in building up a gigantic system” that “will call for an enormous and ever-increasing annual expenditure for maintenance,” he expressed the belief in 1896 that “the time has come to call a halt before this burden of taxation becomes too heavy.” ”

“ The corporation fixes the minimum price of articles of sale, and has secret agents to watch that no house takes less, thereby setting bounds to competition and preventing the injurious depreciation of goods. Only the public suffers from the existence of the minimum, but it does not seem to perceive it, and the Government never interferes except in respect to the price of grain, for which it fixes a maximum, and in times of great stress sells from its own granaries. ”

“ Roberts, setting forth the scandal in very moderate terms, “that the taxpayers of the State should be required to pay for Blue Points, lobster, terrapin, frogs’ legs, partridge, quail, venison, and most of the delicacies of the season to supply the tables of officials already well paid and well housed by the State.” But solicitude about table economies was never known to be a trait of bureaucratic parasites. They never trouble themselves to prolong their vision to the meager tables of the poor and suffering robbed of the necessaries of life to load theirs with luxuries. ”

“ Far more interesting to the one who has not been properly rewarded in his search for placer claims than the placer deposits themselves are the gold-bearing beach sands, whose productivity will mainly be responsible for the influx of population to the new region. From them, by crude and simple methods, has been taken, in barely more than two months, gold to the value of more than a million dollars, and what the possibilities for the future may be no one is wise enough to tell. ”