The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, October 26, 1902, Page 24

THE SAN FRANCISCO CALL, SUNDAY,i OCTOBER 26, 1902. THE SAN FRANCISCO CALL. JOHN D, SPRECKELS, Proprietor. . - Address Communications to W. S. LEAKE, Manager A A R T OCTOBER 26, 1902 WORKINGMAN, who identifies himself by 'inclosing his name and address, sends us the following queries, which we put in this column for the convenience of those who want to study them and the answer to them: : “The Democrtatic party so loudly proclaims its friendship for the working class, and being one of that class I have been trying to reconcile the' claim with the party’s acts, but must con- fess my inability so far to do so. ; - “Now, what' I would like to know is, upon what does that party’base its claim? “What has it ever done for the henefit of the labor of the nation? “And, by way of comparison, what has the Republican party done.tor the benefit of the laboring class of the nation¢ _ “An answer to-these two questions will be appreciated by seekers after knowledge. “A WORKING MAN.” As the condition of labor is measured by the wages it earns and the permanence of its em- ployment, the answer of the first question may be sought in a study of work and wages during the sixty years in which Democratic policy controlled the country, prior to 1861. In that time the opposition to Democracy elected as President only John Quincy Adams, the elder Harrison and Zachary Taylor, but the Democracy all the time controlled one or both branches of Congress and its policy ruled unbroken. For more than thirty years of that period all the energies of the Dem- ocracy were exerted in defending and extending the institution of slavery. Onelooks in vain out- side the speeches of Webster and a few Northern Whig leaders for any, allusion to the interests of free labor. There was no legislation to encourage manufacturey, increase the home market, furnish employment to free labor, give it shorter hours, a homestead privilege on the public domain, or in any way make it the especial care of statesmanship and national policy. An investigation of the Congressional debates down to the period of the Civil War reveals the singular and interesting fact that the greatest interest fostered by the Democratic party was that of the Southern owners of slave labor. It was during that period that Toombs and other Demo- cratic leaders habitually referred to free labor as the “mud sill of society.” The free labor of the North was constantly brought into degrading competition with the slave labor of the South, and was left to the destiny that such competition implies. The long history of Democratic legislation for all that period reveals.not, a line in the interest of free labor. It was left to work out its own salvation. Not only is this true as to national legislation, but as to State legislation also. In that pe- riod the mechanics who worked on the public buildings of the Federal Government in Wash- ington City were paid $70'a year, or $60 for all the work they\could dofrom sun to sun from March Therefore we are compelled by the facts of history to answer the first question entire, that the Democratic party did“nothing prior to 1861, when it went out of power, to further the inter- The first measure of-the Republican party after it came into power not related directly to the war for-the Union was the Morrill tariff, enacted to preserve the home market to be supplied by our-home labor. - Then began our great industrial development which has furnished American labor. steadier -employment ‘and better wages than labor has ever had in any part of the world since history began. The factory laws to regulate labor, take children out of the ranks of bread- winners, to compel sanitary conditions in manufactories, to enforce means of safety and safety ap- pliances in mines; to furnish more employment by shortening the work day, to exempt the work- man’s tools of trade from execution for debt, and, above all, the revenue laws which protect Amer- ican manufactures and industries, are all the work of the Republican party. "It first decreed that all 24 | - — ' OSCAR WEIL REVERENTLY i‘ TELLS THE WORLD SUNDAY . i BY BLANCHE PARTINGTON. i E 5 = : | ! | I | | i H { | 1 to December 20. | | ests of free labor. « L TENOR OF WORLD-WIDE RE- || PUTE \\"H& "ii{li.:: C?;IY.HEARD { case for the church e average organist. put brilliantly and reverently as s likely to be put for another summer’s d or two. It is an from a p would that space the whole of it—on delivered a Adelphian Club week or of doing of music in our g of instruments anil much going to concerts one «of the vices of our one of our approved e-wasting. For any use form! of serious thought, some degree of growth- of the better self, is a waste of that time and t of injustice to our- selves. There no standing still ’for l. The path is too steep for that. | forward or we retrograde. And ve this as an outcome of much ob- servation in the field of music-study, of talk with people who play on instruments or sing, of endeavor to find some point | of contact with pupils and proposed pupils—the proportion of music-hearers or music-students who are even or willing to be made aware, of any s ous side to the a yond a mere mall n music urable erstood passing I find t is simply a when it to the average pretty and easily perhaps times exciting, but so f s intellectual status is concerned, just a point above euchre or golf “It i& on this hypothesis, and on th one only, that one is able to account [ the low, shamefully unfit character f the , music heard in so many -of | our churches—music unsuitable utterly to | either the solemnity of, the service or to the sobriety of thought that ought to accompany divine worship. If the church means anything it certainly means an at- mosphere into which the thought of self, personal display or aggrandizement should never dare to enter. Yet how many, 4o you suppose, of the organists 2nd singers who make up the, choral por- tion of the service have left the persomal, the selfish part of themselves outside? Nor, indeed, as these matters stand now- adays, would it be wise on their part to do go 4f Lhey care to keep their positions —and salarfes. “The average congregation calls for,and expects 1o get, pretty music, and gives to that music much of the same kind of sttention that it would If it were heard at a concert. The music committee is looked to to furnish it, and the clergy- man is—very often, at least—more than nieased to have it, as it Graws and helps fill the benches. That it is unsuitable to its purpose, which, I take it, is the gentle guidance of the thoughts to purer and loftier things, the bridging over, as ir were, for the senses of the space be- tween the sordid atmosphere of every- day life and the more spiritual ether of ihc sanctuary—that it should be unfit utterly to do this does not seem to occur 10 clergymen, music committees or music makers. So long as it pleases the un- 1hinking ear and is attractive it answers its purpose; it Is lstened to and ' com- mented upon very much as a concert per- tormance would be, and I imagine it never occurs to ninety-nine people out of a hundred that they have been party to on utterly wicked perversion of what should be one of the most solemn and edi- lons of the service. What id we think of a clergyman of whom we saw that he was usicg his pulpit in i+ ar and How to Study | t does not include some | entertainment, | the_ spirit in_which most of our ‘music- ! makers use their end of the church; that Lis literary standard was on a plane with the thinnest and trashiest of what hap- | | pened to be in vogue for the shallowest | of readers? We should despise him, pity him! Yet it is of just such stuff that the usic is made up in ninety-nie out of a hundred of the churches throughout our land! d why? mply because the millions of people whose better sense is thus insulted, week | after week, will not give that better | sense the chance to which it is entitled. | They will not learn to hear aright so that | they may judge aright for themselves. I | cannot be made to believe that a genuine | | feeling for the fitness of things is lacking | | in the great mass of people. I do belfeve that a wholesome, clean sense of right and wrong iles deep in the human heart, | | undeveloped often, perverted often, but | unquestionably ‘there. And if this feeling ! for the fitness of things, this sense of | right and wrong, is not to be brought into | play and applied to the choice of music when it is called upon for the highest ser- | vice with which it is honored, it seems to | me that we are doing the art and our- | selves a grievous wrong. Here we have | an instanice where it is our duty—the| plain duty of every one, to learn how to | hear aright. And, as I see it, this con- sists in the as far as we can pur- | sue it, of t st and purest of the music | literature of the church, by which I mean | of all branches of the church. the simple, | | devout music of the earlier English and | Ttalian. composers and those who have reverently followed in their footsteps, music in which there was no thought of, | no opportunity for, the display of self: but in which the sole aim of the com- | poser was to lend, as far as he might, a higher grace and nobler beauty to that | | rortion’ of the service that was entrusted | to him. *If you will learn to know something of the Englishmen, Tallis, Byrd and tneir | contemporaries (Sulllvan, Stanford and a considerable number ‘of the composers of | our own day are of thelr legitimate fol- lowers), if you will look diligently into | the spirit—as distinguished from the technique or method—of Allegri, Di Lasso, | Palestrina and the other Italians of their | s 1; at Bchicht, Praetorious and (hu; Germans of before Bach’s time, you can- not but revolt at the tawdry, tinsel-laden | stuff to which the average choir director | asks you to listen. You will have learned | hear for yourself, whether vou are | | musician or not, that it Is unclean. I| have =aid “‘th ermans before Bach.” With the master himself you are not al- ways safe. In his day there had already | crept into church music something of the spirit of over-elaboration, a certain dan- gerous disposition to consider the music as music, and for its own sake, and a consequent drifting somewhat away from { its integrity of purpose. “‘Bach is perhaps at his best in his larger compositions. ‘The Mass in B Minor, ‘The Paesion According to St. Matthew,’ and many of the motets and clntst?s. But these were not designed for nor afe they adapted to use in the service propér, neither the greater number of the things that he did write for that purpose— chorales and shorter anthems—are in a form that makes them generally available for our use. Nearly everything we have of Bach is unapproachable in its way; full of the enduring beauty of a great style and a perfection of workmanship entirely beyond comparison, but for the purposes of the church—the Protestant church, more especially, a bit over-elabo- rated and contrapuntal, a little too fre- quently suggestive of the art that went to the making of ft. “‘And, until you have learned to hear the music of your church in a spirit that un- hesitatingly rejects every intrusion of artificiality, every obstrusion upon your notice of technical skill or sensuous pret- tiness; until you have learned to demand entire purity of intentlon, as well as exe- cution, from those who make that music, You are not hearing aright. Of this I am sure, so, I am convinced, must be every one who gives the matter somewhat of sober, serious thought.” Lo a ] One of the first foreign people of note to be heard here this winter will be An- dreas Dippel, the tenor, who made so agreeable an impression during the Grau opera season of last year. He comes early In December. labor must be free labor, and then it gave that free labor all of its even chances. This work of the Republican party has ‘heen-interrupted only once since 1861, and that by the only Democratic Congress since that time, by tinkering with the tariff and attempting to re- verse the policy of protection. The result was written in poverty and misery for labor and’ in pinch and in stress and anxiety for the well-to-do but not rich members of the ¢community, ‘be- tween 1893 and 1897. No party is perfect in all its policies and administration, but the érrors of the Republican party have not been in its treatment of the interests of labor. = Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Garfield and McKinley all sprang from the ranks of labor. The leaders of the party now, like Beveridge, Littlefield, Cushman, all came forward from the homes of workingmen to sit in the great councils of the nation. The party has prospered as labor has been bettered in its estate, and when it made the gigantic struggle for return to power in 1896 the labor vote of the country flocked to its standard and gave it victory. It has kept the pledges it then gave to the working- men of the country. If they are wise they will turn a deaf ear to the siren song of its antagonist and vote for permanent employment, progressive wages and the even chance in life which have is- sued from Republican policy and legislation. Y the committee of the State Floral Society in charge of the decorations for the coming citrus fair an appeal has been issued to the people of all parts of Northern California for flowers to be used in decorating the fair and making a display of the richness of our autumnal woods and gardens. It is to be hoped this appeal will be duly noted even amid the excitements of the ‘closing weeks of the political campaign. The fair is designed to be an illus- tration of the attractions of Northern California at this season of the year and it will be so inter- preted by the thousands of travelers and tourists who will visit it. Under such circumstances it is imperative that it be made worthy of the State. The appeal is not for lowers only, but for decorative plants as well. . Many pretty plants of that kind grow wild in our fields and on the hillsides. . The wealth -of the State-in graceful native reeds, grasses, ferns and other decorative plants is at once large zind various. With a little energy in the gathering of such plants and the exercise of a discriminating taste in selecting choice speci- mens, it will be easily possible to provide the fair with a rich array of glowing greenery to serve as a picturesque and appropriate background for the cultivated glories and triumphs of our gar- dens and conservatories. Arrangements have been made with the express company by which contributions . in. the way of flowers and decorative plants can be delivered to the committee in charge free of cost to the sender. The arrangements will of course greatly facilitate the work and render it compara- tively easy for any one to join in the contributions. About all then that is asked of the public is a cordial co-operation in the task of making a really gorgeous display of the floral treasures of the northern counties. The appeal runs directly to the local patriotism of Northern Californians and to their delight in the beauty of flowers. The response should be prompt. Let us show to the Eastern visitors that in the matter of fruits and blossoms a California November is as bright as an Eastern May. In the recent census of India therie were found in the province of Nahan 117 persons who described themselves as “receivers of stolen goods” and 126 who gave in their occupation as that of “wizards and cow poisoners.” The report on the face of it looks bad for the morality of the people, but what a respect they must have for British law when they are willing to speak qut and tell the truth about themselves in that way. * The announcement that Krugér’s forthcoming book will expose the duplicity of British statesmen would be more welcome were it not dccompanied by another announcement to the ef- fect that the Sultan of Turkey is going tG=publish a volume of memoirs showing that all Christian statesmen are liars. . \ \ A story is going the rounds of the Eastern press to the effect that the original of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer is keeping a saloon in this city. - The story may be trve, for nearly every genuinely original man in the United States is living here and cither keeping a saloon or running for_office. 3 A Parisian inventor. has improved upon' the American voting machine by adding to it a music box accompaniment. The machine plays popular tunes while the voting is going on and the citizen has the inspiration of music to aid him in voting right. . A New York theatrical inanager assexfts “itis impossible to get 3000 absolutely pretty girls.” Here then is another chance for California to come to the resctie of the East and furnish a supply for what seems to be an arlent demand. | ¥ \ R B DE s T T TN FROM FUNEREAL SUCCESS HITCHCOCK DRIFTS TO COMEDY. BY GUISARD. I F Raym:}nd Hitchcoek, who essays' the role*of King Dodo in the merry musical play of that name, had not been borm with a lugubrious cast of countenance and a pathetic tenor volce he might still be working in! tge bank at Cohoes, N. Y., where he was born and reared. But old man Hitchcock's kid Ray- mond was always a sad and sandy little cuss, with a mop of hair hanging down | into his eyes and a hig mouth that turned down at the corners. Ard at that Raymond only discovered that he was genius by the merest acci- dent, and thcn he had hard work to make himself belicve it. He had never suspected it until one day he was offered | | 33 to sing twn solos at a funeral. Young “Sandy’” accepted the offer and made a hit. All the prominent citizens who attended the funeral said that his singing was the most affecting thing they ever listened to, and as a result Raymond worked up quite a trade in the funeral music line. That funeral success strangely gave him his first idea that he was cut out for comic opera comedian. He figured out that if he could please the people of Co- | hoes by singing a sorrowful song he ought to be able to put on reverse Eng- I'sh and plcase another audience by mak- ing fun for them. By this time he had got a regular job as first tenmor in a | ciurch choir in his home town, and that uve him practice in still another line of ummer the W. T. Carleton Opera Company played an engagement in a nearby town, and Raymond went over and gave an exhibition of ground and | lcfty tenor tumbling for the benefit of the manager. That important person said he could use Mr. Hitchcock’s voice in his chorus at about ten per, and Mr. Hiteh- cock accepted on the spot. He was. to join the company on a Monday, and he | signalized his departure from the church | choir on the preceding day by singing “We Sail the Ocean Blue” as an offertory solo, much to the scandal of the good | church people. Fhey declared with 2 unanimous voice that Raymond would come to no good end, and now point to his present emi- nence as a musical comedian as proof that their prophecy has come true already. Tpey wouldn't let Hitchcock try to be (unhy in tne ehorus of the Carleton Opera Company, and that made him sad. When | he’d think up a piece of funny business and try to spring it during a perform- | | ance the leading comedians of the com- pany would pick him up bodily, seat him | behind the wings and ask him what right { e had to “butt In” to the center of the | stage. Once while the Carleton Opera Com- pany and Hitchcock were still mutually dependent the tenor singer was playing Lilliards in the Casino at Newport. Then his face again almost got him into se- rious trouble, or helped to a great oppor- tunity. At any rate, a well-dressed man Intro- Guced himself and asked if he might join in a game of billlards. Later he told Hitchcock he had been attracted by his face. “I have rarely seen such a sad and’ mournful face,” said the stranger. “If I had it, it would be worth §20,000 a year to me. Instead, I am handicapped by a big fat face and a black mustache, that leads everybody to put their hands on their pockctbooks the minute they see me. IWith_your face and a long. plack coa® [ would be a millionaite in ten years.. By the way, how wouid you like to work for me? Il guarantee you 35000 the first year.” ‘What is the work?" asked Hitchcock. ““Well, you see, I'm the owner of a gal- lery of paintings, the greatest in the world. Some of them are famous old masters and are worth many thousands of Jollars. I want to sell some of these paintings. Now I'll furnish you with let- ters-to half a dozen of the richest fami- lics in New York and you go down and sell them some of my paintings. I'll pay you 100 a week until you make a sale and when you do that I'll hand you more money than ycu ever saw in your life be- fore.' " “That night,” continued Hitchcock, “T discovered that the stranger who made me the proposition was ‘Paper Collar Joe," quite the most famous confidence man in the world, so next day I refused his of- fer. Not long after that I read that one of the Vanderbilts had béen duped into paying a large sum for a bogus Rubens and I recognized at once the handiwork of my friend ‘Paber Collar.’ ' A few months in the chorus of the Carleton Opera Company convinced young Hitchcock that he would have a hard time being &s funny as ‘he could in that organization, so he quit it on the first chance and became a *“ minstrel.” For two years he was an end man in Charley White's minstrel organization, T AN ORIGINAL COMEDIAN, THE STAR OF “KING DODO” COMPANY. p L S rattling the bones, thumping the tam- bourine and helping to pull the inter- locutor’s chestnuts out of the fire. He found it such hard work being funny eight times a week that he fell back again on his mournful face and pathetic voice and became the leading tragedian of a “ten-twent'-thirt'” traveling com- bination. Hitchcock himself says that fond and flattering friends who think his King Dodo funny should wait until they wit- ness his original creation of Shylock be- fore they presume to pass on his abilities as a humorist. Once he played Hawkshaw, the demon detective, so realistically in Janesville. Wis., during his dramatic ex- perience that before the morning which followed his performance half the lead- ing citizens of the town had departed for parts unknown. But il this was merely preparatory— as all the authorized lives of great men say—to Mr. Hitchcock’'s real life work. + ), | which appears to be the making of many peovle laugh by dressing up in ridiculous clothes and doing funny things with his vocal and other apparatus. He got started a number of years ago with one of the Castle Square opera companies in a minor capacity, and he had a pretty hard time of it at first, but perseverance has landed him at the too. Hitchcock has an ambition to write a comic opera—at least he had. It was eight vears ago that he wrote the book for a masterpiece in three acts, entitled “King Johannes.” Louis F. Gottschalk Wwrote the music and the only reason the thing wasn’t a howling success was the fact that Mr. Hitchcock’s kind and thoughtful landlady burned up two coal scuttles full of the last act one day in a well meant effort to tidy up his room. Since then he has shunned the muses and stuck to amusing other people. I Prunes stuffed with apricots. Townsend's.* + —_————— demm‘:'- Cll!!d.urnll Glace frult and candies, $0c a pound, in artistic fire-etched Boxes. A nice Dresent for Eastern trienda, €39 Maarket st., Palace Hotel bullding. * —_—— “ Special information supplied daily to tusiness houses and public men by the Press Clipping Bureau (Allen’s), 230 Cali- fornia street. Telephone Main 042 NEW PIAND $4.0Uu PEx mUNTH. Price, $137 to $1000. 200 to select from; bar~ sains, $25 up.