Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/694

674 purpose of the founders of the republic, is an invasion of freedom and a step toward degradation. As has invariably happened, and as Hamilton so clearly foresaw, such a policy will eventually turn the most civilized people into a race of barbarians, prone not only to assail one another but to attack their neighbors at home and abroad. In another way, and in that way only, must the goal of human existence be attained; it is to put within the reach of the poorest and weakest the means to resist the rich and strong. Instead of spending countless millions upon a work that should be left to the people themselves, the work of education, the regulation of morals, labor, and trade, the initiation and management of industrial enterprises, spend them, if need be, upon the establishment of a scrupulous justice free to all. Then will it be possible to mitigate and, in time, to end the countless evils of vice and crime that come of war and despotism. Then will people learn to provide for themselves the thousand blessings, moral and material, born of peace and freedom. Then will be solved the only problems of democracy that require or admit of solution—the simple but weighty problems of self-support and self-control.



HE cord markings on American pottery have been usually ascribed mainly to a desire on the part of the aboriginal potter for decoration. While this may in some cases have been the purpose of the application of the fabrics, which are so distinctly seen in the casts made by Mr. Holmes, it has occurred to me that originally the decorative purpose, if there was any, was quite a secondary matter, and that the real object of the net or coarse fabric was to aid construction. It was one of the means invoked by the primitive potter to enable him to handle his pot or jar when complete and before it could receive the firing.

As these vessels show no evidence of the "coil": process, he must have used some kind of a mold or form. If built on interior molds of indurated clay, as has been suggested, there would be great difficulty in removing the pot from the mold, hence it seems to me this was not the kind of mold used.

The earlier potters probably used baskets that came up to the curved-in part of the jar, which was continued above the basket by