USA > Ohio > The Western Reserve of Ohio and some of its pioneers, places and women's clubs, Vol. I > Part 30
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31
In 1872 Commodore Perry entered Japan. The money is 1, 3, 5, 10 and 50 cents standard, printed on paper. Bags of rice are the standard of value.
The Japanese play with their children, so that they are called the "Playing Nation."
In front was a garden, ten acres in all. On the sides a wall look at the locust flower, emblem of eternal calm.
436
The Western Reserve of Ohio and Some of
Some of their maxims are: The frog in the well knows not the great ocean (the conservatives are the frogs) .
The ocean does not mind the dust (a great man lives down slander).
Don't trust a pigeon to carry grain (don't send one man to bring back another from a place of pleasure).
In a hurry go around (the more hurry the less speed) .
The rat-catching cat hides her claws.
The more words the less sense.
The newspapers are the Mail, Gazette and the Tribune.
Caste is to disappear. The true cause for Japan's degrada- tion, filial obedience and polygamy.
The girl obeys her parents, who are ignorant and brutish. The same thing kept China down. The new civilization must be planted in the homes. Spirituality, morality and chastity will make the home life like ours. The work of Christian women, for women in Japan, will give far reaching results.
The Mikado in 1872 visited the navy yards when in Amer- ica as a student.
In April a fire destroyed 5,000 houses in Tokio. The streets were widened to 90 feet. On the 14th of October a railroad was opened. One-half of the teachers are Americans. In 1895 they had 10 churches with 800 members.
July, 1872, there was an imperial proclamation that all sinecure offices be abolished, and the salaries be turned over to the imperial treasury and hereditary incomes should be re- duced.
All officials had to be reported direct from Tokio. Now school directors are only four; then they were fourteen. The local offices were reduced from five hundred to seventy. Japan's greatest curse has been an excess of officials. Some men of in-
437
Its Pioneers, Places and Women's Clubs
fluence say, "Now Japan will take a position like England or America."
At a function three thousand guests bade adieu to the Prince, who goes to Kiota. The Prince walked down the hall and his message was read by a chief minister of allegiance to the new dynasty.
His physician and body servant go with him to Kioto. Many hundreds of old men, women and children were weeping. Most of the high officials had been called to Tokio.
It is a great idea thus to break up local prejudices.
The military school is abandoned and the gunpowder works removed; taxes are being made uniform; old feudal privileges abolished.
The Buddhist theological school is broken up. Sections de- sire to restore the old Shinto faith. I lectured on the need of a polytechnical school and received a message today to come to Tokio and be the president of one there; also one from Fuki to remain, but I have not seen one of my race for six months, and the polite fencing with intellectual rapier against men cul- tured under other systems of morals is more than I care to undertake.
The silk worm was introduced in 403; tailors in 471; archi- tects in 423; learned men in 912, and in 552 astronomers from Corea; with them the Buddhist missionaries.
Japan was invaded first by China, second Corea, third west- ern Europe, fourth America through Commodore Perry.
Japan is divided into northern land, southern sea, western sea.
There are eight departments of government: Imperial, Palace, Civil, Education, Etiquette, Census, Revenue, War, Jus- tice, Treasury, Religion, and four ministers. The Empress does not blacken her teeth or shave off her eyebrows. Etiquette is a moral education.
LIFE IN HIMALAYAS
Dr. Martha Sheldon, third child of the eight of Rev. Charles Sheldon and Mary Prentice, daughter of Clarinda Parmelee Prentice, eldest sister of Theodore Hudson Parmelee, was born in Excelsior, Minn., where her father preached for thirty years. She studied medicine in Boston and was sent by the Methodist Society to India.
Dr. Martha Sheldon was for eighteen years a missionary in North India. For six years Miss Sheldon's work was near Dar- jiling, then she and Miss Eva Browne were assigned by the Methodist Missionary Board to the northwestern border of Nepal, within ten miles of Tibet, and which included the Bhotiya villages in the valley of Kali Ganga and that of Dhauli river. For six months they lived at Dar Chula. Here hundreds of families came to escape the ice and snow of higher climes.
They then removed to Chaudus, a place surrounded by Bhotiya villages. These people are active and well-to-do. They live by farming and trading. They have flocks of sheep, which they use as beasts of burden to carry articles of trade over mountain-passes into Tibet, to exchange blankets and clothing, which their women weave, for salt, borax and wool. They teach their children to weave at a very early age.
Dr. Sheldon found the Bhotiya language had no written characters. She learned the meaning of words by sitting beside women as they weaved, jotting down words and phrases. Find- ing it like other dialects, she translated the Decalogue and other portions of Scripture, and hymns. She writes: "I find it very easy to love these people," and proved her love by her service. She made thatches for the sick, built some grist-mills, and had
DR. MARTHA SHELDON TWENTY-THREE YEARS MISSIONARY IN BHOTA, NORTH INDIA
439
Its Pioneers, Places and Women's Clubs
a kindergarten. She built a house for herself on the hillside, of which the explorer Landor said, "Was an object lesson in thrift."
The stories of her wonderful cures of cataract and goiter spread over the country; the natives nad cured only by blood- letting or burning.
She observed Children's Day and had an Epworth League and Christmas. She writes: "The restless boys and girls do not sit, but stand, at our meetings. We had a Christmas tree; on it were dolls, picture books and games and a hot dinner of rice, chutney and goat meat for the adults." She gave scrap books to the highest officials in the Provinces, whose wives be- came her patients.
She writes: "We have to lead our horses up almost perpen- dicular places, and meet great flocks of sheep going up and down these places."
She wished to gain an entrance into Lasso, the capital of Tibet. Four different times she climbed mountains 16,000 to 18,000 feet only to be sent back by the ruling Rajah. At last she clothed herself in men's garments and entered. After a day, when it was discovered, she was obliged to leave, but she had shown them her leaflets in their language and soon they vis- ited her to get more of them, and now they have sent twelve men to London to learn the ways of the English. She writes: "Would you, sister, have slept that night in a tent, in a strange country, under a guard of nearly thirty men, the night we were told we must go?"
"Again medical work opened the way for us to spend two weeks in Tibet, to operate on a cataract of a woman living near its monastery. We visited the monastery and performed opera-
440
The Western Reserve of Ohio and Some of
tions in the stone houses built for pilgrims and traders outside. Just before reaching Lake Manasarowar, we saw a black cross on a white surface on the mountain, caused by the snows melting so as to cut this figure upon it. It was thrilling. It seemed as if the cross had gone before us, as indeed it had. What a power the printed page is; all parts of the world made one by the work of the press. We have had difficulty wandering over beds of snow packed from seventy-five to one hundred feet deep. These Tibetans resemble the North American Indians."
She transcribed the Scripture into their language, so, for the last few years, she went to and fro among these people, and was treated with great reverence for the work she was able to do for them.
She died in her home on the mountain-side October 10, 1912, having had a life of transcendent usefulness on one of earth's great highways .- From the Missionary Review of the World, Funk & Wagnalls, publishers, New York and London, April, 1913.
FLORIDA AND CUBA
On the 9th of January, 1903, one hundred and thirty-four left Cleveland for the "Sunny South." Snow and sleet were with us as far as Chattanooga. At Atlanta the weather was milder. On the morning after reaching St. Augustine, only one night on the car, we were greeted with a group of palm trees and blooming flowers in great profusion in the yard of the Hotel Alcazer, an annex of the Ponce De Leon. The poinsettia looks like beautiful red hollyhocks, but is really not a flower, but the calyx to the flower. It shows off admirably among the green palms. Nature and art are here combined by planting them amongst shrubs. The great hotels remind us of the Pan- American architecture and the interior, like them, possess halls of curios.
We visited Fort Marion. The moat was shallow and nar- row. An old boat was in it, but the only use for the Fort and the city wall is to give us a photograph of the past. At the alli- gator farm the attendant said he had gathered twenty-seven of them in that vicinity. They were in a tent or cage. Their fat black paws, not unlike a child's hand, were laid affectionately on each other. The eggs were in an enclosure covered by mud, the mother alligator bringing water in her mouth to keep them moist. In a box near by were two rattlesnakes, and when their master poked them with a stick they rattled their tails and darted out their tongues and began to uncoil their huge forms.
The bear greeted us with his paws and the fox was glad to see us. On our return we saw the oyster beds in the river.
The next day we took luncheon at Ormand. Young ladies in black dresses and white aprons served our tables. The car- riages that drove over the automobile race course the following
442
The Western Reserve of Ohio and Some of
week were in waiting. It was a distance of nine miles. The track was wide enough for four abreast and was of solid sand from the constant wetting of the waves. Automobiles whizzed by at lightning speed. We hardly saw what it was that startled our horses until it was out of sight.
"Sea Breeze," a town near by, gets the best view of the "breakers," which are little waterfalls of white on a sea of blue. Daytona is a town of homes under the tall live oak trees draped in Florida moss. Here we were halted for a photograph, but the low limbs had, in spite of the caution "low bridge," made us in no plight for a photograph. This is the home of many Cleve- landers. Some of our company will return here to stay until April. Daytona was founded by Lorenza Day, a student at Oberlin.
At Palm Beach we stopped at "The Breakers." H. M. Flag- ler has a home opposite the hotel "Poinsetti," and between this and "The Breakers" there is a broad promenade, having cocoa- nut palms on one side of the automobile track and the Australian pine on the other, a tall fine leafed tree. Between the former two is a poinsettia bush with great red flowers. The proprietor of the Poinsetta hotel is a Mr. King of Cleveland, married to Jessie Kimball. He greeted us cordially and we were shown some of its rooms, with a capacity for 1,500 guests. From the tower we could see roofs, roofs, and nothing else, but from the lower balcony we got a good idea of the landscape gardening. At "The Breakers" the swimming-pool was patronized by both ladies and gentlemen; also in the ocean; twenty-five cents across the bridge to view it.
On Saturday we took the "Martinque" at Miami for Cuba. It was a small boat, tossed like a chip on the waves, but most of us showed up at mealtime. It was said the remnants of the
443
Its Pioneers, Places and Women's Clubs
Maine were to be put on exhibition in the towns of the United States, but there is not much left of it above water. We stopped at the Pasage or Arcade hotel, 95 Prado St. A fine park is op- posite. The carriages and carts are allowed to go only one way on account of the crush. All sorts of things were for sale under the awnings and women were thronging us to buy some of their wares.
The rooms in this hotel are twenty-five feet high, with win- dows from floor to ceiling. The floors, banisters and stairs are white marble. Everything is white and clean. Pure air circu- lated freely. The meals were strange to us; gumbo soup (the green pods we saw in the market), oranges, grape fruit, pine apples, guavi, hard-baked rolls, but within sweet; attentive servants and clean napery. The meats were covered with gravy. A writing room off the office where twenty could write at a time and where this article is written; paper and envelopes free; postage to be obtained at the postoffice in the adjoining room.
At Motanza we were given a banquet with special reference to Cuba's popular diet. First, a rice mixture that had a relish. After dinner we had speeches, some very amusing, from both ladies and gentlemen of our party. We went in fifty carriages around the place and to Mount Tabor. Women in their homes viewed us from behind curtains, or from the sidewalk with smiles of welcome to Americans, who have come to invest in their lands or in their toys so freely displayed in all stores.
The following day we visited Marianna, the home of our Ambassador Squires. The town is new and the roads level and the houses of a better class. We were allowed to enter the house of Mr. Squire in the absence of his wife. It is ideal in its love- liness, of one story, with rooms opening on a corridor, that faces
444
The Western Reserve of Ohio and Some of
a court filled with plants and trees of the tropics, and shaded by a roof from the sun. In its rooms it had books, music, pictures and furniture of cane with white silk brocaded cushions.
Opposite is the public school of the Cubans; we were invited to enter it. The girls were dressed in cool garments and greeted us with smiles. They study our text books and speak both Spanish and English. Our stay was so short that we did not look at the text books.
The next day we visited Mora castle. Our guide was Alex- ander Mendoza, who explained the guide book of the dungeons where the prisoners were kept after a sham trial and brought to the "dead line" and shot with many bullets; the impress of them are all over the wall. Twenty-seven boys were cruelly shot for an idle word in regard to such cruelties. We were shown where some were thrown to the sharks and their whereabouts reported "unknown." The place reminded us of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, not unlike the Phonicians who gloated over their cruelty.
We next visited the penitentiary. Five hundred were in- prisoned here. We were shown the electrocuting chair. This last year five have been beheaded. We passed through the kitchen. The meat was skinny and of the poorest kind, but smelt sweet as one handed us a piece of it. Many of the pris- oners stood respectful but sullen as we passed them. If the gov- ernment would provide work and food at fifty cents per day it would save taxes to keep them and save character and disgrace. It is time our rulers saw that prevention of crime is far better than punishment.
We next visited the National Club House, where whole fam- ilies belong for $3.00 annually. It has 58,000 membership and besides paying expenses they have a hospital of fifteen miles
445
Its Pioneers, Places and Women's Clubs
floor space, where everyone is provided, free, with medicine and care. There is some gambling, but not for money.
In the Arcade Hotel it was proposed we give to Mr. and Mrs. Colver a souvenir. The gentlemen selected for him a $15.00 umbrella. The ladies, at fifty cents each, gave Mrs. Colver a sandalwood box and a white Spanish lace shawl. At the giving of them at the Miami Hotel, where we separated, speeches were called for and Mrs. Rose said: "We have learned much in this travel to the West Indies and Florida. What will it be when we visit other worlds after death? Surely we will all live so as to be rewarded with that happy life."
At Miami on the Sabbath we visited the Baptist Church; one whose pastor came for his health; and it had memorial windows and a choir of excellent rendition. Everyone was friendly and one lady who accompanied us to her home on the way to the hotel said : "I do hope you have come to stay."
In our train to Jacksonville the cortege of the son of Mr. Croker was in the rear of our train. The casket had been sent on before. The accident happened by a bicyclist running before an automobile and the occupants thrown out. At Ormand we saw the machines covered with sand, left for others to care for, while their owners accompanied the friends to New York City.
At Chattanooga some of our friends went to look at Lookout Mountain, but reported the fog was so great that nothing could be seen. Surely no $200.00 could be better spent than a trip to Florida and Cuba.
WHY WOMEN SHOULD HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOTE
To vote is to express an opinion, and women have opinions. They are workers for the family, for the state and for the nation.
Woman is intuitive-she can see remedies for causes. She is perceptive, as all know. She would make a good detective, the average woman-exceptions are in both sexes.
Mankind was made in pairs-Adam and Eve. Adam did little work until Eve came to his side. We might as well de- velop one eye or one hand or one leg, and cripple or blind the other by lack of work, as to cripple woman and then expect the world to make progress.
In every meeting I see women's eyes glistening with intelli- gence and appreciation of what is being said, but no one calls upon her to speak or expect to be benefited by her opinion.
This is not fair to her. She has a responsible place, as the mother of all living, and needs the broadest cultivation to do her work well. She understands the tender and susceptible child and she should be on all Boards of Education, and as one of the Trustees of Colleges, and mothers should help the boy out in the course of study and the hours necessary of work to perform it. Until children are of age, the mothers have the care and responsibility of their offspring.
Let us, then, give them a chance to become educated, by hav- ing a share in the government. Men who know nothing of its details are not debarred, and vote even when filled with blind- ing liquor.
Why refuse women who certainly are more clear-headed and intelligent than one-half of those who now vote, and who would conscientiously study the laws and be the first to call at- tention to their not being enforced.
Woman is interested in the disbursements of money, for they are taxed and forced to pay taxes. They would like to see that money go as far as possible in real improvements to the com- munity.
Women are interested in street cleaning, for their dress more than man's is soiled by their foulness.
MRS. W. G. ROSE.
WOMAN'S SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT
Woman has come to stay. She was made the equal of man in Eden and she must arise to that high privelege before she can expect to influence the men for good.
We are here for a day, as it were, but we are here at a time when invention has brought the nations into speaking dis- tance. Newspapers and telegrams make us as one people. What is done in Russia, Korea or Japan is known to us at once.
Japan has even now sent a delegation to see if the Christian religion is better than Buddhism. The Buddhist succeeded the Shinto which was only appealing to the gods to keep off calami- ties. Buddhism provides a future life in Nervana or God. But the Christian religion believes that when we die we enter a life of greater activity, that we shall cry, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord, God Almighty" with an understanding heart.
Eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ, whom he has sent. To know is the great hunger of the soul, and this is to be the fulfillment of the eternal ages to us.
Do you suppose a loving God would have spread out the heavens each night for us to see the innumerable worlds he has made growing more peculiar in their position with every new in- vention of the telescope? Now the heavens are divided into two hundred and fifty spaces and in no one of the spaces has there been less than three of the cylindrical placements of worlds, the larger at the front and growing less as they recede -what looks to be a street of worlds that move in cycles in space. Miss Proctor speaks of stars that move in circles and then suddenly after a great distance traversed they diverge in another direction, led by a leader, like a flock of sheep. If we,
448
The Western Reserve of Ohio and Some of
in one corner of this universe, with our limited powers of ob- servation, a small world among the other planets which form our coterie, can find out even this, what will we not learn when we leave this world and enter upon that eternal life with God the Creator of the Universe as our teacher?
Is it not worth while to use our utmost endeavor to be ac- cepted of Him as worthy to live with Him who suffered to re- deem us because He knew the life of the soul?
Christ said: "There is in heaven neither marriage nor giving in marriage," but we are as the angels of God in heaven. Shall we go handicapped into that life because here we were assigned so few public duties to perform, were shut up to the small hori- zon of young children and the physical needs of a growing family? Let us remember that Paul was put in the stocks with no companion but an ignorant soldier, yet there he composed epistles and sent them to the seven churches of Asia, who were in the midst of idolatry, costly, licentious and supported by the government, but out of his dungeon window he saw the stars and their light beckoned to him of other worlds and he prayed that God would so enlighten the minds of the few Christians that they would not despair but rise to their high calling and lead the discouraged and sin-sick soul to Christ. It is equally neces- sary, today woman has her mission, let her accept the vilest Magdeline who will forsake and repent of her ways, let her turn the thoughts of children to this blessed country, which floats above us, filled with the light of the sun as if it had streets of gold and the fashion of clothing or the fascination of cards will pass away. There is a life so much more worthy and Christ has said: "He that giveth to the least of these giveth unto me."
COLLEGE WOMEN IN WINNING THE WEST.
REV. DAN BRADLEY.
To College Club of Cleveland, O .:
There were 41,777 women in the Universities and Colleges of Liberal Arts of America in 1905. Of these about 6,000 were in the North Atlantic States, while 27,700 or, two-thirds of the whole, were in the north, central and western States, that is the States reaching from Ohio to the Pacific Coast.
The New England States, famous for "Smith," "Wellesley" and "Holyoke," have fewer women in college than California or Michigan and Massachusetts has fewer than Colorado.
The college education of women is still most vigorously prosecuted in the West, where, first, the doctrine was held that woman deserved and was capable of securing as thorough and complete education in liberal arts as man. This doctrine was first carried into practice in Ohio and Ohio has today the largest number of women in liberal arts of any state in the Union save Illinois. In the East this doctrine has received reluctant assent, and the establishment of Radcliff and Barnard Colleges with privileges grudgingly yielded to women, marks a profound change in eastern opinion. But the east has suf- fered by its undue conservatism in this regard and will never wholly make good its loss of time in the race with the more prosperous regions of the interior.
The West which began to give women education in its pioneer days has profited immensely by that wise and broad policy. It cannot be doubted that the unparalleled development of the western States, not only in material wealth but in all that makes for freedom and intelligence of the higher life, is
450
The Western Reserve of Ohio and Some of
due in an important measure to the double intellectual leader- ship by college-bred women as well as college-bred men in all this region. It may also be, in part, due to these same causes that the States showing the lowest per cent. of illiteracy are such States as Nebraska, Oklahoma, the Dakotas and Iowa, where, twenty-one out of every hundred, attend school and only seventeen out of every hundred of the Atlantic States in- cluding New England. It is only seventy-five years since the privilege of a college education was conceded to women and it is apparent that the leaders of these Commonwealths could have done no wiser thing than they did, when they thus con- fessed to the intellectual equality of women with men and made provision to care for her complete education. For civi- lization must of necessity be greatly handicapped, when it checks the free development of arts and sciences in any class or section of society.
Progress of civilization comes from the superior contri- bution of some individual to that civilization. From what part of society that contribution shall come, no man can foretell.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.