Sifting Through the Sands of Time

Never set a boy down for stupid because he does not make a figure at school. Many of the most celebrated men who have ever lived have been set down by some conventional pedagogue as donkeys. One of the greatest astronomers of the age was restored to his father by the village schoolmaster with these encouraging words: “There’s no use paying good money for his education. All he wants to do is to lie on the grass on his back and stare at the sky. I’m afraid his mind is wrong.”

Scientific men have often been flogged for falling into brown studies over their books, and many an artist of the future has come to present grief for drawing all over his copy book and surreptitiously painting the pictures of his geography.

Your genius, unless musical, seldom proves himself one in his childhood and your smug and self-sufficient piece of precocity, who takes all the medals and is the show scholar of the school, often ends by showing no talent for anything beyond a yard stick.

Sir Walter Scott was called stupid as a child and it was not considered to his credit that he was fond of “such trash” as ballads and could learn them by heart at any time. Going to Siberia

The czar of all the Russias has an immense, cold country where he sends his criminals, and he punishes for very slight offenses, so he has many people to send. These convicts leave St. Petersburg at night, the men having their hands chained behind them, and wearing leg chains of four pounds weight all the way. The women go in gangs by themselves wearing black cloaks with hoods. The men who conduct them to this desolate land are mounted on horses, and have long whips which they use for the least provocation. Once there, they work year after year in the mines, never seeing the light of day. They sleep in recesses hewn out of the rocks, into which they creep on their hands and knees. They work Sunday the same as any other day. No man who has worked in the mines is ever allowed to return home. Who Benefits?

There are 107,931 persons in the employment of the Federal Government. Each individual member of this obedient army has an average of five persons dependent on him, and through him, on the federal administration. Thus we have an immense lever used to perpetuate the party in power.

Here is an army of about 540,000 men working for the machine, and if the machine sweeps away an honest ballot and grinds out a rank fraud, a radical majority, the office-holders, and their newspapers will shout themselves hoarse over the “victory.”