The Charlotte News

Wednesday, October 27, 1937

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "October", being definitely, by its style generally and peculiar usage of "by ordinary", a Cash piece, we include it separately, along with the other two pieces, probably also by Cash, from the remainder of the day's page.

Was this, then, the red-letter day on which Cash began his regular stint as Associate Editor at The News? And with a poetic piece reminiscent of his lead piece on the history of the fair appearing in the second semi-weekly installment after he became Editor of the fledgling Cleveland Press in Shelby in autumn, 1928, reminiscent in its use of the figure of Roland, albeit in a different vein of the leaf here, even of "The Mind of the South" piece for The American Mercury of October, 1929, which gave rise to the suggestion by the Knopfs to write the book.

It would be an October day twenty-five years later which almost became the penultimate day ever to see the autumnal skeletal dance of those trees repeated in cycle a hundred thousand years prior to it.

Yet, time and good will among humans who are consigned by their lot, as prevailing in that aspect of being to which we refer as consciousness, to be the faithful stewards of those trees, that is when not being unjust bandits of them and to them, prevailed against what might have been otherwise that penultimate day, within hours blazed of hot winds repulsing those trees as catapults to fission's back-blast, into a hundred thousand year darkness, into the multiplication to naught by the coruscating infinitessimal's division via the incomprehensible bowtie which is infinity.

Along all the roads to the west and most of the roads to the east and the north and the south they stand. They are not trees as we commonly understand it, for trees, however beautiful, are by ordinary things of everyday. But these--they are the domes of the Xanadu that never was, the little belled towers of Western man's forgotten dream of far Cathay. They are the essence of all flame and all purple and all gold. They are billowing wonder and burning glory, the peel of Lord Roland's trumpet, aspiration, and exultation and surrender--the ineluctable flow of the mystery which is life into the mystery which is death.

Splendid, calm, they stand. And look at you as you pass. And wait. They bow their glowing crests to the winds; sometimes they shiver a little. But always and above all they seem to stand and wait. That is the effluvium of their dying--the exhalation of their receding breath--the great blue haze smoking over all the land. That is their dirge you hear, that breathless expectancy over all the country, the mourning of the hounds on the hills. And they wait, serene, their arms folded, as it were, remembering a hundred thousand years in which every autumn has been like this, and in which every returning April has brought rebirth.

By the record, the black republic of Haiti, seated in the middle of the Caribbean, would appear to be one of the three or four most completely civilized countries left on earth. For the essence of civilization, we take it, resides in the exercise of rationality and restraint, and in respect for the pledged word--the basis of all faith among men. French-speaking Haiti shares the 30,000 square miles of her island with the white Spanish-speaking republic of Santo Domingo. And in times past they have fought back and forth and eternally over things quite as foolish as the postage stamp controversy which has been so close to bringing Panama and Costa Rica to blows. But some years ago they concluded to have done with such bloody nonsense and entered into an agreement to settle all future disputes on the basis of the facts found by a joint commission of inquiry.

Then, the other day the Santo Dominicans of the border towns, angered by a great influx of Haitian laborers, rose and killed a few hundreds of them brutally. By all the standards that prevail in the world, that was a perfect casus belli. More than that, Haiti is probably strong enough to win a war against her neighbor. But she met the test beautifully. She not only announced that she would do nothing save on the basis of the facts found by the joint commission provided for under the treaty, but also, hearing that angry Haitians were planning to retaliate on Santo Dominicans living in Cap Hatien and Port-au-Prince, issued a stern warning to the effect that she was prepared to defend the foreigners with the army.

Japan, in attempting to conquer China, is only following the pattern laid down by the great Western nations. Thus the Associated Press quotes the Right Rev. Henry St. George Tucker, Bishop of Virginia and sometime for twenty-five years a missionary to Japan.

And that the Bishop is right in his facts goes without saying. Of course England and France did carve out their empires in banditry and blood--though in those innocent days the art of wholesale murder was not so well developed as it is now. But we trust that the Bishop, whom we admire, did not mean to assume what is almost invariably assumed when this statement is put forward--that therefore Japan stands justified morally. For that, of course, is really a non sequitur of the worst sort. It happens to be true that the gangsters who infest our cities are, in their own fashion, only pursuing the pattern laid down by, say, the Rhenish robber barons of the tenth century, who enjoyed a more or less legal status. But that does not justify them one whit. Murder and robbery are crimes by whomever committed, and we long ago got around to a decisive assertion of that fact.

Murder and banditry among nations are crimes, too, and during the last fifty years have come more and more to be recognized as such. And somewhere, some time, the line must be drawn, the old practice branded as no longer allowable. Or we may as well abandon hope for the moral advance of the human breed.