Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 06.pdf/372



CURRENT TOPICS. Cutting off the Corners. — The lines of the writer of this department are fallen to him in a pleasant place — the most beautiful city in America for residence — spacious, regular, arranged upon a grand park system, shaded, architecturally elegant, nearly every house with ample grounds of its own, and very few fences. But this arrangement of the grounds is disfigured by a frequent pedal intrusion where a lot comes upon two streets. Here to save a few feet of space and a few seconds of time the public are prone to walk diagonally across the fair turf, and eventually to destroy the grass and impress a permanent and unsightly pathway across the corner. In some instances the owners of such lots have guard ed against this thoughtless trespass by maintaining about a rod of low fence at the corner to fend off the hasty pedestrian. And then, as wayfarers are apt to sit down on this short fence to wait for the street cars or loaf, the owners have sometimes resorted to the heroic measure of twisting a barbed wire about the rail. The Philadelphians insist that they can al ways detect a Yankee or a New Yorker in the City of Brotherly Love by his cutting diagonally across the street corners, instead of following the cross-walks. This comes of the Hurry Fiend who rules and curses our land. The same spirit drives the traveler on the ferry boat to rush to the bow and jump off before landing, at the risk of his life or limbs; to jump on or off of railway cars in motion; to gobble his food; to gulp his drink while standing. The same spirit impels the proprietors of ocean steamers to spend much money and jeopard the safety of their human freight by striving to "break the record" an hour or two on a voyage of three thousand miles, when nobody on board has any pretext for being in a hurry. In short, it is a curse upon our people, this feverish anxiety to "get there" a few minutes sooner than somebody else or to break their own record. This is a bad and distinctively American habit. There is no leisure in our country. People will not have it. Our countrymen sneer at the Englishman as " slow," but somehow he seems to "get there," the year round, about as soon as the American; he accomplishes about as much —- some say more — and

with much less wear and tear of body and mind. This chafing, uneasy, fuming spirit shortens life and makes its shortness wretched. It breeds dyspepsia, the direful spring of all American woes. It entails haste in judgment and immaturity of thought. It converts speech into chatter. Worst of all it inspires the fatal haste to be rich, which is the basis of most of the crime that infests, and the unhappiness that haunts society. The western train-robber is simply trying to cut across a financial corner, and so is that other pestilent robber, the Wall street broker. Coxey and his rabble are trying to cut across a corner to avoid honest labor, and the leader has already ex perienced the penalty of not keeping off the National grass. T"he modern woman who neglects her house hold to run to attend upon Browning clubs, is trying to cut across a corner in culture, and crams her poor little head with stuff for which it is not fitted. The merchant who practices oppression all his life and leaves some money at his death to a college or a church is trying a short cut into the kingdom of heaven — let him read Hawthorne and be convinced that there is no Celestial Railroad, but that we must all fare painfully on foot to that goal. These thoughts come to us at the opening of the lawyer's vacation. We suppose some American lawyers take a vacation. We know a good many who do not, but who stay at home in the summer to pick up the business which their more leisurely brethren sacrifice by absence. The half is sometimes greater than the whole. Hurry does not invariably result in overtaking; it sometimes eventuates in collision. In human life as in nature the best growths are slow. A western farmer who desires some speedy shade about his prairie home sets out some quick and ephemeral cottonwoods, but who shall give them the preference to the slow-grow ing elm, which will broaden and strengthen with the decades and embrace the homestead for his children's children? A reasonable consecutive length of vaca tion is a good thing; frequent holidays are every way bad. So let our weary lawyer go to the woods, or the seashore, or to foreign lands for a few weeks in the genial summer time, forgetting his briefs and his books, and he will return home in early autumn a wiser, better, richer and happier man.