Christ. Some time after his conversion one of his mates, seeing how clean and happy he was looking, asked him jocularly if he had any houses to let. He knew the questioner was a heavy drinker, so he decided to give him a practical lesson. "Here, mate," he said, "just take a look down my throat, will you?" "There's nothing there," said the other, after a careful inspection of his throat. "Well, that's queer, for I've put three good homes and a grocer's shop down that throat, drowning them in drink." (Text.)
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See Drink, Effects of.
WASTE OF LIVES
Of all wastes, the greatest waste that you
can commit is the waste of labor. If you
went down in the morning into your dairy,
and found that your youngest child had got
down before you, and that he and the cat
were at play together, and that he had
poured out all the cream on the floor for
the cat to lap up, you would scold the child,
and be sorry the cream was wasted. But if,
instead of wooden bowls with milk in them,
there are golden bowls with human life in
them, and instead of the cat to play with—the
devil to play with; and you yourself the
player; and instead of leaving that golden
bowl to be broken by God at the fountain,
you break it in the dust yourself, and pour
the human life out on the ground for the
fiend to lick up—is that no waste?—John
Ruskin.
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WASTE, STOPPING
The Agricultural Department has inaugurated
a war on rats, not as a preventive
of the plague or on account of health, but
because of the great loss produced in the
country by rats, and especially to farmers
and producers. The department claims that
a rat eats sixty cents' worth of grain a year,
and that the actual destruction caused by
them amounts to over one hundred millions
of dollars a year. The extermination of rats
will be a great undertaking. Yet it could
be accomplished by national effort were it not
for the new supplies brought by ships. It is
believed that by proper regulations even this
supply might be cut off, or the rats killed
before spreading. It would cost only a
small part of the one hundred millions of
dollars to exterminate the rat. The expenditure
of ten millions under national authority
would be economy.
There are moral wastes comparatively
more destructive than the plague
of rats, that all men should join in exterminating—the
saloon, for example.
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WASTE, THE PROBLEM OF
Professor Marshall, the English economist,
estimates that the British working classes
spend every year not less than $500,000,000
for things that do nothing to make them
either happier or nobler. The president of
the British Association, in an address before
the economic section, confirmed these estimates,
and avowed his belief that the sum
named above was wasted in food alone. Professor
Matthews adds that so large a proportion
of our housekeepers are brought up
in town life and factory life that they do not
know how to buy economically, while the
cooking art has necessarily gone into decadence.
He estimates the waste in the
United States from bad cooking alone to be
at least $1,000,000 every year.—Independent.
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WASTES, MORAL
One day in a public restaurant a gentleman, who owns a large fruit-orchard in one of the Northwestern States, was talking about what wonderful fruit was produced by his trees.
"Why," said he, "I see in market here in
Pittsburg apples selling at a good price that
we wouldn't even use out our way. We'd
never think of selling them. Such apples
are thrown aside as culls."
There are a great many human culls, men and boys, who, because of some injurious habit, have lost their full market value. There is the cigaret cull, the boy who is blighting his future and depreciating his value as a member of society because of his nauseous habit. And there is the whisky and beer cull, the man who can not keep out of a saloon; good enough man, many ways, but nobody wants to employ him in any responsible position. Then we have the obscene cull, the individual who has some rancid story to tell to raise a haw-haw among companions as coarse and vulgar as himself. He may be a good workman, but morally he is a cull. Another man I know is the Sabbath cull. This is the man who goes about watering his garden on the Sabbath, or driving out in his automobile for the pleasure of the thing; who is sometimes seen on the train Sabbath morning with his
