Sifting Through the Sands of Time from the Courier Archives

140 Years Ago 2 June 5, 1869

Sleeping Together

The Laws of Life says: "More quarrels arise between brothers, between sisters, between hired girls, between clerks in stores, between apprentices in machine shops, between hired men, between husbands and wives, owing to electrical changes through which their nervous systems go, by lodging together night after night under the same bedclothes, than by almost any other disturbing cause. There is nothing that will so derange the nervous system of a person who is eliminative in nervous force as to lie all night in bed with another person who is absorbent in nervous force. The absorber will go to sleep and rest all night, while the eliminator will be tumbling and tossing, restless and nervous and wake up in the morning fretful, peevish, fault-finding, and discouraged. No two persons, no matter who they are, should habitually sleep together. One will thrive and the other will lose. This is the law, and in married life it is defied almost universally."

135 Years Ago 2 June 6, 1874

Moral Cowardice

A suicidal mania seems to rage in this direction at present. One man puts a bullet in his brain. Another suspends himself, instead of his garments, to a clotheshook. A woman charcoals herself into a condition of asphyxia, and another leaps overboard in order to reach eternity by water. Shame, poverty, love, and inebriety were responsible for these sudden takings off in the popular sense; but, strictly speaking, it is moral cowardice only, to which suicide at any time may be attributed. The man or woman who takes away his or her own life may plead any convenient excuse for thus running away from existence, but they really fear much more to live and face the appalling now than to die and meet all the coming terrors of a mysterious hereafter.

100 Years Ago 2 June 4, 1909

Chinese Scholar on Marriage

Sir Robert Hart speaking of marriage and death customs in the Far East, tells a story of a great Chinese scholar and high official, who said that our foreign way of letting the young people fall in love and choose and the Chinese way of first marrying and then making acquaintance reminded him of two kettles of water: the first--the foreign-- was taken at the boiling point from the fire by marriage and then grew cooler and cooler, whereas the second--the Chinese was a kettle of cold water put on the fire by wedlock and ever afterward growing warmer and warmer, "so that," said his friend, "after fifty or sixty years we are madly in love with each other."