Excerpt from The Trestle Board, Vol. 4: A Monthly Masonic Magazine; March, 1890

Of youth and beauty, for a hundred years ago youth and beauty traveled for a week or two in stage coaches or private carriages to reach an inauguration ball. The new fact Of palace-cars has not ruined this movement of fashionable minds. Nor did the steam-cars make General Grant less of a soldier than Washington. Grant, hurrying in a car, was the same military Chieftain Washing ton was on his charger Or in his lumbering carriage. Thus chivalry and Knight hood should reappear in our times Of cars and telegraphs, and become again mighty forces in our civilization.

It now seems that our country is in danger of suffering for want Of eminent, ardent individuals. It seems to be set tling down into the peaceful contempla tion Of some gradual advance by way of law, education and general justice If there is awful cruelty reported in asylums, or in the pineries, or in the chain-gang system, or among the Southern negroes, there are a million philosophers, from the President at Washington down to the dry goods clerk in Oregon, who feel sure _that those evils will all pass away under the benign influence of education and Christianity. In an adjoining town, a few weeks since, two School teachers (female teachers) flogged a smart school boy in a brutal manner, the one refined school-teaching woman holding the boy, while the other refined person beat him most cruelly. What a good hour that would have been for Nicholas Nickleby to step into the school-house and make real the pounding once bestowed in holy indignation upon Old heartless Squeers! But to find Nickleby Mr. Dickens must have used his creative powers, for the community reads about this cruelty, and then repeats its hope that in fifty or a hundred years from now the flogging Of a small boy by two refined women, will be an event of less frequent occurrence.

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