Sifting Through the Sands of Time

In the past nine years, more than 100,000 permanent federal officials have been added to the rolls-increasing cost to $195,591,000.

State official payrolls have been increased in numbers and cost so that altogether one out of every twelve workers is a government employee.

Additional laws enacted by Congress and state legislatures all increase taxes and take money away from the producing citizen.

It has been the slogan of the last two presidents that government payrolls must be cut down in numbers.

Pennsylvania, Illinois, Washington and Idaho have consolidated boards and commissions and materially cut their overhead. This is what Governor Smith endeavors to do in this state but a reactionary Republican Assembly even refused to submit the proposition to the people. This accounts in part for the popular demand for the renomination and reelection of the reform governor for another term.

Every state in the union and every department of the federal government could probably trim at least 25 percent off its overhead.

Why not do it?

A rather common superstition is that the falling of a portrait from the wall where it is hanging portends a death in the family. Some even go so far as to regard as unlucky the accidental dropping of a photograph of a friend or relation. This is really traceable to the connection which the primitive mind established between the symbol and what it representated, an idea which found one phase of its expression in the belief of an intimate connection between a person and his image! If a symbol of one of the gods acquired a reverence and half-worship from its close connection with the immortal it represented, was it not natural to suppose that a more or less intimate connection existed between a person and his “counterfeit” presentment? It was this idea that caused the necromancers of the Middle ages to “get square” with the enemies of themselves or their patrons

by making a rag doll to represent the aforesaid enemy and sticking it full of pins, or a wax doll and letting it melt before a fire, thereby claiming to cause, by sympathetic magic, illness, perhaps death, to the victim.

The ideas of our cave-man ancestors and our medieval forbears lingering deep in our “unconscious” ego cause some of us to establish therefore a close connection between a person and his portrait. Now when that portrait falls we get that form of symbolism which causes one to suggest another. The picture falls from its place: the original falls from his place-dies. Strictly, it ought to be that way but perhaps, the original of the portrait is already dead and, being broadminded persons not a bit superstitious we say, “Well if not that person or another; somebody we know; some member of the family, probably, is indicated. It’s a bad sign, anyway.”