The united American : a magazine of good citizenchip., December 01, 1925, Page 17, Image 17

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DECEMBER 1925
THE UNITED AMERICAN
No longer will she receive, while remaining unmarried,
the customary portion of her husband’s salary, if Judge
Lewis can help it. If wives, on the other hand, can
persuade their husbands to give them a cash settlement
at the time the divorce is granted, it will be all right
with the judge, but he is from now on irrevocably set
against all orders for weekly of monthly payments to
that particular class of petitioners.
Quoth the judge:
Thè idèa of the marriage institution is that man and wife
shall live together and propagate the race, when they separate,
both cease, in that regard, to be of any benefit to the community.
Why a healthy woman should receive alimony from a
divorced husband is beyond my comprehension. If he wants to
marry again, he is forced to consider' the burden of the pay­
ments to his first wife. Yet she is free to remarry when she
wishes.
The ailmony automatically stops then, but if she so desires
she may remain single and force her former husband to support
her until old age. I don’t consider that a fair proposition.
My court is clogged with cases in which wives are seeking
to put in jail husbands who failed to keep up their alimony
payments. I sympathize with the husbands in many cases and
there will not be any more of that class of cases in this court.
A rather unusual decision, in view of the precedents
set by all the spineless lawyers that are sitting on the
bench and allowing the marriage institution in America
to become more of a joke than it ever was in any
country since it was instituted. Let us have more
judges of the Lewis typé and there wouldn’t be so many
flappers entering the. state of matrimony for the pur­
pose of collecting alimony. If it is possible for Chief
Justice Lewis to set up a simple rule of common sense,
so thoroughly ethical and so consistent with the divorce
laws in any state, then why can’t his rule he applied
everywhere in order to restore the marriage institution
to the position of respect and esteem it occupied before
it became a capital joke on the vaudeville stage, a
tawdry agency for the consumation of illicit desires and
a mart which is legalizing and making possible a com­
mon exchange where virtue is traded for gold.
It’s queer how we are inclined to think other people
are funny, but we never seem to think that other people think
the same of us. When the time had come to give the new im­
perial granddaughter of Japan a name, they called her
Shigeko Terunomiya, meaning Bright Prosperity in-the Japa-
neese language. The occidental plan of names, limited to some
ancestors’ trade or the name of his homestead, village or town,
or the “son” suffix to some ancestor’s given name, taken from
the early Hebrew plan, may seem- perfectly all right to us
because the custom is- so well established, but to the mind of
the oriental, or to the mind of the American Indian, people
who give their children names suggesting strength, beauty,
culture, natural grandeur, happy disposition, charity, good­
ness, love, tenderness, success or fame, the occidental plan of
naming their progeny must seem void of. romance and imagina­
tion, which in the instance is not far from being correct. Come
to think of it — “if there is something in a name” then if a
human being, through its name, could become associated with
a thing in itself beautiful and significant, of meaning, we might
improve upon the occidentals’ idea of the powers of suggestion
by adopting the oriental and; Indian custom of selecting names
for. pur children..
It is natural to be impatient when you are in a
hurry and . Central gets your , number twisted, a-wrong prefix
or makes, you repeat your number several timeg before service
is given your call, but when you look through the telephone
di.t-gctory and think of the thousands of contacts Central has to.
wpr^Witit, it ;jus.t makes you dizzy. - The. new . telephone
dfrectofy for.the city of New York .contains nine hundred and
Page Seventeen
sixty thousand subscribers — almost a million subscribers in
one city calling Central several times every day. Think of the
maddening job of the Central girls making millions of con­
nections every day. It takes’ steady nerves and balance ot
mind to be at a busy switchboard in a metropolitan city. Some
calls are bound to miscarry. Wrong numbers are not pur­
posely made, but the girl at the board taking your call is io.
the same instance- switching and ringing in several other call"
and every call has a prefix and four numbers. Try" to have
a half a dozen’ people shout a prefix and four numbers at you
almost simultaneously and see how many you would call cor­
rectly and how many you would miss. Bear this in mind the
next time you get a wrong number or there is a recall or two
or a delay in completing your call.
“Better Business” is a term understood to have its
proper application to men who apply strict rules of integrity,
otherwise called ethics, in their business or profession. The
term has been enlarged upon from time to time until the ex­
pression has been used to decorate Bureaus, claiming for
themselves the right to pass upon what’s good business and
what’s not. And so again we have the spectacle of a perfectly
good expression robbed of its right value. Such dispensaries
are rarely immune against corruption, hence it is possible for
a crook with a dishonest proposition to obtain for “specific con­
sideration” an official “Better Business” clearing house certifi­
cate. while the’ man who asks no favor and is perfectly honest
and upright finds that he is undermined by some secret device
ingenuously handled under cover. When prominent leaders in
community organizations deplore the way the membership
fluctuates and keeps falling off until they are forced to stage
“drives” for new members, every so often, they might find the
answer in some of the abuses that are practiced by bureaus
and sub-organizations that are hampering rather than promot­
ing honorable and ethical conduct in business and professional
life.
Funny isn’t it, the way the statesmen of the world
have been planning, talking, orating and rooting for peace,
during the last two years, that no one has thought of anything
in the interest of peace sufficiently constructive to cause the
Nobel Committee to award the Peace Prize. Rumor has it
that Austen Chamberlain, or to be absolutely correct, Sir
Austen, and Aristide Briand are to be considered; for putting
across the Locarno agreement this year. The suspicious
citizen has it that no one in reality, in all this time, has put up
any argument for peace that didn’t actually look like an argu­
ment for more war. The Nobel Prize, With accumulated in­
terest and all, will now amount to some one hundred and sixty
thousand dollars. Whatever can be said of the successes and
the failures of the past proposals, the Locarno treaty has a
margin in its favor, even if it doesn’t contain everything that
is essential to make lasting peace. Strange though that some
of the peace-makers are still waging aggressive warfare for
colony rights on foreign territory. Oh, well, since the great
multitude is singing “Blessed are the peacemakers” we might’
as well join and make the hubbub unanimous.
Soviet Russia is evidently not for from being
whatever you think it is. In one breath it vigorously denies
to the world that it is trying hard to cause a world revolution,
yet, at the same time its agents are at work everywhere under
instruction to carry on the propaganda work, which somehow
the Soviet government feels inclined to consider a service it
gladly pays for. The Soviet is anxious to come into the good
graces of the Indian tribes of India. Recently the “Peasants
Association” of Moscow cabled its sympathy to the'Bombay
strikers and forwarded ten thousand rubles as aid fund. While
the Soviet religion is no religion, a long address has been sent
to the Indian Khalifat, in the name of the head of the Russian
Moslems, expressing cordial-feeling for the Indian co-religion­
ists. The art of treachery and unprincipled dealings is evidently
so deeply seated, with the Russian dictators that no matter
how foul the means applied to cause dissension and strife,
causing another government to, be stabbed in the back, it is
an acceptable working order - according to the Russian code
of human relations. Under present world conditions- it is
more -than desirable that, the English rule over India shall