Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/205

Rh his child, or, put with other forced contributions, the total may take his daughter to Europe for a pleasure-trip.

Here is one of our great captains of industry, assisted by accumulated capital and corporate franchises as well as the ability which makes him a captain of industry, competing in the industrial arena for the necessaries and good things of life with a frail girl who has only a one-girl power to depend on, and of the two he it is we find asking government aid, and aid to do what? Why, to take away to himself all his own and a part as well of the poor girl's earnings.

This in what ought to be the manliest country in the world, on the part of that section of our manhood best fitted by nature for the financial struggle for bread, and aimed by these financial giants at the weakest section of the community. We may talk about the ferocity of the Northmen tossing up babies and catching them on their spears, or about atrocities practiced in Russia to-day; we may imagine a Sullivan calling for steel knuckles with which to encounter a seven-year-old boy; but we can not believe that American manhood will not some time rise above the unparalleled meanness of the protective tariff.

 

ARALLEL MYTHS.—The early religious opinions and practices of all peoples appear in myth and by myths are explained. When a religion has endured among a people for a long time after the use of writing has become general, its myths are collected and collated and formed into a system. This system generates dogmas which require support from glosses on the text of the original myths; indeed, these texts are often buried under a mass of homilies and predications, or, when still used in their purity, are interpreted ad libitum. Such is the history of the myths and the religion of Israel.

The Indians have myths and legends which explain their religious opinions and practices; but, as they did not acquire the art of writing, they did not formulate articles of faith. Their beliefs must be ascertained, therefore, by the collection and study of the myths themselves as now reduced to writing and translated. The 