CIVIC IMPROVEMENT. 73 



The Omaha Improvement Club has had inserted in the charter of 

 Omaha a provision permitting an ordinance requiring the owner of 

 property to cut the weeds thereon, and if he fails to do so, the city can 

 cut them and tax the expense to the owner. It is hoped that our present 

 city council will execute that provision of the charter. 



It is the desire of this club also that the weeds along the walks be 

 cut twice a year rather than wait until they have gone to seed furnish- 

 ing a larger crop for the coming year. 



What we want in Omaha among other things is cleaner streets and 

 alleys; a boulevard in the southeast part of the city, small inside 

 parks, more attention paid to trees, tree planting and their protection. 

 A street systematically planted to one kind of trees. A forester whose 

 duty it is to protect trees and to see to proper planting; a public bath 

 house; play grounds, supported by the park board as of its parks; 

 various neighborhood play grounds prepared by the neighbors and the 

 control given into the hands of the boys and girls, thus giving them the 

 responsibility and teaching them the duties of citizenship and makng 

 them love their city. Removal of unsightly bill boards and curb signs 

 that mar our beautiful and expansive streets. New additions formed 

 with an eye to beauty, as the Bemis park addition, for instance. School 

 gardens v/here each child is furnished seeds, taught to plant them and 

 care for the plant. Beautiful approaches to our city. The inheritance 

 tax which under the law is to be used for the construction and main- 

 tenance of permanent roads in and out of cities and villages should be 

 made object lessons, beautiful, permanent and attractive. I am a great 

 believer in object lessons. If each village would see that its permanent 

 road maintained under this tax is made a thing of beauty, it will have 

 more to do with cultivating the idea of beauty in surroundings, in public 

 and private, in city, village and farm, than anything else that can be done. 



Each citizen will be led by such an object lesson more to do his duty. 



Most of us today are profoundly interested in the tremendous struggle 

 the Japanese have undertaken in the far east. We can not cease to 

 wonder at the astonishing progress of that people in the last fifty years 

 in all things that make for the conduct of war. But we are less con- 

 versant with the fact, perhaps, that in some things these same wonder- 

 ful people have for centuries far surpassed the west. The enormous 

 population of those small islands, forty-six millions, requires that every 

 inch of ground be used for something to meet the physical needs of 

 men; but, in a land where even fruit-trees are luxuries, a deep-seated 

 love for the beautiful finds expression in the universal presence of small, 

 flowering trees, mostly plums, cherries, roses, in every door-yard where 

 one would think fruit might be raised. Their flowering trees also fill 

 the grounds of temples, parks, border the streets, highways, country 

 roads, and are planted "along the streches of soil that divide one rice- 

 patch from another." The entire month of April is a flower fete in 



