WIRELESS IN RAILROAD SERVICE 1 i THE Successful use of wireless telegraphy in communicating with moving trains on the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad has been much exploited in the public prints, but the full significance of the wireless in railroad service has been overlooked. While communication with trains is the most spectacular feature of the work, the value of having a system of communication independent of interruptions by weather is very important. In a recent sleet storm, for example, in the Eastern section of the country, when wire service was interrupted, the Lackawanna was able to handle its messages satisfactorily through its fixed wireless stations. One other point that has not been sufficiently emphasized is the economy that will result in transmitting messages to heavy freight trains without the necessity of bringing them to a stop. The saving in time, in wear and tear on equipment, and in power is evident. The latest development in the Lackawanna's experiments is in setting signals by wireless. While it is unofficially reported that the experiments have had some success, full details as to the results have not yet been given out. It is apparent, therefore, that, far from being a toy or a curiosity, wireless holds forth great possibilities in railway service. THE ABSORPTION OF THE INDIAN 2 LAST week occurred an event which, picturesquely celebrated at Muskogee and Tulsa, Oklahoma, may be regarded as a landmark in the record of our Indian relations: the Cherokee Nation dissolving tribal relationships. Since the war in the Carolinas a decade before the Revolution, the Cherokees have been peaceful, industrious, and more and more civilized. These 41,000 Indians hold nearly 5,000,000 acres. One of their blood sits in the Senate; they have long maintained a constitutional 1 The Engineering Record, January 24, 1914. government and native newspapers; and they have produced more teachers than all the other tribes combined. Their chief title to notice has, perhaps, been in the alphabet invented by Sequoyah ninety years ago, and its effect on their development. Readers of The Gilded Age will remember the frequent proverbs in this unique charactery which Mark Twain included among his polyglot chapter headings. With the end of the Nation comes the announcement that Oklahoma will commemorate Sequoyah in Statuary Hall at Washington. This is the first large achievement of the Government in its policy of bringing about the cessation of all tribes as individual entities the first policy worthy of the name it has had. The Cherokees were the last of the Five Nations to enter into a treaty to that end; and the record of the contentious lawsuits involved in completing the transaction is, with the tragic history of their early deportation, an epitome of much of the injustice of the United States towards its wards. The other Nations, Creek and Chickasaw, Seminole and Choctaw, which suffered equally from an "independence" in Indian Territory that attracted every outlaw in the Southwest, can rejoice that they also will shortly pass. It was the greed of Georgia for gold discovered on native lands which drove the Cherokees, in spite of the Supreme Court, on a march that cost thousands of lives. Little by little, after the Civil War, they were forced to part with their holdings, the most important sale being of the 8,000,000-acre Cherokee Outlet to the United States in 1892, for $1 an acre and a settlement of long-standing charges for the cost of their removal westward in the 'thirties. This settlement, through Congressional delay, dragged for thirteen years, when the Court of Claims found the United States liable for $4,500,000; and litigation between various branches of the Indians, and over huge fees charged by white lawyers, has lasted until a few months ago. The clearing up of their affairs and the conversion of all tribal property into cash to be distributed, thus sees a measure of final justice done a people that once claimed a vast empire. It is a first goal reached on the road marked out when, in 1887, Congress, abandoning the wretched reservation. idea, enacted the Land Allotment law, authorizing the division of Indian lands into individual allotments, each to be held in Government trust until an allottee was felt competent to receive full letters patent. Such patents, carrying citizenship, have been issued to each member of the tribe. THE American people is not terrified by the Slavonic bogey. We do not concede that Germany, Austria, or any other Western Power is charged with the responsibility of defeating Slavonic aspiration to national form and expression. Not peril, but safety, comes of achieved nationality. Italy, distraught and divided, Germany, a thing of shreds and patches, Ireland, thwarted and discordant, Alsace-Lorraine, Poland, Finland, and Bosnia, wrenched from their congenial associations these, by reason of their inner instability, threaten the peace and happiness of Europe. It has proved difficult enough for powerful nations to Romanize, Anglicize, Germanize, or exterminate scattered and uncultivated populations; small areas detached from organized civilizations have proved entirely indigestible. Germany has not digested either Poland or Alsace; England is confessing its inability to assimilate Ireland. The Russianization of the non-Slavonic Europe is an utter impossibility, even if there were the least danger of its being attempted. If national aspiration is something to be heeded as legitimate and wholesome, the race that aspires to unity must by the same token respect the unity of other states and nations. If the Teuton accepts and welcomes the integrity of a Slavonic state, precisely the same principle protects him from arbitrary aggression. The conduct of Germany is resented because, having gloriously vindicated her own nationality, she has in these latter days been content to play the part that Austria played in Italy and in Germany itself. America refuses to believe that if the achievement of Teutonic nationality is a blessing, the recogni 1 From The Nation, August 27, 1914. German diplo tion of Slavonic self-consciousness is a crime. macy attached itself to an obsolete and impossible object when it undertook blindly to sustain Austria in its historic obstructive rôle. It discredited its own spirit when it permitted the annexation of an unwilling Bosnia and sanctioned the attempted humiliation of Servia. Would not an enlightened and modern diplomacy seek rather to discern and to work with the significant and permanent currents of feeling that have expressed themselves in modern Italy and modern Germany? Assuredly this were a nobler and more fruitful task than that of vainly endeavoring to snatch unnatural and perishable advantages such as go with the annexation of a sullen and alien people. The most enduring fame of Lord John Russell resulted from the steps he took to make a united Italy possible. Not until the diplomats of the Continent conceive their function along similar lines will the nations of Europe lay aside their fatal jealousies. II. ARGUMENT A. ELEMENTS 1. Introduction, Including Special Issues THE THREE HYPOTHESES RESPECTING THE HISTORY OF NATURE1 T. H. HUXLEY WE live in and form part of a system of things of immense diversity and perplexity, which we call Nature; and it is a matter of the deepest interest to all of us that we should form just conceptions of the constitution of that system and of its past history. With relation to this universe, man is, in extent, little more than a mathematical point; in duration but a fleeting shadow; he is a mere reed shaken in the winds of force. But as Pascal long ago remarked, although a mere reed, he is a thinking reed; and in virtue of that wonderful capacity of thought, he has the power of framing for himself a symbolic conception of the universe, which, although doubtless highly imperfect and inadequate as a picture of the great whole, is yet sufficient to serve him as a chart for the guidance of his practical affairs. It has taken long ages of toilsome and often fruitless labor to enable men to look steadily at the shifting scenes of the phantasmagoria of Nature, to notice what is fixed among her fluctuations, and what is regular among her apparent irregularities; and it is only comparatively lately, within the last few centuries, that the conception of a universal order and of a definite course of things, which we term the course of Nature, has emerged. 1 From Collected Essays. (Vol. IV; Science and Hebrew Tradition; Lectures on Evolution.) D. Appleton and Company. |