THE TRUTH ABOUT COLORADO

Dispite Kipling's famous ballad, Easterners and Westerners have many likes and dislikes in common, but the object of their most violent hatred is the man who tells them the unsavory truth about themselves. In a play now appearing in Boston, the hero, a New York minister who says what he thinks; is ejected from office for his attitude towards his rich parishioners. Needless to say the latters' guilty consciences are responsible for the deed, but the chances are, even if his enemies were as innocent as they pretend to be, that he would have been expelled in any case. No man likes to be slandered, truthfully or otherwise.

To some, this theatrical example may seem untrue to life, while others, among them those who live beyond the Mississippi, may contend at least that such a thing would not happen in the "open-hearted West". These objectors should hear the sad tale of Chaplain J. R. Calder of the Colorado House of Representatives, who was officially reprimanded for reporting to his Creator that: "Our courts are corrupt; God has been expelled from out churches;--our boys and girls are going to the dogs; our laboring men are going to work with empty dinner pails, while our farmers starve, and the middlemen wax fat on exorbitant prices . . ." Whether the Colorado Legislature considered it presumptuous to tell God what He must already know, or whether they thought it indiscreet to disclose just how far things had gone in "God's Own Country", is a matter for conjecture. Nevertheless, the fact remains, if one has any opinions about he distressing condition of affairs in the United States, one must not pray about them--at least not in Colorado.