Farmers are peaceable people, and yet the lawyers would starve to death if farmers did not furnish them lawsuits. A movement is on foot in New York state to settle farmers’ differences by arbitration. The Patrons of Husbandry recommend this method, and there is some prospect of its adoption on a considerable scale. We commend the plain common sense of it to our agricultural readers.
King Humbert distinguished the throne of Italy by visiting the plagued cities and following the cholera into hospitals. The Pope, as the pretender to the temporal throne of Rome, had to demonstrate also. He has called for an organized assault by prayer on the heart of the Virgin Mary. It is easier than visiting plague-infested towns, and safer. But the Pope proposes to pay those who pray. All who take part in the “rosary prayer” will get absolution for seven years—not from cholera, but from their sins.
How many people will be in the world in 2000 A. D.? is one of the questions pressing for settlement in the heads of statisticians. It is comforting to know that these interesting and romantic persons assure us that the United States will have six hundred millions, if nothing in the nature of a preventing Providence intervenes. It is a comfort to know that the jury have no personal interest in this verdict in our favor.
This country will have to make some laws on the subject of timber. The big forests are rapidly becoming only memories. We make some kinds of lumber from straw, and iron has taken the place of other kinds. But the woods have climatic uses, and a treeless land is exposed to evils more costly than the value of the timber we are wasting. The annual floods are one item of the cost of destroying trees; changes of climate, which can hardly be measured, are another item but little thought of. The trees are a part of natural economy of the earth.
Public debts are made with far too much carelessness; but people who wish to evade taxes so arising, repudiate en masse; and hence comes the interesting question: “Are we a nation of rascals?” If one judges by the number of worthless (or little worth) bonds of all sorts which are in existence, we are a nation of rascals. There must, in other words, be some rascally element in the national character, or all these promises to pay would not be dishonored. The genesis of the good-for-nothing bonds ought to be written philosophically; that may be a necessary preface to writing it with a moral purpose.