Article June 7, 1900 Issue

An Introductory Address

Marion Daily Mirror

In his introduction of Judge Clarkson, who delivered a lecture at the Grand Opera House at Marion, O., Tuesday evening, May 15, Dr. Max Wertheimei said in part:—

I want to give appreciative expression of gratitude to the divine genius of the American government, which has bestowed upon down-trodden and persecuted mankind, among other priceless gifts, the inalienable right of religious liberty! Religious liberty is not a beseeching favor that is begged for and begrudgingly granted and tolerated. It is an absolute personal right of every citizen. We need not discuss or question that. It has been fought out and satisfactorily settled over a century ago. Like Daniel Webster, each one of us may exclaim every day and every hour: "Thank God, I, too, am an American." And as such I know you will give intellectual hospitality to every new benevolent thought, irrespective of creed or color, denomination or race, and let me tell you it is high time that the thinking world became cognizant of and alive to this. For not always did the world accept this as a truism. Century after century has social conventionality tried to dictate to the thinkers and teachers, and emphatically to impress upon them not to depart from the habitual ruts and accustomed grooves of orthodoxy.

Had the world always been governed by superstition there would have resulted little progress. If the oft-repeated and threadbare theory, what was good enough for our sires is good enough for us, be true, then you have no right to travel in modern steamboats, electric conveyances, Pullman sleepers, and horseless carriages. Then you have no right to adopt the perfect printing press nor the mechanical contrivances to facilitate toil and save human exertion. You have no right to make any different arrangement in your mentality, to think differently from what your fathers and grandfathers thought and imagined; then the pagan has no right to depart from his hobbies to adopt our civilized institutions.

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