Page:Cyclopedia of illustrations for public speakers, containing facts, incidents, stories, experiences, anecdotes, selections, etc., for illustrative purposes, with cross-references; (IA cyclopediaofillu00scotrich).pdf/804



Christ. Some time after his conversion one of his mates, seeing how clean and happy he was looking, asked him jocularly if he had any houses to let. He knew the questioner was a heavy drinker, so he decided to give him a practical lesson. "Here, mate," he said, "just take a look down my throat, will you?" "There's nothing there," said the other, after a careful inspection of his throat. "Well, that's queer, for I've put three good homes and a grocer's shop down that throat, drowning them in drink." (Text.)

(3439)

See.

WASTE OF LIVES

Of all wastes, the greatest waste that you can commit is the waste of labor. If you went down in the morning into your dairy, and found that your youngest child had got down before you, and that he and the cat were at play together, and that he had poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up, you would scold the child, and be sorry the cream was wasted. But if, instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, there are golden bowls with human life in them, and instead of the cat to play with—the devil to play with; and you yourself the player; and instead of leaving that golden bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the dust yourself, and pour the human life out on the ground for the fiend to lick up—is that no waste?—

(3440)

WASTE, STOPPING

The Agricultural Department has inaugurated a war on rats, not as a preventive of the plague or on account of health, but because of the great loss produced in the country by rats, and especially to farmers and producers. The department claims that a rat eats sixty cents' worth of grain a year, and that the actual destruction caused by them amounts to over one hundred millions of dollars a year. The extermination of rats will be a great undertaking. Yet it could be accomplished by national effort were it not for the new supplies brought by ships. It is believed that by proper regulations even this supply might be cut off, or the rats killed before spreading. It would cost only a small part of the one hundred millions of dollars to exterminate the rat. The expenditure of ten millions under national authority would be economy.

There are moral wastes comparatively more destructive than the plague of rats, that all men should join in exterminating—the saloon, for example.

(3441)

WASTE, THE PROBLEM OF

Professor Marshall, the English economist, estimates that the British working classes spend every year not less than $500,000,000 for things that do nothing to make them either happier or nobler. The president of the British Association, in an address before the economic section, confirmed these estimates, and avowed his belief that the sum named above was wasted in food alone. Professor Matthews adds that so large a proportion of our housekeepers are brought up in town life and factory life that they do not know how to buy economically, while the cooking art has necessarily gone into decadence. He estimates the waste in the United States from bad cooking alone to be at least $1,000,000 every year.—Independent.

(3442)

WASTES, MORAL

One day in a public restaurant a gentleman, who owns a large fruit-orchard in one of the Northwestern States, was talking about what wonderful fruit was produced by his trees.

"Why," said he, "I see in market here in Pittsburg apples selling at a good price that we wouldn't even use out our way. We'd never think of selling them. Such apples are thrown aside as culls."

There are a great many human culls, men and boys, who, because of some injurious habit, have lost their full market value. There is the cigaret cull, the boy who is blighting his future and depreciating his value as a member of society because of his nauseous habit. And there is the whisky and beer cull, the man who can not keep out of a saloon; good enough man, many ways, but nobody wants to employ him in any responsible position. Then we have the obscene cull, the individual who has some rancid story to tell to raise a haw-haw among companions as coarse and vulgar as himself. He may be a good workman, but morally he is a cull. Another man I know is the Sabbath cull. This is the man who goes about watering his garden on the Sabbath, or driving out in his automobile for the pleasure of the thing; who is sometimes seen on the train Sabbath morning with his