Time to consider how our annual worship of the God of Noise is to be abolished. This blatant and death-dealing Divinity long ago usurped the shrine occupied by Patriotism. Every year we carry and lay on his bloody altars human sacrifices, like the tribute of maidens to the Minotaur—only they are mostly boys. And so, year after year, the “Glorious Fourth” becomes more and more a dread festival of blood and fire and noise, of death and mayhem.—_Minneapolis Journal._ The traditional gunpowder and dynamite orgies of Independence Day are wrong. Firearms and explosives have no place in any sane scheme of city life.—_Cleveland Plain Dealer._ The day on which human folly too frequently runs amuck.... That the achievement of our national independence, brought about through the necessary spilling of great quantities of blood, should be commemorated by the very general loss of life and limb is as unnecessary as it is deplorable.—_Union_ (Manchester, N. H.). Americans are realizing that noises, maimed and wounded children, and big conflagrations should not be the sequence of the Nation’s birthday.—_Toledo Blade._ What ought to be the most enjoyable day in the calendar, is made a day of general carnage and a day toward which adults look forward with dread and whose passing they look back upon with a sense of mighty relief.—_Pioneer Press_ (St. Paul, Minn.). It is the money burned up in useless and dangerous explosives that is wasted, serving no better purpose than to leave the city with a headache the morning after.—_Republic_ (St. Louis). The din ... is hideously vulgar and utterly uncivilized ... discreditable to those who make it and to the civil authorities who permit it.—_Evening Wisconsin_ (Milwaukee). I fain would haul down the red flag of our modern Fourth of July and, in its place, run up the flag of peace, quietude, rest, contentment, and personal safety.—_Life_ (New York). The total results of our last “jolly celebration” of Independence Day were 164 killed and 4,249 injured, many of them being maimed for life! Is this method of celebration really worth while?—_Journal Amer. Med. Assn._ (Chicago). How can any satisfaction be taken in the perversion of a holiday to purposes of disorder and destruction, and how can any pride be felt in methods of observance which inevitably condemn hundreds—if not thousands—to be shot, burned, maimed, and otherwise disfigured and tortured in propitiation of the great god of senseless uproar?—_New York Tribune._ As for those who are in favor of continuing our present mode of celebration, I can find but one who has written openly in its defense, and even then there is a suspicion that the article is ironical.