Editorial Comments

1916

Alice B. Glines, editor

More and more newspapers are owned for ulterior purposes.

After the war Europe can engage in iron mining all over the lot.

If the Bremen keeps it up she will become another Flying Dutchman.

We must not think the presidential campaign has really started; Judge Hughes has not ridden on a locomotive yet.

What is a yegg? It used to be headwriters' short for highwayman, but now they are beginning to use it for a safe-blower.

Luckily it was only foggy, not a storm, or it would not have been such a picnic going to the Two Lights to see the Bay State.

Among the numerous plans to "help the farmer," the one that seems never to occur to folks is to keep their hands out of the farmer's pockets.

There is no knowing how soon the war may stop. The Germans are a people much devoted to logic, willing to base their actions on their mental processes. Once they see that every week's delay puts them in a worse position, how long will they then delay?

Portland has reckoned her temporary settlement from 1632 or 1633. If Biddeford is to reckon hers from 1616 Portland could reckon hers ten years' earlier. Christopher Levett did build a house to accommodate the annual fishing voyages, which was still standing in 1632 when the Trelawny settlement at Richmond's Island started. Vines built only temporary cabins if anything; Sir Ferdinando Gorge's book says Vines dwelt with the savages. Levett's house was about three miles from Portland proper; Vines's wintering place about five miles from Biddeford proper. Biddeford is in truth a year or two older than Portland, both in their preliminary settlements, which ended in 1690, and in their permanent settlements, a quarter of a century later.

A way by which our readers can help us in our unequal struggle with the paper mills is by reading the fewer papers the better. The reading public are in the final analysis the intended victims of the paper mills' greed. If subscription rates are raised, the people must pay the increase or stop reading, and if advertising rates are raised the people in the long run must pay the increase in the added cost of the merchandise they buy. But we are not obliged to read any more newspapers than we want to, and the sooner the demand falls below the supply the sooner the paper mills' raid will collapse and react on themselves. Of course if we receive paper for next week (at a high but not highway robbery price), we will issue as usual. At this writing no encouragement is offered us.

Ex-Governor St. John of Kansas, the Prohibitionist candidate for President in the Blaine-Cleveland campaign, has just gone to his reward without the satisfaciton of voting to back up President Wilson. The curious pranks fortune plays with us humans is illustrated by a personal anecdote told by Gov. St. John on the platform of the former City Hall in Portland. Governor St. John was being branded as a traitor to the party that freed the slaves, and John A. Logan was Blaine's running mate for Vice President. But before the war, when both men were young lawyers out in Illinois, St. John lay in jail for assisting in the underground railroad and helping fugitive slaves to escape into Canada, and John A. Logan was the Democratic prosecuting attorney who convicted him. Another memorable phrase in that speech of 1884 was his advance vision of the blight of trusts. "I was taught in Sunday school," he said, " that the world is 6,000 years old. Now if Eve had never got Adam to eat that apple, and if they were still alive in the Garden of Eden, and Adam had had a salary all this 6000 years at $25,000 a year, and never spent a cent of it because everything was gratis, he would now have $150,000,000. But John D. Rockefeller, who was a clerk in a grocery store out in Illinois when I was a young lawyer, has got more now than Adam would have had." "Did he earn it?" asked one of the clearest minds of our generation.

—The Fryeburg Post, Fryeburg, Maine, Sept. 26, 1916, p. 6.