My Dear Mr. Macfarland:
I have your letter of July 1st with respect to the celebration of the Fourth of July. I am very sorry that I shall not be in the city on that day because of a previous engagement; but I am heartily in sympathy with the movement to rid the celebration of our country’s natal day of those distressing accidents that might be avoided and are merely due to a recklessness against which the public protest cannot be too emphatic.
Very sincerely yours,
(Signed) Wm. H. Taft.
Hon. Henry B. F. Macfarland,
Commissioner of the District of Columbia.
This letter, sent out by the Press Association with a brief account of the celebration, must have helped the cause of the “safe and sane” celebration of Independence Day everywhere.
NEW FOURTHS FOR OLD
BY MRS. ISAAC L. RICE
“When you are past shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude ... with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit and voluble with convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction.... It is pitiful to have dim conceptions of duty; more pitiful, it seems to me, to have conceptions like these of mirth.”—John Ruskin.