Thursday, September 9, 1920
The French have a saying: Place aux dames.
It means give way for the ladies. Ladies first. It is called into use when an incident reminds man, poor man, that in every contest women beat men hollow. Here within sixty days of the election a theory has become a condition, and politics has ceased to be an exact science.
A philosopher arose the other day and said that the real reason that men refused to contend with women was not through courtesy but through fear, and the more we think about it, the more truth there appears to be in it.
We have never known a man who was brave where women were concerned. Not one of them that would not go a long way around to keep from meeting an angry woman.
There is some kind of an excelling mentality in women that puts it all over the male brute. It is called woman’s tongue. Woman’s chief weapon is the tongue, and they will not let it rust…
The first discipline that every man gets is by a woman and none ever lives long enough to overput it. From now until election day we expect to add to our education considerably, and anyone who follows our musings in these columns will see signs of a man groping in darkness.
When the proclamation came that women were free and equal, man was hurled from his throne, and his first thought was of salvage. There are two kinds of women, the one that rocks the cradle and the one that rocks the windows.
STILL DESTROYED
State Constables Moore and Wooddell and Darnell raided a moonshiner’s outfit on the head of Beaver Creek last Thursday night. They got the outfit, but the men heard the officers coming and made off through the woods.
The outfit consisted of a homemade still of perhaps ten gallons capacity, with a piece of hose and lead pipe for a worm. Mash to the amount of about 250 gallons was found and destroyed. A few quarts of moonshine in fruit jars was captured. Operations were in a fair way to start as the mash was getting right. Corn meal was the ingredient.
The scene of the operation was on a small stream on the head of Beaver Creek, back in the woods far away from trails or people. All the materials had to be carried in on man’s back over a rough steep way.
The State Constables are certainly mopping up on the moonshiners, and the quick- er the better. Moonshining is the violation of a law that is backed by public sentiment. These law breakers have no regard for the deluded victims whose patron- age makes possible the bad business. Eight to twenty dollars a quart is paid by the men with the craving or the young fool who wants to do something devilish. If they get whiskey, it is bad enough, but usually they get poison from a lead pipe worm or a concentrated lye can.
Back up the State Constables in their good work.
A WISE DIAGNOSIS
Of course there are many, many Republicans who are not crazed with Wilson-hate, and have been willing for a year past, and are still willing, to back sound world leadership from whatever source. But they must feel that in the group of politicians who control the Republican party at present, world-leadership is mighty scarce. Mr. Taft makes what allowances and apologies he can for Mr. Harding, but his real explanation of the Harding fall-down on the treaty was that it was due “to the purpose of keeping Senator Johnson from bolting…”
But there is more than the fear of Johnson the matter with the old-guard Republicans. They are like people who have not heard the news. Their curious, blind Wilson-hate is instinctive and due mostly to terror – a sentiment such as snakes probably have about mongooses.
They have seen Wilson rout them by powers and means they could neither understand nor handle. He has been something uncanny to them, driving them to fits of impotent protest and to a long succession of absurd stories and slander such as a company of fairly fastidious skunks would hesitate to circulate about a ground hog.
Seeing him disabled and believing him to be discredited, they think their turn has come.
But has it?
It seems daily more doubtful. They are so peculiar. Their cry of “America first” is the offer of self interest in a campaign in which the issue promises to be virtually religious.
To be brotherly and helpful to a distressed and disintegrated world is religion. Not a note of all Harding’s vociferation calls anyone to that. There are words about it, but they are feeble words in which there is no spirit of succor.
Harding is all for safety first and staying by the sty and putting more fat on home ribs…
THE WOMEN’S CONVENTION
Will women take an interest in politics?
The Democratic convention of the women of Pocahontas county at Marlinton last Saturday afternoon answered that question in the affirmative. An intelligent one, too.
Fifty or sixty ladies were at the meeting. There were grandmothers and there were those just old enough to vote. They were in earnest. They had not sought the responsibility of citizenship, but they were not dodging the issue. Party prejudice played no part in bringing them together, but they desire to take advantage of the opportunity to help humanity which the Democratic party offers at this particular time.
Talk about an enlightened, educated electorate, the women voters are it. In all his experience in attending political conventions, this writer never saw as large a body of voters where the educational average was so high. Nor one where self interest played no part.
The country is saved. Fifty years of our present effective public school system would not have sufficed to bring our voting citizenship to the high plain reached when women were given the vote.