This report being pretty fairly uninteresting, we leave it and turn to another report, which covers the manufacture and sale of rugs.  This has a picture of a rug in it, and a darned good likeness it is, too.

In this rug report we find that it takes a Navajo Indian only eleven days to weave a rug 12 x 5, with a swastika design in the middle.  Eleven days.  It seems incredible.  Why, it takes only 365 days to make a year!

Now, having seen that there are 73,000 men and women in this country today who can neither read nor write, and that of these only 4%, or a little over half, are colored, what are we to conclude?  What is to be the effect on our national morale?  Who is to pay this gigantic bill for naval armament?

Before answering these questions any further than this, let us quote from an authority on the subject, a man who has given the best years, or at any rate some very good years, of his life to research in this field, and who now takes exactly the stand which we have been outlining in this article.

“I would not,” he says in a speech delivered before the Girls’ Friendly Society of Laurel Hill, “I would not for one minute detract from the glory of those who have brought this country to its present state of financial prominence among the nations of the world, and yet as I think back on those dark days, I am impelled to voice the protest of millions of American citizens yet unborn.”

Perhaps some of our little readers remember what the major premise of this article was.  If so, will they please communicate with the writer.

Oh, yes!  Bigamy!

Well, it certainly is funny how many cases of bigamy you hear about nowadays.  Either more men are marrying more wives than ever before, or they are getting more careless about it. (That sounds very, very familiar.  It is barely possible that it is the sentence with which this article opens.  We say so many things in the course of one article that repetitions are quite likely to creep in).

At any rate, the tendency seems to be toward an increase in bigamy.

XXII

THE REAL WIGLAF:  MAN AND MONARCH

Much time has been devoted of late by ardent biographers to shedding light on misunderstood characters in history, especially British rulers.  We cannot let injustice any longer be done to King Wiglaf, the much-maligned monarch of central Britain in the early Ninth Century.

The fall of the kingdom of Mercia in 828 under the the onslaughts of Ecgberht the West-Saxon, have been laid to Wiglaf’s untidy personal habits and his alleged mania for practical joking.  The accompanying biographical sketch may serve to disclose some of the more intimate details of the character of the man and to alter in some degree history’s unfavorable estimate of him.

Our first glimpse of the Wiglaf who was one day to become ruler of Mercia, the heart of present-day England (music, please), is when at the age of seven he was taken by Oswier, his father’s murderer, to see Mrs. Siddons play Lady Macbeth. (Every subject of biographical treatment, regardless of the period in which he or she lived, must have been taken at an early age to see Mrs. Siddons play Lady Macbeth. It is part of the code of biography.)