Post Impressions Part 3

CHILD, _noun_; a student of s.e.x hygiene; a member of boy scout organisations and girls' camp-fire organisations for the practice of the kind of self-control that parents fail to exercise; a member of school republics for the study of politics while father reads the sporting page; a ward of the State; a student of the phenomena of alcoholism; a handicap carefully avoided by specialists in child-study; one-third of a French family; the holder of an inalienable t.i.tle to happiness which the Government must supply; in general, a human being under thirteen years of age who must be taught everything so that he will be surprised at nothing when he is thirty years of age. The ignorant and innocent offspring of a human couple, obs. Synonyms: man-child; girl-child; love-child.

MOTHERHOOD, _noun_; a profession once highly esteemed, but rejected by modern spirits as too frequently automatic.

MOTHER, _noun_; a female progenitor; a term often employed by the older poets in connection with the ideas of love, sacrifice, and holiness, but now delicately described by writers of the _Harper's Weekly_ temperament as being synonymous with cow.

EUGENICS, _noun_; a condition of intense excitement over the future of the human race among those who are doing nothing to perpetuate it.

LITERATURE, _noun_; see s.e.x; WHITE SLAVE.

DRAMA, _noun_; see s.e.x; WHITE SLAVE.

PUNCH, _noun_; see DRAMA; LITERATURE; MAGAZINE ADVERTISING.

ADENOIDS, _noun_; something that is cut out of children.

SOCIAL-MINDEDNESS, _noun_; something that is injected into children.

II. GEOGRAPHY

ARGENTINA; where the tango comes from.

RUSSIA; where Anna Pavlova and ritual murder trials come from.

PERSIA; where the harem skirt comes from, and other fas.h.i.+ons eagerly embraced by a generation which insists that woman shall no longer be man's chattel and plaything.

AMERICA; where the profits of all-night restaurants in Montmartre come from.

a.s.sYRIA, BABYLONIA, EGYPT, PERU, YUCATAN, PATAGONIA; where the decorations for Broadway lobster-palaces come from.

EQUATOR; the earth's waistline, unfas.h.i.+onably located in the same place year after year.

TENDERLOIN; where the world's wisdom comes from.

CAMBRIDGE, NEW HAVEN, PRINCETON, MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS; the sites of once celebrated educational inst.i.tutions whose functions have now been taken over by theatre managers on Broadway.

UNDERWORLD; the world now uppermost.

MOUNTAIN; a rugged elevation of the earth's surface which comes to every self-const.i.tuted little prophet when he snaps his fingers.

SEA; where we are all at.

MEXICO CITY; residence of Huerta, the most eminent living disciple of Nietzsche.

BULGARIA; a nation which scornfully rejected peace and reaped honour, widows, and orphans; where the Servians were the other day.

SERVIA; where the Bulgarians may be next week.

CHAUTAUQUA; any place outside the offices of the State Department.

III. ARITHMETIC

1. A s.h.i.+p carrying 800 pa.s.sengers and crew is in collision off the banks of Newfoundland, and 700 are saved. Describe the method by which the _Evening Journal_ computes 400 souls lost.

2. The salary of a police lieutenant is about $2,500 a year. At what rate of interest must this sum be invested to produce a million dollars'

worth of real estate in ten years?

3. 2+2=4. Show this to be true otherwise than by writing a four-act play with its princ.i.p.al scene laid in a house of ill fame.

4. The loss to the nation from disease has been estimated at $200,000,000 a year. Show the profit that would accrue to the nation from abolis.h.i.+ng every form of disease after deducting the cost of maintaining the dependent widows and orphans of 50,000 doctors who have starved to death.

5. In a certain gubernatorial campaign several disinterested gentlemen contributed $10,000 each to the campaign fund; yet the total of campaign contributions was a little over $5,000. Explain this.

6. If you were called upon to build a bridge to the moon, which would you rather use, the total number of postage stamps on rejected magazine contributions laid end to end, or the total number of automobiles s.h.i.+pped from Detroit placed end to end?

7. In a recent article on mortality statistics in the _World_, the writer omitted to divide his average death rate by 2. Was his argument, because of that, two times as convincing or only half as convincing?

8. Describe the modifications in the laws of arithmetic introduced by Mr. Thomas W. Lawson.

IV. HISTORY

The supporters of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt have frequently remarked that if Abraham Lincoln were alive to-day, he would be with them. Uncle Joe Cannon has expressed the conviction that Abraham Lincoln if he were alive to-day would be on his side. Is there anything in history to indicate that Abraham Lincoln, great man though he was, could be in two places at the same time?

Mention three Republican administrations in which the rainfall was twice as heavy as in any Democratic administration since 1837, and show what this indicates for the prosperity of the country under Mr. Woodrow Wilson.

Julius Caesar is said to have been in the habit of dictating to three secretaries simultaneously. How does this compare with the literary productivity of Mr. Arnold Bennett and Mr. Jack London?

At the last meeting of the Tammany aldermanic convention of the Fifth a.s.sembly District a speaker declared it to be the most momentous event in the history of the world. Compare the Fifth a.s.sembly District convention with (a) the battle of Marathon; (b) the meeting of the States-General at Versailles in 1789; (c) the signing of the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation.

V. LOGIC

Prove that the department store is the princ.i.p.al cause of prost.i.tution by showing that the department store is fifty-six years old and the social evil is forty thousand years old.

The mortality rate in munic.i.p.al foundling asylums is 99-1/2 per cent.

Develop this into an argument for the maintenance of all children by the State.

Compare the arguments advanced in at least four (4) New York newspapers to show that the Giants would win with the reasons given in the same newspapers why the Athletics won.

Compare Richard Pearson Hobson's last speech on the j.a.panese peril with Demosthenes's Oration on the Crown.

VI. SCIENCE

The cla.s.sification of the sciences has always presented peculiar difficulties, but a partial list would include the following:

Tonsorial Science, Sunday Supplement Science, Science of Bricklaying Domestic Science, Science of Cosmic Love Bohemian Science, Science of Advertising Science of Sir Oliver Lodge, Scranton, Pa., Science Science of Packy McFarland, Science of Puts and Calls Science of s.e.xology, Anti-vivisectionist Science, Science.