Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois • Page 8

1'AGE EIGHT DECATUR HERALD Friday, October 1, 1337. Better In Opera Than in Politics imagined that the Sunday suit had been put to work or had disappeared entirely. "Extreme cruelty" is an elastic phrase but few husbands in our block or in yours would account the Providence bakery foreman as terribly abused. In many homes Sunday is the day hen the head of the household neglects to shave and appears at the breakfast table in a pair of old pants, scuffed shoes, a worn sweater and no necktie. He may have dirty chores to perform or he may just putter around in the yard or lounge in the living room with the Sunday papers.

In any event, Sunday still is distinguished as a day apart from other days in the week, whether or not church attendance is included on the schedule for the day. The man who works in overalls or old clothes six days of the week likes to "dress up" on Sunday. The business or professional man who dresses carefully six mornings of the week and gives attention during the day to the creases in his trousers and the fold of the handkerchief in the breast pocket of his coat, delights in forgetting or flouting sartorial considerations for a day. Sunday is. among other things, a day of rest and relaxation demands a break in the usual routine.

Revolt Kemarkable "Report" Throws Light on Basic Factors of Italian Policy in the Mediterranean Discontent in Sicily Makes Necessary the Maintenance of "Army of Occupation" on Island. Editorials In this modern age, so we understand, primary school children are not required to learn the letters of the alphabet and imagine their embarrassment when they grow enough to read about the government bureaus and agencies in the newspapers. The most conservative man in our block frowned on the suggestion that his granddaughter take expensive dancing lessons until he read that the former Irene Castle has been awarded temporary alimony of $750 a month. Sure of AivAudience. Pressed for a statement on his alleged Ku Klux Klan affiliation Justice Hugo L.

Black told the newspaper reporters who greeted him at Norfolk upon his return from Europe: "If I make a statement, I will make it publicly so the people can hear it and understand what I say, because some portion of the press might decide not to publish what I said." The inference was that the jurist will make his statement to the great invisible audience of the radio networks and there may be those who will compare the invisible audience to the invisible empire to which, it is reported. Justice Black once swore allegiance. Justice Black need have no fear that American newspapers, of whatever political persuasion, will fail to display prominently any statement he may care to make. Since the klan charge was raised a nation has been waiting for a word from the individual most intimately concerned. Tlie controversy is bogged down until Justice Black admits or refutes the charge.

No newspaper would dare suppress a word of Justice Black's statement which will be one of the big news stories of the Let us suppose that Justice Black makes his eagerly awaited statement before a radio microphone, that the statement broadcast from coast to coast and that 100 millions of Americans are gathered about their receiving sets to hear his words. Static, wire trouble, a bad tube, the slamming of a door, a sneeze or squeaking rocking chair can garble the most significant words in the statement. Most listeners will be anxious to read the statement in the newspapers to supply missing words or to check on what they believed they heard. Justice Black can be assured that the newspapers of America, despite his flouting attitude toward them, will print his statement even though he chooses to give one of the most interesting stories of our times to the radio. Justice Black may win friends when he goes on the radio to comment on his alleged Ku Klux Klan affiliation, providing he doesn't take the hour usually assigned to that versatile dummy, Charlie McCarthy.

Xot Sporting! Chinese armies defending Shanghai arc reported to have won a major victory Thursday when they repulsed the most terrific offensive waged thus far by the Japanese in the undeclared war. The world has been surprised at the new powers of resistance mustered by the Chinese under the direction of able Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek. Even more surprised have been the Japanese who have been accustomed to relatively easy victories over the disorganized and poorly equipped Chinese armies. There's no doubting that the Chinese have made progress in the arts of war since the last major clash with Japan. The defending armies are not mere nondescript aggregations of men.

They have been well drilled and trained in the use of modern war implements. Furthermore, they have a new morale, the result of the untiring efforts of Chiang Kai Shek, his American educated wife and other leaders in the movement to occidentalize a lethargic people. But there is another reason, a most interesting one, for the success of the Chinese defenders of Shanghai. Japanese military commanders complain that the Chinese either are ignorant of, or decline to abide by the rules and customs of military tactics that are gathered together under the general heading of modern military strategy. The Chinese fail to retreat when such a maneuver is dictated by a set of circumstances described in the rule books.

Japanese commanders are baffled when the Chinese fail or refuse to recogni6 a Japanese victory in strategy. Contract bridge players ill understand the plight of the Japanese generals and admirals at Shanghai. A team of exps'ts dreads to play with opponents who do not understand or scorn the usual and accepted conventions. Particularly distressing is the circumstance that the unorthodox players often win. Popular songs multiply so rapidly that this old paragrapher.

listening to the harmonizing of the younger generation, may not recognize the words of the new songs, but many of the tunes are oddly familiac. Cruelty. A ProvidcVe. R. bakery foreman -on a divorce on grounds of extreme rruelty following testimony that his wife compelled him to wear work clothes on Sunday.

The story is of interest sufficient io justify its coast-to-coast distribution by one of the great news services. It hints at the survival of that fine old institution. the Sundav suit. Some folks mav hae As I View the Thing Bv SAM TUCKER LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES must have been, in many respects, more lively and interesting than now. It is true that there were no baseball or football games, no radio, no movies, but these artificial diversions can hardly have been missed, because there were so many more serious contests to occupy the people.

Old Satan himself was constantly lurking around to steal the souls of honest men. Anybody might encounter him, at any hour in the day, and he wore a thousand of interesting disguises, so the prudent man had to be more alert than a present-day pedestrian trying to get across a busy street. Competitors and enemies did not merely undersell you then. They were likely to resort to witchcraft, and it behooved everybody to know about all possible spells and charms. The year was more richly sprinkled with holy days than now.

and many of these by custom offered the opportunity of exciting sports. Even church services, sometimes, were as dramatic as a Holy Roller camp meeting and a nudist colony combined. Easter week was one of those exciting interludes that made every city lively during the Middle Ages. Each priest and bishop on Palm Sunday exhorted his flock to go out and stone the Jews, giving them a special blessing upon the enterprise in advance, just in case of 'accident. What happened then must have been just as much fun for all the adventurous young men as a Southern lynching bee, with an added zest of danger because it appears that the Jews sometimes fought back.

Here is an account by the pious Father Geoffrey, telling about the exciting events in the city of Bcziers, France, in the year 1152: "Many Jews have dwelt in the town of Beziers from time immemorial. On Palm Sunday, the Bishop, having preached a mystic sermon to his people, was wont to exhort them in many words, to the following effect: Lo, ye see before you the descendants of those who condemned the Messiah, and who still deny that Mary was the Mother of God. Lo! here is the time wherein our heart echoes more often to the injury done to Christ. Lo! these are the days wherein you have leave from the prince to avenge this" so great iniquity. Now therefore, taught by the custom of your ancestors and fortified with our benediction after that of the Lord, cast ye stones against the Jews while there is yet time, and insofar as in you lieth.

atone manfully for the evil done to our When, therefore, the Bishop had blessed them then they would batter the Jews' houses with showers of stones, and very many were oftentimes wounded on either side. This fight was commonly continued from Palm Sunday until Easter Eve, and ended about the fourth hour." As the centuries wheeled by, the sadly outnumbered Jews grew tired of this sport and undertook to arrange other terms under which they might live in a most Christian society. Probably it was no feeling of tenderness toward them, but some prince or bishop need for money, that led at last to a compromise. Instead of stoning all the Jews in a city, the Bishops agreed that it would answer all Christian purposes to take out a symbolical punishment upon just one Jew, who should be selected by his brethren for a scape goat. Bishop Theodard of Narbonne tells about it in elegant Latin: "They.

suffered to live and dwell in the city only on condition of submitting to the following punishment. On the day of the Lord birth, on the night of His passion, and on that of His Ascension into Heaven, one of the Jews themselves, or one of their descendants, was chosen yearly to be buffeted before the porch of the Cathedral church, receiving one blow only from some strong man. and having first offered a tribute of three pounds of wax." It distressing to observe what comet next, but the evidence is that the churchly fathers were not quite sporting in living up to their side of the bargain. In arranging for that "one blow only from some strong man it appears that they did not alwavs consider it necessary to ask the strong man to take off his iron glove. In consequence, we inio in me ancient record, this account rougfi handling for one unfortunate Jew: of nugn, chaplain to Aimery, passed his ni ioiuou.se with his master where mvc me customary buffet to at Eastertide, with which buffet the Jew sudden- i smote the brain and eyes from the fcl- low's faithless heart and scattered thnm rnrm; wnereupon the dead man was taken forthwith the church of St.

Stephen to the Jews' synagogue and there buried." That srpm tn i i u. "II utrvii considered a par- ucuiany joyful Easter at St. Perhaps it was on account of some regrettable incidents of this sort that the idea be-gan to gel about, not only among Jews but among pious Christians as well, that it was unlucky to meet a priest on the street first thing the morning. This part.cular superstition was a matter of serious irritation to the churchmen, who wrote on several oc cas.ons of their efforts to stamp it out One account. an old document, goes as follows-Here is an example of a woman who used to make the sign of the Cross, as it is said, when she met her priest in the morning, and who answered that she did this lest some mishap should betide her that day it said- Dost bpl' .11 be the worse for thee for having met me? And she replied.

-I fear if. Then" he It shall indeed be to thee as thou hast believed, for thou shall have one mishap be- the shoulders, he cast her into a muddy ditch "evedfi; Unt 6VC" 35 'h0U hast bc- There are a thousand equally diverting tones in the Coulton translations from mon astic writings, and elsewhere. Most of them have no great signif.car.ee for us todav except as they illustrate the spirit of their own time, but there is one continuing thread that Mrs. I rene Castle McLaughlin complains that she must get along on $5 a day for food and it may be that the onetime toast of the Broadway gallants is, like the rest of us, growing older and doesn't have so many invitations out to dinner in thse last years. Shed a Tear.

The great heart of America has been touched so often the wonder is that the essential muscle, popularly believed to be the seat of the emotions, has not become callous and impervious to further recitals of human misery. In our own rich country wretched human beings live in squalor an. I actual want. In Spain and in China thousands have been butchered and cruelly wounded in the wars while other thousands have been deprived of food, shelter and medical care. When misery, hunger and privation are so prevalent only an extreme case of dire necessity is pitiful and dramatic enough to touch the great heart of America.

a case has been reported from Chicago, the great and modern metropolis of our own state of Illinois, a rich and prosperous state. All residents of Illinois blush in realization that residents of other states in the Union are ashamed of us for tolerating the existence of so pitiable a case. Mrs. Irene Castle McLaughlin, former dance star, is compelled to get along on $750 a month temporary alimony grudgingly allowed by her rich sportsman-husband. Mrs.

McLaughlin complains to the press of her plight" and the ever svmpa-thetic journals of news and opinion give generously of their space to acquaint the world with her dire straits. Imagine if you can, women of America, you who are comfortably housed, warmly dressed and adequately fed, how you couid keep your chin up if you had to strugge along on $750 a month, a paltry $9,000 a year. Perhaps you do not appreciate the inadequacy of that miserable dole. So let's break it down and budget it. Sun-posed you had to feed yourself on S5 a day.

Suppose you had to give up vour dog refuge and manage without a personal maid for five days of each week, particularly when you were living in a city hotel. Picture, if you can, the shame and pity of it all to discover, after listing the necessary expenses of living for the month, that you had only $30.70 to spend for facials, manicures, massages and clothes for 30 days. Pity the poor foreigners who think that America is a land of opportunity and that everyone in this country is comfortable. We have been guilty of gross deceit. Shame on us! Some of the more generously upholstered girls in our set brazenly confess that they would welcome an opportunity to eke out a slender existence.

Lucirn Lrlong. the French fashion designer, says that a husband failure to notice that his wife has a new dress is a graceful compliment but there is -I a i. it- mai me laiuire sometimes be explained by blind rage. can News You Read in Your Herald Twenty-Five Years Ago Today President J. C.

Hesslcr of the University club is lining up programs for the year Professor A. T. Mills will read a paper at the first meeting of the club this season. Isaac E. Hess, of Philo.

known as "the bird man and an authoritative ornithologist, has been secured for a later meeting. Editorial Pace Paragraph: -When Springfield has an epidemic of typhoid fever. Decatur can do nothing but extend sympathy and regret the necessity for our sister city's having to drink Sangamon river water." A clas in brass and leather u-nrlt been started at Decatur high school. Miss Delia Ford Wilson is instructor. Three Decatur girls have been pledged to sororities at the University of Illinois.

They are: Miss Mildred Campbell and Miss Mary Uheelhouse. Pi Beta Phi, and Miss Eva Weilepp. Alpha Chi Omega. OUR MISTAKE Through an oversight ot someone. We are responsible for a verv serious error in Coles Bargain Basement ad fr Monday.

We used the word "policy" instead of "price." It should have read: When Richard III exclaimed 'My kingdom for a horse." he didnt know about our mule "Price" or he would have exclaimed "My kingdom for a Mule." Adv. Klan on the Supreme Kench. St. Louis Globe-Democrat. The disclosures of the Ku Klux Klan connections of Hugo L.

Black, United States Senator from Alabama, who was recently appointed to the United States Supreme Court and formally by the Senate, which are now appearing in the St. Globe-Democrat, the New York Times and other leading papers of the country, members of the North American Newspaper Alhance. are shocking revelations of Mr. Black's close relations with that iniquitous organization which became a grave menace to the peace and security of the country during the 10 or 12 years following the war and then dwindled rapidly to insignificant proportions as the result of public condemnation of its intolerable pretensions and its excesses, and its own internal disorders. Documentary evidence from the official records of the Klan itself is being presented in this series of articles which show that Mr.

Black became a member of the Klan on September 11. 1923, and took the solemn oath of fidelity to the organization: that on July 19, 1925, he resigned his membership, presumedly as a matter of political strategy, he having become a candidate for the Democratic nomination for United Stales Senator from Alabama; that in the primaries on August 10, 1926. he was nominated as the Democratic candidate for the Senate, because, according to the records, of the support of the Klan; and that on September 2, less than a month after the primaries, he was formally reinstated as a member in a great assembly of the Klans of the state called for that purpose at Birmingham, and presented with a gold certificate of life membership, which apparently he still possesses as there is no record of its surrender or cancellation. The Ku Klux Klan was, and is yet, a secret organization whose members were and are. bound by a fearful oath to battle against Roman Catholicism, the influence of the Jews, and the political equality of Negroes.

It was the most conspicuous, and for a time the most alarming, instance of religious and political intolerance that has ever been manifested this country. It took its name, and to a considerable extent, its methods of direct action, from the Ku Klux organization that developed in the South immediately after the Civil war. but it had none of the justification of the original society. In the more or ess hysterical emotions that prevailed after the World war. its membership and its political and social power grew with great rapidity, until there was hardly a section of he country that was not disturbed bv its influence, which was aU the more te'rnfvmg because of the extreme secrecy in which its membership was shrouded.

Never has there een an order more pernicious in its effects or more destructive of real American principles And while for the reasons above stated it has been reduced to a mere shadow of its former self, it still exists, and is reported to be now experiencing a revival. STRIKES IN ITALY "Our messengers have just had three snaown strike." WeCkS? Culdn't 'uu sP before "It was only after three weeks that we found out that they were Milan. ed in the middle of the Abyssinian war in order to persuade Britain to give way to the Italians on important international issues and conflict with British interests, on the ground that unless this is done, there will be a social collapse in Italy in Sicily rate partially based not on external political considerations at all but on the fact that quite large troop movements to Sicily were in any case going to be necessary and that it was judged desirable to conduct them under cover of the maneuvers. A study of the dates at which, according to agents' reports, the troops afterwards engaged in the maneuvers actually left for Sicily supports this assertion.) It is not, apparently, suggested that this was by any means the only or even the original reason for the decision to hold the maneuvers in Sicily. But it is stated that it played a big p.irt in shaping that decision.

Il is, of course, already known that even at the time of the beginning of the Abyssinian war, there was a practically general strike in the Sicilian sulphur mines, which appears to have started on the basis of ordinary wage and condition claims and to have fused subsequently with some sort of protest against the departure of men for Abyssinia of which the exact extent and political importance as an "anti-war" movement has never been easy to estimate. Now it appears from this report that as a result of "disorganization arising from the war situation and labor the sulphur mines have had to be closed down. This is accounted for by: 1 failure of local crops, 2 combination of the drain of man-power to Abyssinia and Spain. Sporadic Civil War In the nature of things or rather in the nature of the type of agent military making this report, there is extremely little in it on the actual social, political and economic conditions of the people of an island to whom it casually refers in one drily sensational phrase as being in "a state of more or less open and sporadic civil war." On the other hand there is a great deal about the number of troops moved to Sicily before the maneuvers, the number left in Sicily after the maneuvers, types of arma ments, equipment, etc. The fact that these considerations played a big part in the decision to hold the maneuvers in Sicily is stressed again and again.

It is this fact which has burst like a bomb in the select circles ot the admirals and other technical experts at Geneva, who, one gathers, have cared very little for reports of discontent in Italy on the grounds that they came from left-wing sources a charge which certainly cannot be brought against the present If the statements in this report are true, they offer new angles of explanation for the recent speech of Mussolini and on the propaganda now being built up on the successes of the Italian legionaries in Spain. Although we do not guarantee the absolute truth of the details we have been unable to make an independent check-up we believe that the report itself is suffi-ciently serious to warrant belief that the account given is very probably true. In any case it has had a very big effect in Geneva. Thus it can be predicted that one of the results of this new evidence of trouble in Italy may be to produce a new wave of pro-Italian propaganda iri England as happen- The Week, London OPERATING powerfully in the background of Nyon and Geneva meetings, and likely to play a big role in diplomatic developments of the next few weeks, is a remarkable -report" really only a bunch of notes at the moment which is regarded as throwing for the first time (tome real light on the basic factors of Italian policy in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. Though the facts disclosed in it are sensational, it is regarded by serious and responsible people who have seen it as possibly the first accurate picture of the position with which it deals: namely the situation in Sicily.

Apparently its appearance just at this time is due to the fact that parts of it seem to have been contributed by military 'observers' in plain language, spies who had to be in Sicily anyway for the great maneuvers and picked up a lot of general and. so to speak, information on the side. No Secret As everyone knows, for more Jhan a year reports of "troubles" in Italy and Sicily have been trickling and sometimes streaming across the frontiers: strikes, antiwar demonstrations, agricultural "revolts" etc. Many were probably exaggerated, and it has fairly often happened that owing to the difficulties of those whose business it is to gei and pass out the information, the same event has beei. described by different agents as though it were two or three different events, and in this form publishd in left-wing newspapers.

The importance of the latest information contained in the bunch of agents' "notes" now circulating is that it confines itself to Sicily and has apparently been pretty carefully cross-checked. The essential gist of the report so far as Wr have been able to get it is 1 That the situation in Sicily following terrible harvest and a war-caused disorganization of the great sulphur mines is agriculturally and industrially disastrous. 2 1 That the violence of discontent in thrt island is such that the authorities at Rome judge it necessary to maintain what amounts to an army of occupation in the place. 3) That the collectors of those notes being "unpolitical" agents are not in a position to estimate just how far what they describe as "mob are developed in the sense of a political movement capable of sustained action; but that 4 They are in a position to state with uncompromising definiteness. and to stake their reputations on the accuracy of the statement, that the decision as to the time and the place of the Sicilian maneuvers was at any is immensely suggestive: In every century during that great -Age of pious churchmen lamented that the modern generation was going tc Hell; piety was disappearing, lust for finery and wealth was increasing, and people no longer went to church like they used to!.