Thursday, September 6, 1900
Major Carter, of Washington, who spent his vacation at Marlinton, is the President’s physician. He said he was advised that this was a wild country, the people being little better than barbarians, and that he should come fully armed. On the contrary he had found Marlinton to be the most peaceful community he had ever seen. That after a couple weeks here, he had seen but one drunk man and “that was a red-headed Irishman, who have the constitutional right to get drunk the world over.”
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Just as grand old Sol was hiding behind the western hills last Sunday evening. Mr. Andrew Newton Taylor and Miss Lelia C. Hess, of Marlinton, drove up in front of the Methodist parsonage and were united in the bonds of matrimony by Rev. Atkinson. After receiving a polite bow and a word of congratulations from the little company assembled to witness the ceremony, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor drove to their home at the Big Spring. We wish them well and hope they will do well for both worlds.
LIFE IN THE WEST
Iowa is certainly the place for “the man with the hoe” – or that other implement of which the hoe was the ancestor – the two-horse cultivator; for the day is long past with most other implements for which man himself furnished the motive power. Even the vegetable garden is planted out in the field where the farmer can run through it with his corn plow. Everything here is done, with the object of compassing the greatest possible amount of everything that comes in the line of farm product, and one has an object lesson continually in view of what Herbert Spencer meant by “high pressure in life” in America; for the rush begins just as early in the spring as conditions will admit, and continues, Sundays often not excepted, until far into December. The farmer will often be out picking corn while that stars are shining and come in by the same light with all his chores to do after night and chores, like the other business of the farm, is a big thing.
“Though we might sit by our lamp at home and read the figures representing the annual crop of small grain in Iowa, yet mere figures give little idea, and one needs to ride over the country and see the vast stretch of land sowed to barley and oats, and hear the ceaseless clack, clack, of the reapers to realize much about it…”
TRUE EDUCATION
One of the cheering features of the present era is the awakening on the subject of what constitutes a real education.
More than 40 years ago, Herbert Spencer asked this common sense question: What knowledge is of most worth?” Had it been a clap of thunder from a cloudless sky, it could not have been more startling to the educational world in its influences. … It seems that previously to the appearance of this question but few or none of the leading educators had ever entertained the idea that any knowledge had any worth whatever, the value of higher education being mainly that of class distinction, merely making out of its possessor as a person above the common people…
To answer the momentous question, “What knowledge is of most worth?” Mr. Spencer classified in the order of their importance the leading kinds of activity that make up human life, and arranged them thus:
First – Those activities which directly minister to self-preservation.
Second – Those activities which by securing the necessities of life indirectly minister to self-preservation.
Third – Those activities which have for their end the rearing and discipline of offspring.
Fourth – Those activities which are involved in the maintenance of proper social and political relations.
Fifth – Those miscellaneous activities which make up the leisure part of life, devoted to the gratification of tastes and feelings.
This arrangement is something like the right order of subordination that the activities that make up human life hold to each other. As to the first, it is manifest that without personal sanity and safety, there can be no care exercised for others…
