The press of the city is well conducted. It is the exponent of American ideas, and the faithful guardian of American interests. The writers are evidently of that class who have risen above flunkeyism and deal justly by the time in which they live. They oppose their journals to innovation, when such does not give promise of good results; they stigmatize moral cowardice, and teach that from the village council room to the chambers of the National Government virtue should be doubly cherished and vice subjected to rebuke and punishment.

The industrial revolutions of the coming century will, without doubt, be brought about very largely through the utilisation of Nature’s waste energy in the service of mankind. Waterfalls, after being very largely neglected for two or three generations, are now commanding attention as valuable and highly profitable sources of power. This is only to be regarded as forming the small beginning of a movement which, in the coming century, will “acquire strength by going,” and which most probably will, in less than a hundred years, have produced changes in the industrial world comparable to those brought about by the invention of the steam-engine.

Lord Kelvin, in the year 1881, briefly, but very significantly, classified the sources of power available to man under the five primary headings of tides, food, fuel, wind, and rain. Food is the generator of animal energy, fuel that of the power obtained from steam and other mechanical expansive engines; rain, as it falls on the hill-tops and descends in long lines of natural force to the sea coasts, furnishes power to the water-wheel; while wind may be utilised to generate mechanical energy through the agency of windmills and other contrivances. The tides as a source of useful power have hardly yet begun to make their influence felt, and indeed the possibility of largely using them is still a matter of doubt. The relative advantages of reclaiming a given area of soil for purposes of cultivation, and of converting the same land into a tidal basin in order to generate power through the inward and outward flow of the sea-water, were contrasted by Lord Kelvin in the statement of a problem as follows: Which is the more valuable–an agricultural area of forty acres or an available source of energy equal to one hundred horse-power? The data for the solution of such a question are obviously not at hand, unless the quality of the land, its relative nearness to the position at which power might be required, and several other factors in its economic application have been supplied. Still, the fact remains that very large quantities of the coastal land and a considerable quantity of expensive work would be needed for the generation, by means of the tides, of any really material quantity of power.

It is strange that, while so much has been written and spoken about the possibility of turning the energy of the tides to account for power in the service of man, comparatively little attention has been paid to the problem of similarly utilising the wave-power, which goes to waste in such inconceivably huge quantities. Where the tidal force elevates and depresses the sea-water on a shore, through a vertical distance of say eight feet, about once in twelve hours, the waves of the ocean will perform the same work during moderate weather once in every twelve or fifteen seconds. It is true that the moon in its attraction of the sea-water produces a vastly greater sum total of effect than the wind does in raising the surface-waves, but reckoning only that part of the ocean energy which might conceivably be made available for service it is safe to calculate that the waves offer between two and three thousand times as much opportunity for the capture of natural power and its application to useful work as the tides could ever present. In no other form is the energy of the wind brought forward in so small a compass or in so concrete a form.

From: Twentieth Century Inventions. A Forecast., by George Sutherland, 1901.

1. This Club shall be known as the Ignoramus Club of ——.

4. Every member shall be pledged not to read the latest book until people have stopped expecting it.

5. The Club shall have a Standing Committee that shall report at every meeting on New Things That People Do Not Need to Know.

6. It shall have a Public Library Committee, appointed every year, to look over the books in regular order and report on Old Things That People Do Not Need to Know. (Committee instructed to keep the library as small as possible.)

8. No member (vacations excepted) shall read any book that he would not read twice. In case he does, he shall be obliged to read it twice or pay a fine (three times the price of book, net).

11. The Club shall meet weekly.

12. Any person of suitable age shall be eligible for membership in the Club, who, after a written examination in his deficiencies, shall appear, in the opinion of the Examining Board, to have selected his ignorance thoughtfully, conscientiously, and for the protection of his mind.

13. All persons thus approved shall be voted upon at the next regular meeting of the Club—the vote to be taken by ballot (any candidate who has not read When Knighthood Was in Flower, or Audrey, or David Harum—by acclamation).

Perhaps I have quoted from the by-laws sufficiently to give an idea of the spirit and aim of the Club. I append the order of meeting:

1. Called to order.
2. Reports of Committees.
3. General Confession (what members have read during the week).
4. FINES.
5. Review: Books I Have Escaped.
6. Essay: Things Plato Did Not Need to Know.
7. Omniscience. Helpful Hints. Remedies.
8. The Description Evil; followed by an illustration.
9. Not Travelling on the Nile: By One Who Has Been There.
10. Our Village Street: Stereopticon.
11. What Not to Know about Birds.
12. Myself through an Opera-Glass.
13. Sonnet: Botany.
14. Essay: Proper Treatment of Paupers, Insane, and Instructive People.
15. The Fad for Facts.
16. How to Organise a Club against Clubs.
17. Paper: How to Humble Him Who Asks, “Have You Read—-?”
18. Essay, by youngest member: Infinity. An Appreciation.
19. Review: The Heavens in a Nutshell.
20. Review. Wild Animals I Do Not Want to Know.
21. Exercise in Silence. (Ten Minutes. Entire Club.)
22. Essay (Ten Minutes): Encyclopædia Britannica, Summary.
23. Exercise in Wondering about Something. (Selected. Ten Minutes. Entire Club.)
24. Debate: Which Is More Deadly–the Pen or the Sword?
25. Things Said To-Night That We Must Forget.
26. Adjournment. (Each member required to walk home alone looking at the stars.)

“Ruskin,” it says in the introduction to The Crown of Wild Olive which my little friend reads at school, “is certainly one of the greatest masters of English prose.” That has often been declared. But is he? Or is our tribute to Ruskin only a show of gratitude to one who revealed to us the unpleasant character of our national habits when contrasted with a standard for gentlemen? It ought not to have required much eloquence to convince us that Widnes is unlovely; the smell of it should have been enough. It is curious that we needed festoons of chromatic sentences to warn us that cruelty to children, even when profit can be made of it, is not right. But I fear some people really enjoy remorseful sobbing. It is half the fun of doing wrong. Yet I would ask in humility–for it is a fearful thing to doubt Ruskin, the literary divinity of so many right-thinking people–whether English children who are learning the right way to use their language, and the noblest ideas to express, should run the risk of having Ruskin’s example set before them by soft-hearted teachers? I think that a parent who knew a child of his, on a certain day, was to take the example of Ruskin as a prose stylist on the subject of war, would do well, on moral and aesthetic grounds, to keep his child away from school on that day to practise a little roller-skating.

From the essay “Ruskin” in Waiting for Daylight, by H. M. Tomlinson. New York: Knopf, 1922.

To The Illustrator

In grateful acknowledgment of his amiable condescension in lending his exquisitely delicate art to the embellishment of these poor verses from his sincerest admirer

The Author

From: The Bashful Earthquake & Other Fables and Verses by Oliver Herford with many pictures by the Author (Scribner’s 1898).

The experiment of free government is not one which can be tried once for all. Every generation must try it for itself. As each new generation starts up to the responsibilities of manhood, there is, as it were, a new launch of Liberty, and its voyage of experiment begins afresh.

Robert C. Winthrop, Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1852, p. 163. Noted in Lord Acton, A Lecture on the Study of History Delivered at Cambridge, June 11, 1895. London: MacMillian and Co., 1911.

(Say 1 vol., octavo, about 128 pages, wanting very much a publisher.)

To Death.

Welcome, sad Death, creed of the glazèd eye,
Our last true friend, the fickle hand of maid,
The faith of dame replacing, unafraid
Who clasp they own and with one latest breath

Bid, “Lead me to some palace of the night
That all must know, deprived of mortal sight,
Of earthly comfort, health, and human aid”;
Welcome, thrice welcome, final hope, sweet Death!

Perhaps in that long vision signs decree
Of aspirations and unclaimed desires
That fitly rose to feed immortal fires

The consummation that came not to me
Within this weary width of land and sea,
Of parents, pavements acres, homes, and spires.

From: My Soundspeed Discovery, by George Winslow Pierce. Boston: Published by the Author, 1895.

Gleanings from Old Journals.

Old newspapers make good reading–if they are old enough. Like the deciphering of moss-covered epitaphs, the reading of journals of other days gives rise to reflections that mingle the sweet with the sad. It shows plainly that time does not alter human nature, much as customs may change.

The Scrap Book, Volume 1, Number 3, published May, 1906 by Frank A. Munsey.