The Nation 1930 : Vol 130

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The Nation A WEEKLY JOURNAL DEVOTED TO POLITICS, LITERATURE, SCIENCE DRAMA, MUSIC, ART INDUSTRY FOUNDED 1865 43029 pUBUO VOLUME CXXX JANUARY 1, 1930, TO JUNE 25, 1930 THE NATION, Inc. 20 VESEY STREET. NEW YORK US,

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43029 INDEX TO VOLUME CXXX JANUARY 1, 1930. TO JUNE 25, 1930 (Nos. 3365-3390) The following letters are used to indicate the type of article: A Art C Correspondence Ct Cartoon D Drama Dt Driftway E Editorial Article EP Editorial Paragraph I International Relations, Documents IP International Relations, Foreign Press IS International Relations, Signed Article M Music P Poetry S Signed Article Book reviews and reviewers are indexed separately in the Book Review Section. A Abbott, Edith D. Washington (state) sugar beets and lum- ber; C 517 Absolutes and progress F. A. Manny; C 396 Academic freedom Pittsburgh university, illiberality; E.... 32 Accidents. See Safety Ada beats the drum J. W. Krutch; D 659 Aeronautics Accident in California costs many lives; EP 113 Agricultural relief Dollar wheat, lesson of; E 286 Farm board affairs in critical state. P. Y. Anderson; S 293 Legge, A., follows his own will. P. Y. Anderson ; S 66 Meets enemy in commission man. R. S. Allen; S .8 Uncle Sam, plunger; E 351 Alaska Exploitation ; E 116 Aliens Registration; EP 312, 409 Registration bill dies; EP 348 Registration indorsed by American fed- eration of labor; EP 112 Alimony. See Divorce All quiet on the western front. A. Bakshy; D 688 See also Remarque, E. M. Allen, Robert S. Farm relief meets an enemy; S 8 Aluminum Duty lowered by senate; EP 231 Aluminum company of America Federal trade commission dismisses com- plaints against company; EP 437 Amalgamated clothing workers Union with brains; E. 209 American civil liberties union Publishes annual report, "The story of civil liberty— 1929-30"; E 721 Should have been on The Nation's honor roll for 1929. F. Goodman; C . 125 Work for southern textile workers; aid needed; EP 30 American federation of labor At Marion. Xorth Carolina; EP 166 American society of newspaper editors Rejects proposal to control members. P. Y. Anderson; S 539 America's cup races; E 693 Americans. See United States I Anaesthesia known to ancients. C. Hooper; C 546 Andersen, Hans Christian Celebration in Copenhagen by children; EP 411 Anderson, P. T. Farmer subscribes for The Nation; C... 218 Anderson, Paul Y. American society of newspaper editors re- jects proposal to control members; S.. 538 Anti-injunction bill; delay sought; S.... 701 Boal, F. K., loses job as newspaper cor- respondent ; S 9 Correction, EP 113 Boulder dam, struggle over; S 173 Campaign expenditures, Pennsylvania and I Nebraska; S 538 Cannon, James, jr., challenge to United States senate; S 701 Communications merger dead; S 174 Communications, senate investigation; S 9 Hoover and newspapermen; S 419 Hoover, failure as politician; S 598 Hoover, feud with Republican senators; S 701 Hoover has bad luck with friends; S.... 9 Hoover hippodrome; S 293 Hoover "in bad" with country; S 538 Hughes, C. E., confirmation by the sen- ate; S 238 Huston, C. H., activities disclosed; S.. 239 Huston, C. H., connection with Muscle shoals; S 293 Huston, C. H., lobbying and other char- acteristics; S 419 Illinois politics; S 485 Injunction bill, Shipstead; S 598 "Lame-duck" diplomats; S 66 "Lame-duck" sessions resolution held up by Speaker Longworth ; S 485 Legge, A., and farm relief; S 66 Muscle shoals; S 485 Muscle shoals, conspiracy against public operation; S 538 Muscle shoals, scandal unearthed; S.... 293 Parker, J. J., appointment to supreme court; S 419 Parker, J. J., rejection; S 598 Pennsylvania politics; S 485 Pennsylvania primary results; S 651 Plots and counterplots in Washington; S 650 Post-office leases scandal ; S 485 Power regulation bill; S 359 Prohibition and politics; S 119 Prohibition lobbying; S 650 Radio corporation of America, activi- ties; S 120 Radio corporation of America, in the news; S 9 Radio corporation of America, monopoly hinders police work; S 174 Radio trust, prosecution; S 538 Roberts, O. J., nomination for supreme court; S 599; confirmation, 650 Scandal and impending scandal in Wash- ington; S 358 Senate committee assignments; S 120 Tariff; S 650 Tariff; Grundy's work; S 419 Tariff; rayon duty increased; S 174 Tariff; to be as Hoover wanted; S.... 3S8 Unemployment bills, Senator Wagner's, held up; S 485 Washington correspondents; S 66 Washington topics of interest; S 599 West, J. L., becomes press agent of Re- publican national committee; S 239 Wilbur, R. L.; companionship with power men; S 419 Anderson, Sherwood Lift up thine eyes; automobile assem- bling plant; S 620 Andrews, C. F. What next in India? IS 25 Angell, Norman Naval politics at London; S 146 Parity or reduction? S 266 Angels on earth. M. G.; D 24 Anna Christie. A Bakshy; D 404 Antarctica Who shall govern? V. Karapetoff; C... 125 Anti-fascism Mazzolo, C., killed in riot at anti-fascist meeting, New York; EP 479 Apology for the present. H. Hazlitt; S... 397 Apple cart, the, by G. B. Shaw. J. W. Krutch; D. 338 Archbishop's automobile. S. Danzijjer; C, 151; see also 71 Argentina Gold exports stopped by presidential de- cree; EP 31 Armament limitation and reduction. See naval reduction Art American, industrial; EP 285 Etchings, genuine and false. C. Z. OiS:i; C 32ft Artists and models. H. Hazlitt; D 740 Ashburn, Major general T. Q. Government in business; Inland water- ways corporation; EP 691; S 699 Asphalt. A. Bakshy; D 632 Associated press. See Newspapers At the bottom. J. W. Krutch; D 134 Atlanta, Ga., communists. W. Wilson; S.. 730 Auburn prison Conditions; reforms recommended; EP.. 2 Disturbances; EP 312 Audubon, John James; E 482 Austria Health insurance in. E. Kulka; IS 530 Authors Unfavorable conditions for; E 287 Autographs Presidents'; market value; EP 141 Automobile tires. See Tires Automobiles American, in Europe; EP 139 Assembling plant, work in. S. Ander- son; S 620 British claims to lead in invention; EP 59 Sales; EP 87 Speed limits, use for; Dt 14 Aux Cayes. See Haiti Aviation. See Aeronautics B B., A. S. Three little girls; D 525 Babcock, Frederic McCormick, R. H., success in Illinois primary ; S 484 Babson, Roger W. Being right with Babson. R. W. Robey; S 359 Baker, George L. Way with communists in Portland, Ore- gon; C 423 Bakshy, Alexander All quiet on the western front; D.... 688 Anna Christie; D 406 Asphalt; D 632 Cain and Artem; D 739 China express, the; D 404 Color in films; D 337 Demon of the steppes, the; D 226 Devil may care; D 54 Fragment of an empire, a; D 226 Green goddess, the; D 280 Happy days ; D 280 Journey's end; D 524 King of jazz; D 632 Last night, the; D 226 Laughing lady, the; D 106 Lost patrol, the; D 54 Love parade, the; D 158 Mammy; D 465 Man from Blankley's, the; D 465 Men without women; D 337 Mighty, the; D 106 News reel ; D 54 Not so dumb ; D 280 Old and new; D 577 Paramount on parade; D 577 Puttin' on the ritz; D 280 Rogue song, the; D 226 Sally; D 158 Sarah and son; D 404 Screen musical comedy; D 158 Silent enemy, the; D 632 Son of the gods ; D 226 Song of the flame; D 632 Song of the west; D 337 Song o' my heart; D 465 Springtime; D 106 Turksib; D 688 Under a Texas moon; D 524 Vagabond king, the; D 337 Virginian, the; D 106 Baldwin, Roger Russia's conscientious objectors, appeal for; C 547 Balfour, Earl of Course in regard to inter-allied secret treaties and President Wil-on; EP 383 Death; career. Lord Ponsonby; S..391; letter 653 Baltimore street railway Decision on return on present value, by supreme court ; EP 85 Bank failures. J. G. Curtis; S, 239; EP, 258; letter 625 Bank for international settlements. See War debts and reparations Bank mergers National city bank fiasco. C. W.: S. 1'.: letter 93 Banks Branch banking. J. G. Curtis; S 489 Banks, savings Life insurance. E. S. Smith; S 149 Barkoski, John Killing; W. J. Lyster and H. P. Watts convicted of involuntary manslaughter; E. Slapikis acquitted; EP 167 Battle hymn of the republic as national an- them. A. C. Jourdan; C 297 Bayard. Thomas Francis, on protection. C. O'C. Hennessy; C 625 Bayous; Dt 570

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Vol. cxxx] Index [Jan.-June, 1930 Beamish, Richard J. Pennsylvania primary campaign; S 564 Bekker, L. J. de Haiti — a plan for self-government; IS.. 282 Massacre at Aux Cayes; IS 308 Bergman, George J. Magnes, J., views on Palestine; C 46 Big-business brains; open letter to Senator Norris. J. G. Curtis; S 673 Bilbo, Theodore G. Wins pardoning championship; EP.... 410 Birth control Dennett, M. W., conviction reversed; EP 283 Roman Catholic attitude; M. Packard; C. 71 letter 151 Black, Helen Revolutionary tactics; C 570 Black, Ruby A. New deal for the red man; S 388 Blackwell, Alice Stone India, British rule; C 675 Blanshard, Paul Racketeering; information sought; C... 571 Blease, Coleman Livingston Defends lynching. C. B. Cheney; C... 423 Block, I. On Magistrate Sabbatino; C 99 Block, Paul Not under obligations to National city bank 113 Blossom, Frederick A. Nominates E. Smith for The Nation's honor roll for 1929; C 218 Blum, Leo Alimony, payment of; C 395 Boal, Frank K. Loses job as newspaper correspondent for refusing to violate confidence. P. Y. Anderson; S 9; correction, EP 113 Bockmann, A. F. News reel theater not worthy a place on The Nation's honor roll ; C 99 Bolitho, William (W. B. Ryall) As seen by H. Broun. H. Broun; S... 288 Death; EP 691 Bolivia. See Paraguayan-Bolivian dispute Books Authors, unfavorable conditions for; E. . 287 Censorship. See Censorship, book Children's. H. Broun; S 695 Classics; who reads them now? H. Haz- litt; S 449 Dollar books; E 639 Dollar books, economics of. H. Hazlitt; S 676 Prices. M. D. Follin; C 363 Summer reading; E 694 Boston Freedom of speech loses; EP 410 Protest against shooting of rum-runners; EP 57 See also Censorship, book Boston symphony concert; four moderns. H. Hutchinson; M 252 Boulder dam Another view. A. L. Smith; C 245 People's power : E 385 Public and private interest at. W. C. Mullendore; R. Finney replies; C... 179 Struggle over. P. Y. Anderson; S 173 Wilbur, Secretary, and Boulder dam. R. Finney; S 214 Bouton, S. Miles Reparations referendum, German; C... 327 Boy, perfect; Dt 178 Boy scouts And peace. J. E. West; C 364 Militarism. A. A. Conan; C 218 letter by J. M. West 364 Boyden, Roland W. Appointed as member of Permanent court of international arbitration; EP. . . . 504 Brains, big-business; open letter to Senator Norris. J. G. Curtis; S 673 Branch banking. See Banks Bread American; Dt 624 Good; Dt 732 Briand, Aristide United States of Europe project; EP. 532; E 615 Briggs, Clare Death; E 62 Broun. Heywood Bolitho. \V., writings; S 28R Censorship, stage and press; S 36 Children's books; S 695 Communists ; S 63 Communists, division among; S 353, 483; letter 570 Communists need better propaganda; S. 442 ; letter 733 Criticisms conditioned by mention of per- sonal life of writer; S 210 Dancing; S 171 Dog kibitzer; S 263 Free speech, and police action against New York communists; S 145 Gold, M., "Jews without money"; S 35.1 Grammar ; S 509 Green pastures, the; S 415 Hack work; S 387 Hoover, President ; S 563. 723 Kissing hands as reduction exercises; S Liquor at private dinner parties; S.... 317 Newspaper sensationalism; S 117 Newspaper work; S 670 Novelty; S 617 Pope Pius XI's views on coeducation; S. 91 Printing trade controversy; S 537 Supernatural, belief in; S 643 To be dramatic critic of The Nation in the absence of J. W. Krutch; EP 667 Unemployment; government employment agency needed ; S 442 White, W., largely responsible for re- jection of Parker for supreme court; S 591 World, New York; S 237 Brown, G. M. L. Business English ; C 16 Brown, Mrs. William J. Nation luncheon group in Baltimore; C. 364 Bruenn, Anna R. Criticizes The Nation; C 326 Buell, Raymond L. Special correspondent, the; C 625 Burrill, Mary Green pastures, the; Negro view of; C. 600 Business And the law; E 614 Business English. G. M. L. Brown; C... 16 Butler, Charles On The Nation's honor roll for 1929.. 35 Butler, Smedley D. Address on marines' work; EP 58 Byington, Steven T. "Our country, — "; C 546 Bynner, Witter Ghosts; P 240 To one under a mountain cloud; P 187 Wintry mind, the; P 294 Byrd, Richard Evelyn And companions, on The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Byrd antarctic expedition Returning; inside story of life at Little America not told; EP 259 C Cable bill. See Citizenship Cain and Artem. A. Bakshy; D 739 Calkins, Raymond Defends Watch and ward society; C... 178 Cameron, Alice M. Defends England; C 571 Canada Tariff, speed-making records broken; EP 557 Canick, Michael Magnes, P., views on Palestine; C 45 Cannon, James, Jr. Challenge to United States senate; S.... 701 Stock-market activities; EP 719 Stock market and campaign activities; EP 690 Carlisle, Floyd L. Views on government ownership. Re- porter ; C 653 Carnegie foundation Carnegie corporation comes to its aid; EP 87 Carnivorous plant ; Dt 674 Carol, King. See Rumania Carpenter, Edward Letters sought ; C 704 Censorship, book Boston bookseller sentenced for selling Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D. H. Lawrence ; EP 2 Boston; Watch and ward society, my brother's peeper. G. Jackson; S.... 64 Boston; Watch and ward society defended by its president; C 178 Boston; Watch and ward society loses three distinguished members; EP 86 Massachusetts amends law; EP 438 Massachusetts supreme court upholds sen- tences; EP 691 Modern history, by Hayes and Moon, barred in New York City; EP 559 Obscenity in court: E 642 Pornography and obscenity, pamphlet, by D. H. Lawrence: E 236 Smoot and Heflin on "obscene" books; E 384 Censorship, plays Players seek amendment of Wales act; EP 207 Census, United States; Dt 517 Taking the census; EP 437 Centenarian club of East Aurora, New York Seeks members at $100 each; E 6 Centers, creative. Z. and R. P. Hecht; C. 270 Century Magazine Joined with Forum: EP 667 Chain stores, war on. H. W. Schacter; S.. 544 Chaplin, Charles Spencer Abjures talkies; EP 313 Charles, Robert On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Chase, Don M. Praise of G. W. Norris by California editor; C 245 Chase, Stuart Prosperity — Believe it or not. VII. Balancing the books; S 39 Chauvet, Ernest G. Thanks for Mrs. Weed's article; C 517 169 423 587 690 175 241 291 207 571 6 558 Chemical foundation Investigation urged; E Cheney, Coleman B. Senator Blease defends lynching; C. Chernik, Jacob Back-cover hyperbole; C 327 Chicago Financial plight; EP 140; EP, 207 Child labor National committee celebrates twenty- fifth anniversary; EP 3 Children of darkness. J. W. Krutch; D 134 Children, saving; E 481 Children's books. H. Broun; S 695 China Civil war again; EP "Communist armies"; EP Madame Sun Yat-sen keeps faith. R. Gould; IS 109 Missionaries' special privileges being sur- rendered; EP 140 China express, the. A. Bakshy; D 404 Chinese Eastern railway. See Sino-Russian controversy Chinese theater, the; EP 233 Chinese-Russian controversy. See Sino-Rus- sian controversy Chocolate soldier, the. M. G.; D 228 Christian science Censor. I. Machinery of suppression. H. R. Mussey; S 147 II. "Obnoxious books." H. R. Mussey; S III. Freedom of the press. H. R. Mus- sey ; S IV. Siege of Fort Scribner. H. R. Mus- sey; S Christian Science Monitor Declines advertisement of The Nation's article on Christian science censorship; EP Christian social ethics, school of. V. D. Scudder ; C Christmas, night after; E Cinematograph. See Moving pictures Citizenship Cable bill amended to make naturaliza- tion difficult; EP 719 Denied because of refusal to bear arms; EP Questions asked in Louisiana. S. T. Byington; C 546 City haul. O. G. V., D 254 Civilian West Point expansion; C 245 Clark, John Bates Veto the tariff; C 675 Classics, who reads them now? H. Hazlitt; S 449 Cleland, John Bought off by British government after publication of obscene work; E 414 Clemenceau, Georges Destroyer, the. R. Dell ; S 92 Cleveland Press Editors purged of contempt; EP 348 Clothing industry. See Garment industry Coal industry Cutthroat competition; E 261 Coal miners, American Battle goes on; EP 411 Illinois dispute; EP 232 Rebellion. L. Stanley; S 356 Coe, George A. Militarism; C 327 Cohen, Alfred E. Defends Judge Parker's Negro decision; C 547 College athletics Professionalism denounced by President Day of Union College; EP 59 Color; Dt 151 Combinations. See Mergers Communications Air monopoly again; E 90 Investigations, senate. P. Y. Anderson; S 9 Merger plan dead; P. Y. Anderson; S.. 174 Communism Atlanta's communists. W. Wilson; S.. 730 Broun, H., on communists; S 63 Broun, H., on dissension among com- munists; S 353, 483; letter, 570 Broun, H., on free speech and police ac- tion in New York; S 145 Broun, H., on need for better propa- ganda; S. 442; letters 363, 733 Brutality of New York police; EP 139 Convictions reversed in Ohio; cases in other states; EP .' 690 Court rules labor contract may not be broken because laborer is a communist; EP 86 Demonstrations; EP 284 Demonstrations, March 6; EP..311; EP. 410 Denounced in court by Magistrate Sab- batino, sitting in judgment on youthful communist, D. Weiss; EP 58; C 71 Detroit; treatment of reds on March 6. C. Parker; C 518 "Forceful" writers, dearth of. B. Rogers; C. 733 : see also 442 Membership in party not ground for de- portation; EP 113

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Nos. 3365-3390] Index [Vol. cxxx Portland, Oregon; Mayor Baker's way of handling communists. A. Jourdan; C 423 Treason-smellers active; EP 718 Treatment of communists, protest against. Student; C 395 VVhalen documents printed in New York; EP 612 Whalenism; E 350 Conan, Abraham A. Boy scout militarism; C 218 letter by J. M. West 364 Congress Bills of merit; EP 718 "Lame duck" sessions resolution held up by Speaker Longworth; S 485 See also Senate, United States Conscription ; E 439 Constitution, United States Fourteenth amendment; O. W. Holmes dissents on intent. C. Looker; C... 733 Undermining by executive usurpation; EP 30 Cooke, R. F. America and the League of Nations; C. 244 Coolidge, Calvin Declares Americans can take care of their economic destiny; EP 87 Cork; Dt 703 Corn exchange bank trust company. See Na- tional city bank Cotton Attempt by Farm board to support price results in loss; EP 719 Courtesan. J. W. Krutch; D 606 Creative centers. Z. and R. P. Hecht; C. 270 Crile, George W. On The Nation's honor roll for 1929. ... 35 Placing on honor roll criticized. A. E. Wight; C 124 Crime and criminals Detroit crime clinic. J. A. Fellows; S.. 568 Misdemeanor or felony, at discretion of district attorney ; EP Ill Criticism Critic, modern; point of view. C. H. Grattan ; S 514 Conditioned by mention of personal life of writer. H. Broun; S 210 Croly, Herbert Death; EP 613 Curran, Henry H. On eighteenth amendment; EP 504 Curry, W. B. League of nations and treaty revision; C 151 Curtis, J. G. Bank failures; S 239 Big-business brains; open letter to Sena- tor N orris; S 673 Branch banking ; S 489 Cutting, Bronson On The Nation's honor roll for 1929... 35 Czecho-Slovakia German culture; EP 285; letter, 518 Minorities. S. Klima; C 271 Minorities, treatment of. K. F. Geiser; C 364 D D., D. V. Rebound; D 254 Recapture ; D 228 Dakin, Edwin Franden Mrs. Eddy: The biography of a virginal mind; effort to suppress. H. R. Mus- sey; S 291 Dance repertory theater. J. W. Krutch; D. 106 Dancing. H. Broun; S 171 Danziger, Samuel Archbishop's automobile; C 151; see also 71 Darlingtonia calif ornica; Dt 674 Daudet, Leon Pardoned; returns to France; EP 59 Daughters of the American revolution Activities criticized; EP 232 Convention action; EP 504 Davis, Horace B. Substitute for lynching; S 12 Day, Frank Parker Denounces professionalism in college ath- letics; EP 59 Deadwood Dick Death; EP 613 Deak, Frances Hungarian decision; C (with editorial comment) 15 Death takes a holiday. J. W. Krutch; D 79 Debentures. See Tariff — United States Degrees, college, and wealth. E. Williams; C 151 Dell, Robert Clemenceau the destroyer; S 92 France wins at London; S 542 Demon of the steppes, the. A. Bakshy; D.. 226 Dennett, Mary Ware Conviction reversed by circuit court of appeals; EP 283 Deportation Communist membership not ground for deportation ; EP 113 Detroit Communists; treatment on March 6. C. Parker; C 513 Crime clinic. J. A. Fellows; S Deutsch, Babette Sanctuary; P 187 Devil may care. A. Bakshy; D 54 Dictatorships; E 169 Dill, Clarence C. Tariff, action on; EP 637 Diplomatic service Business administration; EP 29 Diplomatic service 'Lame duck" diplomats. P. Y. Ander- son; S 66 Disarmament Einstein, A., views: E 144; letter, 297 See also Naval reduction Dishonored lady. H. IL; D 254 Distilled liquors known to ancients. C. Hooper; C 546 Divorce Alimony, payment of. L. Blum; C 395 And after. I. Children and property. M. Ernst; S 172; letters, 395 II. Separation without divorce (a per- sonal narrative) 211 III. Divorce and the child 268 IV. Insecurity of the child 323 V. Divorce with arbitration 393 VI. Child of divorce, a 393 Doheny, Edward L. Acquittal of charge of bribing A. B. Fall; EP 382 Drama. See Theater, the Dresbach, Glenn Ward Mountain background; P 365 Drugs Enforcement of laws by federal govern- ment; EP 284 Dunbar, James British budget problems; S 445 Economics Dominant in congress; E 168 King in Washington; E 142 Edelstein, Harry M. Separation of married couples; C 395 Edison, Thomas Alva Inventor enters heaven, the. J. Rorty; S, 295 ; letter 396 Edman, Irwin Dialogue; P 298 New naturalism ; S 447 Egypt English subscriber speaks. E. William- son; C 734 Nationalist party's success; EP : • -. • 30 Treaty negotiations with Great Britain break down; EP 613 Einstein, Albert Views on peace; E.. ...144; letter, 297 Encyclopaedia of the social sciences; volume I published; E 143 England. See Great Britain English language Business English. G. M. L. Brown; C. 16 Correct English. H. Broun; S 509 Ergot Deterioration of; EP 587 Drug administration replies to criticism; EP 611 Ernst, Morris Divorce — and after. I. Children and property; S 172; letters, 395 See also Divorce Etchings Genuine and false. C. Z. Offin; C 326 Europa (steamship) Wins blue ribbon of Atlantic; E 413 Europe United States of Europe, Briand project; EP 532; 615 European war British entry made on vague commit- ment; Lloyd George admission; E 481; letter 571 Hatred survives and passes; EP 438 Evans, F. E., soldier and newspaperman; C. 734 F Fall, Albert B. Doheny, E. L., acquitted of bribery charge; EP 382 Fame, bargain counter; E 6 Farm board and relief. See Agricultural re- lief Fascism. See Anti-fascism Fascist league of America Swan song ; EP 41 Fashions Spring; EP 3 Federal power commission Bill for full-time body passed; EP 718 Couzens bill for reorganization; EP.... 611 Grants Flathead license to Rocky moun- tain power company; EP 638 Federal reserve board And stock market; EP 382 Federal reserve system Book on. by P. M. Warburg; E 535 Fellows, J. A. Detroit's crime clinic; S 568 Ferril, Thomas Hornsby Dialogue in Kansas — 1850; P 677 Filipinos California prejudice; EP 165 Finney, Ruth Boulder dam, public and private inter- est at; reply to W. C. Mullendore; C 179 Wilbur, Secretary, and Boulder dam; S 214 First Mrs. Fraser. J. W. Krutch; D 79 Fischer, Louis Latest bolshevik zigzag; S 513 Russia's new revolution; S 322 Vatican and the Kremlin, the; IS 82 Fishman, Jacob Jewish Morning Journal and W. Zuker- man; C 703 Flathead Indian reservation. See Water power Fletcher, Henry Prather Work in Mexico defended; C 364 Follin, Maynard D. Book prices; C 363 Food and drug administration Chief replies to criticism; EP 611 Fordham, Herbert Navies, expensive; C 395 Forum Joined with Century Magazine; EP.... 667 Fourteenth amendment. See Constitution, United States Fragment of an empire, a. A. Bakshy; D.. 226 France Colonies at peace; EP 559 Relations with Italy; EP 689 Wins at London. R. Dell; S 542 Frank, Waldo Mariategui, J. C; death; appeal for family ; C 704 Freedom Defense of; E 507 War for; E 721 Freedom of the press Cleveland Press editors purged of con- tempt; EP 348 Korea. C. Hugh; C 652 Freedom of speech Broun, H., views; S 145 Loses in Boston; EP 410 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins Death ; EP 349 French, Daniel Chester; eightieth birthday; EP 505 Friends of music; "Dido and Aeneas." H. Hutchinson; M 497 Friends, society of. See Quaker memorial Furness, Horace H., Jr. Death; EP 533 G G., M. Angels on earth ; D 24 Chocolate soldier, the; D 228 Garrick gaieties; D 740 Jew Suss ; D 24 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand. See India Garment industry Stabilization needed; EP 3 Garrick gaieties. M. G.; D 740 Garvan, Francis P. Investigation urged; E 169 Gasoline. See Petroleum Gasparri, Cardinal Resignation as papal secretary of state; EP 259 Geiser, Karl F. Czecho-slovak minorities; C 364 Geneva tariff conference. See Tariff George, Henry, work of. G. White; C 363 Germany Bruening cabinet accomplishments; EP.. 533 Economic life and finances in sad state; EP 30 Women attend higher educational institu- tions in greatly increased numbers; EP 259 See also War debts and reparations Gilman, Grace Non-violence in India; C 675 Glassman, Don Evans, F. E., soldier and newspaperman; C 734 Gliickliche hand. die. H. Hutchinson; M.... 605 Goddard, Captain Calvin H. Withdraws voluntarily suit against The Nation; EP 719 Gold, Mike "Jews Without Money." H. Broun; S.. 353 Goodman, Fanny Says American civil liberties union should have been included in The Na- tion's honor roll for 1929; C 125 Gould, Randall Madame Sun Yat-sen keeps faith; IS... 109 Government ownership. See Public owner- ship Grammar, English. H. Broun; S 509 Grattan, C. Hartley Modern critic's point of view; S 514 Great Britain Budget problems. J. Dunbar; S 445 "Crisis" over unemployment-insurance bill averted; EP 206 Defended. A. M. Cameron; C 571

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Vol. cxxx] Index [Jan. -June, 1930 Farmer, vanishing. J. A. Hobson; IS.. 714 Government work.ngs to be investigated. by H. J. Laski; EP 31 Labor governnie-.it d.m :i i ies; L. 64-1 Labor government weathers storms; EP 349 Labor party in travail; E 535 MacDonald and the Independent labor party; IP 407 MacDonald leaves Independent labor party; EP 258 Navy; naval politics at London. N. Angell; S 146 Tariff; empire free trade defeated in de- bate; EP 167 Taxes raised in new budget; EP 477 Unemployment. J. A. Hobson; S 96 Unemployment; ultimatum to MacDonald government; EP 411 Great Northern railroad Merger with Northern Pacific; EP 257 Green goddess, the. A. Bakshy; D 280 Green pastures, the. J. W. Krutch; D 376; H. Broun; S 415; letter, 600 Greenburg, Sophie Xuiion Ciu.) of San Francisco dinner; C 152 Gregg, Richard B. India confronts Britain; S 696 Will Gandhi win? IS 661 Ground hog Fails as harbinger of spring; EP 167 Gruening, Ernest On The Nation's honor roll for 1929... 35 H H. H. Dishonored lady ; D 254 Infinite shoeblack, the; D 306 It's a grand life; D 254 Josef Suss ; D 226 Open door, the ; D 226 Out of a blue sky; D 254 Simple Simon; D 306 Strike up the band; D 226 Women have their way, the; D 226 Hack work. H. Broun; S 387 Hadley, Arthur Twining Death; EP 313 Hague conference. See War debts and repa- rations Haiti Crisis passes; EP 478 Disturbances due to American adminis- tration; EP 30 Evans, F. E., soldier and newspaperman. D. Classman; C 734 Hope for. H. H. Weed; IS 342 Massacre at Aux Cayes. L. J. de Bekker; IS 308 Plan for self-government, a. L. J. de Bekker; IS 282 Roy, E., becomes president; EP 612 Situation not reassuring; EP 438 Situation promising; EP 34X Thanks from Haiti for Mrs. Weed's articles. E. G. Chauvet, C. Moravia, S. Pradel; C 517 Victory in. H. H. Weed; IS 378 Haitian commission Appointed ; EP 2 Bill passed by house of representatives; EP Ill Does good work; EP 312 Hope for Haiti, in report of commis- sion; E 413 Makes good beginning; EP 284 Membership; EP, 205; letter on H. P. Fletcher 364 Refused to President Hoover; investiga- tion voted; EP 166 Report ; 1 433 Half gods. J. W. Krutch; D 52 Halpern, D. Sabbatino, S., Magistrate; denunciation of young communist ; (" 71 Hamburg-American line Agreement with North German I.lovd; EP ". .. 383 Hamilton, Mary Agnes Visits America; EP 87 Happy days. A. Bakshy; D 280 Harding, Warren Gamaliel Letters, destruction of. M. Welpley; C. 244 Hardy, Arthur Sherburne Death; EP 349 Harris, Julian and Julia Retire from management of Columbus, Georgia, Enquirer-Sun; EP 141 Hart, Charles C. United States government appeals to Soviets to aid him; EP 113 Harvard university, scrubwomen's case Discharge explained; EP 16" Harvard defends course: EP 382 Harvard "explains." G. Jackson; S... 212 Scrubwomen, school for. G. Jackson; S. 118 Women and wages. A. Lutz; C 297 Hawley, Edward W. Planet, new. name for; C 625 Hawley-Smoot bill. See Tariff — United States Hayes. Carlton J. H. "Modern History" barred in New York City; EP 559 Hazlitt, Henry All too humanism; S 181 Apology for the present, an; S 397 Artists and models; D 740 Dollar books, economics of; S 676 Lysistrata; D 740 Ripples; D 278 Topaze; D 278 Who reads classics now? S 44 •) Headless Washington. O. G. Villard; S... 264 Health insurance in Austria. E. Kulka; IS. 580 Hebrew university in Jerusalem Wolffsohn memorial library dedicated; EP 479 Hecht, Zoltan, and R. P. Hecht Creative centers; C 270 Heflin, J. Thomas Book censorship; E 384 Hemingway, Ernest On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Hennessy, Charles O'Connor Bayard, T. F., on protection; C 625 Henry, James L. White woman's attitude toward Filipino; C 15 Henze, William E. On All quiet on the western front; C 16 Hicks, Granville Twenties in American literature; S... 183 History, newer ; E 262 Hobson, John A. Britain's vanishing farmer; IS 714 Unemployment in England; S 96 Hoeflich, W. A. Investing $1,500; C 98 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Dissents on intent of Fourteenth amend- ment. C. Looker; C 733 Homicides. See Murders Hooper, Charles Discoveries of the ancients; C 546 Hoover, Herbert Administration, bankrupt; E 560 Administration, first year; E 234 Administration; Hoover hippodrome. P. Y. Anderson; S 293 Appointments diminish prestige; EP.... 503 Appoints research council on social trends; EP 1 As economist; EP 531 Bad luck with friends. P. Y. Anderson; S 9 Broun, H., on the president; S....563, 723 Chastisement in coming election fore- seen; E 480 Failure as politician. P. Y. Anderson; S 598 Failure to advise delegate z to London naval arms conference; EP 585 Feud with Republican senators. P. Y. Anderson ; S 70 1 Government by abstention; E 640 Happiness boys; E 692 Headless Washington. O. G. Villard; S 264 Huston. C. IL; Hoover-Huston combina- tion; EP 381 "In bad" with country. P. Y. Ander- son; S 538 Newspapers, relations with. P. Y. An- derson ; S 419 Plots and counterplots. P. Y. Anderson; S ' 650 Prohibition, attitude not known; EP... 257 Prohibition called an experiment "noble in motive." A. Lattimore; C 363 Tariff test for; EP 611 Veto of Spanish war veterans' pension bill overridden; EP 665 Hoover, Theodore Defends war; EP 638 Hotel universe. J. W. Krutch; D 525 Housing New York City, plans; EP 691 Huebner, S. S. Says 98 in 100 are financially incom- petent; EP 87 Hugh, C. Freedom of the press in Korea; C 652 Hughes, Charles Evans Appointment as chief iustice of the United States; EP 165: E 20s Confirmation by the senate. P. Y. An- derson; S 238 Record; EP 165 Remained on supreme court bench z('t running for president. W. Isaacs; C. 271 Hull house, fortieth anniversary; EP 587 Humanism All too humanism. H. Hazlitt; S 181 Apology for the present. H. Hazlitt; S. 397 More, P. E., denounces New York's in- telligentsia; EP 719 Hungary Aristocracy's decline; IP 180 Decision in recent case. F. Deak: C (with editorial comment) IS Hunt. Robert Marigold ; P 397 Huston, Claudius H. Activities disclosed. P. Y. Anderson: S. 239 Connection with Muscle shoals. P. Y. Anderson; S 291 Hoover-Huston combination; EP 381 Lobbying and other characteristics: P. Y. Anderson ; S 419 Hutchinson, Howard Boston symphony concert; four moderns; M 252 Friends of music; "Dido and Aeneas"; 497 Gluckliche, hand, die; M 605 Neighborhood playhouse program, with Cleveland symphony; M 374 Opera in English; M 201 Sacre du printemps, le; M 605 Schola cantorum, concert; M 553 Hydroelectric power. See power industry I Illinois Politics. P. Y. Anderson; S 485 Illinois state prison Radio for prisoners; EP 667 Immigration Mexican, restriction, proposed; EP 667 National-origins provision; EP 532 Independent labor party. See Great Britain India All-India national congress for complete independence; EP 58 British rule. A. S. Blackwell; C 675 Civil disobedience movement EP, 383; EP 478 Confronts Britain. R. B. Gregg; S 696 English subscriber speaks. E. ■ William- son; C 734 Events; EP, 585; EP 612 Freedom, movement for; E 5 Gandhi begins campaign. IL A. Miller; IS 501 Gandhi begins civil-disobedience program; EP 313 Gandhi begins making salt; '- P 4>.S Gandhi, the non-resistant. H. R. Mus- sey; IS 608 Gandhi, the terrible meek; E 588 Gandhi; will he win? R. B. Gregg; IS 661 Gandhi willing to treat with Great Britain; EP 86 Gandhi's purpose; EP 58 Lord Irwin's blunder; IP 26 MacDonald, R., and India; E 669 Nationalist congress; EP 29 Native doctors boycott British medicine; EP 689 Non-violence not rejected. G. Gilman; C 675 Passive resistance; E 722 Peshawar killings; IP 741 Revolt; E 561 Revolt grows; EP 533 Simon report, first volume published; EP 689 Unrest grows; EP 637 What next in India? C. F. Andrews; IS 25 Indians And the power trust; E 440 Children, deficiency appropriation for; EP 438 New deal for the red man. R. A. Black; S 388 Infinite shoeblack, the. H. H.; D 306 Injunctions Attempt to sidestep Shipstead bill fails; EP 718 Delay on bill sought. P. Y. Anderson; S 701 Shipstead anti-injunction bill. P. Y. An- derson; S 598 Inland waterways corporation. Major general T. Q. AsMmrn; EP 691; S, 699 Insurance, health In Austria. E. Kulka; IS 580 Insurance, life "Cash and carry" insurance. E. S. Smith; S 149 Interstate commerce commission Railroad consolidation plan; E 4 International ladies' garment workers' union Union with brains; E 209 International review, the. J. W. Krutch: D. 306 Inventor enters heaven, the. J. Rortv; S 295 ; letter 396 Investor, small. W. H. Hoeflich; C 98 Irish Statesman passes; EP 438 Irwin, Lord, blunder; IP 26 Isaacs, William C. E. Hughes remained on bench after running for president; C 271 Non-combatants and war; C 16 Isserman, Ferdinand M. Dr. Magnes and Zionism; IS 56 Italy Fascist finance. F. Nitti; IS 162 Frees political prisoners on occasion of royal wedding; EP 59 See elso Mussolini. B.; Naval reduction It's a grand life. H. H.; D 254 Jackson, Gardner Harvard "explains" in scrubwomen's wage case; S 212 Harvard — school for scrubwomen; S.... 118 My brother's peeper; S 64; letter. I?fl On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 Ji

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Nos. 3365-3390] Index [Vol. cxxx Jaffe, Harry Describes Russian prison; C 218 Jamison, M. P. G. Southern chivalry; C 326 Janowsky, Oscar I. Magnes, J., views on Palestine, and The Nation's; C 47 Japan And the naval pact. K. K. Kawakami; S 727 Elections, government victory; EP 259 Jennings, Leslie Xelson Admonition; P 17 Migrant; P 548 Tabula rasa; P 424 Jew Suss. M. G. ; D 24 Johnson, Nelson T. Open mind on China; EP 207 Josef Suss. H. H.; D 226 Joseph, George W. Oregon gubernatorial campaign; EP 666 Jourdan, Albert C. Battle Hymn of the Republic as na- tional anthem; C 297 Communism in Portland, Oregon; Mayor Baker's way with; C 423 Journalists. See Newspapers Journey's end (moving picture). A. Bakshy; D 524 Journey's End (play) ; D 524 Produced at West Point; EP 141 Jugoslavia Matchek trial; E 693 Julian petroleum company Keycs, A., goes to prison; EP 34S K Kaplan, Saul Palestine situation ; C 45 Karapetoff, Vladimir Antarctica; who shall govern? C 125 Karolyi, Count Misunderstanding with friends; EP.... 57 Kawakami, K. K. Japan and the naval pact; S 727 Kellock, Harold Woodberry — a great teacher; S 120 Kellogg pact Honorable agreement, or bunk? EP.... 1 Keyes, Asa Goes to prison in Julian petroleum com- pany scandal ; EP 348 King Lear. J. W. Krutch; D 498 King of jazz. A. Bakshy; D 632 Kingman, Harry L. Restitution for Mooney and Billings; C. 125 Klein, Nicholas National gallery heroes; C 326 Klima, S. Czecho-slovakia, minorities in; C...271; letter 364 Kohn, Robert D. On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Korea Freedom of the press. O. G. Yillard and C. Hugh; C 652 Krai J. J. Masaryk, President, defended; C 518 Kreymborg, Alfred Dulcinea and Dorothea; P 702 Krutch, Joseph Wood Ada beats the drum ; D 659 Apple cart, the, by G. B. Shaw; D 338 At the bottom; D 134 Children of darkness; D 134 Courtesan; D 606 Dance repertory theater; !> 106 Death takes a holiday; D 79 First Mrs. Fraser ; D 79 Goes to France for year on Guggen- heim fellowship; EP 667 Green pastures, the; D 376; letter, 600 Half gods; D 52 Hotel universe; D 525 International review, the; D 306 King Lear; D 498 Lady Clara; D 554 Lawrence, D. H., death; S..320; letter, 570 Leiber, Fritz, D 466; 498 Lost sheep; D 606 Love, honor, and betray; D 403 Mei Lan-Fang; D 403 Meteor; D 78 Michael and Mary; D 52 Month in the country, a; D 430 New American drama, the; D 678 Penal law 2010; D 554 Plutocrat, the; D 306 Red rust; D 160 Retrospect of the drama; D 202 Review of the theatrical season; S 659 Rivals, the; D 403 Romeo and Juliet; D 578 Room 349; D 554 Tavern, the; D 659 This man's town; D 403 Uncle Vanya; D 554 Vikings, the; D 633 Wake up and dream; D 106 Waterloo bridge; D 106 Kulka, Ernest Health insurance in Austria; IS 580 Kunitz, Stanley J. Interior; P 452 Invocation to the phoenix; P 601 Parting; P 100 Skull of ecstasy; P 735 Labor Automobile assembling plant. S. Ander- son; 620 How digging began. A. K. Tuell; S... 361 Injunctions. See Injunctions Unemployment. See Unemployment Labor party (British). See Great Britain Labor unions Dress industry and steel industry con- trasted; EP 2ii Railroad, win in supreme court; EP.... 666 Unions with brains; E 209 Lady Clara. J. W. Krutch; D 554 La Follette, Philip Out for governor of Wisconsin; EP.... 411 La Follette, Robert Marion Appointment to senate finance commit- tee; EP 85 Land and prosperity. G. White; C 99 Laski, Harold J. To investigate workings of British gov- ernment; EP 31 Last mile, the. O. G. V.j D 278 Last night, the. A. Bakshy; D 226 Latin America And the United States; E 90 Law still permits president of United States to send military men; EP.... 586 See also Monroe Doctrine Lattimore, Alida Hoover's description of prohibition; C... 363 Laughing lady, the. A. Bakshy; D 106 Law Respect for; Ct 321 Servant of life; E 534 Law observance and enforcement. See National commission on law observance and en- forcement Lawrence, D. H. Death. J. W. Krutch; S 320; letter, 570 Pamphlet, Pornography and obscenity; E. 236 Lawyers. See Legal profession League for independent political action Williams, H. Y., western speaking tour; C 396 League of nations America and the league. R. F. Cooke; C 244 And treaty revision. W. B. Curry; C 151 Article XII, amendment proposed; EP.. 283 Development, work, and weakness; E.. 60 Permanent court of international justice; American membership; EP 504 Ten years of the league. F. Morley; S 67; E 60 Lechlitner, Ruth Cocoon; P 219 Legal profession Minnesota supreme court declares veteran preference law for admittance to pro- fession invalid; EP 478 Le Gallienne, Eva As Juliet. JT. W. Krutch; D 578 On The Nation's honor roll for 1929.... 35 Legge, Alexander. See Agricultural relief Leiber, Fritz. J. W. Krutch; D 466, 498 Levinson, Salmon O. On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Levinthal, Israel Herbert Lord Ponsonby on Balfour; C 653 Libel Posthumous, actionable in New York. B. Tuska; C 734 Liberia Forced labor; 1 256 Library of congress Vollbehr collection, and history of li- brary. E 590 "Lie-detector." V. Marshang; C 71 Life insurance. See Insurance Lift up thine eyes. S. Anderson; S 620 Lindsey, Ben B. Barred by Colorado. H. McGuire; S... 420 Literature American, twenties in. G. Hicks; S.... 183 Critic, modern; point of view. C. H. Grattan; S 514 Littletown, prohibition in. W. W. Norton; S 510 Livingstone, John A. Radio trust's monopoly; C 71 Lloyd George, David Admits Great Britain entered war on vague commitment; E 481; letter, 571 Lloyd George, Megan Maiden speech in Commons; EP 479 Locusts, plague of; E 508 Loeb, James Mair, A. W., death; C 125 London Daily Chronicle Merged with London Daily Hews; EP.. 667 London naval conference. See Naval reduction Looker, Charles Holmes, O. W., dissents on intent of Fourteenth amendment; C 733 Lost patrol, the. A. Bakshy ; D 54 Lost sheep. J. W. Krutch ; D 606 Louisiana Murder case; white man convicted of murder of Negro girl; EP 479 Love, honor, and betray. J. W. Krutch; I).. 403 Love parade, the. A. Bakshy; D 158 Lowe, Robert Liddell De libris; P 572 Lutz, Alma Women and wages; C 297 Lynching Averted; EP 86 Blease, Senator, defends lynching. C. B. Cheney; C 423 Oklahoma; EP 666 Sherman, Texas; EP 586 Substitute for. H. B. Davis; S 12 Lyne, J. G. Railroad view of consolidation; S 94 Lysistrata. H. Hazlitt; D 740 McAdoo, William Censured by New York City bar asso- ciation ; EP 47g McCormick, Ruth Hanna Victory in Illinois primary. F. Bab- cock; S 484 Wins in Illinois primary; E 480 MacDonald, James Ramsay And India ; E 669 And the Independent labor party; IP. . . 407 Leaves Independent labor party; EP.... 258 MacDonald, Malcolm Maiden speech in Commons; EP 479 McGinty, L. J. Race prejudice north and south; C... 71 McGuire, Harry Colorado bars Judge Lindsey; S 420 Macy, V. Everit Death; public service; EP 383 Magazines New; E 116; correction, EP, 141 Magnes, Judah L. And Zionism. F. M. Isserman; IS.... 54 Letters on his views on Arabs and Jews in Palestine; C 45 Maiakovsky, Vladimir; suicide; EP 505 Main, R. H. Bank failures; C 625 Maine Hard times in. O. A. Robinson; C 326 Mair, Alexander William Death; tribute. J. Loeb; C 125 Mammy. A. Bakshy; D 465 Man, what is? E 143 Man from Blankley's, the. A. Bakshy; D.. 465 Manners, J. Hartley Hatred of Germany kept alive; EP.... 439 Manny, Frank A. Absolutes and progress; C 396 Mariategui, Jose Carlos Death; appeal for family. W. Frank; C 704 Marine corps Butler, S. D., speech on marine rule abroad to be kept quiet; EP 3 Butler, S. D., speaks on marines' work; EP 58 Marsh, Corinna Reiman Fulfilment; P 153 Marshall, Carl Pardoned by Mississippi governor after conviction of contempt; EP 410 Marshang, Victoria "Lie-detector" ; C 71 Martin, Helen R. The Nation not on sale in Harrisburg, Pa.; C 270 Masaryk, Thomas Garrigue Eightieth birthday; EP 285; letter, 518 Masefield, John Appointed poet laureate of England; EP 587 Matchek, Vladimir Trial; E 693 Mathes, Hodge Tennessee yields to Maiden; C 16 May day New York police action invites trouble; EP 505 Observance quiet; EP 558 Mazzolo, Carlo Killed in riot at anti-fascist meeting, New York; EP 479 Mei Lan-fang; EP 233; J. W. Krutch, D, 403 Men without women. A. Bakshy; D 337 Merchant marine Hamburg-American and North German Lloyd in agreement; EP 383 Mergers Business and the law; E 614 Control ; EP 409 Government control or ownership. O. G. Villard; S 416 Letter to "My dear senator." O. G. Villard; S 416 Merger on merger; E 507 More in sight; EP 348

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Vol. cxxx] Index [Jan.-June, 1930 Meteor. J. W. Krutch; D 78 Mexico President, new, P. Ortiz Rubio, in- stalled. L. C. Wilson; S 216 President, Ortiz Rubio, shot; EP 206 Michael and Mary. J. W. Krutch; D 52 Michelson, Albert A. On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Mighty, the. A. Bakshy; D 106 Militarism Boy Scout. A. A. Conan; C 218; letter by J. M. West 364 Manifestations in United States. G. A. Coe; C 327 Miller, Herbert Adolphus Gandhi's campaign begins; IS 581 Miners, coal. See Coal miners Minnesota Veteran-preference law for admittance to legal profession declared invalid; EP 478 Missionaries. See China Mitchell, William De Witt Report that he will leave cabinet. P. Y. Anderson; S 701 Monroe, Will S. Carpenter, E.; letters sought; C 704 Monroe doctrine What it is and what it is not; EP 311 Montana power company Grab, threatened; EP 166 Month in the country, a. J. W. Krutch; D 430 Moon, Parker T. "Modern History" barred in New York City; EP 559 Mooney and Billings California and Mooney. I. F. Morrow; C 653 Mystery; prize offered by Liberty for solution; E 351 Restitution in case of pardon. H. L. Kingman; C 125 Young, Governor, not yet convinced of accused men's innocence; EP 113; EP 382 Moore, Virginia To spring; P 491 Moravia, Charles Thanks for Mrs. Weed's articles; C. ... 517 More. Paul Elmer Denounces New York's intelligentsia; EP 719 Morrison, Hyman Jewish pioneers in Palestine; C 45 Morrow, Dwight Whitney Prohibition views; EP 611 Morrow, Irving F. Mooney and California; C 653 Morton, David Two swans I watched at twilight; P.... 357 Mosbaek, L. More men teachers favored; C 15 Moscowitz, Grover M. Censured by House of Representatives; EP 478 Moses, Robert On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Mosher, W. E. New York public utilities, legislation on; C 626 Mosley, Sir Oswald Resignation from British cabinet; E 641 M»ving pictures Aesthetics; E 352 Antique or golden oak; E 562 Color in films. A. Bakshy; D 337 Commandments, according to Hays; E.. 441 News reel. See News reel theater Screen musical comedy. A. Bakshy; D.. 158 Talkies, future of; E 61 Vulgarization; E 562 Mullendore, W. C. Boulder dam, public and private interest at; R. Finney replies; (' 179 Mundelein, Archbishop. Automobile. S. Danziger; C, 151; see also C 71 Murders Substitute for lynchings; H. B. Davis; S 12 Murray, Robert Hammond Fletcher, Henry P., work in Mexico de- fended; C 364 Muscle shoals Conspiracy against public operation; P. Y. Anderson; S 538 Inquiry, further, needed. P. Y. Ander- son; S 485 More delay ; EP 503 Norris, G. W., praised by California edi- tor; C 245 Scandal unearthed. P. Y. Anderson; S. 293 Senate passes bill for government cor- poration ; EP 437 Museum of modern art On The Nation's honor roll for 1929.... 35 Mussey, Henry Raymond Christian science censor. I. Machinery of suppression; S 147 II. "Obnoxious books"; S 175 III. Freedom of the press; S 241 IV. Siege of Fort Scribner; S 291 Gandhi, the non-resistant; IS 608 Tariff vote market; S 318 Mussolini, Benito Speeches, belligerent; EP 637 Speeches disturb Italo-French relations; EP 689 N Nansen, Fridtjof Death; E 616 Narcotics. See Drugs Nation, The Albany club meeting. H. P. Winchester; C 271 Back-cover hyperbole. J. Chernik; C... 327 Baltimore luncheon group. Mrs. W. J. Brown ; C 364 Criticized. A. R. Bruen; C 326 Farmer subscribes. P. T. Anderson; C. 218 Goddard libel suit withdrawn voluntarily; EP 719 Honor roll for 1929 35 Honor roll for 1929; E. Smith nominated. F. A. Blossom; C 218 Honor roll protests; C 124 Krutch, J. W., goes to France for a year; H. Broun to be dramatic critic; EP... 667 Mr. Layman complains that it is esoteric. C. F. Roth; C 99 Not on sale in Harrisburg, Pa.; called not "strictly American." H. R. Mar- tin; C 270 Philadelphia club proposed. L. Stern; C 675 Replies to charge that it is "destructive and never constructive"; E 168 San Francisco club dinner. S. Green- burg; C 152 Subscription discontinued. D. A. Rich- ardson; C 218 Tariff poll 592, 618, 648 National child labor committee Celebrates twenty-fifth anniversary; EP.. 3 National city bank Fiasco in proposed merger with Corn ex- change bank trust company. C. W.; S, 11; letter 98 National commission on law observance and enforcement Prohibition report criticized by H. L. McBain; EP Ill Report, preliminary; E 89 National gallery heroes. N. Klein; C 326 Naturalism, new. I. Edman; S 447 Naturalization. See Citizenship Naval reduction (London conference and treaty) Admirals' opposition to treatv: FP 638 American delegation returns; EP 531 Billions to "reduce"; E 589 Borah receives state department messages; EP 666 Chances for reduction excellent; EP.... 165 Conference a failure; EP 347 Conference makes progress; EP 205 Crisis; E 261 Crumbs only ; E 506 Difficulties; E 33 Documents withheld by Stimson; EP. . . . 717 Dollars and ships at London 122 Failure; EP 381 Figures for American navy according to treaty; EP 477 France wins at London. R. Dell; S.... 542 Government by abstention; E 640 Grave news from London; E 233 Hoover's failure to advise delegates; EP 585 Hopes for conference; E 114 Hucksters' treaty; E 615 Issues at conference; E 88 Italians launch ships and approve plans for additional vessels; EP 558 Japan and the naval pact. K. K. Kawa- fcami ; S 727 Japanese claim to cruiser r.ntio: EP 1 Naval politics at London. N. Angell; S. 146 Parity the enemy at London; E. 314; letter 395 Parity or reduction? N. Angell; S. .... 266 Protest against proposed abandonment of reduction program at London; EP... 2S3 Roping America; E 412 Security and ''sanctions"; IP 229 Slow progress at London; EP 139 Stimson denounces admirals for opposing treaty; EP 717 Treaty, joker in. D. W. Wainhouse; IS 634 Navies Expensive. H. Fordham; C 395 Navy, British. See Great Britain; Naval re- duction Nebraska Campaign expenditures. P. Y. Anderson; ^ ... S j.' 538 Neckties ; Dt 490 Negroes Actors and singers; Dt 599 Assaults oh white women. Baltimore; EP 86 Louisiana white man convicted of murder of Negro girl; EP 479 Lynching. See Lynching Parker, J. J., attitude toward Negroes O. G. Villard; S 512 Parker, J. J., rejection for United States supreme court. H. Broun; S 591 Race prejudice north and south. L. J. McGinty; C 71 "Racial integrity" still invoked in Rich- mond, Virginia; EP 112 South Africa's "white problem"; 1 136 Square deal by Oklahoma mayor; EP.. 559 Neighborhood playhouse Program, with Cleveland symphony. H. Hutchinson; M 374 Returns; E 236 New Freeman, the First issue appears; EP 349 New Orleans ; Dt 422 New Orleans cookery ; Dt 546 New York city Housing plans; EP 691 Intelligentsia denounced by P. E. More; EP 719 New York philharmonic symphony orchestra invades Europe; EP 533 New York police Display restraint at funeral of Communist worker; EP 206 New York state Water power; E 61 New York World. See World New Yorker, the On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 News reel theater Criticism. A. Bakshy; D 54 On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Newspapers Correspondents, special. R. L. Buell; C. 625 Newspaper work. H. Broun; S 670 Press today. I. The Associated press. O. G. Villard; S 443; letters, 625, 734 II. The Associated press. O. G. Villard; S 486; letters, 600, 625, 734; see also 541 III. The United press. O. G. Villard; S 539 IV. Chain daily. O. G. Villard; S 595 V. Standardizing the daily. O. G. Vil- lard; S 646 VI. Philadelphia cabbage patch. O. G. Villard; S 671 VII. What's wrong with the World? O. G. Villard; S 724 Sensationalism. H. Broun; S 117 Washington correspondents. P. Y. An- derson ; S 66 See also American society of newspaper editors Nimmons, Carr, and Wright On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Nitti, Francesco Fascist finance ; IS 1 62 Noise Referendum ; Dt 44 Norris, George W. Big-business brains; open letter to Sen- ator Norris. J. G. Curtis; S 673 Praised by California editor. D. M. Chase; C 245 North Carolina Senator Simmons defeated in primaries; EP 691 North German Lloyd Agreement with Hamburg-American; EP 383 Northern Pacific railroad Merger with (ireat Northern; EP 257 Norton, William W. Prohibition in Littletown; S 510 Not so dumb. A. Bakshy ; D 280 Novelty. H. Broun; S 617 Oakland, California Power control breaks down. J. C. West; C 423 Obscenity Cleland, J., bought off by British govern- ment; E 414 See also Censorship, book Ocean voyages by sail; Dt 217 Offin, Charles Z. Etchings, genuine and false; C 326 Ohio state penitentiary Fire; EP, 503; EP 532 Two convicts killed by machine-gun fire; EP 586 Oil. See Petroleum Old age pensions New York bills; EP 258 Old and new. A. Bakshy; D 577 Open door, the. H. H.; D 226 Opera in English. II. Hutchinson; M 201 Oregon Joseph, G. W., gubernatorial campaign; EP 666 Ortiz Rubio, Pascual Shooting; EP 206 See also Mexico Othello, played by Negro: Dt 599 Out of a blue sky. H. H. ; D 254 Ownership, public. See Public ownership Packard, Mandel Birth control and Roman catholic church; C 71; letter of comment; C 151

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Nos. 3365-3390] Ind ex [Vol. cxxx Palestine . And the Jews; letters on 77ie Nations views ; C 45 Arab-Jewish riots; Arabs blamed by Brit- ish commission; EP 411 Arab-Jewish riots; British investigation comes to end ; E 31 Immigration suspended by British govern- ment; EP 639 Magnes, J. L., and Zionism; IS 54 Shaw commission report; E 441 Zionism finds itself. W. Zukerman; S 644; letter 703 Paraguayan-Bolivian dispute Breaks out again; EP 141 Paramount on parade. A. Bakshy; D 577 Parker, Caroline Detroit reds, treatment on March 6; C. 518 Parker, John Johnston Appointment one of worst in generation. P. Y. Anderson; S 419 Appointment to United States supreme court; EP 381 Attack and defense; EP 531 Attitude toward Negroes. O. G. Villard; S 512 Decision in Negro case defended. A. E. Cohen; C 547 Fight against, in senate; EP 557 Opposition; EP 477 Opposition grows ; EP 409 Rejection by senate. P. Y. Anderson; S 598 Rejection due largely to W. White. H. Broun; S 591 Parole boards Recommended for New York state; EP.. 232 Passive resistance, apostles of; E 722 Peace Article XII of covenant of League of nations, amendment proposed; EP.... 283 Einstein, A., views on disarmament; E. . 144 Penal law 2010. J. \V. Krutch; D 556 Pennsylvania Pinchot enters gubernatorial ring; EP.. 312 Politics. P. Y. Anderson; S 485 Primary campaign; EP 504 Primary campaign. R. J. Beamish; S.. 564 Primary campaign methods and expendi- tures. P. Y. Anderson; S 538 Primary campaign results; EP 639; P. Y. Anderson; S 651 Republican politics; EP 410 Pensions, old age. See Old age pensions Permanent court of international justice. See League of nations Peters, Harry T. On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Petroleum Cutthroat competition; E 261 Dohenv, E. L., acquitted of charge of bribing A. B. Fall; EP 382 Mergers; EP 257; EP 409 Philadelphia Newspapers. O. G. Villard; S 671 Philippine islands Independence; EP 165 White woman's attitude toward Filipino. J. L. Henry; C 15 See also Filipinos Pinchot, Gifford Enters Pennsylvania gubernatorial ring; EP 312 Pittsburgh, University of Illiberality; E 32 Pius XI Views on coeducation. H. Broun; S.... 91 Planet, new Discovery; E 386 Name for. E. W. Hawley; C 625 Plutocrat, the. J. W. Krutch ; D 306 Poems Admonition. L. N. Jennings 17 Ambience of love, the. I. Schneider.... 706 Cocoon. R. Lechlitner 219 De libris. R. L. Lowe 572 Dialogue. I. Edman 298 Dialogue in Kansas — 1850. T. H. Ferril 677 Dulcinea and Dorothea. A. Kreymborg. 702 Fulfilment. C. R. Marsh 153 Ghosts. W. Bynner 240 Interior. S. J. Kunitz 452 Invocation to the phoenix. S. J. Kunitz 601 Kneeling nun, the. E. L. Walton 627 Love songs after the Aztec. J. T. Ship- ley 126 Marigold. R. Hunt 397 Mid-voyage. I. Schneider 246 Migrant. L. N. Jennings 548 Mountain background. G. W. Dresbach. 365 Not yet a word. E. Seaver 328 Of changing seasons. E. L. Walton.... 519 Park in the gathering dusk. E. L. Walton 272 Parting. S. J. Kunitz 100 Portent. H. S. White 654 Sanctuary. B. Deutsch 187 Sexton's spade, the. G. P. Smith 48 Skull of ecstasy. S. J. Kunitz 735 Tabula rasa. L. N. Jennings 424 These humble people. E. L. Walton.... 72 To one under a mountain cloud. W. Bynner 187 To spring. V. Moore 491 Two swans I watched at twilight. D. Morton 357 Wintry mind, the. W. Bynner 294 Poet laureate, English; E 536 Masefield, J., appointed; EP 587 Poland Conditions; appointment of J. N. Willys as American ambassador; EP 285 Politeness; Dt 652 Political leadership, genuine, needed in America. O. G. Villard; S 354, 416 Political prisoners Freeing, as in Italy, suggested; EP 59 Politics Economics rules in Washington; E 142 Ponsonby, Lord Balfour, A. J.; S, 391; letter 653 Poronography. See Censorship, book; Ob- scenity Porto Rico Conditions; E 287 Post office, United States Leasing scandal. P. Y. Anderson; S... 485 Power and power industry Control breaks down. L. Todd; S 289 Control breaks down in Oakland, Califor- nia. J. C. West; C 423 Control, public; E 168 Couzens introduces regulation bill. P. Y. Anderson; S 358 Flathead lease; EP 477 Flathead license granted to Rocky moun- tain power company; EP 638 Montana power company's threatened grab; EP 166 New York state; E 61 New York state development policy; EP. 112 Trust and the Indians; E 440 See also Boulder dam; Federal power commission Power commission. See Federal power com- mission Pradel, Seymour Thanks for Mrs. Weed's articles; C 517 Prayer, efficacy of; EP 667 Prendergast, William A. Resigns as chairman of New York public service commission; EP 206 Present, apology for. H. Hazlitt; S 397 Presidents, United States Autographs, market value; EP 141 Press. See Newspapers Printing trade controversy. H. Broun; S... 537 Prisons and prisoners American and British; EP 232 Last, worst month. L. J. Salter; C 733 Santanella, J., attempt to escape; EP.... 613 See also names of prisons Professors Salaries; E 170 Prohibition And politics; P. Y. Anderson; S 119 Attacks on prohibition before house judi- ciary committee; EP 284 Boston protest against shooting of rum- runners ; EP 57 Curran, H. H.. views on eighteenth amendment; EP 504 Enforcement personnel, new, needed; EP 29 Flare up; E 668 Hoover, President, attitude not known; EP 257 Hoover's description of experiment. A. Lattimore ; C 363 In Littletown. W. W. Norton; S 510 Liquor at private dinner parties; S 317 Lobbying. P. Y. Anderson; S 651 Morrow. D. W., views of; EP 611 Under fire; EP 231 Proofreaders Almost extinct: tribute to G. Schumm; Dt 124 Lynch. J. M., explains present condi- tions; Dt 325 Propaganda. See Public utilities Prosperity And the land. G. White; C 99 Believe it or not. VII — Balancing the books. S. Chase; S 39 Figures show decline; EP 558 Hard times in Maine. O. A. Robinson; C 326 Protection. See Tariff — United States Public ownership Carlisle. F. L. views. Reporter; C 653 Public utilities New York state regulation: EP, 532, 559; letter 626 Ownership, public and private. W. Raoul; C 327 Propaganda activities not admitted to record; EP 112 Regulation in critical state; EP 206 Pulitzer awards; EP 613 Putnam, Georee Haven Death; EP 285 Puttin' on the ritz. A. Bakshy; D 280 Q Quaker memorial. L. H. Wall; C 732 Qualia, C. B.. and W. A. Whatley Spanish drama ; C 15 R Race problem. See Negroes Racketeering Information sought. P. Blanshard; C... 571 Radio For inmates of Illinois state penitentiary; EP 667 Merger on merger; E 507 See also Radio trust Radio corporation of America Activities ; S 120 Merger; E 507 Monopoly hinders police work in Detroit and Chicago. P. Y. Anderson; S 174 Story of establishment told to Senate committee. P. Y. Anderson; S 9 Radio trust Monopoly. J. A. Livingstone; C 71 Prosecution strikes snag. P. Y. Ander- son; S 538 Railroad rates Discriminatory rates defeated by supreme court decision; EP 690 Railroads Consolidation; EP 257 Consolidation. J. G. Lyne; S 94 Consolidation plan of Interstate commerce commission; E 4 Consolidation; why consolidate? D. R. Richberg; S 37 Earnings, decline in; EP 666 Stations; Dt 98 Raoul, William Public utilities, ownership; C 327 Rayon. See Tariff Reading. See Books Rebound. D. V. D. ; D 254 Recapture. D. V. D. ; D 228 Red rust. J. W. Krutch; D 160 Religious men in politics; EP 586 Remarque, Erich Maria All quiet on the western front again. W. E. Henze; C 16 Reparations. See War debts and reparations Reporter Carlisle, F. L. on government owner- ship; C 653 Republican party Chastisement in coming election foreseen; E 480 West, J. L.( becomes press agent of national committee; S 239 Research council on social trends. See Social welfare Resnick, Louis Safety; I. How safe is the subway? S.. 566 II. Saving and wasting lives; S 593 III. Why safety movement fails; S 622 Revolutionary tactics. H. Black; C 570 Rice, Elmer On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Richardson, D. A. Discontinues subscription; C 218 Richberg, Donald R. Why consolidate railroads? S 67 Richmond, S. L. Jewish enterprise in Palestine; C 46 Richmond, Virginia Segregation of races; EP 112 Rickatson-Hatt, Bernard On O. G. Villard's article on Associated press ; C 600 Ripples. H. Hazlitt; D 278 Rivals, the. J. W. Krutch; D 403 Roberts, Owen J. Nomination for United States supreme court; EP..585; P. Y. Anderson; S.. 599 Nomination is confirmed. P. Y. Ander- son; S 651 Robey, Ralph West Being right with Babson; S 359 Robinson, Otis A. Hard times in Maine; C 326 Rocky mountain power company. See Power and power industry Rogers, Bruce Broun, H., views on dearth of "forceful" communist writers; C 733 Rogue song, the. A. Bakshy; D 226 Roman catholic church And birth control. M. Packard; C, 71: letter of comment 151 Romeo and Juliet. J. W. Krutch; D 578 Room 349. J. W. Krutch; D 556 Rorty, James Inventor enters heaven, the; S 295; letter 396 Roth. Carl F. Mr. Layman complains; C 99 Roumania. See Rumania Roy, Eugene. See Haiti Rubio, Ortiz. President of Mexico. See Ortiz Rubio, P. Rumania Carol returns; EP 689 Russia Agrarian policy slows down; EP 347 Appeal to soviet government by United States to aid C. C. Hart; EP 113 Bars P. Scheffer; EP 3 Collectivization and nationalization of farms slowed down; EP 285

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Vol. cxxx] Index [Jan.-June, 1930 Collectivization of agriculture. L. Fischer; S 513 Conscientious objectors, appeal for. R. Baldwin; C 547 Five-year plan; E 561 Godiessness and humbuggery ; E 260 Goes communist; EP 87 Prayer, day of, comes and goes; EP. . . . 347 Prison described. H. Jarre; C 218 Religion in. L. Fischer; S. . 417 Religious policy; protests against protests; EP 313 Revolution, new. L. Fischer; S 322 Soviets, non-existent; E 34 Trip to. H. R. Seager; C 518 Turkestan-Siberia railroad completed; EP 533 Vatican and the Kremlin, the; L. Fischer; IS 82 Russian-Chinese controversy. See Sino-Rus- sian controversy Ryall, William Boliiho Death; EP 691 Sabbatino, Sylvester Denounces communism in sitting in judg- ment on youthful communist, D. Weiss; EP 58; C 71 Sacco-Vanzetti Mystery, prize offered by Liberty for so- lution; E 351 Sacre du printemps, le. H. Hutchinson; M.. 605 Sailing voyages; Dt 217 Safety I. How safe is the subway? L. Resnick; S 566 II. Saving and wasting lives. L. Res- nick; S 593 III. Why safety movement fails. L. Res- nick; S 622 Saint Augustine, Florida; Dt 244 Saint Clair, Ruth Sentenced to life imprisonment after fourth conviction for shoplifting; EP 206; EP 25S Sally. A. Bakshy; D 158 Salter, L. J. Last month in prison; C 733 Sanford, Edward Terry Death; EP 311 Santaneila, John Attempt to escape from prison; EP. 613; letter 733 Sarah and son. A. Bakshy ; D 404 Savings bank life insurance. E. S. Smith; S 149 Sayre, J. Nevin On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Schacter, Harry W. Chain store, war on ; S 544 Scheffer, Paul Barred from Russia; EP 3 Schneider, Isidor Ambience of love, the; P 706 Mid-voyage ; P 246 Schola cantorum, concert. H. Hutchinson; M 553 Schools Bankruptcy, financial and educational; Dt 270 Schumann-Heink, Ernestine Still singing at sixty-nine; EP 719 Schumm, George Tribute to; Dt 124 See also Proofreaders Science and war; Dt 70 Scott, Evelyn On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Scott-Moncrieff, C. K. Death; EP 349 Scribner, Charles Death; EP 505 Scribner's, Charles, Sons Siege of Fort Scribner, the; Christian science censorship. H. R. Mussey; S. 291 Scripps-Howard newspapers On The Nation's honor roll for 1929.... 35 Scudder, Vida D. Christian social ethics, school of; C 571 Seager, Henry R. Russia, trip to; C 518 Seaver, Edwin Not yet a word; P 328 Security and "sanctions"; IP 229 Senate, United States Committee assignments: S 120 Expenditures of candidates; EP 586 On The Nation's honor roll for 1929.... 35 Sbapley, Harlow On The Nation's honor roll for 1929.... 35 Shearer, William B. Clean bill of health for; EP 718 Lecture in New York a failure; EP.... 57 Shefferman, M. S. Police brutality; C 363 Sherman, Texas, lynching; EP 586 Shipley, Joseph T. Love songs after the Aztec; P 126 Shipping. See Merchant marine Shipstead bill. See Injunctions Silent enemy, the. A. Bakshy; D 632 Simmons, Furnifold McLendel. See North Carolina Simple Simon; H. H.; D 306 Simon report. See India Smith, A. L. Boulder dam ; C 245 Smith, Edwin S. "Cash and carry" life insurance; S.... 149 Smith, Elmer Nominated for The Nation's honor roll for 1929; C 218 Smith, Granville Paul Sexton's spade, the; P 48 Smoot, Reed Book censorship; E 383 Smuts, Jan Christiaan Visit to United States; EP 57 Snake stories; Dt 362 Snowden, Philip Speech on national war expenditures; EP 231 Social welfare Hoover appoints research council on social trends; EP 1 Society of Friends. See Quaker memorial Son of the gods. A. Bakshy; D 226 Song of the flame. A. Bakshy; D 632 Song of the west. A. Bakshy; D 337 Song o' my heart. A. Bakshy; D 465 South, the Chivalry. M. P. G. Jamison; C 326 South Africa •'White" problem; 1 136 Soviets. See Russia Spain Cork, and description of country; Dt.... 703 Dictatorship ; E 169 Drama. C. B. Qualia and W. A. Whatley; C 15 Ferment in; IP 529 Spanish war veterans Pension bill passed over president's veto; EP 665 Speier, Herman Case against Dr. Magnes; C 45 Sports, American, and American life. J. R. Tunis; S 729 Spring time. A. Bakshy; D 106 Stanley, Louis Miners' rebellion; S 356 Star spangled banner Battle hymn of the republic suggested as national anthem. A. C. Jourdan; C. 297 National anthem; E 209 Steamships Europa wins blue ribbon of Atlantic; E.. 413 Stein, Clarence S On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Stendhal Quotation from, on last worst month in prison. L. J. Salter; C 733 Stern, Leon Proposes Philadelphia Nation club; C... 675 Stocks Being right with Babson. R. W. Robey; S 359 Federal reserve board and stock market" EP 382 Stone, Shepard Arthur Einstein, Albert; C 297 Strike up the band. H. H. ; D 226 Strikes — Textile mills, southern American civil liberties union aid to southern textile workers; EP 30 American federation of labor was at Marion, North Carolina; EP 166 Case of textile workers against North Carolina; EP 2 Marion, aid needed; EP 207 Wiggins, E. M., five to be tried for her death; EP 140 Wiggins, E. M.J men accused of killing her acquitted; EP 312 Student Protest against treatment of communists; C 395 Sturges, Preston On The Nation's honor roll for 1929.... 35 Subway safety. L. Resnick; S 566 Sugar Machine for cutting and stripping cane tested; EP 349 See also Tariff Sun Yat-sen, Madam, keeps faith. R. Gould; IS 109 Supernatural, belief in. H. Broun; S 643 Supreme court, United States Decisions, basis of; E 534 Letter to "My dear senator," on ap- pointment of J. J. Parker. 0. G. Villard; S 512 Vacancy ; EP 311 See also Parker, J. J., Roberts, O. J. Symposium Not taken over by Hound and Horn; EP 141 Taft. William Howard Death; E 316 Talkies. See Moving pictures Tampa, Florida ; Dt 394 Tariff. Canadian Speed records for tariff -making broken; „ EP . . . 557 Tanlr. International action Truce sought at Geneva; EP 258 T.iriff. Great Britain. See Great Britain Tariff, United States Bayard, T. F^ on protection. C. O'C. Hennessy ; C 625 Bill hangs in balance; EP 665 Bill rushed through. P. Y. Anderson; S 651 Buncoing the farmer ; E 115 Creator of ill will; EP 409 Debate goes on; EP 205 Debenture, eliminated by house of rep- resentatives; EP 557 Dill, Senator, action; EP 637 Economic folly of new tariff; EP 503 Economists ask for veto; EP 557 Foreign countries' resentment; E 589 Grundy's work. P. Y. Anderson; S.... 419 Hides, and boots and shoes; EP 139 Hoover signs bill ; E 720 Hoover, test for; EP 611 Hoover to get tariff he wanted. P. Y. Anderson; S 358 Letters to "My dear senator." O. G. Villard; S 354; 619 Letter by E. D. Abbott 517 Log rolling passed bill; EP 717 "My dear senator"; on a certain be- trayal in Washington. O. G. Villard; S 354; letter 517 Nation's poll 592, 618, 648 Pennsylvania in doubt; EP 690 Protests against bill ; EP 665 Rayon duty increased. P. Y. Anderson; S 174 Senate completes its revision; EP 381 Sugar; on a certain betrayal in Wash- ington. O. G. Villard; S 354; letter 517 Sugar; raising cane in Washington. A. Warner; S 41 Unpopularity; E 641 Veto the tariff! J. B. Clark; C 675 Vote market; S 318 Tavern, the. J. W. Krutch; D 659 Tea; in America; Dt. 44 Teachers Men, favored. L. Mosbaek; C 15 Television; EP 479 Tennessee yields to Maiden. H. Mathes; C. . 16 Textbooks "Modern history," by Hayes and Moon. barred in New York city; EP 559 Textile mills. See Strikes Thacher, Thomas D. Appointment as solicitor general of the United States; EP 257 Theater, the Chinese; EP 233 Holiday fare. J. W. Krutch; D 22 New American drama, the. J. W. Krutch; D 678 Retrospect. J. W. Krutch; D 202 Review of season. J. W. Krutch; S. . . . 659 Spanish drama. C. B. Qualia and W. A. Whatley; C 15 This man's town. J. W. Krutch; D 403 Thomas, Norman On The Notion's honor roll for 1929.... 35 Three little girls. A. S. B. ; D 525 Tires, automobile Cutthroat competition; E 261 Tirpitz, Admiral von Death; EP 313 Todd, Laurence Power control breaks down; S 289 Tolstoy, Leo Letter, The porcelain Sophia Andreyevna 649 Topaze. H. Hazlitt; D 278 Treaties League of nations and treaty revision. W. B. Curry; C 151 Trusts. See Mergers Tuell, Anne Kimball How digging began; S 361 Tunis, John R. American sports and American life; S.. 729 Turkestan-Siberia railroad completed; EP... 533 Turksib. A. Bakshy ; D 688 Tuska. Benjamin Libel, posthumous; C 734 Tyler, Marian D. H. Lawrence; C 570 U Uncle Vanya. J. W. Krutch; D 554 Under a Texas moon. A. Bakshy; D 524 Unemployment British. J. A. Hobson ; S 96 British; ultimatum to MacDonald gov- ernment; EP 411 Constructive program needed: E 235 Demonstrations, March 6; EP 410 Figures, discrepancy; EP 139 Government employment agency needed. H. Broun; S 442 Hoover happiness boys: E 692 Measures proposed; EP 437 Situation still acute: EP 504 Stones for bread ; EP 315 Time to act ; E 385 Wagner bills held up. P. Y. Anderson; S 485 Unions, labor. See Labor unions

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Nos. 3365-3390] Index [Vol. cxxx United mine workers Decline shown by Illinois dispute; EP.. 167 United press, the. O. G. Villard; S 539 United States American financial competency; varying views of C. Coolidge and S. S. Huebner; EP 87 American sports and American life. J. R. Tunis; S 729 Economics rules in Washington; E 142 Government by abstention; E. . 640 Government in business. Major general T. Q. Ashburn; EP, 691 ; S 699 Headless Washington. O. G. Villard; S 264 Imperialism ; E 90 United States military academy Enlargement, proposed; EP...232; letter 245 United States of Europe. See Europe United States power commission. See Fed- eral power commission United States supreme court. See Parker, J. J.; Roberts, O. J.; Supreme court, I'nited States Vacancy; EP 311 Urbana (Illinois) Daily Courier Views on Latin America and the United States; E 90 Utilities, public. See Public utilities V., O. G. City haul; D 254 Last mile, the ; D 278 Vagabond king, the. A. Bakshy; D 337 Vatican and the Kremlin, the. L. Fischer; IS 82 Veterans Preference law declared invalid in Min- nesota; EP 478 Vikings, the. J. W. Krutch ; D 633 Villard, Oswald Garrison Greets editor of Korean paper; conse- quences of greeting; C 652 Headless Washington; S 264 Mergers; letter to "My dear senator"; S 416 "My dear senator," letters to. I; S, 354. letter, 517; II; S, 416; III; S, 512; IV; S : • 619 Political leadership, genuine, needed in America; S 354, 416 Press today. I. The Associated press; S 443 ; letter 734 II. The Associated press; S....486; letters, 600, 625, 734 (see also 541) III. The United press; S 539 IV. Chain daily; S 595 V. Standardizing the daily; S 646 VI. Philadelphia cabbage patch; S.... 671 VII. What's wrong with the World; S 724 Supreme court; Parker appointment; let- ter to "My dear senator"; S 512 Tariff; letter to "My dear senator"; S.. 619 Virginia Woman's university, not near Charlottes- ville. M. P. G. Jamison; C 326 Virginian, the. A. Bakshv; D 106 Virtue, definition of; Dt 297 Vollbehr collection offered to Library of con- gress; E 590 W w., c National city bank fiasco; S .... 1 1 ; letter 98 Wagner, Cosima Death; EP 439 Wagner, Robert Ferdinand Record commended; EP 612 Wainhouse, David W. London naval treaty, joker in; IS 634 Wake up and dream. J. W. Krutch; D 106 Wales act. See Censorship, plays Wall, Louise Herrick Quaker memorial ; C 732 Wall street. See Stocks Walton, Eda Lou Kneeling nun, the ; P 627 Of changing seasons; P 519 Park in the gathering dusk; P 272 These humble people; P 72 War Non-combatants and war. W. Isaacs; C 16 Science and war; Dt 70 Young men's view; EP 141 War debts and reparations Bank for international settlements as described by J. E. Reynolds; EP 284 Bank for international settlements pro- vided for; E 143 Details prove troublesome at The Hague; EP 86 International loan floated under Young plan; E 721 Referendum, German. S. M. Bouton; C 327 Young plan agreed upon at The Hague; EP Ill Young plan goes into effect by German vote; EP 349 War expenditures, national; EP 231 Warburg, Paul M. Book on federal reserve system; E 535 Warner, Arthur Raising cane in Washington; S 41 Washington, D. C. Correspondents. See Newspapers JScanuai and impending scandal. P. Y. Anderson; S 358 Washington (state) Sugar beets and lumber. E. D.Abbott; C 517 Watch and ward society, Boston. See Censor- ship, book Water power. See Power and power in- dustry Waterloo bridge. J. W. Krutch; D 106 Weed, Helena Hill Haiti, fresh hope for; IS 342 Haiti, victory in; IS 378 Thanks from Haiti for articles. E. G. Chauvet, C. Moravia, S. Pradel; C... 517 Weiss, David, ^ee Communism Wells, Herbert George Wellsiana sought. G. West; C 626 Welpley, Margaret Harding, v\ . G., letters, destroyed; C... 244 West, Geoffrey vVeilsiana sought; C 626 West, J. C. Power control breaks down in Oakland, California ; C 423 West, James L. Becomes press agent of Republican na- tional committee. P. Y. Anderson; S. 239 West, James M. Boy scouts and peace ; C 364 West Point. See United States military academy Whalen, Grover A. Needed by Wanamaker's, not by New York; EP 382 Resigns as New York police commis- sioner; EP 638 Whalenism; E 350 Whatley, W. A., and C. B. Qualia Spanish drama ; C 15 Wheat Dollar wheat, lesson of; E 286 Uncle Sam, plunger; E 351 While, Ueorge Henry George, work; C 363 Prosperity and the land; C 99 White, Hal Saunders Portent; P 654 White, Walter Largely responsible for rejection of J. J. Parker for United States supreme court. H. Broun; S 591 Whitlock, Brand On The Nation's honor roll for 1929.... 35 Wight, Alexander E. Criticizes inclusion of Dr. Crile in The Nation's honor roll for 1929; C .. 124 Wiggins, Ella May. See Strikes — Textile mills, southern Wigmore, John H. Not fitted for place on bench of World court ; EP 504 Wilbur, Ray Lyman And Boulder dam. R. Finney; S 214 Companionship with power men. P. Y. Anderson ; S 419 Williams, Edgar Degrees and wealth; C 151 Williams, Howard A. Speaking tour, western, for League for independent political action; C 396 Williams, L. F. Rushbrook Interview with, and mission to British embassy; EP 612; letter by 705 Williamson, E. English subscriber speaks on India and Egypt; C 734 Willys, John N. Appointed ambassador to Poland; EP... 285 Wilmer, William H On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Wilson, Lyle C. Mexico installs a president; S 216 Wilson. Walter Atlanta's communists ; S 730 Winchester, Harold P. Nation club of Albany meeting; C 271 Wisconsin Progressive movement; P. La Follette out for governor; EP 411 Woltman, Frederick E. Expulsion from Pittsburgh university; E. 32 Women Workers; women and wages. A. Lutz; C 297 Women have their way, the. H. H.; D 226 Woodberry, George Edward Appreciation. H. Kellock; S 120 Death; EP 59 Woodbridge, Homer T. On The Nation's honor rolll for 1929.. 35 World (New York) Management. H. Broun; S 237 What's wrong with the World? O. G. Villard; S 724 World court. See League of nations Yachting America's Cup races; E 693 Yachts, gargantuan; E 316 Youm;, Owen D. On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Young plan. See War debts and reparations Yugoslavia. See Jugoslavia Zeitlin, Jacob On The Nation's honor roll for 1929 35 Zionism. See Palestine Zukerman, William Zionism finds itself; S 644; letter 703 BOOK REVIEWS Books are indexed under author and in some cases under subject. and title, The following explanatory letters in the index: are used B Book review AN Brief annotation R Reviewer A Abraham Lincoln, his path to the presidency. A. Shaw; B 604 Adams, Leonie High falcon and other poems; B 249 Adamson, Margot Robert Treasury of middle English verse, a; AN 739 Adventurous America: A study of contem- porary life and thought. E. Mims; AN 336 Africa and some world problems. J. C. Smuts; B 522 Age for love, the; E. Pascal; AN 605 Agin' the governments: Memories and adven- tures of Sir Francis Fletcher Vane; B 197 Alexander Pope. E. Sitwell ; B 573 Alexander Pope as critic and humanist. A. Warren; AN 334 All our yesterdays. H. M. Tomlinson; B.. 186 Alsberg, Henry G. ; R 196 Ambrose Bierce: A biography. C. McWil- liams; B 223 America and England? N. Roosevelt; B... 154 America conquers Britain. A record of eco- nomic war. L. Denny; B 299 American Jezebel, an. H. Augur; AN 552 American stage, the. O. S. Coad and E. Mims, Jr.; AN 22 Amiel, Henri Frederic Philine. V. W. Brooks, translator; B.. 782 " & Co." J. R. Bloch. Translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff; B 368 Anderson, John Box-office; B 49 Anderson, Margaret My thirty years' war; B 707 Andrews, C. F.; R 398; letter, 675 Anonymous In spite of all rejoicing; B 738 Annals of American sport. J. A. Krout; AN 22 Anthology of invective and abuse, an. Com- piled by H. Kingsmill; B 549 Anthony, Katherine Queen Elizabeth; B 19 Apes, the. E. Phillpotts; AN 276 Apperson, G. L. English proverbs and proverbial phrases; AN 51 Apples be ripe. L. Powys; B 707 Armstrong, Martin Fiery dive, the, and other stories; AN.. 686 Sleeping fury, the; AN 104 Art of reading, the. A. R. Orage; B 684 Asbury, Herbert; R 127 Asch, Nathan Pay day; AN 304 Assorted articles. D. H. Lawrence; B 519 Atherton, Gertrude Dido: Queen of hearts; AN 51 Audacious Audubon. E. A. Muschamp; AN. 304 Audubon, John James; Audacious Audubon. E. A. Muschamp; AN 304 Augur, Helen American Jezebel, an; AN 552 Auslander, Joseph Hell in harness; B 49 Letters to women; B 49 Austin, Mary; R 370 Australia felix. H. H. Richardson; B 153 B Bacon, Leonard Lost buffalo; B 491 Bacon, Sir Francis: The first modern mind. B. Steel; B 222 Balzac: The man and the lover. F. Gribble; B 493 Barres, Maurice Sacred hill, the. M. Cowley, translator; B 5C

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Vol. cxxx] Index [Jan.-June, 1930 Barrett, E. Boyd; R 737 Baudelaire. L. P. Shanks; AN 712 Beethoven, L. van; Eroica: A novel based on his life. S. Chotzinoff ; B S7S Belloc, Hilaire Missing masterpiece, the; AN 334 Benstead, C. R. Retreat: A novel of 1918; B 329 Bent, Silas Machine made man; AN 576 Beresford, J. D. Love's illusion ; AN 402 Best poems of 1929. Edited by T. Moult; AN 336 Between the lines. H. M. Tomlinson; B.... 601 Bibliography of John Dewey, a. M. H. Thomas and H. W. Schneider; B 100 Bierce, Ambrose: A biography. C. McWil- liams; B 223 Big American parade, the. E. Haldeman- Julius; AX 200 Black Christ, the, and other poems. C. Cul- len; B 303 Black Venus, the. A. Salmon; AN 103 Blake and modern thought. D. Saurat; AN 105 Blaker, Richard Medal without bar; AN 738 Bloch, Jean-Richard " & Co."; B 368 Block, Herman, and H. Lyon Edward Coke; AN 402 Bolitho, William Twelve against the gods; AN 225 Book of Arthur Gleason. My People. By A. Gleason. "A. G." an appreciation. By H. H. Gleason; B 73 Boswell, James, and Dr. Johnson. H. Sal- peter ; B 400 Bottom dogs. E. Dahlberg; B 496 Bottome, Phyllis Windlestraws; AN 199 Bourru, soldier of France. J. des V. Rouges. Translated by E. H. Wright; AN 688 Bowen, Stirling Wishbone; AN 686 Bowers, Claude G.; R 129, 248 Box-office. J. Anderson; B 49 Bradford, Gamaliel Daughters of Eve; B 710 Brewster, Dorothy; R 400, 710 Bridge, the. H. Crane; B 520 Bridges, Robert Testament of beauty, the; B 193 Brief account of diplomatic events in Man- churia, a. Sir H. Parlett; AN 21 Brief candles. A. Huxley; B 654 Broad, C. D. Five types of ethical theory; B 424 Brody, Alter; R 429 Brown, Harriet Connor Grandmother Brown's hundred years, 1827-1927; B 429 Brown, Ray C. B.; R 575 Bruce, Philip Alexander Virginia Plutarch, the; AN 401 Buchanan, Scott Poetry and mathematics; B 629 Buck, Mitchell S. Rose of Corinth; AN 277 Bunzel, Ruth L. Pueblo potter, the ; B 370 Burman, Ben Lucien Mississippi ; AN 51 Burnett, W. R. Iron man; AN 224 Byron. A. Maurois. Translated by H. Miles ; B 460 Bystander. M. Gorki. Translated by B. G. Guerney ; B 452 Cabell, James Branch Way of Ecben, the ; B 17 California, University of; recent publications; AN .' 51 Callaghan, Morley It's never over ; B 399 Calverton, V. F.; R 681 Calverton, V. F. Three strange lovers; AN 373 Canterbury tales. Prologue and four tales with the book of the duchess and six lyrics. G. Chaucer. Translated by F. E. Hill; AN 711 Capek, Karel Money and other stories. F. Marchant and others, translators; AN 686 Cardinal Newman. J. L. May; AN 373 Carlisle, Helen Grace Mothers cry ; AN 224 Carlyle, Thomas: Froude and Carlyle; A study of the Froude-Carlyle contro- versy. W. H. Dunn; B 366 Cathn, George E. G.; R 522, 681, 738 Catlin, G. E. G. Study of the principles of politics, a; AN 711 Caulfield, Ruby Van Allen French literature of Louisiana, the; AN. 132 Chamberlin, William Henry Soviet Russia; B 492 Chariot wheels. S. Thompson; AN 78 Charpentier, John Coleridge, the sublime somnambulist. M. V. Nugent, translator; B 426 Chaucer, Geoffrey Canterbury tales. The prologue and four tales and the book of the duchess and six lyrics. F. E. Hill, translator; AN 711 Chauvire, Roger Sword of the soul, the. E. Boyd, transla- tor; AN 199 Cher, Marie Up at the villa; AN 51 Childhood in exile. S. Levin. Translated by M. Samuel; B 18 Chivers, Thomas Holley: Friend of Poe. S. F. Damon; B 655 Choiseul. Madame de; in "Three women." H. E. Wortham; B 710 Chotzinoff, Samuel Eroica: A novel based on the life of L. van Beethoven; B 575 Christian science. Our new religion. H. A. L. Fisher; B 330 Cimarron. E. Ferber ; B 494 Circumference. Varieties of metaphysical verse, 1456-1928; B 190 City of tomorrow, the. Le Corbusier; B... 130 Class of 1902. E. Glaeser. Translated by W. and E. Muir; B 131 Claude Monet: The water lilies. G. Clemen- ceau; AN 577 Clemenceau, Georges Claude Monet: The water lilies; AN 577 Grandeur and misery of victory; B.... 494 Clemenceau. J. Martet; B 332 Closing hour. N. Hoult; AN 334 Clough, Shepard B. and H. W. Schneider Making fascists ; B 334 Coad, Oral Sumner, and E. Mims, Jr. American stage, the; AN 22 Codman, Florence; R 50, 464 Coleman, McAlister; R 368 Coleridge, the sublime somnambulist. J. Charpentier. Translated by M. V. Nu- gent; B 426 Collected poems. D. H. Lawrence; B 75 Collected poems (1914-1926). R. Graves; B.. 75 Columbus, Don Quixote of the sea. J. Was- sermann ; B 298 Company, the. E. Seaver; B 573 Concise Oxford dictionary of current English. H. W. and F. M. Fowler; AN 51 Consequences. J. E. Ford; AN 277 Contemporary attitudes. K. B. Taft, J. F. McDermott and D. O. Jensen, editors; B 48 Cornered poets. L. Housman: AM 713 Coronet. M. Komroff ; B 186 Cowper, William, life of. The stricken deer. D. Cecil; B 708 Crane, Hart Bridge, the; B 520 Cross, Wilbur L. Life and times of L. Sterne; AX 52 Cru, Jean Norton Temoins; B 462 Cullen, Countee Black Christ, the, and other poems; B... 303 Cruise of the Kronprinz Wilhelm, the. Count A. von Niezychowski; AN 22 Cultural history of the modern age. a. Vol. I. E. Friedell. Translated by C. F. Atkinson; B 126 Cyrano. C. Rogers; AN 158 D Dahlberg, Edward Bottom dogs ; B 496 Dakin, Edwin Franden; R 330 Damon, S. Foster Thomas Holley Chivers: Friend of Poe; B 655 Dandelion days. H. Williamson; AN 658 Dane, Clemence Tradition and Hugh Walpole; B 19 Daughters of Eve. G. Bradford; B 710 Davis, Jefferson: His rise and fall. A. Tate; B 154 Davis, Jerome; R 629 Davis, Royal J.; R 222 Dear Judas and other poems. R. Jeffers; B. 20 Decline of the age of Louis XIV; or French literature, 1687-1715. A. Tilley; AN. 132 Delayen, Gaston Misadventures of Martin Guerre, the: A dramatic idyll. F. Symons, trans- lator; AN 739 Delteil, Joseph On the river Amur. Translated by S. Putnam ; AN 52 Denny, Ludwell America conquers Britain. A record of economic war; B 299 Desert of love, the. F. Mauriac. Trans- lated by S. Putnam; AN 76 Deutsch, Babette Fire for the night; B 736 Dewey, Davis R.; R 74 Dewey, John Quest for certainty, the: A study of the relation of knowledge and action; R.. 100 Sources of a science of education, the; B 100 Dewey, John, a bibliography of. M. H. Thomas and H. W. Schneider; B 100 Dewey, John, essays in honor of; B 100 Dibble, R. F. ; R 19 Dibelius, Wilhelm England. M. A. Hamilton, translator; B 397 Dickinson, Emily, friend and neighbor. M. Jenkins; AN 657 Dickinson, Emily life and mind of, the. G. Taggard; B 735 Dickinson, Emily, two books on; B 329 Dido: Queen of hearts. G. Atherton; AN.. 51 Dillon, E. J. Russia today and yesterday; B 492 Dime novels; or, Following an old trail in popular literature. E. Pearson; B.... 127 Dissenting opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes, the; B 157 Dissolution of the Hapsburg monarchy, the. O. Jaszi; B 196 Dobie, J. Frank; R 425 Dobie, J. Frank Vaquero of the brush country, a; B.... 371 Doctor Fogg. N. Matson; AN 78 Doctor Johnson and Mr. Boswell. H. Sal- peter ; B 4C0 Donne, John, dean of St. Paul's. Complete poetry and selected prose. Edited by J. Hayward; AN 105 Dos Passos, John 42nd parallel, the; B 298 Down in flames. B. R. Redman; B 329 Dresbach, Glenn Ward Wind in the cedars, the; B 736 Droll parade. C. Talbott; B 491 Dunn, Waldo H. Froude and Carlyle: A study of the Froude-Carlyle controversy; B 366 Dunsany, Lord Fifty poems; B 736 Duun, Olaf Trough of the wave, the. A. G. Chater, translator; AN 524 Eckenrode, H. J. Rutherford B. Hayes; B 654 Economics and ethics. J. A. Hobson; B 273 Eddington, A. S. Science and the unseen world; B 75 Eddy, Mrs.; in "Three women." H. E. Wortham; B 710 Edman, Irwin; R 75 Edward Coke. H. Lyon and H. Block; AN.. 402 Elizabeth Gaskell. G. D. Sanders; AN 401 Ellery, Eloise; R 20 Ellis, Anne Life of an ordinary woman, the; AN... 277 Embezzlers, the. V. Kataev. Translated by L. Zarine; B 73 Emerson: The enraptured Yankee. R. Michaud. Translated by G. Boas; B.. 735 Emily Dickinson, friend and neighbor. M. Jenkins; AN 657 Emily Dickinson: The human background of her poetry. J. Pollitt; B 329 England. W. Dibelius. Translated by M. A. Hamilton; B 397 English government and politics. F. A. Ogg; B 549 English proverbs and proverbial phrases. G. L. Apperson; AN 51 Epoch and a man, a; Martin Van Buren and his times. D. T. Lynch; B 129 Eroica: A novel based on the life of L. van Beethoven. S. Chotzinoff; B 575 Erskine, John Uncle Sam: In the eyes of his family; AN 604 Escape. F. Nitti ; B 246 Essays in honor of John Dewey; B 100 Excursion to Tilsit, the. H. Sudermann. Translated by L. Galantiere; AN 523 Fables. T. F. Powys; AN 686 Fadeyev, Alexander Nineteen, the ; B 425 Fadiman, Clifton P.; R 74, 186, 298, 629 Fairless, Michael Roadmender, the; AN 105 Faulkner, William Sound and the fury, the; B 74 Fausset, Hugh I'Anson Proving of Psyche, the; B 49 Faust: Part I. J. W. von Goethe. W. P. Andrews, translator; G. M. Priest and K. E. Weston, editors; AN 52 Fay, Sidney B. ; R 72, 463 Febvre, Lucien Martin Luther: a destiny. R. Tapley, translator; B 191 Federal reserve system: Its origin and growth. P. M. Warburg; B...602; E, 535

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Nos. 3365-3390] Index [Vol. cxxx Ferber, Edna Cimarron ; B 494 Ferrara, Orestes Private correspondence of Xicolo Machia- velli, the; B 20 Ferrero, Guglielmo Unity of the world, the; B 738 Fiery dive, the, and other stories. M. Arm- strong; AN 686 Fifty poems. Lord Dunsany; B 736 Fire for the night. B. Deutsch; B 736 Firehead. L. Ridge; B 303 Fisher, H. A. L. Our new religion: An examination of Christian science; B 330 Fitts, Dudley; R 602 Five types of ethical theory. C. D. Broad; B 424 Fletcher, John Gould Two frontiers, the; B 462 Flexner, Abraham; R 397 Ford, Julia Ellsworth Consequences ; AN 277 Forestry. A. B. Recknagel and S. N. Spring ; B 63 1 42nd parallel, the. J. Dos Passos; B 298 Fowler, H. W. and F. M. Concise Oxford dictionary of current English; AN 51 Fowler, Harold and Mary Picture book of sculpture, the; AN 158 France, a study in nationality. A. Siegfried; B 709 Francis Rabelais: The man and his work. A. J. Nock and C. R. Wilson; B 250 Francke, Kuno Weltbiirgertum in der deutschen dicht- ung von Herder bis Nietzsche; AX.. 21 Franco-Russian alliance, the, 1890-1894. W. L. Langer; B 428 Franco-Russian alliance, the, 1891-1917. G. Michon. Translated by N. Thomas; B 428 Francois Rabelais: Man of the renaissance. S. Putnam; B 250 Frank, Leonhard Robber band, the; AN 104 Frankfurter, F., and N. Greene Labor injunction, the; B 574 Free. B. Niles; AN 276 French literature of Louisiana, the. R. Van A. Caulfield; AN 134 Friedell, Egon Cultural history of the modern age, a. Vol. I. C. F. Atkinson, translator; B 126 Froude and Carlyle: A study of the Froude- Carlyle controversy. W. H. Dunn; B 366 Fuller, Harold de Wolf; R 372 Fuller, Henry B. Gardens of this world; AX 104 Xot on the screen; B 188 Fulop-Miller, Rene Power and secrets of the Jesuits. F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait, translators; B 737 Gabriel, Ralph Henry Lure of the frontier, the; AN 22 Gallows' orchard. C. Spencer; B 454 Gandhi, Mahatma, ideas. C. F. Andrews; B 628, letter, 675 Gannett, Lewis S.; R 76, 332, 494 Gardens of this world. H. B. Fuller; AN.. 104 Gaskell, Elizabeth. G. D. Sanders; AN 401 Geiser, Karl F. ; R 102, 191 George Washington, 1771-1781. R. Hughes; B 248 German students' war letters. Translated by A. F. Wedd; B 252 Ghent, W. J.; R 274, 371 Gibbs, Philip Hidden city, the ; AN 304 Gide, Andre Immoralist, the; B 491 Montaigne; B 365 School for wives, the; B 49 Ginzburg, Benjamin; R 18, 274 Glaeser, Ernst Class of 1902. W. and E. Muir, trans- lators; B 131 Gleason, Arthur Book of Arthur Gleason. My people. By A. Gleason. ''A. G.": an apprecia- tion. By Helem Hayes Gleason; B... 73 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust: Part I. W. P. Andrews, trans- lator; G. M. Priest and K. E. Weston, editors ; AN 52 Gold, Michael Jews without money; B 428 Gold coast customs. E. Sitwell; B 399 Goldenweiser, Alexander ; R 1 92 Good-bye to all that. R. Graves; B 186 Gorki, Maxim Bystander. B. G. Guerney, translator; B 452 Gothick north, the: A study in mediaeval art, life, and thought. S. Sitwell; AN 306 Gottschalk. Louis R. ; R 21 Gramont, E. de, ex-Duchesse de Clermont- Tonnerre Pomp and circumstance. B. W. Downs, translator; AN 402 Grandeur and misery of victory. G. Clemen- ceau; B 494 Grandmother Brown's hundred years, 1827- 1927. H. C. Brown; B 429 Grattan, C. Hartley; R 188, 493, 630, 684 Grattan, C. Hartley Why we fought; B 366 Graves, Robert Collected poems (1914-1926); B 75 Good-bye to all that; B 186 Poems: 1929; B 75 Gray, Cecil History of music, the ; B 603 Gray dawn — red night. J. L. Hodson; B... 329 Great meadow, the. E. M. Roberts; B 300 Greene, Evarts B. and R. B. Morris Guide to the principal source for early American history (1600-1800) in the City of New York; AX 199 Greene, Xathan, and F. Frankfurter Labor injunction, the; B 574 Gregory, Horace; R 399, 737 Gribble, Francis Balzac: The man and the lover; B 493 Guerra. A. Neumann; B 684 Guide to the principal sources for early American history (1600-1800) in the City of New York. E. B. Greene and R. B. Morris; AN 199 Guignebert, Charles Short history of the French people, a. F. G. Richmond, translator; B 709 Gutman, Walter; R 130 H Hacker, Louis M.j R 654 Haggin, B. H.; R 603 Haldane, J. S. Sciences and philosophy, the. Gifford lectures, 1927-28; B 127 Haldeman-Julius, E. Big American parade, the; AN 200 Hamilton, J. G. de R.; R 154 Harding, Alfred Revolt of the actors, the; B 49 Harding, Warren G., strange death of. M. D. Thacher (from the diaries of G. B. Means); B 630; letter, 734 Hardy, Florence Emily Later years of Thomas Hardy, the: 1892- .1928; B 680 Harlow, Ralph Volney; R 429 Harm's way. R. Tapley ; B 737 Harris, Frank My reminiscences as a cowboy; B 425 Hawbucks! the; AX 50 Hayes, Carlton J. H.; R 710 Hayes, Rutherford B. H. J. Eckenrode; B.. 654 Hazlitt, Henry; R 100, 126, 153, 219, 223 246, 272, 298, 328, 365, 424, 491, 519 548, 572, 602, 627, 654, 706, 735 Heinrich, Carl Orphan of eternity, or the katabasis of the lord Lucifer Satan; AX 659 Heinz, Max Loretto: Sketches of a German war vol- unteer; B 329 Hell in harness. J. Auslander; B 49 Hergesheimer, Joseph Party dress, the; AN 604 Hess, Leonard Tomorrow's voyage; B 101 "Hey, yellowbacks!" E. L. Meyer; B 426 Hicks, Granville, R...101. 303, 329, 454, 520, 735 Hidden city, the. P. Gibbs; AN 304 High falcon and other poems. L. Adams; B. 249 Hindus, Maurice Humanity uprooted; B 156 Hingston, R. W. G. Instinct and intelligence; AN 158 His own people. L. W. Rogers; AN 334 History of Canada, a. C. Wittke; AN... 21 History of financial speculation. R. H. Mot- tram; B 74 History of music, the. C. Gray; B 603 History of nationalism in the east, a. H. Kohn. Translated by M. M. Green: B 301 Hoax, the. I. Svevo. Translated by B. de Zoete; AX 524 Hobson, J. A. Economics and ethics ; B 273 Hodson, James Lansdale Gray dawn — red night; B 329 Hollander, Lee M.; R 248 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, dissenting opinions of; B 157 Hopkins, Father Gerard Manley, S. J., life of. Father Lahey, S. J.; B 456 Hopkins, Gerard Manley Vision of the mermaids, a; B 456 Hoult, Norah Closing hour; AX 334 Hour of the American novel, an. G. Over- ton; AX 105 House of gold. L. O'Flaherty; AN 51 Housman, Laurence Cornered poets; AX 713 Houston, Sam, biography. M. James; B... 274 How we lived then— 1914-1918. Mrs. C. S. Peel; AN 200 Hudson river bracketed. E. Wharton; AN.. 76 Hughes, Rupert George Washington, 1771-1781; B 248 Human history. G. E. Smith ; B 656 Human mind, the. K. A. Menninger; B... 458 Humanism and America. Essays on the out- look of modern civilization; B 272 Humanity uprooted. M. Hindus; B 156 Huntsman in the sky. G. Toogood; AN.... 605 Hutchinson, A. S. M. Uncertain trumpet, the; AN 51 Hutchinson, Anne; two biographies; AN 552 Huxley, Aldous Brief candles; B 654 I thought of Daisy. E. Wilson; B 20 I was sent to Athens. H. Morgenthau; AX 336 Ibsen, the master builder. A. F. Zucker; B. 248 Imagist anthology, 1930; B 603 Immoralist, the. A. Gide; B 491 In spite of all rejoicing. Anonymous; B.... 738 India in bondage. J. T. Sunderland; B 398 Infidels and heretics. An agnostic's anthology. Edited by C. Darrow and W. Rice; AX 577 Instinct and intelligence. R. W. G. Hingston; AX 158 Intellectual things. S. J. Kunitz; B 709 International relations of Manchuria, the. B. C. W. Young; AN 21 Iron man. W. R. Burnett; AX 224 Iron man and the tin woman, the. S. Lea- cock; AN 158 Irwin, Will; R 73 It's a great war. M. Lee; AN 76 It's never over. M. Callaghan; B 399 J James, Marquis Raven, the. A life story of Sam Hous- ton; B 274 Jaszi, Oscar Dissolution of the Hapsburg monarchy, the; B 196 Jeffers, Robinson Dear Judas and other poems; B 20 Jefferson Davis: His rise and fall. A. Tate; B 154 Jefferson, Thomas, letters; AX 711 Jelliffe, Smith Ely; R 458 Jenkins, MacGregor Emily Dickinson, friend and neighbor; AX 657 Jews without money. M. Gold; B 428 Joaquin Miller and his other self. H. Wag- ner; AN 225 John Donne, dean of St. Paul's. Complete Joetry and selected prose. Edited by ohn Hayward; AN 105 John Merrill's pleasant life. A. B. Parsons; B 368 John, William M. Seven women; AN 51 Johnson, Samuel, and Boswell. H. Salpeter; B 400 Josephson, Matthew; R 462,707 Josephson, Matthew Portrait of the artist as American; B.. 627 Joy is my name. S. Salt; AN 276 Jiinger, Ernst Storm of steel. B. Creighton, translator; B 131 K Kataev, Valentine Embezzlers, the. L. Zarine, translator; B 73 Kayser, Rudolph Stendhal: The life of an egoist; B 630 Keller, Helen Midstream; B 576 Kellock, Harold; R 656 Kien, Walter ; R 252 Kindness in a corner. T. F. Powys; B 707 King, David Ten thousand shall fall; B 329 King Haber. A. Neumann; B 550 King mob. F. K. Notch; B 572 Kohn, Hans History of nationalism in the east, a. M. M. Green, translator; B 301 Komroff, Manuel Coronet; B 186 Kramer girls, the. R. Suckow; AN 523 Kreymborg, Alfred Our singing strength; B 132 Krout, John Allen Annals of American sport; AX 22 Krutch, Joseph Wood; R..49, 127, 368, 460, 519, 573, 655

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Vol. cxxx] Index [Jan.-June, 1930 Kunitz, Joshua; R 73, 156, 425, 454 KuniU, Stanley J.; R 682 Kunitz, Stanley J. Intellectual things ; B 709 Kuprin, Alexandre Yama: The pit. B. G. Guerney, trans- lator; AN 277 L Labor injunction, the. F. Frankfurter and N. Greene; B 574 La Farge, Oliver Laughing boy; B 102 Lafayette, letters; AN 711 Lahey, Father, S. J. Life of Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J., the; B 456 Landlubber's log, a. A. Warner; B 400 Langer, William Leonard Franco-Russian alliance, the, 1890-1894; B 428 Lansdowne, Lord: A biography. Lord New- ton; B 72 Larsen, J. Anker Stranger in paradise, a. R. C. Jordan, translator; AN 199 Later years of Thomas Hardy, the: 1892- 1928. F. E. Hardy; B 680 Latimer, Margery This is my body; AN 552 Laughing boy. O. La Farge; B 102 Laut, Agnes C. Overland trail, the; AN 304 Lawrence, D. H. Assorted articles ; B 519 Collected poems ; B 75 Pansies. Poems ; B 75 Laws and liberties of Massachusetts; AN.. 52 Leacock, Stephen Iron man and the tin woman, the; AN.. 158 Leaders of the French revolution J. M. Thompson; B 21 Le Corbusier City of tomorrow, the; B 130 Lee, Mary It's a great war; AN 76 Letters and friendships of Sir Cecil Spring- Rice, the. Edited by S. Gwynn; B.. 220 Letters of Lafayette and Jefferson; AN 711 Letters to women. J. Auslander; B 49 Levin, Shmarya Childhood in exile. M. Samuel, transla- tor; B 18 Youth in revolt; B 463 Lewinsohn, Richard Mystery man of Europe, the: Sir Basil Zaharoff ; B 656 Liberty. E. D. Martin; B 706 Life and letters of Emily Dickinson. Edited by M. D. Bianchi; B 329 Life and mind of Emily Dickinson, the. G. Taggard; B 735 Life and times of L. Sterne. W. L. Cross; AN 52 Life of an ordinary woman, the. A. Ellis; AN 277 Life of Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J., the. Father Lahey. S. J.; B 456 Life of George Meredith, the. R. E. Sen- court; B 101 Life of Miranda. W. S. Robertson; AN... 712 Lincoln. E. Ludwig; B 185 Lincoln, Abraham: His path to the presi- dency. A. Shaw ; B 604 Look homeward, angel. T. Wolfe; AN 225 Lord Lansdowne: A biography. Lord Newton; B 72 Lorenzo the magnificent. D. Loth; B 20 Loretto: Sketches of a German war volunteer. M. Heinz; B 329 Lost buffalo. L. Bacon; B 491 Lost child, the. R. Sanzara. Translated by W. Katzin; AN 132 Loth, David Lorenzo the magnificent ; B 20 Love's illusion. J. D. Beresford; AN 402 Loving, Pierre; R 49, 550, 684 Lowell, Amy Poetry and poets; B 656 Loyalists in the American revolution, the. C. H. Van Tyne; AN 659 Ludwig, Emil Lincoln; B 185 Luehr, Emil New German republic, the; B 102 Lure of the frontier, the. R. H. Gabriel; AN 22 Luther, Martin: a destiny. L. Febvre. Trans- lated by R. Tapley; B 191 Lynch, Denis Tilden Epoch and a man. an: Martin Van Buren and his times; B 129 Lyon, Hastings, and H. Block Edward Coke; AN 402 M MacCallum, Elizabeth P. ; R 301 MacDonald, William; R..48, 154, 299, 428, 656 Machiavelli, Nicolo; the private correspond- ence of. O. Ferrara; B 20 Machine made man. S. Bent; AN 576 Mackenzie, Jean Trader's wife, the; AN 605 McWilliams, Carey Ambrose Bierce: A biography; B 223 Macy, John; R 366 Mahatma Gandhi's ideas. C. F. Andrews; B ...628; letter 675 Making fascists. H. W. Schneider and S. B. Clough; B 334 Malaeska: the Indian wife of the white hunter. Mrs. A. S. Stephens; AN.. 51 Man a woman marries, the. V. C. Peder- sen; B 192 Man who lost himself, the. O. Sitwell; B.. 464 Manchuria: a brief account of diplomatic events; Sir H. Parlett; AN 21 Manchuria; the international relations of. B. C. W. Young; AN 21 Mann, Heinrich Royal woman, the. A. J. Ashton, trans- lator; AN 686 Marsh, Fred T.; R...18, 222, 273, 426, 463, 496 Marshall, Robert; R 631 Martet, Jean Clemenceau ; B 332 Martin, Everett Dean Liberty; B 706 Martin Luther: a destiny. L. Febvre. Trans- lated by R. Tapley; B 191 Masefield, John Hawbucks, the ; AN 50 South and east; AN 52 Matson, Norman Doctor Fogg; AN 78 Mauriac, Francois Desert of love, the. S. Putnam, trans- lator; AN 76 Maurois, Andre Byron; B 460 May, J. Lewis Cardinal Newman; AN 373 Meade, Norah; R 20, 101 Means, Gaston B. Strange death of President Harding, the, by M. D. Thacher (from the di- aries of G. B. Means); B..630; letter, 734 Medal without bar. R. Blaker; AN 738 Meet the Germans. H. A. Phillips; B 102 Memories of my life. E. Westermarck; B... 153 Mengelberg and the symphonic epoch. E. R. Sollitt; AN 713 Mencken, H. L.; R 550 Mencken, H. L. Treatise on the gods; B 328 Menninger, Karl A. Human mind, the; B 458 Meredith, George, life of, the. R. E. Sen- court; B 101 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand Saint, the. E. F. Hauch, translator; AN 739 Meyer, Ernest L. "Hey, yellowbacks!" B 426 Michaud, Regis Emerson: The enraptured Yankee. G. Boas, translator ; B 735 Michon, Georges Franco-Russian alliance, the, 1891-1917. N. Thomas, translator ; B 428 Midstream. H. Keller; B 576 Miller, Joaquin, and his other self. H. Wag- ner; AN 225 Mims, Edwin Adventurous America: A study of con- temporary life and thought; AN 336 Mims, Edwin, Jr., and O. S. Coad American stage, the; AN 22 Miranda, Francisco de, life of. W. S. Rob- ertson; AN 712 Misadventures of Martin Guerre, the: A dramatic idvll. G. Delayen. Trans- lated by F. Symons; AN 739 Missing masterpiece, the. H. Belloc; AN ... . 334 Mississippi. B. L. Burman; AX 51 Mississippi provincial archives, 1701-1729. Translated and edited by D. Rowland and A. (i. Sanders; AX i2 Mitchell. Broadus; R 550 Monet, Claude: The water lilies. G. Clemen- ceau; AN 577 Money. D. H. Robertson; AN 659 Money and other stories. K. Capek. Trans- lated by F. P. Marchant and others; AN 686 Montaigne. A. Gide; B 365 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat Persian letters. M. Komroff, editor; AN 52 Morgenthau, Henry I was sent to Athens; AN 336 Morris, Harrison S. Walt Whitman. A brief biography with reminiscences; AX ~\ \ Morris, Richard B., and E. B. Greene Guide to the principal sources for early American history (1600-1800) in the city of Xew York; AX loo Mothers cry. H. G. Carlisle; AN .'..'. 224 Motherwell, Hiram; R 2'fi 114 Mottram, R. H. ' History of financial speculation; B.. 74 Mountain city. U. Sinclair; B 680 Mullin, Clen; R ''' 400 Muschamp, Edward A. Audacious Audubon ; AN 304 Mussey, Henry Raymond; R 273,602 My life. L. Trotzky ; B 629 My reminiscences as a cowboy. F. Harris; B 425 My thirty years' war. M. Anderson; B.... 707 Mystery man of Europe, the: Sir Basil Zaharoff. R. Lewinsohn; B 656 N Neumann, Alfred Guerra; B 684 King Haber; B 550 New German republic, the. E. Luehr; B... 102 Newman, Cardinal. J. L. May; AN 373 Newton, Lord Lord Lansdowne: A biography; B 72 Niezychowski, Count Alfred von Cruise of the Kronprinz Wilhelm, the; AN 22 Niles, Blair Free; AN 276 Nineteen, the. A. Fadeyev. Translated by R. D. Charques; B 425 Nitti, Francesco Escape; B 246 Nock, Albert Jay, and C. R. Wilson Francis Rabelais: The man and his work; B 250 Not on the screen. H. B. Fuller; B 188 Notch Frank K. King mob; B 572 O O. Henry memorial award prize stories of 1929; AN 686 Obelisk, the. W. Rollins, Jr.; B 739 O'Flaherty, Liam House of gold, the; AN 51 Return of the brute; B 329 Ogg, Frederic Austin English government and politics; B.... 549 Olden, Balder On virgin soil; AN 402 Olden, Rudolf Stresemann. R. T. Clark, translator; AN 711 On the river Amur. J. Delteil. Translated by S. Putnam; AN 52 On virgin soil. B. Olden; AN 402 Orage, A. R. Art of reading, the; B 684 Orderly. M. R. Werner: AN 738 Origin of species. C. Darwin; AN 52 Orphan of eternity, or the katabasis of the lord Lucifer Satan. C. Heinrich; AN 659 Our changing human nature. S. D. Schmal- hausen; B 274 Our new religion: An examination of Chris- tian science. H. A. L. Fisher; B.. 330 Our singing strength. A. Kreymborg; B... 132 Overland trail, the. A. C. Laut; AN 306 Overton, Grant Hour of the American novel, an; AN.. 105 Pacifism in the modern world; B 274 Pansies. Poems. D. H. Lawrence; B 75 Parlett, Sir Harold Brief account of diplomatic events in Manchuria, a; AN 21 Parsons, Alice Beal ; R 708 Parsons, Alice Beal John Merrill's pleasant life; B 368 Party dress, the. J. Hergesheimer ; AX.... 604 Pascal, Ernest Age for love, the; AN 605 Passing of normalcy, the. C. W. Wood; B.. 219 Paterfamilias. W. B. Trites; AN 132 Patrick, M. M. Under five sultans; AN 22 Paxson, Frederic L. When the west is gone; AN 739 Pay day. N. Asch; AN 303 Pearson, Edmund Dime novels; or, Following an old trail in popular literature; B 127 Pedersen, Victor Cox Man a woman marries, the; B 192 Peel, Mrs. C. S. How we lived then— 1914-1918; AN 200 Persian letters. C. de S. Montesquieu. M. Komroff, editor; AN 52 Philine. H. F. Amiel. Translated by V. W. Brooks; B 682 Phillips, Henry Albert Meet the Germans; B 102 Phillpotts, Eden Apes, the; AN 276 Picture book of sculpture, the. H. and M. Fowler; AN 158 Poems. P. Quennell ; B 682 Poems: 1929. R. Graves; B 75

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Nos. 3365-3390] Ind ex [Vol. cxxx Poetry and mathematics. S. Buchanan; B.. 629 Poetry and poets. A. Lowell; B 656 Poets, farewell! E. Wilson; B 399 Polk: The diary of a president, 1845-1849. Edited by A. Nevins; B 101 Pollitt, Josephine Emily Dickinson: The human background of her poetry; B 329 Pomp and circumstance. E. de Gramont, ex- Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre. Trans- lated by B. W. Downs; AN 402 Pope, Alexander. E. Sitwell ; B 573 Pope, Alexander, as critic and humanist. A. Warren ; AN 334 Portrait of the artist as American. M. Josephson; B 627 Potato face. C. Sandburg; AN 658 Power and secrets of the Jesuits, the. R. Fulop-Miller. Translated by F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait; B 737 Powys, Llewelyn Apples be ripe; B 707 Powys, Theodore Francis Fables; AN 686 Kindness in a corner ; B 707 Private correspondence of Nicolo Machiavelli, the. O. Ferrara; B 20 Prize poems. 1913-1929; AN 658 Process and reality. A. N. Whitehead; B... 18 Proust, Marcel Sweet cheat gone, the. C. K. Scott- Moncrieff, translator; B 519 Proving of Psyche, the. H. I 'A. Fausset; B 493 Pruette, Lorine; R 17, 153 Pueblo potter, the. R. L. Bunzel; B 370 Pure gold. O. E. Rolvaag. English text by S. Erdahl and the author; B 273 Putnam, Samuel Francois Rabelais: Man of the renais- sance; B 250 Queen Elizabeth. K. Anthony; B 19 Quennell, Peter Poems; B 682 Quest for certainty, the: A study of the rela- tion of knowledge and action. J. Dewey; B 100 Rabelais, Francis, two biographies; B 250 Ratcliffe, S. K.; R 628 Raven, the. A life story of Sam Houston. M. James; B 274 Read, Herbert Sense of glory, the: B 188 Recknagel, Arthur Bernard, and S. N. Spring Forestry; B 631 Redman, Ben Ray Down in flames; B 329 Regula S. Benedicti. Edited by E. A. Lowe; A\T 52 Retreat: A novel of 1918. C. R. Benstead; B 329 Return of the brute. I.. O'Flaherty; B 329 Revolt of the actors, the. A. Harding: B 49 Revolt of the fishermen, the. A. Seghers. Translated by M. Goldsmith; AN 373 Rhyne, Jennings J. Seme southern cotton mill workers and their villages; B 550 Rice. Elmer Voyage to Purilia. a ; B 426 Richaidson. Henry Handel Australia felix; B 153 Way home, the ; B 548 Ridge. Lola Firehead; B 303 Roadmcnder. the. M. Fairless; AN 105 Robber band, the. I.. Frank. Translated by C. Brooks; AN 104 Roberts, Donald A.: R 222 Roberts, Elizabeth Madox Great meadow, the; B 300 Robertson, D. H. Money ; AX 659 Robertson, William Spence; R 101 Robertson, William Spence Life of Miranda; AX 712 Rogers, Cameron Cyrano: AX 158 Rogers, Leon W. His own people; AN 334 Rneue Hm;'«. H. Walpole; AX 657 Rollins, William. Jr. Obelisk, the; AX 739 Rolvaag, O. E. Pure eold. English text by S. Erdahl and the author; B 273 Roman holiday, a. D. Ryan; B 222 Roosevelt, Nicholas America and England ? B 154 Rose of Corinth. M. S. Buck; AN 277 Rouges, Jean des Vignes Bourru, soldier of France. E. H. Wright, translator; AN 688 Royal woman, the. H. Mann. Translated by A. J. Ashton; AN 686 Rugg, Winifred King Unafraid: A life of Anne Hutchinson; AN 552 Russia today and yesterday. E. J. Dillon; B 492 Rutherford B. Hayes. R. J. Eckenrode; B.. 654 Ryan, Don Roman holiday, a ; B 222 Sacred hill. M. Barres. Translated by M. Cowley ; B 50 Saint, the. C. F. Meyer. Translated by E. F. Hauch; AN 739 Saint Teresa; in "Three women." H. E. Wortham; B 710 Salmon, Andre Black Venus, the; AN 103 Salpeter, Harry Dr. Johnson and Mr. Boswell; B 400 Salt, Sarah Joy is my name; AN 276 Sandburg, Carl Potato face; AN 658 Sanders, Gerald DeWitt Elizabeth Gaskell; AN 401 Sanzara, Rahel Lost child, the. W. Katzin, translator; AN 132 Saurat, Denis Blake and modern thought; AN 105 Schneider, Herbert W., and S. B. Clough Making fascists; B 334 Schneider, Herbert Wallace, and M. H. Thomas Bibliography of John Dewey, a; B 100 Schneider, Isidor; R 456 School for wives, the. A. Gide; B 49 Schlump. The story of a German soldier told by himself. Translated by M. Samuel; B 131 Schuyler, Robert Livingston ; R 549 Science and the unseen world. A. S. Edding- ton; B 75 Sciences and philosophy, the. Gifford lec- tures. 1927-28. J. S. Haldane; B 127 Seagle, William; R 157, 229, 574 Seaver, Edwin Company, the; B 573 Seghers, Anna Revolt of the fishermen, the. M. Gold- smith, translator; AN 373 Sencourt, Robert Esmonde Life of George Meredith, the; B 101 Sense of glory, the. H. Read; B 188 Seven women. W. M. John; AN 51 Shadows of men. J. Tully; AN 224 Shanks, Lewis Piaget Baudelaire; AN 712 Shaw, Albert Abraham Lincoln: His path to the presi- dency; B 604 Shelley's lost letters to Harriet; B 454 Shipley, Joseph T.; R 19, 494 Short history of Chinese civilization, a. R. Wilhelm; AN 158 Short history of the French people, a. C. Guignebert. Translated by F. G. Richmond; B 709 Siegfried, Andre France, a study in nationality; B 709 Simpson, Clinton; R 329, 573 Sinclair, Upton Mountain city; B 680 Sir Francis Bacon: The first modern mind. B. Steel; B 222 Sitwell, Edith Alexander Pope; B 573 Gold coast customs; B 399 Sitwell, Sacheverell Gothick north, the: A study in mediaeval art, life, and thought: AX 306 Skeffington. H. Sheehy; R 197 Skinner, Constance Lindsay Songs of the coast dwellers; AX' 712 Sleeping fury, the. M. Armstrong; AX 104 Sly, John Fairfield Town government in Massachusetts, 1620- 1930; AX 713 Smith, G. Elliot Human history; B 656 Smith, J. Russell Tree crops ; B 76 Smuts, J. C. Africa and some world problems; B 522 Sollitt, Edna Richolson Mengelberg and the symphonic epoch; AX 713 Some forerunners of the newspaper in Eng- land, 1476-1622. M. A. Shaaber; B.. 372 Some southern cotton mill workers and their villages. J. J. Rhyne; B..., 550 Songs of the coast dwellers. C. I V Skinner; AN t 712 Sound and the fury, the. W. Faulkner; B.. 74 Sources of a science of education, the. J. Dewey; B 100 South and east. J. Masefield; AXr 52 Soviet Russia. W. H. Chamberlin; B 492 Spencer, Claire Gallows' orchard; B 454 Spring. Samuel Newton, and A. B. Reck- nagel Forestry; B 631 Spring-Rice, Sir Cecil, the letters and friend- ships of. Edited by S. Gwynn; B.... 220 Stendhal: The life of an egoist. R. Kayser; B 630 Stephens, Mrs. Ann S. Malaeska: the Indian wife of the white hunter ; AN 51 Sterne, Laurence; life and times. W. L. Cross; AN 62 Storm of steel. E. Jiinger. Translated by B. Creigbton; B 131 Strange death of President Harding, the. M. D. Thacher; from the diaries of G. B. Means; B 630; letter 734 Stranger in paradise, a. J. A. Larsen. Trans- lated by R. C. Jordan; AN 199 Stresemann. R. Olden. Translated by R. T. Clark; AX 711 Stricken deer, the. The life of Cowper. D. Cecil; B 708 Study of the principles of politics, a. G. E. G. Catlin; AX 711 Suckow, Ruth Kramer girls, the ; AXT 523 Sudermann, Hermann Excursion to Tilsit, the. L. Galantiere, translator ; AN 523 Sunderland, Jabez T. India in bondage; B 398 Svevo, Italo Hoax, the. B. de Zoete, translator; AN. 524 Sweet cheat gone, the. M. Proust. Trans- lated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff; B 519 Sword of the soul, the. R. Chauvire. Trans- lated by E. Boyd; AX 199 Talbott, Carlton Droll parade; B 491 Taggard, Genevieve Life and mind of Emily Dickinson, the. B 735 Tapley, Roberts Harm's way; B 737 Tate, Allen; R 185 Tate, Allen Jefferson Davis: His rise and fall; B... 154 Temoins. J. N. Cru; B 462 Ten thousand shall fall. D. King; B 329 Testament of beauty, the. R. Bridges; B 193 Testamento literario. A. P. Valdes; AN.... 553 Thacher, May Dixon Strange death of President Harding, the (from the diaries of G. B. Means); B. 630 That devil Wilkes. R. W. Postgate; B 299 This is my body. M. Latimer; AN 552 Thomas, Milton Halsey, and H. W. Schneider Bibliography of John Dewey, a; B 100 Thomas, Norman; R 219, 274 Thomas Holley Chivers: Friend of Poe. S. F. Damon; B 655 Thompson, J. M. Leaders of the French revolution; B 21 Thompson, Sylvia Chariot wheels; AN 78 Three strange lovers. V. P. Calverton; AXT. 373 Three women: Saint Teresa, Madame d» C'oi- seul, Mrs. Eddy. H. E. Wortham; B. 710 Tilley, Arthur Decline of the age of Louis XIV; or French literature, 1687-1715; AX 132 Tomlinson, H. M. All our yesterdays; B 186 Between the lines; B 601 Tomorrow's voyage. L. Hess; B 101 Toogood, Granville Huntsman in the sky; AXr 605 Toward civilization. Edited by C. A. Beard; B 681 Town government in Massachusetts, 1620- 1930. J. F. Sly; AN 713 T?ader's wife, the. J. Mackenzie; AN 605 Tradition and experiment in present-day lit- erature; B 219 Tradition and Hugh Walpole. C. Dane; B.. 19 Treasury of middle English verse, a. M. G. Adamson; AN 739 Treatise on the gods. H. L. Mencken; B... 328 Tree crops. J. R. Smith; B 76 Trilling. Lionel ; R 684 Trites, W. B. Paterfamilias; AXT 132 frotzky, Leon My life; B 629 Trough of the wave, the. O. Duun. Trans- lated by A. G. Chaf:r: AX 524 Tu Fu: The autobiography of a Chinese poet. Translated by F. Ayscough; AN 158 Tully. Jim Shadows of men; AN 224 Twelve aeainst the gods. W. Bolitho; AN... 225 Two frontiers, the. J. G. Fletcher; B 462

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Vol. cxxx] Index [Jan.-June, 1930 u Unafraid: A life of Anne Hutchinson. W. K. Rugg; AN 552 Uncertain trumpet, the. A. S. M. Hutchin- son; AN 51 Uncle Sam: In the eyes of his family. J. Erskine; AN 604 Under five sultans. M. M. Patrick; AN 22 Unity of the world, the. G. Ferrero; B 738 Up at the villa. M. Cher; AN 51 V Valdes, Armando Palacio Testamento literario; AN 553 Van Buren, Martin, biography. D. T. Lynch; B 129 Van Doren, Carl; R 188 Van Doren, Dorothy; R 300, 368, 494, 707 Van Doren, Mark; R 20, 75, 190, 454, 680 Vane, Sir Francis Fletcher Agin' the governments: Memories and adventures ; B 197 Van Tyne, Claude H. Loyalists in the American revolution, the; AN 659 Vaquero of the brush country, a. J. F. Dobie; B 371 Vile bodies. E. Waugh; B 602 Villard, Oswald Garrison; R 426, 492, 576, 604, 630 Virginia Plutarch, the. P. A'. Bruce; AN... 401 Vision of the mermaids, a. G. M. Hopkins; B 456 Vivas, Eliseo; R 250 Voyage to Purilia, a. E. Rice; B 426 W Wagner, Harr Joaquin Miller and his other self; AN.. 225 Walpole, Hugh; Tradition and Hugh Walpole. C. Dane; B 19 Walpole, Hugh Rogue Herries; AN 657 Walt Whitman. A brief biography with rem- iniscences. H. S. Morris; AN 713 Walton, Eda Lou; R 49, 102, 132, 193, 249, 399, 491, 603, 656, 709, 736 Warburg, Paul M. Federal reserve system: Its origin and growth; B, 602; E 535 Warner, Arthur Landlubber's log, a; B 400 Warren, Austin Alexander Pope as critic and humanist; AN 334 Washington, George, 1771-1781. R. Hughes; B 248 Wassermann, Jacob Columbus, Don Quixote of the seas; B.. 298 Waugh, Evelyn Vile bodies; B 602 Way home, the. H. H. Richardson; B 548 Way of Ecben, the. J. B. Cabell; B 17 Weltbiirgertum in der deutschen dichtung von Herder bis Nietzsche. K. Francke; AN 21 Werner, M. R. Orderly; AN 738 Westermarck, Edward Memories of my life; B 153 Wharton, Edith Hudson river bracketed; AN 76 Wharton, James B.; R 131 When the west is gone. F. L. Paxson; AN.. 739 Whitehead, Alfred North Process and reality; B 18 Whitman, Walt. A brief biography with rem- iniscences. H. S. Morris; AN 713 Why we fought. C. H. Grattan; B 366 Wilder, Thornton Woman of Andros, the; B 246 Wilhelm, Richard Short history of Chinese civilization, a; AN 158 Wilkes, John; That devil Wilkes. R. W. Postgate; B 299 Williamson, Henry Dandelion days; AN 658 Wilson, C. R., and A. J. Nock Francis Rabelais: The man and his work; B 250 Wilson, Edmund I thought of Daisy ; B 20 Poets, farewell ! B 399 Wind in the cedars, the. G. W. Dresbach; B 736 Windlestraws. P. Bottome; AN 199 Wishbone. S. Bowen; AN 199 Wittke, Carl History of Canada, a; AN 21 Wolfe, Thomas Look homeward, angel ; AN 225 Woman of Andros, the. T. Wilder; B 246 Wood, Charles W. Passing of normalcy; B 219 Wortham, H. E. Three women: Saint Teresa, Madame de Choiseul, Mrs. Eddy; B 710 Yama: The pit. A. Kuprin. Translated by B. G. Guerney; AN 277 Young, B. C. Walter International relations of Manchuria, the; AN 21 Youth in revolt. S. Levin; B 463 Zabel, Morton Dauwen ; R 426 Zaharoff, Sir Basil; biography. R. Lewin- sohn; B 656 Zucker, A. F. Ibsen, the master builder; B 248 i

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 1, 1930 No. 3365 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 1 EDITORIALS: Consolidation — What For ? * India and Its Freedom Bargain-Counter Fame 6 The Night After Christmas 6 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 7 FARM RELIEF MEETS AN ENEMY. By Robert S. Allen 8 THE RADIO CORPORATION IN THE NEWS. By Paul Y. Anderson 9 THE NATIONAL CITY FIASCO. Bv C. W 11 A SUBSTITUTE FOR LYNCHING. By Horace B. Davis 12 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 14 CORRESPONDENCE 15 BOOKS AND DRAMA: Admonition. By Leslie Nelson Jennings 1" Cabell's Last Word? By Lorine Pruette 17 Mr. Whitehead's Living Universe. By Benjamin Ginzburg IS A Russian-Jewish Childhood, by Fred T. Marsh 18 Tradition and Clemence Dane. Bv Toseph T. Shipley 19 Queen Bess Once More. By R. F. Dibble 19 Greenwich Villagers. By Norah Meade 20 Machiavelli and Lorenzo. By Eloise Ellery 20 Judas, Savior of Jesus. By Mark Van Doren 20 Eleven French Revolutionists. Bv Louis R. Gottschalk 21 Books in Brief 21 Drama: Holiday Fare. By Toseph Wood Krutch 22 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: What Next in India? By C. F. Andrews 25 Lord Irwin's Blunder 26 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 27 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN- NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal L'nion, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 34, Clifton Gardens, W. 9, London, England. SEVEN TO TEN for cruisers of 10,000 tons instead of six to ten as fixed by the Washington Conference, and the same increased ratio for auxiliary craft, is in substance the Japanese claim as brought out in the recent discussions with the Japanese delegation to the London Conference which stopped over for a few days at Washington to feel Secretary Stimson's pulse and take his temperature. As usual in such preliminary talks there are some alternative;. According to Mr. Wakatsuki, former Premier and head of the delegation, Japan wTould be glad to see a permanent holiday in the building of battleships, and will not insist that the 70 per cent ratio for auxiliary vessels shall be ap- plied to each class of such vessels. As for the submarine, it will not abandon that type of craft, but it is willing to accept some limitation of submarine tonnage. In other words, Japan professes its readiness to agree to about any reduction or limitation of naval armament that will suit the other Powers, provided it is accorded a better position in relation to Great Britain and the United States than was given to it at the WTashington Conference, and is allowed to retain the submarine. As the United States and Great Brit- tain appear to be opposed, tentatively at least, to all of these contentions except the battleship holiday, the official an- nouncement that "agreement in the objectives of both coun- tries was established" at Washington is apparently to be taken only in a Pickwickian sense. NEUTRALITY FOR ARGENTINA in the next war, 800,000 tons of naval armament as a minimum for France, a protest by Earl Beatty in the House of Lords against any reduction in the strength of the British fleet: these and similar reports and outgivings of the past few days, taken in connection with the discussion of neutrality to which Ave referred last wreek, raise the question whether the Kellogg pact is coming to be looked upon by the signa- tory Powers as only an expression of a pious hope, or whether its doctrine possesses something that can be recog- nized as reality. In accepting the Kellogg pact, as we under- stand it, the nations have solemnly agreed not to go to war, with the implied reservation, however, that they may fight in self-defense. Why, then, all the to-do about neutrality and the need of keeping navies up to a high pitch? If war has been abolished there can be no neutrals, for neutrality has no existence save when there is war. On the other hand, if the armaments that are being talked about are really needed for defense, then every naval Power must be seri- ously expecting that the Kellogg pact is not really going to be observed. Is it not time that we had a little clear thinking and plain speaking about this peace business? Against whom does France need 800,000 tons of fighting craft, or Great Britain, according to Lord Beatty, require the laying down of ten cruisers within the next ten years? Is the Kellogg pact an honorable agreement, or is it bunk? PRESIDENT HOOVER is responsible for a great in- crease in the amount of current information available with reference to social conditions in the United States. The report of his committee on recent economic changes published last spring was an extremely valuable study of contemporary economic movements, and he has now appointed a research council on social trends which shall direct corre- sponding studies in broader social fields, dealing with national health, changes in family life, housing, education, recreation, and like topics. The work will be carried on with funds provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the personnel of the council is a guaranty both of the scholarly character and impartiality of the work and of the skill with which the results will be presented. Mr. Hoover has been well ad- vised in trusting this survey to five such men as Wesley C. Mitchell, Charles E. Merriam. William F. Ogburn, Howard W. Odum, and Shelby M. Harrison. It is worth noting, also, that the Social Science Research Council has given aid in defining the nature of the survey. All this promises much for the usefulness of the study that is to be made. COMPLETE VICTORY FOR RUSSIA— that is the outcome of the negotiations at Khabarovsk in the mat- ter of the dispute over the Chinese Eastern Railway. The troops of both sides are to be called away from the fron- tiers as soon as possible, all Russians and Chinese arrested

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The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365 by either nation will be released, all White Russians em- ployed will be removed, all Soviet and Chinese executives who have been dismissed or have resigned will be restored, all economic organizations interrupted by the dispute will be reestablished, the respective consuls in East Siberia and Manchuria are to be put back into office, and the Chinese agree to dissolve the White Guard Corps and expel its lead- ers and organizers from Manchuria. From the Russian point of view nothing could be more complete and satis- factory. It is to be noticed, however, that the Soviets have not asked for any financial reparation for damages for the acts which the Chinese, by the acceptance of these terms without protest to the rest of the world, admit were wrong on their part. Yet Secretary Stimson has the effrontery to have given out in Washington that he sees in this re- sult "a vindication of the so-called Hoover doctrine of action under the Kellogg peace pact." It is added, how- ever, that neither the White House nor the State Depart- ment is expected to make any direct claim of credit for forc- ing a peaceful adjustment. We hope not. That would be an impudence beyond all characterization. BOSTON has done it again. This time a perfectly re- spectable Cambridge bookseller has been sentenced to a month in jail and has been fined $500 in addition for selling a book alleged to be immoral, "Lady Chatterly's Lover," by D. H. Lawrence. The book was not exposed for sale nor was anybody solicited to purchase it. An agent of that disgusting organization known as the New England Watch and Ward Society procured the commission of the crime by going into the shop and begging the bookseller to get him a copy. This time the society has at least received from both the prosecution and the defense the dressing down that its despicable methods deserve. The district attorney says that he wishes the public to understand that he indorses neither the policy nor the tactics of the society and he adds that if its agents go into stores of good repute and induce people to commit crime he will proceed against them. He should begin right now by making an example of the con- temptible agent who figured in this case. The counsel for the defense, Herbert Parker, who has held high office in the State and stands well at the bar, properly declared : These miserable, false pretenders who pose brazenly as protectors of public morals are nothing but falsifiers and deceivers. God forbid that the standards of this Com- monwealth should be stained by the false and poisonous hands of such persons! What is the matter with Boston that this society is not put out of business by the contempt of the citizenry? "npHEY ARE SIMPLY SMALL FILES in which A human beings are stored away" — thus Colonel George F. Chandler, who has just investigated Auburn Prison at the request of Governor Roosevelt, describes the horrible cells in that prison. They are, he declares, "anti- quated, damp, dark, and cold," and devoid of all sanitary conveniences except pails. They are seven feet high and seven deep ; half are four feet wide and half only three and one-half feet — in these two men are often immured. The prisoners are "poorly and inadequately clothed"; there are "few gloves, overcoats, or boots" for those who work out- of-doors. The prison itself was built in 1816 and has not been added to since 1880. In addition to all this the men have for months been without adequate work or any work at all, without athletics or any proper exercise. Is it sur- prising that victims of this kind of "reform" have twice within six months risen in desperation? Colonel Chandler is able to praise only the women's wing which has 115 in- mates— and three babies! He recommends immediate re- lief from overcrowding even by the use of the State Fair Grounds, an increase in the number of guards and civilian emplo}7ees, better food, the abolition of special privileges, the segregation of incorrigible prisoners, and the abolition of the Mutual Welfare League. The Governor has accepted four of these recommendations: relief from overcrowding, better food and clothing, and a new prison-guard system. We are glad that he will not abolish the League. It is not less but more self-government that the prisoners need. At the end of seven months' struggle to organize, the strikers' toll is six men and one woman killed, twenty- four wounded, seven sentenced to prison for five to twenty years, seven kidnapped, and five flogged by mobs. Not a single one of those responsible for the violence against the strikers has been brought to justice. THE CASE OF THE TEXTILE WORKERS against the State of North Carolina stands as above, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The eight deputies lately on trial for second-degree murder for the death of six textile workers have just been acquitted by a mountaineer jury in Burnsville, North Carolina. The strik- ers were shot in the back ; not one of them, according to eye witnesses, carried a gun ; the deputies used their guns to disperse a crowd in front of one of the mills at Marion. Their plea was self-defense — against an old man, James Jonas, now dead, who, after the sheriff had thrown tear- gas bombs into the crowd, began to lay about him with his cane, against two or three hundred unarmed workers who had shown no disposition to violence and even when they were shot at had only a desire to get away. The verdict was not a surprise to spectators in the courtroom, nor will it be to anyone who has followed the mill trials so far. The State always wins ; the strikers and organizers always lose. But the State may rest assured that, while labor conditions in the South remain what they now are, the bloody struggle will not end. THE PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION to report upon conditions in Haiti has now been voted by both Houses of Congress. It is, therefore, an accomplished fact. We have never felt that it was really needed, for the real facts as to Haiti and our misgovernment of it could be as- certained easily by Mr. Hoover had he the will to peruse the existing literature on the subject. But he now has his commission ; the question now is as to the personnel. Upon that everything will hinge. First of all the appointees should be men capable of entirely detached judgment about the conduct of our officials and the policies under which they have governed. Next there should be at least one repre- sentative colored American upon the commission. Our colored fellow-citizens are deeply concerned with the fate of Haiti; there are a number of them, notably Bishop Hurst of Baltimore, familiar with that country and competent to interpret the wishes of the Haitians themselves. If Mr.

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January 1, 1930] The Nation Hoover does as well by the Haitians as he has in naming his new research council on social trends, we shall not fear. A SPECIAL DISPATCH in the New York Times of December 18 stated that Secretary Adams apparently had received a reply from General Smedley D. Butler con- cerning his Pittsburgh speech on marine rule abroad, but did not intend to make it public. The Administration, the Times intimated, was not anxious to magnify the incident. Quite right ! Let it die. The public memory is short, any- way. But we beg our readers not to forget that it now stands uncontradicted in the verified newspaper record, and that, if the Times account is correct, the Navy Department, with General Butler's report in hand, does not deny, that the marines have elected "our men" in Nicaragua by methods that would have disgraced Philadelphia ward politics in its palmiest days. If the •Navy Department is satisfied to let the record stand at that, we are. THE NOTEWORTHY FEATURE of the banquet held several weeks ago to celebrate the fifth anni- versary of the resumption of arbitration in the New York men's clothing industry was the stress laid by all the speakers on the need for a more stabilized industry. Lead- ing retailers of the country, clothing manufacturers, and the union all joined in making a public plea for greater coopera- tion among the responsible factors in the industry. It is a far cry from discussion of the generalities of industrial re- lations to the consideration of such problems as the credit risks of the customers of woolen mills, the evils of cancela- tion, and the public admission by large distributors of the value of labor organization. Lieutenant Governor Lehman said that stabilization of this type of industry was incon- ceivable without a strong and responsible trade union ; and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers went so far as to predict the creation of an industrial coun- cil, composed of all the elements of the industry, which should utilize its moral force for the control of those who refuse to contribute to the welfare of the industry. A sur- vey of the operations of the impartial machinery, made by Jacob Billikopf, the Impartial Chairman, showed how much progress has been made toward the peaceful adjustment of disputes and toward higher standards of living in the indus- try as a result of the introduction and successful administra- tion of unemployment insurance. PAUL SCHEFFER, perhaps the foremost German for- eign correspondent, who since 1921 has brilliantly repre- sented the Berliner Tageblatt in Moscow, has been barred from Russia. The Soviet Government has assured him that there is nothing personal in this, but that it was necessary to establish further the principle that foreign journalists are not "resident" and therefore not covered by a treaty between Russia and Germany which guarantees to Germans perma- nently resident in Russia the right to return if they journey abroad. The Soviets have even hinted that Herr Scheffer may be allowed to return to Moscow at some later time. In a remarkable first-page editorial Theodor Wolff, editor of the Tageblatt, has told the whole story, declaring that the Russian Ambassador to Berlin had for a long time past urged upon him Herr Scheffer's recall. Theodor Wolff sees no possible interpretation for this act save that the Soviets de- sire to carry on the world revolution "with publicity com- pletely barred." Undoubtedly Herr Scheffer wrote from an intensely German point of view. It is true, also, that from having been an admirer of the Soviet Government he became one of its bitterest critics. His analyses of Soviet economic affairs, while biased, have been among the most searching of any made in Moscow. Fortunately America profits by Mos- cow's stupid action: Herr Scheffer is hereafter to represent the Tageblatt in the United States. In this connection it is to be noted that the Soviets have denied circulation in Russia to our excellent contemporary the World Tomorrow. THE NATIONAL CHILD LABOR Committee, which has just been celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, deserves the thanks of all good citizens for its notable work in protecting children against the many dangers of premature gainful employment. Its task, however, is only begun. Miss Grace Abbott, chief of the Children's Bureau, which is in some sense an outgrowth of the committee's work, pointed out at the anniversary dinner that when Great Britain in 1931 raises the school-leaving age to fifteen it will be ahead of the United States in preventing interference with education by child labor. In some of our States chil- dren of fourteen and fifteen may still work eleven hours a day, or even longer. Our legislative standards do not in- clude all children, and even our most advanced legislation constitutes only a first step in that "program for a whole- some, healthy service to the life of young people" called for by Miss Frances Perkins, Industrial Commissioner of New York. With gratitude for the progress of the past twenty- five years we must gird ourselves for vastly greater effort during the next quarter-century or we shall find ourselves in respect to our children far in the rear of other countries (Russia, for example) which have come to appreciate more highly than we the value of their chief asset. SPRING FASHIONS ARE OUT. Those persons who have been breathlessly awaiting their coming may take comfort, for they will be rejoiced to learn not only that skirts will be less extreme as to length but less adorned with bows, ruffles, pleats, and gadgets than they have been this fall. Thus the American woman can say triumphantly and loudly that she has won her fight against the Paris couturiers ; no longer will she be bound in what she shall wear by the captious and arbitrary notions that emanate from Paris. She can say this and she doubtless will ; but will it be true? M. Worth, head of one of the most fa- mous Paris dressmaking establishments, came to New York the other day. He was horrified — not a bit less horrified than Miss Fannie Hurst, Miss Virginia Gildersleeve, and at least half of the editorial staff of The Nation — by the pre- vailing female fashions. "No, no," Mr. Worth cried out in dismay, "Paris never had any such ideas as these. Paris modes for this winter differed, it is true, from those of late years; but not like this; not so long, so intricate, so elabo- rate, so decorated. These are American adaptations of Paris models. Pfui !" We do not vouch for the above as M. Worth's exact words, but they were indeed his sentiments. And what is the answer to that? If the American woman all by herself invented the clothes she has this winter been seeing in the shops, then she deserves her punishment, which is — to wear them.

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The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365 Consolidation — What For? AFTER almost ten years of travail, the Interstate Com- merce Commission has brought forth its plan of rail- road consolidation. The Transportation Act of 1920, it will be remembered, required the commission "as soon as practicable" to prepare and adopt a plan for the con- solidation of our nineteen-hundred-odd existing railroad com- panies into a limited number of systems. Competition was to be preserved "as fully as possible." For each system the cost of transportation as related to the value of property used was to be the same, so that under uniform rates they might all earn the same rate of return. The securities of consoli- dated roads might not exceed the valuation of the roads as fixed by the commission. That body was given no power to require consolidation, but once its plan was adopted, no con- solidation might occur that did not conform to the plan. The plan now published groups the railroads of the country into twenty-one systems, including the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific, making nineteen domestic groups. The commission would establish five trunk-line sys- tems, based on the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Van Sweringen group, and the Wabash, instead of a four-system consolidation. In the Northwest, the Great Northern and Northern Pacific are to merge, but without the Burlington, which is to be the center of an independent system. An important feature of the plan is the proposal for terminals not tied to a particular line, but open to the use of all. The sharp criticism imme- diately voiced by Professor Ripley and the rumblings of dissatisfaction from railroad and political leaders indicate something of the ordeal the plan will have to face. No more footless task than the one laid on the com- mission, we venture to say, was ever given by a legislature to an administrative body. The glaring theoretical incon- sistencies that have run through all our railroad legislation, reaching their climax in the much-lauded Transportation Act of 1920, made the preparation of such a plan all but meaning- less from the standpoint of the public interest. There are two possible reasons for consolidation: the gain to the public and the gain to the railroads and their financial backers. The first is the only sound reason for commission action ; but under the voluntary plan the commission can get results only when the railroads stand to gain. The action of the commission shows clearly its appreciation of the fatuousness of its task. It originally employed Professor Ripley to pre- pare a tentative plan of consolidation, on which it held ex- tensive hearings and collected fifty-four volumes of testi- mony. After four years of fruitless attempts to reconcile the conflicting interests of quarreling railroads, it let the mat- ter lapse, and in its report for 1925 asked to be relieved of the task of preparing a comprehensive plan. This request it repeated in 1926, 1927, and 1928. Congress did nothing, and the commission in apparent despair has now proceeded to "prepare and adopt" the plan just given out. It remains to be seen whether the railroads will accept the commission's proposed arrangements in whole or in part, and whether Congress will pass the necessary legislation. The primary purpose of present consolidation legisla- tion is to make possible a uniform rate structure that will not give excessive profits to strong, well-located roads with good credit, at the same time that it starves weak ones. To ac- complish this result, the strong roads must be combined with the weak ones, so that their earnings may go into a common pot. But railroad presidents are not fools; their job is to make money for their stockholders, and incidentally to serve the public in so far as such service will sooner or later in- crease profits. Therefore they are not going to take over weak roads that will prove a financial burden to them if they can help it, and in justice to their stockholders they ought not to. The only consolidation that is likely under pres- ent law, therefore, is consolidation that profits the strong roads. As regards the major issue of combining strong and weak roads, private profit and public gain stand directly opposed to each other. In general the strong roads will not consent to such mergers. Under present law and policies, they cannot be compelled to. Anyone who has followed the consolidation discussion of the past ten years knows that the ruling consideration in every case has been, not the public advantage involved, but the advantage of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the profits of the New York Central, the ambitions of the Van Sweringens, or this or that other private interest. These are the determining conditions now, and they will continue to be so just as long as the railroads are privately owned. Put nineteen hundred railroads together into nine- teen systems, and each system will still try, and will properly try, to make profits for its owners. We shall still have the same conflict of public and private interests that we have now. What we need is a unification of all the roads (not for purposes of operation, but for purposes of accounting) into a great transportation system in which the gains or losses of each particular part shall fall into a subordinate place. Theoretically, that is what we are trying to get now, but the whole attempt is vitiated by the effort of the roads to get as much as possible for themselves. Witness the mil- lions of dollars and the yet more valuable energy of thou- sands of able minds expended in the endless controversy over valuation, a controversy completely irrelevant to any public service — irrelevant to anything, indeed, except the gains of railroad owners. Witness the unceasing maneuvers of rail- road executives and financiers in their efforts to achieve this or that combination, purely to make private millions, with- out regard to any public gain or loss involved. Witness the indecent haste with which we scrapped all the remarkable gains of unification achieved during war-time, and the moun- tain of current misinformation about that experience. Consolidate the roads further under existing law and theories, and you only strengthen the forces of private inter- est lying squarely athwart the path of genuine consolidation. Let the strong roads strengthen themselves by consolida- tion, and you only increase the valuation on which they are going to demand a return. Discussion of the plan may help us to see the opposition of interest between a system of pri- vately owned, profit-making railroads and a public needing a unified railroad system operated to produce adequate trans- portation at minimum cost.

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January 1, 1930] The Nation India and Its Freedom A MILESTONE in the history of the East— this the year 1930 may prove to be. Few in the Occi- L dent outside of England realize how portentous the next few months may become. They understand vaguely that there is unrest throughout India; that Afghanistan has just been somewhat pacified after a bloody civil war; that in Palestine the bitterness grows between English, Jews, and Arabs; that in Irak, Syria, and a dozen other countries the natives are outspoken against the mandate system or the overlordship of white men, and are more and more de- termined to free themselves of any foreign yoke or guidance, saying that they, too, prefer, if necessary, bad government of their own to good government by foreigners. As we write comes news of trouble from far-flung spheres of Brit- ish influence. The British Under Secretary of State for the Colonies has just had to make the humiliating confession that in Southeast Nigeria in West Africa there has been a clash between natives and police in which eighteen natives were shot. The Labor Under Secretary "regretted to an- nounce" that all the casualties were among women — an in- credibly humiliating confession from an English official! From South Africa the news is very bad. In Natal, where in June last there was a riot at Durban in which over a hundred persons were killed or wounded, the police on November 14 examined 6,000 natives and made 600 arrests; a few days later 700 more arrests were made. Three na- tives have been wounded in the Transvaal and effigies of Premier Hertzog and General Smuts have been burned. As we write comes the startling news of a bomb meant for the Viceroy's train near Delhi on December 22 and the ominous break-up over the vexed question of dominion status of the preliminary conference between the Indian leaders and the Viceroy. "The English people in Parliament," wrote Richard Cobden seventy years ago, "have undertaken to be responsi- ble for governing 150,000,000 of people, despotically, in India. They have adopted the principle of a military despot- ism, and I have no faith in such an undertaking being any- thing but a calamity and a curse to the people of England." He added that it was "an abiding conviction in my mind that we have entered on an impossible and hopeless career in India." Today it is India that is the touchstone, and it is certainly the irony of fate that it is a Labor govern- ment which is to be put to the test by India as to its de- mocracy and its willingness to do justice to a great mass of backward human beings. There are many in England who say today that the life of Ramsay MacDonald's so promising Government depends upon what happens in India. Moreover, the hour is at hand. At this juncture the Indian National Congress is meeting to decide whether the promise lately made to it of ultimate dominion status is to be ac- cepted by the leaders of the Indian people, or whether there will be an immediate declaration of war. Not, of course, physical war, at least not at the beginning; the Indian people are completely disarmed and forbidden under heavy penal- ties to possess arms. If it comes to a break the struggle will begin with non-cooperation, that is, the refusal to obey laws and to pay taxes. But it is a grave question whether it will be possible to carry on a pacific revolution without eventual bloodshed. A single blunder by a British official ; another bloody deed like the massacre at Amritsar ; the killing in India of eighteen women in order "to allay unrest," and the fat will be in the fire. Because we have felt deeply concerned over the situa- tion in India we have, of late, given considerable space to Indian matters. We print two articles elsewhere in this issue presenting contrasted British points of view. No one is better qualified to speak for one side than C. F. Andrews, the foremost British supporter of Mahatma Gandhi, whose recent visits to this country — where he now is — have made him personally known to many Americans. The hope that men like Mr. Andrews held for averting a calamity in India was due to the recent renewal by the present Viceroy of the promise of ultimate dominion status. A year ago the hot- heads in the National Congress could barely be held in check by Gandhi ; it was only through his efforts that the con- gress did not demand dominion status at once. We earnestly hope that the patience of the Indian people can be stretched a little farther. Sorely tried as they have been, one more delay seems trifling in comparison with the horrors of a long and bloody struggle. As to what is best for India each person will, we sup- pose, decide in accordance with his own particular political philosophy. Those who assume that only men of fair skin can govern properly in India will have their answer ready, and so will all those who have lost faith in democratic doc- trines. There is also a great school, notably in England, believing in self-rule and desiring to help the Indian people, which can, however, only point to the possibility, nay, the probability, of religious conflicts and wars among the Indian states, and therefore finds itself unable to carry through to the logical conclusion the principles which it professes to hold. To our minds no compromise is possible. It is the Indian people who must have the final say and no one else. From the day of its foundation this journal has been firmly committed to the doctrine that no amount of good govern- ment inflicted upon a people by officials from another coun- try can take the place of self-government, however bad. This may be, as some say, carrying theory to indefensible ends. We can, however, no more yield our position than could the American Abolitionists who were told that if they persisted in their mad demands for freedom for the Negroes the United States would become nothing but a shambles. So we are for having the people of India achieve free- dom by the peaceful means of Gandhi. Any other course will obscure the issue, rouse the bitterest and vilest human passions, and give to the imperialists of Great Britain the very excuse they seek to renew what Cobden himself charac- terized as the English "game of fraud, violence, and injus- tice in Asia." But however the issue may come out in the im- mediate future the fact is, in our judgment, that the day of white supremacy in backward and undeveloped countries is drawing to a close, if only because of the lessons of hypoc- risy and deceit and wholesale murder which the superior races taught to their inferiors from 1914 to 1918.

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The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365 Bargain- Counter Fame TWO members of The Nation staff have received a letter which informs the recipient that he has been selected as one of The World's Most Useful Per- sons. Careful investigation reveals the fact that at least $100 must be forwarded to the Centenarian Club of East Aurora, New York, before the names can be publicly en- tered upon the roll of honor, but the distinction is so great and the cost, comparatively speaking, so little that we have decided to pass the details on to our readers. We are in- clined to suspect that "most useful" means only "most use- ful to the gentlemen who receive the checks," but that ex- planation will probably not be printed, and we suggest that any members of our public who need honor more than they need a hundred dollars try sending draft, money order, or stamps to Mr. St. Clair Baxton, secretary of the association. We are not cynics but we do suspect that almost anybody with the needful cash will be discovered to have claims quite as authentic as the two editors of The Nation. Judge Henry Neil, somewhat awkwardly described as "the father of mothers' pensions," is the president of the club and its purpose is to prolong the lives of the most use- ful persons by teaching them to subsist upon a rational diet. Anyone who pays, not $100 but $10,000, automatically be- comes so exceedingly useful that the association will under- take to feed him at its own scientific table for the rest of his useful life, and it offers specimen menus — in which tur- nips, tomatoes, and spinach play a prominent part — to show what it will do for him. But even we humbler, hundred- dollar members are not neglected, for "every man, woman, or child who enrols as a member of the Centenarian Club becomes — a potential centenarian, and can look forward to an extended life of happy, healthy usefulness." He can also, it seems, contemplate the list of useful persons kindly supplied and take comfort in the undenied assumption that he is in the same class with Calvin Coolidge and Charles Chaplin, Herbert Hoover and Bernarr Macfadden, Anton Lang and Mussolini — all of whom appear on the list. Only once does Judge Neil seem to us to have become a little confused in his logic. He is enlarging upon the joys of longevity and upon the importance of diet in attaining it when he inadvertently remarks that improper eating habits kept many at home with bad health when they should have been fighting for their country in the last great war. At this point we paused and, after a little reflection, tore up the check we were about to mail. We do want to live to be a hundred and we might even be willing to eat turnips to do it, but surely bullets are even more dangerous than pro- teins and it strikes us as undeniable that the sickly who stayed home had a far better chance of becoming cente- narians than the turnip-eaters who went to battle. And so, instead of joining the centenarians at East Aurora, we think we shall form a club of our own and formulate a dietary pro- gram guaranteed to give our members some form of indi- gestion entirely incompatible with life in the army. Dys- pepsia may not be pleasant, and it certainly is not patriotic to prefer ill health to the soldier's glorious death, but if it's long life that one is looking for one had better not be too robust when the next war comes around. The Night After Christmas THE joyful Christmas season has once more come and gone. We have had the usual plum-pudding stom- ach-aches and depleted-bank-account headaches. We have heard shouts of joy about Christmas from the young and moans of distress from the old. We have listened to the customary pleas from earnest persons to remember what Christmas really means — as if anyone in the world could state the meaning, after some two thousand years, of so com- plicated a festival, so deeply interwoven with the thought and behavior of millions of persons and dozens of nations. The Soviet Government, in its bold, refreshing way, has decided to abolish not only Christmas but Sunday. Four days of work, one of rest : that is, in so far as it is enforceable, to be the Soviet program henceforth. But whatever our distaste for Christmas on the morning after, we can learn something from it about the state of America. Thus we read of a lady in San Francisco who bought for a Christmas present to a certain gentleman an emerald ring costing $240,000. We hear the story of another lady, also anxious to make a present to a gentleman, who after consulting with a famous jeweler in New York about just the right sort of distinguished gift that should properly represent her sentiments, decided on a knife, fork, and soup spoon (because "his favorite dish is soup") of platinum with a monogram in diamonds, all for $1,500. This would seem to indicate that the recent stock-market disaster had not been quite universal. But wait : the New York Times is having a hard time collecting its fund for the Hundred Neediest Cases; unless by the end of the collection period unprece- dented strides are made in the fund, it will fall short of last year's total. Charity, the first of the luxuries, seems to be dropping behind. Thus also we are told that a lady in search of an ermine wrap for her daughter offered consider- ably less than the price demanded by one couturier, was refused, and made the same offer to another who accepted it gladly. And when she got home, after making her purchase, the first salesman was on the telephone, telling her that the firm had changed its mind and would sell her the cloak for the sum she had named ! Not too much can be deduced from so short a list of incidents. But probably they are not alone of their kind. In so far as they are significant at all, they indicate first that Christmas giving is over-lavish, ostentatious, and vulgar; sec- ond, that the decline in the value of investments has first of all reduced gifts for charity; and third, that while the middle-class and middle-price shops may have done as large a Christmas business as usual, the luxury trades were hard enough hit to wish to take any price they could get for what they had to sell. These deductions put one in a strangely sympathetic frame of mind toward the Soviet system. If Christmas is to be no more than an unintelligent redistribu- tion of wealth where it is not needed, then would it not be simpler to abolish it altogether? Four days of work; one day of rest. On the day after Christmas how simple, sweet, and desirable that seems!

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Tanuary 1, 1930] The Nation It Seems to Heywood Broun HERE it is 1930, or thereabouts, and I must make a resolution to lose a deal of weight. Dieting is difficult and I don't play handball. The best sort of exercise is of the sort which can be introduced easily into the daily life of the victim. I think I'll endeavor to adopt the foreign custom of kissing ladies' hands. Let me admit at the beginning that I realize this is much more difficult than it seems. I don't expect to be an expert without long and protracted practice. Many years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote a short story in which he dealt not unkindly with an expatriate American who was endeavoring to become Anglicized. Just what happened to him is unimportant as far as we are concerned, but in the course of the tale Kipling ventured the remark that when an American had succeeded in learning a golf swing, correct and full, he was to all practical purposes a Briton. Of course, at that time Bobby Jones was not yet born and Hagen was a small boy. Within Mr. Kipling's lifetime dozens of Americans learned to master a coordinated movement which the novelist felt could never be conquered by any save those who were British by birth or spiritual alliance. And so, though I am inept in the be- ginning, it may be that within ten years observers will comment, "I wonder why these clumsy foreigners can't kiss a lady's hand the way that Broun does." If a nation can learn a movement as difficult as the full St. Andrew's swing there is no reason why any one of us should despair of being able to kiss a lady's hand with both propriety and grace. Possibly propriety is not exactly the word I want. The average American, as things are now, goes about the business all wrong or nearly so. He raises the hand to his lips instead of bending over it. The spirit is that of a hurried diner at a buffet lunch rather than of reverence and adoration. It is no fun for the lady and no exercise for the man. Everybody knows that we do not bend nearly enough. There is in our land insufficient romance and too much waist line. We should seize eagerly upon a custom which promises to promote the one and re- duce the other. Not a few of our good citizens engage each morning in exercises designed to promote suppleness of figure. The daily dozen still has an honored place in the national regime. But this is mechanical. Setting-up exercises are hardly ever done with honest zest. It is my impression that muscles do best when they are moved about more or less unconsciously. It would be better by far for a man to kiss somebody's hand twelve times a day than to put the same number of foot pounds of energy into the rather dull pastime of touch- ing the floor of his bedroom with his fingertips. In the beginning of my plan it may be necessary to kiss the same hand twelve times. Twelve different hands would be better for the circulation, but nobody should attempt too much at the start. In looking about for fair and friendly persons having available hands a man could get lots of air, plenty of walking, and possibly even a little running. It is not well to stress too much the purely utilitarian side of the practice. There is need in our life of some new form of greeting or farewell. It seems to me that the hand- shake is one of the least satisfactory contacts ever hit upon by man. Unless a terrific effort is thrown into the proce- dure there's no warmth in a handshake. I would be per- fectly willing to shake hands with my worst enemy just be- fore he turned to stab me in the back. To me this would not seem unduly treacherous, for a handshake should commit no one to anything. Only rarely is a circuit set up. "Excuse my glove," which is used in northern New York and, I am told, in some parts of Ohio, is silly. There's nothing par- ticularly personal in a handshake even when the leather is absent. Why apologize? The people who have tried to make the handshake sig- nificant have all failed grossly. And they deserved their failures. There is the man who endeavors to put sincerity into his clasp by crushing some of the smaller bones in the hand entrusted to him. Practically every state in the Union now has a law which provides that it is not homicide if you kill him immediately after the break. And there is the lingerer. He does not put any crush- ing force into the grip but just hangs on. By mere duration he hopes to suggest some deeper note of feeling. But I have been told that many go away merely impressed with the belief that the poor fellow is fearfully absent-minded. "May I have my hand back now, if you please," has been enough to discourage whole regiments of lingerers. No, the thing is preposterous. Not Hercules himself or Percy Shelley could make a handshake passionate. Still it isn't passion I had so much on my mind as warmth and friendliness. A kiss can be a very adequate expression of the more eager emotions. And this is the very fact which limits its utility. I am glad to hear that casual kissing is making great advances. When I was a young man, kissing was reserved exclusively for relatives and it was far too good for them. And if she was not your cousin then you had to marry her on the first convenient Monday in order to make an honest woman of her. The old censure lying against all those who kiss and tell is another indication of how important the kiss must have been back in the days when Rostand called it a rose-red dot over the "i" in "loving." Suppose you do tell? What on earth have you got to make into an anecdote? People now kiss without commitments. In earlier days, judging by the current comedies, to kiss was to surrender. The hero and the heroine never kissed until just before the final cur- tain. If they had done so earlier it might have created a bad impression. And the old-style problem play had a kiss in it in the middle of the big third-act scene. This also meant something very important, but I can't remember what. We need the kiss upon the hand or something which can stand between the handshake and the more orthodox native kiss. You never can tell just how that will turn out. Not infrequently one gets more than he bargains for — or very much less. It would not be a good thing, for instance, for a business man to start the day by kissing all his employees in turn. But he might very possibly kiss their hands. That would improve his figure and it couldn't very well do the young ladies in the office any harm. Heywood Broun

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8 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365 Farm Relief Meets an Enemy By ROBERT S. ALLEN Washington, December 18 THE farm-relief act that the special session of Con- gress enacted this summer with such solemn assur- ance of great deeds to come has not had long to wait for its test. The long fight between the grain dealer and the grain grower, that has been productive of so much politi- cal and economic history in the Northwest, has forced the issue. On its outcome rests the question of the integrity of the government in this legislation. If the grain farmers win their fight, then the live-stock, the fruit, the cotton, and other growers may hope to win when their turn comes to organize effective marketing agencies. If the grain producers lose, then the others have no chance. Whatever the result, it is certain to have far-reaching political and economic effect. The immediate fight centers around the program of the Farm Board to set up a farmer-owned and farmer-controlled grain marketing and stabilization structure. In its larger aspect the fight is the old, old struggle between the farmer endeavoring to organize the selling end of his business under his own ownership and management, and the commission man, who, possessing the great bulk of the terminal and stor- age facilities, to say nothing of credit, has for so long taken millions of dollars yearly in tolls from the producers, using every political and economic resource to break up the farmers' movement. Heretofore the machinery for the marketing of grain, from the elevators in which the grain is stored to the establishment of prices and the grading of grains, has been controlled, directly or indirectly, by commission firms hold- ing seats on the grain exchanges or boards of trade in Minne- apolis, Duluth, and Chicago. The Farm Board, having acquired membership on the Chicago Board of Trade through its purchase of a brokerage house, the Rural Grain Com- pany, is apparently preparing the way for farmers' coopera- tives to keep the marketing of their grain wholly in their own control. This has not served to lessen the alarm of the dealers. In this fight, the farmer has certain advantages never before on his side. Two decades ago. when wheat producers of the Northwest organized the ill-fated Equity Cooperative Exchange, they had everyone and everything against them — the politicians, the banks, the merchants, their own inexperi- ence, and above all the power and organization of the dealers. The breakdown of this organization was the object of an investigation in 1924 by the Federal Trade Commission. Senator Gerald P. Nye, in a speech before the Senate on De- cember 9, said : This report [of the Federal Trade Commission! sets forth in no uncertain terms the charge that the Equity Cooperative Exchange was wrecked through a program of conspiracy and agreement among the people associated in the grain trade by boycott and by threats of boycott and by a general program of sabotage to hinder, embarrass, and destroy the business of the cooperative. It succeeded in its low work, just as it has succeeded in stamping out competition whenever it should show its head in the form of farmers' cooperative marketing agencies. The situation has changed since then. The ten-year agricultural depression has hit farmer, merchant, and banker alike. The years of agricultural agitation brought new politi- cal forces into influence, the Non-Partisan League, the Farmer-Labor Party, the La Follette Progressive Party, giv- ing the farmer in both State and national politics a militant and enlightened representation. And with Congressional elec- tions looming in the approaching months the farmers are in a position to make their protest effective. In Congress and in the farm belt the situation is being closely observed and talked about. Reports from the North- west are to the effect that there is greater interest in the out- come of the fight between the grain men and the Farm Board than in the tariff bill. The politicians, caught between the grim determination of the farmers and the frantic outcries of the grain dealers, are anxiously observing developments. The issue is clear-cut; and the farmers know this. Both sides cannot win. If the Farm Board's plan goes through success- fully, then the grain dealer loses. If he wins, then the farmer loses. The farm-relief legislation becomes a farce, the Farm Board an innocuous and futile agency, and agriculture faces again the task of renewing its struggle for effective collective bargaining. Senator Nye put the matter squarely in a discussion of the issue on the Senate floor : The Farm Board has come to grips with a farm foe of great strength and influence. It is being bombarded without let-up by organized interests which are leaving no stone unturned, no string of influence unpulled in an effort to embarrass or halt the Farm Board in that body's pro- gram looking to what now seems to be genuine farm relief. . . . By its action the Farm Board has made it clear that the only way for agriculture to win is to supplant the grain-trade operators with farmer-controlled market- ing machinery. . . . While the Farm Board has ignored the more personal interests of the grain trade, it has been apparent that the board has sought to play fair with the trade. The board has realized that the trade-owned terminal and elevator facilities which should under no circumstances be confis- cated but which instead could well be utilized by the new cooperative machinery. . . . The grain trade did stand to lose . . . but to lose what? To lose, primarily, that opportunity to sit in the doorway and collect unearned tolls from the producers of grain. . . . With their backs to the wall the grain trade takes its last stand. Will they accomplish their purpose in the end, or will this administration, through the Farm Board, dem- onstrate to the farm people of the Northwest that at last they do have a helping hand from their government, after their years of struggle with the grain trade which has never contributed anything to the farmers? Senator Nye introduced into the Congressional Record a letter that farmer friends had sent him, written by a grain commission firm in Minneapolis and sent out presumably to all grain-elevator men throughout the Northwest urging revolt against the program of the Farm Board. To offset

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January 1, 1930] The Nation credit pressure on the farmers the board has had to make funds available to cooperatives which have been called upon by commission houses either to pay outstanding loans without delay or to sign five-year grain contracts. So far the farmer leaders declare that there has been no yielding on the part of the Farm Board. It is true that from certain Republican quarters assurances have come to them that the board's plans do not contemplate the elimina- tion of the private grain trade. Alexander Legge, former president of the International Harvester Company, who is chairman of the board and the leader in its cooperative mar- keting program, has himself said this, although admitting that if its plans go through the farmer will dominate the grain-marketing system. The farm leaders are warm in their praise of Mr. Legge's work. They declare that he is carry- ing on courageously and ably. He has won their hearty ap- proval not only by his work in directing the setting up of the grain-marketing organization, but by his stepping in at the time of the stock-market collapse in October and fixing a price of $1.25 a bushel for wheat. According to Senator Nye, the grain trade would have forced the price down to sixty or seventy cents a bushel. Julius Barnes, who is a grain exporter on a large scale and now, as chairman of the board of directors of the Cham- ber of Commerce of the United States, head of Mr. Hoover's business men's council, has interested himself in the commis- sion men's case. He has gone with them to confer with Mr. Legge. Mr. Barnes, summoned before the Senate lobby in- vestigating committee, declared that his sole purpose was to act as a conciliator. But to the farmer there is nothing to conciliate, and he does not trust Mr. Barnes, whose asso- ciation with the grain men has done more perhaps than anything else to arouse the growers. The Farm Board is trying, by means of a central Farm- ers' Grain Corporation, to set up a national cooperative grain- marketing structure. All the cooperatives, with regional units reaching down to the individual elevators and farmers, would belong to it. It would be backed by a $500,000,000 fund obtained direct from the federal treasury. The economic effect of such an organization, if successful, is a moot ques- tion. Some economists maintain that it would inevitably mean ever-increasing acreage and mounting overproduction ; but the farmers assert that that is a problem which they will tackle when it arises. The issue now, they declare, is whether they will be permitted to organize their own mar- keting or whether the private dealers will once again triumph over them. That to them is the test; on that question they are waging their fight. The Radio Corporation in the News Bv PAUL Y. ANDERSON Washington, December 21 CHRISTMAS is here, and the spirit of good-will and forgiveness has descended on the Senate, erasing hatreds, banishing partisanship, and uprooting the most formidable conscientious scruples. Doubtless this ex- plains the ease with which Old Joe Grundy was able to sidle into a Senate seat which had been so strenuously de- fended against the contaminating presence of poor Bill Vare. Doubtless, too, it explains the generous majorities by which Albert L. Watson and Clarence J. Hopkins were confirmed as federal judges, although there are cynics who contend that the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Kansas Anti-Saloon League are even more potent in such matters than the Yule- tide spirit. As for me, I decline to surrender my illusions, and one of the most touching scenes I have yet witnessed was that in which Old Joe helped to make his own dream come true by voting to confirm Watson, who was originally picked at a conference in Old Joe's own room at the May- flower Hotel. And yet, if there is a Santa Claus who re- members deserving politicians, why does not someone re- mind him of Claudius Huston, Chairman of the Republican National Committee and trusted friend of President Hoover, who has just suffered the bad fortune to be sued in the Dis- trict of Columbia Supreme Court for $88,000? The plain- tiff is Guy Standifer, wealthy shipbuilder and sportsman, and a vast deal of mystery surrounds the action. It is doubly unfortunate that the incident should have occurred just when the Senate Lobby Investigating Committee was un- earthing the $75,000 fee which another friend of the Presi- dent, E. P. Shattuck, received from the Cuban sugar lobby. Mr. Hoover seems to have bad luck with his friends! SPEAKING of bad luck — it is not all reserved for Presi- dents, and may even overtake a deserving and indus- trious newspaper reporter if his industry happens to outrun his knowledge of his employer's financial connections. This painful discovery recently was made by Frank K. Boal, Washington correspondent of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and six other papers owned by the illustrious Paul Block. Mr. Boal obtained from a responsible government official certain information tending further to emphasize the Ad- ministration's deep and well-known displeasure with Charles E. Mitchell, president of the National City Bank of New York, and suggesting that Mitchell might soon retire from that position. He scheduled the story to the seven Block papers, and all seven accepted and published it. Very soon thereafter the editor of the Post-Gazette called Boal by tele- phone to say that Mr. Block was extremely angry over the publication, and was demanding the name of his informant. The reporter replied that he was pledged to confidence on the name, but would divulge it to his employer if the latter would let it go no further. That pledge not being forth- coming, the reporter stood his ground, and five days later was summarily discharged. In less than a week he received a call from a gentleman who identified himself as an emis- sary of the bank. He related that Block was under finan- cial obligations to Mitchell, but insisted that the bank had not sought Boal's discharge. He failed to get the name of Boal's informant, and so far Boal hasn't got another job. # ♦ * * * THIS salutary example may or may not be responsible for the curious manner in which the recent radio hearings before the Senate Committee on Interstate Com-

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10 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365 merce have been reported — or, rather, unreported — in the vast majority of the daily papers. Unless the reader happens to subscribe to a paper using the Universal News Service, or to a certain great Middle Western daily which modesty forbids me to name, he or she will be greatly surprised to learn the turn which those hearings have taken. Others know only that the majestic Owen D. Young appeared be- fore the committee, demanding permission to merge the trans- oceanic cable and radio systems and the domestic telegraph lines in one gigantic communications monopoly, on the ground that they are unable, in their divided state, to com- pete successfully with "the British monopoly" ; that he re- iterated the familiar story that the Radio Corporation of America was organized from patriotic motives at the instance of President Wilson; and that majestically he departed with the plaudits of a grateful Senate ringing in his ears. With that much everyone is familiar. Now for the sadly neglected facts. Subsequent questioning of Mr. Young's less sancti- fied subordinates disclosed that the Radio Corporation's na- tionally advertised and constantly reiterated claim that it was "founded at the request of the United States Govern- ment" rests on nothing more substantial than the statement — itself disputed — that President Wilson in 1919 asked the General Electric Company not to sell certain radio patents to the British Marconi Company; and that subsequent to the organization of the Radio Corporation an admiral of the navy asked and received the President's permission to attend some of the board meetings as an observer. That is abso- lutely all ! Under a cross-examination of the sort which his chief had magically been spared, Manton Davis, vice-presi- dent and general counsel of the company, admitted that President Wilson had "neither asked nor suggested its or- ganization," but that he and his associates organized it "on their own motion and of their own volition." So much for that story. ***** NEXT, under similar cross-examination William Win- terbottom, who occupies the comparatively humble but highly practical position of traffic manager of the R.C.A. communications system, admitted that competition between American communication lines and those of that ogre, "the British merger," actually exists nowhere in the world. He did speak of competition in the Pacific with a cable "whose ownership is largely British," but further questioning quickly revealed that the cable in question is a part of the Interna- tional Telephone and Telegraph system, with which the Radio Corporation wishes to unite in competition against the British! And there in the stenographic record of the hear- ings lies the wreckage of Mr. Young's case — buried from the eyes of all the world excepting that portion of the public which I have named. With it are buried many other inter- esting facts. For example, there is the fact that competition between radio and the cables — which Mr. Young seeks to end — has universally resulted in reduction of rates, ranging from 20 to 35 per cent. There is the fact that the R.C.A. refuses to sell communicating apparatus, of which it has a manufacturing monopoly, to anyone who might set up a com- peting communications system. There is the fact that it re- fuses to sell transmitting tubes to owners of broadcasting stations who build the rest of their apparatus instead of buy- ing it from R.CA. There is the fact that in licensing the use of its patents to other manufacturers of receiving sets it not only required them originally to pay royalties on the sets, but also on the hardwood cabinets in which they were encased, and even on the packing boxes in which they were shipped. This was delightfully described by Mr. Young as "requiring them to pay their share of the cost of research." ***** ALTHOUGH interesting, the foregoing are compara- tive trifles, involving only a few millions a year. What impressed me most was the financial "set-up" for the proposed merger of the R.C.A. communications system with the I. T. and T. It is admitted that the actual physical value of the radio facilities involved is not more than $25,- 000,000. In exchange for them, however, the R.C.A. would receive I. T. and T. stock having a present market value of approximately $100,000,000. Assuming that a monopoly in international communications was established, and that the government could regulate its rates (which is highly doubt- ful), the question arises as to what valuation would be al- lowed, as a rate basis, for that $25,000,000 worth of radio facilities. Mr. Young and General Harbord modestly sug- gested a valuation of $40,000,000 and a rate that would return 8 per cent on that figure. Such a valuation would include "intangible assets" such as "going value" — although it is obvious to a child that the going value of the system rests wholly on a gift from the public which would pay the rates, viz., the wave lengths and licenses to operate. Also, it would include the cost of unproductive research and of patents that are obsolete or useless. Senator Couzens aptly described this as "capitalizing your own mistakes." Person- ally, observing the market value of the I. T. and T. stock that would be exchanged for the property, I entertain grave doubts that the stockholders would even be content with a valuation of $40,000,000. Most refreshing of all the testi- mony was that of the extremely candid and forthright David Sarnoff, executive vice-president of the R.C.A. In effect, he said the company is able, through its manufacturing mo- nopoly, to keep other people out of the radio-communications business ; therefore the government should waste no wave lengths on "John Smith and Bill Jones," but give all of them to the R.C.A. He said that certain regulatory laws now on the federal statute books interfere with the plans of the R.C.A. ; therefore they should be repealed at once. He said, finally, that these continual investigations of its methods by the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and the committees of Congress had been extremely irritating to the R.CA., and that they should be discontinued once and for all.. Poor Mr. Sarnoff! I liked him immensely for his frankness, but I shudder to think of the result when his testimony is read and dissected and elaborated on the floor of the Senate. Unless the temper of that body alters greatly under the mellowing influence of Senator Grundy, the com- munications monopoly is further away than ever. Indeed, the legislation, if any, which ensues from these hearings is likely to include either a prohibition on the sort of propa- ganda that has lately been broadcast over the National and Columbia chains by William Hard and Fred Wile, or a provision for some form of antidote. Hard's offensive at- tacks on the Senate and his incredible defense of Vare and Grundy — all thinly disguised as humor — have provoked tre- mendous resentment not only in the committee but in the entire Senate.

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January 1, 1930] The Nation 11 The National City Fiasco By C. W. ONE of the most interesting consequences of the recent collapse in the stock market was the last-moment failure of the National City Bank and the Corn Ex- change Bank Trust Company to achieve the merger to which the whole financial world had been looking forward for sev- eral inflated weeks. The December issue of the National City's Letter gives the incident a formal explanation, which has been generally reprinted by the press. When the biggest bank in the country slips at the very point of becoming the biggest in the world, its explanation of the mishap is news. The incident itself was dramatic. It involved the failure of the shareholders of the National City to ratify the action of their officials and directors, the willingness of the officials and directors to have their action left unratified, the chagrin of the Corn Exchange shareholders at the loss of a chance to sell their property for about $100,000,000 more than it was worth in the market, and the devastation of the prestige of Mr. Charles E. Mitchell, who was separated by but one step from making his financial organization the most powerful in the world as it was already the most aggressive. The ex- planation published by the National City tells nothing really new, but makes the best of a bad situation with characteristic boldness. It conscientiously points out — what its readers al- ready know — that final authority in a corporation lies with the stockholders, and that certain acts, such as a merger with another corporation, require that authority specifically. It does not point out, however, that Mr. Mitchell's bargain turned out to be such a poor one that he had to acquiesce in its abandonment, or that being forced to let stockholders pull a corporation out of a hole the management got into is un- usually painful, especially when the management is of the sort that ordinarily sees to it that whatever it starts gets finished. But candor is not a prominent virtue in business. Sometimes, as in this case, the truth reflects most indelicately on the judg- ment of responsible persons. Mr. Mitchell and the other officers of his organization are supposed to know a great deal about investment values and to practise in their management a stern, unpitiful technique. Yet in the merger agreement they had drawn up, they had provided not only for an ex- change of the shares of the two banks, which is ordinarily all that the situation requires, but also as alternative they opti- mistically and generously provided for outright payment to the widows and orphans and others who own the Corn Ex- change stock a price in cash which was almost six times its book value and almost sixty times its earnings. Almost any- one today will tell you sagaciously that sixty times earnings is too much to pay for anything. But the National City's offer was made many weeks ago when we were still in "a new economic era." Extravagant as it seems now, the option to take cash would have been accepted by few if any at the time it was arranged ; but by the time the agreement came to be ratified it would have been accepted by everyone. But the most impressive part of the whole affair is this: the National City Bank, with all its resources of statistical information, economic counsel, long experience, and unham- pered executive ability, failed to see the deflation that was at hand. For that matter, no one else saw it, either, except those who had been seeing it inveterately for the past two years, but a concern as important as the National City is ex- pected to see such things and see them accurately. Reason- ably or unreasonably, its managers are supposed to be able to do what others cannot. And when they turn out to be as blind as the utterly sightless, people wonder what it is that all those salaries are supposed to pay for. Rumors have per- sisted that many of Mr. Mitchell's shareholders feel that his usefulness to the bank has been fatally impaired by this un- fortunate miscarriage of judgment, but if he should relinquish the headship of his organization, he would undoubtedly be succeeded by an inferior in ability. Mr. Mitchell may be charged with making one big mistake, but scores of other financial executives have done nothing, and by doing nothing have allowed banking to be more and more cluttered with over-stuffed furniture and vice-presidents, and more and more sterilized with privilege. Mr. Mitchell has been imaginative and unconventional. Without intending probably to do more than make money he has done as much as any one except Mr. Giannini to socialize banking. From his position at the helm of the biggest bank in the country he has seen past the busi- ness of millionaires — which is the butt and sea-mark of most bankers' utmost sail — to that of clerks and laborers. The National City — a bank whose resources are practi- cally two billions of dollars, whose organization spreads over the whole earth, whose aggressive tactics make its otiose com- petitors squirm — began a year ago to lend to common people in small amounts at reasonable interest. It began selling securities to even the least investor. It established a fund for the cultural education as well as the practical training of its employees, and one of its three first beneficiaries is being put through college. Leaving aside the question of motive, the facts are significant in business evolution. If the National City as a consequence of the hurt to its amour propre decides to draw in its horns and sulk among the fossils who have found its policies too realistic and progressive, it will be extremely unfortunate, because in banking more than in any other kind of business there is need of organizations that have the courage and intelligence to make experiments. The tradition of responsibility is so strong among good bankers that they are afraid of any deviation from the established rule, and their sensitiveness is pretty well justified by the fact that they are after all dealing with other people's money and are under obligation to return it on demand. But deviations of a systematic sort must be made, for it is only thus that banking can be adapted to the changing requirements of a changing society. Consequently, the errors of those who are courageous enough to attempt new things are regrettable not merely for the immediate embarrassment suffered by the banks concerned, but for the set-back to the spirit of experi- mentation upon which improvement depends. In this instance, all that has been checked, so far as we know, is the plan to make the National City the biggest bank in the world. And as for that, one may perfectly well ask what it has to do with improvement of banking. What is the

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12 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365 use of being big? Why should banks merge, anyway? The explanations they themselves publish on such occasions tell nothing, they are so full of anxiety to soothe the public. Their faithful repetition of one another's verbiage would lead one to suppose that banks were run by parrots; which may be substantially correct, yet still leaves the problem of mergers obscure. Probably the real explanation is that even parrots do not either control or understand their destiny, and often do things they never meant to do. So with bankers. So with Mr. Mitchell and his unintended socialization of banking. So for that matter with business in general. When one contemplates the disorderly, ineffective, purposeless way in which man goes about satisfying his economic needs — calling the thing he does "business" — one is convinced with- out reference to geology or astronomy that society must be very, very young. But the efforts society makes are never the last word, any more than the fumblings of babies are unre- lated to the dexterity of grown people. Even if it is impossi- ble as yet to see much order in the development of civiliza- tion from the point of view of mankind as a whole, it is cer- tainly true that particular eras have grown or are now grow- ing with an orderly growth which transcends the individual. All this applies to mergers. They may be effected in order to gratify vanity and personal ambition, but such per- sonal reasons are not ultimate. The "growing point" of business evolution will always be appearing in some accidental event, in itself unforeseen and unpredictable. Consequently it is reasonable to believe that the circumstances which pre- vented the merger of the largest bank in New York with the most profusely branched bank in New York and which upset one or two less important combinations by no means closed a movement. The National City and the Corn Ex- change will probably not merge with one another, after the falling out they have had, but they will inevitably merge somewhere, and so will their competitors. The immediate reason for this is that the forces of com- petition always seek an equilibrium, and if equilibrium at the old level is destroyed it will be sought on a new one. The bank mergers that have occurred recently in New York and in the country at large destroyed old balances of power and dislocated old connections. If they had been merely separate and unrelated phenomena, they might have stopped at any moment like the ticking of a clock. But as a matter of fact they were all intimately interrelated parts of a general move- ment by no means peculiar to banking. The First and Sec- ond National have to combine because the Third and Fourth are combining, and the Third and Fourth combine because the Fourth has a kind of business and a type of management that the Third needs. When such a disturbance is started, and new strains and new inequalities are created, a long process of smoothing down is inevitable before new truces are attained. And back of this are still greater forces. The imperfections of our economic organization are so great, and the social requirements upon it are so taxing that the secular pressure upon business seems certain not to be suddenly re- laxed. To the extent that mergers are the responses to such secular pressure and occur therefore as evolutionary changes, we may be confident that they are not at an end. And in banking they may begin again at any time, assuming indeed that they can even be said to have stopped. A Substitute for Lynching By HORACE B. DAVIS EDUCATED opinion the country over is all but unani- mous in its public disapprobation of lynching. South- ern newspapers are no less emphatic than those of the North on the subject; representative gatherings of Southern educators and Southern white women have gone on record condemning the crime in the strongest terms. Perhaps as a result of this agitation, lynchings have been decreasing for a generation. Whereas in 1892 no less than 235 persons were reported as having been lynched, the number fell to ninety- seven in 1902, eighty-nine in 1912, and sixty-one in 1922. From 1923 to 1927 the average number per year was under twenty-three, and in 1928 only eleven lynchings were re- ported. In the first six months of 1929 there were reports of only four lynchings, including that of N. G. Romey. white, a grocer, at Lake City, Florida. Not since records of lynchings were kept have there been so few. While the actual number is probably greater than reported, the record undoubtedly is more complete now than formerly.* The deduction is often made that terrorization of the colored race in the South is decreasing also, and that Negroes enjoy greater security of life and limb than ever before. This, however, is not necessarily the case ; our preoccupation with lynching as the most terrible form of murder has led us to • All figures arc from Dr. Monroe N. Work, Tuskegee Institute, Alabama. overlook the fact that other forms are in the aggregate far more important. The same white public opinion that con- demns lynchings will frequently be found sympathizing pri- vately with murder when this has as its object the suppression of "sassy niggers." An incident which took place in Alabama during 1928 will serve to illustrate this point. Matt Lucas was a highly skilled mechanic in the West- field plant of the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railrdad Com- pany. This plant, which is one of the United States Steel Corporation's finest, is located just beyond the city limits of Birmingham. Even the whites brought their automobiles to Lucas to be fixed up over the week-end. But in the plant, in spite of his admitted ability, he could not rise above the rank of millwright's helper. He felt that he was entitled to pro- motion and was being discriminated against on account of his color, and he did not hesitate to say so. Lucas was mar- ried and lived in House 518 B, in Westfield, a town owned and controlled by the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company. He was thirty-four years old, a loud talker, com- pletely unafraid of white folks and quite ready to answer them back, an unforgivable crime for a Negro in the South. On February 9, 1928, Matt Lucas was drunk. His wife tried to persuade him not to go to work, but he went neverthe- less. When he got to the plant, he was ordered to go home.

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January 1, 1930] The Nation 13 15 16 14 12 10 a. LYNCHING AND HOMICID E RATES IN THE UNITED 5TATE5 1900-1928 ^k 1 \ \ 1 If u H0MICIDE5 PER I (31 i 00.000 POPUL CiTiES)' i ATION s, li ^f. H i \ 7 ^w \y NO IING 5 P (UN ER TEC o,oc ) 51 0.0C ■AT >0 P OPU LA7 ION O - W (O O O O o CD 0> CD CD ■* in

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t~ CO en o CM OJ 0J 0) 0> 0) 0) 0) 0) 0) 0) 0> en YEAR He did not obey at first, and some high words and threats seem to have passed on both sides. Eventually he went home. Soon after his wife had with some difficulty got him into bed, there was a knock at the door. The company guards had come for Matt. They took him outside and pumped him full of lead. Deputy Coroner J. J. Crowe turned in a ver- dict of "justifiable homicide." His wife withdrew immediately to Montgomery, leav- ing her three children with her mother in Westfield. She brought suit against the company for her husband's death. The company, attempting to settle out of court, offered S300 ; Mr. Frank W. Smith of Birmingham, handling the case for Hill, Hill, Whiting, Thomas, and Rives of Montgomery, de- manded $1,500; a compromise was reached, in May, on $750. All of this sum, according to Mrs. Lucas, went for the funeral and legal expenses. The guards who killed Lucas were not indicted at all. Out of five men who were involved in the disgraceful affair, two were still in the employ of the company in June, 1929, two had quit without notice, and one, who was not directly involved in the killing. had been discharged. The company paid the money to Lucas's widow, it explained, not because it admitted '"legal responsibility" for the act, but "merely as a means of pre- venting the uncertainty of what a court action will result in." Attorney Smith on his part was glad enough not to have the case get into court. His attitude was not due to any lack of zeal. Mr. Smith is proud of the fact that his grand- father was the first Confederate volunteer from Jefferson County; but he has acquired a high reputation among Ne- groes as counselor and defender of their race. "When the judge is white and the jury are all white (and they always are)," he explained to the investigator a year afterward, "there is very little chance for a Negro to get anything from a white man in court. The defense would claim that he (Lucas) pulled a gun or something, and the widow would get nothing." This statement, in view of the admitted facts of the case, must be considered astounding. Four guards seem to have been actually standing over Lucas while he dressed, and one of them testified at the coroner's inquest that Lucas had three times tried to get his hand into his pocket and had three times been prevented. Yet the guards testified further that Lucas still had a gun in his pocket when he got out of the house, and that he attempted to pull it on them, whereupon they shot him. This defense would appar- ently have been adequate before a white jury. No news of the Lucas killing other than the routine obituary notice reached either of the two Negro papers in Birmingham ; in fact, none of the Birmingham papers carried any account of the incident. But perhaps the most significant point in the whole affair was the attitude taken by the coro- ner, which was undoubtedly typical of a large section of the white community. "Why do you want to investigate this particular case?" he said to the investigator in 1929. "This kind of thing happens all the time." In fact another Negro was shot and killed by a Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company guard before the investigator left Birmingham. The Negro was charged with stealing copper from the plant. The incident created as little stir as had Lucas's killing a year earlier. After all, why should it be otherwise? The Ala- bama subsidiary of the United States Steel Corporation is not the only company in the district which employs guards who are ready to shoot on sight. The nervousness of such guards is understandable when it is remembered that sometimes it is the guard who is shot. A murder of some kind occurs in the Birmingham district every three or four days. Jelift County, Alabama, in which Birmingham and Westfield are

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14 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365 situated, reported 697 homicides from 1920 to 1926 inclusive, or at the rate of more than eight per month. Lucas's killing might be described as a lynching. It is being so classed by the National Association for the Advance- ment of Colored People, though not by the more cautious director of research at Tuskegee Institute. Whether it was or not, it reflects a basically unhealthy condition. Public opinion, which can be aroused by a lynching, needs to be aroused also over these borderline cases, and by ordinary homicides. For while the lynching evil is definitely on the wane, homicides (according to a leading authority) "actually as well as relatively . . . were never so frequent in this country as they are at the present time." The accompanying graph, prepared from the homicide figures of Frederick L. Hoffman in the Spectator of March 14, 1929, and the lynching figures of Dr. Monroe N. Work, Director of Research of the Tuskegee Institute, shows that the decrease in lynchings has been coincident with an increase in homicides. The thirty-one cities for which homicide rates are available have an aggregate population of 23,632,000, and there is every reason to think that they correctly indicate the trend of the homicide rate throughout the country. It will be observed that the lynching rate fluctuates much more vio- lently than the homicide rate. The sudden and permanent decrease in the number of lynchings after 1922, following a decade in which there had been no marked diminution, is striking. The Dyer Anti-Lynching bill was before Congress in 1922. If an aroused public opinion could so affect the lynching evil, why not then also the homicide scourge? The American homicide rate is the highest in the world. It does not result alone from America's being a "new" coun- try, since the rate in 1922 (8.4 per 100,000) for the area where homicides are registered was five times that for the Commonwealth of Australia and the Province of Ontario, each of which had a rate of 1.6. Massachusetts, a compara- tively law-abiding community, had a homicide rate of 2.5 in 1922. The rate for New Zealand was 0.9 in 1923, that for Japan 0.8 in 1922, that for England and Wales 0.5 in 1922, and that for Scotland 0.2 in 1923. Memphis, with a rate of 60.5 homicides per 100,000 population, had probably the highest rate of any city in the "civilized" world, but Bir- mingham was a close second with 54.9. Other rates were: Jacksonville 52.6, Atlanta 45.1, and Little Rock 37.9. Gangster-ridden Chicago with a rate of 15.8 was surpassed by Detroit, which counted 16.5. New York City had a rate of 6.7. One hundred and twenty-two American cities aver- aged 10.4 homicides per 100,000 in 1927, though according to Hoffman the murder rate in 1925 was only 9.8 in Lenin- grad and about the same in Moscow. In Leningrad in 1922, when the waves of the revolution had not yet died down, the murder rate reached 26.7, but eight Southern cities exceeded that record last year. In all European countries for which figures are available, the homicide rate is far lower than in the United States. The regional differences in the homicide rate are strik- ing. The ten cities which in 1928 had the highest homicide rates were all Southern cities. Racial differences are even more important. The rate for whites in the South is high, but not higher than in parts of the West. For Negroes, the rate is usually many times the rate for whites. Unfortu- nately, figures on the color of the murderer are not available. Most murders of Negroes are probably by other Negroes. The high rate for the colored race is due in part, however, to the fact that in many sections of the South it is considered hardly a crime to kill a Negro. If the murderer does happen to be a white man, he usually goes scot-free. The pretext of the murder may be, in the words of Professor A. B. Hart, "simply trivial." A Negro kills a white man's dog which has attacked his sheep ; the Negro is shot dead. A Negro causes his wife to be late to work for a white man ; the white man takes a gun and kills the Negro. In 1929 a Florida white man was sentenced to the electric chair for killing a colored man. It was said to be the first case of the kind on record. One thing at any rate is certain: there has been no marked increase in the Southern Negro's personal security. The anti-lynching campaign has shown what can be accom- plished by an aroused public opinion. It needs to be intensi- fied so that this national disgrace shall be definitely eradi- cated. Furthermore, the campaign must be broadened until public opinion is awake to the evils of all private, cold-blooded murder. The community which condemns mob murder while condoning such killings as that of Matt Lucas is suffering from moral astigmatism. In the Driftway THE State of Connecticut, in which the law establishes no speed limits for motor cars but holds every driver responsible for going at a rate consistent with public safety, is undertaking some experiments with a view to setting up certain maximums. Many persons will regard this as a step backward, the Connecticut law having been widely ac- claimed as embodying the only sound principle in regard to speed. To establish an arbitrary maximum speed for certain highways and inflexibly enforce the rule is ridiculous, as it is all too apparent that a safe or dangerous rate depends upon the circumstances. Yet the Drifter has always believed that it is desirable to have certain legal maximums of speed — provided they are not generally enforced. And doubtless ex- perience has brought the State Motor Vehicle Commission of Connecticut to the same point of view, as it is insisted that the new plan is in no sense to be an "enforcement trap." George Bernard Shaw has put the case for maximum speed limits well in arguing against the government's proposal to abolish them in England. As a driver of twenty-one years' experience Mr. Shaw admits breaking the law every time he takes a car on the road, yet he insists that some speed limit should be retained. He says: A speed limit cannot be observed in daily practice and is not meant to be so observed. It is a device for en- abling the police to halt and mulct motorists in those cases of inconsiderate driving which fall short of driving to the public danger or are not grave enough to deserve the more serious penalties attached to that offense. * ♦ * * * WITHOUT a speed limit it is practically impossible to prosecute any one for dangerous driving until after an accident has happened. For it can always be argued other- wise that a person can't have been guilty of dangerous speed because events didn't show it to be such. In other words, the police are never able to lock the stable door until after the horse has been stolen, if one may quote so equine a proverb in

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January 1, 1930] The Nation 15 connection with the motor age. A maximum-speed law has the same advantages as laws against disorderly conduct. These laws are sometimes used for tyrannical or absurd purposes, but, on the other hand, they serve so many excellent ends that few up-to-date communities would be without them. To return to the automobile, Mr. Shaw remarks: The common assumption that a steam roller or motor bus if driven carefully over a baby at two miles an hour will not hurt it, while a sport car, which at sixty miles an hour or so becomes supercharged and attains the velocity of light or thereabouts, will mangle and slaughter the same baby is erroneous. An intelligent baby would prefer the sport car. Safe motor cars are imaginary, as are safe wheelbarrows, guns, skates, kitchen boilers, or razors. But they can be made safe enough to be tolerated when they are under the control of intelligent, considerate, and able-bodied persons. ***** MR. SHAW goes on to say: "No expert fears a well- driven car, however fast. All fear an ill-driven car, however slow." Here the Drifter pauses to ask what is meant by the word "expert." If Mr. Shaw means an expert pedestrian, the answer is that there isn't any other kind — alive. They get that way because they have to. Probably Mr. Shaw is thinking of drivers. Among them it is doubtless true that a well-driven car, even going immoderately fast, is sometimes less dangerous than a slow-moving automobile, badly handled. But a wise pedestrian would take his chances every time with a slow-moving car, regardless of the driver, for the reason that such a vehicle can stop more quickly and isn't likely to break so many bones even if it hits him. The theory, sometimes advanced, that we need drivers with more skill doesn't hold water ; we need drivers with more morals. Taxicab drivers are admittedly skilful, but it is not well to get in their path — even when they are going their fastest. The Drifter Correspondence That Hungarian Decision To the Editor of The Nation- : Sir: In The Nation of October 30, there appeared an editorial paragraph stating that because of a certain decision rendered by an Hungarian court "it is a crime to praise the United States in Hungary." Such a decision seemed to me as extraordinary as apparently it did to you. I doubted that a court in Hungary, no matter how rotten the political system may be considered by some persons, would condemn anyone because he praised the United States. I have, therefore, pro- cured a certified copy of a decision of the Royal District Court of Budapest rendered on August 23, 1929. It is evident from the record that the person was indicted not because of having praised the United States but because he was found guilty of the crime of advocating the violent overthrow of the existing legal and social order and the forcible establishment in power of the so-called proletarian class. It is also evident that the advocacy of such ideas has been made a crime not by the arbitrary decision of the court but by a statute duly enacted by Parliament. The advocacy of the violent overthrow of the government and the social order is also a crime, if I am not mistaken, in the United States. You may agree with this Hungarian agitator that "in America . . . life is good, because they know no God," but it does not appear that the court in Budapest shared this view or that any con- sideration of the Utopian condition of American life influenced its decision. I wish also to call your attention to the fact that the decision which you criticized was the decision of a court of first instance against which an appeal lies and that an appeal actually has been taken. New York, November 25 Frances Dea'k {The Nation's comment was based upon a report in a reliable Vienna newspaper. The document cited by Mr. Deak, which we have examined, proves that the report was incorrect. We are sorry to have been misled in this instance. — Editor The Nation.] More Men Teachers To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I wish to stand with Bertrand Russell in regard to woman teachers. I think there are all too many of them in our schools. I am in favor of more man teachers. Askov, Minn., December 10 Mrs. L. Mosb/'ek White Woman's Burden To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: I wish to express my appreciation of your review of John R. White's book in The Nation of August 28. I knew Colonel White well. He is an exceptionally fine man, and his statements about conditions in the Islands can be accepted without reserve. It is the first time that I remember having seen authori- tatively stated what I regard as the greatest bar to a fine understanding between Americans and Filipinos — the attitude of our American women to all Filipinos socially. Prior to the coming of American women en masse we men got along with the Filipinos very well, despite the natural irritations exist- ing from war time. But the American woman at once put the Filipino "in his place" socially and sees to it that he is kept there. Hence the Filipino complaint of the Raza dominador and strengthening of a desire for complete separation. The government here has been an inspiration to men of ideals, and has been carried on without deviation for the benefit of the Filipino people; the social situation is an insult to every cultured Filipino. Manila, P. I., October 29 James L. Henry Spanish Drama To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The background of Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch would seem to have its blank spots, judging from his testy remarks in regard to the Quinteros' "A Hundred Years Old" in your issue of October 23. Does he know nothing of Spanish drama beyond the few plays which have been lately presented in New York? Has he never heard of Benavente? Of Zamacois? Or Linares Rivas? Is it possible that he doesn't know that the Spaniards invented realism — and did it so long ago that they have become rather bored by it? And that being bored they claim a legiti- mate right to seek relief from its pessimism and dreariness?

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16 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365 If Mr. Krutch seeks "pessimism, violence, and fire," let him read Benavente's "La malquerida" and "Senora ama"; if he desires social drama with food for thought we recommend to him the same author's "La virtud sospechosa" and "Gente conocida," or "La garra" by Linares Rivas; if the dramatic treatment of the aesthetic or psychological interests him, let him turn the pages of Perez Galdos's "El Abuelo," "Mariucha," or "Electra." If realism means to him only the drably unpleas- ant, let him examine at random the productions of Zamacois. There is no "school" of drama in Spain today; each writer seeks to be different from everyone else. The Quinteros are nst like Martinez Sierra; the first try to show us that life is eminently worth living and that happiness exists, even in this "vale of tears," and the second stresses the fact that there is virtue in modern society — especially among women. Two things are incumbent upon Mr. Krutch — first, that he acquire some knowledge of Spanish drama aside from the few translations which have recently been offered in New York; and second, that he remember that the reason for the prevalence of the cloudless silver lining to which he objects is due to the realization on the part of American producers that that sort of thing is the merchandise that goes over with a public nurtured on "Abie's Irish Rose," Hollywood, and Bernarr McFadden. Lubbock, Texas, November 7 C. B. Qualia W. A. Whatley Remarque Once More To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: In The Nation of November 13 appears a letter of a former German officer, severely criticizing Remarque's "All Quiet . . ." and reflecting on the author personally. The offi- cer is quite correct in saying that the book cannot be recom- mended to "men," at least not to men who possess and exer- cise reasoning power and therefore become unwilling to be butchered and robbed at the behest of stupid or vicious rulers. If pacifism had prevailed in Europe in 1914 Germany would not now be a subject nation. Incidentally the Kaiser's loyal ex-officers should remember that he and his sons saved their skins and are enjoying a private fortune of more than fifty million dollars, which ought to relieve them at least for a while of having to wash dishes as Mr. Kienitz does. Detroit, November 27 William E. Henze Business English To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I have a friend, a Parisian, who speaks fair col- loquial English and has read widely in English literature, but who was utterly stumped by a New York financial letter. I essayed to rephrase it for him in simple English, as shown below. I should like to know, first, if your readers agree with my rendering (which is italicized) ; second, if I am forgetting my mother tongue; or third, if our financial writers are de- veloping a new language intended to conceal facts. That general business has not retained all of it- former impressive buoyancy is evidenced by current trends in several directions, but there is obviously a sharp dis- tinction between moderate recession and fundamental un- soundness. If the rate of activity has not been wholly sustained, the change can be properly interpreted only through recognition of what has gone before, and the attainments of various maximum records if of too recent occurrence to be obscured by present tendencies. Business has suffered a setback, but not a slump. One can get at the causes by carefully surveying past and recent events. Even with a contraction in some lines now, results this year will be unusually favorable in numerous in- stances and it is significant that the monetary tension has been relaxing steadily. Even so, this year's record won't be so bad, and one will at least be able to borrow money again. Those are some surface indications of a reversal from long-continued expansion, yet the alteration is qualified by the earlier exceptional achievements. An especially prominent case is the letdown in steel production, which has come only after a period of unparalleled advance. There are even signs of hard sledding ahead, in steel, for example; but one can always think of the riotous times just ended. There continues to be a large flow of business in many channels, and that autumn has not brought increased mo- mentum in all quarters is mainly because of the great vigor shown in preceding months. The general trade tone is more conservative now but without sign of wide- spread instability. In certain lines trade is still active, and business in general wouldn't have slowed up if it hadn't overspeeded earlier in the year. Those who can are sitting tight. My version proved intelligible to my friend, who thanked me effusively. I hope I didn't mislead him. Paris, November 11 G. M. L. Brown Tennessee Yields To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: As a loyal son of Tennessee I have to confess a feeling of jealousy at the way Maiden has pushed Dayton clear off the map. In fact Dayton isn't any more famous today than York County, Pennsylvania, where the witches still work their wicked spells. Despite the best efforts of Bryan and Darrow and the press, we didn't succeed in luring more than ten or twelve thousand curiosity seekers to our Fundamentalist barbecue. Maiden got out a million and a quarter in a little more than a week. We're licked! Johnson City, Tenn., December 10 Hodge Mathes Non-Combatants and War To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I seriously question the validity of the basic assump- tion that seems to underlie the reasoning of those who accept President Hoover's food-ship proposal, namely, that only those in actual combat should be permitted to suffer from starvation, pestilence, disease, while the non-combatant members of so- ciety should be exempt from such privations. War is a col- lective enterprise undertaken by tile state. Why the lives of those behind the battle line are more worth preserving than those on the battle line is something which has never been made clear to me. I, for one, welcome the possibility of starvation, poison gas, submarines, and anything else which will make war more ghastly and something to be feared by civilian as well as soldier. Let it become clear to every member of the com- munity that war means misery not merely for those in combat but for everybody. New York, November 29 William Isaacs

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Books and Drama Admonition By LESLIE NELSON JENNINGS Be not impatient, do not grasp too soon. I know the heart is eager, having conned Pages brushed white with silver of the moon- Tales of a sea-born city and beyond. Yet not alone to those who are the first On soil usurped from older lords than ours Does the innominable Presence burst, Like an Aegean island, into flowers. There is another Beauty which precedes The arras lifted, the libation poured ; Secret and slow and mystical, it needs No spending of the wine or honey stored, But spins a thread impossible to break Under the knees of gods who never wake. Cabell's Last Word ? The Way of Ecben. A Comedietta Involving a Gentleman. By James Branch Cabell. Robert M. McBride and Com- pany. $2.50. ««/- I "\HE Way of Ecben" may be the last demonstration of the formula of existence which has been growing steadily more authoritative in Mr. Cabell's produc- tions. It is now ten years since he declared that the novel must become more or less an allegory, since art must deal with contemporary life by means of symbols; that the reader must feel that he is not reading about some person unimportant enough to be listed in the local telephone book, but "about humanity — and about the strivings of that ape reft of his tail, and grown rusty at climbing, who yet, however dimly, feels himself to be a symbol, and the frail representative of Omnipo- tence in a place that is not home." He has also expressed him- self about the value of dynamic illusions and has convincingly demonstrated that man is given to playing the ape to his dreams. It is one thing for a man to write books and another for him to account for them. The reading public tends rightly enough to suspect any man's exposition of his own theory of composition. Mr. Cabell, as a particularly conscious artist, is in the curious position of having established his philosophy so early, of having so clearly seen the total pattern of the years, as to make this seem the premise rather than the result of his performance. The progressive abstraction of his later books does owe much to this early recognition of a trend, so that while the author has been playing with determined con- sistency the ape to one special dream there may be some of his readers who wish his mimicry had been less successful. For in his later writings there is the inescapable suggestion that the formula has choked fancy at least into a death faint. If Mr. Cabell means what he appears to be saying — we cannot forget that he delights in the cream of a jest — this slender, exquisitely written account of the faring forth of one Alfgar is the last of those gallant tales of misadventures in a world that is brighter, perhaps, than our own, but no less re- warding of virtue. If such is the case, this "Comedietta In- volving a Gentleman," while relatively unimportant in the list of Mr. Cabell's published works, assumes particular signifi- cance in that larger romance which is likewise a biography, somewhat more personal, developed by the author. Such a renunciation of much that Mr. Cabell holds most dear is at the least a gesture which we may at once admire and deplore. In the commentary that makes up a considerable portion of this book, Mr. Cabell accepts the disadvantages incident to his advanced years and finds fifty the precise and suitable mo- ment for terminating the biography (of Dom Manuel). He describes for us the unfortunate condition of the aging ro- mancer who must needs repeat himself in a declining achieve- ment, and sets himself to outwit time by renouncing the stage long before the curtain shows any disposition to come rumbling down. Elsewhere he has spoken approvingly of certain young men who were so fortunate or so wise as to die to life or literature at the age of twenty-nine, and it may be that he has concluded that the game is not worth the candle and that there remain other diversions to life than the peculiar one of making marks on paper. He declares explicitly that he will write no more stories after this one about Etarre, the witch woman who passes always to the sound of a troubling music, whose bright face he can no longer clearly see with the eyes that time has given him and for whose depiction he dare not depend upon mere memories, however dear. But it has been evidenced before this that renunciation sometimes has remark- able quickening effects upon man's several capacities; further, there have been recent studies of monkeys which show that appearances of senility are removed by a diversification of cage-mates. Thus "hail and farewell, Etarre," need not leave us wholly sad. There is also ground for encouragement in the fact that the recorder of Jurgen's glamorous trials has not committed himself beyond the termination of the saga of Dom Manuel's extraordinary line. If this farewell to Poictesme means the breaking of a formula which has grown increasingly sterile, however magi- cally it worked at first, some of Mr. Cabell's sincerest ad- mirers will not repine. For while life itself may be an allegory ceaselessly repeated by the Original Author for his diversion, there are nevertheless permitted to us trifling varia- tions in size and color and sense which give to each life the illusion of individuality. Mr. Cabell has been less tolerant than that other author of man's need of such a dynamic illusion. Having set himself as an artist with a relentless conscience to a single task, his great skill and word sorcery have been increasingly dedicated to the problem of creation in fewer and fewer strokes. And although this may be a part of the economy elsewhere praised, we cannot forget that the earlier expositions of man's questioning and his end derived richness and delight from the fact that the formula was less clear while the allegory was allowed still to partake of the spontaneity of approximate flesh and blood. "The Way of Ecben" is carved and cool, chastely unadorned; there seems little possi- bility that the story may ever be more austerely told, and thus perhaps little temptation for the artist to pursue it further. The tale is rightly praised by its author for its symmetry, but of all the seven auctorial virtues desired by John Charteris in literature as in life this is not necessarily the chiefest; dis- tinction and clarity, beauty, tenderness, truth, and urbanity were likewise named. And there was some mention also of gusto. It is still possible to believe that Mr. Cabell is too young to be lacking in any of these, even the last, but it i- difficult to believe that in the progressive dramatization of him- self, which is for every good author his most cherished and most elaborated creation, we have had the last word from Richmond in Virginia, however distant Poictesme may now become. Lorinb Prcette

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18 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365 Mr. Whitehead's Living Universe Process and Reality. By Alfred North Whitehead. The Mac- millan Company. $4.50. SCIENCE is today as much of a problem as it is a fact. The tremendous burst of activity in the last twenty-five years which has brought new life to the old and fundamen- tal science of physics has succeeded in ruining the traditional cosmology of materialism, the guiding faith of scientists since the days of Galileo and Newton. With the theories of rela- tivity and the new developments in sub-atomic physics, scien- tific method has achieved some of the most glorious victories that have ever fallen to the human spirit, but the scientist is completely at a loss when he stands aside from his specialized equations and tries to conceive the structure of the universe as a whole. Mr. Whitehead suggested a few years ago, in his "Science and the Modern World," that the way out of the difficulties posed by relativity and quantum mechanics lay in the acceptance of a "philosophy of organism"; and he also in- dicated that such a philosophy, unlike the traditional scientific point of view, would be able to heal the divided conscience of mankind and reconcile scientific thought with our religious and esthetic intuitions. In the present work he has attempted to apply this philosophy in detail and to see whether it stands up under the exacting test of a complete interpretation of human experience. The effort is magnificent both in scope and in execution. Many scientists have recently been driven to philosophizing, but their amateur efforts in epistemology and metaphysics have been in striking contrast with their eminence as scientific investi- gators. To cite but one example, Mr. Eddington has thrown up his hands and told us that science no longer knows what its equations and pointer readings mean in reality; hence it no longer forbids us to believe in the "unseen world" accessible to the mystic's immediate experience, with its revelations of God, freedom, and immortality. In contrast to this attitude of scientific skepticism, Mr. Whitehead has undertaken the more difficult and constructive task of determining the place of science and scientific laws in the structure of reality. His work, whether it be regarded as completely successful or not, will certainly stand out as a masterful piece of philosophizing. Even if it does nothing else than revive the rationalist's faith in a wholehearted philosophy of the universe, it will have achieved its aim and earned the gratitude of the friends of thought. Mr. Whitehead asks boldly, how are we to conceive the universe in the light of the new scientific ideas? And the so- lution seems to him to be indicated by the analogy of biological experience, which supplies just the aspects of relativity and in- dividuality that appear to be demanded by the new physics. He bids us imagine, not a static universe of enduring matter motivated by external forces, but a living universe of inter- related corpuscular organizations. These corpuscles are a law unto themselves, having their own purposes and their own free- dom, but they are held together by an internal solidarity, by common participation in Platonic forms, which Mr. Whitehead calls "eternal objects." In fact we can best visualize Mr. Whitehead's universe by keeping in mind the Platonic cosmology in the "Timaeus," where the Demi-urge, with his mind on the Ideas, is repre- sented creating the universe out of relative chaos. Instead of creation taking place from the outside, Mr. Whitehead repre- sents creation as a fixation of the potentiality of the creatures through the spontaneous "ingression" of the eternal objects. It follows that the uniformities on which the scientist bases his laws come into being as part of the evolving activity of the creatures. Mr. Whitehead hazards the conjecture that, like the economic laws of human societies, the basis of the scien- tist's laws is an evolutionary social product — common ideals that come to be shared by groups of elementary organisms. He also believes that as social forms scientific laws are subject to genesis and decay, although the more fundamental social forms, as for example space and time, are carried over into repeated cosmic epochs and thus constitute the underlying basis for the more specialized societies and organic systems. It is by a tour de force — which, however, is not altogether convincing — that the author tries to absorb the space-time con- tinuum into the created universe and to represent both spatiality and temporality as expressions of the internal determinateness of the creatures. The general picture that he would like us to see is a universe of untrammeled creativity and spontaneity — a universe in which indeterminate potentiality gradually takes shape through the ingression of forms emanating from the time- less source of all order, God. That Mr. Whitehead should identify the forms with God is not surprising. There is a twenty-five hundred year prece- dent in philosophy for this identification, but what is surprising is that he should refuse to pay to God the traditional "meta- physical compliment" of eminent reality over and above the finite creatures. Such a compliment appears to be necessary if God is to serve as the internal cement of the universe. But Mr. Whitehead evidently feels that thither lies the road to mysticism, and he therefore tries to compress his metaphysical principle of God (and incidentally his own religious intuition which seems to shine through between the lines) within the narrow framework of biological naturalism. As a result he succeeds in enlivening the universe of the physicist, but he is not quite successful in quickening the life of the spirit. Benjamin Ginzburg A Russian-Jewish Childhood Childhood in Exile. By Shmarya Levin. Translated from the German by Maurice Samuel. Harcourt, Brace and Com- pany. $3.50. DR. LEVIN is one of the prominent figures in the history of modern Zionism. Combining the qualities of scholar and fighter, he has been a political leader in the Jewish world from the time he became a deputy to the first Russian Duma, and his activities carried him into many countries be- fore they brought him home from "exile" to Palestine where he is now living. He has turned aside from his work as pub- licist long enough to write this delightful and moving story of his childhood in Swislowitz — a little Russian town, half Jewish and half Christian, proud of its location at the junction of two rivers which he fondly describes, and backed by a forest of equal nostaligic charm. Dr. Levin has no sensational confessions to record except one which he could not very well avoid — that he was regarded on all sides as a boy prodigy. And for this reason some of his readers will be reminded of John Stuart Mill's "Autobiog- raphy," for, as in that classic, the most striking portions of the book deal with the extraordinary education of an extraordi- nary child. Like Mill, Dr. Levin tells of feats, of learning, memorizing, translating, at incredibly early ages. While still a child he turned to writing essays in Hebrew and even began a serious novel. At the advanced age of nine, already deeply immersed in the profundities and technicalities of the Talmud, he began the study of Russian and, by way of diversion, found time to read widely in Yiddish literature. Now, on looking back, he says: "I cannot remember that I ever overstudied myself; my brain never became weary. It seemed to me that

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Tanuary 1, 1930] The Nation 19 my brain was always at play and the things I learned just leaped into my mind." Of course there was time to play, even for the child Shmarya. And although the sports which the Jewish children of Swislowitz indulged in seem few and pitiful compared to those of American boys of today, they were just as thrilling to the children of a poor Russian village of the seventies — poor, since even well-to-do people like the Levins were poor accord- ing to Western standards. Dr. Levin insists, too, that the Jewish children loved nature passionately and wondered why God had not given land and forests to his people as well as to the Gentiles; and the pictures that he draws of the village and the surrounding country, of the forest and the coming and go- ing of the seasons, share with his descriptions of the activities of the home, the school, and the synagogue in giving to these memories their special charm. He is not so fortunate, perhaps, in making the many characters live again for us, or in weaving them into his narrative; though the picture of Mottye the Bean, his first teacher, brutal and stupid, is unforgettable as is that of his mother. But Dr. Levin is not a novelist, having aban- doned that art (he regrets it now) after his first childish at- tempt. There can be no doubt, however, that he has a great gift for the short story. One has only to read the chapter in this book entitled Cherneh the Widow to realize that Zionism's gain was literature's loss. Fred T. Marsh i Tradition and Clemence Dane Tradition and Hugh Walpole. By Clemence Dane. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2. rnr^HE important element of Clemence Dane's book is con- veyed in the first word of her title; for with all her -*- enthusiasm for Hugh Walpole, her swift, clear survey of his writings, her advancing of the novelist as the true bearer of the traditive torch, combining the qualities of the realist, moralist, and romantic while renewing the element of symbol, she pricks his faults too keenly for us to set him high. She emphasizes, for instance, his "criminal carelessness" of struc- ture and his complete failure to seek any of the effects of sound — that other horn of symbolism on which, per contra, (Gertrude Stein is impaled. On her way to Walpole, however, Clemence Dane travels the long road of the English novel, sprinkling observations like scent in a game of hare and hounds. She maintains that the Gentle Reader dictates to the author, by his desire made mani- fest summoning the work of art. Thus to the popularity of such writers as Conan Doyle and Edgar Wallace she attributes the appearance of Conrad's "Secret Agent," Masefield's "Sard Harker," and Walpole's "Portrait of a Man with Red Hair." The Gentle Reader, indeed, is largely feminine; putting aside the static (Miltonic) character as masculine, Clemence Dane attributes to Jane Austen the recognition and to the Brontes the development of the feminine, the dynamic (Shakespearean) figure that changes with the events. Here she overlooks the earlier influence of Nicholas Rowe, who in the gay Lothario has given women their most beloved libertine and who in "The Fair Penitent" anticipated not only Jane Austen but Ibsen. Pursuing literature through the changing tastes of the Gen- tle Reader, we find in the post-war world a quest of assurance, of revaluation. The hatred of war that has grown into many books Clemence Dane probes to a fear of discipline which, though it strengthens the strong, "sends the characterless back to the button-molder." Thus writers are led on the one hand to the assertion of full freedom, as in Joyce's post-Ulyssean uprooting of the language, and on the other hand toward the comforting trust in an imposed order, as T. S. Eliot seeks the eighteenth century. Looking into literature for interpretation and application of the new ideas the reader finds them presented only in equally new forms, so that confusion is indeed worse confounded. Pre-war writers, as being of an olden day, are benevolently regarded as ancestors though they may continue to produce; the new writers are even as disjointed as the times; the only author who uses the old technique to present the new ideas and the new spirit, and therefore the chief of the tradi- tives, says Clemence Dane, is the novelist Hugh Walpole. Thus we are carried swiftly along; but not free from jouncing. In a phrase each our guide assigns their place to a score of writers. Telling us that the "high-tide marks" of the novel — the bundle falling off Christian's back, Crusoe finding the footprint, Lucy eating dewberries while Richard Feverel watches, Angel Clare watching the flag run up at Tess's hang- ing, the gramophone breaking out in the voice of the mur- dered man in Oliver Onions's "Debit Account" — are all tri- umphs of the realist, she rapidly adds the moralist, then the romantic, as essential to traditive fiction. The romanticist she identifies at one moment with the poet, at another with the "shocker." The summoning of sound to supplement meaning she calls "speaking to the illiterate," yet deems it a measure of the writer's cunning. While Grant Overton presents Sher- lock Holmes as "the modern deus ex machina," she declares the detective to be compact of fantasy as Puck. As we linger over these provocative statements we remember the old Sheep's dark shop that Alice found in the fourth square, its shelves full of all manner of curious things; but if Alice looked hard at any shelf, that particular shelf was bare. Whether or not Clemence Dane's stuff will stand under close examination, window-shoppers will find hers a crowded and colorful store. Joseph T. Shipley Queen Bess Once More Queen Elizabeth. By Katharine Anthony. Alfred A. Knopf. $4. FOR some reason or other this book, so excellent in cer- tain details — bits of characterization, epigrammatic suc- cinctness, and keen observation — does not quite come to life. A number of suggestions might be advanced in explanation of this fact. Perhaps Miss Anthony erred fundamentally in treating the entire life of Queen Elizabeth with something of the terse incisiveness which Mr. Strachey, artistically stingy with his words as always, recently employed on but a few illuminating episodes of Elizabeth's reign. To relate her whole career, and in addition to depict much of the teeming gusto and swagger of the era, would quite certainly exceed the power of compressed suggestiveness of even the greatest of artists; as it is, Miss Anthony's volume, printed in large type on very generously margined sheets, numbers only a trifle more than 250 pages. It might further be suggested that, while her book has unity of design, it lacks a corresponding unity of method. That is to say, at moments she writes with something of the lush fulness of objective treatment which, rightly or wrongly, is supposed to be a dominant element in "modern" biography; but at other times she returns to that almost completely Freudian treatment with which, in her book on Margaret Fuller, she began her writing career. Though her style is not now, as formerly, loaded with the technicalities of the Freudian school — she does occasionally use such expressions as "psychopathic," "delusions of grandeur," and "neurotic" — she nevertheless roundly insists that the lifelong "mannishness" of the Queen was due to the rough-and-ready disposition and language of her notorious father.

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20 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365 And yet this is distinctly not the type of book that one is likely to drop without completing it. One is always aware that a keenly observant brain is at work, even though one may by no means accept all its conclusions — yes, even though one may suspect that at intervals the brain isn't quite sure of itself. The fact that this book, an eminently serious performance with but few amusing interludes, has "made the best-seller list" so soon after its publication indicates that the public will oc- casionally read "dry" and "heavy" volumes if they are the children of intelligent parents. R. F. Dibble Greenwich Villagers / Thought of Daisy. By Edmund Wilson. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.50. SOMEWHERE in Mr. Wilson lurks a Puritan who seems to be suffering from the hang-over of a Greenwich Village adolescence. This book may, then, be regarded as the purgative open confession that is supposedly so good for the soul. "I Thought of Daisy" is, in the main, as obviously auto- biographical to a New Yorker as "Ulysses" is to a Dubliner. But Wilson is not Joyce, and there is lacking the perspective and creative quality that would enable him dispassionately to use and fuse the familiar for his own ends. We assist here at a series of parties, some entertaining, some dull, all very intimate, almost too intimate at times. We also meet various people. Of the parties Sue Borglum's is probably the best, and of the people the poetess fares worst. The author's treat- ment of Rita Coleman suggests a man striving to be fair in face of a grievance, with the result that she emerges from his hands with a kind of angular intellectuality. Of Daisy, on the other hand, he is fond in an indulgent fashion, with the re- sult that she is delightful, if vacuous. Of neither lady, it must be stated, does he deserve much thanks; they suffer from the Puritan in search of a clean soul. The men fare much better, particularly those who do not belong in the pre-war Village. Professor Grosbeck would prob- ably be as well worth meeting in the flesh as he and his family are in print. Hugo is distinctive and interesting. Larry Mickler, though a Villager, is well drawn. If Mr. Wilson has freed his soul of a complex by this pub- lication, then those who admire him in his more familiar lit- erary roles will have reason to be thankful that he "thought of Daisy." Not otherwise. Norah Meade Machiavelli and Lorenzo The Private Correspondence of Nicolo Machiavelli. By Orestes Ferrara. The Johns Hopkins Press. $2.25. Lorenzo the Magnificent. By David Loth. Brentano's. $5. THE "Correspondence" is not, as the title might seem to indicate, a complete edition of Machiavelli's private letters, but rather an essay on the character of Machia- velli as seen in his correspondence with excerpts from the letters. On the basis of studies in Italian archives of the period the author recently published a new biography of Machiavelli. The present volume is of much more limited scope, being merely the amplification of a lecture. The letters, Dr. Ferrara points out, are typical of the correspondence of the time in that they are not hastily written missives intended to convey information of external facts, but rather formal compositions of the nature of academic discussions and often designed to reach a considerable audience. Even so they throw much light, Dr. Ferrara con- tends, on the human side of Machiavelli, revealing him as a jovial friend and companion, a diligent functionary but by no means a hero in adversity, a great lover of his country, a lib- ertine and at the same time "a good husband and a perfect father." The letters show above all, the author concludes, that the idea prevalent for so long that Machiavelli was the very incarnation of evil is a myth, and that his faults were only those of his time. The Renaissance was a period of intense realism and in the political field Machiavelli was its most con- spicuous representative. This idea is not new, but the letters which Dr. Ferrara makes accessible in English add confirma- tion of it. The reader can only regret that the letters are not given in full and that they are not left a little more to tell their own story. To the "Private Correspondence" one could scarcely find a greater contrast than "Lorenzo the Magnificent," both in sub- ject matter and in the treatment by their respective authors. The former is a work of erudition, the second a popularization; Dr. Ferrara explains in detail his object, Mr. Loth leaves the reader to define it for himself; the one cites his sources, the other makes no claim to scholarship though there is abundant evidence that he has read largely in the period of the Renais- sance. What Mr. Loth does do is to tell in sprightly and sometimes racy language the story of Lorenzo. He shows him in all his "splendor, lightheartedness, and rejuvenescence" — to quote the words of Ficino — at the same time that he brings before the reader the cruelty and lust and beauty and intrigue of papal and princely courts. The serious student may find nothing new, but the casual reader will be spurred to curiosity concerning a period presented with much skill and vividness. Eloise Ellery Judas, Savior of Jesus Dear Judas and Other Poems. By Robinson Jeffers. Horace Liveright. $2.50. THE Judas of Mr. Jeffers has learned the lesson of love so well that when he sees the teacher of that lesson, Jesus himself, hardening into a Messiah he decides to save him by betraying him to the authorities, who will chasten him a little and then release him so that he may return to the sweet walks of peace. The Jesus of Mr. Jeffers is motivated in part by an old doubt of his paternity, a doubt which his mother, by making up a story of how the shadow of God once visited her, has to a degree expelled, but which lingers in him sufficiently to turn a natural piety into an abnormal zeal. Even at the beginning of the poem Jesus is fixed in self-faith; but as the story unfolds itself he is seen to be an actively dangerous, a darkly threatening agent. He sees himself, indeed, in such a hue, yet cannot resist the vision. To be with my people, In their very hearts, a part of their being, inseparable from those that love me, more closely touching them Than the cloth of the inner garment touches the flesh. That "this is tyrannous I know, that it is love run to lust: but I will possess them. . . . Their minds love terror, their souls cry to be sacrificed, for pain's almost the God Of doubtful men, who tremble expecting to endure it. I go a stranger passage to a greater dominion, More tyrannous, more terrible, more true, than Caesar or any subduer of earth before him has dared to dream of. This is not Judas's kind of love and it is not, presumably, Mr. Jeffers's. "To let the people alone is the mercy," cries Judas; "all stirring is death to them." Judas, by nature sensitive to pain, cannot endure the thought of the suffering and destruc- |H

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January 1, 1930] The Nation 21 tion which will follow upon Jesus's assumption of leadership; and so, partly to save his teacher and partly to save us, man- kind, from any further teaching now that the line has been overstepped, he sends the son of Mary to — his death. It is far from being one of Mr. Jeffers's best poems. To begin with it is an idea more than it is a poem, and the fact that it is ingenious, or that it seems to fit very neatly into Mr. Jeffers's whole system of "misanthropy," does not alter the case. The success of Dear Judas depends after all upon our perception of a theory, and even upon our agreement with this theory; which at once removes the discussion of it from the field of criticism as I see that field. The setting, as might have been expected, is somber and fine, and the utterances of the principal persons often reach a high level of rhetoric. But there is significance in the fact that Mr. Jeffers's long lines forget most of the time to be poetry. Now there is another long poem in the volume to which these remarks do not apply. The Loving Shepherdess con- tains some of the best work that Mr. Jeffers has ever done; it is continuously pathetic, exciting, and beautiful; and its suc- cess does not depend upon the reader's acceptance of any theory about love. Mr. Jeffers, judging by the jacket of the book, has put such a theory into The Loving Shepherdess, but it does not seem to matter. Necessary as the procedure may have been for him in the acts of conception and composition, it is not at all necessary to the reader; which is to say that here we have a successful poem. It is more than that, this story of a driven girl who wanders north through California with a small flock of starving sheep, a witless girl who only knows that she loves the world and that she is willing to give that love to any portion of the world, human or not, which asks for it, a pretty girl for whom life long ago ceased to be pretty in return — this story is told with Mr. Jeffers's peculiar combination of harshness and kindness, and its long, sinuous rhythms are per- fectly supported by a background of mountain, sky, and tree which Mr. Jeffers has lavished his best powers upon. It is his excursion into pastoral poetry, and though it keeps his austere brand upon each of its flanks it yet emerges a living and lovely creature of its ancient kind. Nothing could better prove the eminence of its author among contemporary Ameri- can poets, and nothing could show more clearly what needed to be shown, namely, that Mr. Jeffers can write poetry which we do not have to be Carmelites to understand. Mark Vant Doren Eleven French Revolutionists Leaders of the French Revolution. By J. M. Thompson. D. Appleton and Company. $3. T was either very rash or very courageous of Mr. Thomp- son to undertake, within less than three hundred pages, to evaluate eleven of the most debated characters of the French Revolution. To say that he has done his task better than three other gentlemen who in the last year have been equally rash or courageous is not, however, unqualified praise. Mr. Thompson, as was to have been expected, has failed to master the latest materials on his numerous subjects, some- times with rather unfortunate results — particularly, I should say, in the case of Robespierre, who is made an austere, un- sociable dreamer; Marat, who is explained as a dual per- sonality; and Saint Just, who is portrayed as a repentant sin- ner, atoning for a misspent youth. Nor has he grasped what seem to me to be more essential characteristics than some of those he attributes to his subjects. Sieyes, for example, whom he considers a philosopher manque, was, I think, merely a bad politician. Mirabeau, whose failure he assigns to low aims, I was more likely not a great man even to begin with. Lafay- ette, whom Mr. Thompson considers a republican, was prob- ably only an aristocrat with many fewer liberal ideas than he himself quite sincerely gave himself credit for. Danton Mr. Thompson suspects of being, but hesitates to call, a scoundrel. The study of Dumouriez is admirable; those of Brissot, Louvet, and Fabre d'Eglantine are good. Quite naturally, too, there are a great number of errors, not alone in typography and opinion, but also of fact — some of them fairly serious. That the book was originally a series of lectures is rather obvious; each character gets about the same amount of space, and the author tends to sermonize and draw lessons. But as is fre- quently the case with popular lectures, they make pleasant and interesting reading. Louis R. Gottschalk Books in Brief A Brief Account of Diplomatic Events in Manchuria. By Sir Harold Parlett. Oxford University Press, American Branch. $1.25. The International Relations of Manchuria. B. C. Walter Young. University of Chicago Press. $3.50. The publication of these two books relating to the chief danger spot of the Orient is singularly appropriate in view of the controversy between China and Russia over the Chinese Eastern Railway. Both books were prepared for the confer- ence of the Institute of Pacific Relations which met at Kyoto in October and November. Both cover much the same ground, but the work of Mr. Young is more valuable because it went to press after the Chinese seizure of the railway last July. It includes a brief account of that crisis and the most important documents relating to railway control. Weltburgertum in der deutschen Dichtung von Herder bis Nietzsche. Von Kuno Francke. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. This treatise on cosmopolitanism in German literature forms the first chapter of the forthcoming volume of Pro- fessor Francke's "Kulturwerte der deutschen Literatur," but the well-rounded presentation of the theme as well as the timeliness of the discussion justifies its separate publication. If the formulation of the problem seems to exclude a bal- anced historical study, and the absence of a clear-cut dif- ferentiation between cosmopolitanism and internationalism, patriotism and V aterlandsliebe , is at first somewhat perplexing, the author gains a peculiarly good opportunity for an almost dramatic development of the idea by varying its bearing and import according to the literary epoch and personality under discussion. Striking vindications, as that of Heine's Weltbur- gertum, the connecting link between Kant's ethics and Nietz- sche's ideals, prepare for a brilliant chapter on the era of Bismarck in which such men as Wagner and Lassalle, Spiel- hagen and Raabe, Vischer and Keller are judicially evalu- ated as unswerving adherents of traditional ideals in spite of the adversity of contemporaneous developments. As a whole, the book continues the confession of faith in German humanistic and democratic ideals which Professor Francke sees \>^ firmly rooted in German leaders of the past, and looks upon as holding a strong promise for the future. A History of Canada. By Carl Wittke. Alfred A. Knopf. $7.50. This carefully written book, one of the Borzoi Historical Series, is evidence of a growing interest in Canada now evi- dent in the United States, long half-forgetful that it had a Northern neighbor. The author passes lightly over the period

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22 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365 ~L of French rule and more than half the book deals with the period since the federation of Canada in 1867. While there is no touch of the picturesque in the writing, the story is told in a clear style and every phase of importance is covered with striking detachment and insight. The text of the con- stitution of Canada is also included. Under Five Sultans. By Mary Mills Patrick. The Century Company. $4. The author of this volume has carried on a noble and use- ful work in the Near East. She is one of the original faculty of the Constantinople Woman's College and for many years was its director and, in times of difficulty, its mainstay. To- gether with Robert College, also situated on the shores of the Bosphorus, the Constantinople Woman's College was one of the strongest agencies in the modernization of Turkey. Nat- urally, during the course of her work, Miss Patrick acquired familiarity with the customs and institutions of the country and learned to know the Turkish people as no casual visitor could learn to know them. She also came in contact with many of the most important personalities of the Empire. As a conse- quence her book gives a kind of intimate and gossipy bird's-eye view of the history of Turkey during the last half century, and is crowded with interesting anecdotes and portraits. At the same time it attempts a serious account of historic developments. In any event it is a very readable book about a Turkey that has now passed into limbo. The Cruise of the Kronprinz Wilhelm. By Count Alfred von Niezychowski. Foreword by Rear-Admiral Walter McLean, U.S.N. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. Count Niezychowski, an officer of the North German Lloyd steamer which became a successful raider in the South Atlantic in 1914-1915, tells in this volume of the cruise of his ship which, after keeping the seas for 251 days and causing great concern to the British Admiralty, finally found refuge and internment at Norfolk. Although it is much too literally translated from the German and inadequately edited, the book none the less has its place in the growing literature of the brilliant naval exploits of the Germans. To the student of strategy and those who believe .that trade routes may be safe- guarded by building cruisers in groups of fifteen, this volume is respectfully commended. Considering the changes in sea conditions, the Kronprinz Wilhelm was a worthy successor to the Alabama which, however, had no radio or other mod- ern devices to contend with. Certainly the Alabama never slipped through a blockade more easily than did the Kron- prinz Wilhelm through the cordon of British vessels off Nor- folk. Altogether this German raider accounted for fourteen Allied ships totaling 58,201 tons, and provisioned and coaled itself from them. The Lure of the Frontier: A Story of Race Conflict. By Ralph Henry Gabriel. The American Stage. By Oral Sumner Coad and Edwin Mims, Jr. Annals of American Sport. By John Allen Krout. The Pageant of America. Vols. II, XIV, and XV. Yale University Press. These three volumes complete the publication in fifteen vol- umes of a pictorial history of the United States which Professor Gabriel and his associates have long been preparing. The scheme, which calls for a text consisting almost wholly of pic- tures, is particularly well adapted to the present subject matter. Mr. Gabriel's volume on the widening frontier is naturally rich with old prints — and rather too rich with reproductions of softly idealized murals of pioneers such as adorn our courthouses and public libraries. Messrs. Coad and Mims have made a dull subject positively bright through a lively choice of old dramatic portraits and theater-interiors. And Mr. Krout, ranging as he does from cock-fighting to football, from bear-baiting to bicycling and mountain-hiking, has written a history that stands quite by itself in the degree of its interest and significance. Drama Holiday Fare NOT all the plays reviewed and recommended in this column have survived the rigors of an Autumn meteoro- logically mild but theatrically very severe. Below I give a list of those which are still to be seen and which, upon second or even third thought, I still believe worth the attention of persons bent upon some holiday evenings in the theater. The list is classified and within each classification the order is that of merit — as I see it. Drama "Berkeley Square" (Lyceum Theater). A pleasantly en- tertaining and sentimental drama about a young American who wanders into the eighteenth century. The references to Einstein are not sufficiently profound to give anyone a head- ache and the acting of Leslie Howard is a delight. "The Sea Gull" (Civic Repertory Theater). To be seen on certain nights only but quite the best thing at present on the program of Miss LeGallienne's company. "The Criminal Code" (National Theater). Martin Fla- vin's drama of miscarried justice. A bit solemn but impressive. "Subway Express" (Liberty Theater). All about a very strange murder committed in a crowded subway car. No more reasonable than most detective plays but novel and in- genious. The mechanical effects which transform the stage into a moving subway car are worth the price of admission. Comedy "Strictly Dishonorable" (Avon Theater). The expert and up-to-the-minute comedy which is, by common consent, the most amusing thing to be seen on Broadway. Perhaps the sec- ond and third acts do not quite live up to the promise of the first, but at least one scene reaches something like a new high for American polite comedy. "June Moon" (Broadhurst Theater). Ring Lardner's talent for parodying the language of Broadway plus George Kaufmann's knowledge of what the people want. Best if one takes the conventional happy ending and the touches of senti- ment as part of the joke. "Candle-Light" (Empire Theater). How a gallant butler had the time of his life when he mistook a lady's maid for a lady. With Gertrude Lawrence. "Broken Dishes" (Ritz Theater). Conventional but thoroughly amusing domestic farce about a downtrodden hus- band who finally rebels — to the delight of the audience. Inno- cent enough to be approved by the Methodist Board of Public Morals and to get on anybody's White List, but still (believe it or not) both funny and reasonably intelligent. "Your Uncle Dudley" (Cort Theater). Another farce of small-town life. Please ditto last sentence of comment on "Broken Dishes." Musical Shows "Fifty Million Frenchmen" (Lyric Theater). Unusually amusing and novel revue based upon the adventures of the typical tourist in Paris. The jokes are not all very delicate. "Sweet Adeline" (Hammerstein's Theater). Witty ope- retta with the scene laid during the gay nineties. Irene Frank- lin and Helen Morgan assist.

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Holttrap 3nteriube MATINEES : GOOD SEATS. ALL PBICES, AT BOX OFFICE WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE ARLISS in AELI" (A Vitaphone All-Talking Picture) CENTRAL THEATRE Broadway and 47 th St. Daily 2:45 — 8:45 Sunday 3 — 6 — 8:45 JUNIOR FILM GUILD presents 8 Holiday Children's Morning Shows Sir James Barrie's "PETER PAN" Dec. 25th to Jan. 1st inclusive Each morning 10 A. M. to 12 Noon Tickets 60c. On sale now for every performance ; by mail or in person. FILM GUILD CINEMA, Dept. N, 53 West 8th Street. Phones Spring 5090-5095-1716 WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See A Wonderful Night — Majestic — W. 44th St. Berkeley Square — Lyceum — E. 45th St. Bitter Sweet— Ziegf eld— 54th St. & 6th Ave. Candlelight— Empire— B'dway & 40th St. Criminal Code — National — W. 41st St. Fifty Million Frenchmen — Lyric — W. 42nd St. Half Gods— Plymouth— W. 44th St.— Op. Dec. 21st. It's a Wise Child— Belasco—W. 44th St. June Moon — Broadhurst — W. 44th St. Marionette Theatre — Garrick, W. 35th St. — Sat. mornings Meteor— Guild— W. 52nd St. Red Rust— Beck— 302 W. 45th St. Strictly Dishonorable — Avon— W. 45th St. Sweet Adeline — Hammerstein — Broadway & 53rd St. The Little Show— Music Box— W. 45th St. The Game of Love and Death— Biltmore— W. 47th St. Yiddish Art Theatre— Jew Suss — Broadway & 28th St. Films Disraeli — Central Theatre — Broadway and 47th St. General Crack — Warner Bros. — Broadway & 52nd St. Hunting Tigers in India — George Cohan — Broadway and 43rd St. Peter Pan— Junior Film Guild— 52 W. 8th St., Dec. 25th to Jan. 1st, each morning. Concerts and Recitals Arthur Hackett — Guild — Sun. Eve., Jan. 12th. Carola Goya — Hampden — B'dway — 62nd St. — Sun. Eve., Dec. 29th. Dorothy Gordon's "Young People's Concert Hours" — Town Hall, 113 West 43rd St.— Sat. Aft., Dec. 28th. Fourth Concert Judson Celebrity Series — Carnegie — Jan. 6th. Grand Opera for Children— Hansel & Gretel — Town Hall— Tues. Morn., Dec. 31st. Josef Hofmann — Carnegie Hall — Sun. Aft., Jan. 12th. Manhattan Symphony — Mecca Temple — Sun. Eve., Jan. 5th. Menuhin — Carnegie — Fri. Eve., Jan. 3rd. Musicians' Gambol — Carnegie — Mon. Eve., Dec. 30th. Philharmonic Students' Concert — Carnegie — Sat. Eve., Dec. 28th. Philharmonic Symphony — Carnegie — Thurs. Eve., Jan. 2nd; Fri. Aft., Jan. 3rd; Sun. Aft., Dec. 29th — Metropolitan Opera House — Jan. 12th. Philharmonic Symphony, Junior Orchestral Concert — Sat. Morn., Dec. 28th, Jan. 11th, Carnegie Hall. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st E. of Broadway. C-:_... -£ A ! * T__. .._ *T* XJ-11 C..« At* Tin 1 'JfrK ■WILLIAM HARRIS JR. PRESENTS - "THE FIRST PLAY OF THE SEASON WITH TEETH IN IT." ROBERT LITTELL, WORLD. CRIMINAL CODE By MARTIN FLAVIN with ARTHUR BYRON MATIAMAI TUCATDC 41st St., West of 7th Ave. Evenings 8:60 1NAIHJ1NAL . nnAlKt, Matinees Xmas week: Thurs & Sat. Mats. New Year's week : Thurs. £ Sat. 2 :30 The Theatre Guild Presents METEOR By S. N. BEHRMAN .P'liSlrl THEA., 52nd St. W. of Broadway V3U11U Evgs. 8:50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:40 SPECIAL MATINEE CHRISTMAS The Theatre Guild Presents RED RUST By KIRCHON & OUSPENSKY Mo.fin R^^lr THEA., 45th St. W. of 8th Ave. drilll UCLK. Evgs. 8:40. Mats. Thurs & k'gS. SPECIAL MATINEE CHRISTMAS Sat. 2:40 A Theatre Guild Production Game of Love and Death By ROMAIN HOLLAND Rilf-v-v-**"***** THEA., 47th St. W. of Broadway DULIIlOrc; Evgs. 8:50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:40 YIDDISH ART THEATRE B'way at 28th St. Bogardus 0676 Every Eve. (Incl. Sun.) 8:80 Mats. Sat., Sun., 2 :30. Prsgrams carry English Synopsis. ■ MAURICE SCHWARTZ PRODUCTION LION FEUCHTW ANGER'S Famous Play JEW SUSS From which his ncv«l "POWEil" was developed OPENING THURSDAY EVENING, DEC. 26- The Actor-Managers Inc. has the honor to present The Distinguished Artist in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER SKBTCHH k( Including 5 new ones) Every evening including Sunday except Monday and Thursday nights /^ /"\ TV It T? T\ "V Theatre 41st. EaBt of Broadway. Matinees Thurs. l>i KJNICj Lf I & Saturday. VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 RUTH DRAPER in MIMICRY ALBERT CARROLL FRED KEATING A 0*T1» Q* Theatre W. of B'way., Every Eve. Inc. Sunday 4V*** **• Pop. price Mats. Xmas, New Year's & Saturdays. in MAGIC TOWN HALL Tues. Morn., Dec. 31 — 11 o'clock GRAND OPERA FOR CHILDREN HAENSEL AND GRETEL CHARLOTTE LUND OPERA COMPANY Aleta Bore Ballet — Allan Rabbins Orchestra Cast — Cowden, Bernhardt, Trolsaas, Wellington-Smith Tickets— 25c, 50c, 75c, $1.00, $150 Loges, seating six, $10.00 Other "Holiday Interlude" announcements on page following

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24 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365i Hardy Perennials "Street Scene" (Playhouse). Elmer Rice's cross section of tenement life, cut so as to include an exciting murder. "Journey's End" (Henry Miller's Theater). How English- men fought the war without forgetting what's cricket and what isn't. "Bird in Hand" (Barrymore Theater). John Drink- water's mild comedy redeemed from fatuity by amusing characters and excellent acting. Joseph Wood Krutch The current offerings at the Yiddish Art Theater are Feuchtwanger's "Jew Suss," presented during the week end, and Gottesfeld's "Angels on Earth" on the other days. "Jew Suss" in play form is not so convincing as the novel, for the dramatization emphasizes its more obvious melodramatic struc- ture at the expense of its characterization and historical de- scription. Despite this, the production as staged by Maurice Schwartz is colorful and often moving. "Angels on Earth" is a satirical comedy describing the latest improvements in hell, which have made it a Jewish Babbitts' paradise, and the ad- ventures of two of its guardian angels who are dispatched to New York to prevent hell from becoming over-populated. Needless to say the angels prefer New York to the quiet joys of the new hell. Boris Aronson's settings contribute a great deal to the fantasy of the play. M. G. Jlolibap Snterlube &3#€ m$€ ^oltbap Snterlube *w* DEBATE Soviet Russia vs' Labor England SCOTT NEARING SPONSORS Prof. John Dewey Morris Hillquit Norman Thomas Roger Baldwin Charles E. Beer John Birro Heywood Broun Abraham Cahan Morris Ernst Charles W. Ervin Adolph Held Dr. Joseph Hollos Dr. John H. Holmes Dr. Sigmtind Klein Algernon Eee Walter Llppmann Dr. Alex. Mi i I.I. John Chas. E. Russell Ipton Sinclair Helen Phelps Stokes Oswald G. ViUard Trof. Harry F. Ward First Public Appearance Lecture Extraordinary ount iichael Karolyi First Premier of Hungarian Republic Heretofore Banned from the Lecture Platform in America Subject: DICTATORSHIP IN EUROPE Carnegie Hall TUESDAY EVENING, JANUARY 7, 1930 Tickets 75c, $1.00, $1.50, $2.00 For information, nvrite or call Count Karolyi Reception Committee, 7 East 15th Street Algonquin 3094 This will be the occasion for a public reception to Count Karolyi by the lib- eral and radical movement of New York. Under the management of the Rand School of Social Science. For Communism VS. FENNER BROCKWAY Brilliant Labor Member of British Parliament CHAIRMAN: SAMUEL UNTERMEYER R.ESOL VED : That the British Labor Party offers more to th\ workers of the world than the Communist Party in Soviet Russia SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1930— S:30 P. M. MECCA TEMPLE— 133 W. 55th STREET — ^— -^— ^— — • Reserved Seats $1.00, $1.50, $1.75, $2.00 & $2.75 Reservations advisable now (or best seat locations. Obtainable by mail or in person at Civic Club, 18 If1 10th Street : Columbia University Bookstore ; Worker Bookshop, 26 Union Sq. ; Rand School Bookstore, 7 Ei 15th Street, and New School Bookshop, 465 W. 23rd Si Also by mail or in person at offices of LEAGUE FOR PUBLIC DISCUSSION 11 W. 42nd St., Room 1950 - CHIckering 578» TO OUT-OF-TOWNERS— This debate will be published in book form, Reserve your copy now by sending $1.00. NEW YEAR'S EVE ARTISTS* COSTUME BALL PLAYBOY'S FETE FUTURISTE CUBIST COSTUME CARNIVAL IN GREENWICH VILLAGE At Webster Hall 119 East 11th St. Tickets in advance, $3.50 : By mail from PLAYBOY, Tuesday Evening December 31 : At door, $5.00 32 Union Square Telephone Stuyvesant 9687 DANCING AT 10 — TILL DAWN Costume or Evening Dress obligatory Tickets on sale at all village shops Send for particulars I Step Out With THE TEACHERS' UNION Informal Dance — January 17th HOTEL PENNSYLVANIA— ROOF GARDEN Order tickets, $1.50 in advance. Address SECRETARY, TEACHERS UNION, 70 Fifth Avenue Other announcements appear on page preceding. SATURDAY FORUM ON CURRENT EVENTS 2 P.M. 25 Cents Admission A. J. MUSTE December 28 Dean, Brookwood Labor College "NEXT STEl'S IN AMERICAN LABOR" H. PARKER WILMS January 4 Professor of Banking, Columbia University "THE PANIC OF 1920 AND ITS RESULTS" RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 7 East 15th Street Algonquin 3094 Questions and Discussion When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section What Next in India? By C. F. ANDREWS We printed in the International Relations Section of our issue of December 18 the recent statement of Lord Irwin, Viceroy of India under the Labor Government, with regard to the future status of India. We printed also the "Delhi Manifesto," issued by a conference of Indian political leaders in reply to Lord Irwin's declaration. This week we present two widely separated points of view with regard to Lord Irwin's statement and to the Delhi Manifesto. C. F. Andrews, close friend of Gandhi and protagonist of his pro- gram, himself a resident of India for many years, may be said to represent the enlightened Indian Nationalist point of view. The New Statesman, from which we reprint the edi- torial, Lord Irwin's Blunder, represents the English liberal, but frankly imperial, point of view which is undoubtedly widely held in Great Britain, in both Liberal and Labor circles. — Editor The Nation. THE past six months have witnessed many swings backward and forward in Indian political life. A pause has now been reached in this oscillation with the Viceroy's announcement that dominion status was the declared goal of British statesmanship and that a conference was to be summoned in London. Everyone in India today who reads the newspapers and thinks for himself realizes Great Britain's critically diffi- cult position owing to the unemployment problem. She is not in a position to challenge India, her best customer, to an economic warfare. The new tone adopted in England towards China has also not passed unnoticed. Young India, especially, has begun to feel a new strength of her own. She is no longer in a pliant mood. These inner facts will prob- ably account for the checkered reception which has been given to the Viceroy's declaration. The younger members of the Nationalist Party, who are at heart in favor of complete separation from England, are critical of everything that comes from England today. Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, who is their acknowledged leader, has stated to the press: A conference to discuss peace terms, when war is be- ing waged against us by the British government, is not to be thought of. Such a conference must be preceded by a cessation of the present warlike repressive activities. There must be a clear indication that the British govern- ment is out for peace, on the basis of the Indian National- ist demand, and is not merely playing for time. Mahatma Gandhi's first reaction to the announcement 72.S no less characteristic. "Any such conference," he said, 'must be like Caesar's wife, above suspicion." At the same ie he was prepared on certain conditions to welcome the Viceroy's proposal for a round-table conference in London, ^ater on, a meeting was summoned of leaders belonging to all parties and creeds. I have seen the list of those present and would regard it as truly representative. It included the name of Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru on the left and that of the Rt. Hon. V. Srinivasa Sastri on the right wing of Indian politics. This meeting issued a statement to the press which was unanimously agreed upon. It recognized the sincerity of the Viceroy's utterance. Three things were demanded : ( 1 ) a quiet atmosphere for the conference; (2) a political amnesty; (3) a majority from the Indian National Congress among those members of the conference who should repre- sent the Indian people. On these points there should not be any serious diffi- culty. Then follows, in their statement, a request to the Viceroy to corroborate their own interpretation of his message, so that there may be no misunderstanding. They assume that the conference itself is to place before the British Parliament what form the dominion constitution of India shall take. Thus the Viceroy's twofold declaration, that dominion status was the goal and a conference was to be held, has been taken by all the Indian leaders to mean that the conference is to decide the new dominion constitution of India. Up to the present, I have not been able to find (after searching through the somewhat scanty news from India) any sign of a deadlock, or disavowal, or disagreement. But it is evident that many newspapers in England have not given the same interpretation to the Viceroy's speech which the Indian leaders have given ; nor are they at all convinced that negotiations have advanced to the point of framing a dominion constitution. We are left, therefore, in a state of uncertainty which may possibly be ended one way or another before what I am now writing is published. If I am asked how far it is desirable and possible to go in carrying out the British government's pledge of ultimate dominion status for India, I would say without any hesitation that the earlier constitution under the Reform Councils of 1921 — making some subjects "reserved" and others "transferred" — proved unworkable. It had in it all those elements of distrust and timidity which ruin honest statesmanship. One of the chief secretaries in the Government of India at Simla said to me : "This Reform Constitution is so bad that it has only one thing to recommend it: no one can ever wish to go on with it, and therefore it drives us forward to something better." But if that be granted (and hardly anyone who knows the facts would question it) then it carries with it the obvi- ous corollary that the new constitution, unlike the half- hearted measure that went before, must proceed on lines of trust and boldness. There is really no half-way house. Responsible government can only mean full responsibility; to offer with one hand and then to draw back with the other is futile and unstatesmanlike as well. For the past ten years an incessant torrent of propa- ganda has been poured forth all over the world, deluging us all with the news that because India is composed of many races, religions, castes, languages, therefore the idea of self- government is impossible. Every riot has been magnified : Miss Mayo's slanderously unfair book has been trumpeted forth ; caste barriers have been exaggerated. On the other hand, nothing has been said concerning the underlying unity of Indian life ; its geographical completeness ; its moral power

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26 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 336 of patient endurance ; its essential reasonableness and modera- tion ; its universal demand for freedom to govern itself in its own way. I shall not easily forget, when I was traveling, in Indian dress, in a third-class railway carriage, how the villagers after discovering my identity crowded round me asking with eager lips and faces: "When shall we get Swaraj (self-government) ?" That was more than twelve years ago in a remote country district almost at the foot of the Himalayas, far from any town center. If the demand for Swaraj was so nearly universal then, what must it be today? It was profoundly interesting to me to read in Mahatma Gandhi's paper, only a week ago, that he had been visiting that very district. He relates simply that the crowd had been more than twice as great as those multitudes who had gathered at the very height of the non-cooperation move- ment. We often hear today that his influence is on the wane, that he retains but a shadow of his former greatness. To those who know the facts that is just as absurd as it is untrue to say that India is not eager for Swaraj. If then the question be asked: "Would you be ready to intrust India during this coming year with full respon- sible government, both provincial and central?" I would answer, "Yes." If I were further asked concerning any safe- guards to the minorities and to the depressed classes that might be needed, the reply would be that there would neces- sarily go along with the new constitution a declaration of rights, these rights to be so framed as to comprise a statutory law which no Parliament could overrule or annul. Lastly, if the problem of military and naval defenses were raised, I would point out that India is already an original member of the League of Nations and a signatory of the Paris pact and also of the World Court. Her record is one of peace with her neighbors, not of war. Also it should be pointed out that not a single dominion within the British Commonwealth of Nations has a full self- supporting armament as yet, either by land or sea. If officers from England were still needed to carry over the Indian Army intact into the new constitution, they would surely be willing to continue their service for that purpose as long as they were needed. Important details of gradual transfer- ence of responsibility could be agreed on, with the necessary accommodations, when once the main issue of full self- government was decided. Lord Irwin's Blunder* The debate on India in the House of Lords made it abun- dantly clear that it is upon the Viceroy that the main if not the whole responsibility rests for the unfortunate form of the solemn declaration which he made on reaching India. Speaking for the government, Lord Parmoor declared that "we should if possible realize what the difficulties are in India and attempt upon a matter of this kind to do our best to support the views and opinions of the present Viceroy." He went on to refer to Lord Irwin as "the greatest Viceroy of modern times." . . . It is quite evident that Lord Irwin while he was in London dominated the India Office and that the India Office is now seeking shelter from the cold blasts of criticism under the wings of the "great" Viceroy. * We reprint this editorial from the New Statesman , English liberal weekly, of November 9. — Editor The Nation. About the blunder there can be no doubt. The only i portant question now is how its dangerous consequences m be averted, if they can be averted at all. Lord Irwin used t! vague phrase "dominion status," about the precise meaning d which lawyers might argue forever, but such lawyers' argil ments are not pertinent in this case. All that mattered wal how the phrase would be understood by the politicians and peal pie of India. All authorities on the present political mentaliti of India — excepting "the greatest of modern Viceroys" — appeal, to have been agreed that such a phrase ought not to have bee employed by the Viceroy at the present moment, because ij< would inevitably be misunderstood. But against all such advicji the India Office decided to trust "the man-on-the-spot." . . I The position of Lord Irwin is clear enough. He wishe I to be able to make a declaration which would avert the dange of that campaign of "civil disobedience" which was threatene1 for New Year's Day. Probably he has averted it, but at wha cost? At the cost apparently of destroying the last scrap ajf confidence which remains in India in the integrity and good fait of the British raj. Lord Irwin seems to be a believer in t doctrine of "Peace in our time, O Lord — and after me th deluge." In all the circumstances of the case his official declar tion in favor of "dominion status" could only be taken in Indi to mean that that status was to be granted in the immediat future. That it did not mean that has been made perfect! clear by Lord Parmoor, but Lord Irwin must have know that it would be taken in that way in India and must hav intended that it should be. How Lord Irwin's speech was actually taken in India wa made clear enough within three days of its delivery. A com mittee of the leaders of all parties in India, including the lib eral moderates, issued a plain statement of what they under stood Lord Irwin to mean. They declared, "We understani that the conference is to meet, not to discuss when dominioi status shall be established, but to frame a scheme of dominioi constitution for India. We hope we are not mistaken in thu interpreting the import and the implications of this weighty pro nouncement of the Viceroy." The men who signed this mani festo — moderates and extremists alike — knew, of course, tha nothing of the sort was intended by Lord Irwin or the Britisl government. But they saw their chance and took it, and wh shall blame them? If Lord Irwin sought to bamboozle them why should not they in turn bamboozle the people of India? For bamboozling it was. That is the whole trouble "dominion status" is a phrase which has almost no meaning ir relation to India. That enormous continental conglomeratior of Hindus and Mohammedans and semi-independent native states can never, as far as it is possible to look forward intc the dim future, have a constitution that would be in any waj comparable to the constitutions of Canada or Australia or New Zealand. "Dominion status" for India as a whole is just abou as remote a prospect as is the ultimate "Federation of the World." The thing is simply not possible, either now or proba bly a hundred years hence. India has a thousand Ulsters. Will the warlike Mohammedan minority ever consent to be rule by the very unwarlike Hindus? Will the aristocratic Indian states consent to be ruled by the spurious (or else illiterate) democracies of Calcutta and Lahore and Bombay? These ques- tions answer themselves almost before they are asked. "Do minion status" is therefore an intrinsically nonsensical term as applied to India. It can only be so applied with a conscious or semi-conscious intention to deceive. The fat, however, is already in the fire — thanks to Lord Irwin. There can be no going back upon his declaration. Care-! fully read, it means, of course, nothing at all. But on the face of it it seems to mean something, to imply some very big change of policy. Yet, according to Lord Parmoor, there is to be no change of policy at all. The intention of the government is to

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January 1, 1930] The Nation 27 pursue the policy which has been pursued by all British gov- ernments during the past twelve years. . . . But, then, why this flamboyant declaration of policy by Lord Irwin? It means nothing, apparently, save a reaffirmation of the policy of 1917. Yet in India it has been taken to mean very much more, and it was the obvious intention of Lord Irwin that it should be taken to mean much more. What is the meaning of it all? If we cannot understand it ourselves, how can the Indians be expected to understand it? "There is no change," says Lord Parmoor. Then why in heaven's name should there be all this fuss? If Lord Irwin's speech meant something, then what is that something? If it meant nothing, as Lord Parmoor suggests, then why has it produced this wonderfully "satisfactory" result in India? The answer to these questions is obvious. The "greatest Viceroy of modern times" has elected to take a short view of the Indian political situation, and in announcing his policy has used phrases which must surely have been intended to hold a double mean- ing— one for India and another for England. It is not, we believe, by such methods that the great problem of Indian gov- ernment can be solved. Lord Irwin is a disastrously bad ad- viser. On what he has done during the past few weeks he should probably be described, not as the greatest, but as the worst Viceroy of modern times. But the urgent question is how the damages can best be repaired. The Indian leaders have affirmed — honestly or dis- honestly— their belief that the proposed conference is to meet at Delhi to frame a constitution embodying the principle of im- mediate dominion status. So far, no official statement has been issued, either by the Viceroy or by the home government, repu- diating that absurd, yet inevitable, interpretation of Lord Irwin's words. But some such repudiation must be made at once if the British government is not justly to be charged with the worst sort of disingenuity and trickery. We are not going to offer India dominion status either this year or next year, or in the lifetime of any living man. We might perhaps leave her alone to work out her own salvation without the aid of British bayonets. That is conceivable. But it is not conceivable that India (as a whole), in any future conditions that can now be even hypothetically envisaged, will be able to control her own army, navy, and civil service in the manner in which these services are controlled in other British dominions. This must somehow be made clear, if only to rectify, in such measure as is possible, Lord Irwin's almost grotesque blunder. . . . He must find means of clearing up the mess that he has made, or if that is impossible he ought to resign. What is immediately urgent, as Lord Reading pointed out, is that the obvious misunderstand- ings to which Lord Irwin's speech has given rise should be instantly rectified. The Indians have already too little confi- dence in our good faith. We cannot afford to let the "greatest Viceroy of modern times" destroy that confidence altogether. In view of the many letters received from readers on recent riots and the present situation in Palestine, The Nation will publish in its issue of January 8 a short article and a considerable number of letters on this subject. LAST 5 DAYS! Mmd of REMOVAL SALE All Etchings, Color Reproductions, and Books must be sold AT ANY PRICE I International Book & Art Shop 8fhcHthAw. Contributors to This Issue Robert S. Allen is a Washington newspaper corre- spondent. Paul Y. Anderson is the national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. C. W. is a writer on current business developments. Horace B. Davis is on the staff of Southwestern College in Memphis. Leslie Nelson Jennings is a New York poet. Lorine Pruette is the author of "Woman and Leisure: A Study in Social Waste." Benjamin Ginzburg is preparing a volume to be entitled "The Adventure of Science." Fred T. Marsh writes occasional book reviews for The Nation. Joseph T. Shipley is at work on a book of literary criticism. R. F. Dibble, whose recent death is lamented by The Nation as well as by his many other friends, was in the department of English at Hunter College. Norah Meade reviews novels regularly for The Nation. Eloise Ellery is professor of history at Vassar College. Mark Van Doren is editor of "An Autobiography of America." Louis R. Gottschalk is in the department of history at the University of Chicago. Joseph Wood Krutch is dramatic editor of The Nation. C. F. Andrews, who has lived more than fifteen years among the villages of Bengal, is connected with the Tagore School in India. Coming to America W : FAMOUS BR AND PI Mr. Brockway ai under the auspices o will speak on — Not Future of India — T/i Way With Crimina Fulfilling its promise For ten A. AL 52 Vanderbilt A A. FENNER BROCKWAY, M.P. ITISH LABOR LEADER iACE ADVOCATE rives in America on January 7th f THE WORLD TOMORROW. He i-Coopcration in War Time — The e Labor Party and Palestine — A Ne<u Is — The British Labor Party, Is It s? ns and dates address: BERT MacLEOD venue New York When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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28 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3365 SHOPPERS' CORNER ftea GIFTS LA Nation That are unique and lovely at moderate price*. Only genuin* handcrafts of Mexican and American Indians. Variety of Rugs— Pottery— YTeavlngg — Jewelry — Bas- kets, etc. MESTA, 38 West 8th St. reader* invited. Open till 10 P. M. MARITZA — 172 W. 4th Street Offers to her friends a very distinctive and unusual selection of lovely gifts just received for the holiday season at very moderate prices. 1 Russian shirts for men. H Charming selection of Jersey dresses. H Russian Cossack coats and hat*. H Original Costumes to Hire. NEW EDITION OF FINE ETCHING/ Hy American fcnci Europe;, artists. Fine subjects to 'fc-autify the home or oino hpleudld for Christian Elite. Writ* for free set ot nmall reprociucticna. Dept. B ETCHERS GUILD 366 Broadway. New York Pit} OPEN SHELF OENTGENOLOGIST needs assistant. He must be cultured, well poised, unattached, and be able to handle tactfully various types of people. The work necessitates residence in or near the office, but working conditions are pleas- ant. Technical experience is unnecessary. The position is permanent and there is possibility of increase in salary. Box 2258, % The Nation. THE PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE Program Dec. 27-Jan. 4 AT COOPER UNION B! 8th Street and Astor Place at 8 o'clock. ' Admission Free. |jj| The Psychology of Progress Friday, Dec. 27 — No Meeting. igj Ethics and Social Science Sunday, Dec. 29 — No Meeting. !|J| Natural Science Tuesday, Dec. 31 — No Meeting. MUHLENBERG BRANCH LIBRARY 209 West 23rd St., at 8:30 o'clock. Monday, Dec. 30 — Dr. Mark Van Doren — The Autobiography of America — "Beyond the Missis- sippi." Wednesday, Jan. 1 — No Meeting. Thursday. Jan. 2 — Dr. E. G. Spaulding— The Development of Fundamental Ideas and Funda- mental Problems in Philosophy and Science. "The Nature of Space and Time." Saturday, Jan. 4 — Dr. Houston Peterson — [HI Types of Character. Emil Lucka's "Frontiers JB| of the Soul" and Spranger's "Types of Ifil Men." EDUCATIONAL TkCM°t£KN THE MODERN SCHOOL Stelton, N. J. (Boys and Girls from 4 to 14 years of age.) Creative activities. Academic Instruction. Write Jas. H. Dick, Prin. FRENCH, SPANISH, ITALIAN, GERMAN, ENGLISH Conversational method. Native teachers. Private lessons, 75c, short course, 9 to 9 daily. 18th year. FISHER'S SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES 1264 Lexington Avenue, N. W. Cor. 85th Strest UNIVERSAL INSTITUTE OF \ ANC-TT\fi^S ITALIAN— GERMAN I /ilXTjU^VrE^ FRENCH— SPANISH Private lessons 75c (Daily 9-9). Native teachers. Simplified conversational method. 18 years' ex- perience. Also neglected English education. 1265 Lexington Ave., Northeast Cor. 8.">th St. RUSSIAN by professional teacher. Imperial university grad- uate. Berlitz method. M. Jerlitzyn, 26 W. 123rd St. Harlem 0487 PERSONAL A CLUB is organizing to give members, through ■'*• mutual cooperation, an intelligent social at- mosphere combined with exclusive out-door ac- tivities e. g. private beach facilities, camp, etc. Please write Box 2257, % The Nation. If you're tired of Hunting a Home Let The Nation Real Estate Column Find it for you. 30 words — $3.08 THE NATION 20 Ve8 id

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 17 ol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 1930 No. 3366 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 29 EDITORIALS: Peace Be to Zion 31 Pittsburgh's Shame 32 Disarmament Difficulties 33 The Non-Existent Soviets 34 THE NATION'S HONOR ROLL FOR 1929 35 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 36 WHY CONSOLIDATE RAILROADS? By Donald R. Richberg 37 PROSPERITY— BELIEVE IT OR NOT: VII. BALANCING THE BOOKS. By Stuart Chase 39 RAISING CANE IN WASHINGTON. By Arthur Warner 41 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 44 CORRESPONDENCE: Palestine and the Jews 45 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 47 BOOKS, FILMS, DRAMA: The Sexton's Spade. By Granville Paul Smith 48 Mobilizing the Jeremiahs. By William MacDonald 48 Meet the Wife. By Pierre Loving 49 A Poet on Hell and Women. By Eda Lou Walton 49 The Economics of the Contemporary Theater. By Joseph Wood Krutch 49 Prose in the Grand Manner. By Florence Codman 50 Fiction Briefs 50 The Book Shelf 51 Drama: A Peevish Play. By Joseph Wood Krutch 52 Films: The News Reel. By Alexander Bakshy 54 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Dr. Magnes and Zionism. By Ferdinand M. Isserman 56 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 34, Clifton Gardens, W. 9, London, England. THE TEMPER OF INDIA is clearly indicated by the scenes that took place at the opening of the Indian Nationalist Congress on December 29, 1929. Shouts, riots, men and women fainting in the crush, leaders whose speeches counseling moderation and sobriety could not be heard above the melee — these were the order of the opening day. And to add to the color and confusion of the pro- ceedings came 9,000 Sikhs, yellow clad, dust-covered, with naked swords beating time on their scabbards as they marched. So far the moderates have won a further reprieve ; Gandhi defeated by a vote of 131 to 89 the proposal of Subash Bose providing for complete cessation of participa- tion in the present government ; and the plan of non- cooperation is set for some future day. But to say, as the London Times with foolish confidence says, that the Con- gress need not be taken seriously and that its resolution for complete independence instead of dominion status does not represent the people of India, "nine-tenths of . . . which are illiterates not caring a fig for politics," is to ignore completely the dangerous possibilities of the situation. The demands of the executive committee of the Congress are for boycott of the existing government, refusal to participate in the proposed round-table conference in London between representatives of the Indian Nationalists and of the British Government, and for giving the Nationalist Congress authority to institute non-cooperation whenever it deems it advisable. This, of course, is further temporizing. But the Indian situation right now is dynamite of the most explosive kind. Not Gandhi, not the British Raj, not all the counsels of moderation in the world can stop that powder train if once it starts to explode. It is the duty both of the Indian Nationalists and of the British Labor Government to pre- vent an explosion if it is humanly possible. This is no time for ultimatums on either side. SENATOR BORAH IS QUITE RIGHT. The Presi- dent's Law Enforcement Commission cannot inform us what the prohibition law is, for we know that, and nothing will really be done to enforce the law until there is a com- plete change in the enforcement personnel. We should add that there will be no real enforcement until there is absolute determination on the part of our highest officials to procure it. It all rests with President Hoover himself. He has now been ten months in office and there has been no change. He has tried to duck the issue by appointing the Law Enforce- ment Commission and by announcing that he is going to make the District of Columbia a model of what the country should and can do on the liquor question. No report from his com- mission will relieve him from his sworn duty to enforce the prohibition law until it is repealed. We have heard a lot about this wonderful executive and his organizing ability. Here is his chance to show what he can do. He will accom- plish nothing until, as Senator Borah suggests, he fires every man in the service who will not do his duty and appoints men who will. If we were of the school which put this law into our Constitution we should make Mr. Hoover's life miserable in every legitimate way until he set himself to the task he is now shirking precisely as did his immediate pre- decessors in the White House. MR. HOOVER APPARENTLY INTENDS to make this a business administration in diplomacy. With Charles G. Dawes at London, Walter E. Edge at Paris, and now Frederick M. Sackett at Berlin, the business man has come into somewhat more than his own in occupy- ing the diplomatic seats of the mighty. There is, of course, something thoroughly appropriate in these appointments at the hands of an administration whose chief emphasis is on business efficiency, and probably that administration is reason- ably representative of the present-day United States. Yet we cannot forbear casting a wistful glance backward at the days when a Bancroft or a Motley was considered an appro- priate representative of this country of ours. Nor can we really believe that corresponding appointments today would be either inappropriate or undesirable. "AN ABSOLUTE SURRENDER of a basic princi- J~\- pie of Anglo-Saxon liberty" is Representative James M. Beck's characterization of the proposal to confer upon

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30 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3366 Mr. Hoover the right to make tariff duties "flexible" by lowering or raising them as he sees fit. "I believe that our constitutional institutions are in process of dissolution," Mr. Beck told the Bond Club of New York a few days ago. Doubtless we shall continue to have a President, a Congress, and a Supreme Court for a long time, but the character of the Presidential office is changing at the expense of Congress because the spirit of the people "is one that believes in the concentration of power in one man." The Sixteenth Amend- ment, Mr. Beck declared, violated the original intent of the Constitution by making the imposition of income taxes in- dependent of the proportionate representarion of the States in the House, while the Eighteenth Amendment was adopted "simply through the impact of minorities upon cowardly legislators and public men." We have more than once found ourselves in sharp opposition to Mr. Beck in political matters, but when he attacks the rapid undermining of the Constitution by the growth of executive usurpation the for- mer Solicitor General is on solid ground and we are glad to commend his courage. THE FIVE CHILDREN of Mrs. Ella May Wiggins, murdered in the course of the Marion textile strike disturbances last fall, are now in a State home for orphans. The man who shot Mrs. Wiggins is at large, although a group of persons have been tried for and acquitted of her murder by due process of law in North Carolina. The deputies of Marion who shot and killed six strikers in a riot in front of one of the mills are also at large, the State having absolved them, too, of any stigma of murder. But the American Civil Liberties Union refuses to be disheartened by this turn of affairs. It has instituted civil suits for dam- ages on behalf of Mrs. Wiggins's estate against the mills, the Gastonia Gazette, and twenty-four persons. It has filed suits against the sheriff of Mecklenburg County and other officers for unlawfully arresting and imprisoning four union organizers. It will shortly begin damage suits on behalf of three textile organizers, Lell, Saviors, and Wells, kidnapped by a group of over-patriotic citizens and taken to a lonely spot in the country where one of them was flogged. It will appeal the cases of the seven men convicted of conspiracy to kill Chief of Police Aderholt in Gastonia and sentenced to from five to twenty years in prison. For these and other activities that will give courage to the underpaid and over- worked textile workers of the South, the union deserves the thanks of everybody who prefers justice and decency to the most barefaced exploitation. But it needs more than thanks: it needs funds to carry on this work. Those who wish to help may do so by sending contributions to the American Civil Liberties Union, 100 Fifth Avenue, New York City. A SHARP WARNING from Dr. Schacht, president of the Reichsbank, early in December, that the financial reforms necessary to enable Germany to meet its obligations under the Young plan had not yet been made, followed by the authorization of a foreign loan of $100,000,000 which Dr. Schacht refused to approve and for which temporary ad- vances from the Reichsbank were immediately substituted, calls attention to the unhappy state of German finances and German economic life. Fortunately the Miiller Govern- ment, after venting its wrath upon Dr. Schacht, announced an elaborate program of reform and thereby probably saved itself from being turned out of office; but the Finance Minister, Dr. Hilferding, resigned and Professor Paul Mol- lenhauer has taken his portfolio. The Reichsbank loan will relieve the pressure upon the treasury and take care of an estimated deficit of 1,700,000,000 marks at the end of the fiscal year. On December 7 the number of unemployed who were receiving doles reached 1,250,000, an increase of more than 100,000 in a single week and a half million greater than the number a year ago. The index of wholesale prices had declined on December 4 to 134.6 against 140.3 the previous year, and the output of iron in November was the smallest of any month since February. German in- dustry, in short, is showing the strain which foreign bor- rowings have for some time concealed. FROM VICTOR CAUVIN, secretary-general of the Union Patriotique d'Ha'fti, we have what purports to be the inside story of just how the recent disturbances in Haiti started. Not disaffection with President Borno, the American-made executive of Haiti, but plain dislike of American methods of administration was evidently the source of the trouble. Demands that students of the Central Agri- cultural School found petty and humiliating were made on them by George F. Freeman, its American head ; the students rebelled and were told by Mr. Freeman to remove themselves elsewhere if they did not care for his system of education. Some two hundred students decided to strike and marched in orderly lines into the town ; twice they were dispersed by police and reassembled. This strike spread to other schools, all the demonstrations being quiet and orderly. On Decem- ber 3 the Government issued a communique disclaiming all responsibility for any measures that might be taken against the strikers. Troops appeared on the following day at the town of Jacmel. At Port au Prince an American struck a Haitian employee of the custom house, and in protest the whole custom-house personnel joined in the strike. Martial law was thereupon instituted without sufficient warning to the citizens, many of whom were arrested for violating it in consequence. Since the strikes continued to spread through the town, martial law was not revoked until December 17. M. Cauvin says: "Until the seventeenth of this month [December] we could not walk the streets from 9 p.m. till 5 :30 a.m. We were treated as enemies in our own homes, in our own country." This seems to be the gist of the matter. We tend to forget that Haiti belongs to the Haitians. We cannot, of course, vouch for the word by word accuracy of M. Cauvin's report. But its import is clear enough. It shows that the American administration in Haiti has been short-sighted, domineering, and brutal. It is a bad record for us ; we can only begin to amend it by getting out. NATIONALIST PARTY SUCCESS in Egypt, ap- pears to be complete, all but seven of the 235 seats in the Chamber of Deputies having been won by the Wafd, or by a small group of Independents who will act with the Wafd, in the election just held. Reballoting in eighteen constituencies will not change the general result, since at most it can only reduce slightly the overwhelming Wafd ma- jority. The election was interesting because of the creation of twenty-one new seats in the Chamber on account of the increase of population since the previous election, and because

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January 8, 1930] The Nation the election was held on the basis of direct suffrage instead of the secondary or "two-degree" basis which the constitu- tion appears to contemplate. Rather curiously, the proposed treaty between Egypt and Great Britain, the negotiation of which has been hanging fire, did not enter as a direct issue into the electoral contest; not, it is reported, because of popular opposition to the treaty, but because support of the treaty would help the former premier, Mahmoud Pasha, whom the Nationalist or Wafd Party had denounced as a dictator and sought to defeat. It is expected that the treaty question will be taken up as soon as the new government is formed and the outlook for the treaty seems to be good. As a remembrance of a limpid and heroic page made sacred by the sacrifice of our martyrs, the banners and his- tories of the chapters will be offered to the Historical Mu- seum of Fascism where they should remain as a symbol of devotion to our ideals. THIS LYRIC FLIGHT, uttered by Count Ignazio Thaon di Revel, was the swan song of the Fascist League of America, officially disbanded on December 31, 1929. Count Revel carefully explained that the league, with its membership (reputed) of 12,000, was to be dissolved be- cause its aims — "to acquaint America with the ideals of fas- cism and the marvelous work of national reconstruction accomplished by the Fascist! government in Italy" — had been achieved. This is, of course, as it may be. But although Count Revel denied it with amused tolerance, one suspects that it was not entirely the accomplishment of all its ends that put the league out of business, but certain strictures on its methods. The league has been a little too high-handed in its dealings; it has not even been above violence in its cam- paign of acquainting America with the ideals of fascism, reprisal for which culminated in the murder of two over- active league members. Marcus Duffield, in an article in Harper's Magazine last November, charged the league with setting up, among Italian Americans, a dictatorship whose ultimate control was vested in the Duce himself. This article was brought up for comment in the United States Senate a fortnight or so ago. In spite of denial by Secretary Stimson that any fault was to be found with the League, one guesses that Mussolini's assistants in this country thought the water was getting a little too hot. STOPPING THE GOLD FLOW from Argentina was President Irigoyen's aim in closing by decree, on Decem- ber 17, the Caja de Conversion or exchange bank at Bue- nos Aires. The reason for this sudden action, which came as a surprise to the financial world, was alleged to be the "damaging influence" of exchange fluctuations upon the Ar- gentine market and the consequent shipments of gold coin out of the country "without justifiable causes." The imme- diate effect of the decree, of course, is to remove Argentina from the list of countries which maintain the gold standard, but the whole transaction appears somewhat hard to explain. New York banking opinion inclines to the view that Presi- dent Irigoyen's decree, besides being precipitate, was unneces- sary and the action in any case is disturbing. It is true that general business conditions in Argentina during the past year have been getting worse rather than better, with an unfavorable balance of trade, high rediscount rates, and a consequent outflow of gold. On the other hand the Banco 31 de la Nacion, the central bank of Argentina, which as a re- sult of the decree takes control of the exchange situation save as local banks may still, apparently, export such gold as they have, is reported to have an 82 per cent gold re- serve against outstanding currency — one of the highest re- serve ratios, perhaps actually the highest, in the world. It is not clear that Argentina has anything to gain by drop- ping the gold standard. Currency depreciation, certainly, will not minister to its prosperity. TO HAROLD J. LASKI has come a signal honor. He has been chosen by Ramsay MacDonald to lead in an investigation of the administrative machinery of the English government, which may result in several changes in the British constitution — at least so the dispatches an- nounce. Whether they exaggerate or not, it may be laid down as certain that whatever subject Mr. Laski applies himself to he will illuminate — witness his searching article in the January Harper's entitled Can Business Be Civil- ized? Indeed, the strength of the British Labor Party remains in the men of most unusual intellectual caliber whom it can call upon for party service; it is open to ques- tion whether any other national political organization can equal it in this respect. That the Labor Party is planning far-reaching constructive changes is altogether significant. If through Professor Laski and those with whom he will serve the party will in due time announce definite recommen- dations as to administrative reforms and constitutional changes, there will be conclusive answers to the recent Con- servative charges that the MacDonald Administration is leading only in foreign affairs. Peace Be to Zion AS the British investigation of the riots in Palestine comes to an end, and as the passions aroused in con- nection with those outbreaks gradually cool, we are struck with the substantial agreement among intelligent and well-disposed observers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, on certain essentials of the Palestinian question, however sharply they may have differed concerning the events of the months just past. It is agreed, first, that the association in any way of Zionism with British imperial interests and ambitions is unfortunate for a movement which is in essence cultural and spiritual. As it is phrased, "Zion cannot be built on bayo- nets." Second, it is agreed that under existing conditions the Jews cannot expect, and ought not to ask, the political domination of Palestine. Third, it is agreed that they ought to be adequately protected against such murderous attacks as those of the past summer. Fourth, and most important, it is agreed that whatever arrangements are worked out for the political control and the necessary policing of the coun- try, the permanent structure of Zion must be built on a foun- dation of mutual understanding between Jews and Arabs. We have not tried to assess the exact immediate blame for the attacks of last August, though it seems clear from the testimony thus far that they were instigated at least in part by certain fanatical Arab leaders. Nor have we attempted, in advance of the findings of the investigation, to determine definitely the responsibility of the British Government, BURv.iiVQ/*«fr pusUq LIB,

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32 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3366 whether by reason of the conflict between the Balfour Decla- ration and the alleged war-time promises to the Arabs or because of laxity in the local administration at a time when trouble was evidently impending. Because we have tried to understand and explain, as far as we could, what lay in the background of the killings, many of our readers have ap- parently felt that we were inclined to condone the attacks on the Jews. Nothing could be further from the truth ; we have nothing but reprobation for violence and murder, and sympathy for the victims. But we have no word to retract that we have spoken in defense of Arab rights; nor have the Arabs forfeited those rights by the misconduct of some of their number. Our primary interest, however, is not in the wrongs and mistakes of the past, or even in the immediate responsi- bility for them. Our concern is with the future. Zionism, we believe, has a genuine cultural and spiritual contribution to make to modern life. The economic and political tasks of working out that contribution are of the utmost difficulty and complexity, in view of the physical, racial, and religious conditions in Palestine. Because we are wholly friendly to this great undertaking, and because we are confident that no enduring structure can be built in Palestine except on the basis of Arab friendliness and good-will, we have supported the irenic position of Dr. Magnes. In his steadfast adher- ence to the highest ethical standards in the face of the most bitter provocation, that great leader seems to us at once to uphold the finest tradition of Judaism and to point the only possible way to the true success of Zionism. At cost, if need be, of further misunderstanding, but in full confidence that our belief is right, we once more assert that the only way for those who have been wronged in Palestine is the way, not of vengeance, but of forgiveness and reconciliation. Pittsburgh's Shame WE have already commented briefly upon the case of Frederic E. Woltman, graduate assistant in the department of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, who was summarily dismissed from his assistant- ship on May 2 last and also expelled from the university because of his alleged connection with a meeting of the Lib- eral Club, a student organization, at which Professor Harry Elmer Barnes of Smith College was scheduled to speak. It will be recalled that the meeting of the club, called specific- ally "to demand the unconditional release of Thomas Mooney and Warren K. Billings," was first denied the use of a room in one of the university buildings, was then de- barred from all university property, and was finally held in a lot near the university where Professor Barnes spoke from the running-board of an automobile. This was on April 12. On April 24 the club was officially dissolved by the univer- sity authorities, but continued its activities off the campus with the result that, on May 2, two students who had been leaders in the club activities were expelled and Mr. Wolt- man, who was not a member of the club, was both expelled and dismissed. A committee of the American Association of University Professors has lately investigated this extraordinary situation and its report has just been published. Never, in all the long list of infractions of academic freedom which the association has investigated, has a university administration emerged more thoroughly damned. The condemnation is the more severe because of the scrupulous care which the committee appears to have taken to give full weight to the factors, few though they are, by which the university administration might profit. They recognize, for example, that no question of tenure was involved in Mr. Woltman's dismissal, since he held a one-year appointment, had no reasonable ground to expect that he would be reappointed, and was paid his salary for the full year notwithstanding that he was dropped in May. They cite the feeling on the part of the faculty that the situation of the university administration "really is diffi- cult." "It has adopted a highly ambitious project of expan- sion, calling for greatly increased endowment; it is depend- ent for funds partly on the local community and partly on a State government, in both of which the influence and peculiar point of view of certain big-business and industrial interests seem to be paramount." Yet it is the judgment of the com- mittee that Mr. Woltman, who had spoken and written on labor and other subjects, "was dismissed without a statement of charges and without a hearing, without any allegation of incompetence for his academic duties, and without recom- mendation by the department in which these duties were performed." The "administration" of the University of Pittsburgh is President John Gabbert Bowman, sometime secretary of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, whose handling of professorial pensions The Nation has sev- eral times dissected. Dr. Bowman's 680-feet-high, ten- million-dollar "Cathedral of Learning" is apparently intended to be an "efficient" institution such as "certain big-business and industrial interests," along with the cultured and the man in the street, will approve. The association's committee finds that Dr. Bowman is a dictator, and it suggests that he is a coward. In spite of his denial that the university ob- jected to professors taking part in the discussion of public questions, provided they did not engage in "propaganda that seemed to associate the name of the university with the end sought," he frankly admitted that a member of the faculty who did not yield to "friendly remonstrance" would be dis- missed, and added that "at the present time there were four or five members of the faculty to whom this was likely to happen." The conclusion of the committee is, in substance, that the president is afraid of his financial supporters, that he offers only the choice of a one-hundred-per-cent loyalty to his own notions of things or dismissal, that the faculty has "little or no part in the government of the university," and that the professors are terrorized. The fact that all mem- bers of the faculty are employed under yearly contracts, with no presumption of permanence, naturally makes their dis- missal easy. The association has done an admirable piece of work in eviscerating this latest academic scandal. It will not have completed the great task of liberating the professoriate, how- ever, until it has devised some method of bringing such a boss-ridden institution as the University of Pittsburgh to book. As long as professors are willing, as they are, to take the places of colleagues who have been unwarrantably dis- missed, and having done so can still retain good standing in the profession, academic freedom will remain only a form of words.

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Tanuary 8, 1930] The Nation 33 Disarmament Difficulties ; day after Christmas, served at once to emphasize the difficulties facing the London Naval Conference and to indicate its possible usefulness. The note serves notice that the French navy is going to be based on the needs of the French empire as understood in France — an uncom- promising suggestion of the difficulties of the conference — and declares that "the conference will fail to achieve its object to the full unless it makes it lead to a general agree- ment in Geneva as to the methods for the limitation of naval armaments." The accomplishment at London of anything worth while depends on a rare combination of idealism and hard- headed realism. Probably no man in public life combines those qualities in higher degree than Ramsay MacDonald, and it is good that the conference is to have the advantage of his leadership. Yet no one should be betrayed into false hopes on that account. At the time of Mr. MacDonald's visit to our shores last summer, his earnestness and eloquence led many enthusiastic observers to feel that the day of peace on earth was very near. At that very moment, however, more hard-headed critics pointed out that aside from psycho- logical results the immediate practical outcome of the MacDonald-Hoover conferences, as far as the public was informed, had been precisely nothing. Since that time a somewhat bewildered American public has learned that despite President Hoover's statement plans of the Navy Department for cruiser building have not been held up by a single day. Mr. MacDonald did make a gesture toward delaying naval construction; yet if we are not mistaken all inquiries addressed to the present British Government con- cerning actual naval work have been answered to the satis- faction of alarmed patriots who feared an undue weakening of the navy. In both countries there has been a gap between talk and action that is painful to contemplate. Yet we are not inclined to charge either of the chief leaders concerned with hypocrisy. The hard realities of the situation have proved too much for the idealism that found expression in public utterance. Appeals to popular sentiment have run afoul of contracts and political commitments. Ramsay MacDonald's pacifism is genuine enough, but when it comes to actual naval cuts the Admiralty holds the trumps, and the blessed state of parity is to be achieved, it appears, by our building up to Britain instead of Britain's building down to us. If results are to be achieved at London then, it must be by a clear understanding that words, however eloquent, are no substitute for deeds. From this point of view the elimination of the Paris peace pact from the London discussion may be by no means an unmitigated loss. President Hoover and Prime Minister MacDonald based their disarmament pronounce- ments on the idea of the peace pact. The French Govern- ment says of the pact: "It is undoubtedly a real step toward the preservation of peace, but it cannot be looked upon as sufficient in its present state to guarantee the security of nations." The note goes on somewhat cruelly: "It was this consideration, no doubt, that prevented the British Govern- f ment from contemplating a substantial reduction in their naval armament and the American Government from giving up the prompt execution of their latest naval program." It is time to stop talking nonsense about basing naval limitation on the peace pact. If the pact means anything, it means that the nations accepting it are not going to fight. But navies are made to fight. As long as you maintain navies then you are proceeding on the assumption that the pact, for practical purposes, is meaningless; and the idea of basing naval limitations as opposed to abolition on the pact is logically nonsense. Neither Mr. Hoover nor Mr. MacDonald last summer had the slightest idea of scrapping his country's navy, nor will a single delegate come to London with such an idea even remotely in mind. How then could a resulting treaty possibly be based on the pact ? To attempt any such logical feat is simply to darken counsel by words without knowledge. And the frank elimination of the Paris document, while it may dash unjustifiably high hopes, may also serve to keep men's eyes on the practical realities and possibilities of the situation. The conference in fact is going to make little practical difference in the actual busi- ness of naval construction unless the governments con- cerned experience a change of heart of which there is no evidence. The French note is clear and frank on this point. It says flatly that the French navy is going to be based not on sentiment embodied in the peace pact but on "national needs," taking into account France's geographical position and colonial empire. Such an attitude deals openly with existing political realities in terms of force and supposed national interests. Such an attitude makes striking naval reduction well nigh impossible. Yet such an attitude seems in fact to be taken, as far as we can see, by all the Powers concerned, though none of the others has stated it quite so plainly. We should approach the conference, accordingly, with no illusions. Because of these difficulties, shall we simply wash our hands of the conference? By no means. The world is as it is; if we expect little, we may be grateful for not much. If definite plans of limitation, carefully worked out, can be put forward, some slight measure of relief from competitive expenditure may be achieved, as happened at Washington. Further, a fillip may be given to the lagging work of the League's Disarmament Commission, through which France insists, perhaps rightly, any approach to a general move toward armament reduction must come. Finally, the con- ference, happily, is going to contain some men, at least, who really believe that reason can take the place of force as the ultimate international arbiter. Let their hands be strength- ened by the support of the world's peace forces, and this con- ference may take on the character of a cooperative attempt at solving common problems. If it does, it will be worth while, no matter how small its concrete achievements. For the attainment of peace is a matter both of public sentiment and of the right organization of international relations. The peoples, eager for peace, will back their government repre- sentatives, we are confident, in every move they may make in the direction of armament reduction.

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34 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3366 The Non-Existent Soviets IN compiling The Nation s Honor Roll for 1929 we had great trouble in deciding whether to give first place, on the score of humor, to the New Yorker or to the De- partment of State. We finally gave it to the New Yorker on the ground that our cheerful contemporary is always good-natured, which the State Department sometimes is not. But we confess that we find the State Department a great deal funnier than the New Yorker. In the field of meta- physics, moreover, or in the solving of conundrums, the de- partment so happily presided over by Mr. Stimson is certainly without peer. In its performance of that old favorite piece, "When Is a State Not a State," the department surely stands near the top in the field of drama also. The latest scene in the play, up to the time of writing, has been put on with the cooperation of Senator Borah, chair- man of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and the Department of the Interior. Senator Borah sent a personal appeal to M. Litvinov, Acting Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, while the department sent messages through the Soviet Union Information Bureau to the officially non-exist- ent Soviet Government, and through Governor Parks of Alaska to those substantial material realities the Soviet ice- breakers Lipke and Stavropol, in each case asking aid in finding our lost fliers Eielson and Borland. According to the earlier newspaper dispatches, Secretary Wilbur in an apparent fit of absentmindedness sent off the message to Mos- cow without stopping to consult Mr. Stimson. Later dis- patches report that he had State Department consent. In any case, we hope that he will not be proceeded against under the Logan Act ; and as he was corresponding with a govern- ment that does not exist anyway, he will probably come off free. Concerning the messages to the ships, the State Depart- ment graciously informed Mr. Wilbur that it had no objec- tion to the appeal for help — very likely because these ghostly icebreakers, though they are the property of a metaphysical no-state, yet have the solid material quality of cutting a good deal of ice when it comes to saving lost polar fliers. The response to Secretary Wilbur's appeal was striking, coming as it did from no government at all. This Soviet unreality promptly dispatched a plane under the guidance of Semyon Shestakov, the celebrated flier who piloted the Land of the Soviets from Moscow to New York, in search of Eielson and Borland, and ordered two other planes to aid in the expedition. If Shestakov, Russian national hero, at the risk of his own life should rescue our fliers, we presume that the State Department again would have no objection. If human lives were not at stake, one could enjoy without qualification this merry game of hide and seek that our State Department plays, able to see the Soviet Government when it wants to get something out of that organization, but under any other circumstances acting deaf, dumb, and blind. This little play of the State Department's is much like the classical marionette show; it goes on for years in a series of changing scenes, and when one set of actors is killed off, their successors play much the same part. The department could not recognize the Soviet Government because it repudi- ated the Czarist debts, because it confiscated the private prop- erty of American citizens, because it carried on propaganda for a world revolution, and now, forsooth, because M. Lit- vinov has given Secretary Stimson a sharp slap on the wrist over his invocation of the Paris pact in connection with the settlement of the Chinese Eastern Railway question. Of course, the play has its inconveniences. As we recognize no Russian government with which we can make a deportation convention, we cannot deport Russian unde- sirables to the land of the Soviets, and the first thing we know we may find traffic in our streets blocked by Russian Com- munists and other such kittle-cattle who vith the devilish ingenuity for which they are famed have managed in one way or another to evade the vigilance of the immigration service. More serious are the business consequences. The great American corporations, like the General Electric, the Westinghouse, the American Locomotive, and the Interna- tional Harvester Company, are eager to do business in Russia. Despite all discouragements trade today is three times as great in value as before the war and many of these corpora- tions are giving Russian trade organizations credit extending up to three years, thus showing their faith in the future of the business. Their competitors in the other great countries which have recognized Russia enjoy the services of consuls and trade representatives and all the other aid their govern- ments can give them. If only the State Department would put on a new act, our business men think that they might enjoy some of these same advantages themselves. But after all, the play's the thing, and what is trade by comparison with considerations of a loftier and more spiritual nature? Our readers will not have forgotten the five million dol- lars of wicked Russian gold sent by the Soviet Government to two great New York banks last year to help meet the Russian trade balance. They will not have forgotten the righteous indignation of our State Department which finally led to the return of this unrighteous wealth. Perhaps they do not know that the German banks then put their stamp on it, thus taking off the curse, and that in due time it came back all right. Again, the Russian state bank carries balances in American banks, and it asked those banks to honor coupons on Soviet railway bonds held here. The State Department virtuously insisted that this should not be done. So it goes. We hesitate to mention these sordid details of trade and commerce, which serve only to illustrate a few of the diffi- culties placed in the way of business development by our official policy. The State Department evidently has its mind on higher things, and while it continues to give as entertain- ing a performance as the one it is now putting on, we feel that the show is worth all it costs, particularly as most of the cost does not fall on us. How long will the play run ? We do not know, but we begin to think that it may be the "Abie's Irish Rose" of the diplomatic repertory. In fact, we are inclined to believe that long after Henry L. Stimson has ceased to be more than a name, and after the present editors of The Nation are moldering in the dust, the same old favorite may still be seen on the boards of the State Department playhouse. By that time its title may be "No Recognition Without Repentance."

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Tanuary 8, 1930] The Nation 35 The Nation's Plonor Roll for 1929 WE offer below the names of certain Americans who, in public service, the arts, sciences, or other fields, have distinguished themselves during the past year. This is not, of course, an inclusive list, but as it stands it forms a group of men and women who have done honor to the United States as a whole or to their particular part of it. Public Service The United States Senate, for keeping hot the fires of controversy and for insisting that the American people be continuously aware of the intricacies of government. The tariff, farm relief, the power problem, the lobbying activities of William B. Shearer and others have all been brought into the clear light of publicity because the Senate remains the one active, debating legislative body in the country. Owen D. Young, for his work in directing the formu- lation of a reparations agreement — the Young plan — which aims to take the reparations issue out of politics. Salmon O. Levinson, father of the idea of the out- lawry of war, now embodied in the Paris peace pact and formally accepted by the great Powers of the world. J. Nevin Sayre, of the Committee on Militarism in Education, for his gallant leadership in the struggle to keep militarism out of the schools. Senator Bronson Cutting, for successfully attacking the censorship clauses of the tariff bill, with the resulting deletion of the provision for the censorship of obscene books and the limitation of the definition of "seditious" matter. Norman Thomas, for his intelligent, forthright, and vigorous campaign as Socialist candidate for Mayor of New York City. Ernest Gruening, who, with his paper, the Portland Evening News, almost single-handed persuaded the voters of Maine to refuse to permit the export of hydro-electric power. Robert Moses, for his part in securing for the people of New York State one of the finest systems of public parks in the United States. Gardner Jackson, courageous Boston journalist, for devoted and persistent service without pay to unpopular causes. Journalism The Scripps-Howard newspapers, for general liveli- ness and liberalism, and particularly the New York Tele- gram, for putting itself on record as favoring a Socialist Mayor — Norman Thomas — for New York City. The New Yorker, for being consistently amusing, good- tempered, intelligent, resourceful, and good-to-look-at. Architecture The firm of Nimmons, Carr, and Wright of Chi- cago, whose work in industrial building and, more par- ticularly, on structures in various cities built for Sears, Roe- buck and Company, is a long step toward a distinctly American treatment of the problem of design. Robert D. Kohn, Charles Butler, and Clarence S. Stein of New York City, associated architects, for the new Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, fresh proof of American ability to build noble houses of worship. Books Brand Whitlock, for "La Fayette," the most out- standing biography of the year. Jacob Zeitlin and Homer T. Woodbridge, for "The Life and Letters of Stuart P. Sherman," in which they make secure the enduring fame of an interesting and powerful American letter writer. Evelyn Scott, for "The Wave," a great novel about the Civil War. Ernest Hemingway, for telling, in "A Farewell to Arms," a tender love story in the vernacular. Harry T. Peters, for recalling, in "Currier and Ives: Printmakers to the American People," a vanished but touch- ing and impressive American age. Drama Eva Le Gallienne, for her increasingly successful direction of the Civic Repertory Theater in New York City. Elmer Rice, for "Street Scene," a prize-winning play in which realism, satire, and melodrama are all made to contribute to great theatrical effectiveness. Preston Sturges, for enlivening an otherwise dull season with "Strictly Dishonorable," a delightful trifle which approaches the ideal of pure comedy without ceasing to pre- serve the flavor of contemporary American life. The News Reel Theater, for the establishment of a unique institution where one may enjoy the talkie-newspaper without waiting for the end of somebody's super-feature. Art The group of collectors and amateurs who have made possible the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which will devote itself to the display of contemporary paint- ing and objects of art, both American and foreign. Science Albert A. Michelson, who, in announcing, on his seventy-seventh birthday, his retirement from his post as head of the physics department of the University of Chi- cago, declares that he wishes merely to have more time to continue his fifty-four years of scientific research. Harlow Shapley, of the Harvard Observatory, for a series of lectures on astronomy in New York City which were heard with delight by large and eager audiences but which did not yield any portion of their scholarly profundity to popular taste. William H. Wilmer, whose years of skilful, devoted, and successful service in the field of ophthalmological surgery have been recognized by the establishment of the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Adventure and Heroism Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd and his com- panions for their bold flight over the South Pole. Dr. George W. Crile, Robert Charles, a Negro passerby, and many other unnamed persons who not only- kept their heads in a panic but performed feats of the most admirable bravery and self-sacrifice during the trying hours that followed the Cleveland Clinic explosion and fire.

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36 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3366 It Seems to Heywood Broun I'VE been against every move made for censoring the theater. And I'm not for curtailment now. And yet New York is in a silly situation when the frankness of the stage so far exceeds the modes and manners of the news- papers. Concerning several plays of recent vintage the re- viewers have written with wariness and embarrassment. Sometimes the mere recital of the plot has been enough to cause stammering and indirection. This, I repeat, is a silly situation. Either the stage is too licentious or the public press too squeamish. Decidedly I lean to the latter interpretation. Moreover, the radio, which begins to usurp the functions of the newspaper, is the most prudish of all. Even a simple "damn" is generally denied to those who broadcast. Now plays are done audibly before a congregation while both the radio speech and the newspaper story may be taken by the individual in discreet seclusion. Why should these mediums not be empowered to go the limit in frank talk and the stage in its co-educational capacity be limited to mild and mannered "Drat it's"? The commotion about theatrical censorship pro and con is out of all proportion. On principle I am against abridgments such as the ban recently placed by Boston against O'Neill's "Strange Interlude." But I must admit that things done for or against the theater are relatively unimportant in our national life. The drama has ceased to be a force as far as the millions are concerned. If cutting is to be done let liberties be taken from the playwright and given to the radio man and the reporter. Save in the case of murder trials and some particularly good divorces the press in general is far too namby-pamby. I know that there is much shouting about the sensational and yellow press and the manner in which it has encouraged crime. And I am willing to admit that much is printed in the tabloids which seems to me singularly offensive to good taste. But sensationalism and yellowness do not arise from overemphasis so much as a paucity of examination. A young man murders his wife and burns the body. This is enough to send the tabloids shrieking into headlines. One of them may print (on many occasions one of them has printed) the true-signed story of the murderer. Yet the tabloids are cor- rect in thinking that a murder story may justifiably com- mand the interest of us all. To say, "I am not interested in such sordid things" is to say, "I am not interested in life about me." Murders are abnormal but after all abnormality is the normal magnified and brilliantly illumined. A com- plete study of the Snyder case would have taught us all a great deal about the problem of the American home and the factors which war against successful marriage in this country. No paper gave anything like a comprehensive story of this fascinating case. Whenever the story approached the sex line the newspapers sheered off. Much that the reporters omitted was decidedly unpleasant and yet I am of the opinion that this kind of censorship is harmful in the long run. To be sure, morbidity may be increased by harping on certain incidents and at the same time none of us will grow wiser and kinder without a greater store of information. In my opinion the Snyder case was enormously significant. It had more educational potentialities than almost any single socio- logical course in college. Again, newspapers were attacked for printing so much of the testimony about the action brought by Mr. Rhinelander against his wife. You have not forgotten, I trust, that the young man sought an annulment on the ground that his wife was of Negro extraction and that she had concealed this fact from him. To say that such a story was sordid and should have been left out of news col- umns or mentioned only briefly is to say that the entire prob- lem of white and Negro relations is of no moment. Here was a concrete dramatization of the question upon which scores of textbooks have been written. And I maintain that these specific illustrations of human behavior should carry more weight with the observer than mere generalizations. Had I been a managing editor I would have endeavored to print at least twice as much as my nearest competitor. The average newspaper owner is fond of referring to his journal as a "family newspaper." Rigorously he guards readers against all sorts of things which he feels would lead them to cancel their subscriptions in protesting horror. But this same family which supposedly cannot endure even the slightest approach to frankness in print will presently put down the paper and be off to some movie house there to enjoy the pleasant ribaldry of "This Cock-Eyed World." And later they may go to a night club to watch slightly clad yonng women singing popular songs the lyrics of which are filled with sinful innuendo. One can be lyrical about sins which must never be mentioned by prose writers. Some- body is making suckers of us humble reporters. Possibly the papers might avoid the risk of shocking readers by putting all forthright stuff into rhyme and pretending that it was merely a quotation from a popular song. When a man says, as I have said on many occasions, that he believes in no censorship at all he probably is not telling the truth. What he really means is that he would allow much material which is suppressed to see the light of day and balance up by curtailing other things which the community, in its ignorance, considers harmless. If Boston made me its dictator I would not think of stopping "Strange Interlude" or "A Farewell to Arms" or "An American Tragedy," but I might be gravely tempted to say, "While I am in office no newspaper will be allowed to carry Mutt and Jeff." Of course I am falling into the same heresy which afflicts other censors. I happen to think that Mutt and Jeff is bad for people. Still it is not unreasonable to maintain that censorship pinches in the wrong places. A year or so ago I had a long argument with a newspaper owner who had refused to print anything about some rather gay divorce scandal because it seemed to him immoral. And in the paper from which the frolicsome episode was barred there ran, two columns long, a story of some singularly depraved and brutal murders by an unbalanced German. Practically none of the details was missing. In the mistaken eyes of the newspaper executive one story had to do with sex and the other didn't, which made all the difference. Somebody ought to tell editors the facts of life. Heywood Broun

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January 8, 1930] The Nation 37 Why Consolidate Railroads? By DONALD R. RICHBERG THE great mystery, concerning who wants to consoli- date the railroads, may never be solved. But it is certainly not the men who run them. The practical operators of the larger, more successful railroads will gener- ally agree that economical, efficient operation becomes more difficult as a railroad system expands beyond the effective control of a single head. According to an accepted dictum "railroading is 95 per cent human." Steam transportation service is furnished by about 1,750,000 human beings, and one manager can direct only a small percentage of these em- ployees with maximum efficiency. It has been my special work for many years to represent large organizations of railroad employees. Frequently I have seen the far-sighted, progressive policy of a railroad president hampered, delayed, and modified by the inherent difficulty of inducing its application by subordinate officials, too numerous and remote for control by a single mind. On the other hand, operating officials frequently have been able to modify the effects of an illiberal policy handed down from above. Like difficulties in acquiring and handling traffic are experienced by far-spread systems. The particular needs of one section of the country cannot be satisfied because of the conflicting demands of another territory served by the same railroad. Communities that seek and are entitled to the fostering care of a railroad find their interests sacrificed to meet the needs of others. Thus, in weighing the advantages and disadvantages of consolidations of railroads, we face at the outset an ancient problem of government. How far can centralization of power be carried so as to eliminate the wastes, frictions, and inefficiencies of small competing units without producing the greater wastes, frictions, and inefficiencies of bureaucratic, remote control ? The Committee on Interstate Commerce of the Senate submitted a report on "Unification of Railroads," which was printed in the Congressional Record of February 25, 1929. There we read : "Everyone familiar with present-day railroad problems . . . believes that the carriers and their properties should be consolidated into a limited number of strong, efficient, and well-balanced systems capable of giving the public the service it demands at rates reasonable to the car- rier, the shipper, and the public." If this high-sounding platitude means that a few systems of large size should be organized to handle the bulk of the steam-transportation business there is no general agreement that such a result is desirable, either among railroad opera- tors, members of the Interstate Commerce Commission, or well-informed students of railroad problems. And further- more, there has been no program yet produced whereby such a result can be accomplished. Certainly the pending legis- lation approved by Senate and House committees, to encourage voluntary consolidations, will not produce the ideal announced. The most pressing need for reorganization of rail systems is presented by the existence of a large number of weak rail- roads (most of them comparatively small roads) which furnish an essential service but which cannot be operated profitably at rates providing an ample, if not an excessive, profit to the larger, stronger roads. It is quite clear that a prosperous railroad will not "voluntarily" share its gains with its impoverished relations, except upon some compulsion or because there is a reasonable prospect of ultimately increas- ing the profits of its stockholders. From the public standpoint the primary question to be solved in any consolidation program is this: How can pro- vision be made to decrease the excessive profits of strong, well-located railroads which have good credit, and to increase the inadequate profits of weak, poorly located railroads which have poor credit? Of course, if all the railroads pooled their revenues so that expenses and profits could be paid from one treasury, we should have a transportation system which could be operated like the postal system, whereby losses on rural delivery may be met from the profits of urban delivery. But no such solution is possible under private ownership; and the present need is to find a way whereby private ownership and operation may be able to function effectively without making excessive charges for public service. The writer has no arguments for or against public ownership to advance in this article. The desirability of maintaining private ownership is simply assumed. The Senate report previously quoted makes the following signifi- cant statement: Unification offers the only means other than govern- ment ownership by which railroad units of a substantially uniform character may be created. Public regulation under present conditions is extraordinarily difficult, and its com- plexities are constantly increasing. If we are unable to make it more effective, efficient, and fair, public regulation may fail. And if it fails, the continuation of private owner- ship will become impossible. Of course, the elimination of "weak" roads and the creation of an adequate transportation system composed only of "strong" roads is the ostensible goal of all the legisla- tive programs now being discussed. But how is this to be accomplished merely by encouraging "voluntary" consolida- tions? It is plain that there must be some elements of com- pulsion in this "voluntary" program, or else it is a mislead- ing proposal designed for some other purpose than to benefit the public. The bills now recommended to the attention of Congress may be summarized as providing the means where- by railroads may be consolidated when they so desire. They provide no means whereby railroads may be compelled to consolidate. There is no positive provision for exerting public pressure to produce consolidations in the public interest. The public protection authorized is wholly nega- tive— the prevention of consolidations which the Interstate Commerce Commission holds to be contrary to the public interest. Just what force is to induce railroads to consolidate so as to reduce the existing profits of the prosperous roads has not been explained. Certainly a zeal for public service cannot be regarded as an inducement to stockholders to reduce their profits and to diminish the market values of their

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38 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3366 stocks. Under proposed laws the commission will not even be required to find that a consolidation will produce any certain or defined public benefits. Apparently the com- mission is expected to assume that consolidations are desirable and will "promote the public interest," unless a public detri- ment greater than any possible public benefit is evident. The political intent to give railroad owners what they want — rather than to compel them to give the public what it wants — is quite visible. And since the Senate and House bills are largely the product of railroad lawyers, it is not strange that private interests are carefully protected and public interests receive little attention in their provisions. The ancient slogan, "Give us more cake and you'll get more crumbs," seems to have controlled the drafting of these bills. It would be impossible in less than a volume to analyze the effect and purpose of the numerous complicated pro- visions of the "official" consolidation bills (sponsored by Senator Fess and Representative Parker). It is far simpler to point out what they do not provide for protection of the public interest (which is very important), rather than what they do provide (which is relatively unimportant). 1. The bills do not provide that consolidations shall be permitted only when in conformity with a comprehensive plan prepared by the Interstate Commerce Commission. Thus they do not assure ultimate absorption of all weak roads into strong systems. But unless railroad consolidations are required to fit into such a plan, a continuation of present expansions, primarily for profit and secondarily for service, is inevitable. Nine years ago the commission was directed by Congress to prepare a comprehensive plan ; but many obstacles have delayed its production, including (1) inherent difficulties, (2) disinclination and disagreement inside the commission, and (3) railroad opposition. Now it is proposed that any plan approved by the commission shall be only advisory to the railroads and to the commission, so that consolidations inconsistent with the plan may be approved until the plan itself is eventually discarded. It would be optimistic indeed to assume that railroad consolidations for private profit would bear any close resemblance to consolidations for public service. 2. The bills do not provide any assurance of more effective rate regulation, or any prospect of lower rates. In the first place, there is little sincere belief found anywhere that any economies sufficient to warrant reduced rates will result from consolidations. The main argument of the con- solidates is that better, not cheaper, service will be provided. In the second place, no effort is made to establish a stable rate basis for roads, whereby the present demand for specu- lative profits based on fluctuating "values" might be eliminated. Therefore, under prevailing doctrines, it is probable that the consolidated properties will claim greater values as the basis for rates than the sum of the present separate property values. Higher rates are more likely to result from consolidations than lower rates. The reasons for this conclusion are many, but they arise from a long and intimate study of the methods whereby many great railroad systems are permitted today to gather profits of 10 to 20 per cent in the public-service field where a generation ago a 6 per cent profit was regarded as a bounteous harvest. 3. The bills do not provide for any more effective control over service and profits than the Interstate Commerce Commission can exercise today. Yet if still greater power is to be given to private persons to serve and to exploit public needs, there should be a corresponding increase in the power of public officials to protect public interests. One of the greatest forces of public protection today is found in the divergent counsels of competing railroads. Consolidation legislation has been delayed up to date, not so much because of opposition from an apathetic public as because of con- flicts of opinion between railroad managements. In concluding this brief survey of the present situation, attention should be drawn to the questions which should be answered before legislation is approved. First, if the Interstate Commerce Commission presents a comprehensive plan for future railroad consolidations, will its ultimate adoption mean the absorption of all weak rail- roads which furnish a necessary service into strong systems capable of giving an improved service at rates which will not produce excessive profits upon actual private investments? Second, will this publicly devised program be made the basis of preventing consolidations which do not conform to this program and the basis of compelling the consolidations recommended, by either direct or indirect pressure of public authority? Third, will consolidated railroads be required to submit to a practical exercise of rate-regulating powers whereby, in return for increased security of investment and assur- ance of a fair return thereon, private owners will surrender their present claims to those speculative profits which are inconsistent with the obligations of public service? Under present laws such profits are being made. New legislation should not be enacted which will provide the basis for any further exploitation of public necessity for excessive private profit. There is a large fraction of the public, consisting of 1,750,000 railroad employees and their dependents, who have a special interest in consolidation legislation, to which I have made no reference. These employees have found that their working conditions are changed, their homes are moved, their privileges and savings acquired by years of labor are wiped out in the rearrangement of work, the mov- ing of terminals and division points, and the changes of management which follow upon railroad consolidations and reorganization. They have not opposed progress and im- provement, but they have urged that the benefits should not flow entirely to security owners, that the public also should gain, and that the losses of the employees should be reduced as far as possible. Finally, without criticizing railroad representatives for drafting consolidation legislation, so as to permit the maximum freedom of private judgment and the minimum restraint of public authority, it seems clear to me that the protection of public interests calls for an entirely different treatment of this problem. No consolidation measure now before Congress, which has any prospect of passage in the near future, merits the approval of an impartial public servant. Such a one may believe that little harm and some good may come out of giving the roads a free hand. But, if well informed, he must also know that the present laws for regulating railroads are a composite of proved wisdom and demonstrated folly which should be drastically revised before we proceed to complicate existing problems and to increase the difficulty of their eventual necessary solu- tion by authorizing new combinations of anti-public forces.

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January 8, 1930] The Nation 39 Prosperity — Believe It or Not VII — Balancing the Books By STUART CHASE WE have, let us say, an onion. The onion represents the total economic life of the United States. The heart of the onion is prosperity. How large does it bulk? First, we must strip off all the States not included in the Middle Atlantic, East North Central, and Pacific States. The National Bureau of Economic Research finds that by and large they have not prospered. Second, in the prosperous belt, we strip off most of the farmers; they have not pros- pered. Third, we strip off a large section of the middle class. The small business man, the independent storekeeper, the wholesaler, many professional men and women, have failed to keep income on a par with the new standard of living. Fourth, we strip off the unemployed. Machinery seems to be displacing factory, railroad, and mining workers — and of late mergers are displacing executives, salesmen, and clerks — faster than they can find employment in other fields. The net increase in "technological unemployment" since 1922 is at least 650,000 men and women. Fifth, we strip off the coal industry, which has been in the doldrums throughout the period. Sixth, we strip off the textile indus- try, which has been seriously depressed. Seventh, the boot- and-shoe industry; ditto. Eighth, the leather industry. Ninth, the shipbuilding industry. Tenth, the railroad-equip- ment industry. Eleventh, we strip off the excessive number of businesses which have gone bankrupt during the era. Twelfth, we strip off those millions of unskilled workers who were teetering on the edge of a bare subsistence in 1922, and by no stretch of the imagination can be called prosperous today. The best that can be said is that their position is a little less precarious than it was. In short, only a part of the country has been prosperous during the past eight years and even in that part there are at least twelve soft spots. What then remains? A good deal. This categorical stripping process is justified, but we must be careful not to let it destroy our perspective. All through the preceding articles we have noted item after item which reflected, according to the definition of prosperity employed, some genuine advance. Should we list them one after another, an impressive exhibit on the other side of the fence would con- front us. And here I should like to be permitted a philo- sophical aside. The human mind is a clumsy and impetuous instrument. Nor is it fond of hard work. Most people find two, or at the outside, three supporting cases sufficient for a generalization. Thus, if we note two Rolls Royces parked on Main Street, we say, "This place is full of millionaires." When I show, one after the other, no fewer than twelve dissents from the view that America is prosperous, the con- clusion is almost irresistible that "Prosperity is a myth." The onion has shrunk, but it has not disappeared. Among the most significant of the surviving layers are: * This is the seventh and last of a series of articles on American prosperity by Stuart Chase. — Editor The Nation. ( 1 ) A 20 per cent increase in the national income per capita from 1922 to 1928; (2) a 30 per cent increase in physical production; (3) a 100 per cent increase in the profits of the larger corporations; (4) a housing program expand- ing faster than population; (5) an increase in average health and longevity; (6) an increase in educational facilities greatly surpassing the growth of population; (7) a per capita in- crease in savings and insurance; (8) a five-hour decline in the average working week; (9) a slowly rising wage scale against a fairly stationary price level; (10) an increasingly fecund, alert, and courageous science of management, result- ing primarily in an ever-growing productivity per worker. The trouble with nearly every item on this second list is that while it indicates that we are more prosperous than we were, nothing whatever is said about the degree of pros- perity from which we started. The base line is missing. If we were barely comfortable in 1922, we ought to be reason- ably comfortable now. But of course the fact is that some 80 per cent of all American families lived below the budget of health and decency in 1922, and the 20 per cent increase in per capita income since that date, while it has helped, to be sure, still leaves probably two-thirds of all families below the line.* Unfortunately, too, the 20 per cent cannot all go into intrinsically better food, housing, and clothing, but must be applied to appease the clamoring salesmen of the new standard of living with their motor cars, radios, tootsie-rolls, silk stockings, talking pictures, and beauty shoppes. In this connection another important qualification should not be over- looked. We have seen in the foregoing articles how Middle- town, and with it the whole nation, has been shifting year by year to a pecuniary economy. Money has become the sine qua non of existence. In pioneering days a hard-work- ing family could provide for itself literally without money from one year's end to the next. Increasingly now we get our income in dollars rather than in the provisioning of our own homes by means of truck gardens, house building and repairing, "handy" work of all kinds. I am sure that a frac- tion of the 20 per cent is accounted for by the steady shift to a dollar economy. We have added a little real income and considerable fluff to the totally inadequate distribution of goods and services obtaining in 1922. Is this prosperity in the deeper sense? No. The most that can be said is that the past eight years have registered a rate of advance in the direction of a pros- perity which may some day be achieved. If you ask me to guess, I would say that if the next seven years are as good as the last, and the next seven again, and the next — by 1950 the United States of America will have doubled its per capita income as compared with 1922. With the usual important exceptions for persons and classes, the bulk of the population * The National Bureau of Economic Researrh estimated, for 1918, that 85.9 per cent of all gainfully employed in the country received less than $2,000 a year; 72 per cent got less than $1,500. There was little gain between 1918 and 1922.

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40 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3366 will be receiving not less than $4,000 a year per family, and will so be, if not extravagantly upholstered, at least reason- ably prosperous. This would mean twenty-eight years of upward curves. The longest period of business prosperity so far in the history of the republic is fourteen years, from 1879 to 1893. Can the going economic system, with its lack of coordinated control, hold the pace for a full generation and then peg it at the top? I profoundly doubt it. You will remember that in the first article we gave four definitions of prosperity: (1) as evidenced by the usual busi- ness barometers; (2) as evidenced by a greater flow of goods and services; (3) as evidenced by economic security and peace of mind; (4) as evidenced by the "life more abundant" — comprehending material welfare, security, and the upbuild- ing of a genuinely noble civilization. Measuring our findings against these definitions, we may conclude: Definition one: Business prosperity is — up to October, 1929, at least — a provable fact. The national totals for cor- porate profits, new capital seeking investment, bank clearings, life-insurance totals, foreign trade, leave no doubt on this score. It has been spotty, however, with lags and set-backs here and there throughout the structure. A crude generali- zation might be made to the effect that industries catering to the new standard of living have prospered at the expense of industries providing the old-line staples. Definition two: Prosperity from the commercial stand- point has never meant much to the rank and file. In the course of the four earlier periods, labor had benefited for the moment in steadier employment and sometimes in an en- hanced wage scale, but with the concluding panic, everything returned to the status quo — the same old tenements, the same old shacks, the same wet babies in the kitchen, the same old bread line. As retail prices usually went up, even the flow of goods was not markedly augmented. The fifth period has a somewhat different story. Since 1922 wages have in- creased, prices have remained stationary (by and large), and the flow of goods and services has been augmented. While population has gained 12 per cent, the tonnage of physical production has increased 30 per cent. Unfortunately for the argument, this is not all consumers' goods. A very large fraction represents an increase in producers' or capital goods. Factories, office buildings, Diesel engines, turret lathes, power houses — these are all admirable things, but they fill no hun- gry stomachs, for the moment. I doubt if the wayfaring man has received as much in tangible consumable goods as the bulk productivity figures indicate. But he has certainly received some increase. Above all he has received new sorts and varieties of goods, sacrificing, at the same time, housing space, bulky foodstuffs, textile yardage. He has received the motor car for which his spirit yearned, for which he was willing to cut down on food and clothing if need be, and which incidentally did more than any other one factor to keep business prosperity swinging upward. With all due allowances, I should conclude that the second definition of prosperity has been met, obliquely if not squarely. Definition three: Now as to prosperity measured in terms of economic security and peace of mind. Unemploy- ment has been rampant and, according to the careful calcu- lations of Dr. Wesley C. Mitchell, increasing throughout the period. We are probably entering, for the first time in industrial history, an era of "technological unemployment," in which, owing to the encroachments of the machine, the total firing rate is to exceed the total hiring rate. A more de- structive agent for security and peace of mind it is difficult to imagine. With their land values in ruins the farmers have not passed their nights in dreamless slumber. They have been seeing werewolves for a decade. The middle class, as we have repeatedly noted, is trying to make a slightly ex- panded dollar meet a greatly expanded budget of wants — and with no very signal success. Industrial strains and stress in the factory, as we have seen, are probably not increasing, but the pace of living is accelerating. As it whirls faster and faster, it brings no discernible peace of mind. No. The third definition we cannot grant. Prosperity in terms of tran- quillity and genuine leisure has not arrived for most of us. Definition four: "Where wealth accumulates and men decay." A very imposing battery of critics and philosophers have taken this line as their text in viewing contemporary American civilization. Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Eu- gene O'Neill, Ring Lardner, James Truslow Adams, not to mention the learned Oswald Spengler, are among those who seem to incline to the belief that as the spiral of commercial prosperity whirls upward, the spiral of the good life whirls downward. Prosperity in terms of a whole civilization — the fourth and last definition — can hardly be said to have spread its wings over the America of 1929. But I see no evidence of a net decay either in men or in their arts and accomplish- ments. Babies live longer, sickness declines, the whole race is improving biologically. Ah, but the mind, the creative instinct, the precious spiritual values! Having no degree in metaphysics, I know nothing about the inwardness of such ghostly matters. But we all have eyes and ears and, with a little training, can tell whether buildings are finer, pictures richer, plays more stimulating, poems grander, novels more compelling; whether criticism is more acute, statesmanship more intelligent, manners better than a decade ago — in brief, whether our commercial prosperity follows signboards marked : To Periclean Athens, To Augustan Rome, To the Florence of the Medicis; or per contra, To Bedlam or Bust. Personally I favor the marker: No Speed Limit on This Highway, supplemented with: Dangerous Curves. American civilization was relatively crazy in 1920, and shows no signs of being less crazy today. It does show enormous and, I sus- pect, increasing vitality. Architecture in the skyscraper is searching for a new art form, in its way as thrilling as the temples of Ankor. It is impossible to take two steps on the streets of New York without colliding with either (a) a novelist, (b) a painter, (c) a playwright, or (d) a designer of fabrics, metal light fixtures, cock-eyed office furniture. A whole new age of decoration is breaking out in interior fur- nishings, office equipment, lavender bath-tubs, and even rose- colored oil heaters. The scene is at once ludicrous, arresting, inspiring, and always genuinely stimulating. There is just a chance that America might whirl itself into the most breath- taking civilization which history has yet to record. But to date the chief exhibit is activity. By all odds the noblest aspect of our civilization is found in our engineering works. Prosperity as a rate of advance. Here if anywhere lies the real achievement of these eight years. In industrial man- agement, the central fire of that advance, we find the most dramatic and significant aspect of the whole complicated story. It is management, furthermore, which has built these turbines, dams, and power lines, released these birds of steel to wing across the sky. Even the skyscraper is more the

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January 8, 1930] The Nation 41 product of the engineer than of the architect. Steadily the output per worker rises in the well-managed factories, rail- roads, mines. Steadily the cost of production falls. Ever more exciting grow the machines and instruments which raise output, lower costs, increase control. Here is a press like a rearing brontosaurus thirty feet in height, just installed by the Olds Motor Company. It exerts a pressure of one mil- lion pounds. A piece of raw steel is fed to it. Crunch ! Out comes a finished fender. Similarly, ever more intelli- gent grow the psychological contacts with the worker — a factor utterly overlooked in the Taylor systems of twenty years ago. His curve of fatigue is plotted, his adaptability to a given job is measured, his accident rate is brought down, his hours of labor are reduced, his wages are increased accord- ing to the doctrine of the economy of high wages, his leisure is respected and not corrupted by the company uplift schemes so dear to the heart of the Big Boss. I assure you that this bright picture is not general throughout American industry, but it does represent the performance toward which such plants as that of Henry Dennison in Massachusetts are striving. The spearhead of the whole movement is probably found in those establishments — such as Hart Schaffner & Marx, or the equipment shops of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad — where a strong and intelligent labor union co- operates, thus becoming an integral part of management. A beautiful technique — the crowning achievement of prosperity. Given a free hand it might remake American industry, humanly as well as technically. It might abolish poverty, immeasurably diminish the stresses and strains which have dogged every step of the industrial revolution since the days of Watt, flood the nation with essential and even beau- tiful goods at a fraction of their present cost, raise the curse of Adam, and lay the basis for, if not positively usher in, one of the noblest civilizations which the world has ever seen. But the hands of management are not free. The technician is constantly undone by the sales department, which, floun- dering in a pecuniary economy, sees no other way — and in- deed there is no other way — to maintain capacity than by style changes, annual models, advertising misrepresentation, and high-pressure merchandising. He is undone by the vested interests of the owners who demand their pound of flesh in rent, interest, and dividends now, with no thought for the rounded perfection of engineering principles and the time that they — and nature which sanctions them — demand. Above all the technician needs a national system of super- management, whereby production might be articulated to consumptive needs, and the fabulous wastes of excess plants, excess machines, excess overhead costs, uneconomically located industries, cross hauling, jam, tangle, and bottlenecks, be brought under rational control. That such super-manage- ment is not beyond human capacity to operate, the experience of the Supreme Economic Council during the war, and of the Russian Gosplan today, amply demonstrates. Prosperity in any deeper sense awaits the liberation of the engineer. If the owners will not get off his back (and why should they? They pay him little enough and he fills their safe deposit boxes) I, for one, would not be sorry to see him combine with the wayfaring man to lift them off. A complicated technical structure should be run by engineers, not by hucksters. Raising Cane in Washington By ARTHUR WARNER Washington, December 23 THE American sugar interests in Cuba have been rais- ing more cane in Washington this winter than in the Caribbean. For several weeks the newspapers have been filled with the doings of the lobby which has been trying to prevent a high import duty on sugar in the new tariff bill in order to keep the market open for the Cuban product. It has come out that in this effort the lobby employed a personal friend of President Hoover and succeeded in winning the President's sympathy if not his definite assistance in behalf of Cuban-grown sugar. Mean- while Cuban growers of sugar, as distinguished from Amer- ican growers of Cuban sugar, engaged the persuasive powers of General Enoch H. Crowder, retired, formerly our ambassador at Havana and, during the World War, in charge of the military draft in the United States. The Senate Judiciary Committee's sub-committee, which was ap- pointed to investigate Congressional lobbying in consequence of the late lamented and already practically forgotten Shearer scandal, has lost all track of ships in its pursuit of the long, sweet trail of sugar. Thus within less than ten months of his inaugura- tion Mr. Hoover stands accused of improprieties of a sort which led the Democratic floor leader of the House, Repre- sentative Garner of Texas, to say on December 20 that the President ought to give the country "a direct, definite, and positive declaration" in regard to his relations with the Cuban sugar lobby. "Mr. Shattuck's denial that he had discussed sugar legislation with the President by no means disposes of the matter," continued Representative Garner. "There are definite statements in the letters of the sugar lobbyists that imply the absolute contrary." As for General Crowder, he is said to have betrayed military secrets — and to benighted foreigners at that — in giving it away that in case of war the general staff had decided not to try to keep a traffic lane open between the United States and the Philippines. The sweet story of how growers of cane sugar in Cuba tried to safeguard their product against the machinations of American beet-sugar raisers in the drawing of the new tariff bill first began to reach the public when, on December 10, the Senate sub-committee called before it as a witness H. C. Lakin of New York City, president of the Cuba Company. Mr. Lakin said that the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Havana had in- formed him that the Cuban government had suggested that somebody be found to represent it in connection with the sugar schedule in the new tariff bill. Mr. Lakin consented to act in that capacity, he said, and considered himself a representative of the Cuban government. Mr.

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42 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3366 Lakin organized a campaign in behalf of Americans with sugar interests in Cuba. He told the Senate sub-committee that General Crowder had begun work, he thought in December, 1928, at the direct request of President Machado of Cuba. General Crowder was paid by a group of Cuban sugar-mill owners, whereas Mr. Lakin's campaign was financed in the United States. On January 29, 1929, Mr. Lakin wrote to General Crowder : I am already making some progress toward further efforts in Washington. By great good fortune I find that Shattuck, who wrote the brief with me [prepared earlier for the Ways and Means Committee] is perhaps Hoover's closest legal friend. He is the personal attorney for Hoover and all his family. I think I have persuaded him to undertake a con- fidential mission, first to convince Hoover, and secondly to work on the committees and members of Congress on behalf of Cuba, and I believe that I can induce several of the larger producers here to undertake to bear the expense. When I have made a little more progress in this connection I will communicate with you again. I am sure that I shall need your advice and cooperation. The full name of the gentleman who was to under- take the "confidential mission" alluded to was Edwin P. Shattuck, a lawyer of New York City, who for some years had represented American sugar interests in Cuba. Mr. Shattuck had a home in Miami and he was there during the visit of Mr. Hoover to that resort previous to his inauguration. In a statement to the press Mr. Shattuck has made the following remarks concerning his "confidential mission": Before the new Administration came in I informed Mr. Hoover of my connections, not to obtain his approval of an important legal engagement, but to inform him what my con- nection was so that there would be no misunderstanding. The President did not feel that he had any right to ask me to abandon my clients and that matter ended. While Mr. Shattuck was in Miami, Mr. Lakin said in a letter that the lawyer had seen Mr. Hoover "in the last ten days." As good luck would have it, Mr. Shattuck was a personal friend of Senator Smoot, too. "It seemed well to employ a man who knew him," wrote Mr. Lakin, and dur- ing the Utah Senator's visit to Miami Mr. Shattuck talked with Mr. Smoot — may one guess of sugar? Mr. Hoover has said that the competitive system of industry is the most beneficent ever devised by man. But, of course, he does not actually believe it — at least not for his own crowd. Competition is splendid among working- men ; it keeps wages down. But in the realm of big busi- ness— sakes alive, no. The less competition there the better, as every up-to-date, big-business man — including Mr. Hoover — knows. Naturally, therefore, Mr. Hoover asked Senator Smoot, according to the Lakin version, if he and Mr. Shattuck couldn't devise a plan whereby domestic sugar could be protected without hurting the Cuban product. "President Hoover has taken a direct hand," Mr. Lakin wrote on March 15, 1929, to W. A. Chadbourne. "He has already suggested a possible solution to Senator Smoot and to Mr. Shattuck." The cane and the beet-sugar in- terests did not want to cut one another's throats any more than Mr. Hoover wanted to have them, as is evident from Mr. Lakin's further comment: "Smoot has already con- ferred with the beet people, among whom we have some representatives through whom we keep posted as to what is going on. I do not dare to write more." The most enlightening details in regard to the pro- cedure of the sugar lobby are contained in the correspondence of Mr. Lakin as dug up by the Senate sub-committee. For instance, there is a letter in regard to stirring up opinion in Latin American countries, of which Mr. Lakin admitted on the stand he was ashamed. It was written on March 5, 1929, to Rafael Sanchez Aballi, Secretary of Communica- tions of Cuba. It ran in part: According to my views, one of our most important arguments is that other Latin American countries will claim that if Cuba's close relations to the United States result in damage to Cuba, they had better fight shy of having a similar thing happen to them. Therefore, it seems to me that it would be a good thing to call the situation to the attention of the appropriate persons in other Latin American countries. . . . My suggestion would be for you to have our brief and supplemental brief translated into Spanish and printed; and that copies be sent by the association to all congress- men, governors, and mayors of Cuba, and to the leading economic associations and the newspapers. Suggestions could be made to the newspaper editors to circulate the brief among their newspaper correspondents in other Latin American countries. . . . Thus far only one company which I have approached has failed to contribute. Mr. Shattuck tells me that he was anxious to have some Cuban contributions, but I think that for the present it is better to leave the responsibility to the American companies, especially as the members of Congress are very sensitive about any foreign interference with what they regard as a purely national matter. There was also a letter to Seiior Aballi suggesting that "it might really be a good thing if a committee of Cuban Masons should go quietly and without any publicity whatever to members of Congress who are Masons." Mr. Lakin thought still better of a letter sent by Cuban Rotarians to all Rotary clubs in the United States. "This letter is likely to have more influence than the undertaking of the Masons," concluded Mr. Lakin, "because the Rotary clubs are formed on the basis of economics instead of fraternal relations." In a letter to J. M. Tarafa of Cuba Mr. Lakin said : I have raised a fund of over $85,000 to conduct the fight. Some of the money will be used for publicity and some for employing people who have a certain amount of influence in Washington. Our chief reliance will be on Mr. Shattuck, who is a very intimate friend of Hoover, and has already talked with Hoover about this subject. Referring to Senator Smoot, Mr. Lakin said that he was very emphatic in stating that the Philippines are the most dangerous competitors of the United States producers. He had many facts and figures which he supplied to me and urged me to advertise as widely as possible the desira- bility of limiting the Philippines to 500,000 tons. He stated very, very specifically that he proposed to make a big fight on that point. Of course, at that time it was not thought that Stimson was to be Secretary of State. A most revealing letter was written by Mr. Lakin on March 4, 1929, to the secretary of President Machado of Cuba. The secretary, expressing, of course, the ideas of his chief, had suggested a commission to go before Congress. Mr. Lakin agreed and named George A. Zabriskie, presi-

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January 8, 1930] The Nation 43 dent of the United States Sugar Association, Mr. Shattuck, and himself. Of this stalwart trio he wrote that they were "as near to President Hoover as you are to President Machado." Mr. Lakin described a plan in regard to sugar to be presented to the Senate and then went on to say: With members of the House of Representatives we are not suggesting any formal plan whatsoever. We are at- tempting to create an atmosphere of doubt in the minds of Congressmen in order that their recommendation shall be either a reduction in the duty or leaving the duty at its present rate or making any increase as small as possible. There are political reasons for this plan which I cannot appropriately put into a letter. The letter said further : The plan is an attempt to put in particular form some general principles with which we know President Hoover is in sympathy. Our knowledge of the desire of President Hoover is accurate but naturally the sources of our knowl- edge should not be stated in writing. This particular mat- ter of a plan for helping both the beets and Cuba is strictly one we must leave to Mr. Shattuck's discretion. . . . It is the custom of the beet interests to maintain a lobby in Washington. I think that eventually the Cuban interests should have a permanent office in Washington, but the fact that Cuba is a foreign country makes the old- fashioned lobbying dangerous for it to undertake. I do not approve of unguided entertainment of mem- bers of Congress. That form of lobbying is no longer fashionable in Washington. That Mr. Lakin was in cordial cooperation with Presi- dent Machado is evident from a long letter from the latter in which Mr. Lakin is praised for his efforts and the Cuban executive says in effect: "On with the dance." Mr. Lakin's most specific reference to the way in which President Hoover helped the sugar lobby is contained in a letter written on April 16, 1929, to Mason B. Starring. Mr. Lakin said that he was informed that a majority of the Ways and Means Committee was opposed to an in- crease in the sugar tariff and he thought that three of them who were in favor of higher duties — Representatives Bacharach of New Jersey and Watson and Estep of Penn- sylvania— "might be induced to change their votes." Several members of the committee have appealed to President Hoover and he has instructed his secretary, Mr. Newton, to establish a contact between the committee and ourselves [the letter continued]. I understand that some suggestion of this came from the individual members of the committee. When Mr. Shattuck himself was called before the Senate sub-committee he denied the accuracy of some of Mr. Lakin's statements, but his answers to questions were not always direct and he failed to shake the general impression left by previous testimony except to emphasize the natural prob- ability that Mr. Lakin had exaggerated certain aspects and had misunderstood others. "Is there any testimony in the record about your rela- tionship with Mr. Hoover that is untrue?" Senator Blaine asked. "No, but I think a great many statements have been permitted from which improper inferences have been drawn," replied Mr. Shattuck. "I have never discussed the sugar tariff with Mr. Hoover," Mr. Shattuck continued. "I have discussed the sliding scale with Mr. Newton, Mr. Smoot, and others." And then Mr. Shattuck added: "Some people might think what Mr. Newton said was the same as what the President said." Indeed they might — not unreasonably. The lobbying activities of General Crowder in behalf of Cuban sugar growers had not been revealed directly up to the Christmas recess of Congress, but the correspondence of Mr. Lakin throws enough light on them to put the former army officer in an unhappy position. Mr. Lakin was a business man, having at least the excuse of his company's interests to justify his lobbying. But that a retired army officer of high rank should have resorted to so shabby a method of turning an extra penny as did General Crowder can be a source of little pride to any American. In a letter to the secretary of President Machado of Cuba, dated March 15, 1929, Mr. Lakin spoke of General Crowder's doings as follows : General Crowder, at my request, has agreed to remain in Washington for two or three months. Of course, you know that his position in Washington is one of the highest. He is received everywhere. He has prepared a strong argument on the Philippines matter. He had a translation made, which the Ambassador has sent to President Machado. I hope you will see that memorandum and dis- cuss it with President Machado, and as a special favor to me, I wish you would ask President Machado to write a personal letter to Crowder congratulating him on the mem- orandum and thanking him for agreeing to devote himself to the Cuban cause in Washington and explaining to Crow- der the President's belief that Crowder will be of great advantage to Cuba in this matter. To which Mr. Lakin added this delicious — if not malicious — morsel: "Of course, you know Crowder, and a little praise of this sort will do a lot of good and make him enthusiastic." That General Crowder's lobbying was not lacking in finesse is evident from a note which he wrote to Mr. Lakin saying: "I discussed with Mr. Shattuck the opportune time to see Smoot and contribute what he could toward perfect- ing sliding tariff, but always with the idea of making Smoot father the proposition in the name of beet sugar, as a means of giving it added strength." The principal ground upon which General Crowder has been criticized appears in a letter from Mr. Lakin to Mr. C. Rionda, in which mention is made of a suggestion of Mr. Rionda that the Secretaries of War and the Navy be approached in regard to the limitation of sugar importa- tions from the Philippines. Mr. Lakin wrote: "General Crowder has written a fine memorandum on this subject. He has also learned that the plans of the general staff pro- vide that in case of war any attempt to keep a traffic lane open between the Philippines and the United States would be promptly abandoned." WThen Mr. Lakin was examined by the Senate sub-committee in regard to this statement about General Crowder, Senator Caraway asked : "Was he getting the plans of the army and giving them to you in the tariff fight?" "Yes," was the reply. "That ought to be very interesting," Senator Caraway observed. Political scandals are no treat to Washington and not much of a tidbit for any other section of the country. The chief novelty of the revelations in regard to the sugar lobby lies, of course, in President Hoover's relations to what has been going on. It is the first time since he took office as

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44 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3366 President that he has met criticism of this kind. There is some doubt as to how deeply and in what way he is in- volved, but granting all that has been said at its full value there will be many who will honestly defend the President as acting within the proprieties. An unbiased discussion of the issue would be worth while, but that the country will not get, as the question has been taken up as a partisan one. Representative Garner's call for a statement of facts from the President — a legitimate demand — was followed at once by a broadside from Representative Wood of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee. Even admitting all that had been charged, said Mr. Wood, for the President "to give audience to men who are also rep- resentatives of industry or commerce does not constitute a plot, nor is a conversation between the two a connivance." But aside from Mr. Hoover's relation to it, the Cuban sugar lobby is instructive as an illustration of the way in which industry and politics work together in our system of government to accomplish the common end that business may go on as usual and that politicians may continue in office. Throughout the entire discussion, including the part that Mr. Hoover is said to have taken, there was no hint of the public welfare in the connection with the sugar schedule of the tariff. It was entirely a question of recon- ciling two business groups so that each could go on making as much money as possible. In justice to Mr. Lakin, though, it should be said that he seems more than a little crestfallen — in retrospect — at the path he has followed. "Do you think it proper to hire people, because they have the confidence of the President, to influence legisla- tion?" Senator Caraway asked Mr. Lakin in the course of the latter's testimony. "I don't think it should be done at all by anybody," was the reply. Then he added that in the circumstances there were special reasons to justify such action. There always are. In the Driftway A DESIRE for less noise seems to be creeping over the country at such an encouraging rate that the Drifter dares to hope that, if he lives out the century, racket may be generally recognized for what it is — a pest as deadly as bad sewage or impure drinking water. New York City has appointed a commission to study noises scientifically and find out which are most objectionable. Meanwhile, the city of Washington has been getting at the same end more expe- ditiously, and probably just as accurately, by means of a popu- lar referendum conducted by one of the newspapers. The Washington Post has been printing ballots and inviting its readers to fill them out so as to indicate the most hated noises. According to a recent tabulation, the most hated noise was loudspeakers in homes, against which 171 votes were re- corded. Next in order were automobile horns, 140 votes; barking dogs, 110 votes; motor trucks, 90 votes; ambulance sirens, 84 votes; and noisy brakes on automobiles, 80 votes. It is worth remarking that, of the six noises most objected to, four — loudspeakers in homes, automobile horns, barking dogs, and noisy brakes on automobiles — might be abolished entirely, or at least drastically restricted, without any real inconvenience or hardship to the community at large. Loud- speakers could certainly be much reduced in intensity with- out destroying their value. Although automobile horns havt some point on country roads, it would be well to forbid the blowing of them in city streets. Such action would compel drivers to be more careful of one another and remind them that it is their legal duty to look out for the pedestrian instead of the other Way about. Noisy parties were listed seventh in the Post's vote and jazz bands ninth. Curiously enough, pneumatic drills and riveting, which in New York would certainly stand high in the list of abhorred noises, rank eleventh and twelfth, respectively, in Washington. Six bal- lots were cast against cats as the worst noise, five against roosters, four against whistlers, and one each against pigeons, alarm clocks, snoring neighbors, and scissors-grinders. Four persons said the worst noise in Washington was Congress. ***** THE note in this column the other day in regard to a visitor, presumably an Englishman, who complained that he couldn't get a satisfactory cup of tea in New York City has brought a communication beginning "To the Drifter, Sir (or Madam)." The correspondent explains this saluta- tion by saying that she and another "Lady-addict of The Nation" have speculated about the sex of the Drifter, be- cause they have "detected traces of feminine tricks of observa- tion and turns of phrase — or thought we did." "And please don't satisfy our curiosity!" the correspondent adds. "Think of the fun your readers would miss if they knew all! It sounds so superior to say: 'One could swear this was written by a woman,' when one doesn't have to furnish proof but just make conversation." After this introduction the corre- spondent goes at the subject of tea, remarking: And while I'm at it, I'd like to mention another atrocity committed on lemon from the point of view of my Russian origin. In the few places where lemon is served properly it is sometimes stripped of the skin. Now that is sacrilege — and ignorance. The average Russian likes the lemon for the aroma of the skin, released by the hot water, usually, rather than for its acid juice. Remove the skin, and the lemon just doesn't belong. And you know probably that Russians have a glass of tea, not your English cup, or Irish dish. A glass of tea — thin glass — with a delicate slice of lemon floating on top, not mauled, squeezed, and helpless at the bottom, looks quite attractive, and tastes grand. There is no danger of break- ing the glass if the hot water is poured against the spoon rather than the glass itself. Needless to say the spoon is removable. Your Englishman might try not only Chinese restau- rants, but also some of the Russian restaurants on lower Second Avenue, if he doesn't mind the glasses. ***** IN regard to the failure to serve enough — or any — hot water with tea in American restaurants, the Drifter's correspondent remarks that once in a so-called tea room on Broadway, after obtaining with great difficulty a pot of hot water, she was charged five cents extra for it! The letter concludes with the soothing comment: "And your column is swell, even if you have no occasion to quote this particular anonymous contrib." After reading that, any bounder who failed to use the letter would prove that he (or she) was not a lady — and certainly no gentleman. The Drifter

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January 8, 1930] The Nation 45 Palestine and the Jews The Case Against Dr. Magnes To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I regret to say that your recent reference to the statement of the American Jewish Congress on the subject of Dr. Magnes's utterances and overtures to the Arabs in Pales- tine is very much out of accord with the feelings of the mem- bership of Jewish organizations and Jews generally. In connection with the recent lamentable events in Pales- tine a few simple considerations should be obvious. 1. The Arabs were the offenders and therefore should have been the first to make proposals of peace. 2. The official investigation to fix the blame for the out- rages was going on and in accordance with all rules of such procedures, negotiations and the expression of radical opinions should have been withheld until the hearing was concluded. 3. There are responsible Jewish organizations associated with the aspirations of our people in Palestine. Dr. Magnes, if he was not in too great a hurry to create a sensation, could have waited or submitted all and every one of his plans to Dr. Weizmann of the Zionist organization, or to Lord Melchett and Mr. Warburg of the Jewish Agency. 4. Dr. Magnes is the Chancellor of the Hebrew Univer- sity, which at least should preserve its neutrality in a time of crisis; and it is not fitting that any officer of that institution should at any time usurp the authority of ranking organizations. 5. A tremendous responsibility is incurred by any indi- vidual who suggests in one form or another that a basic official document, like the Balfour Declaration, which to the millions of scattered Israel marked a new era in Jewish life, should be reinterpreted or modified, or made a subject of hasty and ill- considered discussion. 6. A pronouncement, made with an air of novelty, about the equal rights of the three great religions in Palestine inevita- bly left the unfortunate inference that the Jews had not on many previous occasions recognized and solemnly declared them- selves in favor of these rights. These were the chief points, as logical as they are clear, of the statement which you condemn. The issues involved being far more important than any individual, the conclusion can only be that on this occasion, at least, Dr. Magnes did not act in the best interests of Zionism and the cause of peace in Palestine. New York, December 16 Herman Speier Was It Fair? To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: It is a matter of freedom of opinion whether one will agree or disagree with Dr. Judah L. Magnes's utterance at the opening session of the Hebrew University, as commented on in your issue of December 4. Is it, however, in line with the fine tradition of The Nation for deep human understanding and sympathy to refer to those who could not agree with it as "little bitter-minded Jews"? You have often expressed admiration for these heroic Jew- ish pioneers in Palestine. They are not petty adventurers. All they seek is a return to a free, simple life that may become the cultural and spiritual symbol for Jewish life elsewhere. Theirs is a labor of love — they work with dignity and with considera- tion for their neighbors. And when, through misguided propa- ganda, what they are building with such toil is wantonly de- stroyed, when their old and defenseless ones are massacred, is it to be expected that they will retain their equanimity, that they will turn their left cheek when they have been smitten on the right? On deeper consideration, do you really think it was fair to call these men "little bitter-minded Jews"? Boston, December 21 Hyman Morrison [Nothing could have been further from our thought than to characterize all critics of Dr. Magnes by the phrase to which Mr. Morrison and other correspondents properly object. We regret that any such expression crept into our columns. — Editor The Nation.] Rushing into Print To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I was painfully disappointed with your rash and ill- considered condemnation of the Jewish critics of Dr. Magnes's statement concerning Palestine as a group of "little bitter- minded Jews." I am afraid that what you say about the leaders of the American Jewish Congress rushing into print can be applied with equal force to your own editorial paragraph. Through your devotion to the ideal of pacifism, you have become blinded to the actual facts of the Palestine situation. The coun- try is still very far from being in a state of security. The eco- nomic boycott and the attempted murder of Norman Bentwich furnish ample reason for the existence of a state of highly nerv- ous excitement. Any capitulation at the present time to the Arab leaders would be nothing more than a cowardly admission that the Arab rioters were justified. I should hardly expect The Nation, least of all American magazines, to condone riot- ing and violence, yet that is exactly what you have done. Pittsburgh, December 10 Saul Kaplan "Worse Than Treacherous'* To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Your editorial regarding Judah Magnes, despite the evident sincerity of your tone, is false as to facts and misleading in its implication. The protestants against Judah Magnes, far from being "little bitter-minded Jews," as you bitingly refer to them, are rather the rank and file of the Zionists, i.e., those who have given of either their money or their blood or both toward the rehabilitation of Palestine. No Zionist, however radical, ever wanted to antagonize the Arabs, and even the brutalities inflicted on aged rabbis, women, and defenseless rabbinical students have not shaken their belief in the fundamental goodness of the great mass of Arabs who were merely the dupes of a few Arab instigators and some petty English officials. Moreover, the most radical Zionist has never dreamed further than that Palestine, like Switzerland, should be a home for the three religions and for the two races, the Arabs and Jews, as well as other races. We do not criticize Dr. Magnes for his exhortations to us not to lose our heads and not bear any bitter feeling toward the Arabs. Neither is the protest directed against his abandonment of political aspirations in the Holy Land, inasmuch as he is entitled to his own personal opinion. We do feel that it is most inopportune at this time, when the blood of the martyred victims

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46 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3366 is yet warm and solitary outrages are yet committed by Arab hoodlums, to exhort the friends and relatives of those very vic- tims to cooperation with the Arabs, thereby insinuating that we had not cooperated before and that our failure to cooperate was responsible for the massacre. As a private citizen, Dr. Magnes is entitled to his personal opinion, but he was wrong to speak authoritatively when he had no right of authority; he was indiscreet in not waiting for the Arabian atrocities to subside, and for the English committee to complete its investigation. Coming from the Chancellor of the Hebrew University, his meaningless and misleading words are worse than treacherous. Brooklyn, December 6 Michael Canick Whose Bayonets? To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: What does Dr. Magnes demand that has not already been put into practice by the official representatives of the Jew- ish people? What acts have they omitted to perform that they should merit denunciation in the name of culture and humanity? What other people has within a decade established school sys- tems, published an exceptionally large number of books, maga- zines, and newspapers, and founded a university for the incul- cation of scientific knowledge, as well as a familiarity with more academic subjects such as the humanities? Never in the history of the world has there been a movement which pro- ceeded along more peaceful lines and with a greater sense of consideration for the ultimate advancement of the ideals for which humanity has been striving. Was it not the Jews who opened hospitals to the long-neglected Arabs — a service which, in itself, stands on a par with the efforts of Dr. Grenfell in Labrador? Who took the unskilled and unorganized Arab laborers and welded them into unions and labor societies so that their stand- ard of living has been raised? How do you account for the fact that the official records show that hundreds of Arabs pro- tected their Jewish neighbors, at the risk of their own lives? To say that the Jews are building a home on bayonets is to say that up to last August the Jews were brandishing knives at their Arab neighbors, which any child knows to be absurd and untruthful. As for last August, who but the Grand Mufti — a young fellow of thirty-six — told the Bedouins from the desert to be present in Jerusalem with weapons? Who started the damnable lie that the Jews had bombed the mosque? Who went into the rabbinical college and snuffed out the flower of Palestine's American-Jewish young manhood? Is it the Jews or the Arab instigators that have caused bayonets to play a part Palestine? Boston, December 18 George J. Bergman Jewish Enterprise in Palestine « To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: What Ramsay MacDonald said at Geneva with re- gard to the Arab outbreak in Palestine — that it was an up- rising of lawlessness and disorder, and that there is no racial conflict between Moslem and Jew — is absolutely the truth. Let me tell your readers what has happened to the Arabs since the Jews came to Palestine. Oranges which are now exported for about $7,000,000 yearly were hardly worth picking before the Jews arrived. This orange trade was brought about through Jewish energy and enterprise but the Arabs have profited by it. A Jewish electric company is supplying power and light to Jews and Arabs alike. The same company is working on a project THE NEW SCHOOL for Social Research Second Term: Jan. 13— April 4 Among other courses: Problems in Abnormal Joseph Jastrow Psychology Twelve lectures — Tuesdays, 8:20 P.M. Behavior Problems in David M. Levy Children Twelve lectures — Wednesdays, 5:20 P.M. Psychoanalysis and Fritz Wittels Culture Twelve lectures — Thursdays, 8:20 P.M. beginning January 23 Individual Psychology: Alan Porter Its Sociological Aspects Twelve lectures — Mondays, 8:20 P.M. The Marriage Rela- Beatrice Bishop tionship Twelve lectures — Tuesdays, 8:20 P.M. Creative Attitude Ralph M. Pearson, Toward Life Thomas Munro, Lewis Mumford, H. A. Overstreet and others Twelve lectures — Wednesdays, 8:20 P.M. Fee for twelve lectures, $15 465 West 23rd Street New York City VISIT RUSSIA Short, low rate $ Winter trips from Including round trip passage and a five day complete service and sightseeing in Leningrad and Moscow. 280 * AMALGAMATED BANK Travel Dept. 11-15 Union Square, N. Y. O. or Amalgamated Trust & Savings Bank 111 West Jackson Blvd. Chicago, DJ. For information on Spring and Summer trips, write for booklet "N." t- l 5 m p tr-Q - DISCUSSION THE GROUP A Clearing House Of Opinion Meets at Auditorium— 150 West 85th St. Tuesday, January 7th, at 8:30 P. M. CLEMENT WOOD (Distinguished Author) will speak on : "RATIONAL, LOVE LIFE" Admission 50c Sunday afternoon at 4 P. M. (.Tan. 12th) Informal Discussion Group SEYMOUR A. SELIGSON will speak on: "MARRIAGE AND MORALS" (Bertrand Russell and Modernism) Organized 191 3 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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January 8, 1930] The Nation 47 to harness the Jordan and Jarmuk rivers in order to provide cheap current for all Palestine. Before the Jews came to Pales- tine everything wearable had to be imported from Europe. Now there are more than ninety factories producing all sorts of wear- ing apparel, furniture, bedding, matches, soap, foodstuffs, and, last but not least, cement and bricks. These things not only are being sold in Palestine, but are exported to the neighboring countries. The commerce of Palestine has expanded through Jewish enterprise to such an extent that often one sees four steamers at a time in the port of Jaffa where formerly only one steamer called in two weeks. From all these undertakings, which require money and courage, the Arabs reap the same benefit as the Jews. When the Jews settled in Petach Tikvah it was a sand dune; they dug down 150 feet, brought up water, and turned the dune into a paradise. And what progress have the neigh- boring Arabs made? None at all. Go to any of the Jewish settlements and see how everything is progressing while the neighboring Arabs live in the primitive way in which they have always lived. The Jews work the land with modern machin- ery, while the Arabs use the same tools they employed when King Solomon built his temple. It is safe to say that the Jews have done more for Palestine in less than ten years than the Arabs accomplished in more than 900 years. There will always be room enough for those Jews that care to stay in Palestine to live in peace with the Arabs if only the agitators will mind their own business. Tel-Aviv, Palestine, November 4 S. L. Richmond jilmitiinnttlilninnitmmmnumtniiiiiinnitiiiiiimiii Wisecrack To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The Nation's pious attitude regarding Palestine has of late been buttressed with some profound and learned refer- ences to the Old Testament. May I suggest, however, that your apparent approval of Dr. Magnes's position would prove far more convincing if you exhorted moderate Arabs to cooper- ate with him. "If space permits" should this time not have been a deterrent as you could very well have dispensed with that sophomoric wisecrack about walls tumbling down. New York, December 2 Oscar I. Janowsky Contributors to This Issue Donald R. Richberg is general counsel for the leading railway unions. Stuart Chase concludes in this issue a series of seven articles on American prosperity. This series, with ad- ditions, is now available as a Boni Paper Book. Arthur Warner is associate editor of The Nation. Granville Paul Smith is a Southern poet who has con- tributed verse to various magazines. William MacDonald is a regular contributor of his- torical and political reviews to The Nation. Pierre Loving, long resident in France, is now living in New York. Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at New York University. Joseph Wood Krutch is dramatic editor of The Nation. Florence Codman is a regular contributor of reviews to The Nation. Alexander Bakshy, author of several books on the theater, writes on motion pictures for The Nation. Ferdinand M. Isserman is the rabbi of Temple Israel in St. Louis. ^••■■■(■■■■■■■■(■•■■•••■•^•(■•■■•■*a Why a Training School for JEWISH SOCIAL WORK? BECAUSE experience has shown that the social worker can only be successful if he knows and reckons with the social, religious and cultural background of the people among whom he works. BECAUSE the Jewish group in America represents a racial, religious and cultural entity possessing a highly distinctive character. BECAUSE the social worker who identifies his work with the Jewish group in America should by special training and knowledge be able to contribute to the problems of its adjustment to American life with a view to its own greater happiness and to the greater enrichment of the culture of America. College graduates are invited to examine carefully the advantages of Jewish social work as a profession. Scholarships and Fellowships of $150 to $1,000 for each school year are available for especially qualified students. For further information address M. J. Kabpf, Director The Training School For Jewish Social Work A graduate school 71 W. 47th St., New York City AN ERA OF NEW VALUES The twentieth century is slowly groping towards new spir- itual values revolutionary in their effect on mankind. Among other ideals, a condition of world peace is coming to be accepted not as the vision of impractical theorists but as a basic principle in the government of all self-respecting free peoples. Wfyt jWandjeater (©uarbtan WEEKLY will interpret fully for you the momentous efforts that are being made at the present time to facilitate the removal of war as an arbiter of international disputes. It will also interpret the entrancing experiment of democratic government in England, where Labor guides the destines of an empire. At the beginning of the present Fall is a fitting time to start reading THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN WEEKLY with its progressive outlook on vital affairs of the day. • -—-- — - MAIL this coupon The Manchester Guardian Weekly, 222 West 42nd Street, New York City Gentlemen: — Enclosed please find $3.00 for which send THE MAN- CHESTER GUARDIAN WEEKLY to the below address. Name Address When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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Books, Films, Drama The Sexton's Spade By GRANVILLE PAUL SMITH It always stood where he could lay his hand Upon it without search or loss of time; He spoke a language it could understand, Down driven muscles in a ragged rhyme. For twenty years it bit the living sod And gnawed into the gravel and the clay; A partnership for heaping clod on clod, They put a thousand weary folk away. One day he had a turn and went to bed, To hear them whisper that the end was near ; And then a mad thought galloped through his head So all his flesh closed on his blood in fear. He stole at midnight to the lake and threw Something that whirled from out his hands and made A splash ; and though their prophecy came true, His grave was hollowed with a bright new spade. Mobilizing the Jeremiahs Contemporary Attitudes. Essays in Many Fields of Thought. Selected and Edited by Kendall B. Taft, John Francis McDermott, and Dana O. Jensen. Houghton Mifflin Company. $3. THE editors of this volume have been moved by the lauda- ble desire to "present definitely conflicting points of view on a number of important aspects of contemporary life and contemporary thought," excluding "dulness and prosi- ness" because those things "have been looked upon as the out- ward and visible signs of intellectual sterility." What they have done is to compile from the writings of upwards of forty authors, most of them Americans, something akin to an anno- tated catalogue of the seven-times-seven deadly sins of the mod- ern age in general and of America in particular. Here and there, in the melancholy exhibit, appear a ray of light and an accent of hope, enough to bear out the promise of "conflict," but the leaven is not sufficient to leaven the lump and the net effect of the whole is one of gloom. I would not venture to affirm, even in the face of this recital, that there may not be still other sins with which our time should be charged, for the world is a large place and the possibilities of evil probably bear some rough relation to square miles and population ; but if any- thing of great importance has been left out it would appear to have been through editorial inadvertence. A few examples of what is offered will be enough to show what the book is like. Robert L. Duffus, who leads off with a survey of American prejudices, tells us that we need humility and tolerance; and Andre Siegfried assures us, as gravely as if it had never been said before, that "in its pursuit of wealth and power America has abandoned the ideal of liberty to follow- that of prosperity." Agnes Repplier, when she wrote, saw conventions as "the life and soul of the country"; while Dr. Canby, who scans our sentimentality, concludes that we have been infected by "a disease of our own particular virtue," namely, "idealism, suppressed and perverted." Dr. Joseph Collins discovers in the history of the Ku Klux Klan "the enduring monument to our preposterous hypocrisy" ; Katharine F. Gerould scores our passion for law-making and our non- chalant law-breaking; Walter Lippmann reminds us that America is a world power of a portentous kind and "no longer a virginal republic in a wicked world"; and Harold J. Laski emits the crushing dictum that "if we assume that democratic government is desirable, there is hardly a canon of institutional adequacy against which the American system does not offend." The case is almost as bad when we pass to business and education. Professor Durant Drake, who elsewhere agrees with Kirby Page that a Department of Peace at Washington would help to abolish war, deplores the fact that business is conducted so much for private profit and would like to see in it more of a cooperative spirit; and Professor Ross exhumes from "the mutualism of our time" some new varieties of sin not all of which, he declares, are "superficially repulsive." Stephen Leacock, who tolerates coeducation as a kind of necessary evil not wholly unmixed with good, would rather like to see "every girl lucky enough to get a higher education" spend at least six months of her four years "in the training and discipline of a hospital as a nurse," because, of course, she is going to marry. "There is more education and character making in that," he writes, "than in a whole bucketful of algebra." John R. Tunis finds that "the sporting heroes of the nation are its gods," and Robert Littell sees a vision of "football law, football hygiene, the drama of football, football ballistics, football his- tology, the aesthetics of football." When it comes to religion, science, and morals, the temper of America and that of the modern age are examined more or less together. The late Dr. Edwin E. Slosson discerns and laments a considerable list of dangers lurking in "the changing mind of man," while Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick is sure that "never in man's history has faith in God been more necessary to sane, wholesome, vigorous, and hopeful living than today amid the dissipating strain and paralyzing skepticism of modern life" — a conclusion which Professor Conklin, looking at religion from the standpoint of science, appears to regard as not wholly quixotic. There are sharp raps at the questionable state of contemporary morals, the cult of violence, the harmfulness of so-called good men, the spread of recklessness under the glamor of success, and the depressing effects of democracy in various manifestations. Professor Wertenbaker makes a brave attempt to show that a youthful America has done at least as well as was to be expected; Dean Gauss of Princeton declines to despair about the undergraduate; Bernard De Voto blesses the co- eds, and Zona Gale and others have some mildly hopeful things to say about the outlook for literature, art, the drama, and music on this side of the Atlantic. On the whole, however, these 526 pages contain far more blame than praise. What, it may in fairness be asked, is such an exhibit worth? Some useful historical purpose may doubtless be served by assembling facts and arranging them in order so that those who care for that kind of thing may see how unlovely the mess is; but if the contemporary attitudes here set out represent accurately the prevailing temper of our intellectuals, one can only conclude that the outlook for the intellectual life in this country is dark. The darkness will not be turned into light, however, by displaying classified descriptions of virtues and vices. The American intellectual has done yeoman service for his country by exposing its shortcomings and exploding its pretensions, and a certain amount of vigorous arraignment is likely always to be good for the soul; but too few of those who now assay destructive criticism have anything new or virile to say, and the messengers of hope are rarely concerned with any- thing save elaborating another device for keeping up appear-

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Tanuary 8, 1930] The Nation 49 ances. What seemed to be, not so very long ago, a sturdy wave of intellectual radicalism is spending itself in ripples and scum on the shore of a dead liberalism. It would be worth while, I think, for the intellectuals to make the experiment of letting the evils that so much distress them churn on for a bit without giving so much attention to the turmoil, and to devote themselves to developing the good art, the sound writing, the decent politics, and the sensible morals they profess so earnest a desire to see. William MacDonald Meet the Wife The School for Wives. By Andre Gide. Alfred A. Knopf. $2. IN this brief and remarkably condensed novel M. Gide shows himself to be not only profound but over-subtle, for so fas- tidiously has he handled the character drawing and the cen- tral theme that the real point is likely to be missed. In "The Counterfeiters" the author used the diary framework to give his people neighborly reality and to enable him to comment freely upon them and their affairs, although the comment is limited strictly by the terms of Edouard, the novelist, whose notebook we are supposed to be reading. This book depicts the gradual disillusionment of a young wife, Eveline, who keeps a diary, in regard to her husband, Robert. Eveline discovers that Robert is a liar, a cozener, and a prig; but Eveline herself is also, in another sense, an out-and-out prig with quite impossible "chimerical ideals." What, then, in reality, is she and what is he? Neither knows, and Eveline does not even realize, until twenty years have passed, that her husband really loves her. When she realizes it, she has ceased altogether to love him. The subject of the book is concisely phrased by Robert in a last talk with his wife before she enlists as a nurse in a fatal sector at the war front. "You say I am not the man you thought. But then you are not the woman I thought, either. How is it possible ever to know whether one is the person one thinks one is? . . . The question is, you see, whether emotion exhausts itself in the expression of emotion, or whether, on the contrary, it is called into being by expression. . . . And indeed one begins to doubt whether anything exists in reality apart from ap- pearance." This is the bitter moral or philosophical pill that M. Gide asks wives, schooled or unschooled, to swallow. Pierre Loving A Poet on Hell and Women Hell ir. Harness. By Joseph Auslander. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $1.75. Letters to Women. By Joseph Auslander. Harper and Brothers. $2. JOSEPH AUSLANDER is far too facile a poet. He has grace, excellence of music, and language, a quick poetic insight into character or scene; yet despite all this he is of less importance as a poet than a number of more awkward and more groping writers. He has somewhat the same annoying fluency as the English poet Humbert Wolfe. Like Wolfe he is in the literary tradition without being strikingly individual. He inherits something from the younger Keats and something from the weaker Browning. His words flow effortlessly, melo- diously, without anything of that impact which words must have if they are to be, in Frost's definition, "deeds." The reader follows with a mild delight, usually quite unstirred by either pleasure or dislike. We have two books in a year from Auslander's pen, and two very different books. "Hell in Harness" is a tale in verse concerning a New York East Side youngster who ends in the electric chair, convicted of a murder he did not commit. The verse moves rapidly. The story is fairly dramatic. One reads it as one would a cheap novel. It is not a poem unless we are to consider any verse-narrative a poem. The characters, like movie characters, play their rather unconvincing parts con- vincingly. The poem has not the energy of rhythm or action that makes The Set-up an interesting poem on a prize-fight. It has not the intense feeling of Auslander's shorter narrative Steel. It is an example of how much too easily Auslander writes anything he may choose to write. "Letters to Women" (to Elinor Wylie, Amy Lowell, Eleonora Duse, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Clemm, Fanny Brawne, Sappho, Lot's Wife) is a more serious poetic endeavor. Mr. Auslander knows these women; he has read their lives; he interprets them imaginatively. If he does not tell us anything very new concerning them, we are not amazed; that is not his purpose. These women have moved him as a poet, and he addresses them as one poet would another. What- ever their artistic function, they have been women of vision or women close to an artist's heart. Mr. Auslander is interested in them as personalities and he presents them to his reader as personalities. In addressing Elinor Wylie, for example, he makes use of the images and emotions most frequently to be found in her own poetry. The same statement holds for his study of Amy Lowell, one of the best in the book. The study of Emily Dickinson, which won the Palm's prize of $1,000, is less interesting than some of the others; Emily Dickinson's person- ality is too subtle to be easily presented. The poorest poems are those in which Mr. Auslander allows himself the freest emotional outpourings: Virginia Clemm, Duse, Lot's Wife suf- fer from too close an identification with his personal feelings. The "Letters" make a pleasing collection as letters. As poems they suffer from Mr. Auslander's fluency in rhythm, rhyme, and phrase. Good poetry has to be pulled from deeper roots and more rocky soil. The only ease allowable to a poet is that ease which comes after the full circle of struggle for exact and emotional statement has been made. One never feels this struggle back of Mr. Auslander. Eda Lou Walton The Economics of the Contemporary Theater Box-Office. By John Anderson. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $2.50. The Revolt of the Actors. By Alfred Harding. William Mor- row and Company. $3.50. MR. ANDERSON'S little treatise on the commercial aspects of the American theater is valuable and re- freshing for the simple reason that it is written from the standpoint of one in close contact with realities. He has undertaken to trace in outline the effects of the theatrical busi- ness upon theatrical art, and he recognizes the fact that under no possible conditions could the two be entirely divorced. The production of a plan is a costly undertaking which someone must pay for, and the box-office is the place where the payment is made. Evil results only when the costs are so great that the manager can take no risks, can produce nothing which does not appeal to a very large audience, and is compelled to charge an exorbitant price for admission. Hence the trouble with the New York theater is not that it is "commercial" but simply that the running of it has become so expensive as to make mass appeal inevitable. If it cost twenty-five thousand dollars to

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50 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3366 publish a book American literature would be in at least as bad a way as the American theater now is. It is probable that the monopoly established by Erlanger and later fought by the Shuberts was largely responsible for the destruction of the provincial theater, but Mr. Anderson makes it clear that no one person or group of persons can be held accountable for the rapidly mounting cost of production which has now reached a point where the suitable presentation of any play inevitably involves a financial operation of very consider- able magnitude. On the one hand increasing real-estate values have made the rent of a theater so high that it cannot possibly be paid out of the profits of any performance which does not immediately attract large audiences. On the other hand the organization of actors and stage hands into groups powerful enough to enforce demands of one kind or another has added greatly to the cost of the production itself. Every kind of labor, talent, and material is two or three times as expensive as it once was, and the advance in the price of admission is not proportionate. Under the circumstances any play, to succeed, must draw larger audiences than ever before and that means that the producer can afford to take fewer chances. Every- thing except the theatrical "best seller" tends to be forced out. Mr. Anderson has no panacea to offer. To those enthusi- asts who proclaim that the provincial Little Theater consti- tutes our one hope he replies with convincing skepticism that most of the Little Theaters now produce chiefly Broadway suc- cesses and that such a local folk drama as Paul Green's "In Abraham's Bosom" was not in demand until it had created something of a furor in New York. Theatrical centralization has probably come to stay and the best theaters have usually been in some sense "commercial." What we need is not so much the non-commercial manager as some opportunity for the manager who could play for smaller stakes and engage in enterprises which could be profitable without necessarily appealing to the largest possible audience. Mr. Anderson touches only in passing upon the struggle which resulted in the establishment of the Actors Equity Asso- ciation. Mr. Harding's volume recounts in great detail the story of the "revolt" and reprints the chief documentary evi- dence. His book will probably take its place as the standard account of events extremely important both in the history of the American theater and in that of the labor unions. Joseph Wood Krutch is to include only the brilliant sparkle which runs from Rabelais through Voltaire and Renan to Anatole France, and to exclude everything else in French prose, particularly the tradition branch- ing from Chateaubriand and de Guerin. To confirm such a statement to Frenchmen would prove embarrassing, especially to the group which acknowledges Barres as its master; to pref- ace Barres's masterpiece with it only cheapens Mr. Cowley's otherwise authentic and informative foreword. The story of "The Sacred Hill" is a true one. About one hundred years ago on the heights of Zion-Vaudemont in Lor- raine the three Baillard brothers raised their great religious citadel. In the shadow of the hill they had been born and on it and round about it they experienced ordination, triumph, sus- picion, excommunication, ridicule, and death. To Maurice Barres the tragedy of their fanaticism was an inseparable part of the history, influence, and significance of the hill itself; with- out the hill the special quality of their heresy would have been unimportant. The hill was old — old enough to have supported pagan temples, to have seen Celtic chaos fall before Roman order, to have sustained at the same time both a church and a castle when spiritual and temporal power ruled together and by one another's will. That the hill should have fostered in the Baillards one more creed, one more revelation was only another manifestation of its spiritual power as natural to its destiny as that it should hold on its summit, at Leopold's death, another convent of the church which stamped upon and smothered the very exaltation the hill had inspired. The highest expression of such an idea was certain to be lyrical, and although Barres wrote in prose he attained through his style a rhythmic measure in perfect accord with his thought. His sentences are long, complex, and beautifully balanced. His contrasts between characters, between the foolish prophet Vin- tras and the zealot Leopold; between the sentiment of Therese and that of Father Aubry; between objects in the landscape; between the hill and the meadow; between themes, civilization, and revolt are as varied and as unified as the language. The strident details of realism are absent; behind Therese's flight and Vintras's insinuations they exist but are not emphasized. They were beside Barres's purpose. He was intentionally detached, and this objective attitude serves to magnify his conceptions, to lend them strength, and at the same time to intensify his material, to lend it verisimilitude. "The Sacred Hill" gains thereby a grandeur that revives the finest of the romantic tradi- tion. Florence Codman Prose in the Grand Manner The Sacred Hill. By Maurice Barres. Translated from the French by Malcolm Cowley. The Macaulay Company. $2.50. ANY publication in English of Maurice Barres's classic novel about a hill in Lorraine would be a noteworthy event; in Malcolm Cowley's translation there is the rare opportunity of approaching, as closely as is possible through an interpreter, the style and thought of one of the most important French writers of the past half-century. Mr. Cowley not only translates idiomatically and accurately but he achieves the most difficult goal of all — the reproduction of the rhythm of the origi- nal, the quiet power of Harres's clear but ladened prose. The only adverse criticism of Mr. Cowley has nothing to do with his translation. It concerns the statement in his intro- duction in which he says, speaking of Harris's style: "It is not a 'French' style in the usual meaning of the rcrm; that is, it has nothing in common with the limpid, bright, and rather shallow manner of Anatole France and his imitators." Even the quo- tation m.irks do not excuse the assertion nor lessen the sugges- tion that Barres was a literary exception. To say such a thing Fiction Briefs The Hawbucks. By John Masefield. The Macmillan Com- pany. $2.50. Fox hunting squires, their gallant sons and fair daughters, together with their faithful old retainers, are the people with whom Mr. Masefield's new novel is concerned. George Child- rey, on the death of his elder brother, arrives in England after seven years of knocking about in the colonies to take over the Bartons. Carrie Harridew, a playmate of his childhood, is now the belle of the countryside and George promptly falls in love with her. Unfortunately, some dozen or so other young men have anticipated him. These form a group of stock characters that seem to come straight from the pages of the more naive old melodramas. There are the scoundrel Vaughan, the slick lawyer, the silly poet, the burning young minister, and other recognizable types. The story progresses by a process of elimini- nating suitors one after another. Sandwiched in between the love scenes are delightful bits of description, and those who know their Masefield as poet will not be surprised to learn that there is a splendid chapter on a fox hunt, but these are

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January 8, 1930] The Nation 51 not sufficient to save the book from its artificial characters and hackneyed plot. Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter. By Mrs. Ann S. Stephens. Edited by Frank P. O'Brien. The John Day Company. $2.50. This was the first of Beadle's famous dime novels, and as such deserves reprinting from the edition of 1860. The story of an Indian woman who suffered from the failure of her white offspring to acknowledge her is still readable as well as curi- ous. Mr. O'Brien's brief but informative introduction describes the series which the book began and supplies some bibliographical data concerning Mrs. Stephens, who wrote the novel from which "The Old Homestead" was taken. Up at the Villa. By Marie Cher. D. Appleton and Company. $2. "Up at the Villa" unfolds as the putative diary of a soli- tary woman living above the modern city of Rome. "To fill her lengthening leisure" she surrounds herself with a group of disillusioned young people: Adela, her conventional niece, Tatia, the little Russian sculptress, and three men — an Italian painter, Silvio, who is irresistible to women; Henry Fleming, a con- sumptive poet whose ardor and jealousy for Tatia hasten his death; George Rose, an English painter who loves Adela; and Theobald Woodman, stepfather of Henry. With ironic detach- ment the nameless diarist records the progress of the loves and jealousies of the protagonists. But the story is slight; it is the atmosphere of Rome which the author so successfully evokes, the subtle delineation of character, and the exquisite prose in which she has enveloped her story that will linger in the reader's memory. The Uncertain Trumpet. By A. S. M. Hutchinson. Little, Brown and Company. $2.50. Arrived at Ashton Parva the young vicar, David Quest, found that he had to combat not only the sins of the flesh as exemplified by the hunt-loving Flogg-Wallopers and sundry others, but also the more venal sins of the spirit displayed by the austere Pelham Heritage and by a malicious old maid whose accumulated venom came near wrecking David's work. Matters were further complicated by the sudden death of the vicar's patron. Through the long years of struggle to ulti- mate success Quest was buoyed up by the friendship of Banjo Heritage, Pelham's half-brother. Those who dislike overdoses of sentimentality, prolixity, and characters who respond like puppets rather than human beings will not be enthusiastic over this book, but others will discover in the vicar a character worthy of a place beside the immortal Mark Sabre. The House of Gold. By Liam O'Flaherty. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.50. Passion, Disintegration, Nemesis, the division headings of this novel, supply the best key to it. It is the record of the destruction, moral, mental, and physical, wrought by one wo- man's beauty on husband, lover, friend, and priest. The course of the calamity is so swift that neither time nor space is spared for anything but a record of its track. Once or twice there is a fleeting glimpse of a lovely bit of Irish sea coast; the rest is lust and squalor. Adjectives such as powerful, brutal, star- tling fit the book no better than desperate, melodramatic, and insignificant. Mississippi. By Ben Lucien Burman. Cosmopolitan Book Corporation. $2. When States Lilly discovers that he is not the son of Cap- tain Lilly on whose steamboat he has spent most of his life, but was born a Shantytowner, lowest of the low whites who fester along the muddy banks of the Mississippi, he feels that there is nothing for him to do but to go back to his kinsfolk; and go back he does, fighting down his homesickness until time and tide (this time a flood tide) bring about a reunion. "Mis- sissippi" is a somewhat pretentious title for this extended short story. And the story itself occasionally lapses into exaggera- tion, sentimentality, and banality. But Mr. Burman evidently knows the Shantytown folk, those nomadic, unlettered outcasts who live in houseboats along the banks of the river, and he writes of them wisely and entertainingly. One would like to hear more about this little-known people, and in their own right, not as local color for a magazine story plot. Seven Women. By William M. John. J. H. Sears and Com- pany. $2.50. The flat, open country of the Middle West, if authors are to be trusted, abounds in women with warped souls. These creatures have been analyzed and satirized by a whole school of writers; in "Seven Women" seven of them, as alike as peas in a pod, are portrayed as the witless exponents of their own prudery — embittered, vindictive women who exalt their malice as the shield of their fear of reality. This is Mr. John's first novel. The variety he gives to a single theme, the scope he causes that variety to embrace, the balance he strikes between his story and his design, remake an old idea into a novel of fresh interest, originality, and promise. Dido: Queen of Hearts. By Gertrude Atherton. Horace Live- right. $2.50. This is the third novel of Gertrude Atherton's which con- cerns itself with the ancient world. This time she tells the story of Elissa, deposed queen of Tyre who, with her faithful followers and bearing the vast treasure of her murdered hus- band, steals away with the Tyrean fleet and founds the new city of Carthage, there to reign as the Queen Dido whom Virgil is to celebrate in immortal verse. Mrs. Atherton sticks close to the traditional facts and tells the story of the ill-fated queen without the sentimental-romantic embroidery which is so fa- miliar in popular historical novels, and which is so unsuited to the ancient spirit. But the book has no high spots; it is merely the competent work of an author who has done much better things. It should, however, prove entertaining and instructive to high-school students struggling through their Virgil, espe- cially since Mrs. Atherton shares with most of them the opin- ion that the pious Aeneas was something of a prig, and was unconscionably long-winded in his narrations. The Book Shelf The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, by H. W. Fowler and F. M. Fowler, based on the great Oxford Dic- tionary and first published in 1911, has been brought out in a new edition revised and much enlarged (Oxford University Press, American Branch; $4.50). English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, by G. L. Apper- son (E. P. Dutton and Company; $8), offers the novel feature of "dated quotations, in chronological order, drawn from the whole range of English literature," accompanying the various sayings. Recent publications of the University of California Press in history and international relations include The Anglo- Japanese Alliance, by Alfred L. P. Dennis ($1.50) ; The International Government of the Saar, by Frank M. Russell ($1.75) ; Some Aspects of the Recent Foreign Policy of Sweden, by Eric C. Bellquist ($1.75), and The Encomienda in New Spain: Forced Native Labor in the Spanish Colonies, 1492-1550, by Lesley B. Simpson ($3.50).

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52 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3366 Mississippi Provincial Archives, 1701-1729 (Jackson: State Department of Archives and History), is the second volume of a series devoted to the colonization, development, and govern- ment of the French province of Louisiana. The papers have been translated and edited by Dunbar Rowland and Albert G. Sanders. The fourteen-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino has been commemo- rated by the reproduction in facsimile of Regula S. Benedicti (The Rule of St. Benedict) from the earliest manuscript copy, now at the Bodleian Library (Oxford University Press; $2.50). The work is edited by E. A. Lowe. The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, familiarly known as the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, has been re- printed in facsimile from a copy of the 1648 edition in the Henry E. Huntington Library at San Marino, California, with an introduction by Max Farrand (Harvard University Press; $5). Goethe's Faust: Part I, translated by William Page An- drews, edited and revised by George M. Priest and Karl E. Weston (Princeton University Press; $4), is the first instal- ment of a metrical version by the author of "Goethe's Key to Faust" and other studies. The latest addition to the Library of Living Classics, edited by Manuel Komroff, is The Persian Letters of Montes- quieu, reproduced "with a few minor corrections" from the translation of John Davidson (The Dial Press; $4). An English translation by Samuel Putnam of Joseph Del- teil's On the River Amur, with illustrations by Alexeieff, has been brought out by Covici-Friede ($12.50). South and East, by John Masefield, already published in a recent collection of his verse, has been separately issued in a large-itype quarto form with six color plates by Jacynth Parsons (The Macmillan Company; $2). A third edition, in one volume, of Wilbur L. Cross's Life and Times of Laurence Sterne (Yale University Press; $5) contains some emendations of the previous text and additions to the bibliography. The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, has been added to the Thinker's Library (London: Watts and Company; Is.). The text is that of the sixth and last edition. Drama A Peevish Play IT is, I take it, no part of a dramatic critic's business to inquire too closely into whatever private reasons a play- wright may have for changing his opinions. If, for example, Mr. Sydney Howard once thought very well of both women and Freud, he has a perfect right now to denounce the two of them in good round terms without thereby giving me any license to speculate publicly upon the causes of the change. But the artist should earn his immunity by assuming a reciprocal obli- gation. It is his business to cover up with the impersonality of art the private feelings which inspire him, and accordingly when Mr. Howard, excellent playwright that he is, exhibits be- fore the world a drama like "Half Gods" (Plymouth Theater) it becomes my duty to say that the play gives every indication of having been written in some kind of a private pet; and it becomes, furthermore, my privilege to remark that such plays are much better torn up as soon as they have performed their only possible function, which is, of course, to relieve the minds of those who write them. Passion is the sine qua non of drama and even anger may occasionally serve the playwright very well, but a masterpiece cannot be founded on mere irritation even though, as seems here to be the case, that irritation nourishes a delusion of grandeur and believes itself to be moral indigna- tion. Throughout nine scenes Mr. Howard reiterates, with the tiresome insistence of a minor monomaniac, his conviction that the modern wife is a terrible creature. The particular one whom he has chosen to exhibit keeps her hard-working husband up late at night, neglects her children, and frequents a psy- choanalyst. Moreover, lest her actions should not speak clearly enough for themselves and lest it might possibly be sus- pected that she is somewhat worse than the average, he employs three separate and distinct raisonneurs who see to it that the audience is continuously provided with a running homily in- spired by the action. The first, a disillusioned divorcee, ex- plains why she and all women like her make a mistake when they leave adulterous husbands; the second, a child specialist, delivers a lecture on the whole duty of woman — which is, of course, to breed; and the third, a kindly old judge with a copy of Emerson at his elbow, quotes something undoubtedly pro- found but of dubious application. As a result of it all the male members of the audience are supposed to go home, spank their wives, and live ever after, not exactly happily but in that embattled state which, according to Mr. Howard, is characteristic of all truly sacred marriages. Yet so grotesquely does he overstate his case, so obviously is he speaking like a dyspeptic who has been kept waiting for his morning coffee, that even the husbands are embarrassed by the tactlessness of their champion. Irritation seems, moreover, to have robbed Mr. Howard of his skill as well as of his sense of proportion, for he not only states his platitudes with intem- perate vehemence but states them clumsily as well. Certain brief, clear-cut incidents and occasional flashes of pointed dia- logue are the only things which testify, even momentarily, to the talent he has allowed to be obscured. The piece as a whole, vacillating between shrill almost hysterical earnestness and slapstick farce, flounders like the work of an amateur. Now I, for one, am perfectly willing to forgive Mr. Howard his unfortunate divagation if it will serve to purge his soul. Such accumulated irritation must be got rid of some- how and most of us, in similar circumstances, either send a letter to the Times or break up a few pieces of furniture. The pity is only that a playwright of Mr. Howard's talents feels compelled to write a play when either of the two more ordinary methods would probably have done just as well. "Michael and Mary," A. A. Milne's sensational comedy- drama, seems to have settled down for a good long run at the Charles Hopkins Theater. Even its warmest admirers will hardly deny, however, that all of its drama is confined to one short scene in the second act, and the only question which remains is the question of whether or not the padding which surrounds this one scene is whimsically delightful or merely infantile. Many seem to incline toward the former opinion, but I must confess that I personally cannot understand their sense of humor. Amorous baby-talk is doubtless sweet in the ears of the one for whom it is intended, but public kittenishness leaves me cold, and it embarrasses me much to imagine Mr. Milne in his own study being so deliberately and persistently arch. As Macaulay remarked of one of Southey's feeble witticisms, "a sensible man might make such a joke in the privacy of his family circle. A sensible man might even write it down. But that any one should copy it off, send it to the printer, and correct two sets of proof makes one despair of human nature." Joseph Wood Krutch

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January 8, 1930] The Nation 53 D THEATRES □ D FILMS D ■WILLIAM HARRIS JR. PRESENTS- THE FIRST PLAY OF THE SEASON WITH TEETH IN IT." ROBERT LITTELL, WORLD. CRIMINAL CODE By MARTIN FLAVIN with ARTHUR BYRON NATIONAL THEATRE «•* St. West of 7th Ave Evenings 8 :B0 Matinees New Years week: Thurs & Sat. The Theatre Guild Presents I METEOR By S. N. BEHRMAN i^nZlsl THEA., 52nd St. W. of Broadway VJU11U Ergs. 8:50. Mats. Thnrs. & Sat. 2:40 The Theatre Guild Presents RED RUST By KOtCHON & OUSPENSKY Maftin R^oU- THEA., 45th St. W. of 8th Ave. IViarLin DeCIV Evgs. 8:40. Mats. Thurs & Sat. 2:40 A Theatre Guild Production Game of Love and Death By ROMATN HOLLAND Rilfin-irwa THEA., 47th St. W. of Broadway IDllLIXKjrc Evgs. 8:50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:40 The Actor-Manager* Inc. has the honor to present RUTH DRAPER Every evening including Sunday except Monday and Thursday nights COMEDY in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER SKETCHES (Including 5 new ones) Theatre 41st. Years & Sat. East of Broadway. Mats. New VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 in MIMICRY ALBERT CARROLL FRED KEATING A*Sft-f% J8* Theatre W. of B'way., Every Eve. Inc. Sunday 8 :50 4 *l" ■»• Popular price matinee Saturdays. in MAGIC BEGINNING SUNDAY EVG., JAN. 5 Through Sunday Evg., Jan. 12 The Actor-Managers, Inc., introduce DANCE REPERTORY THEATRE Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weldman, Tamiris Week of Joint and Individual Dance Programs Every Evg. Incl. 8un., Jan. 12. Mat. Sat. only. MAXINE ELLIOTT'S Thea., W. 39th St. — — — — Now Playing — — ~^^^— EXTRAORDINARY DOUBLE-FEATURE PROGRAM!!! The titanic awe-inspiring drama of demonology "... greater than 'The Dybbuk' . . ." "{Re (HolenT enacted by a medieval romance a notable of the Ghettoes of cost Europe intensely unique — and on the same program — POLA NEGRI in "A Woman - World" a sophisticated tragicomedy based on CARL Van VECHTEN'S "The Tattooed Countess" a stirring combination of emotional thrill, spirited drama and rollicking humor. FILM GUILD CINEMA New York's Unique Theatre— Direction : 8ymon Gould 13 West 8th Street, bet. 6th and 8th Avenues Popular Prices Spring 5095-5WK) Continuous Dally Noon to Midnight MATINEES: GOOD SEATS, ALL PRICES. AT BOX OFFICE WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE ARLISS in (4 DISRAELI (A Vltaphone All-Talking Picture) yy CENTRAL THEATRE Broadway and 47th St. Daily 2:45 — 8:45 Sunday 3 — 6 — 8:45 55TH STREET PLAYHOUSE Just east of 7th Ave.— Popular prices Continuous from 1 until Midnight Commencing January 4th THE GREATEST HINDU SPECTACLE "THROW OF THE DICE successor to "SHIRAZ" and "THE LIGHT OF ASIA," pro- duced by the same director with the same cast of Hindu stars. JJ Other announcements appear on pages 54 and 55 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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54 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3366 Films The News Reel THE motion picture was a screen newspaper before it was a screen play: it recorded events before it began to invent them. But there is clearly a marked element of enter- tainment that distinguishes the motion-picture record from its analogue in the ordinary newspapers. It is a peculiar kind of entertainment, and its presence or absence, as the case may be, does not become apparent until one sees a fairly large number of screen news items presented at one time. Such an experience has now been made possible by the News Reel Theater which has recently opened in New York. The venture is no doubt timely and welcome. There has been a need for it for some time. But a visit or two to this theater is sufficient to make one realize that screen journalism has hardly advanced beyond the rudiments of its art. The material of the new theater is the familiar news reel of all the cinema houses, except that it is reinforced by the addition of sound. Since it has been elevated, however, to the position of an independent show, it immediately forces the question whether the news reel in its present form offers both sufficient entertainment and sufficient information. I feel fairly certain that it does not. The criticism that might be leveled against it and that comes easiest to one's mind is, of course, its obviously tabloid character. There is no doubt that in its subject matter the American news reel fashions itself after the model of the tabloid press. Like this latter it is anxious to let us see and hear Mrs. Peaches Browning discourse learnedly on the feminine fashions, or introduce us to the plans and hopes of the boy who has inherited a million-dollar fortune. It panders to our morbid curiosity, and such "celebrities" are its stock in trade. But being tabloid means something more than mere sensationalism. It stands for compressed and vivid pre- sentation. And it is the principal characteristic of the motion picture and one of its chief virtues that it deals not with abstract ideas but with vivid, concrete images, even where as in the talk- ing picture they are accompanied by words. For this reason the chief fault to be found with the news reel is not so much that it is a tabloid, but rather that it is not enough of a tabloid. Instead of giving us a mere reproduction of an event or a person, it should present a selective picture that would bring out the most characteristic features of its subject; and to do this it must use a more imaginative and more flexible technique. The connection between this problem of form and the enter- tainment value of the news reel will be readily appreciated. It is one thing to see and hear Mrs. Browning as she is, and quite another thing to have her presented to us as she would be seen by an observant journalist who is also an artist at his job. A composite portrait of a person could be made vastly entertaining where a faithful reproduction would be merely dull. Seeing that so many of the "events" reported in the screen news are specially staged for the benefit of the camera and the microphone — a practice which places the modern news reel somewhere be- tween the pure record and the invented play — there should be really no difficulty in enlivening the cinema reporting by allow- ing it more freedom in the way of deliberate arrangement and of the personal touch of an imaginative journalist. "Devil May Care" (Astor's), starring Ramon Novarro, is one of those musical costume plays which leave the impression of complete futility. With its few tunes indifferently sung, medi- ocre acting, and pointless plot, it has very little to justify it. "The Lost Patrol" (Cameo) is a meritorious British effort marked by able acting and intelligent direction, and telling a dramatic story that is impressive if a trifle too well ordered. Alexander Bakshy □ FILMS □ LECTURES □ 42nd Street and Broadway beginning SATURDAY Another Cinemaster piece from the Soviet Studios .4 it THE RESTAURANT" STARRING VERA MALINOVSKAYA and TCHEKOV FAMOUS RUSSIAN PLAYERS in addition to CLARK AND McCULLOUGH Talking Comedy MEXICO! Shall Europe understand our nearest neighbor better than we do? The eyes of the world are on Mexico today. The Open Forum Speakers Bureau, Little Building, Boston, is offering lectures by Jose Kelly, Commis- sioner of Commerce, Industry and Labor of the Republic of Mexico. Mr. Kelly is considered an expert on the social and economic development of Mexico. For available dates and terms, address the Bureau. L First Appearance in America COUNT MICHAEL KAROLYI FASCISMCh Its danger to world peace TUESDAY EVE., JAN. 7, 1930 AT 8.30 CARNEGIE HALL 57th St. & 7 th Avenue Tickets $1.00 to $2.50 now at Box Office MGT. WILLIAM B. FEAKINS, Inc. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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January 8, 1930] The Nation 55 □ C T U R E S □ DINNER □ D E B A TE □ RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 7-E. 15 St. Alg. 3094 NEW LECTURE COURSES Winter term begins January 6 Mod., 8.30 p. in. PHILOSOPHY OF EVERYDAY LIFE R. N. Boardmnn RECENT ECONOMIC CHANGES Marina Hansome Tues., 8.80 p. m. CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE Abcn Kandel Tues., 7.00 p. m. SOCIALIST POLITICS AND POLICIES Morris Hillquit Harry W. Laidler Norman Thomas Algernon L,ee Tues., 8.30 p. m. BASIS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR Joseph M. Osman Tues., 8.30 p. m. BRITISH LABOR'S RISE TO POWER Mark Starr Wed. PROGRESS IN THE ARTS Herman Epstein Anita C. Block Lewis Mumford Douglas Haskell Gilbert Seldes HISTORY OF INDIAN CIVILIZATK J. Vijaya-Tunga SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION Dominic d'Lustachio 8.30 p. m. Wed., 8.30 p. m. Wed., 7.00 p. m. Thurs., 8.30 p. m. Registration now open. Nominal fees — Single admission 50c. Six Illustrated Lectures GEOLOGY oS SOCIAL SCIENCE by A. J. TAYLOR (Auspices Socialist Labor Party) IRVING PLAZA, 15th St. & Irving Place V.W YO^K, N. Y. WEDNESDAYS, JAN. 15, 22, 29 FEB. 5, 12, 19, at 8 P. M. 2nd Lecture — The Cave Man 4th Lecture — The Land Man-1 Gth Lecture — The Machine Man Admission $1.50 the entire series. Tickets from — ROSE EPSTEIN, Treasurer 73 Elwood Street no reserve seats New York, N. Y. 1st Lecture — The Dawn Man 3rd Lecture — The Tool Man 5th Lecture — The Land Man-? The Friends and Students of WILL DURANT are tendering to him and Mrs. Durant a FAREWELL DINNER at the Aldine Club, 200 Fifth Avenue, New York, 6.30 p. m., Friday, January 10th, 1930, on the eve of their departure for a round-the-world tour. Tickets at $3.00 may be obtained through Wm. J. Perlman, 39 Broadway, New York City; 'phone Digby 6110; or Dr. Hannah Stone, 41 Fifth Avenue, New York, or Simon and Schuster, 37 West 57th Street, New York. Speakers: JOHN DEWEY, HEYW00D BROUN, NATHAN KRASS, HENRY GODDARD LEACH, Chairman. A Momentous 3 -Cornered DEBATE!!! SOCIALISM, or f sco.. CAPITALISM • NEARING for Communism Noted Sociologist and Lecturer Fenner BROCKWAY for Socialism Brilliant Labor Member of British Parliament Prof. Edwin R. A. SELIGMAN for Capitalism Foremost Economist, Columbia University Chairman, SAMUEL UNTERMYER — Subject — Resolved: That Capitalism offers more to the workers of the world than Socialism or Communism. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1930—8:30 P. M. MECCA TEMPLE— 133 W. 55th STREET Reserved Seats $1.00, $1.50, $1.75, $2.00 & $2.75 Reservations advisable now for best seat locations Obtainable by mail or in person at Civic Club, 18 E. 10th Street; Columbia University Bookstore; Rand School Bookstore, 7 E. 15th Street, and New School Bookshop, 465 W. 23rd St. Also by mail or in person at offices of LEAGUE FOR PUBLIC DISCUSSION 11 W. 42nd St., Room 1950— SPRinff 1716 TO OUT-OF-TOWNERS — This debate will be published in book form. Reserve your copy now by sending $1.00. CARNEGIE HALL— SUNDAY EVENING- JANUARY 5th— 8:15 P. M. William B. SHEARER will tell "The Inside Story of Ten Years of International Intrigue Against U. S. Sea Power" with comments on the approaching LONDON CONFERENCE What might have come out at the Senate investigation, had it been completed Tickets on sale at Carnegie Hall Box Office and by mail Bale. $1.00; Dress Circ. $1.50; Orch. $1.50-$2.50; Box Seats $3.00 Direction— Celebrities Management, Inc., 11 XV. 42nd St., N. Y. O. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Dr. Magnes and Zionism By FERDINAND M. ISSERMAN JUDAH L. MAGNES, Chancellor of the Hebrew Uni- versity, stirred up a veritable hornets' nest by declar- ing, in the midst of the Palestinian crisis, that Zionists must abandon the hope of establishing a Jewish Palestine, that a representative parliament ought to be instituted there, and that Jews and Arabs should make peace among them- selves. His position was condemned by Zionist officials, by students at the Hebrew University who hissed his address, by the American Jewish Congress, by the Jewish press gen- erally, by rabbis, by Jewish legionnaires, and by many others. His critics are of two classes. Some are unalterably opposed to his plan ; others regard this as an inopportune time to suggest it. I agree entirely with Dr. Magnes. I regard his views of Palestine as the only ones which an enlightened liberal Jew (using the word "liberal" in a philosophic and not a religious sense) can hold. In addition to that I believe they are practicable. What are the facts about Palestine? At the present time, there are about 125,000 Jews there, 600,000 Arabs, and perhaps 50,000 Christians. The land is being adminis- tered by a British high commissioner, who is an absolute autocrat, responsible for his actions to no Palestinian group but only to the British administration in London. The only appeal that Palestinians have against his decisions is to the Cabinet or Parliament of England. The government of present-day Palestine is undemocratic and despotic. Prac- tically, the administration has curtailed no personal liberties, and has granted autonomy to communities, but theoretically there is no political freedom in Palestine. The taxes are levied by the high commissioner. Not only is there taxation without representation, but the whole administration of the country is dictated by London and its officials and not by the people who reside in Palestine. One of the great slogans of the World War, phrased by Woodrow Wilson, was the self-determination of peoples. The Arabs contend that in 1915 General M'Mahon, a British general, promised independence to the Arabs of Pales- tine if they would rise against the Turks and favor the Brit- ish, and declare that they now want this promise redeemed. There is some doubt as to whether this promise was made, or whether if made it was authorized in London. Even assuming that no such promise was made, the problem still remains, what of self-determination for the Palestinians? Certainly Jews, who for centuries have struggled for po- litical rights, will not justify denial of this right to any group. How can liberals, who sympathize with the desire of the Philippines for independence, with Chinese National- ist aspirations, with India's desire for dominion status, deny to any group the right of democratic government ? Are the Jews ready to become parties to tyranny? The fact that the condition of the Arab was worse under Turkish rule is no argument at all. The very hope of political Zionism is based on a desire for national independence. The fact that there are Arabs elsewhere who have political autonomy is also irrelevant. The ideal of the self-determination of peo- ples is one to which most Jews, certainly Zionists, subscribe If the Palestinians were to be granted full political free- dom, the Arabs would easily dominate any established po- litical Parliament, and they could easily put an end to Jew- ish immigration, and thus close the book of Zionism. In order to prevent this from happening, and in order to enable Great Britain to carry out her pledge to the Jews as made in the Balfour Declaration, St. John Philby suggests that though political autonomy be granted in Palestine, the mi nority rights of Jews be recognized, and the high commis- sioner retain the power of veto over any legislation. The recognition of minority rights implies the right to a minorit language and to minority schools. If the high commissioner has the right to veto legislation, any attempt, not based oi economic motives, to restrict immigration can be frustrat St. John Philby's proposal, indorsed by Dr. Magnes, is f to both Arab and Jew. Now, as to the timeliness of Dr. Magnes's utterances There are many who feel that even if he is right he should not have spoken out at this time of crisis. The time to speak out on fundamental principles is not when no issue is at hand, but when issues are open and principles are needed with which to solve these issues. If as a result of the in- vestigation that is now going on to sift the causes of the riots in Palestine, any changes are to be made in the status of Palestine, these changes should be determined by principle and not by opportunism. There is no doubt that from the standpoint of immediate practical expediency the Jews have to lose by insisting on principles as Dr. Magnes does. Be- cause the Arabs were the aggressors and because their hands are stained with the blood of innocent victims, their demands are bound at present to lose force. But shall the Jew at this late date sacrifice principle to expediency? If I understand Jewish history at all I see it as an expression of loyalty to an ideal. Material things, wealth, power, influence, all were sacrificed by our fathers for the ideal. Shall we in Palestine, the cradle of our ideals, where Amos pleaded for justice, Hosea for love, and Isaiah for peace, erect a new altar and sacrifice upon it the ideals of our tradition? Is it for this that we want Zion ? In times of crisis, the prophets demanded the application of principle to vital issues. Amos denounced ritual not on a week-day but on a holy day be- fore the crowds fulfilling ritual duties. A Zion built on expediency would be a renunciation of Judaism. Not with bayonets but with good-will must Zion be redeemed. Pales- tine will remain, until the Arab leaves of his own volition, a bi-national country, the Switzerland of Asia, the home of three great faiths — Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammed anism. Here is an opportunity to demonstrate to the world that religious bigotry is not essential, that Jew, Christian, and Mohammedan can live together in peace and harmon. Thus the Holy Land can again teach the world. I therefoi regard Dr. Magnes's utterance as timely and in keeping with Israel's finest tradition. He spoke not as a seller politician but as a courageous prophet.

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. cxxx NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 1930 No. 3367 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 57 EDITORIALS: „ The League of Nations J" New York's Power °J The Talkies' Future »\ "Hey, Skin-nay !" °f IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 63 MY BROTHER'S PEEPER. By Gardner Jackson 64 LAME-DUCK DIPLOMATS. By Paul Y. Anderson 66 TEN YEARS OF THE LEAGUE. By Felix Morley 67 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 70 CORRESPONDENCE 71 BOOKS AND DRAMA: - These Humble People. By Eda Lou Walton If Insight and Charm. By Sidney B. Fay If Russian Irony. By Joshua Kumtz if An American Knight. By Will Irwin IJ\ Speculation. By Davis R. Dewey if Hardly Worth While. By Clifton P. Fadiman 75 Two English Poets. By Mark Van Doren. . 75 The Quaker and the Quantum. By Irwin Edman If A Prophet of Trees. By Lewis S. Gannett If Fiction Briefs ...................."..••.•"• Drama: Portrait of an Egotist. By Joseph Wood krutcn /» INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: The Vatican and the Kremlin. By Louis r ischer »^ CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 83 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor ^pvpTkaTtTtt JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY hAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN- NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 34, Clifton Gardens, W. 9, London, England. THOSE ADHERENTS OF THE LEAGUE of Na- tions who brought General Smuts to this country were well advised in doing so. They could have invited no one who would impress the thoughtful public more, for he has been a discriminating critic as well as a supporter of the League since its inception. Moreover, General Smuts is the accredited inventor of the mandate system; it appeared first in his proposal for the League of Nations which The Nation had the privilege of publishing in America early in 1919. That the idea was born of a laudable purpose to improve the administration of backward nations by the self- appointed colonizing nations is beyond question. General Smuts is certainly not to be blamed for the failure of the League of Nations to supervise the mandatory Powers as he planned that they should. We cannot help wondering, how- ever, if any system by which government is imposed upon any people by another can ever be made honorable or work- able or bearable. Certainly the dark spots on General Smuts's own record are his relations with the exploited races • in South Africa and the use of force to control them. None '" the less we recognize that General Smuts is one of the few great men of the world, and we especially recall with grati- lde that although he signed the Treaty of Versailles, he at the same time caused to be circulated a protest against it. IT IS A MATTER FOR REGRET that the arrival of Count Karolyi in this country, from which he had been barred by the State Department for five years, should have been marked by misunderstanding between the count and his friends here, who have carried on a valiant fight for his admission. The Rand School of Social Science ar- ranged with his lecture manager for a great welcome meet- ing in Carnegie Hall under the sponsorship of a representa- tive committee of Socialists and liberals, including such men as Norman Thomas, Morris Hillquit, John Dewey, Charles A. Beard, and the editor of The Nation, to mention only a few. The American Communists, with their usual genius for mischief making, sent word to the count that the members of this committee were persons with the same views as those who support Horthy in Hungary — referring to the agree- ment between the dictator and the Hungarian Social De- mocracy. Thereupon Count Karolyi instructed his manager not to accept the sponsorship of the Rand School or other po- litical groups, thus turning his back on his best friends in this country. Count Karolyi has been extremely ill advised in this matter. We are confident that his action has been due to a misunderstanding of the real situation here, and we trust that this unfortunate beginning may not interfere too seriously with the success of his lecture trip. OF ALL THE SAD SHOWS ever staged, unques- tionably the saddest was William B. Shearer's New York lecture on "The Inside Story of Ten Years of In- ternational Intrigue against United States Sea Power." Lost in the immense reaches of Carnegie Hall, three or four hundred persons sat in bored or amused silence while a hand- ful applauded every other sentence as Mr. Shearer repeated his testimony of last summer before the Senate investigating committee, declaring pathetically enough that the Navy Department did not tell him that his celebrated "secret document" was a hoax. He was introduced by the incred- ible Admiral Fiske, who in a newspaper interview had al- ready indorsed him : "I have looked into his alleged activities at Geneva and I find he was only doing what the govern- ment was trying to do. The only people he was opposing were the British." The London Conference, the Admiral declared, "is going to be the greatest game, played for the greatest stakes, that the world has ever known." That is exactly the nationalistic spirit which, as we pointed out last w7eek, if unchecked will reduce the conference to nullity. The visit of Ramsay MacDonald did much to set the people of this country thinking in different terms, and the flat fail- ure of Mr. Shearer's meeting is encouraging evidence that anti-British propaganda is at present unpopular. As we have already suggested, success at London depends on the delegates coming together in friendly spirit to do everything possible to lift a common burden. AMASS MEETING in Faneuil Hall, protesting against a new massacre, though in Newport and not in Boston, sending a vigorously defiant message to the highest authority, and then tearing dowTn official posters on Boston

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58 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3367 F Common — what good reading that is! At last it seems Americans are capable of working themselves into a fury and asserting that they have rights and liberties which they intend to have respected. Since the war it has seemed as if the spirit of 1776 were dead, laid to rest by the war to end war. Not that we have much affection for the victims of the "Newport massacre" — three rum-runners, confessed lawbreakers, who were killed when their rum-laden craft was stopped by Coast Guard bullets. The meeting was on better ground when it protested against the cocksure way in which Assistant Secre- tary Lowman upheld the Coast Guard without making any inquiries as to the facts. He has, however, now been sustained by Secretary Mellon himself. But we should still rejoice even if the occasion for this protest were less worthy. The members of the Boston audience who were so vigorously out- spoken to Mr. Hoover have done a genuine service. So, too, we like the continued pounding away of Senator Borah and the Drys in Washington. As we said last week, Mr. Hoover must be made to face this issue and must not be allowed to follow his usual custom of dodging. We are aware that there is a lot of the usual hypocrisy and politics in the Wash- ington controversy, but still we rejoice in the protests. WE THOUGHT that the Navy Department had safely bottled up General Smedley D. Butler for its own good and his, but we note with profound regret that he has fizzed over again. According to an Associated Press dis- patch the brave general recently addressed an American Legion post in the outskirts of Harrisburg as follows: I believe that God made us the most influential nation in the world for a purpose, and that it is our duty to keep our neighboring nations from murdering one another. When the marines get a job, they go and do it. We are not diplomats. Soldiering makes a man direct in his methods and sometimes abrupt. To kill people, as the marines have done in Haiti, in order to prevent them from murdering one another is, as the general says, direct, not to say abrupt. It reminds us of the State that proposed to make attempted suicide a capital offense. MAHATMA GANDHI'S influence in India is still powerful, as the proceedings of the All-India National Congress at Lahore show, but the immediate outlook for the Swaraj or home-rule movement which he directs and inspires is not altogether clear. The congress, called to pave the way for a conference out of which, it was hoped, India would emerge with the much-discussed dominion status, rejected that solution of the problem by adopting almost unanimously a resolution offered by Gandhi demanding complete inde- pendence. No useful purpose would be served, the resolu- tion declared, by Indian participation in the round-table con- ference at London at which the question of constitutional re- form for India was to be threshed out, and the Nationalist members of the central and provincial legislatures were called upon to resign. But while a proposal championed by Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the Youth League, for the adoption of a militant program was overwhelmingly voted down and a more moderate amendment deferring action on the question of independence was also rejected, the executive committee of the congress was nevertheless authorized to inaugurate whenever it thought fit a program of non-coopera- tion or civil disobedience, this last including non-payment of taxes to British authorities. JUST WHAT IS Gandhi's purpose? Apparently he has abandoned dominion status as only a halfway house and has committed himself and his followers to absolute inde- pendence. On the other hand, the discretion given to the executive committee of the congress, a body of some 300 members, to adopt a program of passive resistance if, when, and as the committee thinks the moment opportune, seems to suggest that the attainment of independence is not looked for immediately, but is nevertheless to be held over the heads of the British government while further negotiations are car- ried on or preparations for action are being made. Not all of India's population of 320,000,000, of course, is behind Gandhi; most of the 70,000,000 Moslems have never recognized his leadership, the 3,000,000 Sikhs have yet to be conciliated, and the attitude of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the native states is uncertain. The National Liberal Federa- tion, representing moderate Indian opinion, is reported to have rejected the idea of independence and reasserted adher- ence to the program of dominion status. The thing most to be hoped for at the moment is that Great Britain may not feel compelled to send additional troops to India. FRENCH POLITICS should be livelier than ever now that Leon Daudet, guiding genius of the Action Fran- chise and protagonist of a monarchy in place of the republic, has been pardoned and allowed to return from comfortable exile in Belgium. There was nothing to do but pardon him, of course, for the circumstances of his exile were ridiculous. Daudet bitterly attacked the Paris police about three years ago for alleged complicity in the death of his son, and for that was convicted of libel and sentenced to prison. The Sante prison is an ancient structure, but it had a telephone; so also had the Ministry of the Interior; and when, one day, somebody telephoned from the Ministry of the Interior, or from some place temporarily dubbed such, to say that Daudet was to be released, the obliging governor of the Sante opened the doors, bowed M. Daudet to a waiting automobile, and the whilom libellist sipped his aperatif that evening in Bel- gium. In that safe retreat he has continued to write his daily editorials for the Action Francaise, and the monarchist agitation has gone on in spite of a ban from Rome. Now a Tardieu Government (Tardieu the Poincarist and Clem- encist, of all persons), backed by Edouard Herriot and political leaders of various stripes, has moved for a pardon and President Doumergue has graciously acquiesced. What you need is for me to have you in a two-by-four room. What wouldn't I do to you? I'd blacken your eyes and give you some real American spirit and do for you what your parents should have done. ... In your diseased mind do you think the United States and com- munism are in any way alike? . . . We spend billions in this country for schools and what have we educated here — a mongrel and a moron who tries to go out and defy the American people. It would be a grand thing for me to send you back to Poland. It is too bad this government has so much red tape, that makes it hard to get rid of people like you. . . . The sentence that I am going to give you is not the one I had in mind. I am not going to sentence you to jail.

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January 15, 1930] The Nation 59 That would make a martyr of you. Get out of this court room. You are not fit to be here. THESE were the hysterical outpourings, as reported in the New York press, of Magistrate Silvester Sab- batino as he sat in his court in Brooklyn to pass judgment upon David Weiss, seventeen, confessed Communist, arrested for collecting funds for the strikers of Gastonia, North Caro- lina, and charged with vagrancy. The irrelevance of these remarks is exceeded only by their stupidity. The campaign of the American Civil Liberties Union to have the magistrate removed from the bench deserves to succeed. Incidentally, if Mr. Sabbatino and his like are really interested in winning over to American ideals impressionable young men like David Weiss who have accepted the easy and spectacular simplifica- tions of communism, they should adopt other tactics. AN INDIGNANT READER of the London Nation and Athenaeum is profoundly hurt that the Ency- clopaedia Britannica employed the vice-president of a great American motor combination to write its article on the modern motor industry. The article declares that "America has admittedly taken the lead in this industry," a statement which further rouses the ire of the protestant. He lists a number of achievements in the development of the motor car in which England has led. First of all he points out that "the car which any unbiased American will own is the best car in the world is a car made in this country." More than that, he says, the first six-cylinder car was pro- duced in Great Britain, the first free-wheel device was put into practical use on British soil, and British manufacturers were the first to adopt "dipping head lamps, non-splinter- able glass, all-weather bodies, and sunshine saloons" — we hope that the latter term, with which we confess our un- familiarity, has nothing to do with the question of alcoholic drinks! Finally, this aroused Englishman declares that his country has led in adoption of the front-wheel drive and in the use of the medium-pressure tire, which was evolved in England, and he hopes that these facts will show the differ- ence "between taking the lead in number of cars sold and taking the lead in motor engineering." We are inclined to think that there is a good deal to be said on his side. SIX THOUSAND ITALIAN PRISONERS were freed as a gesture in the general program of rejoicing over the marriage of the Italian Crown Prince and Princess Marie Jose of Belgium. This strikes us as an excellent idea and we have a proposal to make with regard to it. Let Allan Hoover, younger son of President Hoover, announce his approaching marriage (we are even willing to let him choose the fortunate young lady) ; and then, just to show how happy everybody is or ought to be, let Tom Mooney, Warren K. Billings, all the Centralia prisoners, the young California Communists who had the children at a summer camp make a red flag, the young Communists in Ohio who passed pamphlets at a meeting — let all these and any other political prisoners we have not mentioned be sent home by President or Governor with a pardon in their pocket. That would be as pretty a gesture as one could make. In addition we should recommend that the bride be dressed in white velvet and ermine and the groom in a dashing military uniform; that a large military escort in full-dress uniform on horseback ride fore and aft in the procession ; that bands play on the route from the bride's home to the church; that flowers be cast at all concerned. In short, that we have a celebration that is a celebration. None of these quiet democratic weddings for us, with a young woman in a tweed jacket married to a young man in a blue serge suit. We want action, noise, color, splen- dor. And in such a setting what could be more fitting than a little princely generosity toward the unfortunates who, for their opinions, languish in our jails? WE APPLAUD the brave words of President Frank Parker Day, of Union College, denouncing the com- mercialization of college sports, the employment of highly paid professional coaches, and all the other well-known athletic abuses of our institutions of higher learning. But such brave words are fairly cheap, even when they are spoken to the men who themselves run college athletics, so we applaud even more highly President Day's specific sug- gestions for correcting the evils he denounces. Rightly enough, he blames college executives as being largely re- sponsible for these abuses, and he suggests the formation of a league of small colleges, beginning with Hamilton, Rensselaer Polytechnic, Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, and Union, which shall agree to do away with gate receipts, professional coaches, and all compensation of any kind to athletes. That sounds like business, and we stand ready to applaud most heartily any such program if instituted by the colleges mentioned, or, failing that, by President Day and his associates at Union acting by and for themselves. President Lowell of Harvard has also made the compromise suggestion that only one intercollegiate game be held in each sport annually. These are beginnings; we hope they will shortly be translated into action. ONE OF THE GREATEST of American teachers and critics, George Woodberry died in his seventy- fifth year on January 2. Professor Woodberry was for long years one of The Nation's most valued critics and reviewers and for a time a member of its staff, and this journal cannot but record now, in advance of a longer appreciation, its deep and sincere regret at this loss to American letters. Heir to the New England tradition, a graduate of Harvard in the class of 1877, for several years under the direct personal influ- ence of James Russell Lowell, Mr. Woodberry early became a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and simi- lar publications, and was among the first scholars to take up the teaching of comparative literature, holding for five years a chair in that subject at Columbia. Inspired as he was, students came to him for a spiritual refreshment and quick- ening all too rare in this day and generation, and when he was virtually forced out of Columbia by the refusal of the authorities adequately to maintain his department and to overlook the inability of a man of near-genius to do routine committee and administrative work, a mighty protest arose from the students. But in vain. Scholars of this type were not congenial to the Butler regime at Columbia — Edward MacDowell went when Woodberry did, and Joel Spingarn followed in later years. But Mr. Woodberry never lacked adequate recognition for the long list of his published works, and among other honors was the rare one of being chosen Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Fortunate is a country to whom is vouchsafed so great a teacher and scholar !

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60 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3367 The League of Nations THAT the League of Nations has grown and developed since its foundation none can deny. Its supporters can point, like Felix Morley elsewhere in this issue of The Nation, to fundamental changes in the mechanism of the League, to a new emphasis in its policies, to a certain detachment from the spirit in which it was founded, and to a marked tendency to free itself from the domination of the "Big Five" nations which completely controlled it in 1919. Then it was that Professor Gilbert Murray declared truth- fully that the League "does not put the world at the mercy of the Big Five; it is there already." "Without the League,'' he added, "the Big Five would be so many robber chieftains." Lord Robert Cecil, its great protagonist, was at the same time for excluding "definitely untrustworthy and hostile states, e.g., Russia, should the Bolshevist government remain in power." "Otherwise," he opined, "it is desirable not to be too rigid in scrutinizing qualifications, since the small Powers will in any case not exercise any considerable influ- ence"! Let us then admit that the League has gone far beyond that amazing conception of one who still poses as a statesman and humanist. We are willing also to concede that the constitutional evolution of which Mr. Morley speaks has gone in the right direction, in part because of Europe's evolution out of the period of war liquidation ; in part because of events in Europe outside the League, and often in spite of it. The Locarno treaties; the economic settlements; the Kellogg pact; the removal of the troops from the Rhineland — the credit for all these goes not to the League but to out- siders, to statesmen of the caliber of Briand, Stresemann, and MacDonald, who stepped in to pacify Europe at the time when the League was nearest collapse. But we must also record thankfully the dramatic incident of December 15, 1928, when the Council of the League, supporting Germany against the Poles, for the first time put one of the war vic- tors in the wrong. There was progress, there at least the promise of genuine justice and a final breach with the con- ception of the League as an instrument of the victors to enforce their will upon the vanquished. But it is in the development of the various technical bureaus of the League that one finds the greatest satisfaction — in the battle against opium and the white slave traffic; in the great progress of the International Labor Office toward handling the common problems of the working classes every- where as a world entity ; in the direct discussion of numer- ous problems such as agriculture, instead, as Mr. Morley points out, of requiring them to go through the circumlocution offices which handle the nations' foreign affairs. There lies the real gain for humanity; there the chief possibility of a solution of international ills at a table face to face, by men ruled by other considerations than politics; there the true inception of an eventual parliament of mankind of which the ages have dreamed. Beyond doubt the creation of this clear- ing house for discussion and adjustment and reform has been a great step forward for the world. But when all this has been freely admitted, when praise has been given as all lovers of humanity must give it where and when it is due, there remains the other side. That still prevents us from joining those who all over the United States will be seizing upon the tenth anniversary of the League to urge anew the entrance of the United States into its mem- bership. For the League is still part and parcel of that body of death, the Treaty of Versailles, which still prevents the final pacification of Europe; which keeps alive a dozen sore spots that threaten another catastrophe. The League has per- mitted the increase of the armed forces of Europe to a point where there are at least a million more men under arms in Europe than the day the World War started; it has been silent and complaisant in the face of such monstrous wrongs as the crucifixion of the entire people of the lower Tyrol ; it has been unable to find its voice when the Treaty of Ver- sailles, of which it is at once the child and the guardian, has been openly and flagrantly violated. Indeed, it has itself violated the treaty while strictly enforcing the worst pro- visions against the beaten or violated peoples. On these and other counts, the League is and has been "a magnificent conspiracy against justice," keeping alive the spirit of war. It is in this very matter of peace that we must indict it most directly and most searchingly. It was the League that abdicated its functions and turned over its task to a non- legal body, the Council of Ambassadors, when Mussolini shot up the island of Corfu. It was the League that sat silent when the Poles stole Vilna which they have ever since kept. It was the League that, in its cowardice, kept silence when the French, violating the treaty, entered the Ruhr to enslave, to torture, to debase, to murder a people whom the League itself had helped to disarm. It was the League that shut its eyes to chicanery, deceit, and fraud on the eastern German frontier. It is the League that has achieved not one step toward the real disarmament to which it and the treaty are pledged, and has ignored and scorned the only true and honest proposal for that disarmament yet presented in Geneva — that of the Russians voiced by Litvinov — the Rus- sians to whom the League still refuses fellowship. The United States enter this League? Some time in the distant future perhaps but not now. We are utterly opposed to our country's becoming a party to the iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles which this country refused to sign, which we shall be bound to uphold, to sanctify, and to enforce if we join. We are well aware of the stock argument that it took the United States eight years to grow out of the loose and weak Confederation into a true and effective union of States. The parallel is not to the point for the Confederation was not charged with preserving the peace of the world, was not solemnly pledged to the abolition of that system of brute force which came so close in 1914-1918 to the destruction of civilization. The League was and is so pledged. It has been recreant to its trust while advocates have praised it to the skies and covered reams of good paper with adulation over its gradual acquisition of the strength to keep its solemn pledges to do what is right. And the horrible thing about it has been that while it hid its head in the sand the military forces of evil have grown and not lessened ; that the world is hourly menaced by the threat of a new warfare of the nations to make the horrors of 1914-1918 seem child's play.

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Tanuary 15, 1930] The Nation 61 [ New York's Power THERE is beautiful fighting all along the line in the water-power battle, but nowhere prettier than in the State of New York. Ever since Alfred E. Smith, with his unerring instinct for the popular well-being, suc- ceeded in dragging the matter into the open, the issue has been growing clearer and clearer. In the exigencies of party politics, a Republican majority in the legislature, its back to the wall, has been standing doggedly for the interests of the power companies, insisting that there should be no develop- ment of the State's water resources except on terms that give the companies the lion's share of the benefit; a Democratic governor with tenacity and apparently growing clearness of insight has been standing more or less definitely for the inter- ests of the industries and the domestic consumers of electricity who want current supplied as cheaply as possible. New York, a highly industrialized State with an extensive agri- cultural territory and population, controls the great St. Law- rence power. If New York can solve its power problem along right lines, the other States will profit by its experi- ence. The longer such a solution can be delayed, the farther may the power companies carry the pleasant process of skim- ming the cream off our electrical development. Following in the path marked by his great predecessor, Governor Roosevelt in a special message last year urged the retention and operation of the proposed power plant by the State, with distribution by private companies under contract. This year he goes farther. After reasserting that "the own- ership, development, and operation of the St. Lawrence power resources" should "remain forever in the actual pos- session of the people of the State or of an agency created by them," he goes on thus: At the same time I thought it advisable that the State agency should at least provide the financing of and retain the fee to any system of State-wide transmission of elec- tricity made necessary by the new power development. As a mere matter of saving in interest rates alone this would reduce the cost of electricity many millions of dollars each year, for the consumer, of course, pays the interest and dividend charges on the project. The Governor, it will be recalled, has proposed a board of trustees, a separate corporate entity like the New York Port Authority, with power to issue to private investors securities based on the structures to be built. The board of trustees will make contracts with private companies for the actual distribution of current at rates to be fixed in the con- tracts. Whether the transmission lines are to be leased to such companies is not clear from the Governor's plan. If what he proposes is that the State shall own and operate both generating plant and transmission lines, there will be left to private companies the local distribution of current at prices to be fixed by contract with the board. Under present legislation there is little possibility of municipalities going ex- tensively into the business of distributing current. Local dis- tribution, with all its extensive possibilities of economy, will then perforce remain for the most part in private hands. The weakness of such a system (and it is a serious one) lies in the absence of any threat of effective public competi- tion with the private companies in distribution. Lacking such a club the trustees may well have difficulty in bringing about economies of distribution and in exercising effective rate control. The plan does promise, however, the benefits of inexpensive public financing and unified operation of the generating and transmission system, and it perhaps repre- sents as long a step as it is possible at this time to take in New York in the direction of outright public production and distribution of light and power. Of course, the power com- panies insist that the plan is not practical and that private capital cannot be induced to take over the task of local dis- tribution under such conditions. If this be true, they are simply saying that private capital cannot be induced to dis- tribute electricity under conditions that give any promise of safeguarding the public interest. We venture the guess, how- ever, that the opposition of the companies is due to their fear not that the plan will fail but that it will succeed. The striking feature of the New York situation, and in our judgment the promising one, lies in the frank recognition of the failure of public regulation of the private power in- dustry. A quarter of a century ago people were looking hopefully to the movement for regulatory commissions of various kinds. As far as the power industry goes, the failure of that movement is confessed by everybody except the power companies, who have discovered astonishing virtues in public regulation since they learned how to control it. The his- tory of the past two decades has made one thing abundantly clear : in the development of electric power there is no effec- tive way of safeguarding the public interest except for the organized community to keep in its own hands the ownership and operation of the basic generating and transmission sys- tem, letting private enterprise come in, if at all, only in a minor capacity under conditions of strictest control by a public authority which actually has the whip hand. That is what the power companies are trying to prevent in New York and everywhere else. The Talkies5 Future THE immediate and overwhelming popularity of the talkies gives evidence of the fact that they have come to stay. Not only have the most important pro- ducers ceased to make anything else, but the "wiring" of even the village nickelodeons has gone on so rapidly that the silent movie house is already almost a thing of the past. The wave of public protest predicted by certain critics never showed the slightest sign of materializing, and audiences, instead of trou- bling themselves about the alleged threat to an independent art form, accepted dialogue as an obvious addition to their favorite entertainment. Probably only America could have released so rapidly the capital and energy necessary to revo- lutionize an industry overnight, but that revolution is already a fait accompli. Nor can it be denied that the technical development of the talkies has been almost as rapid as their spread. Voices sound far more human than they did six months ago and a method of story telling, half way between that of the stage and that of the screen, has been developed so successfully that it is possible to maintain with some show of reason that a film like that of George Arliss in "Disraeli" is better than the original production of the play from which it is taken.

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62 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3367 Yet despite these facts there is not, at present, the slightest reason for supposing that the talkie is destined to rise above the artistic level of its silent progenitor. The best dialogue pictures yet seen are not in any significant respect superior to the best of the old-style films, and the pity of it is that, whatever the theoretical possibilities of the new device may be, they do not seem any more likely to be realized than those possibilities which enthusiasts have been, for ten years past, vainly discussing in connection with the traditional cinema. The word "movie" remains synonymous with all that is cheap and vulgar, not because cheapness and vulgarity are obviously inherent in the medium, but because the moving picture was developed under certain definite limiting condi- tions; and the prospects are that the talkie, developing under the same conditions, will continue as it has begun — that it will be merely a movie made more ghastly because it has learned to say in words the nonsense which it formerly could only imply in pantomime. If there were any way of rescuing it from the already established tradition of the film, then the hopes expressed for it might possibly be justified, but the movie was stultified by mass production and censorship and it is not easy to see how the new-style films can fail to feel the full force of these destructive influences. They passed almost automatically into the control of the same censoring bodies, official and un- official, which had already been accepted by the magnates of the cinema, and the very fact that they could appeal to the population at large made it inevitable that the whole effort of the producers should be, as it had been in the past, to hit the largest common denominator of a vast public. It is obvious that the censorship has succeeded only in removing from the films every trace of intelligence, while it has left them dripping with every variety of implied sensuality. It is equally obvious that the effort to construct stories of uni- versal appeal has resulted only in the mechanical repetition of the most elementary fables. But the movies have paid too well for the industry to wish to try any other method, and the censorship has proved so little harmful to the box office that there is not the slightest likelihood of any effectual pro- test against it. The talkies are made by the same people, with the same aims, and for the same public, as the movies. How can they possibly be other than what the movies have always been? Much talk is heard again of "intimate" theaters and of films made for special audiences, but though similar proposals were made in connection with the silent movies, and several "art" theaters were established in New York and elsewhere, they were compelled to depend almost exclusively upon for- eign films. Production is far too expensive to be undertaken without the prospect of a very large audience, and unfortu- nately the talkies, being even more costly than the silent films, are even less likely to be produced for any except the largest public. The very fact that they can be so easily transported and shown simultaneously in a hundred places turns out to be a curse which makes any production not in- tended for a hundred places almost unthinkable. Under the circumstances all discussion of the purely theoretical possibilities of the new medium is futile until some method is devised for rescuing it from those who in- vented and exploited it. Yet so many are contented with what it is that it is not easy to see how it can be made into what it well might be. "Hey, Skin-nay!" CLARE BRIGGS was just a grown-up small boy and, to an America made up of small boys of all ages, one of the most appealing cartoonists in our national history. We do not really take politics seriously; the town swimming-hole and the small boy's houn'-dog and the petti- nesses of home life and the sorrows of kelly pool and golf loom larger on the national horizon. Briggs was their artist laureate. And it was a pretty good small boy's America that Clare Briggs pictured. Perhaps it was not an entirely true, or a truly entire, America, for it had so little meanness or malice in it. One reason that Briggs could not do political cartoons was that politics almost requires a little meanness and malice, and Briggs did not have them in him. Perhaps the Reeds- burg, Wisconsin, in which he lived until he was nine, or the Dixon, Illinois, where he lived his next five years, or even the Lincoln, Nebraska, of Briggs's pre-Bryan years, had less meanness in them than the cities of today. At any rate, they provided Briggs with the material for his immortal series, "When a Feller Needs a Friend" and "The Days of Real Sport" ; and similar small towns and small-town grad- uates built up the vast newspaper audiences that looked for Briggs first, even before they turned to the sporting pages. It may be nonsense to say, as some do, that the comic strips are the authentic art of present-day America. But it is certainly true that they are an authentic expression of America today; when newspapers by the hundreds subscribe to a strip or a series it is because their canny editors know that the artist-author touches the hearts of his readers. The social historian could find much to ponder in Briggs and his success. His picture of the golf fan, all dressed up in plaid knickerbockers and tasseled stockings, who got up early to get a good start at the country club, and tried to be un- conscious of the stares and remarks of the husky laborers who crowded into the same street car, has material in it for an essay on America — its democracy and its standardization both. The infinite series "Mr. and Mrs." might provide material for a dozen volumes on Marriage in America, on Life in the Suburbs, on the American Home. And they would be all the richer material because Briggs almost never consciously preached a moral or tried to drive a lesson home. He just looked about him, amused, and recorded upon his pad the ridiculous pettinesses he saw. In his amusement there was always a certain zestful sympathy. "The Male Quartette," absurd as it was, was a dramatization of Briggs's own life. He adored singing, and had a marvelous repertory, not all recorded in print. He drew kelly-pool pictures when he was playing kelly pool for enthusiastic hours every day; he drew golf cartoons after he turned to golf. One large reason for his success was that perpetual fountain of small-boy enthusiasm for life that was his. It was never forced; it welled up in the man; and it stamped his brand of humor. Not in all Briggs's work can one find the cheap snicker which so often makes the comic strip a synonym for vulgarity. We shall miss him ; he was the great comic artist of small-town America, and the machine age has not yet produced his peer.

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January 15, 1930] The Nation 63 It Seems to Heywood Broun THERE is nothing essentially childish in communism. Individuals of high intelligence have been the adher- ents of its cause. Grant the original premises on which this economic philosophy is based, and the rest follows logically enough. Nor is there any sound reason why Ameri- can communities should grow excited and pass all sorts of silly and savage laws to check communism. To be sure, the Communist frankly admits his desire to overthrow the exist- ing governmental and economic structure by force, but what of that? Nobody can legislate the right of revolution out of existence. When your revolutionist is strong enough to effect his coup he will hardly be restrained because of some statute in a book. And when he isn't strong enough why bother with him? I shall be told by some that if no check is put upon Communist propagandists the cause may gain sufficient con- verts to become a realistic menace in this country. People who say this have not heard Communist speeches. But though the party has been cursed with many dreadfully dull leaders it has not lacked men and women of dignity and sin- cerity. Accordingly, I wonder just what they have been doing during several recent Communist jamborees. I am no red baiter but I feel that the Communists themselves should purge their ranks of shrill and trivial recruits. It has always been my contention that the left wing's reliance on force made it an inevitable and natural ally of American militarism. All who put their trust in guns and bullets are brothers under the skin. Striking proof of this was furnished just the other day in Washington when twenty-eight boys and girls calling themselves members of the Young Communist Party staged a hostile demonstration in front of the Mexican Embassy. Among the banners which they carried was one inscribed "Down with Ortiz Rubio, President-elect of Mexico." And, curiously enough, some- one else in that same procession carried a placard with the slogan, "Down with American imperialism." Here, surely, there was some lack of team work because these rattle-headed radicals were distinctly playing the game of American jingoes. Patrioteers who declare that the stars and stripes should float over every foot of territory from the Rio Grande to the Panama Canal could well afford to hire such muddle-minded revolutionists to demonstrate in the same manner every afternoon. Only by vigilance can peace with Mexico be preserved. Many powerful public leaders are patiently waiting for some incident sufficient to raise a conflagration which will permit them to sweep the American public into a receptive mood for a Mexican invasion. And if war came and our forces penetrated deeply enough into Mexican territory you may depend upon it that the United States would be hopelessly embarked upon a great and tragic imperialistic venture. Isn't it enough that we already have a Haiti on our conscience? To be sure, the young Communists did carry a banner in which they attempted to explain their demonstration upon the grounds of class consciousness. "Ortiz Rubio is the mur- derer of workers and peasants in Mexico" was the slogan which they displayed. Waiving any argument as to the jus- tice of this assertion, I might point out to the adolescent Communists that precisely the same thing was charged by our jingoes against Huerta when the disgraceful Vera Cruz adventure was launched by Woodrow Wilson. A general conflict wTas averted at that time only by a narrow squeak and it became evident as soon as our forces landed that in the face of foreign invasion left- and right-wing Mexicans immediately came together to make cause against the alien. It would be utterly ironic if some such demonstration against the ambassador of a friendly nation as the chuckle-headed Communists launched in Washington should become the ex- citing incident of an imperialistic war. And such a possi- bility is not utterly fantastic. Riots against the representa- tives of foreign governments have always been grave symp- toms of impending conflict. Excited nationals are very fond of venting their patriotism upon some isolated group of aliens. If there had been a scuffle and some one attached to the legation had been hurt the consequences might have been serious indeed. Out of just such thoughtless escapades arise questions of national honor which press peace treaties to the breaking-point. I do not make the charge that this particular set of reds was actually inspired by native jingoes. Just for the mere devilment of it they played the game of one of the most dangerous factions which exists in America. And already they have succeeded in adding some little fuel to the woodpile of misunderstanding and distrust which looms up between the United States and Mexico. No red flag belonged in this procession but the saffron banner of jingoistic, yellow- journalism. Less reprehensible but just as silly are many other Com- munist college pranks. I think it is ridiculous for a nation to believe that it can legislate the right of revolution out of existence, but if you strike at a king you must kill him. I wonder just what the Young Communists believe is gained by various wrist-slapping tactics. How is the Utopia of which they dream advanced by a single day when left-wing hecklers succeed in breaking up a Socialist meeting? Can't the Communists leave this to the American Legion? I'm afraid that the average American Communist sees this revo- lution, so freely prated of, as a sort of second-act curtain in a musical comedy with red sashes and barricades. With no particular good-will I give the American Com- munist Party a little good advice. It has made the fatal error of becoming comic, and most of the opposition against repressive red-baiting laws comes from men and women who feel that it is silly to level blunderbusses at butterflies. Here and there, as in Gastonia, Communist organizers have done hard, dangerous, and necessary missionary work. But for the most part American communism is out of Greenwich Village by Gordon Gin. The movement has little chance to grow because it has become just about as exclusive as the Union Club. For instance, the latest test for membership in the militant proletariat is exceedingly hard to pass. It may even limit the party to a total of one. As I understand the latest by-law of the party, as expounded in the New Masses, no one can be a good Communist unless he likes the plays of Michael Gold. Heywood Broun

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64 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3367 My Brother's Peeper By GARDNER JACKSON Boston, January 2 THE methods of the New England Watch and Ward Society and, incidentally, the workings of that pecu- liar mechanism, the mind of the censor, have been suddenly thrust into the limelight. The glare of publicity has been revealing, if not complimentary. Felix, the Greek newsdealer who sold a copy of the American Mercury con- taining the story, Hatrack, a few years ago, was poor and without prestige. In the latest instance, the society was un- lucky enough to catch in one of its numerous traps a book- seller who had sufficient influence to enlist noted counsel, a scholarly clientele, and a press campaign in his defense. The Watch and Ward Society sent an agent some months ago to the Dunster House Bookshop in Cambridge to buy a copy of D. H. Lawrence's novel, "Lady Chatterly's Lover." The society knew that James A. DeLacey, the manager, had already sold five of the "obscene" books. The fact that three of the five had been sold to members of the Harvard faculty, one to "a prominent lawyer," and one to a book collector did not deter the society's directors. Tempta- tion must be removed wherever it exists. The agent, John Tait Slaymaker, experienced representative of the society, approached DeLacey and his clerk, Joseph Sullivan. He said his name was "John Tait." This was no error of dis- honesty but merely one of omission, according to Charles S. Bodwell, executive secretary of the society, who explained that Slaymaker's name had recently appeared in the news and "it would have been announcing himself an agent of the society to have used it in securing evidence." Slaymaker also said that he was an agent of the Automobile Legal Asso- ciation. DeLacey and Sullivan told Slaymaker that they did not keep Lawrence's book in stock and had none at hand. Slaymaker was persistent and persuasive, and suggested that there might be ways of getting one. He returned another day and chance produced a second-hand copy from a Har- vard student which DeLacey sold to him without profit. After trial in the District Court of East Cambridge be- fore Judge Arthur P. Stone, DeLacey was sentenced to pay a fine of $800 and spend four months in the House of Cor- rection ; Sullivan drew a $200 fine and two weeks in the House of Correction. The case was appealed to the Superior Court of Middlesex County. DeLacey waived jury trial and appeared before Judge Frederick W. Fosdick, with Dis- trict Attorney Robert T. Bushnell prosecuting. Judge Fos- dick found DeLacey guilty and sentenced him to pay a fine of $500 and spend one month in the House of Correction. The case of Sullivan, the clerk, was placed on file. DeLacey has appealed to the Supreme Court on technical exceptions. During the trial in the District Court Richard C. Evarts, well-known Harvard graduate, son of the Reverend Prescott Evarts, was subjected to a bitter tongue-lashing and was threatened with the charge of contempt of court by Judge Stone because he (Evarts) questioned the methods used by the Watch and Ward to procure the evidence. The sentence in the District Court aroused the Harvard elements of Boston and Cambridge to an even greater extent than the banning of "Strange Interlude." It was the com- mon tea-table and dinner talk in all Boston intellectual cir- cles. The Boston Herald, in a vigorous editorial, dissected the Watch and Ward Society and its methods, pointing out incidentally that a number of former agents of the society had been convicted of crime. The board of directors of the society struck back with a letter to the Herald charging un- fairness. It was signed by the Reverend Raymond Calkins, president, Godfrey L. Cabot, treasurer, Dr. Mark W. Rich- ardson, Sumner Clement, Grosvenor Calkins, and Bernard J. Rothwell, former president of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, directors. These gentlemen complained at the prominence given to the fact that the criminals referred to were once agents for the society. The editor of the Herald replied by again listing some of the former agents by name. "One of them, Joseph Farrell, a degenerate of the worst type, is now serving a thirty-year sentence." The campaign of the Herald and the Transcript whetted general as well as Harvard interest. (The Post alone upheld the censors' po- sition.) Sympathetic Harvard students (who form a large part of the Dunster House Bookshop's clientele) started a subscription fund to pay DeLacey's fine and help him along during his incarceration. When the case came up on appeal in the Superior Court, the courtroom was crowded. Mr. Evarts, more at home with pen than with tongue, had associated with him as de- fense counsel Herbert Parker, white-haired and elderly, former attorney general of the State. Mr. Parker elicited all the sordid details from Slaymaker of the Watch and Ward and his active superior, Mr. Bodwell. Then he pointed his patrician finger at the Watch and Warders and called them "depraved and perverted procurers . . . deceiv- ers .. . falsifiers." He was so vehement that the Herald subsequently felt called upon to justify his words. Meanwhile the prosecutor, ^)ist;nct Attorney Bushnell, young Harvard graduate who is ib(raly steaming ahead to higher political office on his record of convictions in Mid- dlesex County, found himself in a difficult position. To pre- serve his reputation as a "killer" — a name bestowed upon him by reporters — he must answer the immaculately fervent Mr. Parker. But if he convicted the favorite bookseller of Harvard intellectuals on charges of obscenity, what would his classmates, some of whom were among those same intel- lectuals, think of him? Mr. Bushnell was clever. He strad- dled the issue, stole part of the limelight from Mr. Parker, and received at the moment the uncritical praise of everyone concerned. He did this by attacking the Watch and Ward Society himself — the society which had induced him to prose- cute DeLacey. He pounded the jury rail and shouted: I want the public to understand that the district attor- ney does not indorse the Watch and Ward Society's policy or tactics. I serve warning here and now that as long as I am district attorney of this district and agents of this society go into a bookstore of good repute and induce and procure the commission of a crime, I will proceed against them for criminal conspiracy.

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January 15, 1930] The Nation 65 Bravely spoken, cried the Herald. Bravely spoken, echoed those who had been thrilled by his words in the courtroom and in print. But then one or two reflective minds detected Mr. Bushnell's trick. Why not proceed against the society for criminal conspiracy in this case? Certainly it was as good a test case as any conscientious district attorney, hold- ing the avowed sentiments of Mr. Bushnell, could possibly wish for. Judge Fosdick, in finding DeLacey guilty, joined the chorus against the Watch and Ward. "I do think," said Judge Fosdick, "that the way in which the defendant was induced to sell the book calls for every part of the condemna- tion that has been placed on it by counsel for either side. . . . The Court entertains no cordiality for the society." There was little or no discussion at the trial as to the meaning of obscenity and as to Lawrence's book in relation to that meaning. Defense counsel admitted that the book was obscene within the meaning of the Massachusetts statute. They did not object when the careering Mr. Bushnell labeled Lawrence "a filthy degenerate with a sewer brain." One wonders what these gentlemen of the bench and bar would say of Harvard faculty members and their wives who discuss the book as a serious attempt on the part of Lawrence to accomplish a significant and difficult task of writing. This faculty interest is hardly pornographic. The drive on the society has continued with increasing vigor. The Herald epitomized the castigation from counsel, court, and prosecution, printed the list of officers and direc- tors of the society, spoke of their prominence in the com- munity, and suggested that "it is impossible these reprehensi- ble methods have the indorsement of these gentlemen." The list includes, in addition to the names already mentioned: Bishop W. F. Anderson of the Methodist church, Rev. Daniel L. Marsh, president of Boston University, Rev. W. H. van Allen, Rev. Austin K. DeBlois, Rev. Endicott Pea- body, Joseph Lee, and Arthur McArthur, all vice-presidents ; Frank Chouteau Brown, Thomas Dudley Cabot, Francis J. Moors, Dr. David D. Scannell, and David Claghorn, direc- tors. The blue blood of old New England is well repre- sented in the list. An amusing interlude was the resignation of Professor Julian Coolidge of Harvard from the society's board because, according to first newspaper reports, the Harvard boys are boycotting the particular Harkness house of which he is to be head next year. He later denied this, insisting that his resignation was prompted by mere press of duties connected with the new Harvard housing plan. And he showed a long waiting list of applicants for his house. But the later resignation of Bishop William Lawrence of the Episcopal church from his vice-presidency of the society could not be laughed away or concealed by silence. All the newspapers headlined his defection and gave as the reason his disap- proval of the society's tactics. The bishop, however, has uttered not a word of denial or affirmation. In the face of this unprecedented attack some of the directors counter- attacked with a bitter arraignment of young Mr. Bushnell and DeLacey 's defenders. They held long meetings behind locked doors with "nothing to say" afterward. At one of these conferences a lengthy defense of the society's conduct was prepared for private distribution, over the signatures of Messrs. Calkins and Bodwell, to the 500 or more contribu- tors to the society. It was a pitiful plea. The society, it said, was "founded by such men as Edward Everett Hale and Phillips Brooks. Some of Boston's best citizens have been in its service. It has achieved an international reputation in its field. It is entitled to be treated with some respect." It attempted to justify the agent's tactics in the DeLacey case by insisting at length that detective methods are essential to uncover such evidence and that government detectives would get nowhere without using them. But the society's directors soon had another, volunteer defender. E. Tallmadge Root, executive secretary of the Massachusetts Federation of Churches, resented, as did many others, "the abuse being heaped upon" the Watch and Ward- ers. "One who scatters cholera germs," he declared, "is Jess of a menace to ..society than one who sells an impure book." The Herald replied that if Mr. Root is right, DeLacey ought to go to the electric chair. Mr. Root replied by saying that he advocated abolition of the death penalty, with quotations from Christ and St. Paul and with the assertion that the underlying question is: Is our civilization to be pagan or Christian? Meanwhile the booksellers, the Massachusetts Library Club, and a committee of prominent citizens have a well- organized campaign for their bill which changes the present law governing books primarily by substituting for the words, "containing obscene language," the words, "which considered as a whole is obscene." The Dunster Bookshop furor will sharpen the issue when it comes before the legislature just now convening. The bill, sponsored by Representative Henry Shattuck, treasurer of Harvard, has a fair chance of passing the Senate but probably not the House. Even if it is enacted, it seems to me that it will make little difference. The state of mind in administering a law often counts more than the law, and the Dunster House case shows the dilemma. The Reverend Raymond Calkins is a supporter of the Ameri- can Civil Liberties Union, Joseph Lee is a member of the advisory board and one of the chief bulwarks of the Civil Liberties £ommittee of Massachusetts, yet these two men are, respectively, president and vice-president of the Watch and Ward Society. With obscenity to be had in two-bit, four-bit, and six- bit lots at several theaters and burlesque shows, as well as in countless dirty magazines on the newsstands — in fact, wher- ever one hunts it — Mr. Calkins devotes the energy of his society to procuring a sale of Lawrence's book by deception. And there are plenty of legislators on Beacon Hill, and on many another legislative hill in America, who think he's right. It must be frightfully uncomfortable to be "an expert" in obscenity — Mr. Bodwell told an interviewer that it takes "an expert to find the dirt in 'The Well of Loneliness.' " For relief from contemplation of this anguish of the Watch and Warders one turns with joy to the censor bill written by Eliot H. Paul and filed recently on Beacon Hill by Senator Henry Parkman, Jr. The first section of that bill reads as follows: Any person acting as censor of either books, plays, pic- tures, music, «r dancing?*for the commonwealth or any county, city, or town there«, shall first pa^s'"a civil-service examination including the standard Binet intelligence test for mentality of eighteen years, general information and language test similar to those required tor employees of the Boston Public Library, and shall submit to the State de- partment of public health satisfactory evidence of normal sex experience.

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66 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3367 Lame-Duck Diplomats i By PAUL Y. ANDERSON Washington, January 4 F there was one concession that Herbert Hoover's critics were willing to make when he entered the White House, it was that he undoubtedly would seek to improve the quality of the country's foreign diplomatic service. He was no callow New England provincial, but a traveler who knew the world and its variegated politics, and was fully aware of the enormous disadvantages which the United States suf- fers from being officially represented abroad by men who speak but one language and speak it none too well. Having personally observed the ineptness or downright ignorance of these dressed-up bankers, brokers, pork packers, and publish- ers, it was natural to suppose that Mr. Hoover would re- place them with emissaries having some knowledge of the his- tory, language, policies, and problems of the respective coun- tries to which they were accredited. Exactly the reverse has happened. We may pass over his selection of that 200 per cent patrioteering poseur, Charles G. Dawes, for the London post, although on at least one occasion the State De- partment has been seriously embarrassed by "Hell-and- Maria's" plain incompetence in reporting the facts of the British government's position on naval limitation. But what occurred when it was necessary to fill the position of second importance, that of Ambassador to France? Senator Walter E. Edge of New Jersey, a typical Babbitt, distinguished from other Old Guardsmen by his incoherence and the fogginess of his mental processes, was facing a stiff if not entirely hopeless fight for reelection. What did it matter that upon the attitude of the French government might depend the suc- cess or failure of the arms conference to which Mr. Hoover was hopefully looking forward? Senator Edge had been a faithful party henchman, he was very wealthy (from news- paper advertising), and his young wife had strong social inclinations. So off he went to Paris — and a few days ago all Washington chuckled when press dispatches reported that the Ambassador "sees nothing discouraging" in the French attitude toward the London conference. The word "dis- couraging" probably might have been omitted without any loss of accuracy. ***** BUT worse was yet to come. A few days ago the capi- tal and the country were astounded by the announce- ment that Senator Sackett of Kentucky would be made Am- bassador to Germany. A report of this appointment had been current for days, but it was treated as a joke. An obscure back-bencher known only for his timid manner and his panicky straddling on nearly every question that had arisen during his five years in the Senate, Sackett had made no impression on legislation. He ranked well down among such senatorial nonentities as Keyes of New Hampshire, Shortridge of California, and Trammell of Florida. And yet there must have been some reason for designating him to represent the United States at a capital whose policies will furnish one of the principal answers to the problem of future peace in Europe. There was: the explanation lay in the political situation in Kentucky. The backbone of the Republican organization in that State consists of the moun- taineer vote of the Eastern counties. Its leader is Governor Flem Sampson, a Kentucky Heflin locally celebrated as "Flim-Flam Flem." To him and his gaunt cohorts the mil- lionaire Sackett has always been a "Louisville dude," whose frightened sponsorship of an alien exclusion amendment to the census bill was not sufficient to win their trust. They were all set to retire him this year in favor of Representative John M. Robsion, a fire-eating, fundamentalist statesman of their own tribe. Since Sackett had announced his candi- dacy, and since his millions plus command of the Louisville machine would enable him to put up a struggle that would disrupt the party and probably insure Democratic victory in this important border State, it seemed incumbent on the party leaders, especially such leaders as National Chairman Hus- ton and Senator George Moses, to do something. The an- swer to the problem presented by the prejudices of the Ken- tucky poor whites was found, of all places, in Berlin. Mr. Hoover is the first of our Presidents to save politicians from impending lame duckery by making them ambassadors. Another triumph for efficiency! ***** CHAIRMAN ALEXANDER LEGGE of the Farm Board continues to follow his own sweet will, and grower-owned and grower-controlled organizations for the marketing of agricultural products spring up in the West and South like gigantic mushrooms, although the grain trade has been quick to recognize the unmistakable and sinister odor of the toadstool. It begins to look as if the "pink-slip boys" really are through, unless Providence or some influence more powerful than Julius Barnes intervenes. Piteous cries issue from Minneapolis, Chicago, Duluth, and Kansas City ; paunchy gentlemen who contributed real money for the de- feat of Al Smith and the hated McNary-Haugen plan wear a look of betrayal, and George Akerson's gloom must be at- tributed to something more than the White House fire. Legge is not merely adamant, he is as bellicose as a badger, and the backward States are still guffawing over his blunt suggestion to President Butterworth that the United States Chamber of Commerce divest itself of economic theories that belonged to the horse-and-buggy era. At a press con- ference someone asked Chairman Legge what would become of all the "pink-slip boys" if he carried out his program of eliminating speculation. The Chairman replied that it was not one of his problems, but he chuckled grimly when some- one else remarked that they might have to go back to work. This rough diamond from Chicago impresses me as being just about the brightest gem in the Administration's crown. ***** THE writer is sometimes accused of commenting in this place with undue severity on the professional courage and standards of his colleagues. It is true that to see newspaper men abasing themselves before such characters as Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon, to see them present- ing Jim Watson, John Tilson, and Bert Snell as statesmen,

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Tanuary 15, 1930] The Nation 67 fills me with nausea. But it is often said in their defense that it is extremely difficult for a reporter to be any more honest than his newspaper. That is true. It requires no particular courage to write the truth for the Baltimore Sun, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, or the Scripps-Howard papers. Such newspapers as these expect it. But what would happen to the correspondent who tried to write the truth about "Coolidge economy" for the Boston Transcript, or about the Mellon tax refunds for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, or about the social lobby for the Washington Star? What would happen to any man who insisted on dishing up the bald truth about any Republican administration for such papers as the New York Herald Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat , the Chicago Tribune, or the Los Angeles Times? The Washington corps of correspon- dents has its inevitable percentage of sycophants, climbers, politicians, and lads with an eye on the main chance, and it has, sad to relate, a solemn bevy of "gallery statesmen" who have been duped into a bogus sense of being "part of the Government," and hence bound to conceal its blunders and knaveries. But on the whole they are ten times better men than the owners of their papers. I present herewith my own Honor Roll of Washington correspondents for 1929: John A. Kennedy and Edward L. Roddan, of Uni- versal Service, who dug up and printed the facts that led to public exposure of the Bingham-Eyanson tariff scandal. Paul R. Mallon and Raymond Clapper, of the United Press, who broke up secret executive sessions of the Senate on appointments, by publishing the secret roll call on the confirmation of ex-Senator Lenroot. Harold Brayman of the New York Evening Post, and Phelps H. Adams, of the New York Sun, who discov- ered that the suspension of cruiser construction indicated in a White House statement last July actually never was ordered and did not occur. M. Farmer Murphy, of the Baltimore Sun, who in- vestigated and wrote a remarkably illuminating series on con- ditions among the North Carolina mill workers, and capped it with a brilliantly ironical description of the reception by Senator Overman, first, of a party of sight-seeing plutocrats from that State, and immediately afterward, of a delegation of mill workers. Ruth Finney, of the Scripps-Howard papers, whose reporting of the Boulder Dam legislation and the ensuing chicaneries ought to be emulated by several dozen of her masculine colleagues. Marion L. Ramsay, of Universal Service, who de- clined to join in the chorus of ecstatic ohs and ahs when the eminent Owen D. Young appeared before the Senate Com- mittee on Interstate Commerce, and proceeded to report the devastating truth about the Radio Corporation's claims as they were revealed in the subsequent cross-examinations. Drew Pearson, of the Baltimore Sun, who has startled the bureaucrats and shocked the poll-parrots by his realistic reporting of the conduct of our foreign relations. Robert B. Smith, of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, who despite poor health and a paper that is too stupid and reactionary to appreciate him, continues to exemplify for all of us the finest qualities of the true reporter — an insatiable zest for getting the truth, an incorruptible mind, a contempt for sham, a fluent style, and an irrepressible sense of humor under difficulties. Ten Years of the League By FELIX MORLEY Geneva, December 3 THROUGHOUT the world plans are now being made for celebrating during January the tenth anni- versary of the launching of the League of Nations. There will be banquets and speeches from Nanking to Cape Town. Russia will not be able to ignore the occasion and the United States will dine it with just as much enthusiasm as if Washington were the capital of a member state. Al- most in spite of ourselves we are intrigued by the persistent vitality of an institution which President Harding years ago pronounced "dead." Only one sizable city is likely to pass over the anniversary as a matter of course. That city is Geneva. Sir Eric Drum- mond, the thoughtful, tactful Secretary-General of the League, has always made it a positive policy to decry League self-advertisement. The laying of the cornerstone of the permanent buildings last September was an occasion of super- Jeffersonian simplicity. And Sir Eric will have his way again in January. "What's ten years in the life of the League?" he asks, and then with a Scotch twinkle, "I agree that when we get around to the hundredth anniversary we shall be justified in putting on a bit of a show." The evolu- tion of the League has been so rapid that there is doubt as to the propriety of regarding the truly international institu- tion of 1930 as the same organ which the victors in the World War created at Paris in 1919. With the recession of the war and its problems into the background, the League is for the first time coming into its own. In the early days the greater part of its work was con- centrated on such subjects as boundary disputes, plebiscites, prisoner repatriation, fiscal reconstruction in Central Europe, and other problems which were a direct heritage of the hos- tilities. But of late years the League has more and more turned its attention to problems of peace, though they are often none the less controversial. It concerns itself today with such questions as multilateral customs agreements look- ing toward a less hampered international trade, improvement in international transport and communications, examination of production problems affecting the economies of all coun- tries, standardization of the purchasing power of gold, codi- fication of international law, regulation of the traffic in dan- gerous drugs, international supervision of politically back- ward areas through the mandate system, and many other matters affecting the welfare of the world community. One of the best reasons for believing that this League, and no other, has come to stay is the increasing extent to which non-European states are calling upon it for vital work. It was to Geneva, not to the Pan-American Union, that the

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68 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3367 Bolivian government turned recently when it decided to re- organize its public-health service. Side by side with the transformation in the character of the League's work a most interesting constitutional evolution has been in progress. Ten years is a short time to measure a development of this kind, but it is quite clear that changes have already come about which fundamentally alter the mechanism designed at Paris in 1919. The Secretariat is a much more expert, influential, and potent organ than anyone then thought it would be. Because its members are always on the job of organizing international cooperation they have developed not merely an international viewpoint, but, what is more significant, unsuspected powers and directive abilities which make it a strong force in international relations. Pari passu has come an increase of the authority of the Secretary-General. This international official, who holds a life appointment and is subject to a regular accounting at the triannual Council and annual Assembly sessions, may in the future be much more in the public eye than at present. Sir Eric Drummond, the first and present "S. G.," is a retiring individual who exercises the greatest caution in utilizing the large theoretical powers within his grasp. Will Drummond's eventual successor, who by the politics of the present situa- tion is likely to be a Frenchman, be equally diplomatic? It is a question of great importance, for the wrong kind of man in this potentially autocratic post could go far toward wrecking all the careful work of the past decade. Inciden- tally, the title of Secretary-General gives a very inaccurate idea of the large executive powers in the hands of that offi- cial. He would be much better described had the originally suggested title of chancellor been kept. We recall how much authority a medieval chancellor could acquire in the reign of a weak king. The League Council, composed of busy men with widely varying viewpoints on many problems, is, as a composite, the inevitably weak king to the chancellor of the League. The growing authority of the Secretariat illustrates one of the substantial difficulties in the present relationship be- tween the United States and the League. As everyone knows, official cooperation between Washington and Geneva has been steadily increasing, though the formality of keeping our legation at Berne as intermediary is still observed. We are now represented, either officially or quasi-officially, on a good half of the threescore international committees and commissions engaged under League auspices in studies of more than transient importance. But among the 700 mem- bers of the League Secretariat, the different sections of which serve as planning and strategy boards for the appropriate international commissions which meet at Geneva periodically, there are only a half-dozen Americans, and these with no official standing whatsoever. While the United States is generally in a position, then, to block League policies which it does not like, it is handicapped in initiating plans for in- ternational cooperative action which it favors. To take a concrete case, the American representative on the Economic Committee can there point out that it is useless to expect our cooperation in a world program for lowering tariffs on alumi- num, but he cannot tell that body in what specific respect it may expect American cooperation. Our present negative intimacy with the League seems to spring from the tendency of the Administration to associate itself ever more closely with all the technical work at Geneva, while Congress as a whole remains in the most profound ignorance of what the League is doing. The anomalous situation created is one which can scarcely continue indefinitely. Yet it is probably due partially to the almost surrepti- tious nature of American participation that the beginnings of a change of very great importance are now apparent in the League's technique. This change is coming in the theory of international administration, a theory which was really born with the various interallied control commissions which had to be set up to win the war. Before the war, as Sir Arthur Salter has pointed out, such international administration as existed had to be initi- ated through the clumsy and inexpert method of foreign- office collaboration. If some problem arose affecting the mu- tual agricultural interests of X, Y, and Z, it could be solved only by treaties laboriously concluded between X and Y, X and Z, and Y and Z, treaties in which the technical agri- cultural needs of all three countries were sure to be subordi- nated to diplomatic considerations. From the outset the League has tried to substitute a more scientific method, by bringing together on its various technical commissions men who could speak not merely for their governments, but more particularly for specialized interests with the care of which their governments are charged. Thus, officials from the ministries of agriculture of X, Y, and Z confer with col- leagues from a score of other countries in a League com- mission at Geneva. If the subject at issue is susceptible of settlement, this direct relationship between the appropriate government officials will point a way to much more fruitful collaboration than when contacts were limited to the foreign offices. International cooperation, at first carried on through the medium of a single government department in each coun- try— the state department or foreign office — has through the agency of the League developed into a whole network of contacts between most of the government departments of the participating nations. In the development of the science of politics this is obviously a step of great importance, and its perfection has been one of the most notable achievements of the League's first decade. Only the traditions of the past — the idea that the public are more interested in conversations between the French and German foreign ministers at Geneva than they are in the more basic negotiations between the French and German ministers of commerce and industry — have prevented the extent of the development from being generally realized. But even those Americans who have ap- preciated the possibilities of the new theory of international administration have found themselves baffled as to how the United States could best play its part therein. There is not merely the artificial obstacle caused by the fact that our de- partmental officials and experts cannot frequently be ap- pointed to membership on League commissions as long as we try to maintain the fiction that the organization is primarily a European affair. There is the deeper difficulty that both the tradition and the technique of American government are largely opposed to such an enforcement of bureaucratic power. The popularity of state socialism in Europe is some- thing alien to most American minds. And it has not escaped unnoticed that the original League technique was something which would develop international bureaucratic cooperation — superimpose a sort of interstate socialism upon the state socialism of the past.

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Tantiary 15, 1930] The Nation 69 Therefore, it was not only the least provocative way, but also the natural American way, to have most of our first appointments to League commissions those of private citi- zens, who acted, however, with tacit government approval. The American representative on the League Economic Com- mittee, for instance, is not a representative of the Depart- ment of Commerce, though most of his colleagues are officials of the analogous departments in their own governments. On the contrary, he is an active business man, a former presi- dent of the Merchants' Association of New York, an ideal spokesman for thousands of his fellows in large-scale com- mercial affairs. As is the case with Lucius Eastman, so also with Jeremiah Smith, American representative on the League's Financial Committee. Mr. Smith has no official connection with the Treasury Department, but he is for that reason none the less able to present the attitude of American finance on international problems. In other words, our active participants in League work are to a large extent functional rather than governmental spokesmen. And it is a matter of great interest to close students of the League that this policy, adopted quite nat- urally by the United States, is now being followed to an increasing extent by other countries. Along with their bureaucrats they are also sending leading technicians, indus- trialists, and financiers to speak as representative nationals on League commissions. This new stage is one which is coming the more naturally because the International Labor Office has always done its share of the League's work on a functional basis, employers and labor being represented sepa- rately from their governments. And while the trend is too recent to make it advisable to overemphasize the point, it requires no ardent imagination to realize that it may be one of great significance. But in any case, the gradual substi- tution of a basically syndicalist for a basically socialist tech- nique would make American cooperation with the League much easier. For we know that Mr. Babbitt would not hate the I.W.W. so much if Rotary and syndicalism did not have a common philosophical basis. The steadily increasing power of the Secretariat and the rapid development of administrative technique on the part of the international commissions which the Secretariat serves (and sometimes does much to direct) are vital changes of the League's first decade which have passed almost unnoticed in the public eye. Much more attention has been paid to the obvious changes in its parliamentary organs, the Council and the Assembly. And it is noticeable that while the technical commissions are developing the idea of functional represen- tation, both Council and Assembly are becoming accurately representative of the governments of the member states. The Council is today a much less dominant organ than was anticipated by those who framed the Covenant of the League during the peace conference. To mention only the most striking outward alteration, the Great Powers are no longer numerically supreme. The five permanent members, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Japan, are now outnumbered nearly two to one by the nine non-permanent members, three of which are elected by the Assembly every year for three-year terms. One effect of this change, among others, has been to make the Council much more nearly an executive cabinet for the Assembly than the upper legislative house to which the smaller body has sometimes been falsely compared. Actually, though not theoretically, the executive func- tions of the Council are shared in an undefinable degree with the heads of the Secretariat. These full-time servants of the League are frequently better informed on problems before the Council than are the busy national statesmen who control the latter. The Council, however, still maintains in latent form the powers attributed to it by the framers of the Covenant. It formally appoints, though the Secre- tariat may actually name, the personnel of the various inter- national commissions. The reports of these commissions must receive Council approval before they take the form of international conventions to be acted upon by the govern- ments of the world. And no development of the World Court or of other machinery to preserve peace is likely to rob the Council of its essential function as a tribune of first instance for the consideration of problems affecting peace. The Assembly, on the other hand, is steadily tending to increase its authority and to develop powers which few people in Paris in 1919 thought this "talking shop" would ever dream of assuming. Its growing importance is reflected in the character of the national delegations which compose it. At the First Assembly, for instance, only four European nations were represented by their foreign ministers, while at the Tenth Assembly, last September, only four European nations failed to send their foreign ministers. In the case of non-European countries, it is now the custom for the na- tional delegation to be headed by the dean of the diplomats accredited to Europe, though even lands distant from Geneva are beginning to send those responsible for foreign policy to the annual sessions, as Cuba and Panama did in 1929. The result of this concentration of authority is that the As- sembly is becoming a great world forum for public declara- tions of national policy. It is not merely the League pro- gram, but also a general picture of the current foreign policy of all the member states, which is adumbrated in the formal Assembly speeches each September. Less dramatic, but no less important, has been the de- velopment of the Assembly organization, which now func- tions with an almost too machine-like precision. With the development of this organization the Assembly has taken over from the Council the control of League finance and thereby established its right to be considered the most important of the League organs. At the last Assembly preliminary steps were taken toward giving this body a permanent organization which would be prepared to function during the eleven months of the year when the Assembly is not in formal ses- sion. It is the smaller nations, notably Norway, which have taken the lead in increasing the power of the Assembly. Yet it is only eleven years since Lord Robert Cecil observed with engaging frankness that in the work of the League "the smaller Powers will in any case not exercise any consider- able influence." The rapid organic development of the League — in itself probably a symptom of health and vitality — does not stop short with the central mechanism of Secretariat and commis- sions, Council and Assembly. The International Labor Of- fice, founded perhaps on too grandiose a scale because of the feeling that it would prove a counter-attraction to Bolshe- vism in the workers' minds, has now settled down as an im- portant, though secondary, technical and humanitarian arm of the League. The Permanent Court of International Jus- tice is closely linked with Geneva as the League's supreme

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70 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3367 tribunal. Before the International Bank is organized, pres- sure to bring it under the League aegis gets under way. Un- doubtedly, those who maintain that American membership in either court or labor office or bank would be a move to- ward membership in the League are correct in that conclusion. In short, evolution has brought about a League of Nations which is very different from that sketched out in Paris during those recent, yet very distant, days when the Allied representatives sought a compromise between the ideal of an organized world community and an organization which should serve to stereotype the war-time settlements. The old emphasis on the enforcement of peace has passed. The idea of a League army is a patent absurdity to anyone who knows of the direction in which the League is going. As the fog of suspicion passes away, Americans see a patient, tire- less, and unspectacular organization working to secure peace by the development of cooperative agencies for the mutual benefit of all. Successes in this line are not of the type to create newspaper headlines, but perhaps they are none the less vital for that. And more and more we see revealing indications that along with its daily grind the League is bringing a new outlook upon world politics. The Chinese representative at the last Assembly proclaimed with no open protest that the time is drawing near for that body to exer- cise its authority under Article XIX of the Covenant, which says: "The Assembly may from time to time advise the re- consideration by members of the League of treaties which have become inapplicable. . . ." Thus it is that here in Geneva a formal anniversary — even the tenth — is subordinate in interest to the limitless possibilities of the unfolding future. The League looks for- ward, not back, and leaves the dead past to bury its dead. Too much is being done, too much remains to be done, to linger at this early milestone on a road where the way ahead is just beginning to be clear. In the Driftway WILL science save us from war? Robert A. Milli- kan said it would in his presidential address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science the other day, but the Drifter thinks that in that particular the distinguished physicist was not on as firm ground as elsewhere in his remarks. He relaxed as a scien- tist to become a prophet, and although Dr. Millikan is not without honor in his own country, that honor has come to him for his science, not for his prophesying. The Drifter might hesitate to attack Dr. Millikan as a scientist, but prophecy is everybody's domain and one in which the Drifter finds himself especially at home because there is little responsibility attached to it — and practically no retri- bution. In fact, prophecies are usually forgotten unless they come true. Dr. Millikan is quoted as saying: In my judgment, war is now in process of being abolished, chiefly by this relentless advance of science, its most powerful enemy. It has existed in spite of religion, and in spite of philosophy, and in spite of social ethics, and in spite of the Golden Rule, since the days of the caveman . . . simply because it has had survival value. It will disappear like the dinosaur when, and only when, the conditions which have given it survival value have disappeared, and those conditions are disappearing now, primarily because of changes in the world situation being brought about by the growth of modern science. The Drifter can see nothing in the history of science, unfor- tunately, that justifies such a position. If Dr. Millikan is using the word science in its strict sense as knowledge of the physical world, then it is almost a truism that science has done nothing about war since time began except to make it more deadly. During the past century the physical sciences have advanced more than they did for a thousand years preceding. Yet the past hundred years, in which science has risen side by side with the capitalist system of industry, have seen a prodigious increase in the scope if not in the causes of war. Present economic tendencies are all away from competition among individuals or small groups and toward fights among great cartels or combinations, each backed by its respective government, the latter supported by a nationalistic patriotism which has largely displaced the old-time religions in its emotional and unreasoning character. ***** JUST previous to 1914 Norman Angell suggested the incompatibility of internationalized industry and war. It didn't turn out quite that way, and one surmises that advancing science will of itself be equally powerless to prevent war. We shall have, after all, to call upon philosophy, which Dr. Millikan — in the quoted statement — would seem to regard as impotent. In other words, the one probable cure for war is the adoption of cooperation in industry, individual and national, in place of the present insane, cut-throat competition, the essence of which is mutual extermination. Meanwhile war will continue to have its "survival value." Human beings will have to progress further toward reasonable and reasoning animals before they can banish the specter of war, no matter how much they possess of science. And here it is interesting to remark the ideas expressed before the American Philosophical Association by William Ernest Hocking of Harvard University the day after Dr. Millikan's address. Denying the popular notion that Americans are flexible — that is, real — thinkers, Profes- sor Hocking said: It is because we are dominantly a people of deeds that we are inclined to be a dogmatic nation, believing stiffly in eternal principles, final convictions, natural rights, an unchanging Constitution, and mechanical theologies. The great public work of the instrumental philosophy has been to limber up the ways of knowing of this people, to give the intellectually traditional, authority-making, hero-wor- shiping American the courage of his own experience. THE Drifter sees immense possibilities in modern philosophy and psychology for the direction and con- trol of the human mind, so that man irt a surprisingly short time may make astounding gains in rationalism. We are not impossibly at the beginning of a great mental age just as we are in the midst of a great material one. There lies the end of war rather than in science, which has never done anything but stand behind the ropes, fan the fighters when they flop in their corners, and push them out again with a fresher, more deadly punch in their fists. The Drifter

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January 15, 1930] The Nation 71 Correspondence New York Has Magistrates To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I should like to register my protest against the unde- served tongue-lashing given to young David Weiss by Magis- trate Sabbatino. When I read the case, I thought that the decision had been rendered in some small "hick" town. Imag- ine, therefore, my surprise and disgust when I read that the case had been decided in a court of enlightened New York. How is it possible for a magistrate completely to ignore the charge on which young Weiss was arraigned in order to challenge his political beliefs? New York, December 30 D. Halpern And There You Are! To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: In the Christmas Day edition of the Chicago Tribune was a news item to the effect that Cardinal Mundelein's chauf- feur-driven $14,000 limousine was stolen. (It was promptly recovered.) I may be mistaken, of course, but in my naive way I associate the ownership of such an expensive automobile with wealth — with great wealth even. Jesus admonished men that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Cardinal Mundelein evidently prefers his heaven on earth. In the same issue of the Chicago Tribune, several columns removed from the report of the theft of Cardinal Mundelein's limousine, are to be found glowing accounts of the felicity spread among Chicago's poor by the "Good Fellows." Thirty- three hundred of these "Good Fellows," recruited by the Chi- cago Tribune, made one day in the year pleasant for some 22,000 of the most indigent of the city's "have-nots." Which is very nice. But what about the other 364 days? I even make so bold as to hint that most, if not all, of these miserable poor would have been better off if they had never been born, and that they probably wouldn't have been if a plutocratically endowed church, in conjunction with the state, hadn't kept them in the dark about such matters as birth con- trol. Cardinal Mundelein, high representative of the Christ, is driven around in a $14,000 limousine. The Catholic church is uncompromisingly against birth control. And there you are. Chicago, December 25 Mandel Packard Two Monopolies To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: I have read with great interest an article in a recent issue of your periodical by Mr. Paul Anderson in which two monopolies are described, one being the radio trust and the other The Nation. The radio trust monopolizes the air and The Nation monopolizes intelligence about the air monopoly. I believe Mr. Anderson did suggest that occasionally he sent a brief item about the radio trust to his own paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Inadvertently I have been guilty of a feeble effort to inter- fere with your intelligence monopoly. I attended Senate com- mittee hearings on the radio trust, consulted Mr. Anderson, conferred with him, and actually wrote a few thousand words about the probe for the Raleigh, N. C, News and Observer. It did not occur to me that anybody had a monopoly on the reports. Imagine my surprise when I learned of your claim. If you feel that I am unduly intruding, I suggest that you get out an injunction. The radio trust would surely do so if I intruded into its exclusive patent field. Washington, January 1 John A. LIVINGSTONE Prejudice North and South To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The N. Y. U.-Georgia football game was played many weeks ago, but I read your comment on the Myers epi- sode, which occasions this letter, only quite recently. I think one can assume with confidence that you would like to see an end of Southern prejudice against the Negro. May I remind you what a relative thing tolerance is? The prejudiced Southerner is not alone in drawing the color line; he simply draws it at a different place from where his "unprejudiced" Northern brother draws it. The former balks at playing football with the Negro; the latter balks at having him marry into his own family. In France the degree of dif- ference would be thought small. Viewing race hatred as a social phenomenon flourishing inevitably in certain environments all over the world, with causes that can be as readily adduced as the causes for, say, goiter, scurvy, and pellagra, one is puzzled by the rancor with which you so insistently styled the youngsters on the Georgia football team "Southern gentlemen." Surely in an era as scien- tific as this one there are better expedients for fighting fire than fire itself. Albemarle, N. C, December 6 L. J. McGinty The "Lie-Detector" To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: The "lie-detector" used by the prosecuting attorney here is all that you say it is in the Driftway of December 11. But you evidently didn't get the last report. You will be glad to learn that when the "evidence" so obtained came before Judge Malcolm Douglas, he ruled against recognition of it and ordered the prosecutor to discontinue the use of the instrument, at which that gentleman was sorely aggrieved. The case is one that has aroused considerable feeling against the accused man, but despite that and despite the de- plorable apathy with which the public usually regards the ad- ministration of justice, the use of this modern instrument of torture has not added anything to the prestige of Mr. Colvin, the prosecutor. The local Hearst paper, the Post-Intelligencer, made much of the device and its use, in the sensational and un- scrupulous manner of certain newspapers of the day, but after several days of glaring headlines, numerous photographs, and reams of copy, the entire business suddenly collapsed. The "Oregon boot" which was mentioned in the account you read is the name formerly applied to a strap fastened to the ankle to which was attached a piece of iron shaped some- what like a pick. These were used on prisoners working in road gangs to encumber their movements. It hardly seems necessary to handicap a man who is safely behind prison walls, but our prosecutor's mind evidently is of a medieval cast. It is also possible that what is here spoken of as the "Oregon boot" is an entirely different contrivance from the one which was known by that name among migratory workers of the West ten or fifteen years ago. Seattle, December 16 Victoria Marshang

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Books and Drama These Humble People By EDA LOU WALTON Looking upon their mountains all day long Where shadows slipping downward like cooled lava Leave the white heart burning; Looking upon their mountains crumbling To ashes in the windy night, These humble people never lift their hands Palm-lit in prayer to sunlight, never carve Their granite to thin altars toward unpitying skies. Heaven will have its way, they know, Even with mountains, smelting them in sun, And shadows will run downward into valleys; Under some star these iron peaks will flow Like ribbons out across the pit of night, They know, and they have followed with their hands This sure decay, Have seen the flesh withering on the bough, And the tree ash; and will not pray Before their graven images. To mountains which endure beyond their sight They look, and pass their hands before their eyes And stare on darkness, hearing rivers run Under the stone, and wings beat down piled dust. Insight and Charm Lord Lansdowne : A Biography. By Lord Newton, P.C. The Macmillan Company. $8.50. LORD NEWTON'S charming biography of Lord Lans- downe is a joy to the casual reader no less than to the serious scholar. Any intelligent person will delight in the skill, the humor, and the sympathetic but independent attitude with which one British aristocrat has drawn the portrait of another great personality. The serious student of history and politics will admire Lord Newton's perfect acquaintance with the vast mass of documents now available on pre-war diplomacy, his self-restraint in quoting but sparingly from it, and the ju- diciousness with which he has drawn fresh material from the Lansdowne papers to supplement it. Lord Lansdowne, who was born in 1845, was well quali- fied by inheritance for diplomacy, as his grandfather was prob- ably Talleyrand and not Count de Flahault. He entered office under Gladstone, but soon resigned because he profoundly dis- approved, as a great Irish landlord, of some of Gladstone's legislation for Ireland. Under a Conservative government, as Governor-General of Canada and Viceroy of India, his tact, industry, and good sense brought him success. He introduced no striking changes, but he avoided serious blunders, and that is saying much. Becoming Secretary of War in the Salisbury Cabinet of 1895, he had the ungrateful task of conducting the Boer War until Lord Salisbury's failing health and resignation brought him to the head of the Foreign Office in the autumn of 1900. The new Foreign Secretary had difficult furrows to plow in a flinty soil. The Germans were raging over the treatment of the Boers. The French were still sore over Fashoda. The Russians held to their traditional hostility. Lord Lansdowne was desirous of better relations with the Kaiser, but the ob- stacles in the way of an alliance were too great. Lord Newton is undoubtedly correct in his view that the failure of the al- liance negotiations with Germany was not altogether Ger- many's fault; but even if successful, "William II would have been almost intolerable as an ally." The failure of the Ger- man negotiations was followed by the alliance with Japan and the entente with France. The credit for the latter belongs mainly to Lansdowne and Paul Cambon. Edward VII's in- fluence, Lord Newton thinks, has been greatly exaggerated in this connection. Delcasse he depicts as secretive and unreliable, a man "whose stock of courage barely lasted long enough to achieve a successful result, and who imperiled the whole agreement by haggling over details in the final stages of the negotiations." Delcasse's claim in 1905 that Lansdowne had promised British armed support Lord Newton declares to have been the preposterous figment of the French minister's imagi- nation. But he also quotes a letter from Lord Sanderson that in 1905 "there was some loose talk by Lord Fisher and even more exalted persons as to a possible landing on the Schleswig coast." This seems to support the view which the present re- viewer has ventured to express that Sir John Fisher's reckless utterances may have been part of the basis of Delcasse's exag- gerated claim about British promises of support. Lord Lansdowne was never obsessed by the anti-German hysteria which afflicted some of his countrymen. He regretted that England did not cooperate at the outset in the building of the Bagdad Railway. He found it difficult to deal with such a theatrical, susceptible, and unstable person as the Kaiser, but was forced to admit that his own sovereign's attitude was em- barrassing; Edward VII wrote and talked about the Kaiser, he says, "in terms which make one's flesh creep, and the official papers which go to him, whenever they refer to H. I. M., come back with all sorts of annotations of a most incendiary char- acter." Lord Lansdowne's famous peace letter of November, 1917, which certainly contributed to the formulation of Wilson's Fourteen Points, brought down a storm of criticism on his old head. Geoffrey Dawson hesitated to accept it for the London Times, but Lord Burnham was glad to print it in the Daily Telegraph. It is often spoken of as though it originated in a sudden fit of pessimism ; Lord Newton shows that it was almost identical with a memorandum which Lansdowne laid before the Cabinet a year earlier, and that it expressed his long-felt con- viction that the Allies should come to a clear understanding as to reasonable terms of peace and the possibility of Germany's acceptance of them. Lord Newton frequently indulges in interesting and often humorous comments. He concludes his highly diverting account of the Persian Shah's struggle for the Garter, which King Edward at first refused to give him, with a sage observation on "how large a part decorations played, and presumably still play, in exalted circles" as valuable assets in diplomacy. In connec- tion with the decisive letter of August 2, 1914, pledging the support of the Conservatives to Sir Edward Grey, the author says the Germans were unlucky in making war when a Liberal government was in office in England, "for it is inconceivable that a Conservative government, under similar circumstances, could have received assurances of support from a united Liberal Party." Lansdowne's success as leader in such a peculiar body- as the House of Lords was owing to "his gift of suffering fools gladly." Not the least attractive feature of the volume are the photographs and cartoons picturing Lord Lansdowne in varied activities from a boy of thirteen to a sportsman of eighty land- ing a twenty-one pound fish. Sidney B. Fay

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January 15, 1930] The Nation 73 Russian Irony The Embezzlers. By Valentine Kataev. Translated from the Russian by L. Zarine. With an Introduction by Stephen Graham. The Dial Press. $2.50. THIS is an excellent and beautifully translated story of two very ordinary exemplars of the human species: two Soviet citizens — a henpecked, middle-aged accountant who in his reveries of "high life" imagines himself to be "that wonderful and unattainable Count Guido . . . who . . . leaped on his charger . . . etc. . . ." and an impressionable, hero- worshiping little cashier, his subordinate. Inadvertently, as a result of a few innocent drinks on top of a romantic dispo- sition, these most ordinary citizens launch upon a dizzy career of embezzlement and drunken debauchery. They begin in Mos- cow but, before realizing it, they find themselves, with the pay- roll in their pockets and a harlot by their side, en route for Leningrad, the imagined El Dorado. Thereafter, through a phantasmagoria of trains, cabs, clubs, and doss-houses, in the company of prostitutes, ex-princesses, paupers, and peasants, our adventurers, while the money lasts, fatuously pursue a "vaguely imagined" but "never attained" ecstasy. Finally the moment comes when, their money gone, they are forced to pawn their overcoats and, beaten and despondent, make their way back to Moscow. The story ends with the sorry spectacle of two desolate knights errant marching to prison. In his introduction Stephen Graham praises this "very clever book . . . written in the vein of Gogol's 'Dead Souls' " as "more real in detail and color than any picture given us" of Soviet Russia, and as the cause of much "whole-hearted laughter." This praise brings to mind an episode famous in the annals of Russian letters. Once, the story goes, Gogol was reading to Pushkin chapters from "Dead Souls." At first the great poet laughed "whole-heartedly" at Gogol's immortal Chichikov and his roguish schemes. Gradually, however, as the reading progressed, and as the distressing gallery of graft- ing officials and savage serf-owners, the Sobakeviches, Pliush- kins, Manilovs, and Korobochkas passed before his eyes, the poet grew terribly silent and morose. At the end, utterly crushed, he muttered: "What a wretched, wretched place our Russia is!" One wonders what the poet's reaction would have been to "The Embezzlers," a work so similar in vein to "Dead Souls." On me, I confess, this novel has a strangely depressing effect. And this, I am certain, is not at all due to any outraged sense of civic virtue, or to any belief that the picture of Soviet Russia presented by Kataev is "more real in detail and color than any picture given us" of that country. On the contrary, the dire punishment of the peculators is enough to appease the most vindictive virtue, while the fact that "The Embezzlers" is a satire is reassuring evidence that it is not "more real" than many another picture given us of Soviet life. Clearly, a satire is never, strictly speaking, real; it is a caricature, a distortion; it emphasizes out of all proportion one feature, one aspect, one phase of a very complex reality. Indeed, there are numerous Russian books, many of them obtainable in English translation (Veresaiev's "Deadlock," Pilniak's "Naked Year." Babel's "Cavalry Sketches," Libedinsky's "A Week," Tolstoy's "Azure Cities," Gladkov's "Cement," Ognyov's "Diary of a Communist Schoolboy"), that would correct any such lopsided notion of Soviet Russia as one might form from reading the present satire. Moreover, the high literary quality of the story as well as the large measure of self-criticism contained in it is further striking proof of the great vitality of Russian letters, and of the generous latitude granted to Soviet writers by the Communist censor. Seen thus from a purely Russian point of view, Kataev's novel, despite the lurid light it throws on the "strange peculations prevalent in the offices of the Soviet trusts," is distinctly hope-inspiring. It is the universal, all-human implications of the book that are depressing. It is the realization that this story is as American or German or Chinese as it is Russian, and that the two unfortunate heroes, so utterly innocent of any wrong in- tentions, so pathetically frustrated in their delirious pursuit after a will-o'-the-wisp, are replicas of the vast majority of mankind, that is depressing. The story contains neither the purifying exaltation of tragedy nor the amusing relief of com- edy. What it does have is a dark, persistent, haunting, and in its cumulative effect utterly crushing overtone of irony — an irony which, rising as it does above any particular time or place, provokes anything but "whole-hearted" laughter. Joshua Kunitz An American Knight The Book of Arthur Gleason. My People. By Arthur Gleason. "A. G.": An Appreciation. By Helen Hayes Gleason. William Morrow and Company. $2.50. I FEEL as I lay down "The Book of Arthur Gleason" that it represents the man infinitely better than a complete, proportionate work all neated up about the edges. Seventy- five pages of his essays and private writings, varying between mere chips from his literary workshop to pages of astonishing beauty, completeness, and meaning; a hundred and fifty pages of scattered but vital reminiscence by Mrs. Gleason; the book has no conscious pattern. But it depicts him as no biography, novelized after the modern plan, could possibly do. It has not been necessary to prune episodes and incidents to fit a plot of action or character, to prove a thesis. Such a book might have created a fine picture; this conveys a thing of flesh and blood, a man. And what a man — above all, what an American! The book, I think, would have proved that to me even had I not known Arthur Gleason. We are not likely again to see in our time such a flowering of the American colonial breed. He had even the background. There was distinguished public service in his ancestry, including a signer of the Declaration; and almost typically he was a minister's son. He had the aristocratic mind, which sees and judges everything from the standpoint of taste and tolerance, along with thoroughly democratic instincts and beliefs. That combination, it seems to me, has marked all our great Americans of the old stock from Washington down. He abandoned early the dogmatic Puritanism in which he was reared but he kept the fine essence of Puritanism in the obligations which he laid upon his own soul — the Puritanism not of Praise- God Barebones and Cotton Mather, but of Milton and Emer- son. That old-American stock was a breed of poets, whether they expressed themselves in action like John Brown and Kit Carson, in daily speech like Lincoln, or on paper like Whitman. That streak infused not only those fine-cut sentences of the essays, but his daily life; as witness the tender fantasy of the Star which Mrs. Gleason records. Though in politics he saw the necessity of collective forces, he was personally an individualist almost to madness. He quit even the old Collier's, where he might have been happy if any- where in chains, because his spirit could not endure the time- clock. His faction in politics was mostly anti-Ally in the early stages of the late war. He saw for himself during the German advance into Belgium, and became convinced that he desired of this world could never come to fulfilment if Ger- many won. Being what he was, he could not draw without shooting, could not let others bear the burden of his beliefs.

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74 The Nation rVol. 130, No. 3367 So he tried, simply and quietly, to enlist in the British army. Refused, he became heart and soul of a free-lance "ambulance outfit" in Flanders, braving the concentrated German shell-fire to save the lives of the wounded. In this service he was not the knight without fear and reproach; he has confessed that himself. Better, he was the knight with fear and without reproach. He faced danger as any man of imagination must, and faced it im- perturbably nevertheless. He had a touch of that cosmic consciousness which has marked all our greater American mystics like Whitman, Thoreau, and Lincoln. Above all, he radiated kindness. I am not exaggerating my conviction when I call this quality of his Christ-like. Mrs. Gleason, in her simple, eloquent, delicately reserved narrative of her husband's life with her, cites a few instances; I could cite many more. When they met, he was keeping his nose to the grindstone putting a boy through college, helping a friend in difficulties, "carrying people." Though he needed money desperately at the time, he gave most of the re- ceipts from his war books to war charities. Miraculously, he finished the war a thousand dollars ahead of the game. Though the worldly-wise considered the investment very risky, he put the money into French bonds; he wanted to do his bit to help a people with whose sufferings he had suffered, and whom he admired. I think sometimes of those boys who died in his arms in Flanders. Their passing had better benediction than any priest could give. I had forgotten until I renewed acquaintance in these essays how well Gleason wrote, what a mastery he had of his working tools. It may be association with him, it may be inherent quality, but Mrs. Gleason's writing, in the major part of this book, has something of the same final and simple poetic quality as her husband's. In recommending it as a whole, I am obliged to fall back on an old Samuel Smiles phrase of my boyhood; it is "a good book to put into the hands of youth." For here, all expressed, is the finest model for American manhood and gentlemanhood that I have known in my time. Will Irwin Speculation A History of Financial Speculation. By R. H. Mottram. Little, Brown, and Company. $4. THIS volume has little significance for those who have par- ticipated in the recent campaign on the New York stock exchange. It contains no recipes for bulls or bears who seek rules for reducing losses or increasing gains by trading in securities. On the other hand, the student of history may, by close and attentive reading, find clues to the forces which have determined the development of the economic life of the world. Speculation is generously interpreted. It applies to all human activity which is directed to the acquisition of more than is needed for immediate consumptive wants, for the purpose of trading such acquisition for gain. According to Mr. Mottram, this activity is inherent in human nature, for his narrative opens with several pages describing the flint-mining industry of a neolithic tribe in England, as an illustration of primitive efforts to produce more than could be personally or directly used. Speculation is of immemorial antiquity. Speculation in brief is "dealing in fluctuating values." As long as there are fluc- tuating values, there will be speculation. But economic institu- tions are becoming more and more stabilized, and monopolies, in whose soil speculation thrives, are less and less potent. The leveling-up processes of democracy are gradually lessening in- equalities. Mr. Mottram's exposition is much broader than his title and concerns political and commercial movements as well as the narrower field of financial investments. Mr. Mottram traces the rise of financial speculation from ancient times through the development of banking and com- mercial institutions in Italy, Holland, and England down to the present time. Unfortunately the material is not well or- ganized. The reader jumps back and forth from one country to another — from England to France, to Germany, and oc- casionally to the United States, frequently seeking in vain for dates which will record his rapid progress. The author, for- merly a banker and more recently the recipient of the Haw- thornden prize for the "Spanish Farm" trilogy, has read widely, but only those who have a well-stocked background of historical knowledge can follow his comments and interpretation with utmost advantage. With this background, one will find the scholarly analysis illuminating and suggestive. Davis R. Dewey Hardly Worth While The Sound and the Fury. By William Faulkner. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $2.50. PROBABLY someone has already remarked that the per- fect enjoyment of great literature involves two factors. The reader should make an analysis of the methods em- ployed by the artist to produce a given effect; and at the same time he should experience a synthetic appreciation of that effect in its emotional totality. The analysis must be almost in- stantaneous, almost unconscious. Otherwise the reader may become enmeshed in a tangle of aesthetic judgments, and ex- perience difficulty in feeling the work of art as a whole. Here, perhaps, lies the problem of comprehending the present-day revolutionary novelist. Frequently the intelligent reader can grasp the newer literary anarchies only by an effort of analytical attention so strained that it fatigues and dulls his emotional perception. He is so occupied in being a detective that by the time he has to his own satisfaction clarified the artist's intentions and technique he is too worn out to feel any- thing further. This is why the Joycean method of discontinuity has been entirely successful only when applied to materials of Joycean proportions. For it is obvious that if the theme is sufficiently profound, the characters sufficiently extraordinary, the plot sufficiently powerful, the reader is bound to absorb some of all this despite the strain on his attention. But if, after an interval of puzzle-solving, it dawns upon him that the action and characters are minuscular, he is likely to throw the book away in irritation. The analysis has taken too long for the synthesis to be worth the trouble. This seems to me to be the case with "The Sound and the Fury," a novel by an extremely talented young writer deal- ing with the mental and physical disintegration of a Southern family. Mr. Faulkner's work has been magnificently praised by Evelyn Scott and other critics for whose opinions one must have respect. It is in all humility, therefore, that I record the feeling that the theme and the characters are trivial, unworthy of the enormous and complex craftsmanship expended on them. I do not see, for example, that Dilsey is more than a faithful old Negress; she is not, for me at least, "stoic as some im- memorial carving of heroism," nor does she "recover for us the spirit of tragedy which the patter of cynicism has often made seem lost." I admit that the idiocy of the thirty-three- year-old Benjy is admirably grasped by Mr. Faulkner, but one hundred pages of an imbecile's simplified sense perceptions and monosyllabic gibberings, no matter how accurately re- corded, are too much of a good thing. Similarly, Quentin and Jason are not sufficiently interesting, not large enough, in a symbolic sense, to make it worth while to follow painfully the ramifications of their minds and memories.

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Tanuary 15, 1930] The Nation 75 One has the feeling that Mr. Faulkner's experiments in the breaking-up of consciousness, in the abolition of chronology and psychological continuity, are both ingenious and sincere, but they are not absolutely necessary to his story. The fact that his material includes imbecility, incest, paranoia, and sadism does not mean that his tale is therefore complicated or obscure and in need of oblique and bizarre treatment. The relationships between his characters are a trifle unhealthy, one must admit, but must the prose in which they are described therefore be feverish? After one has penetrated the mad, echoing labyrinth of Mr. Faulkner's style one finds a rather banal Poe-esque plot, a set of degenerate whites whose disin- tegration is irritating rather than appalling, and two or three Negro characters who, if they were reproduced in straight prose, would appear as fairly conventional types. Sound and fury indeed. Signifying (the witticism is cheap, but inevitable) almost nothing. Clifton P. Fadiman Two English Poets Collected Poems (1914-1926). By Robert Graves. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. Poems: 1929. By Robert Graves. Hammersmith, London: The Seizin Press. 8s. 6d. Collected Poems. By D. H. Lawrence. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. Two volumes. $5. Pansies. Poems. By D. H. Lawrence. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. NEITHER Mr. Graves nor Mr. Lawrence has gained very much by collecting his poems. Both, indeed, may have lost, for at least one reader has decided, after going through a great deal here which disappointed him, that they were not quite the poets he had thought they were when their separate works survived only as memories. The cold test of print is too much for a pair who previously had every right to be considered among the most interesting poets in contemporary England. Mr. Graves, for instance, has for several years seemed to me the most noteworthy member of his generation. I remem- bered The Pier-Glass, "The General Elliott," The Gnat, Lost Love, The Dialecticians, In Procession, and other pieces of remarkable skill and originality. The difficulty now is in find- ing enough of those other pieces to make the whole achieve- ment of the man impressive. What I do find, outside of the titles I have mentioned, is an interminable series of forced and silly gaieties, labored antics in none too readable verse, and com- plicated controversies with contemporaries who do not matter. Doubtless I exaggerate; and I must not neglect to mention two poems at the end of the collection, Pure Death and The Cool Web, which seem to me incontestably subtle and fine. But the net effect is disappointment. I still think Mr. Graves more interesting than most of his generation, and of course it is much to have made so deep a mark with so few poems. It is merely a pity that they are so few; bulk after all has its value. Mr. Graves's new book, "Poems: 1929," takes him farther in the "metaphysical" direction indicated by Pure Death and The Cool Web. If anything it takes him too far, since he gets — as was perhaps inevitable — into excesses of ingenuity. The book is clever and searching, yet once again I feel that Mr. Graves is betrayed by the very intelligence that made him first interesting; there is always the danger that as he flies from sentiment, which he hates too bitterly, he will run into aridity. Mr. Graves is so worried lest he shall write bad — meaning for him conventional — poetry that he does indeed write bad poetry of a very special kind. I wish he could free himself from a sense that he is chosen to keep English poetry pure. Perhaps English poetry will take care of itself, and meanwhile these brilliant gifts of his might exhibit themselves with a becoming freedom. Mr. Lawrence was never a poet whom one could be con- cerned about in this way. He was windy, wordy, blustering, sprawling, and frequently absurd. I supposed that in spite of such qualities, or even because of them, the two volumes of his collected poems would be entertaining; the gusto of his preju- dices, I thought, would carry one through. It did not. The first of the two volumes, containing early pieces in rhyme, was positively dreary in its insistence upon the uniqueness and dark excellence of the author's personality; and the second volume, while much better than this, still waved a wilted greatness at the reader. Look! We Have Come Through is sometimes a noble autobiography in verse, and Birds, Beasts, and Flow- ers must long be remembered for its section on the love life (as a certain American humorist would put it) of the tortoise; yet in general the brooding done by Mr. Lawrence is hectic, and the shouting is horribly loud. "Pansies," which is Mr. Lawrence's English for "Pensees," shows him still hot on the trail of truth and still convinced that it is important for him to tell us how he feels about every- thing. It is a series of capricious utterances, most of them brief and many of them pointed with a luminous if half-mad irony. The volume is valuable as an anthology of his opinions, even when they are expressed, as they often are, without any poetry whatever. When poetry does creep in the note is grim or amusing, or both; as here: Elephants in the circus have aeons of weariness round their eyes. Yet they sit up and show vast bellies to the children. Mark Van Doren The Quaker and the Quantum Science and the Unseen World. By A. S. Eddington. The Macmillan Company. $1.50. EDDINGTON has three reputations and three streams of influence. He is an astronomer, both mathematical and ex- perimental, of first importance. He has influenced and won the undoubted respect of his professional colleagues. He is a gifted humanistic expounder of the new physics and astro- physics and of the general theory of relativity. He has won a large popular following. He is a man of religious feeling, mystical in character and specifically Quaker in persuasion. To a great many persons who for one reason or another wish to escape a "nightmare" reality such as nineteenth-century materialism seems to provide, he comes as a leading and kindly light. There is salvation, there is still belief. The new physics apparently makes place for something very like the old God. A careful examination of this small but revealing book indicates not the nature of the physical world, but the nature of the mind of Eddington when it touches religious matters. Lib- eral theologians have taken him up because they think here is the latest scientific support for the belief in the existence of God. Eddington himself expressly denies that it is his inten- tion to produce such proof or that he thinks science can do it: "It is probably true that the recent changes of scientific thought remove some of the obstacles to a reconciliation of religion with science; but this must be carefully distinguished from any proposal to base religion on scientific discovery. For my own part I am wholly opposed to such an attempt." Eddington's counsel toward religious faith derives indeed not so much from the new physics but from an old philosophy, a philosophy as old at least as Kant. Eddington wishes, to

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76 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3367 start with, to go back to consciousness. "Consciousness alone can determine the validity of its convictions." "There shines no light save its own light to show itself to itself. The world of science is a realm of symbols, a system of shadows. It is revealed to, it is indeed determined by, the nature of mind. The realm of values and significances is likewise a system of symbols, borrowed from the elements of consciousness. But the world of value must use as its symbols those personal ele- ments which the physical sciences must disregard." "We have to build the spiritual world out of symbols taken from our own personality, as we build the scientific world out of the symbols of the mathematician." To many minds this assumption of two "worlds" con- structed out of two sets of symbols will not seem so much the latest word from a scientist as the latest echo of Kant. This little book indeed is a classical example of the Kantian attempt to save science from chaos and religion from science. But it reveals more than it attempts to demonstrate, and its revela- tion is not so much of the objects of religious belief as the nature of religious experience. Eddington is an avowed Quaker, and the persistent appeal of that creedless sect lies largely in the atmosphere of mysticism, quiet, personal, and uncontroversial, which is the center and the circumference of its religious teaching and experience. There are not two worlds, one revealed by science, the other revealed by religion. The fact is Eddington has far from demonstrated that there are two worlds, one seen and the other unseen. He has simply given a renewed illustration of the fact that experience is wider than any set of intellectual structures which may be developed in its regulation and control. In this book he is not a scientist talking about the Unseen. He is a Quaker talking about a kind of experience, a sense of searching and a sense of light to which the formulas of quanta and of relativity are irrele- vant. His Quakerism and his science are as usual beautifully stated, with humor, lucidity, and color. But they are not logi- cally related to each other. The astronomer and the Friend meet here purely by accident. Irwin Edman A Prophet of Trees Tree Crops. By J. Russell Smith. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $4. J RUSSELL SMITH is a poet-geographer and a preacher, despite the fact that he was once professor of industry at Pennsylvania and is now professor of economic geog- raphy at Columbia. He loves the green hillsides of America; and he wants to rouse America to the menace of corn-fields and make it the promised land of what he calls tree corn, tree beans, and tree meat. "We Americans," he says, "are destroying soil by field wash faster than any people that ever lived — ancient or mod- ern, savage, civilized, or barbarian." Wheat and rye hold the soil; our tillage of corn, cotton, and tobacco is "the most effi- cient known way for destroying the farm that is not made of level land." And he fills his book with savage photographs of washed-out gullies in Georgia that were good cotton land a few decades ago, today "gone to economic Hades." Major Andre, famous traitor, he remarks, "was not going to destroy any land; he would merely have changed the law-makers from one group to another." So we need a new definition of patriot and traitor: Smith's traitor is a man who plows a hillside; his patriot plants tree crops and studies them. He calls for an Institute of Mountain Agriculture to study the great prob- lem of growing tree crops on hillsides, where the agricultural methods of the flat plain are an economic crime. A man with a mission is always either a joy or a bore. Russell Smith is an unmitigated joy; his enthusiasm is infec- tious; he leaves you yearning to plant an acre — at least — to black walnuts and hybrid chestnuts and persimmons, and to make acorn meal and acorn bread such as sustained the In- dians and John Muir. He wants the American farmer to learn that acorns and mulberries are cheaper hog food than is corn, that nut orchards are profitable, that honey locusts yield more sugar than sugar maples. And he wants scores of plant spe- cialists to set to work, doing the same kind of painstaking hybridizing and experimentation which has produced golden bantam corn and the Des Moines Table Queen sweet potato squash. In his mind's eye he sees the rocky hillsides of New England and the hungry slopes of the Appalachians repopulated, bearing tree crops comparable to those of the finest Sicilian chestnut mountains. I suspect that he is one of the major prophets of our day. Lewis S. Gannett Fiction Briefs Hudson River Bracketed. By Edith Wharton. D. Appleton and Company. $2.50. Mrs. Wharton, like all writers great and small, has her failures; "Hudson River Bracketed" is one of them. No one belittles an author's attempt to extend his scope, but Mid- Westerners have shown themselves so able to express their neighbors' frustrations that Mrs. Wharton's unsuccessful foray into their field adds nothing to her laurels. Her ambitious young genius from Illinois is only the husk of a character be- cause his creator, scorning to exaggerate his potentialities or to allow him to become melodramatic about himself, fails equally to plumb the depths of his character, to show the internal play between his dawning self-consciousness and the pathetic experi- ence of his career. As is to be expected, the description of the uninhabited house on the Hudson filled with the personality of the dead, the projection of the past into the present, the brief sketch of the Spears, are the best parts of the book — an observa- tion which forces the repetition that Mrs. Wharton is still the one fine novelist of that small but tenacious class of Americans with a social and cultural tradition. It's a Great War. By Mary Lee. Houghton Mifflin Com- pany. $3. This is the book which shared the American Legion prize for the best war novel. It is written by a woman who first served as a clerical worker with the army and later as a canteen worker with the "Y," and it records the frequently referred to but seldom explained Battle of Paris, and life in the rest camps behind the front and with the army of occupation. Miss Lee's keen eyes and ears did not miss much either good or bad, heroic or cowardly, fine or ridiculous, pure or foul that occurred around her behind the lines. In groups of unconnected words, phrases, and clauses she fires from her journalistic pen hundreds of varied scenes depicting the tell-tale truth about the general, the colonel, the captain, and the private. Besides giving evidence she draws three or four excellent character sketches, and sus- tains with breathless persistence the impression of the exciting abnormality of armed conflict. The Desert of Love. By Franqois Mauriac. Translated from the French by Samuel Putnam. Covici-Friede. $2.50. A father and son love the same woman; the father's affec- tion is undeclared because unreturned, the son's is misunderstood and repulsed. The parent stoically accepts an unhappy, embit- tered old age; the boy attempts to revenge his wounded vanity by inflicting pain on every other woman he meets throughout his life. As in all Mauriac's novels the scene is laid in the

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January 15, 1930] The Nation 77 w H A T is wrong with this picture? . . . Why is the man leaving the theatre? . . . Ah! The orchestra pit is empty . . . Perhaps the man is bored with factory-made music . . . Perhaps it has occurred to him that HE IS NOT GETTING HIS MONEYS WORTH . . . He used to hear Living Music and see a movie — all for one price of admission . . . Now he gets the movie story, with talk, AND CANNED MUSIC, which is cheaper . . . Can it be that Big Business has over-estimated the patience of Mr. Pro Bono Publico? . . . Can it be that old Bono is not so easy after all? . . . Is he weary of supporting an economy in which he 48?* RE AT yourself S^ to a sigh of relief. S*S> «£>*' Sign the ,'^ yfif coupon *'& ^V4' below. 'O^- ^ / gets no share . . . What, Mr. Reader, do you +'4 ^ J^ think about it O S&& *ri> / // ? / / ,-- / / / / / ^ >** ^ THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF MUSICIANS (Comprising 140,000 professional musicians in the United States and Canada) JOSEPH N. WEBER, President, 1440 Broadway, New York, N. Y. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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78 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3367 southwest of France in the region around Bordeaux, but like all his characters the doctor, Raymond, and Maria are pro- vincial only in the sense that they are creatures of a specialized environment in which their characteristics are more pronounced, more sharply developed, simplified, and intensified, and show more clearly than in a complex setting. The conflict arises not from the situation but from the action and reaction of tempera- ments dominated by relentless desires. Mauriac is a master of such impassioned people and of these strained, intimate dramas, and "The Desert of Love" is, like "Therese," a book for all who cherish fine writing. Chariot Wheels. By Sylvia Thompson. Little, Brown, and Company. $2.50. Sylvia Thompson's latest novel tells the story of Cressida Midge who, born into a conventional Victorian home, becomes interested in the new literary and political movements that are a part of her generation. Carried away by her admiration for him as a literary figure, she falls in love with and marries Lester Midge, a rising young radical editor-novelist. Midge has dealt with the various aspects of "modern love" and a "new freedom" in his novels and essays, but Cressida finds it difficult to adjust her life to his ideas when he puts them into practice. Part of the novel consists of an autobiographical sketch by their daughter who is of the post-war generation which her father describes as having a vitiated palate. "Chariot Wheels" is a thoroughly unimportant novel, but to those who like that kind of thing it may have a passing interest because of real or fancied resemblances which some of its characters bear to cer- tain figures in the English literary world. Doctor Fogg. By Norman Matson. The Macmillan Company. $2. Doctor Fogg is a. mechanical magician of the age of liter- ary sophistication. His radio experiments produce an astral creature who has all the qualities of a D. W. Griffith heroine, and he is also able to communicate with other solar bodies. When his experiments are announced, the newspapers trans- form his work into a Graf Zeppelin exploit; the island where he works becomes a show place, and governments and capi- talists bid for rights in Doctor Fogg's discoveries. Eventually Fogg destroys his creations and escapes to live in a comfortable cottage with his astral female. The book is better than sim- ilar works by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but it creaks with the workings of a correspondence-school plot formula. At best it is a rather dull book with several good wisecracks. Drama Portrait of an Egotist IN "Meteor" (Guild Theater) Mr. S. N. Behrman has drawn a dramatic portrait of extraordinary richness and originality. Even the casual observer cannot fail to be intrigued by the vivid personality of his central character, but I doubt if such a casual observer is very likely to realize what a difficult feat the author has achieved. It is easy to say that your hero is a genius and it is not especially difficult to make the other dramatis personae act as though he were, but it is a very different matter to convince your audience and that is exactly what Mr. Behrman does. The story which he has chosen to tell is not, in itself, very novel or very important. Indeed there is something artificial about this tale of his hero's rise to financial eminence — some- thing factitious which suggests that it was invented without LLOYD CABIN QUARTET The Luxury of Leisure LLOYD EXPRESS BERLIN STUTT6ART MUENCHEN DRESDEN To England, Ireland, France, Bremen The Gaiety of Speed ^BREMEN . u ... , . EUROPA Every Lloyd Liner Carries Tourist Third COLUMBUS To England, France, Bremen * World's fastest Liner •pi"' 57 Broadway New York, or your local agent I . . . From One You have the opportunity to rent Nation Reader vour house or apartment or sublet it, to Another or se^ '*' or rent vour farm for the summer, to more than 40,000 other Nation readers, through the classi- fied columns of The Nation. Nation Reader Rates: One Inch $6.16. Additional lines of 6 words, 62 cents each. THE NATION 20 Vesey St., N. Y. Fitzroy 9074 "Eat for Health" Health Food Store Appetizing and and Luncheonette Nourishing Meals of Freshest Unprocessed 45-n East 34th St. Food-Stuffs (Bet. Park & Madison Aves.) Served at our Health Foods Distributors Health Food Counter Phones: j Ash tigton 6926 land 6366 F res Delivery Servies Ask for Catalog Books on Health. Sex & Psychology ; Health Periodicals When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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January 15, 1930] The Nation 79 great enthusiasm and for no other reason than that a story of some sort was necessary. But this relative conventionality of plot is thrown into sharp relief by the vivid reality of its pro- tagonist. From the very moment when this consummate and yet ingratiating egotist appears upon the scene he seizes upon the imagination of the spectator and holds it by virtue of that very fascination which is supposed to reduce his companions to impotent wonder. We are not asked to understand him and we never do. For us as for those who share the play with him he remains an all but incredible mixture of vanity and power — a man to be laughed at and to be labeled with all the names which psychologists have invented to chastise the pride of those who think abnormally well of themselves. But his reality is as indubitable as his secret is dark, and though the last curtain leaves us still wondering how much of his success is due to genius and how much to a delusion so powerful that it hypno- tizes others as completely as it does its victim, the one thing we never doubt is the existence of the man whose portrait Mr. Behrman has so skilfully drawn. His vigor, his confidence, and his maniacal self-absorption are all there. So, too, are the touches of weakness and folly which make him human. Some- times we suspect, as his companions sometimes do, that he is merely naive, but our doubts are never so strong as his faith and that, perhaps, is the secret of his power. Some part of the credit for the brilliant effect must of course be given to Alfred Lunt, who plays the role, not only with great gusto but with a fine sense of its humorous overtones. Some part of it must also be accorded to Philip Moeller, who is said to have labored long over the production and to have intro- duced some important modifications into the spirit of the play- ing after the try-out in Boston. But the backbone of the char- acter is in the text of the author and he has, I think, succeeded because of the extent to which he has been willing (and able!) to let his hero speak for himself. Whenever Mr. Behrman succumbs to the temptation to explain or analyze he is relatively weak. Even the touch of mysticism seems to me a blemish and so do all the other efforts to get inside the character or to explain him in terms of normal human nature. We can know such a man only from the outside. He takes our breath away with the directness of his vanity; he dazzles us with his success in realizing his own conception of his powers; and it is in the rep- resentation of these things that Mr. Behrman excels. In one sense his character is too much for him just as he is too much for his companions, but the record of his words and deeds is too vivid to be forgotten. If "Meteor" be considered as a whole it is doubtless far from perfect, but I cannot, at least offhand, think of any character in American drama who is likely to remain longer in the imagination of the spectator. St. John Ervine's "The First Mrs. Fraser" (Playhouse) is as amusing as a comedy completely devoid of any kind of origi- nality can very well be. Take all the drawing-room pieces written since Pinero and Jones popularized the "Mrs." titles; cut them into strips; shake in a hat; draw out a sufficient number of fragments; paste them together; and you will have something very like the new play. Nevertheless the pasting has been smoothly done, the whole is well acted, and the result, accordingly, an amusing evening. "Death Takes a Holiday" (Ethel Barrymore Theater) aspires toward a macabre sort of poetry. The story of how Death took on human shape, fell in love with a beautiful girl, and carried her off to his own realm, is of dubious profundity, but the play has its moments of suspense and an element of grisly fascination. Of the new musical reviews "Top Speed" (Forty-sixth Street Theater) is the fastest and most amusing. Revivals in- clude "Babes in Toyland" at the Jolson and Walter Hamp- den's production of that ponderous old melodrama "Richelieu" (Hampden's Theater). Joseph Wood Krutch JUST OUT WALTHER RATHENAU HIS LIFE AND WORK Count Harry Kessler Henry Ford, interested in material ends only for the sake of spiritual regeneration — Wood- row Wilson, with a clear-headed and practical vision — that was Walther Rathenau, one of the first and greatest representatives of a new type of business man. He saved Germany from early defeat in the War — and was assassinated for his loyalty to the terms of the Versailles Treaty. "A remarkable biography of a re- markable man." — London Nation. ' $3.75 NATURE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE by Edmund Blunden. $1.25 THE PROVING OF PSYCHE Hugh I'Angon Faussett author of WILLIAM COWPER Probably $3.75 THE SENSE OF GLORY Herbert Read. Probable price $3.00 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 383 Madison Avenue, New York City THE NEW SCHOOL for Social Research Second Term: Jan. 13 — April 4 Among other courses: Problems in Abnormal Joseph Jastrow Psychology Twelve lectures — Tuesdays, 8:20 P.M. Behavior Problems in David M. Levy Children Twelve lectures — Wednesdays, 5:20 P.M. Psychoanalysis and Culture Fritz Wittels Twelve lectures — Thursdays, 8:20 P.M. beginning January 23 Dominant Ideals of H. M. Kallen Western Civilization Twelve lectures — Fridays, 8:20 P.M. beginning January H American Literature Gorham B. Munson 1920-30 Twelve lectures — Wednesdays, 8:20 P.M. Creative Attitude Ralph M. Pearson, Toward Life Thomas Munro, Lewis Mumford, H. A. Overstreet and others Twelve lectures — Wednesdays, 8:20 P.M. Fee for twelve lectures, $1~> 465 West 23rd Street New York City When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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80 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3367 D THEATRES □ □ D FILMS □ LEO BULGAKOV Theatre Associates, Inc. presents AT THE BOTTOM WALDORF by MAXIM GORKY New version by William L. Laurence POPULAR PRICES $2.50 to 76c Phone reservations accepted Circle 1407 THEATRE — 50th St., Bet. 6th & 7th Aves. Eve., 8:50 MATINEES Thursday and Saturday, 2:30 -WILLIAM HARRIS JR. PRESENTS- "THE FIRST PLAY OF THE SEASON WITH TEETH IN IT." ROBERT LITTELL, WORLD. CRIMINAL CODE By MARTIN FLAVIN NATIONAL THEATRE with ARTHUR BYRON 41st St., West of 7th Ave. Evenings 8:50 Matinees Wednesdays & Saturdays, 2 :30 The Actor-Manager; Inc., introduce DANCE REPERTORY THEATRE Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weldman, Tamlris Week of Joint and Individual Dance Programs Every Evg. Incl. Sun., Jan. 12 at 8:50. Mat. Sat. only at 2:30. MAIINE ELLIOTT'S Thea., W. 39th St. Ths Actor-Managers Inc. has the honor to present in her ORIGIN AL CHARACTER SKIT0HB8 (Including S new ones) RUTH DRAPER Every eve. including Sunday except Monday and Thursday nights, 8 :50. i~*f\ A/f IT Fl V Theatre 41»t. East of Broadway. Mats. Thurs. KjVJiVirjlJ X & Sat 2:30. VERY GOODS SEATS at $1.00 The Theatre Guild Presents METEOR By S. N. BEHRMAN f^M-mlltA THEA., 52nd St. W. of Broadway V»U11U Evgs. 8:50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:40 The Theatre Guild Presents RED RUST By KIRCHON & OUSPENSKY Mart;n R^L- THEA., 45th St. W. of 8th Ave. arilll DcCK Evgs. 8:40. Mats. Thurs & Sat. 2:40 ALAN PORTER (of London) on Individual Psychology: Its Sociological Aspects In a series of twelve lectures, beginning January 13th: Mondays, 8:20 to 9:50 P. M. Course $15.00 The New School for Social Research 465 West 23rd Street, New York City Mr. Porter comes to this country on the invitation of a group of Dr. Alfred Adler's students. Dr. Adler says of him: "/ <would not know a better man to spread the views of Individual Psychology in the field of sociology." Mr. Porter is a distinguished sociologist and literary critic. (Advertisement pnid for by Dr. Adler's students.) "Starting this Saturday, January 11th Tolstoy's RESURRECTION a powerful screen - version of the famous Russian classic. -AND ON THE SAME PROGRAM— ACTUAL!! AUTHENTIC!! "a DAY with TOLSTOY" an intimate film-record of his daily life made when Tolstoy was 80 years old ... on his estate at Yasnaia Poliana ... In Moscow . . . etc. — the only documentary film extant of a great, universal and legendary figure! — ALSO — Special Soviet news reel just arrived from MOSCOW showing vivid scenes of celebration of the 12th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution. FILM GUILD CINEMA New York's Unique Theatre — Direction: Symon Gould 52 West 8th Street, bet. 5th and 6th Avenues Continuous Daily Noon to Midnight Popular Prices Spring 5095-5090 Special Forenoon Prices — Weekdays 12 to 2 — 35c. Sat. and Sun., 12 to 2— 50c. LAST TWO DAYS — Thursday-Friday. Jan. 9-10 — "THE GOLEM" — famous drama of demonology — and POLA NEGRI in Carl Van Vechten's "A WOMAN OF THE WORLD" ("The Tattooed Countess"). MATINEES : GOOD SEATS, ALL PRICES, AT BOX OFFICE WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE ARLISS In 64 DISRAELI (A Vltaphone All-Talking Picture) 7» CENTRAL THEATRE Broadway and 47th St. Dally 8:45 — 8:46 Sunday S — 6 — 8:46 55TH STREET PLAYHOUSE Just east of 7th Ave — Popular prices Continuous from 1 until Midnight Commencing January 4th THE GREATEST HINDU SPECTACLE "THROW OF THE DICE" successor to "SHIRAZ" and "THE LIGHT OF ASIA," pro- duced by the same director with the same cast of Hindu stars. When writing to advertisers pleaee mention The Nation

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January 15, 1930] The Nation 81 WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See At the Bottom— Waldorf— 116 W. 50th St. Berkeley Square — Lyceum — E. 45th St. Bitter Sweet— Ziegfeld— 54th St. & 6th Ave. Broken Dishes — Ritz — 48th St., West of B'dway. Candlelight — Empire — B'dway & 40th St. Children of Darkness — Biltmore — W. 47th St. City Haul— Eltinge— 236 W. 42nd St. Criminal Code — National — W. 41st St. Dance Repertory Theater — Maxine Elliott — E. 39th St. Death Takes a Holiday — Barrymore Theater — 47th St., W. of B'dway. First Mrs. Fraser — Playhouse — E. 48th St. Journey's End— Miller— 124 W. 43rd St. June Moon — Broadhurst — W. 44th St. Marionette Theater — Garrick, W. 35th St. — Sat. mornings. Meteor— Guild— W. 52nd St. Playboy of the Western World — Irish — 7th Ave. & Christopher St. Red Rust— Beck— 302 W. 45th St. Strictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. Sweet Adeline — Hammerstein — Broadway & 53rd St. The Little Show— Music Box— W. 45th St. Waterloo Bridge — Fulton— W. 46th St. Yiddish Art Theatre — Jew Suss — Broadway & 28th St. Films Disraeli — Central Theater — Broadway and 47th St. Resurrection — Film Guild — 52 W. 8th St. Throw of the Dice — 55th St. Playhouse — East of Seventh Ave. Concerts and Recitals Arthur Hackett — Guild — Sun. Eve., Jan. 12. Fifth Concert Judson Celebrity Series — Carnegie Hall — Wed. Eve., Jan. 22. Katherine Goodson — Carnegie Hall — Wed. Aft., Jan. 22 — Pianist. Josef Hofmann — Carnegie Hall — Sun. Aft., Jan. 12. Paul Haakon — Guild — Sun. Eve., Jan. 19 — Dance Recital. Olga Averino — Town Hall — Wed. Eve., Jan. 22 — Russian Soprano. Philharmonic Students' Concert — Carnegie — Sat. Eve., Jan. 18. Philharmonic Symphony — Carnegie — Thurs. Eve., Jan. 16, 23; Fri. Aft., Jan. 17, 24; Sun. Aft., Jan. 19 — Metropolitan Opera House — Jan. 12, 19. Philharmonic Symphony — Junior Orchestral Concert — Sat. Morn., Jan. 11, 25— Carnegie Hall. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st St., E. of Broadway. Society of Ancient Instruments — Town Hall — Sun. Aft., Jan. 12. Young People's Concert Hour — Town Hall — Sat. Aft., Jan. 25. Ingersoll Forum Jan. 12— DEBATE: "Spiritualism, Fact or Fake?" M. S. Kesner and T. Stamm vs. A. J. Goldsmith and K. Blanchett. Jan. 19 — Morris Goldberg: "Atheistic Materialism." LECTURES EXTRAORDINARY by KARL E. PAULI: Jan. 25— "The Sexual Origin of Religion." Jan. 26 — "Phallic Rites and Ceremonials." With charts PYTHIAN TEMPLE, 135 W. 70th Street, New York City Sundays, 8 P. M. Admission, 50 cents. List of lectures and debates for three months and book catalogue mailed free. Set of Atheist tracts, 10c. write: American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, Inc. 119 E. 14th St. New York City HELENA HILL WEED will lecture on HAITI at Temple Emanu-El 65th St. and 5th Ave. Saturday evening:, January 18th, at 8:15 under the auspices of American Women's Ort. Admission free LECTURES D DEBATE D A Momentous 3-Cornered DEBATE!!! COMMUNISM, or — SOCIALISM, or V Scott CAPITALISM « NEARING says Communism Noted Sociologist and Lecturer Fenner BROCKWAY says Socialism Brilliant Labor Member of British Parliament Prof. Edwin R. A. SELIGMAN says Capitalism Foremost Economist, Columbia University Chairmen, SAMUEL UNTERMYER & ROGER N. BALDWIN RESOLVED: That Capitalism offers more to the workers of the world than Socialism or Communism. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1930—8:30 P. M. MECCA TEMPLE— 133 W. 55th STREET Reserved Seats $1.00, $1.50, $1.75, $2.00 & $2.75 Reservations advisable now for best seat locations Obtainable by mail or in person at Civic Club, 18 E. 10th Street : Columbia University Bookstore ; Rand School Bookstore: 7 E. 15th Street, and New School Bookshop, 465 W. 23rd St. Also by mail or in person at office* of LEAGUE FOR PUBLIC DISCUSSION 11 W. 42nd St. Checkering 5788 or Spring 1716 TO OUT-OF-TOWNERS— This debate will be published in book form. Reserve your copy now by sending $1.00. RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 7 E. 15 St. Alg. 3094 NEW COURSES. NEW LECTURERS Winter term begins January 6. PHILOSOPHY OF EVERYDAY LIFE R. X. Boardman Mon AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT Louis Stanley Mon RECENT ECONOMIC CHANGES Marius Hansome Tnes CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE Aben Kandel Tues SOCIALIST POLITIC8 AND POLICIES Morris Hillquit Norman Thomas Harry W. Laidler Algernon Lee Tues BASIS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR Joseph M. Osman Tues BRITISH LABOR'S RISE TO POWER Mark Starr Wed PROGRESS IN THE ARTS Herman Epstein Anita Block Gilbert Seldes Lewis Mumford Douglas Haskell Wed. HISTORY OF INDIAN CIVILIZATION J. Vijaya-Tunga Wed. 8CIEXCE AND CIVILIZATION Dominic d'Eustachio Thurs. WORLD SOCIALISM TODAY David P. Berenberg Thurs SEMIXAR ON MARXIAN ECONOMICS Algernon Lee Thurs. Registration now open. Nominal fees — Single admission 50 cents. ., 8.30 p IU ., 7.00 p m ., 7.00 p m ., 7.00 p m ., 8.30 p. m ., 8.30 p. m. ., 8.30 p. m. ., 8.30 p. m. ., 7.00 p. m. , 8.30 p. m. ., 7.00 p. m. , 8.30 p. m When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section The Vatican and the Kremlin* By LOUIS FISCHER WHEN Pius XI ascended the throne in 1922 he was presented with the opportunity of achieving the greatest papal conquest in modern times: he could break up the Greek Catholic church and convert ninety million Eastern Orthodox Christians to Roman Catholicism. The separation of church from state in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution had weakened Greek orthodoxy eco- nomically and politically, and Communist campaigns against the church, specifically against the solidly and bitterly anti- Bolshevik Greek church which represented one of the chief organized opponents of the new regime, appeared to make Rome's task easier. Italian papers of the day published sar- castic cartoons showing the Holy See in the act of granting its blessing to Bolshevik efforts to combat Greek Catholicism. The Polish Roman Catholic clergy obstructed the Pope's policy in the realization that it would succeed only at their expense. A Bolshevik understanding with the Vatican was possible only if the Holy Father consented to strip the Roman church in Russia of its Polish influence and leadership, yet even then Moscow would never sign a con- cordat or agreement with the Pope. The Bolsheviks merely offered to submit to the Vatican's examination a circular of the Commissariat of Justice relating to the rights of the Catholic church in the Soviet Union. Father Edmund A. Walsh of Georgetown University, Washington, D. C, who was the Curia's official delegate to Moscow, directly told Chicherin that two tendencies existed at the Vatican: one led by the Pope which aimed at a com- promise with the Bolsheviks and the winning of the vast mul- titude of simple-minded followers; the other represented by Walsh himself whose program was to combat Bolshevism. The Bolsheviks noted this unique juxtaposition, but ex- pected the Holy Father to dominate. In 1922 and 1923 they had not yet been recognized by the major Powers. Friendly relations with the Vatican could bring them certain bene- fits in Catholic countries and with Catholic parties in other countries. Such advantages are not to be overlooked by the makers of a realistic foreign policy. Moreover, the triumph of Roman Catholicism in Russia would be won at the ex- pense of Greek Catholicism and of Polish prestige — results the Soviets were ready to greet and facilitate. Years would elapse before Roman Catholicism became a menace, and then Moscow could cope with it. In like manner, the Bol- sheviks encouraged reformistic schisms in the Greek Catholic church as well as independent sects. The purpose was to destroy the solid phalanx of Greek Catholicism. During the Genoa Conference in 1922 Chicherin found himself seated opposite the Archbishop of Genoa at a small dinner given by the King of Italy aboard the cruiser Dante. The Archbishop inquired about the condition of Catholics in Soviet Russia. Thereupon Chicherin elaborated on the advantages of separation of church from state. Separation, • This article is a chapter from a two-volume book on "The History of Soviet Foreign Affairs, " to be published in February, 1930, by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, New York. — Editor The Nation. the Bolsheviks believed, should arouse no serious objections among Roman Catholics. Independence made for greater virility. Official protection undermined moral fiber. Spain was an instance in point, Russians contended. Chicherin's remarks reflected this view. Archbishop Signori listened with rapt attention ; then he rose, clinked his wine-glass to Chicherin's, and said: "I thoroughly agree with you." The Archbishop's view was not that of the Vatican as a whole, yet important influences within the walls of the Curia felt that at least in Russia the new status might prove of practical benefit. Father Walsh constituted the chief obstacle to the suc- cessful consummation of the Pope's plan. The Bolsheviks found him "most objectionable, proud, and inclined to make a terrible scandal out of every little issue." At one time they even suspected him of contacts with the United States Steel Corporation. He had come to Russia in 1922 to ad- minister relief in Russia on behalf of world Catholic organi- zations, and to act as the Vatican's plenipotentiary. His implacable and undisguised enmity soon caused difficulties. First he demanded that his food shipments for the famine sufferers be accompanied by foreign monks — mostly Italian. This the Bolsheviks could not allow; they expected the starving to be fed bread without religion. Then he pro- posed a method of money transmittances from foreign coun- tries to Russia and from Russia abroad which the Bolsheviks interpreted as an effort to establish financial contacts between Roman Catholicism in the Soviet Union and the White emigres in Europe. The bitterest feud arose over the ques- tion of church property. The Bolsheviks, having national- ized all property in Russia, nationalized also the churches, but were willing to grant them to religious communities for use. This was an issue on which Roman Catholicism had fought unyieldingly through the ages. The church is sacred and remains sacred and in the hands of the faithful forever, is Rome's principle. Was not Thomas a Becket killed on this account? The stand of the Petrograd Catholics had be- come particularly unrelenting, and the Bolsheviks finally agreed on a formula, limited in time and to Petrograd, which settled the conflict. But Father Walsh, the Bolshe- viks declare, immediately informed the Vatican that this formula applied to all Russia, so that when Jordansky ar- rived in Rome to negotiate with Macchi-Venturi, Cardinal Ledochovski's assistant in the Jesuit order, he was told that the problem no longer existed. He likewise learned that modifications suggested by Walsh to a draft Bolshevik agree- ment had been submitted to Rome as accepted by Moscow. Here again, therefore, Father Macchi-Venturi appeared to be under the impression that all moot questions had been solved. The Jordansky-Venturi conferences that had given promise of a settlement accordingly proved abortive as a re- sult of the strategy of Walsh. In 1924 a change of attitude became noticeable in both camps. The Bolsheviks had obtained British, Italian, and French de jure recognition. Signs were not wanting that

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Tanuary 15, 1930] The Nation 83 they would patch up a peace with Patriarch Tikhon. The Vatican, on the other hand, began to orient itself on the White emigration in Europe. A group of prominent Russian noble families living in exile had adopted Roman Catholi- cism, and the Curia, remembering that the nobility in Russia and even the royal family had at various times in history- toyed with the idea of conversion to the Roman church — see, for instance, the rumor that Alexander I had accepted Catholicism before death, and the practice in certain Rus- sian circles of employing Catholic teachers — changed its tactics and commenced to place its hope on political de- velopments in Russia which would sweep away the Bolshe- viks. The Vatican now became indifferent to the Soviet Union, and prospects of an agreement grew more distant. Father Walsh was succeeded in 1924 by a German named Germann who, in June, was joined by Marquis Ray, an Italian. Although these representatives of the Vatican impressed the Bolsheviks with their superior tact and greater tolerance, the obstacles remained insurmountable. Germann and Ray left Moscow in September, 1925. The Bolsheviks, nevertheless, had not despaired of an understanding with Rome on practical problems. In 1925 Chicherin and Krestinsky handed Pacelli, the Papal Nuncio at Berlin, two documents — one outlining Soviet principles in Roman Catholic church matters, the other dealing con- cretely with the appointment of bishops, the transmission of Vatican funds to the Russian church, and education. In the matter of moneys and schools there was and is a feeling that if the Vatican respected Soviet laws — and nothing else could be expected — an accord would present no great difficul- ties. As to bishops, the Bolsheviks preferred a preliminary agreement on their part about the candidate, or they would . probably be satisfied should the Vatican consent in advance to appoint only Russians. Their objection was to Poles who might further the national interests of their country. The Russians likewise objected to the publication in Russia of papal bulls and to uncensored communication between the Russian hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church and Rome. The Vatican kept the Soviet documents for one year and then returned a reply on three of the twelve or more questions involved. In 1927 Rome intimated that the Soviet proposal did not satisfy. The negotiations were never resumed. Today the church in Russia has no definite legal status. The Vatican, in the absence of its own representative, has on numerous occasions availed itself of the friendly services of accredited diplomatic agents of foreign states at Moscow. During Wirth's term as German chancellor, Brockdorff-Rantzau was frequently burdened with what for him was the unwelcome task of intervening with Chicherin on behalf of the Vatican. More recently, Herbette, the late French ambassador, regarded himself as a sort of papal legate. In 1925 a man reputed to be a private French citizen named d'Herbigny came to Moscow under Herbette's pro- tection. D'Herbigny, in fact, was a Catholic bishop, and he immediately set to work ordaining a complete list of Russian bishops and reconstituting the Catholic clergy which had been disorganized by the new state of affairs in Russia. He did without Soviet consent and previous knowledge what Mos- cow would have allowed only on conditions carefully laid down after consultation with the Vatican. Not only the Bolsheviks were furious. Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau re- garded Herbette's step as an intolerable attempt to place the Roman Catholic church in Russia under the French aegis. Herbette's interest for the Vatican thus served to worsen Soviet relations with his own country. Papal envoys at Tokyo, Kovno, and other capitals have, on occasion, interceded with Soviet agents on behalf of Cath- olic priests under trial in Russia. This and similar issues might conceivably be regulated by an agreement between Moscow and the papacy. The Bolsheviks do not want the Vatican's de jure recognition nor would they recognize the Vatican. In this respect, the recent treaty between the Pope and Mussolini changes nothing. Yet the Soviet Government is prepared to consider the international character of the Roman Catholic church and to permit a relationship between its center and the Russian section. It seems incongruous that two institutions so different and distant as the Roman Catholic church and the Bolshevik state should have sought to bridge the gap that separated them. Yet such a desire moved both sides. Practical con- siderations ruled. Ideologically, of course, no common ground exists on which they could meet. The militant atheism of the Communists and their doctrine of revolution must be as abhorrent to the Vatican as the theology, highly developed private-property sense, and conservatism of the Roman Catholic church are to the Kremlin. The papal philosophy of temporal and clerical condominium confronts not only the diametrically opposed Bolshevik principle of dis- establishment but also the Soviet tendency to use the state in checking church power. Opportunist considerations may con- ceivably bring the realists in the Kremlin and the Vatican to arrive at a modus vivendi — although the likelihood continues to diminish — but no such development could disguise the fun- damental gulf and hostility that must divide the Pope of Rome from the ruling disciples of Karl Marx in Moscow. Contributors to This Issue Gardner Jackson is a Boston newspaper man, best known for his work in behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. Paul Y. Anderson is the national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Felix Morley is the Geneva representative of the League of Nations Association of the United States. Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at New York University. Sidney B. Fay is professor of European history at Smith College. Joshua Kunitz is author of "Russian Literature and the Jew." Will Irwin is author of "The House That Shadows Build." Davis R. Dewey is professor of economics and statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Clifton P. Fadiman is head of the editorial department of Simon and Schuster. Mark Van Doren is editor of "An Autobiography of America." Irwin Edman is assistant professor of philosophy at Columbia University. Lewis S. Gannett is a contributing editor of The Na- tion. Joseph Wood Krutch is dramatic editor of The Nation. Louis Fischer, Moscow correspondent of The Nation, will soon publish "The Soviet in World Affairs."

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84 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3367 □ FOR RENT □ FURNISHED ROOMS Manhattan Beach Hotel Manhattan Beach, N. Y. C. T IVE In a modern fireproof hotel by the seashore for leas than In the crowded city — »1.00 per week and up for one; $18.00 per week and up for two. All hotel aervlcea Included. Tenuis and handball courts. 87 minutes from Times Square (B.M.T. Brighton Beach Sta- tion). Phone Sheepshead 8000. 93 D STREET — 252 West — Room for business mother and board and care child (school age) during day. Schuyler 9838. LARGE beautiful furnished room in Woodside, Queens. 20 minutes from Times Square. Kitchen privileges, modern conveniences, avail- able to congenial woman (or couple) with lan- guage teacher. References. Telephone morn- ings between 11 and 12, Havemeyer 0707. APARTMENTS TO SHARE W1 DENTIST will sublet. 243 W. 70th. 2 unusu- ally large rooms, excellent kitchen ; dinette and bath. Part of larger apartment. $90. Busi- ness couple or similar preferred. Dr. Alstadt. Endicott 8288. flLL share my comfortable and convenient four-room apartment in Greenwich Vil- lage with intelligent woman. Box 2264, e/e The Nation. A YOUNG LADY wanted to share a beautiful 3-room apartment near Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Call Slocum 9662 at 8 A. M. for further information. FURNISHED front apartment, 2 rooms, bath, kitchenette, with congenial young woman of about 25-35. $36 per month. Inquire or write 2848 Broadway, Apt. 14, Near 110th St. RESORTS T5USTIC Beauty for your relaxation and rec- ^■*- reation, convenient for week ends. H4 hours from Grand Central. Skating, Skiing and tobogganing. HIL-BERT HOUSE, Lake Mahopac. N. Y. Hill Friedberg, Prop. Tel. Mahopac 363 THE LAKE VIEW SILVER & CAMBN Surpassing Accommodations Atmosphere of Refinement Excellent Cuisine Moderate Rates 59 Madison Are. Phone Lakewood 2S7 Lakewood - New Jersey DUSSIAN NOOK. Accommodation weekends ■"• or week. Congenial surroundings, homelike atmosphere. Skating, hiking. Very reasonable rates. Excellent cooking. 50 minutes from New York. M. Mardfin, Croton on Hudson, N. Y. Tel. Croton 604. ^ SUMMER CAMP ■\rOU can enjoy your next summer's vacation in a new camp, equipped with all most modern improvements, at a 25% reduction from the regular rates if you join the Mounts Mill Country Club now. Positions for Social Director, Physical Director, Head Cook, Dining Room Manager, Musician, etc., are still open. Address, A. Greenblatt, 215 E. 149th St.. Bronx, N. Y. □ EDUCATIONAL □ THE PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE PROGRAM— Jan. 10-18 AT COOPER UNION 8th Street and Astor Place at 8 o'clock. Admission Free. Friday, Jan. 10— DR. EVERETT DEAN MAR- TIN IRI The Psychology of Progress In What Sense are "Ideals" Social Forces? A lecture on the Nature of Public Opinion. |B| Ethics and Social Science Sunday, Jan. 12 — Dr. Albert E. Wiggam— "Genius." HI Natural Science Tuesday, Jan. 14 — Mr. William B. Curry — "The Development of the Science of Mechanics Since Newton." MUHLENBERG BRANCH LIBRARY 209 West 23rd St. at 8:30 o'clock. Monday, Jan. 13 — Dr. Mark Van Doren — The Autobiography of America — "Civil War and Reconstruction." Wednesday, Jan. 15 — Dr. Rexford Guy Tugwell — The Industrial Discipline — "The Processes of the Market." Thursday, Jan. 16 — Dr. E. G. Spaulding— The Development of Fundamental Ideas and Funda- mental Problems in Philosophy and Science. "Change, Development and Evolution." Saturday, Jan. 18. — Dr. Houston Peterson — |U| Types of Character — "Types of Character in Ifjl Moaern Fiction." FRENCH, SPANISH, ITALIAN, GERMAN, ENGLISH Conversational method. Native teachers. Private lessons, 75c, short course, 9 to 9 daily. 18th year. FISHER'S SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES 1264 Lexington Avenue, N. W. Cor. 86th Street UNIVERSAL INSTITUTE OF I ATVi*^ IT A I^U'C ITALIAN— GERMAN IjAiXVrlJAljtiS FRENCH— SPANISH Private lessons 76c (Daily 9-9). Native teachers. Simplified conversational method. 18 yean' ex- perience. Also neglected English education. 1205 Lexington Ave., Northeast Cor. 85th St. GERMAN LESSONS. German visitor, Colum- bia graduate student, experienced, gives lessons. Moderate rates. Write Box 2269, % The Nation. FRENCH INSTRUCTION FRENCH — modern instruction suited individual needs, or small group, by professional young native. Evenings. Rates fair — depending on kind and length lessons. Box 2268, % The Nation. SCHOOL NOAH'S ARK A year-round home and kindergarten school conducted on modern principles. 56 acres on Croton Lake. Varied activities. Children of all ages accommodated for weekends. Railroad Station : Harmon, N. Y. For in- formation communicate with Erika Feist, R.F.D. 15, Yorktown Heights, N. Y. Tele- phone Yorktown 46 F-3. GRAPHOLOGY /CHARACTER read from handwriting. Send dollar with specimen for analysis. Box 2267, % The Nation. HELP WANTED SOCIAL DIRECTOR wanted by Jewish Adult Camp of distinction. Only experienced men of sociable nature; versatile and competent to assume leadership in Camp activities need apply. Box 2270. <■/, The Natiim. D SHOPPERS1 CORNER D MABITZA — of 172 West 4th Street — is having an anniversary sale. Wonder- ful assortment of dresses, blouses, hats, Russian smocks, Russian pajamas, and shirts for men. Orders taken at sale prices. OPEN SHELF DEMOCRATIC YOUTH Published for young idealists who still be- lieve in democracy. Six months' trial sub- scription, 25c. Sample copy, 10c ROSCO BRONG, publisher, West Liberty, Ky. THAT BOOK YOU WANT I We hold 2,000,000 of the best books — new, second-hand, out- of-print, rare — all subjects. Also Sets of Authors. Catalogues free (25 issued). Outline require- ments and interests. Books sent on approval. Foyles, Charing Cross Rd., London, Eng. BOOK MANUSCRIPT Wanted — Let us publish your book. The best service at lowest cost. Meadob Publishing Co., 27 Beach St., Boston, Mass. DISCUSSIONS — FORUMS THE GROUP A Clearing House of Opinion meets at Auditorium — 150 West 85th St. Tuesday, January 14th, at 8:30 P. M. KONRAD BERCOVICI (Distinguished Author) will speak on "LIFE OF THE GYPSIES" Sunday afternoon at 4 P. M. (Jan. 19th) Informal Discussion Group SEYMOUR A. 8ELIG8ON will speak on "SINCLAIR LEWIS" (A Critic of America) Admission 50c Organized 1918 THE INTERNATIONAL CLUB 2 West 64th St. New York. Sunday, Jan. 12th, 4 :00 P. M. Discussion under leadership of RALPH SEWARD. Subject: "TEN TEAKS OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS." TEA. Admission to non- members 50 cents. Sunday, Jan. 19th, 4:00 P. M. AN HOUR OF MUSIC. Excellent program of vocal and instrumental music. TEA. Admission to non-members 50 cents. Please Write for Otir Complete Program. Student Forum W. E. Burghardt DuBois, editor of "The Crisis" HAITI — HAS AMERICAN OCCUPATION FAILED? Sunday, January 12, 3 P.M. Congregation Emanu-El 1 East 65 Street Discussion and Tea POSITIONS WANTED OBJECT: MATRIMONY No, this isn't a search for a mate. It's a declaration from a young man who's already found the lady but doesn't earn enough to start housekeeping. He has a good mind, a literate pen, a college education, experience, and sufficient adaptability to fit himself into any business which can use the services and mind of an energetic, intelligent young man. Can you use him? Write Box 2266, c/c The Nation. UNIVERSITY woman of mature years, pro- fessor Biology, successful executive, varied research, wishes responsible position — instruc- tion, executive, secretarial, research. Box 2271, % The Nation. When vriting to advertisers please mention The Nation

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22, 1930 No. 3368 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 85 EDITORIALS; The Issues at London 88 The Report on Law Enforcement 89 Air Monopoly Again 90 Our I mperial Burden IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 91 CLEMENCEAU THE DESTROYER. By Robert Dell 92 A RAILROAD VIEW OF CONSOLIDATION. By J. G. Lyne.... 94 UNEMPLOYMENT IN ENGLAND. By John A. Hobson 96 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 98 CORRESPONDENCE 98 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 99 BOOKS, FILMS, DRAMA: Parting. By Stanley J. Kunitz 100 Consolation or Control. By Henry Hazlitt 100 An American Augustus. By William Spence Robertson 101 Dream and Be Free. By Norah Meade 101 Victorian Biography. By Granville Hicks 102 The Navajo in Fiction. By Eda Lou Walton 102 Two Views of Germany. By Karl F. Geiser 103 Books in Brief 103 Drama: Magdalene. By Joseph Wood Krutch 106 Films: As You Were. By Alexander Bakshy 106 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Madame Sun Yat-aen Keeps Faith. By Randall Gould 109 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Edito* Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN- NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 34, Clifton Gardens, W. 9. London, England. THE SUPREME COURT of the United States seems determined to drive us willy-nilly into public owner- ship and operation of public utilities. In a long series of decisions it has been making us pay more and more dearly for the privilege of having utility services furnished by pri- vate companies instead of providing them ourselves. The latest case is that of the Baltimore street railways, decided on January 6. The court held that under existing condi- tions a return of 6.26 per cent on the present value of the property used by the company is so inadequate as to consti- tute confiscation, adding: "It is not certain that rates secur- ing a return of 7^2 or even 8 per cent on the value of the property would not be necessary to avoid confiscation." The company claimed rates yielding 7.44 per cent, asserting that even such rates were inadequate, and the court decided : "Upon the present record, we are of opinion that to enforce rates producing less than this would be confiscatory." This is not all. Asserting "the settled rule of this court that the rate base is present value" the court held that deprecia- tion also must be figured on present value and not on cost, thus raising even farther the rates necessary to avoid confis- cation. Finally, it declined on technical grounds to exclude from the value claimed as a basis for rate-making purposes easements in the streets valued at $5,000,000. In other words, the city, having allowed the corporation the use of the streets, must now pay it a 7.44 per cent return on the esti- mated value of the privilege thus given it. The whole spirit of the majority opinion is summed up in this observation : "The fundamental principle to be observed is that the prop- erty of a public utility, although devoted to the public service and impressed with a public interest, is still private property; and neither the corpus of that property nor the use thereof constitutionally can be taken for a compulsory price which falls below the measure of just compensation. One is con- fiscation no less than the other." THE DECISION brought vigorous dissents from Jus- tices Brandeis (Justice Holmes concurring) and Stone. In his dissenting opinion Justice Brandeis declared that the estimated present return of 6.26 per cent is in fact much larger if the rules which he deems applicable are fol- lowed ; that is, if the easements are excluded from the rate base, the return becomes 6.70 per cent, and if the deprecia- tion charge is computed according to ordinary business rules, instead of following the doctrine now laid down by the court, it rises to 7.78 per cent. He points out that fran- chises are not included in valuing plant for rate-making pur- poses and that to call the company's rights in the streets ease- ments makes them none the less franchises. On the basis of both history and logic he makes what seems to us an impreg- nable case in favor of basing the depreciation charge on cost and not on present value, as was done in reaching the ma- jority decision. The practical result of the rule laid down by the majority concerning depreciation is suggested in the last paragraph of Justice Stone's dissenting opinion : To say that the present price level is necessarily the true measure of future replacement cost is to substitute for a relevant fact, which I should have thought ought to have been established as are other facts, a rule of law which seems not to follow from Smyth v. Ames, and to be founded neither upon experience nor expert opinion and to be un- workable in practice. To take present value rather than prudent investment as the rate base is a principle likely in a period of falling prices to prove disastrous to the companies themselves, and every stu- dent recognizes that it makes effective control of rates impos- sible. The present decision goes farther than any preceding one in the application of this mistaken principle. It works to the present advantage of the companies, but, as the present case indicates, it makes the public pay handsomely. TO BE THE SON of a great father is not easy, but the same uncompromising honesty, courage, and genius for grueling hard work that made his father at once the most feared and the best loved man in Washington have marked the Senatorial career of Robert M. La Follette up to this time. His appointment to the powerful Committee on Finance, in the teeth of the bitter opposition of the Republi- can Old Guard, is an event well worthy of note. It means a powerful reinforcement to the liberal forces at this strategic point in the Senate battle line, and it will make it vastly more

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86 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3368 difficult for Senator Smoot and his cohorts to override opposi- tion in the committee and sacrifice the interests of the public at large to those of their big business friends, as they did in writing the tariff schedules now under fire on the floor of the Senate. Senator La Follette's appointment, further, is testi- mony to the growing power of that little group of honest and independent Progressives in the Senate whose sturdy battle tor popular rights against predatory privilege of various kinds has been the most heartening feature of American public life dur- ing the years of sodden Coolidge prosperity. BOSTON'S WATCH AND WARD Society has suf- fered three defections since its last encounter with "obscenity," which was described by Gardner Jackson in our issue of January 15. The society won its case against the Dunster House Bookshop, to be sure, but the fact that the bookdealer had been persuaded to obtain and sell the guilty book by one of the society's paid procurers was a little more than even Boston could endure. The judge who pre- sided, the attorney who prosecuted, and most of the Boston press attacked the society and its methods with a fierceness which, added to general public ridicule, penetrated the righteous armor of that snooper-dreadnought, the Watch and Ward. Three distinguished Bostonians, Professor Julian Coolidge, Bishop Lawrence, and Dr. David Scannell, have resigned from the board of directors. According to a report issued by the society on January 13, none of these resignations was the result of disapproval of the society's tactics in the Dunster House case— which, of course, makes them at this particular moment most inopportune. At any rate, the society seems to be perilously near to going on the rocks. We wish it the worst of luck. TWO PARTICULARLY odious assaults by Negroes on white women were recently committed in the city of Baltimore. Since Baltimore is a civilized community, civilized even on the Negro question, neither of the offenders was taken out and subjected to the loathsome caprices of a mob. Both will be dealt with swiftly and justly under the law which governs their offenses. The Baltimore Sun, in commenting editorially on the matter, quotes with approval the resolution drawn up by various Negro societies in the city, denouncing recent crimes committed by members of their race and promising their whole-hearted support in sup- pressing such crimes in the future. We recommend the Baltimore attitude on the race question to the sovereign State of Florida, which admits to four of the ten lynchings which took place last year. It is encouraging to note, in consider- ing the figures on lynching, that in twenty-seven cases lynch- ings were prevented by the prompt and courageous action of officers of the law, and that twenty-four of these were in Southern States. We can only hope that some of the twenty- four took place in Florida. THE SECOND HAGUE CONFERENCE on the Young plan evidently thought to clear the way for a consideration of the proposed international bank by first dis- posing of a number of less important matters. Some of these proved unexpectedly troublesome. The Germans, who hag- gled over various details until Mr. Snowden, British Chan- cellor of the Exchequer, warned them to stop objecting and either take the Young plan or go on under the Dawes plan, made a great point of the proposal that payments should be made on the fifteenth of the month instead of on the first, and did their best to escape from the possible imposition of sanctions in case of default. On this latter point they found a weighty argument in the recent treaty with the United States for the separate payment of war claims and the costs of the American army of occupation, the treaty saying noth- ing about sanctions and specifically recognizing German good faith ; but the other creditors were not ready to give up the right to compel payment if necessary. When the bank ques- tion was finally reached, Dr. Schacht, president of the Reichsbank, announced that his bank would not subscribe to stock in the proposed bank because of changes which had been made in the Young report, but his opposition, it was thought, would not prevent the establishment of the bank. LABOR CONTRACTS SHOULD BE BROKEN, according to Charles G. Wood, Commissioner of Con- ciliation in the United States Department of Labor, if the laborer who is party to the agreement turns out to be a Communist. The La Valle Shoe Company of New York City entered into an agreement with the Independent Shoe Workers Union, in April, 1929, under which it was agreed, among other things, that the company should employ only members of the union and that there should be no strike or lockout while the agreement lasted. In August Mr. Wood wrote to the company advising them that Fred B. Bieden- kapp, general manager of the union, was a Communist and "a very active enemy of our form of government, municipal, State, and federal," and stating that "it is desirable that em- ployers who voluntarily or involuntarily sign an agreement purporting to bind them to recognize this Communist organi- zation and give employment only to persons belonging to it withdraw forthwith from participating in it." Called into court as a witness in a case involving an application for an injunction against a strike which had occurred in the La Valle shop Wood admitted the authorship of the letter and asserted that his superiors knew of it and had never repudi- ated it. Mr. Justice Callahan, before whom the application was heard, dismissed the case with the remark that if the Wood letter "advised the plaintiff to break a solemn contract because of the political views of the other contracting party" the court "disagrees with that advice." All honor to the court for rebuking another display of government insolence. MAHATMA GANDHI drew up the resolution, passed on December 31 by the Indian National Congress in session at Lahore, which rejected the offer of a round-table conference to discuss dominion status and declared for com- plete independence from Great Britain, an end to be achieved if necessary by a program of civil disobedience and boycott of the English government of India. Less than two weeks later Gandhi made two statements, one printed in his maga- zine, Yourtff India, the other released by the North Ameri- can Newspaper Alliance. He said that "the independence resolution need frighten nobody. I had repeatedly declared that for me, as for all other congressmen, dominion status could mean only virtual independence." Moreover, he said that the Lahore resolution did not rule out the possibility of a conference with the British. "If the British government invites the congress to a conference to discuss and frame, not any scheme, but a scheme definitely for an independent gov-

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Tanuary 22, 1930] The Nation 87 ernment ... I take it the congress leaders will gladly re- spond." Gandhi stated also that in his opinion India was not ready for a campaign of civil disobedience. Such a cam- paign at this time would inevitably end in violence. In such an event Gandhi, according to his principles, would be com- pelled to withdraw his leadership and his withdrawal would certainly mean complete failure and more violence. Gandhi wants freedom for India, whether it is called dominion status or independence. He is willing to wait, and he will not refuse to consider new offers from Great Britain. AND NOW RUSSIA has gone communist. When the first period of military communism came to an end with the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, critics rightly enough saw economic necessity asserting itself and calling private trade again into existence; wrongly enough they proceeded accordingly to write the obituary of communism. It was less than three years before the Nep- men received their first check, and from that day to this the government has been drawing the rope tighter and tighter about their necks. As the economic situation has improved, the Communists have grown more communistic and they are driving swiftly forward with their five-year program, appar- ently confident that the people can and will stand the strain. Now come dispatches from the well-informed correspondent Walter Duranty, reporting the astound- ing decision of the Central Committee of the Com- munist Party that the grain-producing areas are to be com- pletely collectivized by the spring of 1932, instead of 20 per cent of them being collectivized by 1933, as originally con- templated in the five-year program. Mr. Duranty also re- ports the demand of the Moscow Committee of the party for the prompt "liquidation" of the private traders. The Communists are proceeding with their usual directness to put into effect the thoroughgoing communist policy recently announced by Stalin. Whether they are going to succeed or not is a question to which they themselves do not yet seem to have a confident answer. THE MANAGERS of the National Automobile Show report that sales at the show of most makes of cars were higher than last year, and that for a number of cars the average increase was slightly more than 10 per cent. Two months ago few persons either outside or inside of the automobile trade would have dared to predict such a result. If anything seemed certain then it was that the unparalleled stock-market collapse would bring a drastic reduction in all "luxury" buying. Yet the General Motors Corporation soon reported that its dealers had sold 90,871 cars to users in November, a decrease of only 539 cars from November of the year before. While December sales show a falling off, much of this decrease is attributed to the fact that numerous changes in car models have led to a brief postponement of buying. In considering the effect of the stock-market collapse on "luxury" sales, it must be kept in mind that the October- November crash came after an unprecedented advance in stock-market prices during the preceding months of 1929, and that there has already been a substantial recovery; at present the average level of prices is only about 10 per cent below the level at this time last year. This decline is not negligible, but neither is it necessarily a presage of national disaster! PITY THE CARNEGIE FOUNDATION for the Advancement of Teaching and the professors who are its uncertain beneficiaries! It will be recalled that the foun- dation, having in 1922 adopted rules which appeared to assure to professors in accepted institutions certain rates of pensions or retiring allowances, found in 1929 that it had failed to cut the coat according to the cloth and that the expected payments must be considerably reduced. The lat- est report of the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, just issued, tells how the corporation had to come to the aid of the foundation to the extent of providing nine annual grants of $600,000 each out of which professors at the age of seventy are to benefit to the extent of $500 a year. Incidentally, the report reveals that the corporation has granted over $20,800,000 since 1911 in aid of retiring allowances for professors. What the foundation and the cor- poration between them have been unable to do the accepted colleges and universities must now do for themselves, and the report notes that some forty-nine institutions, representing collectively more than 75 per cent of the pensionables, have either made the needed provision or are trying to devise ways and means of doing so. IT IS PLEASANT to welcome again to this country Mary Agnes Hamilton, British writer and lecturer, to whose name the magic letters "M.P." are now appended. An alternate British delegate to the Assembly of the League of Nations last year, Mrs. Hamilton made her debut in the House of Commons early in December. Her maiden speech, which the London Nation and Athenaeum declares "gave evidence of a clear and powerful intelligence," to be ap- plauded not merely by comparison with other maiden speeches "but by Front-Bench standards," was immediately followed by one by Mr. Runciman, a veteran of the House, who not only praised her for her achievement, but paid her the greater compliment of analyzing her argument and test- ing it step by step. Certainly the women in the British Parliament are winning more laurels than the corresponding group of members of the American House of Representa- tives. This is, however, in large part due to the opportuni- ties for training in debate offered by the House of Commons. UNQUESTIONABLY the greatest living American humorist is the make-up man of the New York Times. The other day Mr. Calvin Coolidge, of Northampton, Massachusetts, who, it will be recalled, was at one time President of the United States, but who has now gone into life insurance, addressed a few burning words to a gathering of insurance executives at St. Petersburg, Florida. "The advocates of defeat have often asserted that the only eco- nomic salvation law is communism," he declared, the habit of Presidential oratory apparently reasserting itself; "but the independent spirit of the American has constantly re- plied that the individual is sovereign, that private ownership of property is a sovereign right, and he is able to take care of his economic destiny." And the naughty make-up joker put into a box at the top of the next column but one: "Ninety-eight people out of every 100 are financially in- competent, Dr. S. S. Huebner, professor of Insurance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania, told Toronto underwriters in convention today." Poor team-work some- where among these insurance fellows!

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88 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3368 The Issues at London ON January 7, two days before the American dele- gation to the naval conference at London sailed from New York, President Hoover issued a state- ment in which he expressed the hope "that the people of our country will cooperate in the progress of the conference by patience, encouragement, and freedom from criticism." This unusual appeal followed a frank admission that "the diffi- culties of rinding a basis" for "actual reduction in naval burdens of the world" that will be "acceptable to five dif- ferent nations are great, but they are not insuperable," that "the technology and the complexities of the problem are such that we need hope for no immediate and quick re- sults," and that "to complete the conference in three or four months would be in itself a great accomplishment, and we should not expect any hurried conclusions." Mr. Hoover's appeal for patience, hopefulness, and an open mind on the part of the American public was doubtless called out by his recognition of the unexpectedly complicated situation which the conference will have to meet. The London conference will have before it two radically dif- ferent proposals for dealing with the question of reducing and limiting naval armaments. The original Anglo-American program of Mr. Hoover and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald con- templated a direct approach to the question through an agree- ment between those two Powers to establish a parity of cruiser strength by limiting both the total cruiser tonnage and the number of cruisers which each country should main- tain. A difference of opinion developed regarding the terms of this adjustment and a matter of three cruisers or 30,000 tons remains to be apportioned ; but it was understood that, in order to attain parity, Great Britain would be willing to reduce the number of its cruisers from about seventy, the present number, to fifty, and that the United States should be entitled to the same number even though, in view of its present disparity in cruiser strength, it should decide to build up to the limit of fifty and thereby make parity actual as well as theoretical. It very soon became apparent, even before France, Italy, and Japan were invited to take part in a five-Power con- ference at which the Anglo-American agreement should be discussed, that the question of naval reduction was not so simple. It was pointed out that naval strength does not depend upon cruisers alone but involves consideration of other types of vessels, especially battleships and submarines. Intimations that Great Britain and the United States would like to see the submarine abolished were met by statements that the other three Powers held the submarine to be essen- tial to their defense, while Japan injected a further element into the discussion by expressing informally a desire for a larger allotment of cruiser tonnage than the Washington conference had given it. It was learned that Mr. Mac- Donald and Mr. Hoover had also discussed the questions of freedom of the seas and the British naval bases in America, only to find that on these points they were not agreed. The net result of some weeks of criticism, explanation, and re- joinder was to leave the United States and Great Britain still committed to parity in cruisers, but to widen the scope of the conference so as to include other types of vessels. To this Anglo-American proposal France presently op- posed an entirely different thesis. Naval reduction or limita- tion, it was pointed out, however desirable in itself, is only one aspect of the general question of armaments, which includes armaments on land and in the air as well as on the sea. Any general agreement must take account of the special needs of each country for security; France, for example, with two seacoasts, an extensive land frontier, and a colonial empire second only to that of Great Britain, has need of an army as well as of a navy, and the nature of the one force is affected by the nature of the other. Moreover, since the League of Nations is bound by the Covenant to prepare a plan for general disarmament, France insisted that whatever decisions were reached at London ought to be regarded as provisional only, dependent for their validity upon their harmony with the League plan. In- stead of segregating the naval problems of the five Powers, the French thesis called for the treatment of naval reduc- tion in the light of a general problem whose solution had been, by international agreement, assigned to the League. These, in substance, are the opposing views which will confront the conference when it assembles. Out of the maze of affirmations, denials, qualifications, explanations, and arguments which the two proposals have engendered it is possible to distinguish a few points about which debate seems likely to center. Mr. Hoover wants an agreement that will bring about actual reduction of naval armaments and put an end to competitive building. Mr. MacDonald also wants the same practical outcome. Both Mr. Hoover and Mr. MacDonald appear to be ready to discuss the reduc- tion or limitation of all classes of naval vessels. France, on the other hand, unless it makes a complete change of front, may be expected to keep its own special needs, the League of Nations, and the general armament question clearly before the conference, and to join with Italy and Japan in defending the submarine. Japan has not abandoned its purpose to secure, if possible, a larger cruiser tonnage and Italy declines to accept a naval limita- tion inferior to that of France, but it is believed that Italy will support France in its proposal of a Mediterranean Locarno which would regulate the naval forces of those two Powers and Great Britain in the Mediterranean. The Department of State has already taken the position that a naval treaty, if one is made at London, cannot be con- sidered as provisional and that unless all five of the Powers agree there will be no treaty at all, but Secretary Stimson has also intimated that the United States has no intention of embarrassing the League. Mr. Hoover is right in emphasizing the supreme im- portance of the London conference. A failure to bring about some substantial measure of naval reduction and limitation at London would be nothing short of a calamity for the cause of world peace. The difficulties are great, but they are not insuperable. The hope of success, as Mr. Hoover has said, lies in "the importance and the gravity of the occasion" and the good-will with which the delegates approach their task.

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January 22, 1930] The Nation 89 The Report on Law Enforcement STAMPEDED by loud political cries in both Houses of Congress and by reproachful editorials in most of the newspapers of the country, Mr. Hoover's Commis- sion on Law Observance and Enforcement has issued a pre- liminary report of its findings to date. The commission was chosen and put to work because of a widespread notion that certain laws in the United States were not being enforced ; therefore the main contention of the present report — that certain laws in the United States are not being enforced — is not exactly news. The report as a whole contains little ex- cept promises; it is unfortunate that political pressure elicited them so far ahead of performance. The commission an- nounces division of the subject into eleven parts with a com- mittee for each ; it promises studies of the most careful and thoroughgoing kind on each part ; it has appointed for each committee a group of experts of irreproachable experience, judgment, and honorable intent. This report, when it is finally made, should be a report worth reading. There is, of course, the danger that it will be so long, so detailed, so exhaustive that nobody will read it except a few experts. But there is no reason for quarreling with a report merely because it is too long. There is need for just such an exhaustive study as the present one promises to be. Meanwhile life goes on. The law continues to be unenforced, the judicial enforcement machinery continues to be inadequate to enforce it. Law-enforcement officials con- tinue to be corruptible, prisoners continue to be ill-used in our courts and in our jails — and the "noble experiment" of prohibition continues, in its many and varied manifestations, to make us as a nation the subject for polite amusement to other nations of the earth. We believe — we dare to admit it even before we see the commission's report on the subject — that the relations between our police departments and our criminals are scandalous, that the third degree is a crying shame, that the congestion of our courts makes the orderly processes of justice impossible, that our penal institutions are relics of a more barbarous age than the present. But we are inclined to believe also that — in spite of the commission's warning that since frontier days we have always been a law- less people — if it were possible to get down to cases on the subject of "American lawlessness," "official lawlessness," and all the similar loose terms that have been flung about during the last few years, we should see one very significant thing: "American lawlessness," in its present manifestation, means that many thousands of American citizens refuse to obey one law; "official lawlessness" means that many hundreds of American officials neglect to enforce that law. It may be possible, if we spend money enough and build jails enough and can find a sufficient number of incorruptible officials, to enforce the prohibition laws. But we shall never even begin to enforce them until we have government officers, from the highest down, who are first of all willing to admit that the question of whether or not those laws can be enforced, and whether or not they will be enforced, are the major questions before the American people today. In view of the foregoing, it is pertinent to examine the findings of Mr. Hoover's commission on the subject of pro- hibition— one of the eleven sections into which it has divided its report. The first recommendation of the commission is to transfer the agencies for the enforcement of prohibition from the Treasury Department to the Department of Jus- tice. The work of investigation and prosecution for viola- tion of the prohibition statutes has nothing properly to do with the business of internal revenue or the granting of per- mits for the legal manufacture and sale of spirits. The second recommendation of the commission's report, for the codification of existing legislation on the subject of prohibi- tion, also seems eminently reasonable. So with the com- mission's third recommendation, provision for making so- called padlock injunctions more effective. A padlock does no good if the owner of the premises so treated can move next door, or can transfer the lease to his partner or his brother who immediately proceeds to operate a speakeasy and must be proceeded against in the same way as was the origi- nal offender. The fourth recommendation offers some com- plications. It is, in brief, for the definition by Congress of a class of minor infractions of the prohibition statutes which may be proceeded against without the necessity of an indict- ment by a grand jury, but may be heard before a United States Commissioner in the manner of an ordinary magis- trate's court. If the offender pleads guilty, the judge may sentence him on the spot — to not more than $500 fine or more than six months in jail; if he pleads not guilty, the judge may render judgment which may be appealed by the offender, who may then demand and receive a jury trial. This, of course, involves first the passage of certain legislation by Congress. But as Congress is in a melting mood just now with respect to enforcement of the prohibition laws, this may not present any difficulties. It involves also, however, granting to the district attorney the right to deter- mine whether a case comes under the class of minor infrac- tions or whether the offender should be subjected to indict- ment and jury trial. This is a rather large amount of dis- cretion in a very controversial issue. Moreover, it must be remembered that if the purpose of the proposal is to expedite justice in minor offenses, thus relieving the federal courts of the burden which prohibition has imposed upon them, any offender has the right to demand the full process of law in his case, and, more perplexing still, the most vigorous cham- pions of prohibition will hesitate to admit, for any purpose however laudable, that such a thing as a minor infraction exists. The whole tendency, of which the Jones law is an outstanding example, has been in the opposite direction. It is evident that some very lively debates will take place throughout the country as a result of the law-enforce- ment commission's report. But the report will do one very valuable thing, whatever the value of its various recommen- dations: it will focus the wandering attention of American politicians and Americans as a whole on the necessity for an immediate, disinterested, and whole-hearted attempt to en- force the prohibition law. Such an attempt has never been made. We have laughed at the law, we have wept over it, we have disregarded it, we have invoked it as the greatest blessing of mankind. Now let us enforce it — if we can.

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90 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3368 Air Monopoly Again THE omniscience of Owen D. Young, alas, has been seriously questioned by two of his associated gods of the big-business pantheon. In fact, that mocking Hermes, Newcomb Carlton, president of the Western Union Company, testifying before the Interstate Commerce Com- mittee of the Senate, goes so far as to say: "In respect to Mr. Young's views on international communications, with all respect, of course, I put them in the class with any advice he might be moved to give to nursing mothers." This verges perilously close on lese majeste, not to say Use dhinite. Both Mr. Carlton and Ellery W. Stone, president of the Kolster Radio Corporation and the Federal Telegraph Company, challenge sharply Mr. Young's reasons for want- ing a monopoly in the field of international communications. In our issue of December 25, in commenting on Mr. Young's testimony and approving his views on the advantages of unification as opposed to competition in the communica- tions industry, we pointed out that both he and General Harbord put forward nationalistic considerations as the basis of their appeal for monopoly in the international field. Mr. Young besought unification "in the national interest." The merger of British communications in intimate relations with the British government, it was suggested, was a serious menace to our companies and to us, and must be met by a union of American companies (under government control, of course). Now this is precisely the same kind of nonsense that American oil companies, at that time in sharp rivalry with the Royal Dutch-Shell, were putting forward in 1920. Mr. Carlton characterizes Mr. Young's presentation of the menace of the British communications merger as "one of the most fantastic bogies ever dressed up in my experience," and he goes on: "The British merger doesn't present the slightest menace to anyone. Right now the Radio Corpora- tion of America and the Western Union hold the British merger in the hollow of their hand." Replying to Mr. Carlton, General Harbord, who echoes Mr. Young's views, appeals to us "to maintain the present enviable position of our country in both radio and cables, and to aspire to their combined leadership against the world," and urges that we "must not cut the ground from under those who are fighting America's battles on the fron- tiers of world-wide communication." Frontiers of world- wide bunk! Mr. Young wants to sell the communications system of the Radio Corporation of America, valued by Mr. Stone at $15,000,000 at the outside, to the International Telephone and Telegraph Company for $97,000,000. The law of the United States (a foolish law, in our judgment) stands in the way. Mr. Young beseeches us to sanction his trade in order to save American business and the American people from God knows what disasters in future. His business rivals take the stand and show up his appeal to the national interest for exactly what it is, a means to put across a business deal worth perhaps eighty millions to his stock- holders. If Mr. Young wants to make such a deal, let him not try to persuade himself and us that he is thereby saving his fellow-countrymen from imminent dangers. We reiterate our judgment of the essential soundness of Mr. Young's view that a unified, intelligently planned communications system offers great possibilities of economy by comparison with the duplication and higgledy-piggledy wastefulness of competition in this field ; and at the same time we again point to Mr. Young as a striking example of the danger of accepting business men as safe guides in public policy in matters where their own interests are in- volved. Business deals ought to go about naked, not dressed up in political clothes. Business men like Mr. Young are extraordinarily naive in arraying them in such habiliments, and peoples go to war because they look at the clothes and not at the unshapely forms inside the clothes. In public affairs give us the leadership of impractical theorists. Our Imperial Burden NOT all the serious thinking and good writing in the newspaper world are done in the offices of the bij metropolitan papers, nor do the small-town dailies live wholly on boiler plate. In the Urbana (Illinois) Daily Courier we note two recent editorials on American imperial- ism that deserve quotation. Under the caption Destiny Rides on Its Way the editor, A. T. Burrows, writes: The struggling nationettes of the Caribbean Sea, of Central America, and even of South America, look upon the Colossus of the North, and plainly see their doom written in letters of fire. . . . Latin America is frankly incredulous as to the un- selfishness of our motives. Our explanations to her do not explain. . . . The policy they decry is not one thought out by care- ful schemers, but is simply the inevitable march of destiny. Incompetence must fall before competence. The superior will prevail over the inferior. Another day, under the heading Look Out, World, the same writer says: It is sad but true that the world doesn't want to be reformed. It prefers its own vices to the obvious and undisputed virtues imposed on it from without — no matter what that source might be. The Haitians just want to be Haitians. . . . They do not want to be reformed. They do not care to be solvent. They are not asking for hard roads, or school houses, or fur coats. Our mission among them is to com- pel them to do something they do not want to do; and very properly they resent it. . . . Some day we will learn that it is not possible to im- pose benefits on an unwilling and objecting recipient. Some day we will learn, what others already know, that "the white man's burden" means nothing more or less than the domination of the world — by persuasion if possible — by force if gentler means fail. We have taken up the burden. Look out, World. We are by no means wholly in agreement with the editor of the Courier. In particular, we long ago became extremely suspicious of the march of destiny, because we always found someone who seemed determined to make destiny march that way. But we are delighted to find this striking example of the serious attention being given to our international responsibilities in some of the smaller news- paper offices of the country.

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January 22, 1930] The Nation 91 It Seems to Heywood Broun THE doctrine of papal infallibility is a subtle one, I'm told, and does not mean that the titular head of the Catholic church can never be wrong in any opinion. I trust that this is true, for it will be unfortunate if the latest message from Rome about education is accepted by all Catho- lics without criticism or question. After all, many of the points touched upon are distinctly secular. It seems to me that in such matters even the wise head of a great church could be wrong. Moreover, the field of education is wide and it is difficult for the closest student of the subject to advance and defend generalizations. In recent years, at any rate, the present Pope has hardly been in a position to pay close personal attention to American school conditions. I do not think that anyone familiar with the field would speak quite so harshly of co-education. The Pope, to be sure, is interested chiefly in the sort of education which will best promote allegiance and fidelity to the church which he leads. Yet even admitting this it seems to me that the Pontiff has some misconceptions and that the educational theories which he attacks constitute no danger whatsoever to the faith which he upholds. According to the encyclical : The sexes were made distinct by the Creator. They complement each other reciprocally owing to their diversity, which must therefore be maintained in education, with the necessary separation proportional to the various ages and circumstances. These principles must be applied in all schools, especially during the most delicate and decisive period of growth, namely adolescence, and especially, also, in gymnastic exercises and sports for girls with due regard for their Christian modesty. I have only seen the newspaper reports and it may be that the Pope's proclamation makes a clearer case if read in its entirety. Frankly, this extract does not seem to me to make much sense. It seems to say that God created two sexes ; which nobody will deny. From this accepted fact the leap is made that they must be separated in the schools. But why? Little boys remain little boys and little girls can still b- feminine even though they happen to have shared a class room while hearing how Washington crossed the Delaware. Anybody who feels that co-education promotes looseness of thought and deed has made an imperfect study of the sub- ject. Someone might rise at this point to ask me to qualify as an expert on the subject of education before I undertake to criticize the theories of the Pope. Unfortunately I can- not. But after all I did go to Horace Mann High School, which was co-educational, while the Pope, I assume, went to . some separatist school as is the custom of his church and country. Obviously, one of the Pontiff's chief worries is about the activity of girls in athletics. Here he is dealing with a problem which has local aspects. Mussolini has en- couraged women to participate in sports. The Pope seems to feel that sport clothes, when worn by women, are an offense to Christian modesty. Now modesty is difficult of definition. Even a Pope must admit that in various parts of the world, what with climate and one thing and another, the extent of raiment varies. Good Catholic girls and women in Africa cannot be expected to have precisely the same idea as Eski- mos as to what constitutes quiet and refined attire. I've seen pictures of Italian women engaged in public demonstra- tions of gymnastic skill. They wore bloomers which once shocked and horrified American taste, but by now bloomers are accepted here as a matter of course even by persons of high moral standards. I think the Pope could be wrong about bloomers. At least I do not see why an individual might not faithfully follow every article of Catholic faith and still remain pro-bloomers. In fact it seems to me extraordinary that a great religious leader should think it necessary to include such things within the province of his authority. Moreover, co-education does not stand or fall with bloomers. Girls and boys may study algebra together and still maintain wholly separate basketball teams. And I think that co-education is most valuable at the very time when the Pope would chiefly discourage it. Adolescence is a decisive period but I fail to see in what way segregation is supposed to soften the blow. Sexual development is at least a natural process and the more calmly it is accepted by the individuals concerned by just so much are health and morality promoted. This is, as the Pope has pointed out, a world of two sexes. All but the comparatively small number of persons who be- come members of holy orders have to live in this world. Then why not have them accept it as a place of diversity from the very beginning? Sex distinction is far more marked in mixed companies than in schools where boys and girls are herded separately. In fact I am not familiar with any prob- lem which is best solved by running away from it. Again, I wish respectfully to note a disagreement with the Pope's idea of what modernists are trying to do in the matter of sex education. An extremely dangerous thing [the encyclical says] is that naturalism which invades the field of education in such delicate subjects as moral purity. Very widespread is the error of those who with dangerous presumptuousness and with ugly words promote so-called sexual education, falsely believing that they can forearm youths against the dangers of the senses with purely natural means, such as foolhardy inaction and preventive instruction or, worse still, by ex- posing them early in life to temptations in order to accus- tom them, as they say, and harden their hearts against those dangers. They err gravely in not recognizing the innate frailty of human nature and also in neglecting the experience which warns us that sins against morality are not so much the result of intellectual unpreparedness as of a weak will exposed to temptation and unsupported by grace. And here I think no true issue exists. The Pontiff has very largely manufactured it. He says that intellectual prepara- tion is not enough. Yet surely it is not impossible to equip a youth with both grace and understanding. They are not mutually exclusive. When one prays to be guarded against some certain temptation he is not necessarily fatally handi- capped because he happens to have some knowledge of the nature of that temptation. Heywood Broun

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92 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3368 Clemenceau the Destroyer By ROBERT DELL Paris, December 18 MAYNARD KEYNES said in his "Economic Con- sequences of the Peace" that Clemenceau had one illusion, France, and one disillusion, the whole of mankind, especially his fellow-countrymen. It would be difficult to give in a sentence a more exact summary of Cle- menceau's psychology. Georges Clemenceau was a very remarkable and very exceptional man, but not in the sense indicated in most of his obituary notices. Of all the newspaper articles that I have read about him since his death, few showed such an understanding of his character as that published in the Man- chester Guardian of November 25 with the title, A Daemonic Figure. It was written by an anonymous author whom others besides myself must have identified as one of the most brilliant journalists of our time, who, alas! will write no more. The style no less than the penetrating analysis revealed the late J. G. Hamilton. Clemenceau has been called in every language "the greatest French statesman of his time." As Hamilton said in the article just mentioned, he had none of the qualities of a statesman: "There was nothing con- structive about him, no suppleness, none of that feeling for compromise that is the mark of true statesmanship. Instead, he had an insatiable passion for destruction ; he gloried in his own instinctive nihilism." But, as Hamilton also said, Cle- menceau was a formidable personality, and few men have so impressed their personality on their contemporaries. How did this come about? To what did Clemenceau owe his hold on the French, why did they turn to him in the hour of danger and submit to his dictatorship for two years? Certainly not because of his past political or diplomatic achievements. He was seventy-six years old when he became prime minister for the second time in November, 1917, and his long political career had been barren of any constructive action. He had been in active politics nearly all his life — he was only twenty-nine when he became mayor of Mont- martre in 1871 under the Paris Commune — and he had not a single reform, not a single political achievement of any sort to his credit. Most of his political career had been spent voluntarily in opposition, a purely destructive opposi- tion, for even his criticism was not constructive. Clemen- ceau always denied, never affirmed — he was negation made flesh. He made his reputation in the Chamber as a wrecker, as the man that overthrew ministries, and it was in a great measure thanks to him that France had twenty-nine succes- sive cabinets in twenty years (1873-1893). It was not until October 25, 1906, when he was sixty-five, that he became a minister for the first time in the stop-gap cabinet of M. Sarrien, whom he succeeded as prime minister seven months later. He was prime minister on that occasion for nearly three years and the best comment on his term of office is his own cynical remark in the Chamber: "Nous sommes en pleine incoherence." In those three years Clemenceau broke up the Bloc of the Left that had governed France since 1899, disintegrated the Radical Party to which he himself be- longed, stirred up by his arrogance and domineering methods disorders which he repressed with bloodshed, and very nearly plunged France into war with Germany over the Casa- blanca incident in September, 1908, when German deserters from the French Foreign Legion, protected by the German consul, were arrested by the French authorities. Clemenceau sat up the whole of one night with the mobilization orders ready to be sent out, but war was averted by the consent of the German Government to submit the matter to the Hague arbitration tribunal. Had there been war France would have been easily and quickly beaten, for the French army was then much less efficient than in 1914, France was not pre- pared for war as she was at the later date, and neither Eng- land nor Russia would have consented to be dragged into a war over so trivial a matter. It was during Clemenceau's premiership that the Seventeenth Regiment mutinied when ordered to fire on the wine growers of the South, goaded to revolt by his treatment of their demands, and his term of office was marked by some of the most violent strikes ever known in France. It was proved — and Clemenceau could not deny it — that he had paid an agent provocateur called Metivier to incite the workmen to violence to give him an excuse for shooting them down. When Clemenceau resigned in July, 1909, he left French politics in a state of confusion from which they have not yet entirely recovered. Clemenceau's career in the press was as negative and destructive as his career in Parliament. He was out of Par- liament from 1893, when he lost his seat in the Chamber, to 1902, when he was elected to the Senate, but during that time he retained immense influence as a political journalist. His defeat in 1893 was due to his connection with the Panama scandal. There seems to be little or no doubt that he had had money for his paper from Baron Reinach and a financier of British nationality called Cornelius Herz, both of whom were implicated in the Panama affair, but the chief reason of his disgrace was the absurd legend that he was a British agent, based on forged documents representing him to have been in relations with a mythical British agent called Norton. In fact Clemenceau desired good relations between England and France, no doubt in the hope that they would serve the cause of revanche as they ultimately did, but he was never under British influence and certainly did not fol- low British policy. He was, for instance, an ardent supporter of the Franco-Russian alliance at a time when it was re- garded in England with suspicion and distrust, and in 1896 he said in an article in the Depeche de Toulouse: We wish Russia, after having been the accomplice of our downfall, to become the instrument of our complete resuscitation; that is, to call it by its right name, our re- venge. If we said the contrary, nobody would believe us. It is therefore more simple to avow it. When Clemenceau became prime minister for the first time in 1906, he was personally unknown in Downing Street, where his accession to office caused some uneasiness, for his reputation was that of a rather reckless and irresponsible extremist. Edward VII was sent off post-haste to Paris to make his acquaintance and try to tame the tiger and came

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January 22, 1930] The Nation 93 back with a reassuring report about the new prime minister's intentions, but Clemenceau's reckless conduct in 1908 justi- fied the fears of Downing Street. The one bright spot in Clemenceau's career was his attitude in the Dreyfus affair; it was in his paper, L'Aurore, that Zola's J'accuse was published. Anatole France, how- ever, who had been brought into close contact with Clemen- ceau during the affair, never believed him to have been sin- cere or disinterested in that matter. I do not know on what evidence France's opinion was based, but Clemenceau's sub- sequent evolution was certainly not inconsistent with it. It is right to say that Anatole France always detested Clemen- ceau, even when they were on the same side in politics. He held him to be cruel and malevolent by nature, to be a man who had never done anything but harm and who delighted in doing harm. France himself has often been called cynical, and in a sense no doubt he was, but only a fool can fail to recognize the unbounded tolerance of human weaknesses and the immense sympathy with human suffering that underlie his raillery at human folly. He might have said of himself, with Beaumarchais's Figaro, "Je me hate de rire de tout de peur d'en pleurer." Clemenceau, on the other hand, despised human sympathy as a sign of weakness. "Vous n'etes qu'un sot avec votre pitie," he said to a friend ; "dans la vie il f aut etre mechant, mechant, mechant." And he acted on his own maxim all his life. He hated the whole human race, as Keynes implied. In both private and public relations he was intensely vindictive and utterly unscrupulous as to the means that he used against his enemies and opponents and even against members of his own family that had incurred his displeasure. I doubt whether he ever had a real friend- ship or affection for any individual. His former private sec- retary and ardent admirer, M. Jean Martet, says of him in the current number of the Revue de Paris that he took no pleasure in the friendship of anybody that did not constantly keep him amused and excite his curiosity, and that he never understood or cared to understand the characters of those with whom he came into contact. That is to say, Clemen- ceau was a perfect egoist, utterly lacking in sympathy with others. Both his egoism and his ambition reached such pro- portions as to become monstrous and inhuman. He was pre- pared to sacrifice everybody and everything to them and to his idol — an abstraction called "France." For Clemenceau, who thought himself irreligious and indeed anti-religious, was an adept in what Anatole France called the worst of all reli- gions, Patriotism. He was the super-patriot, and, as is always the case, there was a great deal of egoism and personal vanity in his patriotism. When people bitterly resent what they consider to be an affront to their church or their coun- try, what they really resent is the affront to their own vanity. Clemenceau identified himself with "France," so that the supposed humiliation of France in 1871 was the humiliation of Georges Clemenceau, and he could never forget it. This man, delighting as he did in bloodshed and de- struction, was bound to come to the top in the war, if it lasted long enough. Anatole France, who foresaw so many things, foresaw this. In letters that he wrote to me quite early in 1915 he anticipated with dread a Clemenceau min- istry. At that time he thought that it might be a Clemen- ceau-Barthou ministry — "the terrible Janus, Clemenceau- Barthou" was what he called it. France foresaw, too, that if and when Clemenceau did come into power he would behave exactly as he did in fact behave. He knew the man. It is said that Clemenceau "saved France." It is true that he saved France — and the Allies — from a negotiated peace in 1917, but who will venture to say now that it could have been worse for Europe and the world than the peace after- ward made? There is every reason to think that it would have been better for everybody, including France — not the mystical abstraction of Clemenceau's devotion, but the real country and its inhabitants. In 1917 there had been two serious offers of peace negotiations, the first from the Aus- trian Emperor through Prince Sixtus de Bourbon, the second from the German Emperor through the Belgians, when it was suggested that Briand should go to Switzerland incog- nito to meet Baron von der Lancken. The facts about the second had become known to the Chamber in a secret session in October, 1917, and such was the indignation at Ribot's conduct in turning down the German proposal that he was forced to resign. It was then that Poincare reluctantly came to the conclusion that his old personal enemy, Clemenceau, was the only man capable of forcing France to continue the war. The folly of the Socialists in combining with the Right to overthrow the Painleve Cabinet gave the opportunity a few weeks later of putting Clemenceau in power. It is not true that Clemenceau believed in the victory of the Allies. He himself said after the war — the fact has been published since his death by more than one of his intimates — that he had never believed in victory until June, 1918. Be- fore he became prime minister he was one of the worst "de- featists" in France. Day after day his factotum, Jeroboam Rothschild, alias Georges Mandel, came to the lobbies of the Chamber and drew deputies and journalists aside one after the other into a recess where he imparted to them terrifying and usually imaginary stories of appalling military disasters that had been concealed from the public. Clemenceau's paper, U Homme Enchaine, was in constant difficulties with the censors, often for publishing information likely to help the enemy and hamper the military operations of the Allies. These maneuvers were part of a desperate intrigue to get into power at all costs. It was not easy for Clemenceau to get into power, for he was generally distrusted and, as he him- self said, had not half a dozen friends. Finally he secured the support of the Action Francaise and the Right by promis- ing to have Caillaux and Malvy arrested on charges in which he himself certainly did not believe. Leon Daudet hinted in an article the other day that Clemenceau had not kept to the bargain in that he had not had Caillaux and Malvy shot. Clemenceau ruled by fear and terrorism. He had always inspired fear by his biting tongue and unscrupulous methods — that was how he imposed his personality — and when all the power was in his hands everybody knew that he would stick at nothing to gain his ends. Every means of terrorism was resorted to, including that of listening in on the tele- phone communications of politicians and blackmailing them by threatening to show their wives verbatim reports of com- promising conversations. Over the heads of others hung the threat that they would share the fate of Caillaux and Malvy if they were not careful. Clemenceau even said that he would have Anatole France arrested if he said "a word too much," although the fact was not known to France himself until after the end of the war. The end was victory, no doubt, but if it had not been ? And it would not have been, but for American intervention

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94 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3368 and the British blockade. Even as it was, the Germans came within an ace of victory in 1918. In May of that year Cle- menceau believed so little in victory that he said that there was nothing left for the French people but to go down to the sea and perish there together. The truth — the dreadful truth — is that he was quite prepared to sacrifice the French people to "France" — and Georges Clemenceau. Victory and re- venge, if possible, but if not, then ruin and annihilation rather than a negotiated peace though it should give Alsace- Lorraine to France as a negotiated peace in 1917 probably would have done. Clemenceau was, as Hamilton said in the article already quoted, a "daemonic figure." His pride had a terrible fall when the worms turned against their tyrant under cover of a secret ballot and he was rejected as candidate for the presidency. Clemenceau never recovered from the blow and never forgave the affront. He isolated himself from an ungrateful world and indulged his spite by confiding to his few visitors, mostly royalists and reactionaries, his poor opinion of all his contemporaries and his conviction that democracy was a failure (had it not re- jected Georges Clemenceau?) and that the Republican regime would be the ruin of France. But although the tiger could still roar a little his claws were drawn and nobody was any longer afraid of him. His hold on France is ended. The attempts since his death to exalt him into a national hero have failed. He was never loved ; he is rapidly ceasing even to be admired. The indifference of the public was shown by the poor attendance at the grotesque function in his honor at the Arc de Triomphe. The victory for which he sacrificed so many French lives has turned to dust and ashes ; the peace treaties that he made are crumbling to pieces. And there are signs that the French people are beginning to recognize that wiser and better than the spirit of Georges Clemenceau is the spirit of the man who wrote in a book published only a few months before the outbreak of the war: War engenders war and victory defeat. God, con- quered, will become Satan; Satan, conquering, will become God. ... As to ourselves, celestial spirits, sublime daemons, we have destroyed Ialdabaoth, our tyrant, if in ourselves we have destroyed Ignorance and Fear. A Railroad View of Consolidation By J. G. LYNE IT is now nearly ten years since the Transportation Act of 1920 was passed. Yet consolidation under its provi- sions seems even more remote now than it did at the time of its passage, even though the Interstate Commerce Commission has adopted a consolidation plan. The consoli- dation provisions of the Transportation Act are briefly as follows : That the Interstate Commerce Commission shall, "as soon as practicable" adopt a plan for the consolidation of the railroads into a limited number of systems, That the new systems shall preserve competition and existing channels of trade "as fully as possible," That the new systems shall be so arranged that their costs of transportation as related to their values shall be approximately the same, That the adoption by the commission of its plan must be a condition precedent to the authorization of any par- ticular consolidation proposal and that such particular plans must conform to the commission's general plan if they are to be approved, and That the outstanding securities of an amalgamated railroad corporation must not exceed the valuation as fixed by the Interstate Commerce Commission. What has the Interstate Commerce Commission been doing in the ten years which have passed since the enactment of the Transportation Act? Its first step was to engage the services of Professor William Z. Ripley of Harvard Uni- versity to draft a proposed plan, as a basis upon which to start. The commission took Professor Ripley's plan, made a few changes in it, and then, in September, 1921, served it upon the railways as a tentative report. In March of the following year hearings were begun and lasted through that year and 1923. Oral arguments were heard in February, 1924. By 1925 the commission had apparently run into diffi- culties in arriving at a decision. In its annual report for that year it reproduced a letter sent to Congress in which it rec- ommended, among other things, that the law be amended to absolve it from the duty of adopting a complete plan of con- solidation and to permit a more expeditious determination of value of properties proposed to be consolidated. These rec- ommendations were repeated in the annual reports of 1926, 1927, and 1928, in the last year with the explanation that action in adopting a final consolidation plan was being de- layed awaiting some action on the part of Congress. Now, apparently weary of waiting for Congress, the commission has announced its complete plan. It should not be overlooked that consolidation of a sort is possible under the present law. One railroad acquires con- trol, by lease or stock purchase, of another. Quasi-consolida- tion of this kind is going on all the time, but not at a very rapid rate. It does not involve the scrambling of properties so that they cannot later be unscrambled. Still, the commis- sion has refrained from encouraging such quasi-consolidation along lines which might conflict with its putative general plan. Furthermore, consolidation of this kind does not secure the benefits of complete amalgamation, since the companies involved must be separately maintained and no simplification in accounting or other overhead activities is possible. It is acknowledged that the motive force toward con- solidation must come from the railroads. The Interstate Commerce Commission has no power to compel consolida- tion, and it would probably be difficult to frame a constitu- tional law which would give it that power. No external authority is needed, however, to bring about railroad con- solidation, which is a development dating from the infancy of the industry and continuing steadily until it was almost completely stopped by the Sherman Act, which forbade com- binations in restraint of trade, and particularly by the deci- sion in the Northern Securities case in 1904. Such consoli- dation as has taken place has been a natural economic devel-

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Tanuary22, 1930] The Nation 95 opment proceeding on an ordinary business basis, the A & B railroad foreseeing economies in the acquisition of the C & D which would enable it to offer more to the owners of that railroad as purchase money than the owners could hope to earn from continuing to operate the property independently. Consolidation of this kind is a natural economic phenomenon to be observed in many industries. It has a distinct advan- tage over any nation-wide, pre-arranged plan in that each step in the process must stand the test of its economic desira- bility, which test, if railroad efficiency is to be promoted, is absolutely essential. It seems to be taken for granted that a large industrial enterprise is ipso facto more efficient than a smaller one, and that this general principle is also true of the railroad indus- try. But there is an outstanding difference between the rail- roads and most other industries. In the latter, combination results in the elimination of small and inefficient plants and concentration of production in modern factories, where a heavy investment in modern machinery can be utilized to the utmost. The product of the railway industry is ton-miles and passenger-miles. If consolidation meant that production of ton-miles and passenger-miles now performed on far-flung, light-traffic lines could be abandoned and such production concentrated upon highly developed, level, four-track lines, then we might expect railroad combination to produce econo- mies similar to those in industry. Of course this is not pos- sible, and the economies to be expected from railroad con- solidation are much less than might at first be supposed. There is a size beyond which railroad management is likely to become less effective; for a railroad is widely scattered and, even with modern facilities for communication, ex- tremely difficult of intelligent centralized control. There are economies to be expected from consolidation, with its probable savings from standardization and mass-production methods in shops, but it is easily possible to overestimate such advantages and overlook the more effective managerial con- trol of the smaller property. Consolidation to promote economy in transportation, then, ought to take place only when railroad managers inti- mately concerned with the properties believe the amalgama- tion economically desirable. There are undoubtedly many railroad lines which, because of their peculiar traffic condi- tions or other reasons, can operate more efficiently as inde- pendent companies than they could as parts of large systems. If economy in transportation is to be fostered, then such lines should remain independent. Is there any better method for determining whether a given consolidation will be economical than the fact that a buyer and a seller, both knowing intimately the properties involved, can agree upon a transaction, believing it to be to their mutual advantage? This is not an appeal for complete laissez faire in railroad consolidation. There is more in- volved in consolidation than the self-interest of the railroads engaging in it. There is, for instance, the maintenance of competition, the desirability of which is quite generally ac- cepted by both railroad men and their patrons. There is also the matter of the absorption of weak lines. The extent to which it would be ethical for the government to prescribe the absorption of such lines as a condition precedent to the approval of a specific consolidation plan is debatable. On the other hand, authority to consolidate in some degree ac- cording to their own plans would be a concession to railroad owners for which they could afford also to concede some- thing. The authority which the commission now has over the issue of railroad securities affords ample protection against capital inflation from the process, and the provision in the present law, that valuation agreement must precede consoli- dation and be used to control its security issues, serves only to make progress even more difficult. The primary purpose of consolidation is to avoid the possibility that, with uniform rates, some lines will prosper unduly while others will starve. If this were the only con- sideration, then the logical way to meet it would be to com- bine all railways into one huge company. But there are other considerations, one of them being the preservation of competition. Since competition is to be preserved, which approach to consolidation promises to bring the earlier solu- tion of the problem of the weak roads — that contained in the present law or the more liberal one here advocated ? A regulated laissez faire policy like that outlined herein is the more promising, I believe, primarily for the reason that it is a policy which will encourage, and not hinder, con- solidation of railroads that are already prepared to amalga- mate. A preconceived, nation-wide plan such as is now put forward by the commission will unavoidably throw some railroads together against their owners' wishes and separate others whose owners wish to join forces. There is no com- pulsion in the law, and there probably could not be any with- out much time-consuming litigation. The insistence upon consolidation according to a preconceived plan, therefore, while it will permit some consolidations, promises to post- pone general consolidation indefinitely. If, on the other hand, any consolidation were permitted which would con- form to certain definite principles — public convenience and necessity, maintenance of competition, absence of finan- cial manipulation, some consideration of including necessitous weak lines — then great and immediate progress would be forthcoming. The Interstate Commerce Commission would not be forced, as it now is, to inject itself into situations where the parties concerned can themselves reach an agree- ment, but would restrict itself to the much simpler task of adjudicating differences and passing on specific plans in the light of the public interest. If the commission were empowered, without any refer- ence to a prescribed plan, to approve or disapprove any con- solidation proposal put before it, it would be just as easy to hinder development of gross differences as between com- panies as it is under the present law. In fact, it would really be easier, since the present law acts as a brake on almost all consolidation progress and we continue to have weak and strong roads, with no effective steps being taken to solve the problem which they present. Nor must we lose sight of the fact that nobody knows, for a certainty just what is the ideal size of a railroad com- pany. Is it wise to plan the amalgamation of all our rail- ways into a definite number of approximately comparable systems, when we know that such action will include many smaller railways which might have operated more efficiently and more satisfactorily to their patrons if they remained independent? Consolidation ought to produce some econo- mies, but the only way to be sure of them is to weigh each proposal carefully and put to proof each step in the process. Fortunately, it is not necessary to proceed entirely on assumption in the matter of consolidation. While the sub-

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96 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3368 ject was in the early stages of examination and study in this country, a consolidation bill was passed in Great Britain and its provisions were speedily carried out; 124 railway com- panies were reduced to four, which have been in operation since 1923. Consolidation was effected on a territorial basis, rather than one of maintaining competition ; that is to say, each company is dominant in its own territory. There is some overlapping of territories, it is true, and some com- petition remains, but nothing of the sort contemplated by the consolidation provisions of our Transportation Act. Con- solidation without competition should tend to promote greater economies than where competition is retained — the abandon- ment of competing and parallel facilities being made possi- ble, as well as the savings from standardization, mass meth- ods in repair work, and like gains which can be secured un- der any form of consolidation. Presumably, therefore, con- solidation in Great Britain ought to have brought economies as great as anything we can expect in the United States, and possibly greater. What has actually occurred? Opinions differ widely, but it seems evident that the savings have been far from startling. Indeed it could probably be demon- strated without much difficulty that the American railways, without consolidation, have shown a greater ratio of im- proved efficiency since the war than the British railways un- der amalgamation. The economies to be expected from con- solidation per se, therefore, seem to be relatively less than those obtainable through a constant effort to develop better operating methods and a willingness to spend money to se- cure the advantages of modern equipment. The complexity of the situation is infinite — the details of corporate relationships, the ebb and flow of traffic, the possible combinations which can be worked out. To expect to lay a prearranged pattern of railway systems upon such a crazy-quilt and have it conform is the height of futility. The problem can be worked out satisfactorily only if it is tackled piecemeal — and then preferably by the parties at interest, with the Interstate Commerce Commission keeping a watchful eye from the standpoint of the public and acting as arbiter on points of difference. This is the economical method of achieving desirable consolidations. Unemployment in England By JOHN A. HOBSON A LABOR government is expected to improve the con- ditions of the laboring classes. So far the successes of Mr. MacDonald's Government have been in other fields, especially in foreign policy, which though making perhaps valuable indirect contributions to our economic re- sources in improved foreign trade and reduced costs of arma- ments, have brought no present relief to our industrial distresses. Though some slight improvement is visible in our iron and steel trade, our export trades in general still remain in the trough of the deepest and most prolonged depression recorded in our history. During the past eight years there have been two slight flickers of recovery, but they have soon vanished, and we are all now convinced that the policy of waiting with folded arms for a recovery of world trade which shall absorb our million and a quarter unemployed is sheer imbecility. A Labor government that fails to tackle unemployment successfully, and with reasonable speed, will certainly go under, whether by its own fault or not. It may be that a satisfactory solution of the problem is beyond the power of any government, that the new economic conditions of the post-war world, with its new national industries pro- tected by tariff walls, and the rapid advances of productive power in Germany, the United States, and other countries, have permanently diminished the volume of our export trades, and reduced the number of workers that can be sustained on British soil at the standard of living which earlier conditions have enabled them to reach. If so, nothing but a slow process of emigration, impeded by the "dole" policy and the immigration obstructions of foreign countries and our dominions, seems to offer an escape from our plight. Few economists or business men really believe that the immediate proposals for stimulating employment by public expenditure upon roads, housing, and other public works will greatly reduce the volume of unemployment during the next few years. The speech made recently by Mr. Thomas, who is in charge of this department of governmental policy, has confirmed this view of the unsubstantiality of such measures for stimulating unemployment. Moreover, the finance of the situation, taken in conjunction with the enlarged provisions for unemployed relief under the new measure piloted through the House of Commons by Mi&s Bondfield, is bound to cause great embarrassment to Mr. Snowden when he is confronted with the necessity of raising increased revenues to meet these obligations. The wilder members of the Labor Party, under the leadership of Mr. Maxton and Mr. Wheatley, no doubt hold that capitalist profiteers and landlords can be easily made to disgorge the necessary sums. But no such illusions possess the minds of Mr. MacDonald or of his Chancellor. That some fresh taxation must be imposed is certain in view of the financial weakness of Mr. Churchill's predatory finance. But no such large increase of revenue is possible as would be needed to make a substantial impression upon the mass of unemploy- ment by means of public works or even subsidies for semi- public enterprises such as railway, gas, and water companies. The statement just issued by Mr. Thomas relating to such grants and guaranties does not profess to provide more than a year's employment for some 84,000 men, not 7 per cent of the present volume of unemployed. The more liberal provisions for unemployed relief under the new act will take off a considerable amount of public money without providing any increased employment. These policies are to be regarded as emergency or palliative measures rather than as remedies. Such considerations are exercising the minds of more thoughtful statesmen and business men in favor of exploring the possibilities of larger and more fundamental policies. Though the demand for a removal of these problems from the category of a purely party issue, voiced by Mr. Snowden, and supported by many members of the Liberal and Labor Parties, has not been openly adopted by the Government,

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January 22, 1930] The Nation 97 it has not been rejected. There are signs at any rate of a willingness to take outside men, both economists and business men, into conference on the graver aspects of the situation. Mr. MacDonald has long been known to favor the establish- ment of a General Economic Staff, to correlate the economic information of the various departments handling economic administration, and to offer expert counsel to the govern- ment for guidance of this policy. Several lunches have been held at Downing Street where economists and business men of various political complexions have been brought into private conference to discuss not only this proposal but other methods of bringing authoritative advice to bear upon the industrialists and labor leaders whose intelligence and active good-will are required for the application of any larger reme- dies. These larger remedies fall under the now familiar heads of "rationalization, reorganization, stabilization, the coopera- tion of firms in an industry for the elimination of waste, specialization of production, and, in general, improved technique and organization." It is recognized that a large part of our coal trouble is due to the survival of mines with inferior seams or inferior equipment, that many of our cotton and woolen mills are not up to the modern standard in plant or management, and that the same is true in our metal, en- gineering, and other trades. The war and post-war troubles lost us many of our foreign markets, in addition to those lost by the new economic nationalism. While the public works and subsidies may be of some immediate service in reducing unemployment and stimulating trade through en- larged consumption, nothing short of a widespread and carefully designed method of cutting costs of production in our staple manufacturers can go far toward restoring trade prosperity and reducing unemployment to its normal pre-war limits. Rejecting as socially unsound and impracticable the demand for wage-cuts which to unintelligent employers is the only way of reducing costs, we come to that larger policy of reconditioning of industries as unitary wholes to which we have alluded, as the only way of salvation. But is it practicable in a sufficient measure? Here our problems arise. Is the capital available for the scrapping of obsolete plants and replacement by up-to-date plants, and for other necessary expenditures in adjusting business to the specialized requirements of a well-organized industry? Secondly, if the capital is available, is the mentality of em- ployers and workers capable of responding to the demands for readjustment of their stereotyped habits, rules, and natures? Taking first the question of capital, I find econo- mists and business men generally agreed that for schemes of reconditioning, as likewise for new productive businesses, there is no lack of monetary capital, provided the applicants can show a reasonable prospect of profitable sales. Though most firms in the depressed industries have depleted their resources, and must look outside for any new investment capital they require, such capital is obtainable on reasonable terms for well-indorsed business propositions. The sums recklessly invested during the past year or two in bogus or wild-cat enterprises show that investment capital is not lacking. So, likewise, with bank facilities in the way of loans and overdrafts for running expenses; such credits are available to assist in financing sound amalgamations and the general work of industrial reconstruction. Nor is the re- ! quired flow of new capital confined to our own investible savings. In a word, it is not want of capital that is the obstacle to the reconditioning of our industries. It is the slow re- sponse of our industrialists and workers to the urgent need for revolutionizing the structure and operation of their in- dustries. Few employers can yet be got to recognize that the capitalist era of individual enterprise and laissez faire must in the staple industries be replaced by an era of com- bination, financial, industrial, and commercial. The few experiments in the chemical, the steel-rail, and some minor trades in rationalization or cartelization are still regarded as abnormalities by the general run of business men, who cling closely to purely personal control, established practices, and old-fashioned manufacturing. It is true that larger busi- ness units are being produced in staple trades by amalgama- tion, but the idea of a unitary policy, involving distribution of orders, concerted specialization, cooperative marketing, price agreements, the elimination of obsolete plants, is still distasteful to the average business man. Nothing short of the slow education of necessity and the struggle for survival will make him willing to enter the new industrial order. Labor is in the same position. The prolonged depres- sion has made workers more reluctant than ever to eye with favor a "rationalization" of their industry which would lower costs of production either by cutting wage rates or by displacing skilled labor by machinery. For it is true that in many, if not most, cases the first immediate effect of the pro- posed amalgamation and technical economies will be to "save labor" by reducing the number of skilled employees. This may be compensated for a time by increased employment in other trades making the new machines and other appliances which up-to-date production requires. But each trade looks to its own employment, and though lowered costs of produc- tion may eventually restore or enlarge the volume of employ- ment by increased productivity and markets, the trade econo- mist will be slow to accept any present risk or sacrifice for a speculative future gain which he may not live to share. The restoration of our industrial prosperity and the ab- sorption of our unemployed cannot in any case be a rapid process. Any early bettering of trade conditions, either by government aids or by more intelligent business organization, will not be likely to satisfy the sanguine expectation raised by electioneering promises. This will not be the fault of the Government. They are bent on doing what they can to stimulate productivity and reduce unemployment by public aids and pressures. But Britain is to a less extent than any other great nation a self-contained economic system. Our great foreign trade cannot revive and expand to maintain our working population on its higher standard of living with- out something like a corresponding rise in the wages and other conditions of industry in other countries. For there are limits to "the efficiency of high wages and short hours," and where scientific technique and highly organized industry can be operated by relatively low-paid "robot" labor, there is no guaranty possible of the foreign or even the domestic markets Britain requires for the full output of her industries. Rationalization, therefore, if accepted as a policy, must be supported by a vigorous economic internationalism which, working at Geneva or by trade-union action, shall raise the standard of real wages in the more backward countries to- ward our own standard, thus enlarging the world market for those commodities which form the staples of working-class consumption and of standardized production.

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98 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3368 In the Driftway EXCURSION rates for the holidays, railroad consoli- dations, and the fact that the Drifter had to wait a half hour for a train not long ago have caused him to reflect once more upon the desolation of railroad stations. Wherever one goes by rail, he will find a place which will seem familiar to him, one place he will never feel at home in, the railway station. In the mysterious vistas of the Gare du Quai d'Orsay, under the great arch of the station at Tours, in the simple, forthright station at Cadiz, all above ground and somnolent under the white sun, the traveler feels exactly as he feels in the cindered shadow of a depot in Minnedoka, Idaho. • • • * * IT is true that, in America, railroad stations seem to have been built by the most unpleasant, if not the worst, archi- tects available. This is partially explained by the fact that most of them were built in the latter half of the nineteenth century, though even that ample cloak does not cover all the sins against aesthetics of which the ordinary railroad station is guilty. Likewise, economics explains, though it does not extenuate, the crime of the cheap red paint which combines with the smoke of locomotives to mar many an American countryside. A sagebrush flat, with its sterile white alkali dust whipped into futile whirls by a wind that can bring no rain, is a sad sight. But set in the center of it a dull red railroad station, with its gingerbread gables rising above the treeless prairie like lost and useless ghosts — that is a sight to make the gods weep. • • * * * THE inside of the ordinary railroad station is of course even more depressing than the outside. The tick of the large, ungainly clock with the seemingly motionless hands; the sullen benches, strung along a dingy wall or bound back to back like desperate prisoners, divided by hard unyielding iron bars into spaces too large for one lonely traveler but too small for two; the tight-closed maw that opens only before train time to swallow up the hard-earned pennies; the inadequate lights in their dirty globes; the sound of impatient, slowed footsteps in the great dim cavern. And the insides of railway stations are even more alike than the outsides. A waiting-room seems to attract to itself certain aspects of dreariness that yield neither to race, to religion, nor to morals. It is desolate because it has no life of its own. Except in the ticket office, where no one may enter, there is neither warmth nor friendliness. Nobody goes to a railroad station except on his way to some other place. Always there is the clang, heard or unheard, of a train going somewhere else. ***** AND the Drifter doubts whether his favorite architect — or even he himself — could design a railroad station devoid of desolation. Grand Central Terminal, in New York, is the nearest approach to it, but Grand Central has what most stations lack. It has never-ceasing crowds that mill through it most of the twenty-four hours; it has bright lights; most important, it has dozens of shops where hun- dreds of people lead a consecutive daily existence. In fact the station at Grand Central is not the bright world that whirls under its own starry sky. It is that dark void filled with the sounds of departure and arrival, of going and com- ing but never of staying, that lies beyond the ticket-taker. PENNSYLVANIA Station, on the other hand, is first and last a railway station. One never loses there the sense of trains and travel. Like Grand Central, it has crowds and lights and shops, yet it has somehow managed to preserve, on a scale so grand that it attains a kind of mag- nificence, that unique quality which is to be found in railroad stations from Lahore to South Bend. In its gray recesses the traveler is reduced to his rightful, insignificant role, that of a crawler on the face of the earth. And despite unkind remarks that have passed here, the Drifter prefers Pennsyl- vania Station to Grand Central. A railroad station, after all, should not try to be anything else. The Drifter Correspondence j "The Smallest Investor" To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: It was with intense interest that I read the article, The National City Fiasco, in the issue of The Nation for Janu- ary 1. The writer states that the banks sold securities even to the smallest investor. The following story may illustrate clearly how they did it. At the beginning of August my aged father sent me $1,500 requesting me to invest it for him safely. Prompted by adver- tisements of the National City Bank in which it recommended sound bonds for investment, I decided to go there. I consulted an "investment specialist" and asked him for a good bond yield- ing about 6 per cent. Much to my surprise he told me that I would be foolish to buy bonds. Anaconda Copper would be the right investment and, since it was selling around $118 per share with a dividend of $7, it would yield 6 per cent, just what I wanted. In two or three months the stock would sell for at least $135 and would be still cheap at that. I asked to have some time to think this over, but, nevertheless, the stock was bought the same day for me, although I did not have any money with me at all. You probably know what happened. The stock is selling around $70 (instead of $135), a loss of almost $600 on an investment of $1,416 (twelve shares at $118). I wrote to the bank twice. In my first letter I asked them how the bank was going to protect its customers' interest if it persuaded them to buy stocks instead of bonds. The answer was that it was fairly sure that the dividend was being kept on the present level. Although the bank regretted the break in the market, it could not assume any responsibility. It pointed out that the stock rose shortly after the purchase to $133, to which I answered that I did not buy it for speculation, but for investment. As their answers were not satisfactory (in their last letter they stated that Anaconda is now a much better pur- chase than sale — I suppose they want to sell me still more shares!), I wrote to Mr. Mitchell himself, asking whether it is in line with the investment policy of the bank to persuade a small investor to buy stocks instead of bonds and, when the investment turns out a total failure with regard to the safety of the principal, to decline all responsibility. Vice-President Byrnes answered for Mr. Mitchell that the bank was perfectly justified in recommending Anaconda, and that it was rather weak on my part to assent to buy stocks. New York, January 2 W. H. HoefliCH

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January 22, 1930] The Nation 99 The News Reel Theater To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Permit me to enter vigorous protest against one of the items on your honor roll for 1929. I mean the News Reel Theater. I assume that the people of this town are willing to pay a quarter in order to see United States marines march- ing aboard transports, President Hoover enforcing prohibition, battleships laying smoke-screens, and West Point cadets drill- ing, for an hour. The News Reel gives these people what they want. But on that principle, why not put on your list the News Reel's first cousin, the Daily News, to say nothing of the funny paper? New York, January 6 A. F. BoCKMANN Dispenser with Justice To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The Brooklyn magistrate who, besides wielding a gavel in court, swings a cat-o'-nine-tails at home does not reflect much credit on whoever appointed him as a dispenser with justice. The home of an individual who can work him- self up to such a frenzy should receive the immediate investiga- tion of the Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. In my opinion, Magistrate Sabbatino has earned a rest from his judicial duties for the remainder of his natural life. Larchmont, N. Y., January 4 I. Block Mr. Layman Complains To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: In plain, direct, understandable English, the main body of The Nation discusses the social, economic, and political affairs of the day in such manner that its layman readers can readily obtain a liberal interpretation of current events. Yet in that section of its pages devoted to the theater, literature, music, and poetry, The Nation becomes a forum for the esoteric and sophisticated literati. In these latter pages the layman wanders as in a daze, catching here a sentence that is vaguely intelligi- ble, but missing there whole paragraphs of hidden thoughts. He feels like Mr. Barnstaple, in Wells's "Men Like Gods." Is this failure to comprehend these bewildering criticisms, re- views, and essays to be dismissed with the patronizing remark that the layman should build himself better foundations and otherwise improve himself so as not to be such a blank when he encounters the profundities? Is it permissible to remark here that often depth is not so much depth as poor writing? Mr. Layman is not unusual in that he wishes to provide himself with food, clothing, and shelter. To insure these pri- mary essentials of life, it is necessary that he hire himself out for wages. To earn these wages, he must be at his mercenary labors an average of eight hours per day for five days, and four or five hours on the sixth, with one day only of the seven un- trammeled by this vulgar necessity. Ordinarily, he must sleep eight hours of the twenty-four, and some three hours each day are spent at table and in going to and from work. Thus, of the twenty-four hours of the workday, there remain about five in which to attend to such matters as shaving, bathing, repairing little breaks about the house, exercising, reading the daily news- paper, The Nation, two or three other periodicals necessary for a balanced diet, keeping up with the better books, attending the theater, the concert, the lecture-hall, receiving the occasional visitor and paying back the call. These perfectly obvious but sordid facts are here tediously narrated to bring home to the worthy scriveners (who are really such good fellows and whom we really like) that we of the laity cannot possibly develop the breadth of intelligence neces- sary to imbibe with any success an English which has meaning only to the narrow circle of critics who spend most of their hours in libraries and bookshops. St. Louis, January 9 Carl F. Roth Prosperity and the Land To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Is it really worth while to use pages of The Nation for such unscientific articles as those of Stuart Chase on pros- perity? The only kind of prosperity to be sought and main- tained is that which must come from unhindered, free produc- tion of wealth (products of labor and nothing else), and the distribution of this wealth among the three primary factors — ■ land, labor, and capital. This is the natural distribution. Farmers, as farmers, as producers of wealth, have no interest whatever in economic rent or in the renting or selling values of land, and in considering the prosperity of farmers as a class — the share of general prosperity they have been getting or are getting — it is absurd to consider they gain by increasing land values or lose by decreasing land prices. This would easily be seen if all farmers were renters, but it certainly should not be overlooked by such investigators as Mr. Chase. Dr. Copeland's "beautiful profit and loss account," quoted by Mr. Chase in his article, The Farmer's Share, is properly a subject for ridicule rather than use in a serious ex- amination of prosperity. The natural law which tends to ap- portion to landowners, as such, a very large and absolutely un- earned share in the wealth annually produced is so plain, so undisputed, so universally orthodox in its professorial explana- tions, that there is no excuse for its being ignored by writers for and editors of The Nation. Long Branch, N. J., December 20 George White Contributors to This Issue Robert Dell is The Nation's correspondent in France. J. G. Lyne is financial editor of the Railway Age. John A. Hobson is a foremost British economist and a contributing editor of The Nation. Stanley J. Kunitz will publish in the spring a book of poetry, "Intellectual Things." Henry Hazlitt is literary editor of The Nation. William Spence Robertson is professor of history at the University of Illinois. Norah Meade reviews novels regularly for The Nation. Granville Hicks frequently reviews books for The Nation. Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at New York University. Karl F. Geiser is professor of political science at Ober- lin College. Joseph Wood Krutch is dramatic editor of The Nation. Alexander Bakshy, author of several books on the theater, writes on motion pictures for The Nation. Randall Gould is Shanghai correspondent of the United Press.

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Books, Films, Drama Parting By STANLEY J. KUNITZ Parting, I take with me completed June, Remembered hoard of time in thought compact; Eventual winds will not dissolve a tune Of solid air, the body of this fact. Mind's acres are forever green. Oh, I Shall keep perpetual summer here; I shall Refuse to let one startled swallow die, One petal of this colored beauty fall. Here, wandered from confusion, I shall greet My youth immaculate in memory's urn; This is my country, where the tireless feet Of my adventure, homing, will return. Each day will end in this day; every ship Will bring me back, bright lip on lonely lip. Consolation or Control? The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowl- edge and Action. By John Dewey. Gifford Lectures, 1929. Minton, Balch and Company. $4. The Sources of a Science of Education. - By John Dewey. Horace Liveright. $1.50. A Bibliography of John Dewey. By Milton Halsey Thomas and Herbert Wallace Schneider. Columbia University Press. $3. Essays in Honor of John Dewey. Henry Holt and Company. $4. ««A | i HE Quest for Certainty" is devoted to the elaboration, the insistent iteration, directly and by antithesis, of one idea — that of the intimate connection between knowl- edge and action. It is an apotheosis of the experimental proce- dure. It instals doing as the heart of knowing. Mr. Dewey contends that all ideas must be defined ultimately in terms of operations performed or to be performed. These operations need not always be actual ; they may be imaginatively possible, or they may merely be performed symbolically. Symbols — words, mathematical formulas — enable us to act without acting. But all thinking, all experimental inquiry, finally means directed action of some kind. Mr. Dewey contrasts this view with that of the traditional theory of knowledge, which he calls the "spectator theory." Na- ture must be understood, he holds, not by a mind thinking about it from without but by operations conducted from within. The human organism is a part of the natural world; its interactions with that world are "genuine additive phenomena." The ex- perimental method consists essentially in altering existing nat- ural arrangements to produce new arrangements. Knowledge is the fruit of the undertakings that transform problematic into resolved situations. Where tradition makes the test of ideas their agreement with some antecedent state of things, Dewey finds this test in the consequences of the acts to which the ideas lead — in the new arrangements of things which directed opera- tions bring into existence. Mr. Dewey brushes all the great classical philosophic sys- tems quietly aside. He seeks to dispose of them, in the present volume, not by any detailed logical or technical criticism, but by suggesting that they owe their existence to dubious motives. They are not disinterested; they are rationalizations of desire. The philosophic quest for certainty is at bottom nothing more than a quest for peace of soul, a quest for a refuge. That is why- philosophy, from the time of Plato, has glorified the eternal at the expense of the transitory, the invariant at the expense of the changing. It has translated into a rational form the doc- trine of escape from the vicissitudes of existence. It has sub- stituted a feeling of certainty for an active coping with condi- tions, assurance for insurance. Hence any quest for certainty that is universal, applying to everything, is in Dewey's view a compensatory perversion. At- tainment of the relatively secure and settled can take place, he maintains, only with respect to specified problematic situations. For the quest for certainty Dewey would substitute the search for methods of control. Ideas, he holds, apart from their aesthetic appeal, are intellectually worthless except as they pass into actions which rearrange and reconstruct in some way, be it little or large, the world in which we live. As for values, they are the products of our inevitable desires and affections, and need no wholesale scientific or philosophic "justification." The present volume reinforces Dewey's position as the most original and important American thinker of our time. Its philosophy, to my mind, embodies the implications of the new physics in a more integral as well as more plausible manner than any other that has yet been formulated. There is little of that flirtation with dubious paradoxes which we find in Russell and Eddington. One is almost disposed to agree with Dewey when he holds that the profound change in outlook which he has personally helped so much to bring about, the atti- tude which seeks security through regulation of change rather than through ascribing absolute certainty to the unchangeable, which tests truths not by antecedents but by consequents, consti- tutes a reversal in philosophy "comparable to a Copernican rev- olution." Yet the very importance of Dewey's thought makes his shortcomings more evident. Most of these lie in his style, not only in its diction and sentence structure, but in its larger ele- ments. Mr. Dewey's argument is carried forward too exclu- sively in abstract terms; his work would gain immensely in vividness and conviction if he kept returning to concrete illus- trations and verifications. It is curious that a thinker who seeks a philosophy that shall retain its contact with our everyday life, who constantly emphasizes the particular and the specific, should do it almost entirely by generalities. The writing in detail, while it is not devoid of occasional felicitous phrases, is for the most part clumsy and careless. One comes upon obvi- ous redundancies, predicates that do not agree with their sub- jects, and other solecisms. Perhaps Mr. Dewey's most serious faults, from the standpoint of making himself clear, are his frequent failure to indicate the logical connection between one sentence and the next, and the indefinite reference of his pro- nouns, which are constantly sending the reader off on false scents. All this results in a disproportionate wear and tear on the mind, which tends to make one's reading of Dewey, in spite of the importance of what he has to say, a duty rather than a delight. I must confess, finally, that I cannot rid myself of the sus- picion that Mr. Dewey pushes his "experimental empiricism" too far. While I can readily see that the experimental proce- dure adds facts to nature, and that its ultimate effect may be radically to alter the course of "natural" events, the primary purpose of experiment still seems to me to be the discovery of an antecedent reality — the cause of a disease, the distance of a star, or what not. In "The Sources of a Science of Education" Mr. Dewey

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January 22, 1930] The Nation 101 sees education as essentially in practice an art like engineering, which still allows room for the original and daring projects of exceptional individuals, but which progressively incorporates more and more of science into itself. "A Bibliography of John Dewey" illustrates at once Dewey's astonishing productiveness and the extent of his influ- ence. It lists upward of five hundred items of his author- ship, and some two hundred relating to him. It covers every- thing up to the summer of 1929. "Essays in Honor of John Dewey," with its twenty-nine contributors, must be added to this impressive total. Hbnry Hazlitt An American Augustus Polk: The Diary of a President, 1845-1849. Edited by Allan Nevins. Longmans, Green and Company. $5. POLK may be appropriately styled the American Augustus. Few national leaders have directed such an expansion of their country as was promoted by the eleventh President of the United States. Not many chief magistrates of the re- public have been so much misunderstood during their lifetime, and indeed for some time afterwards, and this in spite of the fact that only one other President has left us so careful a rec- ord of his manifold activities in a diary. In the present case the misunderstanding is probably not unconnected with the fact that it was not until 1908 that Professor Charles W. Mann of the Lewis Institute of Technology undertook to edit and^_ publish the diary of Polk, which had been purchased with } letters and miscellaneous papers from his relatives by the Chicago Historical Society. After Professor Mann's death the task was carefully completed by Milo M. Quaife. The diary was thus first printed in 1910 as Volumes VI-IX of the Chicago Historical Society's "Collections" in an edition of five hundred copies. The scarcity of this work amply warrants ion of salient portions in a one-volume edition. 1 nc text of the new edition has not always been collated with the Quaife text with exactness. In one place (page 118) "would" becomes "should"; two pages farther on "to" is transmuted into "through." Although in the main the selec- tions have been well made, yet some passages are omitted which another editor would presumably have included. The editor has not always been consistent in the use of leaders to indicate omissions from the Quaife text. In one instance (page 116) leaders are not even used to apprise the unwary reader that fourteen pages of the original diary have been omitted. The diarist's sententious statement that he con- sidered the passage of the Walker tariff bill as "the most im- portant domestic measure" of his administration is unwisely deleted (page 125), presumably because this series of selec- tions is mainly concerned with territorial expansion. In an important passage concerning the Oregon boundary dispute (page 114) the phrase "backing out from 54* 40'" appears as "caking out from 54* 40'." Historical scholars will perforce still have to rely upon the four-volume edition. Nevertheless Mr. Nevins's edition will be cordially wel- comed by teachers of American history as a useful source- book. Brackets in the Quaife text have been omitted, abbre- viations spelled out, and misspelled words corrected. The reading public should peruse with interest this epic of expan- sion. In it one can read the thoughts of a taciturn, determined, and patriotic President concerning his foreign policy. Through its pages flit the leading personalities of our national life during those stirring years when American dominion was ex- tended to the shores of the Pacific and when the United States narrowly escaped annexing the northern provinces of present Mexico. William Spence Robertson Dream and Be Free Tomorrow's Voyage. By Leonard Hess. Ives Washburn. $2.50. THIS is the story of a man seeking permanent values in life and pinning an untried faith on the sea. As a boy Samuel Jones had loved to board the Ventura, to meet the captain and the captain's daughter, Amanda Stark. He failed to ship on the boat, and when later Carrie seduces him into marriage, he settles down to his grocery job on the Bowery. But all the time he dreams of "waterways and places green with trees" — and Amanda. When he finds day-to-day happiness, it is in a daughter who proves to have been his wife's child by another man. When he finds Amanda again, it is in a brothel. And yet, when he finally goes to sea as a passenger and not as the sailor he had hoped to be, his companions on his first and last voyage are the false daughter and the reformed harlot. This is not a tragic book despite its plot, for its theme is: "Dreams take flight. When you dream, you are all free things. Day dreams. Night dreams, too. Flight need not lead any- where. It is in itself liberation." Samuel Jones, grocery clerk, is the congenital dreamer, sensitive, imaginative, intelligent Mr. Hess's character sense is subtle and acute, and he gives a life-like portrait of the little man behind the counter and the man behind the figure that faced the world. He is less reliable in his manner of writing. He uses at times to excellent pur- pose the system of the "aside," now credited to O'Neill as far as the stage is concerned but for which Shakespeare was also to blame. His use of the telegraphic sentence is, however, tire- some. A telegram is meant to condense meaning; if used for the purpose of isolating one word from another, then the words should be sufficiently striking to deserve the emphasis. "Large, hot drops. Splashing. Rattling" — neither adjective deserves the majesty of isolation. On the other hand, there is no waste verbiage in this book and much that is memorable in the writing as well as in the character drawing. Norah Meade Victorian Biography The Life of George Meredith. By Robert Esmonde Sencourt. Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.50. ALTHOUGH Mr. Sencourt has had access to more ma- terial than previous biographers of Meredith, it can scarcely be said that his study necessitates any drastic reinterpretation or revaluation of the poet and novelist. Indeed, Mr. Sencourt fails to deal at all decisively with the major prob- lem which other biographers have raised: the problem of Meredith as poseur. Though this book supplants its predeces- sors simply because Mr. Sencourt has used all the information hitherto available together with a certain amount of new ma- terial, it leaves room for a more penetrating analysis of Mere- dith's personality. Perhaps the requisite data for an honest and convincing analysis of the rather uncommonly mysterious tem- perament of this man are not and never will be available; cer- tainly Mr. Sencourt has not given us such a study, nor, if one can judge from the prejudices and timidities of this volume, could he ever do so. What Mr. Sencourt has done best is to show how Mere- dith's energy, pressing against the obstacles of life, surged into his art. Meredith is a beautiful example of the theory of art as compensation — a peculiarly beautiful example because his work shows that theory must be qualified if such truth as there is in it is to be brought out. Far from being an unusually maladjusted or thwarted person, he was, as the world goes,

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102 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3368 rather happily established in relation to his environment. Nevertheless, many of his novels and his poems use the ma- terial of his own life — with a difference. He does in art what most of us do in day-dreams — imagines the course events would have taken if circumstances had been just a hair s breadth altered. But because his assumptions were firmly rooted in fact, and because he abandoned himself so completely to the guidance of the Comic Spirit, the resulting vision of what might have been is quite as real as any account of what was. All this Mr. Sencourt brings out more or less clearly, and for this we can be grateful. In all his criticism he displays Some sensitiveness, and his abounding admiration for Meredith is pleasant rather than otherwise. Nevertheless his critical powers, though by no means negligible, are not equal to the attempt to evaluate Meredith in relation to his Victorian back- ground. On one page we find him rejoicing over Meredith's freedom from the canting smugness of his time; on another we find him arguing rather bitterly for the conventionality of Meredith's views. He treats at length Meredith's views on sex and religion, but it is with unconcealed uneasiness and with every intention of putting Meredith on the side of the angels. Of course, Meredith was partly a Victorian and partly some- thing better or worse — most of us would say better. Mr. Sencourt's difficulty is that he is not himself sufficiently emanci- pated from Victorianism to distinguish with perfect clarity the points at which Meredith rose above the Victorian mentality and the points at which he was submerged by it. Despite Mr. Sencourt's friendship with M. Maurois, who offers kind words of commendation, the book bears few traits of the new biography. It has not the faults of the cheap, me- chanical, fictionalized biography that passes for new; nor has it the clarity, precision, and carefulness of form of the new biography at its best. It is a somewhat confused and confusing account, a useful compilation of facts illuminated by flashes of sound criticism, but yielding neither a complete and satisfying portrait of Meredith nor any striking estimate of his place in literature. Granville Hicks The Navajo in Fiction Laughing Boy. By Oliver La Farge. Houghton Mifflin Com- pany. $2.50. THE American Indian has appeared frequently in Ameri- can poetry and essays and occasionally as a minor character in fiction. He has never before, as far as I know, been the whole subject matter of a novel. Mr. La Farge has taken for his hero a Northern Navajo and for his heroine a Southern Navajo. His plot is the only plot of mental struggle conceivable and interesting with such characters — the struggle of the Navajo girl, educated in American schools, to return to her own people. Slim Girl, by nature deeply religious, had accepted Christianity and all its implications only to find that as a code of ethics it was always disobeyed by the whites. Unhappy and bewildered she returns to her people, but she has determined on revenge and this flaw in her character leads to her destruction. She will make a white man pay for her love and with his money she will rise above the very people she wishes to accept. She fears the decay and early aging which come to Navajo women who do the heavy work expected of them, and will not accept this as her future. Then she falls in love with Laughing Boy, a Northern Navajo and a noble and orthodox young Indian. Suddenly she is afraid of her past, but she determines again to use her wits after the fashion of the whites, and to keep her Navajo lover and force her white lover to grant wealth to both herself and her husband. Of course in the end she is discovered and tragedy swiftly follows. Such an ordinary plot would hold little interest did not Mr. La Farge know the psychology of the Navajo. The interest of the book and its richness lie in his familiarity with these people, their myths and customs. He has taken pains to fa- miliarize himself with the works of Washington Matthews, the best authority on the Navajo, and many of the stories, the customs, the rituals, and the songs which form a natural part of the narrative are taken from Mr. Matthews's "Night Chant," "Mountain Chant," or "Navajo Legends." Along with this scientific knowledge of the Navajo goes familiarity with and a love for the Southwest. The book, accordingly, is not merely a novel but also a study of a folk, of their ideas of art, re- ligion, marriage, and kinship. The contrast between the dig- nity of the Navajo and the natural purity of their outlook and the impurity of the whites would, probably, have been better emphasized had we known more of Mr. La Farge's whites, but as the latter are merely background and do not enter as important actors in the little drama, we are not entirely con- vinced of their villainy. Nor, I think, is the revenge motive in the heroine brought to the reader's knowledge soon enough. The book is almost finished before one realizes that Slim Girl has some reason for her duplicity toward her husband other than a desire for ease and money. These technical faults may be to some degree overlooked if one is willing to enjoy the book for its folk-lore. Eda Lou Walton Two Views of Germany Meet the Germans. By Henry Albert Phillips. J. B. Lippin- cott Company. $3. The New German Republic. By Elmer Luehr. Minton, Balch and Company. $5. THE general scope and purport of the book by Mr. Phil- lips may best be characterized by saying tha* !* " the observations of a tourist. In the author's c\v.» vvords: "This is simply My Book — a Me-Book About Germany: What I Saw, What I Felt, and How It Affected Me." We are asked at the outset to be tolerant and try to ignore the errors of his "facts" because he is not interested in facts as such ; he merely wants "a few representative impressions from which you may form some idea of what the whole of Germany is like." Now it is all very well for the reader to be toler- ant, but if the reviewer has any real mission, candor compels him to point out that in reading this book we do not get a representative picture of the life of Germany today; for while the author's meanderings lead him to many interesting cities and villages and through many by-paths that are not usually followed by tourists, the excursions invariably end in a restau- rant or cafe where the meditations here recorded make all German life revolve about beer and sausages. That the writer is having the time of his life is evident, but it is not tax-bur- dened Germany that is here described; there is no hint of the distress of the shopkeeper and the farmer, or of the discourage- ment of the artist, or of the poverty and hard lot of the great toiling masses who make up the bulk of the population. One wonders whether the change from the bone-dry atmosphere of the States to the jolly life of the German cafe may not account for the numerous errors — sometimes three or four on a single page — that would otherwise be inexcusable. The imperfections are to be regretted because there is a place for a book such as this might have been, and it is written with a sympathetic enthu- siasm that is commendable; but written, nevertheless for Main Street. It may lure George Babbitt from his comfortable sleeping porch to pay a visit to "Munich — City of the Amber Flood," or to Weimar in the hope of meeting the German

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January 22, 1930] The Nation 103 "Andy Gump"; but the thoughtful reader who goes beyond the illustrations — which are well selected and excellent — will scarcely care to meet the Germans if this description is to serve as an introduction to their life, characteristics, or social institu- tions. Of a different scope and character is the work of Mr. Luehr, a book that holds the interest of the reader from start to finish because of the author's obvious mastery of material and the lucid and interesting style in which it is written. It is a comprehensive and authoritative account of recent German history, from the events that led up to the revolution, through the dark and tragic period of convulsions and rapid changes, to the triumph of the republic. The causes of the revolution, the struggle among the political parties, the Weimar Assem- bly and the making of the constitution, the peace treaty, repa- rations, the Ruhr invasion, inflation, and then the successive plans aiming at recovery and stabilization are all placed before the reader with telling force and conviction. But while Mr. Luehr has convictions of his own, and does not hesitate to ex- press them, he does not distort the facts nor bend them to plead any particular cause. He writes Germany neither up nor down, but is guided in his narrative solely by the facts as he sees them and by the conduct of men and the course of events that have shaped the history of Germany during the last decade. Mr. Luehr is in thorough sympathy with the republic, though not blind to its mistakes; he believes that "with all its faults, the institutions created by the Weimar constitution con- tain the necessary contents for the successful government of Germany." In conclusion: The indifference and open suspicion to which the young German Republic was treated is one of the amaz- ing facts of modern history. In an age confronted with the war breakdowns, the disillusions of war settlements, with the loss of faith in democracy, and the jubilant denial of liberty and personal rights, the German experiment had to show its vitality by asserting itself against opposi- tion and crouching hostility. Through the blistering blasts of bolshevism, through the degradation of treaty and rep- arations, through the ferocity of fascism, German democ- racy stood as the strongest bulwark of free representative government on the European continent. Today when its enemies have receded into the background the republic stands firm, tolerant, and superior, ready to pull the country out from the last soft spots of the war mire. This book is one of the best and most readable works covering this period that has thus far appeared in English. A select bibliography of recent works bearing upon the period, and an admirable index, add to its usefulness. Karl F. Geiser Books in Brief The Black Venus. By Andre Salmon. Translated from the French by Slater Brown. The Macaulay Company. $2.50. This novel was published in France in 1920 and created a considerable stir, partly because of the brilliance of the writing and the absurd grotesquerie of the story, but chiefly because the author introduces under assumed names the friends of his youth in the first decade of this century. These include Picasso, Derain, Max Jacob, MacOrlan, the German poet Wedekind, and other pioneers of the days when the modern movement in art and letters, departing from the spirit of the nineties, set out to mold in new forms the eternal verities. Stringing his inci- dents together along the preposterous story-thread of the "Planter" of Montmartre — who dresses like a pirate, endeavors to cultivate in his ash dump of a yard exotic West Indian AFTER MOTHER INDIA Harry H. Field So much has been said pro and con the accu- racy of the books of Miss Mayo and Mr. Field that we are reproducing a series of comments on After Mother India. May we here quote Mr. Edward Thompson in the Saturday Review, who says that "Mr. Field shows up the pathetic feebleness of much of the reply to Mother India/' — and the Bos- ton Transcript, which finds Mr. Field's book "an excellent documentation of Miss Mayo's thesis, almost impossible to challenge." This is a necessary companion volume to your copy of "Mother India." $3.50 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 383 Madison Avenue, New York LONDON— A MILESTONE? The coming Disarmament Conference in London may well be the most significant event of the present century. Important decisions may be taken by the principal nations of the world bringing the dream of idealists for centuries — a condition of world peace — close to accomplishment. ®fje jWancfjestfer (©uarbtan WEEKLY will give a sympathetic and, what is more important, an accurate and unbiased account of this epoch- making conference. At all times The Manchester Guardian Weekly keeps its readers advised of progress in international affairs. To leaders of intelligence in more than sixty coun- tries, it is a constant source of reliable information on all important world happenings and a faithful guide in keeping their viewpoint on vital events, clear and unprejudiced. "mail this coupon" " The Manchester Guardian Weekly, 224 West 42nd Street, New York City. Gentlemen : Enclosed please find $3.00 for which send THE MAN- CHESTER GUARDIAN WEEKLY for one year to the below address. Name . Address When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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104 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3368 plants, and keeps for his "slave" a black dancing-girl — M. Salmon paints in words modernistic pictures of artists and poets, and also of the beggars, soldiers, urchins, and small trades- folk who surrounded them and helped to form their lives and their art. In addition to the celebrities the reader meets Mumu, the male courtesan in love with his own body; the tragic child Leontine and her drunken grandmother; Amedee, the stool pigeon, factotum on the "Plantation," who has a head like a crumpled ball of newspaper; the corrupt Martha, and her absurd husband who combines the careers of clerk and "fleshly" poet. Over the whole the author pours his sardonic humor and scorn. The book has a hard luster which, however, is not entirely impervious to thrusts of sadness and pity. It is unfortunate that the many snatches of song and verse have lost their charm in the translation. Gardens of This World. By Henry B. Fuller. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. The tour which the Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani and the Seigneur of Hors-Concours make through Spain, around the borders of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, and back to Paris by way of northern Italy is as allegorical as the two travelers' names. It is an adventure of age with youth, of the Latin tradition with the American innovation, of unassertive appreciation with untutored acquisitiveness. It is a pleasantry, sophisticated and cultured, full of wit, satire, and enjoyment. Dancing nuns and trans-Atlantic fliers make a romance out of a tourist's note-book. This is the next to the last piece of work Mr. Fuller finished before his death in July last year, and it is as fortunate an introduction to his neglected list of novels as it is a fitting penult to his achievement as a writer. The Robber Band. By Leonhard Frank. Translated from the German by Cyrus Brooks. Jonathan Cape and Har- rison Smith. $2.50. This novel, first published in Germany over fifteen years ago, introduces another European author to American readers. It is particularly worthy of revival and translation because of the first half of the book, which is an extraordinarily realis- tic study of a group of working boys on both sides of adoles- cence. These boys form the "robber band" and find compensa- tion for the harsh tyranny of home, school, and workshop in dreams of escape to the wild West and a life of adventure. As a temporary substitute for fighting Indians they organ- ire marauding expeditions to bakers' shops and vineyards. One of the boys, "Old Hammer-fist," holds to his dreams after the others have outgrown them and until, in the adventure of art, he finds an outlet. There are passages of violence, coarse- ness, and brutality, for Herr Frank is a realist who does not shrink from any aspect of the lives of the laboring people of whom he writes. As a study of boys and young men in a harsh environment the book is a valuable and luminous piece of work. The Sleeping Fury. By Martin Armstrong. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.50. Desire for passionate love may lie sleeping even in the quiet lives of conventional English women. Sometimes it bursts through the barriers of pride, family, caste, prejudices; some- times it is thrust back into its place; in either case the result may prove tragic. Lady Marbury came upon love only after marriage, a marriage which up to then had been a happy one. She barely succeeded in repressing her wild impulse to throw over everything for the man she loved. Later, through the understanding gained from this bitter experience, she is able to do for her daughter what her own mother would never have been able to do for her. On this slender framework Mr. Arm- strong has written his novel — the kind of novel which depends EWWORLD MONTHLY February issue now out Arthur E. Murphy on Whitehead's Philosophy. The most lucid exposition of the Relativity Theory yet published, by Dr. George De Bothezat, inven- tor of the first successful Helicopter. MIND IDOLATRY, by Claude Bragdon. MOTION PICTURE COMEDY, by Harry Alan POTAMKIN. H. L. MENCKEN, by C. A. Tacke. Stories, poems, book reviews, etc. 3 months trial $1.00 $4.00 a Year New World Monthly, 62 W. 37th St., New York 280 * VISIT RUSSIA Short, low rate $ Winter trips from Including round trip passage and a five day complete service and sightseeing in Leningrad and Moscow. AMALGAMATED BANK Travel Dept. 11-13 Union Square, N. Y. O. or Amalgamated Trust & Savings Bank 111 West Jackson Blvd. Chicago, 111. For information on Spring and Summer trips, write for booklet "N." *^ l^bfl&m- DEMOCRATIC YOUTH Published for young idealists who still be- lieve in democracy. Six months' trial sub- scription, 25c. Sample copy, 10c. ROSCO BRONG, publisher, West Liberty, Ky. When writing to adverttitri pleate mention Tba Nation

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January 22, 1930] The Nation 105 for its success entirely on its power to throw light, subtly and delicately, into the secret places of human emotions. In its best chapters it approaches in excellence the fine studies of E. H. Young, a novelist who has received altogether too little praise in this country; but some of the key situations appear so unconvincing as to weaken the general impression of an otherwise fine book. Love at first sight needs more than the mere statement to convince; and the character of Lord Mar- bury, exquisitely touched upon in spots, falls in pieces before the author is through with it. The book is not a first novel but one is tempted nevertheless to call it "promising." An Hour of the American Novel. By Grant Overton. J. B. Lippincott Company. $1. The Georgian Novel and Air. Robinson. By Storm Jameson. William Morrow & Company. $1. Mr. Overton's purpose is frankly informative rather than critical. He crowds into a very brief space an account of the chief American novelists from Charles Brockden Brown to Joseph Hergesheimer and adds a running commentary to each. He is readable but elementary. Miss Jameson takes even less space to discuss with a hypothetical Mr. Robinson the virtues and defects of contemporary writers of fiction. The latter recognizes the intelligence and honesty of Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and the rest, but finds it impossible to say what their books are "about." His cicerone admits her inability to tell him but expresses the hope that some day these novelists themselves (or some younger successor) will find out. The Roadmender. By Michael Fairless. E. P. Dutton and Company. $1.50. Mr. Fairless's reflections on life, the preparation for death, and death itself have been well known in England for nearly thirty years; their reappearance in this recent American edition only offers fresh proof of their timeless quality. The author became a stonebreaker on a country road, content to find his complete satisfaction in the simplest vista and humblest passerby. His observations are Franciscan in spirit, lowly, gen- erous, loving. A meek good sense directs the peaceful record of his thoughts which glitter in the purity of the strong Chris- tian faith. Blake and Modern Thought— By Denis Saurat. The Dial Press. $4. M. Saurat's reference is not forward from Blake, as one might suppose from the title, but backward. His interest is in the sources of Blake's thought, and, as any reader of his previous volumes on both Milton and Blake would have reason to expect, he finds these sources at the bottom of the occultist well. The Gnostics, the Cabalists, and the Hindus are drawn upon for parallels with Blake which become as convincing as at first they are startling. M. Saurat is undoubtedly partial to the tradition which he here explores with a view of explain- ing Blake, but in large measure he vindicates himself, and at any rate he shows his poet in remarkably clear perspective. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Edited by John Hayward. The Nonesuch Press. Random House. $3.75. Uniform except for color of binding with the Nonesuch one-volume Blake, this compact and beautiful edition of all of Donne that any reader needs entitles both editor and pub- lishers to very high praise. Since the prose of Donne is so volu- minous Mr. Hayward could not give it all, and indeed should not have given it all; but he has furnished excellent specimens of the "Paradoxes and Problemes," the letters, the "Devotions," and the sermons; and has reprinted "Ignatius and His Con- clave," a satire against the Jesuits, for the first time since 1652. The poetry, of course, comes first, in an authentic text. CRITIQUE OF LOVE by FRITZ WITTELS Dr. Fritz Wittels has explained Freud's theory of the dominating power of sex so plainly and sim- ply there is no longer any reason for not under- standing it correctly. There is no reason, either, for considering sex as a terrifying or loathsome disease. Dr. Wittels is an eminent Viennese psychoanalyst, disciple and biographer of Freud. His discussions of sadism, masochism, bisexuality, and narcissism, of love and marriage, of the modern child woman, will clarify in your mind the sanity of sex. $3.50 Dr. Ira S. Wilet "He has performed a valuable service in reducing the principles of Freudian doc- trine to readable form without sacrifice of any in- herent values and without any violence to the sen- sitivities of the public." Dr. A. A. Brill: "A very interesting and stimu- lating exposition of some of the manifestations of love." MACAULAY, Publishers, N. Y. XPLORATIVE itiner- aries worked out with reference to social, economic, historic, artistic and scenic features. Visits to factories, schools, children's com- munities, collective farms and villages . . . art treasures, palaces and workers' rest homes . . . for the adventurous . . . camping In the Caucasus and study of primitive tribes. Small groups, each accompanied by a quali- fied American leader and Russian interpreter. From $410 including express steamship pass- age. Literature available. Individual itineraries also exe- • cuted a Independent yeer-Yound • representation in Russia 2^.30 V/EST -13rd S7S£!I? a NEW V'ORK When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation PUBL)0

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106 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3368 Drama Magdalene BEFORE the end of his sophomore year almost every bud- ding writer composes something in verse or prose about a prostitute. Unconsciously aware that his technique is insecure, he naturally gravitates toward themes with an intrinsic interest and there is no story whose values lie closer to the sur- face than do those in the tale of the daughter of joy — especially if she happen (as in fiction she almost always does) to possess virtues which are vulgarly supposed to be incompatible with her profession. The ostensible point of the tale will, to be sure, vary in accordance with the literary milieu of the writer. If his youth has been nourished upon the literature of the nineties he is almost certain to speak of Splendid Sins and to invoke the Im- placable Aphrodite, while if, on the contrary, his thoughts have been given a sociological turn he will very probably seize the occasion to inveigh against the hypocrisy of society and not improbably reveal that the president of the Purity League was himself seen on a particularly dark night bending his furtive steps in the direction of the forbidden quarter. If, however, neither of these effects appeal to him, if, that is to say, he has given his first allegiance neither to Oscar Wilde nor to the less imaginative followers of Ibsen, then he is certain to belong to what, for want of a better name, we may call the Tout Com- prendre school, with the result that his prostitute will stand revealed as not essentially different from her more fortunate sisters and that, like Camille, she will ultimately give up her own happiness for the sake of the man whom she has come to love too well. But the more the story changes the more it is the same thing. The ironies are so obvious that one can hardly develop them without offering a sort of insult to the intelligence of the reader; and there is, besides, still another difficulty involved in the fact that the story has too much interest of a sort not primarily artistic or intellectual, and not even the frequency with which the prostitute has been discussed has served to deprive her entirely of her secret fascination. She stands for sin with a capital S ; it is she who most conspicuously violates the most provoking of all the taboos and she who assists in the breaking of the one commandment of which everyone knows the number. Only the most abandoned can wholly escape a sort of irrational envy when her name is mentioned, and there are few so respect- able that they do not feel a curiosity which they are glad to conceal under the guise of an artistic interest. This fact is, of course, highly advantageous to the young writer, since he may be perfectly sure that he will never completely bore his audi- ence with that story, but the more accomplished craftsman avoids it for the same reason. Success is too easy and he has no desire to compete in a field where the veriest third-rater can produce the illusion of being almost as good as he. Now Mr. Robert Sherwood is not a sophomore. On the contrary he is the author of several plays of which one, "The Road to Rome," was generally praised for its air of sophistica- tion. Yet Mr. Sherwood is responsible for "Waterloo Bridge," now to be seen at the Fulton Theater, and in it he has written, with singularly few variations, the sophomore's story of the Fallen Woman and the Nice Young Man. From the moment when one sees the heroine take up her accustomed stand on the bridge after explaining to a companion how her effort to "go straight" has met with failure, one knows exactly what to expect and never once is one given an opportunity to find oneself agreeably wrong. The innocent and lonesome soldier is not long in appearing and not long in mistaking her for the virgin of his innocent dreams. He proposes an honorable marriage with the promptitude which becomes him, and the prostitute, with the fundamental goodness of heart which becomes her no less, man- ages to escape after leaving a note behind. Only one scene still remains and if anyone in the whole theater doubted that the scene would be Waterloo Bridge once more and that there, un- der the moonlight, the two would be reunited, then that person must have been someone extraordinarily unfamiliar with both the stage and those movies which Mr. Sherwood professionally criticizes and from which he must have imbibed the idea that his story was worth telling again. Some plays are unconvincing because they are obviously un- true to life; others for no other reason than that they have been seen so often that they inevitably remind one of the theater; and the present piece belongs to the latter class. For all I know, events something like those it recounts may have happened fre- quently and, in so far as I am able to judge again a bit of writing so much like countless others, I am inclined to suspect that the author has done a reasonably competent job. But a tale told so often inevitably lulls the faculties to sleep. It is said that the English revue "Wake Up and Dream" (Selwyn) underwent a number of changes intended to adapt it more to American taste before it was presented at the Selwyn. Even in its original form it must, however, have been more in the style of our spectacular exhibitions than in that of Chariot's "intimate" entertainments. Yet it is, nevertheless, sufficiently different in the decor and the dancing to be refreshing. Jack Buchanan and Jessie Matthews are the featured performers, but the dancing of Tilly Losch and her corps is the finest thing in the show. As a whole it belongs with the very best current entertainments of the sort. A new Dance Repertory Theater (Maxine Elliott's) is cele- brating its opening by a series of eight recitals in which Martha Graham, Tamiris, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman are presented. The art of Miss Graham, though very widely ac- claimed, seems to me to be almost too slight to fill a stage, but the vivacity, strength, and fire of Tamiris are electrifying. Joseph Wood Krutch Films As You Were A CURIOUS change has come over Hollywood within the space of a single year. Last winter when the film pro- ducers decided to take a plunge in the production of talk- ing pictures, Hollywood was all in a state of turmoil as it peered anxiously into the future and made frantic efforts to adjust itself to the new conditions. Today, to judge by its recent films, it must be again enjoying the comfortable feeling of restored stability, in fact, of being back where it was before all this rumpus began. There is indeed something almost un- canny in the ease with which the new medium has been turned to the old uses and the whole industry placed back on its accus- tomed rails. After all the talk about the revolution that the talking picture was going to make in the art of the cinema, one is startled to find that the Hollywood talkie of today is barely distinguishable from its familiar silent predecessor. To be sure, subtitles have given place to spoken dialogue, but in refutation of the early fears that dialogue is bound to slow up action, one finds the talkie just as fast moving as the silent picture ever was. Side by side with this undeniably positive achievement Holly- wood has succeeded in retaining practically all the other features which characterized its typical product. In spite of the Russians and the Germans, it still glories in the straight photography

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January 22, 1930] The Nation 107 □ THEATRES □ □ D FILMS □ LEO BULGAKOV Theatrb Associates, Inc., presents AT THE BOTTOM by MAXIM GORKY New version by William L. Laurence POPULAR PRICES $2.50 to 75c Phone reservations accepted — Circle 1407 117 AT TbriRI? THEATRE— 50th St.. Bet. 6th & 7th Aves. Eve., 8:50 yV J\J^U\JS\r MATINEES Thursday and Saturday, 2:30 Kenneth liacgowan and J. V. Reed present BASIL SYDNEY and MARY ELLIS in CHILDREN of DARKNESS A Rich Satire on Exploiters of All Ages by Edwin Justus Mayer, author of "The Firebrand" ¥>TT "Plif PiRE1 THEATRE — 47th Street, West of Broadway DlUltlURr, Evening*, 8:50— MaU., Wed. and Sat., 2:40. Civic repertory I4th St.-6th Ave. Eves. 8:30. 50c, $1, $1.50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:30. EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Fri. eve., Jan. 17, "Master Builder," Sat. Mat., Jan. 18, "Peter Pan," Bat., Mon. and Wed. eves. Jan. 18, 20, 22, "The Living Corpse," Tues. ere. and Thurs. Mat., Jan. 21 and 23, "Sea Gull," Thurs. eve., Jan. 23, Jan. 24, "The Would-Be Gentleman." e. and Thurs. Mat., Jan. 21 ant "Mile. Mourrat," Fri. eve., Ja -WILLIAM HARRIS, JR., PRESENTS- "THE FIRST PLAY OF THE SEASON WITH TEETH IN IT." ROBERT LITTELL, WORLD. CRIMINAL CODE By MARTIN FLAVIN NATIONAL THEATRE with ARTHUR BYRON 41st St., West of 7th Ave. Evenings 8 :50 Matinees Wednesdays & Saturdays, 2 :30 The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present in her ORIGINAL CHARACTKK 8KETCHES (Including 6 new ones) Every Eve. including Sunday except Monday £ Thursday nights at 8 :50. fTillf FTiV THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats., Thurs. Kj\Jm.VjU I Bnd Sat> 2:30. VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00. RUTH DRAPER The Theatre Guild Presents METEOR By 8. N. BEHRMAN t~* 11 Z 1*1 THE A., 52nd St. W. of Broadway VJUIIU K\gs. 8:50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:40 The Theatre Guild Presents RED RUST By KIRCHON & OUSPENSKY Martin TK^r-ir THEA., 45th St. W. of 8th A*****1"1 "CtK Evgs. 8:40. Mats. Thurs & Aye. Sat. 3:40 "Within the Fortnight" appears this week on the page following. •Starting today (Thurs.) Jan. 16th lute*8" « introducing a remarkable Soviet artiste OXANA PODELSNAYA as the woman -leader of the Cossacks — and in the cast — NIKOLAI SALTYKOV. who played the martjred-sailor of "POTEMKJN" FILM GUILD CINEMA Direction : Symon Gould 52 West 8th St., bet. 5th and 6th Ares. Popular Prices Spring 6095-5090 Continuous Daily Noon to Midnight Special Forenoon Prices: Sat. -Sun., 18-2 — 50c. Weekdays, 12-2— S5c. 55th Street Playhouse *»•* f "8t •* * 7th Avenue Popular Prices — Continuous from 1 until Midnight NOW— SECOND BIG WEEK THE HINDI SCREEN CLASSIC "THROW OF THE DICE" enacted and produced by the creators of "Shiraz" and "The Light of Asia." ". . . amazingly beautiful." — New York Timet MATINEES : GOOD SEATS. ALL PBICES. AT BOX OFFICE WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE ARLISS "DISRAELI" (A Vltaphone All-Talking Picture) CENTRAL THEATRE Broadway and 47th St. Pally 9:45 — 8:4ft Sunday S — 6 — 8:45 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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108 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3368 which refuses to look for anything but the obvious. Its treat- ment of character and dramatic situation is still as impersonal as it is in a news reel. And in its choice of subject matter, with a few rare exceptions, it clings stubbornly to the kind of story that is best appreciated by juvenile intelligence. But even on the existing popular level of Hollywood pic- tures there are degrees of quality and some established standards of competence. It is by bearing in mind these standards that one can at all comment on the recent crop of pictures on Broadway. Choosing the most notable among the latter, it is possible to say that "The Virginian" (Rialto) is quite up to the standard of a good Hollywood "Western," with perhaps a little more respect for the realities of the life described than is usual in this highly conventional but entertaining genre; that "The Mighty" (Rivoli) is as thrilling a drama of the underworld as a story of a gunman reformed by the love of a respectable young lady and enforcing the law against his old associates can possibly be ; and that "The Laughing Lady" (Paramount), which attempts a picture of society life, is rather more deliberate and heavy in the mechanics of its plot than can be acquiesced in even by the movie-trained credulity. For real originality in the use of sound on the screen one has to turn to the remarkable animated cartoons designed by Walter Desney. One of them, "Spring Time," belonging to the Silly Symphony series, is shown on the same program with "The Virginian." Like its predecessor in the same series, "The Skeleton Dance," "Spring Time" makes an extremely clever use of characteristic rhythm and melody to enhance its grotesque humor and fancy. Alexander Bakshy WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See •At the Bottom— Waldorf— 116 W. 50th St. •Berkeley Square — Lyceum — E. 4-5th St. •••Bitter Sweet— Ziegfeld— 54th St. & 6th Ave. ••Candlelight— Empire— B'dway & 40th St. ••Children of Darkness — Biltmore— W. 47th St. •Civic Repertory — See advertisement. •Criminal Code — National — W. 41st St. •Death Takes a Holiday— Barrymore Theater— 47th St., W. of B'dway. ••First Mrs. Fraser— Playhouse— E. 48th St. •Journey's End— Miller— 124 W. 43rd St. ••June Moon — Broadhurst — W. 44th St. ••Meteor— Guild— W. 52nd St. ••Playboy of the Western World — Irish — 7th Ave. & Christopher St. •Red Rust— Beck— 302 W. 45th St . ••Strictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. •••Sweet Adeline — Hammerstein — Broadway & 53rd St. •Waterloo Bridge— Fulton— W. 46th St. ••Angels on Earth — Yiddish Art Theatre — Broadway & 28th St. •Drama. ••Comedy. •••Musical. Films Disraeli — Central Theater — Broadway and 47th St. Demon of the Steppes — Film Guild — 52 W. 8th St. Throw of the Dice — 55th St. Playhouse — East of Seventh Ave. Concerts and Recitals Fifth Concert Judson Celebrity Series — Carnegie — Wed. Eve., Jan. 22. Olga Averino — Town Hall — Wed. Eve., Jan. 22 — Russian So- prano. Manhattan Symphony — Mecca Temple — Sun. Eve., Jan. 26. Philharmonic Students' Concert — Carnegie — Sat. Eve., Jan. 18. Philharmonic Symphony — Carnegie — Thurs. Eve., Jan. 23; Fri- Aft., Jan. 24; Sun. Aft., Jan. 19 — Metropolitan Opera Jan. 26. Philharmonic Symphony — Junior Orchestral Concert — Sat. Morn., Jan. 25, Feb. 1 — Carnegie Hall. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st St., E. of Broadway. Albert Spaulding — Carnegie Hall — Sun. Eve., Jan. 26. Young People's Concert Hour — Town Hall — Sat. Aft., Jan. 25. Why a Training School for JEWISH SOCIAL WORK? BECAUSE experience has shown that the social worker can only be successful if he knows and reckons with the social, religious and cultural background of the people among whom he works. BECAUSE the Jewish group in America represent! a religious and cultural group possessing a highly dis- tinctive character. BECAUSE the social worker who identifies his work with the Jewish group in America should, by special training and knowledge, be able to contribute to the problems of its adjustment to American life with a view to its own greater happiness and to the greater enrichment of the culture of America. College graduates are invited to examine carefully the advantages of Jewish social work as a profession. Scholarships and Fellowships ranging from $150 to $1,000 for each school year are available for especially qualified students. For further information address M. J. Kawf, Director The Training School For Jewish Social Work A graduate school 71 W. 47th St, New York City D a DEBATE □ □ A Momentous 3 -Cornered DEBATE!!! Which Offers More to the Workers of the World? COMMUNISM, or ->. SOCIALISM, or / CAPITALISM • NEARING says Communism Noted Sociologist and Lecturer Fenner BROCKWAY says Socialism Brilliant Labor Member of British Parliament Prof. Edwin R. A. SELIGMAN says Capitalism Foremost Economist, Columbia University Chairmen, SAMUEL UNTERMYER & ROGER N. BALDWIN Subject RESOLVED: That Capitalism offers more to the workers of the world than Socialism or Communism. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1930—8:30 P. M. MECCA TEMPLE— 133 W. 55th STREET Reserved Seats $1.00. $1.50, $1.75, $2.00 & $2.75 Reservation!* advisable now tor beat seat locations Obtainable by mail or in person at Civic Club, 18 E. 10th Street; Columbia University Bookstore; Rand School Bookstore : 7 E. 15th Street, and New School Bookshop, 465 W. 23rd St. Also by mail or in person at office* of LEAGUE FOR PUBLIC DISCUSSION 11 W. 42nd St. Chickerint- 5789 or Sprint; 171* TO OUT-OF-TOWNERS— This debate will be published in book form. Reserve your copy now by mailing $1.00.

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International Relations Section Madame Sun Yat-sen Keeps Faith By RANDALL GOULD A CHINESE attached to the present Nationalist Gov- ernment once called upon Madame Sun Yat-sen at her green-shuttered house in the French Concession and said, in effect: "If you were anyone but Madame Sun, we would cut your head off." And she replied, smiling cheerily at her sullen visitor: "If you were the revolutionists pou pretend to be, you'd cut it off anyway!" After only four brief years, Dr. Sun Yat-sen has already been elevated to the status of a Chinese saint whose doctrines, like those of Christ, are excellent to use as wall mottoes but "too impractical" for serious guidance in the workaday werld. Madame Sun's intransigence lies in her refusal to believe that Dr. Sun's ideas will not work. The peculiar obnoxiousness of this attitude lies in the fact that she is not merely a sorrowing widow, but in her own right a staunch individual who is keeping the words of Dr. Sun alive. Fully to understand the reasons why Madame Sun as a Left-Wing leader is particularly harassing to the present decidedly Right- Wing government, it must be borne in mind how closely she is linked with that government by ties of blood. First of all, she is the sister of the former Soong May-ling, now Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the Presi- dent of the State Council. Likewise is she the sister of Soong Tse-voo, Minister of Finance and close to Chiang himself in importance. She is sister to Madame H. H. Kung; Kung is Minister of Industry, Commerce, and Labor, as well as being a direct descendant of Confucius. Sun Fo, only child of Dr. Sun and at present Minister of Railways, is Madame Sun's step-son. Against all these and the things they stand for Madame Sun set herself firmly in a statement issued in Hankow on July 14, 1927, and she has never once since that time stirred from her position. The statement began thus: We have reached a point where definition is necessary and where some members of the party executive are so defining the principles and policies of Dr. Sun Yat-sen that they seem to me to do violence to Dr. Sun's ideas and ideals. Feeling thus, I must dissociate myself from active participation in carrying out the new policies of the party. In the last analysis, all revolutions must be social revolutions, based upon fundamental changes in society; otherwise it is not a revolution, but merely a change of government The statement then pointed out that Dr. Sun's third vital principle, that of the "livelihood of the people," was at stake in the existing crisis, and it was_ emphasized that Dr. Sun had felt this principle to be basic in the revolution. In this principle [said Madame Sun] we find his anal- ysis of social values and the place of the laboring and peasant classes defined. These classes become the basis of our strength in our struggle to overthrow imperialism, cancel the unequal treaties that enslave us, and effectively unify the country. These are the new pillars for the build- ing up of a free China. Without their support the Kuomin- tang, as a revolutionary party, becomes weak and chaotic and illogical in its social platform; without their support, political issues are vague. If we adopt any policy that weakens these supports, we shake the very foundation of our party, betray the masses, and are falsely loyal to our leader. . . . We must not betray the people. We have built up in them a great hope. They have placed in us a great faith. And there is a bit about the background of Dr. Sun : Dr. Sun was poor. Not until he was fifteen years old did he have shoes for his feet, and he lived in a hilly region where it is not easy to be a barefoot boy. His family, until he and his brother were grown, lived almost from hand to mouth in a hut. As a child he ate the cheap- est food — not rice, for rice was too dear. His main nour- ishment was sweet potatoes. Many times Dr. Sun told me that it was in those early days as a poor son of a poor peasant family that he became a revolutionary. He was determined that the lot of the Chinese peasant should not continue to be so wretched, that little boys in China should have shoes to wear and rice to eat. For this ideal he gave forty years of his life. Yet today the lot of the Chinese peasant is even more wretched than in those days when Dr. Sun was driven by his great sense of human wrongs into a life of revolution. And today men who profess to follow his banner talk of classes and think in terms of a "revolution" that would virtually disregard the sufferings of those millions. . . . In giving out the Hankow statement Madame Sun was doing a hard and dangerous thing which meant not only a risk of life — which would mean little to a woman of such caliber — but also the breaking of family ties and a generation of great enmity. Almost two years of voluntary exile fol- lowed the issuance of the Hankow declaration. Then in Berlin on May 6, 1929, Madame Sun announced: I am proceeding to China for the purpose of attending the removal of the remains of Dr. Sun Yat-sen to the Purple Mountain where he desired to be buried. In order to avoid any possible misunderstanding, I have to state that I emphatically adhere to my declaration made at Hankow on July 14, 1927, in which I announced my withdrawal from active participation in the work of the Kuomintang, on account of counter-revolutionary policy and activities of the central executive committee. . . . It must therefore be abundantly clear that my attend- ance at the burial will not mean and is not to be interpreted as in any sense implying a modification or reversal of my decision to abstain from any direct or indirect work of the Kuomintang so long as its leadership is opposed to the funda- mental policies of Dr. Sun; namely, the policy of effective anti-imperialism, the policies of cooperation with Soviet Russia and the Workers and Peasant policy. When these policies were the moving forces of the revolution we made rapid progress toward the realization of the principles of the party. Now that the three policies have been discarded, our party has again become the tool of militarists and counter-revolutionaries. . . . In spite of her absence from the country, Madame Sun had been elected to the central executive committee of the Kuomintang at its hand-picked congress of last spring. Up- on her arrival at Peiping to start the long funeral journey

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T 110 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3368 from the Western Hills to the new mausoleum just outside the city walls of Nanking, Madame Sun made it abundantly clear that she had no intention of lending her name and reputation to the government or party. Keeping herself apart even from members of her family, she went through with the long and trying ceremonials, saw the casket safely deposited in its million-dollar resting place, and returned to her house in the Rue Moliere in Shanghai. For some time she maintained silence. Then, on August 1, she fired a shot which would have echoed throughout the country had not suppression intervened. This took the form of a telegram sent to the Anti-Imperialist League in Berlin on the occasion of the international anti-war day. In view of the Sino- Russian tension, the message was timely to say the least. "Untimely" appears to have been the word favored by vari- ous frenzied callers who presently came to ask repudiation, retraction, or at least a promise to be good in future. The telegram in question read: While the oppressed nationalities today form a solid front against imperialist war and militarism, the reac- tionary Nanking Government is combining forces with the imperialists in brutal repressions against the Chinese masses. Never has the treacherous character of the counter- revolutionary Kuomintang leaders been so shamelessly ex- posed to the world as today. Having betrayed the Na- tionalist revolution, they have inevitably degenerated into imperialist tools and attempted to provoke war with Russia. But the Chinese masses, undaunted by repression and undeceived by lying propaganda, will fight only on the side of revolution. Terrorism will only serve to mobilize still broader masses and strengthen our determination to tri- umph over the present bloody reaction. . . . This message was at first ignored locally. English- language papers of Shanghai felt that they had had enough of fighting with the government; one of the leading British- owned dailies was barred from the mails ; they saw no reason for stirring up another row. A distorted version, translated from the Japanese and portraying Madame Sun as advocat- ing a terroristic policy, finally appeared in one British paper which ignored a true version sent in as correction. The Chinese press took no chances with any version. But gov- ernment officials and party chiefs soon learned of the latest statement. Their emotions, if rumor be true, were far from uniform. Some apparently felt a sympathy they did not dare express publicly. Others were furious. When efforts were made to distribute the message in Chinese in the form of leaflets, the distributor was arrested. Some one threw hand- bills off the roof of the large Sincere Company store on Nanking Road, and when police found that the bills con- tained the offending statement in Chinese they developed a lively curiosity as to the identity of the distributors. Madame Sun herself said: "I feel good inside" — touching her bosom — "since I sent that telegram. It was necessary to express myself. What happens to me personally as a result is not important." Although her house is watched, although visitors to it are followed, although the tick-tacking of her typewriter at night has been mistaken for "a secret wireless to Moscow," Madame Sun is serene and without bitterness or dejection. Her feeling today is the feeling of two years ago, when she wrote: "There is no despair in my heart for the revolution. My disheartenment is only for the path into which some of those who had been leading the revolution have strayed." Address City State Arrested, jailed, transported in chains to share with hundreds of others the harrowing life of a penal colony — all without trial or ex- planation— Prisoners of Mussolini Such is the story of Francesco Fausto Nitti, nephew of Italy's former Premier, who relates his gruesome experi- ences in the NORTH AMERICAN, REVIEW for February This unique and dramatic personal document — vivid sidelight on current world history — is typical of the features in every issue of The North American Review. Other articles in the forthcoming numbers that reflect for intel- ligent readers the manifold and fascinating problems of modern life are: Our Harassed Children Josephine Daskam Bacon Civilization at the Bridge Table Ely Culbertson This Is Anastasia Gleb Botkin Who Caused the Panic of 1929? H. Parker Willis The Protestant Confessional George B. Cutten Psychology of Crime Joseph Jastrow The Lady Boss Estelle Mendelsohn SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY OFFER 5 MONTHS FOR ONE DOLLAR On the newsstand The North American Review sells for 49 cents per copy. You may have the next 5 numbers for one dollar — half the newsstand price. Each edition of The North American Review is limited. We, therefore, suggest that you fill in and sign the coupon now. m» - — — mm — — -• — — — — — ■■ mm m ■_ mb mm > « « ^ ■■ b m» mm » ■ _ mm Nation 1-30 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW 9 East 37th St., New York City For the enclosed $1.00 send me The North American Review for 5 months. (Canadian price $1.25 — Foreign price $1.50.) Name — _____ When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 1930 No. 3369 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS Ill EDITORIALS: The Hopes for London 114 Buncoing the Farmer 115 Exploiting Alaska 116 The New Magazines 116 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 117 HARVARD— SCHOOL FOR SCRUBWOMEN. By Gardner Jackson 118 PROHIBITION AND POLITICS. By Paul Y. Anderson 119 WOODBERRY— A GREAT TEACHER. By Harold Kellock 120 DOLLARS AND SHIPS AT LONDON 122 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 124 CORRESPONDENCE 124 BOOKS AND DRAMA: Love Songs After the Aztec. By Joseph T. Shipley 126 Cultural History. By Henry Hazlitt 126 Dime Novels. By Herbert Asbury 127 Religio Medici. By Joseph Wood Krutch 127 Van Buren. By Claude G. Bowers 129 The City of Dreams. By Walter Gutman 130 More War Stories. By Tames B. Wharton 131 All Kinds of Poets. By Eda Lou Walton 132 Books in Brief 132 Drama: Ideal Corruption. By Joseph Wood Krutch 134 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: South Africa's "White" Problem 136 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 137 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWTSOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 34, Clifton Gardens, W. 9, London, England. -npHE YOUNG PLAN is in effect as far as the confer- X ence at The Hague could give effect to it, although the governments of the various countries concerned must give their approval before the plan can become legally operative, and the charter of the Bank for International Settlements must be accepted by the Swiss Parliament before the bank can be organized. The signature of the protocol, a volu- minous document in some twenty-six different parts, was delayed mainly by the effort of Germany to avoid the possi- bility of sanctions in case it defaulted on its reparation pay- ments, and by the vexatious difficulties which the settlement of the reparation claims of Rumania and Czecho-Slovakia against Hungary presented. The final adjustment at each of these points was, of course, a compromise. No sanctions are to be applied to Germany until the World Court has had an opportunity to pass upon the case, and Hungary, while paying more than it expected to pay after 1943, will be allowed to use a substantial part of its payments to satisfy the property claims of its subjects. A gratifying feature of the agreement is the release of Austria from all reparation obligations. Early steps will now be taken for the issuance of the first instalment of German bonds, representing the so- called mobilization or commercialization of the German an- nuities, and the personnel of the directors of the international bank will, of course, be actively canvassed. Burdensome as the annuities are, the Young Plan has at least gone a long way toward taking the reparations question out of politics, and for that the creditor countries as well as Germany may be grateful. DESPITE THE FACT that the House of Representa- tives has passed the bill providing for a Haitian com- mission the measure seems to be in for hard sledding in the Senate, with some doubt as to whether or not it will be favorably acted upon in that body. Senator King, in voicing his disapproval of the commission, has again called for our retirement from the Island. Senator Borah is not, he declares, opposed to the commission, but he feels "that some things ought to be done without waiting for the report of the com- mission. We should appoint a civilian as high commissioner, or as governor, for that is what it is in Haiti. Secondly, we should give the Haitian people a free and untrammeled elec- tion." He added the truth that "we have not assisted them in the slightest in political affairs or in preparing them for self- government. . . . The United States Government ought to be ashamed to stand before the world at this time, with all our professions of peace and against military power, in the attitude of keeping a military heel upon a helpless people." That is, of course, what every American ought to believe. We cannot but think that this is a policy which will appeal to Mr. Hoover. If he feels that he must have a commission for face-saving purposes and in order to render the change of policy more palatable in certain quarters, by all odds let him have the commission. But in the end he must decide, and he must decide aright. HOWARD LEE McBAIN, professor of Constitutional Law at Columbia University, has in an admirable letter to the New York World taken sharpest issue with Mr. Hoover's hand-picked and highly respectable Commis- sion on Law Observance and Enforcement. Professor Mc- Bain discusses the recommendations in the Wickersham re- port on prohibition enforcement point by point. The "high standing and ability" of the commission, he declares, make it impossible for him to believe that the report was prematurely forced out of them by political pressure ; therefore it must be taken "as the product of its [the commission's] mature de- liberation and conviction. . . . This being so, it seems fair to say that this report is one of the most extraordinary public documents that has ever emanated from a non-partisan agency of inquiry." By "extraordinary" he means, at the kindest, "ill-considered." The Wickersham report displays, accord- ing to Mr. McBain, "an amazing ignorance of, or indiffer- ence to, both the law and the actual practice of district attor- neys under the law." Nor does he retract a word of this criticism despite a sharp answer from Mr. Wickersham which, in fact, fails to meet Mr. McBain's chief objection. THIS OBJECTION IS A SERIOUS ONE. The re- port's last point would permit the prosecuting attorney to decide whether to place a given offense in the class of a

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112 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3369 misdemeanor or a felony — after the case by the commis- sion's own proposal has been classed as a misdemeanor. The commission, that is, in order to expedite justice and clear the federal courts of some of the thousands of prohibition cases that clog the dockets, has recommended that a class of "casual or slight violations" — not felonies — be specifically de- fined by Congress; that in order to avoid the delays of an indictment and a jury trial these cases be heard before a United States commissioner who will report his findings to a district judge for sentence; that if found guilty the offender may demand a jury trial; and that if he does demand a jury trial the district attorney may then decide whether or not the case shall be proceeded against as a felony. In other words, a "casual violation" — by definition not a felony — is a felony if the district attorney says it is. This, of course, is confusion worse confounded. It is difficult to doubt the reasoning and judgment of so sound a constitutional lawyer as Mr. McBain. He speaks with authority not to be lightly gainsaid. So far he has not been successfully answered. A GOOD DEAL OF PREMATURE JUBILATION has been aroused over the "surrender" of the New York Legislature to Governor Roosevelt on the power ques- tion. The bill introduced by the Republican majority, it is true, does accept the principle that the St. Lawrence power sites shall forever remain inalienable to the people of New York, but as far as we can see that is really about all that it does do. It sets up a commission of five members to study and report plans for the development of power and a form of contract for its sale. It provides that, "if a develop- ment by a State authority is recommended in a plan which is approved by the legislature," then a corporate body of trus- tees shall be established with the powers necessary to carry out the plan. But as Senator Knight, majority leader, pointed out in an interview published on January 19: The so-called Roosevelt policy on water-power, as stated in his message to the legislature, is State develop- ment and State construction of transmission lines through a water-power authority. Now the bill just introduced does not declare any such policy. So far as we can see, this is absolutely true. Further, as the Governor himself pointed out in an address delivered before the New York State Bar Association on January 18, the bill omits an important statement of policy contained in the Gov- ernor's bill of last year, namely: The development of the said power sites and the gen- eration, transmission, and distribution of power therefrom shall be made in such manner and on such terms as to as- sure fair and impartial treatment of all consumers at the lowest rates compatible with a fair and reasonable return on the actual cost thereof. We would not underestimate the gain involved in reaching any reasonable agreement for the development of New York's power resources. Nor would we detract one iota from the credit due to Governor Roosevelt and former Governor Smith for their admirable work. To those interested in seeing that the benefits of such development go to the people as a whole, however, we would point out that the battle is not ended, but just begun. Any plan recommended by the commission must be put through the legislature and, while one skirmish has been won, no one should imagine that the forces so long opposed to State development for public ad- vantage rather than private gain have reached the end of their resources. THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION closed its inquiry into the publicity activities of the utility com- panies by refusing to allow their counsel, Bernard F. Wea- dock, to insert into the record something like a hundred docu- ments purporting to show a concerted drive for public owner- ship which made necessary "defensive" propaganda on the part of the companies. Commissioner McCulloch ruled, correctly enough, that the commission had no authority to go into the activities of anyone but the utility companies them- selves. Mr. Weadock was, however, allowed to list for the record the organizations that have lifted their horrendous heads to affright the timorous rulers of our electric empire — the League for Industrial Democracy, the National Popu- lar Government League, the People's Legislative Service, and the Public Ownership League of America. He might have pointed out, but probably did not, that the yearly budget of all of them combined would perhaps be big enough to keep one or two of his State committees going for a month if they were not too active. RACIAL INTEGRITY has long been a phrase to con- jure with, and its magical potency continues to be in- voked notwithstanding repeated condemnation by the United States courts. The city of Richmond, Virginia, in its zeal for the preservation of racial integrity, undertook by ordi- nance early in 1929 to designate the parts of the city in which whites only might reside and to exclude Negro resi- dents from such districts. Some months ago a Negro, J. D. Deans, who was denied by the city the right to occupy a house which he owned in a district set aside exclusively for whites, won his case in the Federal District Court, and the decision of the lower court has just been sustained by the Circuit Court of Appeals. The city has, of course, a right of appeal to the Supreme Court, and the Assistant City Attorney, who has conducted the case, has announced that an appeal will be taken notwithstanding that segregation by ordinance has already been defeated in Louisiana and in Dallas, Indianapolis, Norfolk, and Louisville. The persist- ence of Richmond in doing what the Supreme Court will almost certainly set aside constitutes a kind of moral con- tempt of court for which, unfortunately, there is no legal penalty. It is taking an unconscionably long time for the South to learn that discrimination against the Negro simply because he is a Negro is unconstitutional. THE PREPOSTEROUS PROPOSAL sponsored by the United States Department of Labor for regis- tration of all aliens has been officially indorsed by the American Federation of Labor. The ostensible aim of the federation is to prevent the smuggling in of laborers from Mexico, and probably Canada, who will further complicate the unemployment problem. The actual result of such regis- tration, as has been pointed out many times, will be aid and comfort to witch-hunters of all sorts. The unhappy alien who cannot show a registration card — for whatever reason — will be hounded out of employment. And it is very easy to sit down and think up reasons for withholding the precious certificate of worthiness. Only good aliens will hold cards,

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January 29, 1930] The Nation 113 of that one may be quite certain. And "good" means regular according to the customs and opinions of any given locality. The A. F. of L. is again aligning itself with regularity — with Big Business, respectability, with the maintenance of the status quo ; and one may respectfully point out to the officials of the American labor movement that only when labor has been in united and militant opposition to these manifesta- tions of the capitalist system have such gains as it now enjoys been obtained and sustained. The eight-hour day, the forty- four-hour week, a living wage, proper working conditions, where they exist, were not secured by holding hands with the employers, but by outspoken and independent opposition. The A. F. of L. too often is finding itself on the wrong side of the fence. THAT A MEMBERSHIP CARD in the Communist Party is not ground for deportation of an alien is the decision of Federal Judge Charles C. Simons of Detroit in the recent case of Joseph Paczkowski. Arrested in 1920 in the Red raids, he was found to have the fatal ticket in his pocket, and this was the ground for the original deportation order. He was one of the group saved at Ellis Island by Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School, who pointed out that the United States could not deport to Russia while refusing that country diplomatic recognition. Since then, Paczkowski has lived in Detroit, has conducted a restaurant, graduated from a motion-picture operators' school, and is completing high-school courses in night school. Recently he attempted to secure final citizenship papers — he made his first application, by a coincidence, on the very day of his first arrest — and was seized when he appeared for hearing. Judge Simons dismissed the case and at the same time rebuked the agents of the Department of Justice for "hounding" Pacz- kowski for nearly ten years, causing him great personal incon- venience and expense, not to mention detention in jail. The only evidence against him at any time was the membership card. The court pointed out that Paczkowski had never been asked whether he believed in the principles of the party — he maintained that he never had — and that he was not told of his right to counsel before his original trial. GOVERNOR YOUNG of California has written a long apologia to Fremont Older's criticism of him for turn- ing the Mooney and Billings case over to the State pardon board after spending many months on the testimony — or at least with the testimony in his possession. In answer to Older's remark that an hour with the testimony ought to be enough to convince anybody of Mooney's innocence, the Gov- ernor replies plaintively: I am not yet convinced as to the innocence of these men. ... I do not think for a minute that the cases are so weak that they cannot safely be intrusted to the Supreme Court. ... I cannot conceive of anything fairer to every- one concerned than an honest and conscientious continuation of this study on the part of the Supreme Court, the pardon board, and myself. To Mooney and Billings, now spending their fourteenth year in jail, leisurely contemplation of their case will not recom- mend itself too highly. It took the Governor a year to make up his mind that he did not want to rule on the case and wanted instead to "pass the buck." Mr. Older's character- istic reply to his plea for more time and more light was short and to the point. He said: "The pardon appeals rest on proved facts and no man who is aware of these facts, as Gov- ernor Young is, can doubt the innocence' of these two men." WHEN IN TROUBLE, apply to the Soviet Govern- ment. This seems to be the present policy of the Administration. A few weeks ago it was the rescue of Eiel- son and Borland. Next it is the American minister to Persia, who according to a recent Federated Press dispatch has lately traveled across the Soviet Union on a visa granted by the Russian Government. Travel by automobile through the mountains along the southwestern frontier of Persia in winter is disagreeable and dangerous, so Mr. Charles C. Hart, our new representative at Teheran, sought to go through Russia. Through Boris E. Skvirsky, unofficial Soviet repre- sentative at Washington, permission was granted and Mr. Hart received his visa when he passed through Paris. The Bolsheviks do not claim to be Christians, but when they remember Secretary Kellogg's refusal to let Mme Kollontai pass through this country on her way to Mexico they appar- ently recall also the words of St. Paul, "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." THE DREADFUL DISASTER in California, in which the pilots and fourteen passengers of a regular passenger liner lost their lives, is but another in a long series of accidents to passenger planes. Each one makes it more evident that commercial transportation in this country cannot be considered to be firmly established until the efficiency of the German lines can be achieved. The German planes fly hundreds of thousands of miles annually with not over one serious accident a year. There is something so appalling in being burned to death in a crash that the public will not embark on airliners in any great numbers until accidents are practically eliminated. In this connection it is interesting to note that the Curtiss Tanager plane, which, on January 6, was awarded a prize of $100,000 by the Daniel Guggen- heim Fund for winning the safe aircraft competition, has nothing revolutionary about it. It does, however, embody a number of ideas to the end that the lay pilot may "fly with satisfaction, security, efficiency, and safety." An officer of the Curtiss company declared that this was the most sig- nificant competition in the history of airplane development. But at the same time an official of the Guggenheim Fund declared that a fool-proof plane was an impossibility. Of this we are not so sure ; we are eagerly awaiting developments of the Spanish aero-gyroscope invention and similar planes. IN THE WASHINGTON letter published in our issue of January 1 there appeared an account of the recent discharge of Frank K. Boal, Washington correspondent of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and six other papers owned by Mr. Paul Block. According to the information given to our correspondent, Mr. Boal's discharge was connected with the alleged fact that Mr. Block was under financial obligations to Charles E. Mitchell, president of the National City Bank. Mr. Block informs us that he is entirely unacquainted with Mr. Mitchell, that he is under no obligations of any kind to the National City Bank, and that his only connection with that organization is a small personal checking account. We are glad to accept Mr. Block's assurance on this point, and we sincerely regret the injustice done him.

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114 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3369 The Hopes for London AS we go to press the naval conference is meeting in London. King George has made his speech of wel- come and, marvelous as it appears, the tones of his voice were relayed across the Atlantic and all over the American continent — a far cry from the days of that other King George who could not communicate with his American subjects and receive a reply within a period of three months. Besides the delegates to the conference a horde of newspaper correspondents and "trained seals" is deluging the American press with all sorts of contradictory rumors, guesses, opinions, and prophecies. It takes a stout-hearted reader to wade through the columns cabled every day. Indeed, we are in- clined to urge that the public refrain from trying to winnow the grain from the chaff, and await accomplished facts. Many people, however, will not be ready to do this. For there is widespread recognition that the conference is of the utmost moment; that it is contending with headwinds and cross currents without number ; and that its success or failure will tell tremendously in the history of the next few years. There can be no question that, if it fails, provided the several peoples involved do not assert themselves vigorously, we shall see the statesmen of the various countries embarking upon a naval race which will again fill the world with ill-will and suspicion. We cannot at this moment contemplate anything of the kind. At the risk of again being called innocent and hapless optimists we shall believe until the last that something worth while will come out of this meeting of the Powers. What that will be no man can guess in the preliminary maneuver- ing that is going on. It may be only a further limitation of battleships, or the postponement of further construction of new battleships for a period of six years. Even this portion of a loaf would seem to us welcome and worth while if it should prove as successful in preventing further public irrita- tion between the United States and Great Britain as was the Washington Conference in putting a definitive end to the talk of war between Japan and the United States. We remain hopeful, however, that more than that will be achieved — despite the wiseacres of the press. Certainly, the American delegation has every incentive to return with something more substantial. We are not even convinced that it is opposed to the total abolition of battleships. It has occurred to us that it may have been good strategy on the part of the American delegation not to espouse abolition of this obsolete weapon lest an immediate agreement upon this by the other Powers be used to prevent a limitation of other categories of ships. We believe that Mr. Stimson and Mr. Morrow are as sincerely desirous of achieving something worth while as any pacifist could ask. But if they were not, it would still be plain to them that, unless the Hoover Administration is to enter upon its second year with extraordinarily little on the credit side of its books, every political consideration de- mands a substantial achievement. Mr. Hoover sorely needs victory in London to have something to talk about in the coming campaign. Nor can we believe that the delegates of the continental Powers will dare to return to their respective capitals with- out something accomplished. We cannot forget that when the conference was first proposed the press of France and Italy doubted very much that their respective countries would attend it. The success of Mr. MacDonald's visit to Wash- ington brought about a marked change, and we cannot be- lieve that when the whole world is longing for a genuine disarmament the ministers of France and Italy will be willing to put the Americans and English in the morally superior position of having been blocked by the two continental Powers. We do not deny the vigorous thundering in the index, or the marked diversity of opinion as evidenced by the French note of December 20, and the reply of the British Government on January 12. Both showed how wide the rift in the conference preliminaries had become. To the French observation that the Paris peace pact was not of itself suf- ficient to insure the world against war, the British Govern- ment could only answer that while it was true that "com- plete machinery for sanctions to enforce the various peace agreements now in existence" had not been devised, "public expectation will be disappointed" and "a tendency toward expansion in arms which is only too evident already will develop" unless those agreements are held to have brought such measure of security as to justify a beginning in the re- duction of naval armaments. The French preference for limitation by global tonnage was met by a reiteration of the British preference for a "strict limitation of the types, ton- nages, and guns of all categories of warships," although the British Government was willing to discuss the matter. The French insistence that all branches of national defense, sea, land, and air, should be taken into account in dealing with the navies was rejected, while in the matter of the proposal of a Mediterranean Locarno the British Government could only point to the League of Nations as affording facilities "for joint consultation in event of need" and express its readiness "to exchange views on the subject with all Powers concerned." We know, too, that the emergence of related subjects, such as freedom of the seas, British naval bases, the allotment to Japan of a larger cruiser tonnage than the application of the battleship ratio of the Washington Conference would allow, and the future status of the battleship and the sub- marine had elicited so much difference of opinion as to lead Mr. MacDonald to assure the House of Commons that questions of general naval policy would not be brought up at the conference. Finally, on January 15 Mr. Mac- Donald, in an interview with the foreign correspondents at London, threw a sop to France by asserting in substance that no government will "propose or undertake" a naval reduc- tion "that would endanger its people's sense of national security." Yet we believe that when the actual showdown comes, when the delegates sit around their tables aware of the high expectation with which the whole world has greeted this conference, they will find a way through the difficulties. Let us hope that it will be another milestone in the march toward peace, even though in its extent it is far, far behind what those who believe in complete disarmament would wish to see achieved.

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Tanuary 29, 1930] The Nation 115 Buncoing the Farmer THE refusal of the Senate, by a vote of 48 to 38, to sanction the higher tariff rates on sugar urged by the Committee on Finance constitutes another smashing defeat for the Old Guard and the saccharine Senator from Utah. On the roll call the melancholy remnant of the regulars suffered no fewer than nine defections. Among the deserters were numbered Capper, Goff, Keyes, and Metcalf, all of whom come up for reelection this year. Apparently these brethren think high sugar prices unlikely to endear them to the folks back home. Apparently they are right. The long debate on the sugar tariff, in the press as well as in Congress, enlivened by the lobby investigation, has contrib- uted a good deal to public education on this issue, and pos- sibly the inability of the Finance Committee to put across the added exaction proposed is due in part to such knowledge. It never does to be too hopeful, however. When it is observed that the leading farm organizations of the country have been supporting a higher sugar tariff, it would seem that the economic education of the sturdy agriculturist has not been entirely completed. The boost proposed by the Finance Committee would raise the nation's sugar bill by something between fifty and seventy-five million dollars. Call it only $50,000,000. Of this amount conceivably as much as $7,000,000 might be added to the earnings of the small num- ber of farmers who grow beet and cane, to a large extent on land that might be devoted more productively to other pur- poses. Against this hypothetical $7,000,000 all the farmers of the country would pay perhaps $11,000,000 more for the sugar they use. And this is the way to bring back prosperity to the American farmer by raising the tariff on farm products! The Minneapolis Tribune has had the genius to general- ize the argument. It has occurred to the Tribune that indus- try should not worry about foreign markets "when the world's greatest market lies right at its doors." "Iowa," it seems, "is a better market than India, Kansas is better than Kamchatka, and Minnesota is better than Mesopotamia." Therefore, the thing to do is to increase the buying power of the American farmer. His present income is approxi- mately twelve billion dollars, but "were agriculture enjoying the same proportion of income that the rest of the United States is enjoying, that income would be eighteen billion dollars." The Tribune then sagely adds that "parity for agriculture means just that: an added annual income of six billion dollars." So all we need do is enact legislation creat- ing parity for agriculture by raising a few tariff schedules and, behold, there will be six billion dollars more for indus- try and agriculture to divide between them, mostly for indus- try because agriculture will, of course, rush off and spend every cent that it earns in the shops of the nearest towns. The Tribune, grandly enough, is not concerned with the question of who will contribute that six billion dollars; whether, for instance, a large part of it will not come out of the workers in industry and, therefore, decrease their buying power in other directions. For naivete and economic innocence this proposal sur- passes anything that we have ever read. A great trouble with the American farmer is that he is "overproducing"; that he has a "surplus" beyond what he can sell to his fellow- Americans. Notwithstanding, the theory runs that if the tariff is put up the rest of America will be cut off from buy- ing an occasional egg from China or a few bushels of corn from the Argentine, and in some mysterious way everything the farmer sells must be paid for at a higher rate fixed by the tariffs on foodstuffs. But industry, too, produces a great "surplus" which it can dispose of only by selling abroad — not for cash, because that never happens, but on exchange for goods from other countries. The instant our tariff goes up and makes it harder for the foreigner to export goods to America, he will be able to buy fewer American goods in exchange. Therefore, the proposal of the Tribune, if its theory were correct, would be aiming a double-barreled shot- gun at our industry, which would have to pay higher prices for food in order to live and would at the same time have reduced markets abroad. Now that is bad enough, but the truth is that you can- not raise prices by putting tariffs on foodstuffs without eco- nomically injuring everybody, including the farmer, except in those rare cases where the farmer raises everything he eats. More than that, it is not foreign competition which in any degree keeps down the prices that our farmers get for their products, but faulty and costly marketing methods, domestic competition, and the inability of the farmer to organize for the control of domestic markets. But, after all, the Tribune's greatest error is that it has put the cart before the horse. What the farmer needs is not that elusive and impossible thing, parity in tariff obstruction, but a reduction of the existing duties. When he gets up in the morning he gets out of cotton sheets and woolen blankets upon which there is a high tariff, and puts on woolen under- wear and a woolen suit the tariff on which, if imported, will be forty-four cents a pound. The boots which he pulls on, if American made, have hitherto encountered free foreign competition ; hereafter they will be protected by a tariff of 15 per cent ad valorem. The hat which his wife wears is pro- tected by a duty of twenty-five cents, her hose by one of 50 per cent ; her underwear, if cotton, by 45 per cent, her hand- kerchiefs 10 per cent, her corset steels and clasps 35 per cent. She drinks coffee for breakfast out of an aluminum pot taxed five cents a pound in order that Mr. Mellon, the owner of the aluminum trust, may still further increase his enormous fortune ; her coffee, crockery, table-cloths, glasses, and cutlery are all highly protected, and so is practically every single item that goes into the construction of a house, barn, or silo. Yet it has never occurred to the Minneapolis Tribune or to most of our legislators that the quickest and surest way to increase the buying power of the farmer would be to lower the tariff on the articles he buys. It might even be of interest to the Tribune that two of the recent tariff commissioners, Edward P. Costigan and David J. Lewis, have declared that tariff reduction alone will help the farmer. But the Tribune and our high-tariff Congressmen are not concerned with facts. It is so easy to wave a magic wand, institute tariff parity on March 1, and have the farmer spending six billions of dollars more by the first of the following October!

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116 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3369 Exploiting Alaska The New Magazines FIFTY million dollars' worth of salmon annually was the impressive investment discussed the other day in the House of Representatives at Washington. This is the maximum value of the catch taken — almost entirely by large canning companies — from Alaskan waters every year; the average, according to Dan Sutherland, Delegate from Alaska, is over forty millions. It represents a princely return to the large canneries which dominate the fishing industry; it represents at the same time penury and starvation to the natives, the Indians who are neither permitted, except under certain limited conditions, themselves to fish in their own waters nor to work for the canners who prefer, for good and financial reasons, to import Filipino or Chinese labor. The population of Alaska, 55,000 in the census of 1920, is reported to be shrinking at the rate of more than 1,000 a year. The Indians are reported as destitute, living on a yearly income estimated by a generous government as some- thing around $265 for a family and by Mr. Sutherland as about $150. In addition, they are permitted to catch all the salmon, for family consumption only, that they can. In other words, if they were willing to live on an exclusive diet of salmon, they would still have at most $265 left over for all other expenses. The income, such as it is, is derived entirely from salmon fishing. The natives fish by means of seines or nets, the canneries by traps which catch several hundred thousand fish in a season; in 1924, 57 per cent of the fishing was by traps; in 1928, 71 per cent. The percentage of seine- caught fish has declined from 38 to 25 per cent. Limitations on seine fishing are ostensibly for "conservation." That is, the ancient fishing streams may no longer be fished in because they interfere with spawning grounds, but traps a mile or so outside their bounds catch the run and leave none to escape. Yet when the native, individual fisherman seeks to attach his seine outside to give him somewhat the same effect as a trap, the government steps in and forbids the practice because it is contrary to its "conservation" plans. As Mr. Suther- land points out, the traps are permitted to operate day in and day out during the season of the run, with no attention given to the customary Sunday stoppage — which the natives are compelled to observe — or to shutting down for a period that may be rendered necessary in case the fish are not passing into the spawning grounds. Mr. Sutherland, when pressed for a remedy for the double exploitation of a people and an industry, declared that the fault lay with the Bureau of Fisheries for permitting the canners to have their way, and the remedy with Congress, which can turn the fisheries over to the Territory itself for regulation and control, in imitation of every State in the Union and the Territory of Hawaii. No one pretends that any financial gain accrues to the government departments concerned because of the ruthless spoliation of the Territory. It is simply another case of bureaucratic stupidity and monopolistic cleverness. Together they make a splendid combination — for the monopolies. Mr. Sutherland's speech seems to have been received with open-mouthed indignation by his colleagues. "Why do you not introduce a bill?" they cried. "I have always had a bill," in effect he answered, "and so have my predecessors. You need only enact it." THE despairing comment that accompanied the death last year of the Little Review and the Dial, the la- ment that America could not support experimental literary magazines and that the old ardor of revolt was dying, was apparently premature. For this magazine-founding spirit is like some benign Hydra, and two quarterlies spring forth when one is cut down. Recent months have witnessed the appearance of the Gyroscope, the Miscellany, Pagany, the New World Monthly, and the Symposium, have nourished the Modern Quarterly, and have brought increased attention and prestige to the Hound & Horn. The Miscellany, a bi-monthly edited by former Yale men, opens its December issue with a broadside against almost every reviewer in the country, and scores, incidentally, some palpable hits. For the most part, however, the new magazines are not bellicose in tone, and their announcements of policy are singularly non-committal and modest. Pagany, according to the declaration of its editor, Richard Johns, "will avoid any attempt to seek a standard, it is neither entering into connection nor competition with any magazine trying to make a point, to formulate a policy." The Sym- posium opens with the statement that "there is no critical tradition in America, nor can one be created by the mere enunciation of an editorial policy." And the New World Monthly informs us rather cryptically that "unlike the late lamented Dial," it does "not set up as a criterion of literary excellence," though later in the same article it accuses "the current so-called literary magazines" of "revolving about a central vacuum." If we turn to actual content rather than to declaration of policy, what first strikes us in some of the new magazines is their marked interest in philosophical discussion. The first issue of the New World Monthly (January) devotes leading articles to John Dewey and Friedrich Nietzsche, while its February issue has articles on Whitehead's philosophy and on relativity. The Symposium contains an essay by John Dewey on Qualitative Thought and an admirable confession of faith by Morris R. Cohen which renews one's regret that he writes so little. The interests of Pagany, "a Native Quarterly," are almost purely literary. Many of its con- tributors are recruited from the transition group, and the leading influence seems to be William Carlos Williams, who compares Gertrude Stein to Laurence Sterne and issues a manifesto proclaiming his belief in "the word." We regret to announce that the excellent Symposium has expired with its first issue; it has been taken over by the Hound y Horn. It contained no advertising, and neither does the New World Monthly, which announces that it is not subsidized, that it would not be kept alive artificially, that it depends solely on paid-in-advance subscriptions, and that it would "like to be able to get along with- out advertisers and the whole damned racket of maga- zine distributing." We wish it the best of luck. But because experimental magazines of high quality are so neces- sary a stimulus and so healthy a cultural sign, we hope, if present programs do not go well financially, that the new periodicals will not be too reluctant to allow fairly orthodox business methods to support unorthodox views.

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January 29, 1930] The Nation 117 It Seems to Heywood Broun RECENTLY a well-known writer was shot and seri- ously wounded by masked bandits in a small New York restaurant. He was shot because he courage- ously refused to throw up his hands at the word of com- mand, and instead advanced upon the leader of the gang. The fact that Mr. Garet Garrett was at one time managing editor of a New York newspaper might have earned him a certain consideration from his fellow-craftsmen. It did not. Naturally the fact of the shooting was front-page news, but the reporters did not let it go at that. An air of sinister romance was thrown over the whole affair. Desperately the press reports endeavored to suggest that this was no ordinary holdup but a shooting growing out of some ugly intrigue. With all the facts in hand the police admitted that there was no ground whatsoever for this suspicion. The wounded man seems to have been placed in a false light for no better reason than that he did not care to talk to reporters at a moment when he lay in the hospital with severe hemor- rhages from a punctured lung. Only this, together with the fact that a friend who bent over the bed was heard to say, "I'm sorry, G. G." This was taken for a code message. None of the detectives or reporters was bright enough to realize any relationship between the initials and the wounded man's name. Probably Mr. Garrett has no redress in the matter of the incriminating rumors which were woven about him. A libel suit often serves to reinforce and call attention to a slander. In this case the bad taste and worse journalism cannot be laid at the door of the tabloids. One of the best and biggest of the New York newspapers was the chief offender. However, the tabloids did have an opportunity to per- form in their worst fashion a few days earlier. A young woman who was separated from her husband wandered into an apartment to see two young men who were casual ac- quaintances. She had been drinking and did not want to go home. The young men left her in the sitting-room of the small penthouse. In the morning she was found dead. She had suffered from heart disease. Here again the newspapers had every right to make prominent display of the facts in the case but none was quite content with that. And the tabloids not at all. The fact that the owner of the apart- ment happened to be a motion-picture director opened the way to suggestions of Hollywood orgies. The place itself became for tabloid purposes "a gilded bachelor's hall." This description must have been penned by some newspaper man or woman who had never been inside the apartment. I know it as a modest sort of penthouse, as I almost rented it myself a year ago. "Broadway Film Romance Leads Rich Matron to Mys- tery Death" was the screaming headline in one of the tab- loids. It proceeded to describe the likable young motion-pic- ture man as "the blond playboy fresh from Paris's Mont- parnasse," "a favorite with women of two continents." The fact that the young man in question had not been abroad for six years did not in anywise cramp the style of the inquiring reporters. The dead woman fared even worse. She was "a wealthy woman known to the intelligentsia as 'the mysterious woman in black.' ' Later it was said that "the vivacious" matron had a love for her host which "seemed to be a fixation." Also that she was "fond of smart clothes, dazzling jewels, and a life more exciting than her husband could give her," that she "began to trail celebrities," that she was "anxious to establish for herself a salon in the grand manner." And it was almost mentioned as the sin of sins that she frequented the restaurant of a hotel where New York columnists and actors often meet. In all this there was scarcely a gram of truth. None of it represented any examination of facts by the reporter. Accidentally he was correct in speaking of the dead woman as vivacious. But that she "trailed celebrities," that "often she left her three-year-old son in order to entertain lavishly," and that she "paid marked attention" to the man in whose apartment she died — all this was pure invention. There was no reason why it should have been introduced except that the reporter said to himself, "This will help the story." There ought to be a remedy. It cannot lie in law. Such libel laws as we have are of no use in such a case. The friends and relatives of the dead woman are so shocked and sorry that she died in a somewhat sensational manner that they do not care to stir up things. The remedy must lie in some effective way of expressing scorn for cheap and shabby newspaper work. This could best be expressed by the news- paper men themselves. When a reporter refuses to divulge the source of in- formation, as he certainly should, the point is raised that his position in the matter is much like that of the family physi- cian. With this I agree, but there should be some sort of organization corresponding to the American Medical Asso- ciation to establish rules of practice. Not quite like that, perhaps, because it seems to me that the association has had its moments of tyranny. I would not have the American Newspaper Association privileged to bar any reporter from practice. It should be enough for it to call fouls in order to discourage them. The scorn and disapproval of one's fellows on the job ought to be ample punishment. And newspaper owners should abandon immediately one practice which tends to rob the individual of his rightful protection. Almost universally there is a tacit agreement among publishers never to mention libel suits against papers. A few are big enough and of sufficient importance to break through, but generally speaking libel suits against newspapers are not reported when they are instituted. When the action is ended that same silence is preserved unless the newspaper has won. In that event a very full account will be written. The idea is to create a public belief that no one gets very far in suing a newspaper. That indeed is the general idea, and for that reason many an individual permits a paper to hurt him vitally without striking back. I am willing to grant the fact that a newspaper can hardly avoid making a certain number of mistakes both mental and mechanical, but it has no right whatsoever to tolerate the cooperation of the reporter who invents mean and baseless slanders about individuals in trouble. Heywood Broun

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118 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3369 Harvard — School for Scrubwomen By GARDNER JACKSON HARVARD, richest of universities, recently dis- charged twenty cleaning women from Widener Library without advance notice or pay and without giving them any reason. These women had been in the em- ploy of the university for periods ranging from thirty-three years to two. Harvard University is a vast business cor- poration employing hundreds of wage earners, excluding faculty members. Its ruthlessness in this case might perhaps be laid to our present industrial organization. But what are we to think when President A. Lawrence Lowell, asked by a minister to reconsider the case of one woman who is in dire poverty with her family of five depending on her as its sole support, replied that she and the others were dis- missed because the State Minimum Wage Commission had complained that the university was employing scrubwomen at less than thirty-seven cents an hour? The Massachusetts minimum-wage law provides for boards to set minimum rates of pay for women and minors in particular industries. In case any employer refuses to pay the prescribed rate, he is subject to no penalty except that the Minimum Wage Commission is to publish his name in the advertising columns of the newspapers. The decree covering "office and other building cleaners," effective Feb- ruary 1, 1921, fixes as the minimum payment "for the aver- age worker of ordinary ability . . . for less than forty-two hours per week not less than thirty-seven cents per hour. . . ." In this particular case the women have been working since February 1, 1921, as employees of Harvard University at wages lower than those prescribed by the minimum-wage decree. Each year state inspectors have complained, but the complaints have been ignored. It is only within the past month that the matter has received any publicity. Mean- while scrubwomen at the State House receive fifty cents an hour. Reverend William M. Duvall, a young man, graduate of Boston University Theological School, who has taken courses in the Department of Social Ethics at Harvard under Dr. Richard C. Cabot and others, is pastor of the Trinity Community Methodist Episcopal Church in the slum district of East Cambridge. His church is, in effect, a settlement house to which he brings all races and religions. He wrote a personal letter to President Lowell expressing his astonish- ment that Harvard, with its traditions, should have treated Mrs. Emma Trafton (who lives in a dark, dreary tenement directly in the rear of Mr. Duvall's church) as it did. On December 30, 1929, President Lowell replied as follows: Dear Sir: I have inquired into the discharge of Mrs. Emma Trafton from the Widener Library and I find that the Minimum Wage Board has been complaining of our employing women for these purposes at less than thirty- seven cents an hour, and hence the university has felt con- strained to replace them with men. Some of them, I hope many of them, will be able to be employed at some other work in the university. (Signed) A. Lawrence Lowell. Mr. Duvall was bowled over by the president's letter. Un- til then he had not known the cause for the women's dis- missal. He was complaining only about the heartless manner of it. But here was a brusque note from President Lowell announcing that Harvard University would not raise the wages of the cleaning women from thirty-five cents an hour (which Mr. Duvall knew Mrs. Trafton was receiving at the time of her sudden discharge) to thirty-seven cents to con- form to the findings of a State board. Mr. Duvall, when he showed me the letter, asked if I did not agree that the circumstances warranted making it public. Fully apprecia- tive of the ethical problem involved in disclosing a private letter, he did not finally decide to do so without serious thought. The sorry predicament of Mrs. Trafton was the precipitating factor. She has tramped the streets looking for work, making numerous trips to Harvard in search of the "some other work at the university." Were human misery not involved in the cases of several of the women discharged the position taken by President Lowell would seem more humorous than anything else. The Boston Post, which published the facts on the front page on January 16, approached the situation from that angle. In his lead, the Post reporter figured out that the two-cents- an-hour increase in wages demanded by the State Minimum Wage Commission would amount to $2 a day (the women worked from six a.m. to eleven a.m. in Widener Library) or $12 a week for the twenty women. The increase would have given each woman sixty cents more a week, or $11.10 instead of $10.50. The Post did not point out, as it might have done, that Harvard has investments conservatively listed by the treasurer's recent annual report at $81,000,000. All the women I interviewed told essentially the same story of their discharge as was told by Mrs. Trafton, who had been an employee of the university for thirteen years. About half of them were peremptorily discharged on No- vember 1 last. The others were discharged without notice on the Saturday before Christmas — "a fine Christmas pres- ent," as Mrs. Katharine Donahue ruefully described it. Mrs. Donahue has been in the employ of Harvard for thirty-three years. She said that so far as she has been able to find out the university has neither pension nor compensation pro- visions for its old employees. C. R. Apted, superintendent of the yard and buildings at Harvard, who signed the notices discharging the women, and other officials at Harvard say that it was the university's intention to replace the women with men anyway and to work the women into other jobs. One can only remark that it was most unfortunate that the Minimum Wage Commission's insistence should have been the factor crystal- lizing that intention. The Harvard officials further say that three or four of the women have already been put to work in the dormitories. That is true enough, but the dormitory women get only thirty-two cents an hour. Chambermaids do not come within the provisions of the minimum-wage law. The cleaning women at the Fogg Art Museum get thirty- seven cents an hour ; thirty-five cents are paid by the uni- versity, the additional two cents by an alumnus.

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January 29, 1930] The Nation 119 Noting the facts in the case, Representative William H. Hearn of East Boston has introduced a resolution into the State Legislature calling upon that body to "deplore the action of Harvard University, or any of its officers, in refus- ing to accept the theory or principle of any of these statutes, and that said action was, in our opinion, contrary to what an overwhelming majority of the citizens of the Common- wealth had expected would be the action of the university or its officers under such circumstances." Particular signifi- cance attaches to Harvard's avoidance of the law because of the tax-free privileges the State accords the university. The incident gives fresh illustration of the ineffective- ness of the minimum-wage law of Massachusetts, which provides no effective penalty for disregard of the findings of the Minimum Wage Board. Weak as the law is, the Mini- mum Wage Commission, headed by Commissioner of Labor E. LeRoy Sweetser, has been unwilling to enforce it ag- gressively. But for Miss Ethel M. Johnson, Assistant Com- missioner, the commission would have been virtually inopera- tive for several years past. Prohibition and Politics By PAUL Y. ANDERSON Washington, January 18 PROHIBITION can hardly be said to have prohibited, or even reduced, the consumption of alcoholic bev- erages in Washington, but since the holidays it has effectively prohibited the discussion of any other issue. Tariff, farm relief, railroad consolidation, prosperity, the radio scandal — all have been forced to yield the rostrum to the Noble Experiment, regardless of whether anything new or valuable was being said on the subject. The Wicker- sham commission's recommendations for "tightening up" enforcement contain little that is new, and what is new is not sure of adoption. The transfer from the Treasury to the Department of Justice is an obvious and oft-urged step that would have been taken years ago if previous adminis- trations had not been so fearful of offending the haughty Mr. Mellon. (Incidentally, it may be said for Mr. Hoover that he has never shown the slightest reluctance about step- ping on those sacred toes; indeed, at times he has seemed to delight in it.) The truth about the preliminary report is that the commission was stampeded into premature action i by the criticism of the professional and fanatical Drys in Congress. By tossing this hunk of raw meat into the pit the commission hoped to keep the animals quiet while it I proceeds with its real task — that of making a thorough and comprehensive study of the whole vast field of law, its ob- servance, violation, and enforcement. Royal commissions i completed similar tasks in Great Britain and Canada — I and saw their labors bear fruit — more than forty years ago. I, It is a pity that when at last the effort is begun in the | United States it must be rendered more difficult by the ! selfish heckling of vote-hunting politicians. It is equally pitiful that the President who had the intelligence to in- i augurate the task lacks the courage to stand between his | commission and those who seek to make political capital I by harassing it. Nothing that the commission could recom- i mend concerning prohibition is likely to have much effect, because the lines on both sides of that question are too . tightly drawn; but its studies and recommendations might have a tremendous effect in modernizing and improving our antiquated legal procedure, police methods, and penal system. The wet Senator La Follette and the dry Senator Norris realize that, and were quick to demand that the Joneses and Harrises keep their hands off. Unfortunately, all the commission's troubles do not arise from the outside. It has been seriously embarrassed by the attitude of two of its own members, one of whom is temperamentally unfitted for team-work, and the other of whom cannot forget that he was once a politician with a notable flair for publicity. * * * * * BUT it's an ill wind that fills no political sail. Pro- hibition produces more smoke screens than those util- ized by rum runners, and many a Republican Congressman who was wondering a month ago how he would explain his tariff vote to the home folks this fall, breathes easier now. In the clamor over the fate of the Black Duck he sees an escape from becoming a lame duck himself. Noting the extent to which the prohibition tumult has obscured other things, a more suspicious observer might wonder whether it was wholly spontaneous. To say the very least, it was a godsend to such dry Republican Senators as Goff of West Virginia, Allen of Kansas, and Deneen of Illinois, who were confronting the imminent problem of defending the indefensible votes they had cast on numerous measures, as well as to such Democratic Drys as Glass of Virginia and Harris of Georgia, who similarly were contemplating the difficulty of making their dry Protestant constituents forget how valiantly they campaigned for Al Smith. In other words, it is demonstrated once more that the curse of prohibition, from a political standpoint, is that it is a red herring dragged across the records of public men on every other public question. ***** IF further proof were needed, the last straw would be forthcoming from Nebraska, where Senator Norris is faced with the opposition of the Anti-Saloon League in his campaign for reelection. As everyone knows, Norris has always voted dry. What is more unusual, he drinks dry. In the last Presidential campaign, after comparing the rec- ords and pledges of Hoover and Smith as a whole, especially on the subjects of farm relief and water-power, he sup- ported Smith despite the latter's wetness. It was an exhi- bition of political courage and personal honesty almost with- out a modern parallel in this country. Yet because he real- ized that more than one issue was involved, and because he decided that other issues combined were sufficient to out- weigh that one, the bigots of Nebraska would retire him to private life, and deprive the country and their State of its most valuable public servant! At present they appear to be in a minority, but Uncle George undoubtedly has a fight on his hands. His opposition is not confined to the Anti-

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120 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3369 saloon League. Indeed, there is evidence that the league merely occupies the front-line trench, and that behind it the electric-power industry is mobilizing its resources in preparation for a supreme effort to eliminate the man who has been the most persistent and successful opponent of schemes to grab the natural power resources of the country. It will be interesting to see whether Mr. Hoover consents to have his Administration made a party to this conspiracy. ***** IN the Senate, among political weapons, the sledgehammer is preferred to the mousetrap. The Progressives wielded it effectively when the Republicans went into conference behind closed doors to fight out the question of whether Bob La Follette should have the vacancy on the Finance Committee to which seniority entitled him. When the Old Guard trotted out Metcalf of Rhode Island as a candidate, it was pointed out that his selection would give representa- tion on the committee to every New England State except Maine. Old Guardsmen protested that the West had been given many places on important committees. "Yes, you not only give us representation, but you pick our representatives for us," derisively retorted Norbeck of South Dakota. George Moses attempted to make a virtue of the fact that he had voted against Metcalf. "And everybody knows why," rejoined McMaster of South Dakota; "you voted against him because he told you to stay out of his State during Senatorial campaigns!" Young Standpatter Glenn of Illinois averred that Senators were asking for committee assignments as Republicans who had forfeited their right to the party name by refusing to support President Hoover. "True," cried Senator Norris. On the tariff, the most im- portant matter before Congress, the President had asked for a limited revision, but the Old Guard, in utter defiance of his wishes, had attempted to carry out a general revision, and had only been prevented by the loyal insistence of the Progressives and Democrats that the bill follow the Presi- dent's requirement. Norris was in favor of depriving every Old Guard Senator of his committee assignments. Two days of this sort of bludgeoning was enough for Moses, Smoot, Bingham, and Watson. Young Bob got the job. I HAVE observed in recent days that some of my col- leagues, or their editors, have been taking a more lively interest in — and a conspicuously different attitude toward — the Radio Corporation's activities and ambitions. This may or may not be due in part to Mr. Joseph Pierson's harrow- ing recital from the witness stand of what happened when newspapers endeavored to obtain equipment from the Radio Corporation for use in the transmission of news. First they could not obtain it at all. Then deliveries were in- explicably delayed. A corporation, Press Wireless, was formed to use and hold in trust twenty interoceanic chan- nels that had been assigned to the American press. To use these channels it must have equipment which could be obtained only from the Radio Corporation. Officials of that company stated bluntly they were getting a nice rate on press messages, and desired to keep the business. Finally, after much dickering, they stated the terms on which Press Wireless could "rent" equipment. First, it could not en- gage in transoceanic communication at all — only within the United States. Second, it could not operate as a mutual association, but must be conducted to make a profit. Third, it must buy all parts from the Radio Corporation, and must pay the price of the General Electric Company for building the apparatus, plus a profit of 45 per cent to the Radio Corporation. The Radio Corporation must be allowed to inspect not only its apparatus, but its books and accounts, at will. Its facilities must always be at the disposal of the Radio Corporation's own clients. And so on. Pierson, general manager of Press Wireless, summed up the conclu- sions of himself and his associates thus: "These terms do not appear to have any purpose except that of preventing competition in the field of wireless communication. . . . Some of our directors are of the opinion that it is an effort to make the American press a colony of the electric-power empire which seems to be grasping for complete control of the water and air in the United States." I hope to be par- doned for reminding hero-worshipers that when the fore- going occurred, the head of the Radio Corporation and the head of the General Electric was that illustrious humani- tarian and economic statesman, Owen D. Young. Wood berry — A Great Teacher By HAROLD IT is over a quarter of a century since George Edward Woodberry resigned as professor of Comparative Litera- ture at Columbia and ended his active teaching career. Yet for thousands of his former students his personality has remained as the most vital scholastic memory of their college days. Hundreds of them have kept in personal touch with him, and the Woodberry Society, organized years ago in his honor by the men who had sat under him, still endures. Only a few months ago I happened to sit at luncheon at the Columbia University Club with some half-dozen alumni, now mature men immersed in law, editorship, and real estate. Suddenly, out of random talk about prohibition, plays, Rus- sia, the football team, one asked: "Has anyone heard from the Old Man lately?" One had had a letter from Mr. Woodberry and the others were all attention while he re- KELLOCK peated phrases from it. There was no question from any- one as to the identity of the Old Man. This continuing intimate feeling for Mr. Woodberry among his students of years ago has been all the more re- markable because most of these men have long since out- grown or grown away from or even wholly forgotten what might technically be called his teachings. A poet and a bril- liant young scholar, out of Harvard with the class of 1877, he came to Columbia to teach in 1891 on the recommenda- tion of James Russell Lowell. He had been reared in the Victorian New England tradition with its background of classicism, and he ripened at a time when the Victorian note ( was wearing thin and, in perspective, the New England giants were rapidly diminishing in stature. As the new cen- tury came on new forms were breaking through the old J

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January 29, 1930] The Nation 121 molds, and fresh ideas were contending with old values. Everywhere the young age was full of questionings — about the position of women, about the status of labor, about the validity of scores of accepted conventions and rituals, even about the very social structure itself. Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, and on the continent Anatole France and others were turn- ing established systems of ethics topsy-turvy and playing hob with all sorts of social sanctities. All this ferment awoke no reaction in Mr. Woodberry. If he observed it at all he dis- missed it as a passing irrationality. It had no relation to Keats and Shelley, Whittier and Emerson, and the Mediter- ranean classics. Obviously he was old-fashioned. His horizons were restricted. When the World War broke out he worked him- self into a state of tremendous excitement. When I gently took issue with him for wasting so much emotional energy on an international dogfight, he explained that the earliest recol- lection of his boyhood was of men marching off to save the Union, and probably war was in his blood. Later he ap- parently rationalized on the subject, for he wrote me at length to the effect that Germany had been untouched by the Renaissance or by Mediterranean culture, and therefore was merely a barbaric survival that must be destroyed. After the Soviet revolution he advanced a similar theory to explain the benighted Russians. I would not emphasize such naivetes unduly. In the case of Mr. Woodberry somehow they do not seem to matter, any more than the fact that he could never learn the technique of crossing a street in traffic or the simple art of getting his necktie straight. Moreover, despite his peculiar limitations, in his thought there was often some- thing of that adventurous quality one finds sometimes in scholars whose ancestors have lived on the sea. Mr. Woodberry's magic was sui generis. He was a great teacher, I believe, because he was an authentic poet. I am aware that his verse has been judged coldly among such latter-day critics as have deigned to notice it, and I am not concerned with that, though I have a feeling that at least one of his poems, The Mighty Mother, bears the true stamp of the muse. Had Mr. Woodberry never written a line of verse, he would be proved poet by his teaching. The proof lay not only in his tenderness and his rare understanding of the raw boys before him, but in the way in which he poured out himself and the best that was in him without stint or limit. Within his scope Mr. Woodberry had much to give, and only a poet could have given with such lavishness. In my day, freshman classes were rough and undisci- plined. The young animals took great delight in planning wild demonstrations to discomfit their professors. One would have expected Mr. Woodberry to be a shining mark for the disturbers. In appearance he was always a bit wrinkled and disheveled. His hair was usually parted in zig- zags, his bow-tie (it was always the same tie, only once renewed during his thirteen years at Columbia) was invari- ably awry. As a disciplinarian he was a complete failure. He was painfully shy. Yet, while more competent custodians of order found themselves as the term advanced still strug- gling with their turbulent charges, Mr. Woodberry held his packed classrooms completely quiet after the first two or three lectures. Possibly the boys sensed in him something youthful and groping that made them recognize him as one of themselves. At any rate, from the outset, they seemed to realize that this slight stooping figure with the funny walrus mustache represented a personality that wanted to give them something, that had an affection for each of them as an individual. Thus, from the beginning, a classroom rapport was es- tablished. Within a few days Woodberry would shyly begin calling this or the other boy by his first name. His private office at the university, where the door was never locked, would become a friendly club for such of the new classmen as cared to drop in, and his apartment downtown was re- vealed also as a student club, perhaps appreciably more select. He had a genius for getting on intimate terms with the ill- adjusted boys, and making them easy in their new environ- ment. To the "literary" group among the students he be- came an affectionate mentor, but his particular friendships had a wide range and embraced many who had no special aptitude for belles-lettres, even poor chaps who seemed to have no aptitude for anything whatever. In interpreting a poet, Mr. Woodberry never failed to interpret the man and to relate him to living problems and passions in terms which the students could understand. Once, in the course of a lecture on Keats, he paused in the midst of reading one of the poems. After a minute he re- moved his glasses and enveloped the class with his Mona Lisa smile. "Of course if young Keats were sitting among you he would probably be ranked lowest in the class," he said, "but assuredly he would have the best time. You see, he was a poet. If I were running a college I would work out an experiment whereby the boys who had the best time would get the highest marks. But then, I suspect I am not a real professor." By touches like this he made Keats come alive. I think even dull-witted youths in Mr. Woodberry's courses came almost to "see Shelley plain." He never played for effects, but he was always getting them, largely because of the ten- derness implicit in his attitude. His was the real magic of the poet-teacher. I think he never "prepared" a lecture in any real sense. He had the art of making a spontaneous orientation to his subject and to his hearers. The idea was there, as in a deeply filled reservoir, and he seemed always assured of a steady flow. In an old-fashioned sense he was too thoroughly the gentleman ever to resort to sham and too thoroughly the aristocrat either to play the superior or to stoop to conquer. There is the curious story of a man of mature age who repeated the same series of courses under Woodberry for sev- eral successive years. He was a graduate of Yale who had been associated with Mr. Arthur Brisbane for a period in making the New York Evening Journal of that day a major disturbance of Park Row. This man decided to quit the Hearstian uproar for a time and acquire an acquaintance with literature. He listened in before a number of professors of literature in and about New York, and, as I recall it, was about to return to Mr. Brisbane when he wandered into one of Mr. Woodberry's classes; at the close of the hour he an- nounced abruptly to the lecturer, "I've decided to take all your courses." After several years of sitting before Mr. Woodberry this student-repeater told me that he had never heard Mr. Woodberry give the same lecture twice and he had never come away from any lecture without new appre- ciations and ideas. A peculiar tenderness was reserved by Mr. Woodberry for those students who were planning to become teachers

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122 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3369 themselves. These were not, as a rule, the more brilliant or the more interesting boys, but for Mr. Woodberry they were distinctly a class apart, the elect to whom he would pass on his torch. I fancy he gave them little to help them in a material way, for he was not what is called a practical man. Probably most of them discovered that it was necessary to revalue many of the Woodberrian values, in literature as well as in worldly matters. But he sent these fledgling teach- ers forth with gifts beyond price, to be transmitted to further generations of students, gifts of a quickened sensitiveness to beauty, a broader human understanding, gifts of patience, humility, and loving-kindness. It warms one's heart to be- lieve that something of Mr. Woodberry's quick and gentle spirit has thus been carried to many a far-flung classroom to revivify the humanities for the American students of today and tomorrow. In an editorial on sham patrioteers in an early issue of the Irish Statesman, George Russell (IE) de- fined patriotism as "improving the quality of life in a coun- try." According to this definition, George Woodberry must be ranked as a great American patriot. In Columbia College it was the custom for every gradu- ating class to vote for its favorite teacher. In Mr. Wood- berry's day there was never any doubt as to the choice. When he resigned his professorship his students paid him one of the finest tributes ever accorded an American teacher. The im- mediate cause of his resignation was his feeling that the col- lege authorities had made inadequate provision for some of his assistants. Within a few days after he announced his intention to withdraw, his students had pledged a sum suffi- cient to continue his department for several years, and his former students among the alumni came forward with a simi- lar fund. The three student periodicals at the university began a crusade to retain Mr. Woodberry on his own terms. The agitation did not cease until Mr. Woodberry had re- peatedly requested that no further controversy be raised. "For the teacher," said Mr. Woodberry, as he parted with us on graduation day, "life is a perpetual ave atque vale." His premonitory tenderness made him peculiarly sen- sitive to these annual partings. We had entered deeply into his heart, and most of us came to realize, perhaps only in later years, how he had penetrated ours. As the years wore on he sometimes came to think that he had been a failure. The world had moved beyond him, his writings were neg- lected, and his gentle personality seemed almost obliterated in retirement. Now that death brings him into perspective it becomes clear that however posterity may rate him as poet and critic, he is assured of the immortality of the teacher who gives to youth with generosity and love. Dollars and Ships at London THE assembling of the London Conference once more brings sharply to public attention the economic bur- den of armaments and the actual naval equipment of each of the Powers represented. For convenient reference the following memorandum has been prepared in the office of The Nation. The expenditure figures are taken from the valuable Armaments Supplement published by the Econo- mist (London) in its issue of October 19 last. It was pre- pared by Mr. P. Jacobsen, Secretary General to the Defense Council of Sweden, and the figures in all cases were drawn from official sources. The naval data, taken from the World Almanac for 1930, were compiled by the Department of the Navy of the United States as of July 29, 1929. The total armaments expenditure (including pensions) of the world for the latest available year (generally 1928) was 22,392,400,000 gold francs, or approximately $4,300,- 000,000. The expenditures of the leading Powers were as follows : Ar laments Expenditures Millions Percentage of of francs national income United States 4,553 1.1 Great Britain 2,900 3. France 2,286 4.6 Italy 1,333 4.3 Japan 1,215 — Germany 942 1.3 Russia 2,440 India 1,069 — The figures in the first column illustrate the statement made by President Hoover on July 29 last: "The American people should understand that current expenditure on strictly military activities of the army and navy constitute the largest military budget of any nation in the world today, and at a time when there is less real danger of extensive dis- turbance to peace than at any time in half a century." Our military expenses (including pensions), it will be noted, are more than one-half greater than those of Great Britain, and nearly as large as those of France, Italy, and Japan combined. Nevertheless, owing to our enormous wealth, this huge expenditure absorbs only about 1 per cent of our national income. The United States, in fact, spends on armaments about the same proportion of its national income as Australia. What is even more striking, we spend a smaller proportion of our income on war-making than does disarmed Germany. France and Italy, on the other hand, spend more than 4 per cent of all they produce on these war activities. As for Europe as a whole we quote Mr. Jacobsen's words: "If full data were available, it would probably be found that Europe as a whole spent on armaments at least 3 per cent and perhaps not far from 4 per cent of its aggregate income." To make another comparison, the 120,000,000 people of the United States have a total income probably about as large as the 480,000,000 of Europe, and somewhat larger than the total received by the remaining 1,300,000,000 inhabitants of the globe living outside the United States and Europe ; of the world's total real armament outlays, about two-thirds are expended by Europe, one-sixth by the United States, and one-sixth by the rest of the world. Thus Europe, with a trifle more than a third of the world's income, accounts for two-thirds of its armament expenses, while we, with an equal income, spend only one-sixth of the war moneys, and the rest of the world, with a slightly smaller income, an equal amount. It may be noted in passing that the arma-

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Tanuary 29, 1930] The Nation 123 ments expenditure of all the Central and South American states put together, with an area of nearly 6,900,000 square miles and a population of 69,000,000, come to something less than $195,000,000, a sum smaller than that spent by Spain and Portugal, which have an area of only 225,000 square miles and a population somewhat above 27,000,000. Armaments expenditures (this time excluding pension charges) before and after the war compare as follows (000,000's omitted): Pre-War and Post-War Expenditures Percentage of pre-iuar 219 150 Average 1909-13 1928-9 658 98 2,200 1,200 450 716 915 144 190 235 50 127 United States (dollars) 300 Great Britain (pounds) 64 France (francs) 1,525 Italy (lire) 630 Japan (yen) 192 Germany (marks) 1,435 Russia* (rubles) 718 It will be noted that with the single exception of Japan we have increased our expenditures over those of the pre-war period more largely than any other Power, spending in the fiscal year 1928-29 considerably more than twice as much as the average of the five pre-war years. Of course the in- crease of prices must be taken into account, but even mak- ing that allowance, the actual expenditure of our country is largely increased. Europe as a whole is spending today 8 or 9 per cent more on armaments than in 1913. The countries outside Germany spent £386,000,000 a year be- fore the war; they spend £487,000,000 now. Taking price changes into account, the present figures are somewhat greater than the average of 1909-13. Turning to budgets, we find that in the United States, as has been pointed out over and over, if interest payments and pensions are included, 80 per cent or more of our fed- eral expenditure goes for past or future wars, as against 70 per cent in Great Britain and a corresponding propor- tion in France. The higher proportion here is due to the fact of much greater government centralization in the other two countries, notably in France, so that our non-military activities and the corresponding expenditures here are more largely in the hands of State and local governments. The figures for these great countries, none the less, may profit- ably be compared with those of neutral states which have enjoyed peace for a century. The relatively decentralized Swiss government devotes less than a third of its expendi- tures to war purposes ; Sweden less than 20 per cent. In using any of these figures it must be remembered that it is not possible to make comparison of actual military or naval strength between countries on the basis simply of expenditures, owing to differences in military systems (as in voluntary versus conscript service, for example), in wages, prices, and a dozen other items. It should also be observed that such figures as these represent the absolute minimum of war costs, and that the actual burden is higher than that here pictured which takes no account of military measures that divert economic resources from their most productive uses. We turn now from figures of expenditure to examine the actual fighting ships of the five Powers represented at London. As of July 29, 1929, our Navy Department re- ported their number and tonnage as follows : * Including pensions. Capital Ships (Battleships and Battle Cruisers) Number Tonnage United States 18 525,850 British Empire 20 556,350 Japan 10 301,320 France 9 194,556 Italy 4 89,976 United States British Empire Japan France Italy Aircraft Carriers X umber 4 6 3 1 None Tonnage 92,500 107,550 63,300 21,653 Cruisers Built Building No. Ton- No. Ton- nage nage United States 10 75,000 8 80,000 British Empire 52 308,700 7 66,000 Japan 28 163,955 5 50,000 France 11 89,369 4 36,496 Italy 11 63,419 5 30,000 Approp. or Authorized Total No. Ton- No. Ton- nage nage 15 150,000 33 305,000 3 22,000 62 396,700 33 213,955 United States British Empire Japan France Italy Destroyers Number 284 153 99 58 71 10,000 16 135,865 50,000 22 143,419 Tonnage 337,996 189,165 108,260 69,291 76,995 Submarines Number 108 50 61 45 40 Tonnage 81,807 45,472 61,357 35,631 20,696 United States British Empire Japan France Italy In examining these figures, certain facts may be noted. All capital ships listed are under the effective age of twenty years. There are no capital ships of either type building, appropriated for, or authorized. The cruiser figures show why attention has been centered on this category in recent years. Cruisers, it will be recalled, were not limited in number by the Washington treaty, but were restricted to 10,000 tons. In cruisers built we hold fourth place, and even when those under construction are completed we shall still be only a bad third. Hence the huge program urged by the Navy Department in 1928, and when that was defeated, the suc- cessful fifteen-cruiser bill. It will be observed that the tonnage of cruisers appropriated for or authorized by us is nearly twice as great as that correspondingly provided for by all the other Powers put together, which have authorized but ten. In destroyers and submarines, by contrast with cruisers, we are at present far in advance of any other Power. It may be observed that Great Britain is building twenty destroyers and fourteen submarines; Japan eight and nine respectively ; France eighteen and thirty-two ; and Italy eleven and thirteen. [The first of Mr. Norman Angell's articles on the Lon- don Conference has been delayed in the mail, and will appear in our next issue. — Editor The Nation.]

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124 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3369 In the Driftway LIKE the sailing ship and the hansom cab, the old- school proofreader is practically extinct in this coun- try. There was a time when proofreading was a profession requiring as much preparation and knowledge as to be an editor — however much that may be. The proof- reader was the peer of the editor, concerned not only with punctuation and spelling but with grammar and rhetoric, with slips in quotations and literary allusions, with errors in names and dates, and generally with the verification of fact. He had to be a scholar and a linguist. But within recent years proofreading has been largely taken over by the typographical unions and is often assigned to printers who because of age or other reasons are less useful for other work. They can be depended upon for typographical tech- nique, for uniform punctuation and spelling, and occasionally for correcting a serious lapse in grammar. That is about all. The higher criticism exercised by the old-school proof- reader is now done in part on an editorial desk before the copy goes to the printer and in part it is not done at all. ***** ONE of the last of the old-school proofreaders whom the Drifter has the honor and pleasure of knowing is George Schumm, the man who for many years has read proof for The Nation, made up its pages, and attended to a score of details. He has done those things which correspond to the small boy's definition of salt as what makes food taste bad when you forget to put it in. Recently, having more than passed three score and ten, he has dropped the exacting duties he has been performing to take up for The Nation the equally absorbing but less strenuous work of reading foreign periodicals. It is worth while to say a word about him here, partly because he is an old-school proofreader of the highest type and partly because he is a radical who was fighting the good fight when most of those now carrying on were in their cribs or yet unborn. He came into the world in a town in Illinois, but when about three years old was taken by his parents to a community of German freethinkers settled about Sauk City, Wisconsin. At the ripe age of fourteen he decided his future destiny by chucking up his school to be printer's devil for Der Pionier am Wisconsin in Sauk City. Here he learned the printing trade, but the home town couldn't hold him and before he was out of his teens he trekked to Milwaukee and thence to San Francisco, where he set type for the Abendpost. With a fellow-worker he conceived the idea of starting a radical weekly ; they put up $250 apiece and launched Der Wecker. ***** ALTHOUGH he had found himself fed up with school at the age of fourteen he had been an avid reader, ever greedy for more knowledge. One day while with the Abendpost he had to set the advertisement of a man who offered lessons in algebra. Before the notice appeared in the paper the typesetter presented himself at the man's door as a pupil. From another teacher he took lessons in French. After a year or so of publishing Der Wecker he turned over his interest in it to a brother and set out for Cornell Uni- versity, then recently inaugurated as a workingman's col- lege. He earned his way by working in the college print- ing shop and after taking his degree went to Chicago. While setting type there for the Times he made the acquaint- ance of George C. Miln, one of a group of liberal-minded clergymen in the early eighties who were publishing a not- very-orthodox religious periodical. The printer soon be- came editor, with the title of the paper changed to the Radical Review. Like many another such publication, it was faced by financial difficulties. A wealthy manufacturer offered to support it, but with the mental integrity that is perhaps his strongest trait the editor decided that the two of them did not see eye to eye. As a declaration of inde- pendence he got out a number of the Radical Review advo- cating anarchy. It was the last issue. Soon afterward the editor was again setting type — in Boston. Coming to know Benjamin R. Tucker, who was publishing the anarchist weekly Liberty, he was presently editing a German edition of it. With the repetition for which history is famous, financial difficulties again stalked upon the scene and again the editor went back to the printer's case. Early in this century he followed Tucker to New York City, where the latter had revived Liberty and also was running a book- publishing business. He was with Tucker until the plant burned down, when he became proofreader for the Evening Post and finally tied up with The Nation. ***** NEXT to his mental integrity and his personal kindli- ness, the strongest trait of this man is his self- effacing modesty. He will be surprised, pained, and out- raged when he reads these words. But they are no hot-house bouquet. They are a tying together of flowers which he himself has planted along the way he has walked as a scholar and, in the best sense of the word, a gentleman — gentle to a disarming degree, and every inch a man. The Drifter Correspondence Dr. Crile and the Honor Roll To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: In The Nation's Honor Roll for 1929, consisting of the names of persons "who have done honor to the United States as a whole or to their particular part of it," you include the name of Dr. George W. Crile for his heroism after the Cleveland Clinic explosion and fire. The fire in question occurred on May 15, and 122 persons lost their lives in consequence. Two weeks later the National Fire Protection Association issued an illustrated report of the disaster, from which it is pertinent to quote: The properties of nitrocellulose film are a matter of common knowledge. Previous fires have given sufficiently gruesome evidence of the extreme inflammability of the film, and the noxious character of the gases given off when it burns. . . . Instead of being stored in a vault, protected by automatic sprinklers and provided with a vent to carry off fumes in case of fire, the film in the Cleveland Clinic was stored in an old coal bin, exposed to several poten- tial sources of ignition, and with direct opening to a pipe tunnel and shafts that furnished a natural path of travel for the fumes to every room in the building. The most diabolical cunning could scarcely have devised an arrange-

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January 29, 1930] The Nation 125 ment more surely calculated to spread death throughout the building. . . . For a number of years there has been available "safety" film, composed of cellulose acetate, and having no more fire hazard than paper or cardboard. Dr. George W. Crile appears to have been the organizer and manager of the Cleveland Clinic. His bravery after the tragedy is commendable, but the 122 people who died because dangerous films were stored in an old coal bin are still dead. Alexander E. Wight Welle sley Hills, Mass., January 8 Another Protest To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: On your Honor Roll for 1929 I missed the name of the American Civil Liberties Union. In my opinion it should have headed the list. New York, January 10 Fanny Goodman Recompense for Injustice To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: A question which should cause all Americans concern, in case pardons are granted to Mooney and Billings, is that of properly providing restitution for whatever injustice may be entailed in detaining innocent men in prison for thirteen years. It seems reasonable to hold that injustice by a court of justice should be righted as surely as that of any other social institu- tion. If these two men are pardoned, and thereby acknowledged guiltless of the crime for which they have been mistakenly de- prived of thirteen years of freedom, should not society do its utmost to repay in some measure for its mistake? This may not be easy to do. A substantial money payment may prove the best available form of recompense, inadequate as that would be. In case there is no precedent for such an essential act of justice does not the time approach for establishing one? If this is impossible, I suggest the creation of a fund which should go to Mooney and Billings after their pardon. I will contribute twenty-five dollars if such a project is undertaken. Berkeley, Cah, December 12 Harry L. Kingman Alexander William Mair To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: When your reviewer wrote his notice of the Loeb Classical Library edition of "Oppian, Colluthus, and Tryphio- dorus," for your issue of November 13, he apparently had not heard of the tragic death of its distinguished editor and trans- lator, Professor Alexander William Mair. He was burned to death in his library, leaving a widow and twelve children to mourn his loss. Possibly misled by a remark in Mair's Pref- ace, your reviewer says "here is the work of an old man." Mair was only fifty when he died. He says that the contents of this volume "are poor enough." This is true of Colluthus and Try- phiodorus, but very wide of the mark as far as Oppian is con- cerned. His work is of interest not only to the scholar but also to the sportsman and the zoologist. The Greeks had an im- mense knowledge of fishes and took great interest in them. We know that Alexander the Great allowed his friend and teacher, Aristotle, enormous sums for the study of ichthyology. In fact every zoologist should study Oppian. Mair died before his "Oppian," to which he had devoted so much learning and labor, was published. The "Callimachus and Lycophron," which he did for the Loeb Classical Library in 1921, is a further monu- ment to his erudition, and has been highly praised by specialists in the field of Alexandrian poetry. Professor Mair was not only an uncommonly fine Greek scholar and an inspiring teacher, but he also had the soul of a poet and a true poet's gift. Shortly after his death, H. J. C. Grierson brought out an attractive little volume containing a selection of Mair's poems (published by Messrs. Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh). In the Preface will be found a tender de- scription of the "silent frightened boy" who subsequently became the admired and beloved teacher of many a Scotch youth and maiden. The contents of this slight volume cannot fail to bring joy to every lover of true poetry and of perfect versification, and I hope that by calling attention to it I am doing a real service to many future readers. Besides many lovely original poems, the volume contains a number of translations from the Greek, Latin, French, and German. I doubt whether an ode of Horace or a bit of Virgil or from the "Anthologia Palatina" has ever been better rendered into another tongue. Then there are Mair's Greek versions of poems by such men as Tennyson, Landor, Heine, or Le Gallienne, to delight those who have com- mand of that language. Of these Greek poems one may, with- out exaggeration, say that they are works of a genius. I know of nothing that equals his rendering of the doggerel: In a cavern, in a canyon Excavating for a mine, Dwelt a miner, forty-niner And his daughter Clementine, etc. Murnau, Bavaria, December 5 James Loeb Who Shall Govern Antarctica? To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The story of Commander Byrd's present expedition to the Antarctic regions will for a long time remain a source of inspiration to us all. The only disturbing feature is the recent discussion as to whether the newly explored regions shall be American or British territory. The Antarctic continent (if there is one) may in time become of some importance because of its animal and mineral resources and as a place for landing and radio stations in the future development of aerial navigation in the Southern hemisphere. Its strategic position in war can hardly be of much significance for some time to come. Is it therefore worth while wrangling about a territory whose value is entirely in an uncertain future? I propose that the territory in question be turned over to the League of Nations, to be directly managed by it (no man- date to another nation!). The League could appoint a retired non-Anglo-Saxon diplomat to be governor, with the understand- ing that His Antarctic Excellency could continue to live on the Riviera. A small staff of assistants at the League headquarters could attend to the mapping of the region and other routine questions that might come up. Should a private company desire to engage in fishing, min- ing, hunting fur-bearing animals, or scientific exploration, a charter or a license would be issued by the administration, under the governor's seal and signature. The same would apply to a landing field or a radio station, unless the administration should decide to build one on its own account, under rules and regula- tions approved by the League of Nations. Such a solution not only would do away with a vexatious discussion between this country and England, but would serve as a precedent in similar future territorial disputes and would strengthen the position of the League of Nations as an actual governing body. Ithaca, New York, December 20 Vladimir Karapetoff

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Books and Drama Love Songs After the Aztec By JOSEPH T. SHIPLEY I Thou art a frozen mountain; Let the sun of my love melt thee. May the arrow of thy desire, Winged with flame, Find its home in my bosom That I have bared for the dart. Thou art come. Thy flaming arrow Is aglow in my breast. It feeds me and devours. I shall press it closer, closer, Till I am consumed. Thou art a crater of fire Beneath a cover of snow. II I rejoice, for my lover hath found me. Shyly I hid, but he hath led me out. Beneath the rock of modesty I trembled into bud ; He hath hurled the rock down the cliff of desire And bid me bloom. The forest of maidenhood shadowed my yearnings ; He hath felled the trees with the ax of his longing And bid me drink the sun. I rejoice, for my lover hath found me. Coyly I fled, but his arm encompassed the way. As I eluded him, fear came upon me, Fear of him tripped me; I rested my head on his shoulder, and grew strong. I rejoice, for my lover hath found me. Cultural History A Cultural History of the Modern Age. From the Black Death to the World War. Volume I: Renaissance and Reformation. By Egon Friedell. Translated from the German by Charles Francis Atkinson. Alfred A. Knopf. $5. THIS is the first volume to be translated of a projected four-volume history of European civilization. Only two volumes have so far appeared in Germany. The first of these, "Renaissance and Reformation," covers roughly the period from the Black Death in 1348 to the outbreak of the Thirty Years* War in 1618. The publishers assert that since "The Decline of the West" no other work has made so great a European sensation as this book by Egon Friedell. The comparison with Spengler would be inevitable in any case. Herr Friedell himself sug- gests it when he offers a "pedigree" of his book, a rapid sketch of certain peaks in the "history of cultural history," ending with the name of Spengler, "perhaps the most powerful and vivid thinker to appear on German soil since Nietzsche." The Spenglerian influence is very great; it largely determines Friedell's general attitude not only toward history itself, but toward other realms of thought: his condescension toward mere logic, reason, "causality," science; his relish of paradox, his "Credo quia absurdum," his mysticism, his faith in superficial analogies, even his style, with its peculiar italicization. Yet there are important differences. The two writers have not the same end in view. It was Spengler's object to demonstrate the existence and the nature of a morphology of history: his references to persons, institutions, and ideas were made not primarily for their own sake, but to illustrate and enforce a thesis. Friedell, on the other hand, though Spengler's ideas remain implicit in his work, has aimed to write not a philosophy of history but history itself. He does not, of course, return to the orthodox political narrative. He wants no "dull, barren registering of troop movements and diplomatic shuf- flings, successive rulerships and parliamentary negotiations," but a history of the whole range of human manners and cus- toms, intellectual and spiritual life. And he presents this not by a strict chronological recital, but rather by unfolding a series of pictures or panoramas. From the standpoint of logic, accuracy, and authority, nothing could be easier than a detailed criticism of Friedell's work. His introduction alone will completely undermine the confidence of many readers. He declares that accuracy in a history is far less important than the artistic personality be- hind the work; that genuine accuracy is impossible in any case; that all history is legend ; that his own aim is nothing more than to tell "today's legend of modern history" ; that not only is incompleteness unavoidable in history, but that only when the historian aims at this incompleteness deliberately does his work take on an artistic aspect; and finally that all successful history involves exaggeration. In the body of his work Friedell almost never documents his assertions, weighs conflicting testimony, or balances prob- abilities; he simply makes the flat cocksure statement. When he wants to prove a dubious point he blandly ignores all in- stances that tend to discredit it. Thus he maintains that in the Italian Renaissance art and literature were created exclusively for a select audience of connoisseurs and experts, while in Periclean Athens there was "a culture for all." He seeks to bolster this by remarking that "anyone could understand a Sophocles, a Phidias, a Socrates" and omits any embarrassing reference to Aristotle's metaphysics or Plato's "Laws." In his constant straining for arresting paradoxes he talks a good deal of rubbish. He professes to see in the pre-logical attitude of primitive man a sort of super-logic, and dismisses the "rationalism" of the last four centuries as "nothing more than a temporary prejudice." He seriously pretends that we are greatly the poorer for the loss of the "irrecoverable science of astrology and destiny-calculation" of the Babylonians. He even affects such superstitions himself, and attributes the re- ported earthquakes at the time of the Black Death to the social upheaval: "If humanity was shaken by ... a profound shud- der . . . then the earth must have had some similar experi- ence; and not the earth only but the neighboring planets, nay, the whole solar system." Yet, as with Spengler, in spite of contradictions and ab- surdities, the final result is a book extremely readable and

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Tanuary 29, 1930] The Nation 127 stimulating. I do not mean to imply that Friedell is a writer of Spengler's dimensions; he lacks the latter's force and origi- lality and immense erudition. But he is intelligent, penetrating, and widely informed, and never obscure or heavy. His manner md tone, his capacity to portray an age compactly and vividly, often suggest Taine, and his prose has the vivacity, clarity, and lightness that we are accustomed to think of as French. There are, in addition to the rapid narrative, many fine expository pas- sages scattered through the book — the analysis, for example, of the relation of geniuses to the age in which they appear, the :riticisms of Rabelais and of the literary artistry of Bacon. One can only hope that the subsequent volumes of this history will prove as brilliant and absorbing as the first. Henry Hazlitt Dime Novels Dime Novels; or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Litera- ture. By Edmund Pearson. Little, Brown and Company. $3. I CAN imagine no one better fitted than Mr. Pearson to write the stirring story of the rise and decline of the dime novel and its little brother, the nickel library; he is quite abviously one who as a boy gloated over the extraordinary exploits of Buffalo Bill, Old Cap Collier, the James Boys, and ather celebrated hunters, detectives, and desperadoes, and who still holds them in affectionate remembrance. Nor can I imagine a better job than he has done. For one thing, he has effectively disposed of the ancient canard, even yet heard in pietistic circles, that the old-time thriller was pernicious and immoral. He shows clearly, what every lover of the dime novel has always known, that in reality it was grotesquely strict in its moral standards; its heroes were always giants of chiv- alry, and the ladies who swished through its pages were para- gons of modesty and virtue. Indeed, it is probable that a dime novel, or a nickel one for that matter, was never written which would not receive the approval of the modern censor, even the :urious specimens in Boston. And instead of a formal literary history, Mr. Pearson has written a delightfully informal book packed with amusing quotations, with reproductions of the amazing works of art which illustrated the stories, and with comment upon the authors and publishers which answers in- numerable questions that perplexed the boys of another cen- tury. He writes fascinatingly of both the dime novel and the nickel library, and traces in detail their various phases — the stories of the Revolution and early Indian warfare in the East, the tales of the great plains and the pioneer West, the thrilling sagas of New York detectives, the pious accounts of righteous messenger boys and divinely guided clerks, and the exciting yarns of the college heroes of the nineties. Truly, "thar's gold in them thar pages," and as the publisher says on the jacket, "the quoted matter alone is worth the price of admission." The traditional dime novel is a thin, tattered volume of unlovely saffron hue, the cover ornamented with a gaudy pic- ture portraying the hero at a time of great stress, and inside a tale of wild and absurd sensationalism. Invariably, accord- ing to the tradition, the story begins: "Bang! Bang! Bang! Three shots rang out on the midnight air, and another redskin bit the dust!" But the tradition is true only of the dime novel in its later period, after it had swept the country for almost half a century and built up a popularity comparable only to the modern craze for detective stories. The first ever pub- lished by the great firm of I. P. Beadle and Company, later Beadle and Adams, was "Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter," by Ann Sophia Winterbotham Stephens, a writer who stood in the first rank of American novelists of the day. It appeared first as a serial in the Ladies' Companion, and opens very prosaically: "The traveler who has stopped at Catskill, on his way up the Hudson, will remember that a creek of no insignificant breadth washes one side of the village." Not until page 10 does the reader taste red meat. Then the hero cries: "Touch but a hair of her head, and by the Lord that made me, I will bespatter that tree with your brains!" "It took twenty or thirty years," Mr. Pearson writes, "for such exciting sentences to move up until they became first words on page one." The early dime novels were thus thoroughly respectable, and were written by prominent novelists who were only at- tempting to follow in the footsteps of Fenimore Cooper and Walter Scott. During the Civil War such novels formed the bulk of the soldiers' reading matter and were delivered to the military encampments in great bales. It was not until compe- tition forced the Beadles to cheapen their own product and to issue books of wild adventure and combat that dime novels ac- quired their bad name and were denounced as a literary plague and breeders of iniquity. But despite the gloomy speeches of the moralists, dime novels harmed no one; on the contrary they pleased and entertained millions. Mr. Pearson makes the interesting point that the dime novel is still with us, though changed somewhat in form. Tales as wild as the old thrillers ever dared to be fill the innumer- able magazines that clutter the newsstands, and appear as standard-sized books. The difference is that they are sold for two dollars instead of a dime. What are the works of Edgar Wallace and of S. S. Van Dine but dime novels? The feats of Mr. Wallace's detectives from Scotland Yard differ only in detail and setting from the exploits of Old King Brady and Nick Carter, and that sissified sleuth, Mr. Philo Vance, is blood brother to Old Cap Collier. To this reviewer, at least, Mr. Pearson's book is one of the most absorbing in many months. Every man over thirty-five who recalls the breath-taking hours with the yellowbacks or the "nickul lib'ries" will hug it to his breast amid a flood of happy memories. Herbert Asbury Religio Medici The Sciences and Philosophy. Gifford Lectures 1927-28. By J. S. Haldane. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $3.75. IN the present volume an eminent physiologist joins forces with those of his scientific confreres who have recently rushed into print with confessions of faith. Perhaps it is still a little too soon to be sure just how many of these flirta- tions with metaphysics and theology are actually necessitated by the latest developments in science and how many of them are the result of a fashion made possible by the confusion into which physics and chemistry have been thrown by the most recent investigations. But one thing at least is certain: if the process at present under way continues much longer, then the theologians (now headed toward skepticism) and the sci- entists (now headed toward religion) will pass one another on the road, and the preacher, discovering that he believes less than the physicist, will find that the traditional conflict between science and religion has not so much been resolved as stood on its head, and that the difficulty which faces him is the difficulty of reconciling a rationalistic theology with a scientific attitude which grows increasingly mystical. Professor Haldane, to be specific, undertakes to review those problems of bio-chemistry which seem unsolvable in the terms of that science, and after several genuflections in the direction of Kant and a few rather more guarded acknowledgments of his debt to the Holism of Smuts he gets finally to a chapter on The Belief in Immortality

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128 The Nation [Vol.130, No. 3369 and emerges with a version of pantheism which is to be dis- tinguished from other varieties of the same thing by little ex- cept the road which one travels to reach it. Professor Haldane begins with the now familiar analysis of the element of pure assumption in Newtonian physics. That great-grandfather of scientific thought assumed, so he reminds us, that physical reality is ultimately reducible to infinitesimal and independent particles which are capable of acting upon one another only in a fashion determined by their mass and relative position. This assumption that the material stuff of the uni- verse is essentially "dead" matter became the fundamental postulate of physical science; and though it justified itself pragmatically in the investigation of simpler mechanical prob- lems, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand how a living organism can be built up out of such eternally limited and isolated particles, since, to take one example, though the lungs perform certain mechanical functions explainable in accordance with the laws of gases, they perform other selective functions in maintaining a nearly constant quantity of oxygen in the blood which no mechanical reconstruction of their mechanism could perform. From this difficulty one may attempt to escape either by assuming the existence of mechanisms more subtle than any we have been able to understand or by assuming (as Newton's contemporaries for the most part certainly did) that life is something added to matter by virtue of which it can do certain things which matter alone could not. But Pro- fessor Haldane, after reviewing the difficulties inherent in both the mechanistic and vitalistic theories, comes to the conclusion that neither is tenable, and proposes a solution which involves the rejection of the fundamental Newtonian postulate. If life is not something imposed upon "dead" matter and if, on the other hand, it is not explainable in terms of such "dead" matter, then the capacity for exhibiting the character- istic phenomena of life must be inherent in matter itself which, therefore, must be endowed, with qualities not to be accounted for in any description which pictures it as composed of particles capable of no more than a mechanical action upon one another. Moreover, since physics itself has come recently to doubt whether or not even purely physical phenomena can be explained upon the basis of the Newtonian conception, the physiologist may feel justified in demanding that the whole problem of the relation between the inorganic and the organic be approached from a new angle and the continuity of the two established, not by reducing life to mechanical terms, but by demonstrating that matter itself is living — at least in the sense that it can act in ways unexplainable on the basis of purely mechanical theories of its structure. Thus for the billiard- ball universe of Newton in which isolated particles bombard one another is substituted a conception of matter which makes it essentially organic. Once one has gone this far the temptation to follow a sim- ilar line of speculation is strong, and Professor Haldane takes another long step. The world of consciousness — the world in which what we call values plays an important part — is as obvi- ously different from the world of simple organic life as that lat- ter world is different from the world of mere mechanism. But the difficulties in the way of regarding man as an animal to whom a "soul" has been added are as great as the difficulties in the way of regarding an animal as a mechanism to which "life" has been added; and by a process of reasoning analogous to that used before, it becomes necessary to assume that some- thing in the nature of the physical universe itself corresponds, not merely to life, but to consciousness and the world of values also. Hence the stuff out of which physical reality is composed is not merely organic but spiritual as well. Certain objections to Professor Haldane's argument natur- ally arise. In the first place it may be questioned how many of the functions of religion can be performed by a pantheism so AFTER MOTHER INDIA Harry H. Field FROM INDIA Extract from "The Englishman," Calcutta, India: "Mr. Field's book is a most lucid verification of Miss Mayo's much discussed 'Mother In- dia'. He deals with the various accusations that have been hurled at Miss Mayo, and successfully refutes them all." From "The Civil and Military Gazette," Lahore, India: "Mr. Gandhi and Dr. Rabindranath Tagore are refuted out of their own mouths, and many other wild Indian assertions are quietly taken to pieces and destroyed." This is a necessary companion volume to your copy of "Mother India." $3.50 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY The book that is being discussed in every intelligent person 's home ! MARRIAGE AND MORALS by Bert rand Russell "A bold, fearless book — the kind we so much need, sensational in its courage and candor. Ten years ago it could not have got by the censor. But now they dare not suppress it." — Ben B. Lindsey. Fourth Large Printing. $3.00 When writing to advertiser* please mention The Nation

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January 29, 1930] The Nation 129 tenuous. In the second place it is not likely that a thoroughgoing mechanist would consent to be vanquished by an argument in which no mention is made of either conditioned reflexes or inherited engrams, and it is equally uncertain that the time has yet come to give up so completely the efforts to account for the existence of our sense of the reality of values in terms of a rationalistic psychology which proposes to deduce it from ani- mal traits. But Professor Haldane would have, I fancy, a reply of sorts. He would reiterate his conviction that me- chanistic theories have completely broken down and he would contend that he is offering (at the very least) a universe more livable than that of nineteenth-century science which left the animal alone in a dead universe and the human being alone in a world of beasts. Joseph Wood Krutch Van Buren An Epoch and a Man: Martin Van Buren and His Times. By Denis Tilden Lynch. Horace Liveright. $5. THERE have been few of the Presidents who furnish better material for a colorful biography than Martin Van Buren. A master politician, cunning in intrigue, suave as a Tal- leyrand, and resourceful beyond most men, it was the fashion of his time to put him down as the mere shadow of someone else — a superficial creature without depth or breadth or substance. Thus the average schoolboy for generations has been taught that Van Buren was one of the "little Presidents" ; and he was nothing of the kind. Even his book on "The Origin and Cause of Political Parties" failed to affect this false conception of the man, but the long delayed publication of his autobiography h2s led to a reappraisal, and he has emerged at length as an able man of strong convictions and great courage. His contacts were such as to please a biographer. He knew and was ad- vised by Aaron Burr, consulted with Jefferson, was an intimate of Jackson and, as an old man, was a friend of Tilden, thus covering a century of interesting figures in his friendships. But his methods, subtle, often subterranean, were not those that appeal to the imagination or catch the crowd. Essentially a leader of the leaders, his most important contributions to politi- cal history were more than half concealed. It has been more than forty years since Edward M. Shepard made the last serious attempt to give us a biography of Van Buren; now Mr. Lynch, fresh from his successful study of Tweed, gives us another and a new interpretation. It is not so successful nor so clear as the biography of Tweed; but it is an improvement upon Shepard in its treatment of the Van Buren of pre-Jackson days. Here we have the intrigues and personalities of New York State politics from the time of Madison until Van Buren's retirement from the Presidency. Perhaps the author has gone too minutely into this provincial politics, introduced too many figures of little other than local importance, and thus created some confusion for the reader. The struggles of Clinton and the Livingstons, with Van Buren in the midst of them, are given with more or less detail, and the schemes of the Albany Regency are followed closely. The result is that the real bigness of Van Buren is almost lost in the detailed story of his minor intrigues. After all, his greatness, such as it was, is found in his national career, and this meant more than mere political management. Mr. Lynch combats the notion that his subject was a mere rubber stamp of Andrew Jackson. There has never been any justifica- tion for that assumption. The smaller man was overshadowed in the public view by the greater and more picturesque, but he was one of the wisest of Jackson's inner circle and there were times when he disagreed with his chief. On principles the two men were very close ; they differed temperamentally as to When writing to advertisers To Readers of The Nation: H. L. Mencken declared that in The Twilight of Christianity Harry Elmer Barnes was "con- stantly over-prolix, often repetitious, and not in- frequently somewhat vague." On the other hand, Dr. Charles Prosper Fagnani, Professor Emeritus of Old Testament Literature, Union Theological Seminary, said of The Twi- light of Christianity: "It is a superb piece of work, so compre- hensive, so judicial, so impersonal. There is not a word too much, yet the author has cov- ered magisterially every phase of the sub- ject." In the New Republic Horace Ainsworth Eaton wrote : "In style and purpose the book is bold and vigorous. The amazing knowledge of the lit- erature of the field covered; the aptness of the citations; the orderly mastering of vast material — all these are admirable. The Twi- light of Christianity is a book to be read by anyone concerned with the problems of religion and social progress." Rupert Hughes asserts: "I have just finished reading the last word of Professor Barnes' magnificent Twilight of Christianity. It is a Gotterdammerung indeed. It is overwhelming, like nature, tre- mendous and infinitely minute. The author seems to neglect nothing and his immense scholarship wields every weapon with easy grace." The conservative Churchman admits: "The loyal Christian can hardly accept the author's conclusions, but he must find an answer to them if his religion is to survive in the new age." You are certain to be interested in a volume that has provoked such varied and unexpected responses. Who would have suspected that this anti-clerical book would be condemned by Mencken but praised, albeit grudgingly, by the Churchman? You are quite right in concluding there must be something in this book. Buy it today at any bookstore. $3 $3 The Twilight of Christianity By HARRY ELMER BARNES published by THE VANGUARD PRESS 100 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK CITY please mention The Nation

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130 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3369 methods. Jackson was the more courageous, though Van Buren would have written "less cautious"; this was shown in the difficulty Jackson had in pinning his friend down on the bank question. On domestic questions it can hardly be said that Jackson was influenced greatly by the Red Fox, as Van Buren was called. In the field of foreign relations no one influenced him more, though it is hardly fair to ascribe the amicable settlement of the controversy over French spoliations so exclusively to Van Buren as Mr. Lynch does. In that crisis Jackson was fortunate in the advice of three real statesmen with diplomatic experience and familiarity with foreign affairs — Van Buren, Edward Livingston, and John Forsyth. The three consulted together. Mr. Lynch has crowded his volume with interesting and amusing episodes and with bits of drama which enliven it. He has contributed greatly to our knowledge of the New York career of Van Buren, but he is not so happy in his conception of relative values in the national field. His bibliography shows that he has read widely in preparation for his work; but un- fortunately, I think, he has permitted himself to be dissuaded from the citations of authority that are essential in any his- torical or biographical work that is controversial in character. Claude G. Bowers The City of Dreams The City of Tomorrow. By Le Corbusier. Translated from the eighth French edition. With an Introduction by Frederick Etchells. Payson and Clarke. $7.50. THIS book might have been of great use as propaganda for building reform, since its author is one of the most suc- cessful architects of France and one of the greatest expo- nents of modern architectural theory. It was written, however, to convince a French public, and a good deal of it is unnecessary to an American reader and might actually keep him from taking the author seriously. A good many pages, for example, are de- voted to showing that life in a modern apartment is superior in convenience and hygiene to life in an old-fashioned house or walk-up, and also that a skyscraper can be a thing of beauty; of all of which, of course, we are already convinced. More space is then taken by a quasi-philosophical hymn to the spirit of order. Man is conceived of as an animal who plans. He distinguishes himself by triumphing over rather than acceding to nature. His works, when he is at his best, appear in planned forms; that is, in straight lines, right angles, prisms, cylinders, etc.; hence the proper city is one built or planned with straight streets and well and sensibly spaced buildings. All this argu- ment is employed to refute the proponents of cozy nooks and picturesque curves, but American readers will probably be suffi- ciently convinced by the point which Le Corbusier also empha- sizes, namely, that the traffic of modern life forces city planning. Where the book actually outlines a plan it should be valu- able. Le Corbusier's idea is not original, but his knowledge and his persuasive style make it more forcible than it would be likely to be in other hands. The idea is to utilize the sky- scraper to combine the virtues of urban and rural living. He would have one large building replace a number of small ones, and of the ground thus saved he would make a park. The whole city built in this way would be a great park traversed by wide roads and containing at intervals vast structures. The larger structures would be office buildings; they would be placed in the center, each with its own subway station, and the streets would radiate from them. Surrounding them would be apart- ment buildings built on a honeycomb plan so that each window would open on the great general park, thereby assuring the best light and air as well as a maximum of privacy. In the suburbs When writing to advertiser] XPLORATTVE itiner- aries worked oat with reference to social, economic, historic, artistic and scenic features. Visits to factories, schools, children's com- munities, collective farms and villages . . . art treasures, palaces and workers' rest homes . . . for the adventurous . . . camping In the Caucasus and study of primitive tribes. Small groups, each accompanied by a quali- fied American leader and Russian Interpreter. From $410 Including express steamship pass- age. Literature available. Individual itineraries also exe- • cuted a Independent year-'round • representation in Russia 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK ?TME^O,REN^R.O,A5D< SCIENCE FOR CHILDREN Nature Study groups for children, ages 8 to 12. Saturdays from 9 to 12 or from 2 to 5; and Thursdays and Fridays from 2 to 5. We shall study animals and plants that live in ponds, woods, fields and marshes in Spring. The development of buds of trees; birds that come here in Spring; insects; rocks and minerals; use of the microscope. An all day field trip every third Sunday for those who wish to go— no extra charge. 15 periods, beginning February 15th. $15 for 5 Saturdays. Conducted by a teacher in charge of Nature Study at the Ethirnl Culture School and on the staff of the American Museum of Natural History. Address MART GREIG, 523 WEST 121st STUEET, NEW YORK CITY. IP YOU BELIEVE IN FREEDOM OF THOUGHT you are invited to join THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, Ltd. subscribed now will enable you to receive (post free) : ■ ^^ H. G. WELLS'S "FIRST AND LAST THINGS" ^^^k ^(^^ The famous author's "Confession of Faith and U 9 M Rule of Life." (160 pp.) ^■^ J CHARLES DARWIN'S "ORIGIN OF SPECIES" ^B jj The "Evolutionist's Bible." Complete and final • y]f l^mA edition: (434 pp.) ^VT *^^™ JOHN STUART MILL'S "ON LIBERTY" I The classic case against the Censorship. (160 pp.) (ALL THE ABOVE, CLOTHETTE BOUND) The Hon. HERTRANI) RUSSELL'S "WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN." Twelve issues of "The Literary Guide", the Rationalist monthly of the English-speaking world; and "The Rationalist Annual for 1981" (to appear in October). SEND $2 (MONEY ORDER) NOW TO THE SECRETARY, K.P.A., JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, K.C.4. (England). please mention The Nation

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January 29, 1930] The Nation 131 there would be garden cities. This arrangement, it is believed, would also solve traffic problems, since the population within a given area would be fixed and means of transportation could be adequately planned. In the details of the houses Le Corbusier has some novel ideas. One of his premises is that beauty in a city comes from variety in the general plan and uniformity in detail. By detail he does not mean the decorative motifs but the nature of the roofs, the kinds of material, and the sizes and shapes of the walls. Accordingly he would design a unit apartment, to be reproduced en masse, which would be cheap and efficient and give agreeable formal sensations. The plan he suggests is a duplex arrangement, among its most attractive features being a convertible winter and summer garden. In the office build- ings, because of the large park, set-backs would be done away with and we should have sheer structures, cruciform in plan and encased in glass brick. It is this brick and the masses of verdure that Le Corbusier counts upon to give warmth to his otherwise austere arrangement. Walter Gutman More War Stories Storm of Steel. By Ernst Junger. Translated by Basil Creigh- ton, with an Introduction by R. H. Mottram. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. Class of 1902. By Ernst Glaeser. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. The Viking Press. $2.50. Schlump. The Story of a German Soldier Told by Himself. Translated by Maurice Samuel. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.50. ««r">|TORM OF STEEL" is a diary-like narrative of a for- ^\ mer German officer of infantry who was glad to fight ^-^ for his fatherland and would fight for it again with relish if need be. Junger, the author, was not "disillusioned" by the war. He sees war, not as a catastrophic social phenome- non with peculiar ramifications and unpredictable consequences, but as a welcome patriotic duty and a glorious experience. The book deals almost entirely with action at or near the front. Jiinger's description of actual fighting and his commentaries on war from the point of view of the line soldier are good. "The notion that a soldier becomes hardier and bolder as war pro- ceeds," he declares, "is mistaken. What he gains in the science and art of attacking his enemy he loses in strength of nerve." How true, yet how little known by those inexperienced in war- fare of today! To me the book is dull; it is not cast in any artistic form, and it is slightly irritating because of the author's references to his citations and awards for bravery. It is the book of one whom a great experience has inspired to turn to writing; un- fortunately it is not the work of one inspired by literature to treat a great theme. "Class of 1902" is every moment a first novel. It is auto- biographically written, and deals with an adolescent youth be- fore and during the World War. As far as information and interest go the book has value; it creates a picture of middle- class German life and presents the political and social ideas current just prior to and during the war. It is, however, in- artistic and badly written. Ernst Glaeser does not put himself back into childhood skilfully. At times he and the autobio- graphical "I" are too close (with the typical subjectively sym- pathetic closeness of the first novelist) while elsewhere he appears to apply his psychology of today to the psychology of adolescence. He shows this in the Hilde episode in which the hero plans to fall in love, falsely, with a girl in order to learn about sex from her. Of these three books only "Schlump," to my mind, has any "Sh-h-h— ! "Be calm, please, and quiet. I will do the talking. "Splendid! Your expression assures me that you had no intention of printing any item distasteful to the Christian Science Mother Church. "That's nice, because I'm censor for the Mother Church in this particular city. Just as surely as Right Thinking leads to Pros- perity, your cooperative spirit will be re- flected in the advertising revenues of your excellent and supine newspaper. "We regard you highly for your uncom- mon sense. Good day, Mr. Pub. Restful catnaps to you!" This one-sided conversation never took place in the actual words quoted. But in effect it illustrates the amazing censorship which the Christian Science Mother Church maintains over the press of the United States. The story and the machinery of this censorship will be revealed in a remarkable series of articles beginning in The Nation NEXT WEEK. Beginning February 12— DIVORCE AND AFTER — the most constructive approach to the divorce problem ever undertaken. JUST ONE DOLLAR with the coupon be- low will bring you all the issues containing these two important features. Four additional monthly payments of $1 each will bring you The Nation for a full year (52 issues). Quick action is imperative. THE NATION 20 Vesey St. NEW YORK For the enclosed $1 start my one-year subscription with the February 5 number. I will send the bal- ance at the rate of $1 a month for four months. Name Street City 1-29-30 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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132 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3369 claim to literary quality. The anonymous author understands the art of fiction, utilizes form, seems to know what he wants to do, does it, and characterizes beguilingly his Schlump. He does not aim at the seriousness of the other two authors, but his book does show a bit of war, much of the life behind the front, and the break-up of the German army in the early days of November, 1918. Schlump, a boy of sixteen at the outbreak of the war, volunteers for the infantry. After a taste of the front, of wounds, and the hospital mill, the emotion of patriotism wanes in the youthful breast. Schlump becomes content to hang on to any soft job he can get in the — to use an American army term — SOS ; he "goldbricks." When the character of Schlump begins to deteriorate in the great military machine the author cleverly rehabilitates it through a certain circumstance and the vision of a sweetheart. All the while Schlump has very engaging casual love affairs, mainly of the body, which are the best points of quite a delightful book. James B. Wharton All Kinds of Poets Our Singing Strength. By Alfred Kreymborg. Coward- McCann. $5. ALFRED KREYMBORG'S outline of American poetry from 1620 to 1930 is, unfortunately, just what he names it — an outline. The book shows enormous reading, enor- mous research into sometimes very dead poets, and an amazing familiarity with the names of living poets; it shows almost nothing of an original point of view in criticism of these poets or an ability to judge verse writers according to their relative importance. Mr. Kreymborg is considerate of even the dead, and when he moves among the living he is very fear- ful indeed of treading on toes. His chapters on the more im- portant figures add very little to Amy Lowell's and Louis Untermeyer's comment; his discoveries of minor figures who serve to make the development of American poetry continuous are not always convincing. If he steps forward with one foot to criticize the living poets, he steps backward two steps to flatter each one in turn. It is, perhaps, still too early to undertake the task of placing critically most of these figures in American poetry. A book that attempted this would include long analytical essays on the important poets only and mention, perhaps, in passing, their followers. Certainly in such a book two-thirds of the poets named by Mr. Kreymborg would be dropped entirely, and the essays would include much more pointed and decisive comment on the really important poets of the most modern group. To the criticism of Eliot, Crane, and Cummings Mr. Kreymborg contributes almost nothing. "Our Singing Strength" may serve well as a text for further study, for more accurate grouping, and for more critical judgment. Eda Lou Walton Books in Brief The Lost Child. By Rahel Sanzara. Translated from the German by Winifred Katzin. Longmans, Green and Company. $2.50. This book handles a somber, Dostoevskian theme. Chris- tian Scheffel, a happy tenant farmer in North Germany, loses control of himself when his four-year-old daughter, Anna, dis- appears. Following a period of lonely brooding, interspersed with wild-goose pursuits of rumors, he achieves a new lease on life, the Christian emotion of selflessness becomes the cen- ter of gravity of his soul, and he vows to dedicate his life to others. When he returns home his wife is dead, and slowly and sadly he rebuilds his life and his half-ruined fortunes. Eventually Anna's body is uncovered in one of Christian's barns and the murderer, a trusted servant, is sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment; when the term has expired Scheffel takes the fellow back into service. When at last Scheffel dies he has been for years a spiritual corpse. The story is well told and is full of genuine feeling, but the bur- den of exaggerated romance and mysticism palls. Paterfamilias. By W. B. Trites. Cosmopolitan Book Corpo- ration. $2.50. Mr. Trite's novel of American family life is written in a pre-war, realistic vein of painful and prosy explicitness which misses realism. It deals with a doctor in an Eastern mill city in his personal, professional, and civic relationships. The story, however, is not focused on the doctor; it flows loosely around the various members of his family who seem predestined to dull and sordid catastrophes. The book is written almost en- tirely in dialogue, and the dialogue does not ring true. None of the characters, not even the long-suffering doctor, is com- pletely realized, and the continually shifting focus leaves the reader weary and irritated. The social background of "Pater- familias" is, no doubt, accurate enough, but this virtue fails to compensate for the lack of an inner movement and for the ineffectual characterization. The Decline of the Age of Louis XIV ; or French Literature, 1687-1715. By Arthur Tilley. The Macmillan Company. $8. It is regrettable that this latest contribution of an illus- trious scholar to the understanding of French literature and LONDON— A MILESTONE? The present Disarmament Conference in London may well be the most significant event of the present century. Important decisions may be taken by the principal nations of the world bringing the dream of idealists for centuries — a condition of world peace — close to accomplishment. GTfte JfflancJjester #uarbtan WEEKLY will give a sympathetic and, what is more important, an accurate and unbiased account of this epoch- making conference. At all times The Manchester Guardian Weekly keeps its readers advised of progress in international affairs. To leaders of intelligence in more than sixty coun- tries, it is a constant source of reliable information on all important world happenings and a faithful guide in keeping their viewpoint on vital events, clear and unprejudiced. MAIL THIS COUPON- The Manchester Guardian Weekly, 224 West 42nd Street, New York City. Gentlemen : Enclosed please And $3.00 for which Bend THE MAN- CHESTER GUARDIAN WEEKLY for one year to the below address. Name . Address

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January 29, 1930] The Nation 133 □ THEATRES □ □ □ FILMS D LEO BULGAKOV Theatre Associates, Inc., presents AT THE BOTTOM "Really worth XT by MAXIM GORKY .-A fine p]ay.. upoimr " New version by William L. Laurence Mantle Brown, Post. POPULAR PMCES $2.60 to 75c Newa. Phone reservations accepted — Circle 1407 WAT DORP THEATRE— 50th St., Bet. 6th & 7th Aves. Eve., 8:50 r» ■n.j-.A^v.rAA.x MATINEES Thursday and Saturday, 2:30 Kenneth iiacgowan and J. V. Reed present BASIL SYDNEY and MARY ELLIS in CHILDREN of DARKNESS A Rich Satire on Exploiters of All Ages by Edwin Justus Mayer, author of "The Firebrand" tjtt T'lif fi¥J¥P THEATRE — 47th Street, West of Broadway DIXj 1 iVlUILEi Evenings, 8:50— Mats., Wed. and Sat., 2:40. CIVIC REPERTORY "^S^ST 50c, $1, $1.50. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2:30. EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Thurs.Mat.,Jan.23, "The Sea Gull"; Thurs.Eve.,Jan.23, "Mile. Bourrat" ; Fr.Eve.,Jan.24, "Would-Be Gentleman" ; Sat.Mat.,Jan.25, "Peter Pan" ; Sat.Eve.,Jan.25, "The Cradle Song" ; Mon.Eve.,Jan.27, Premiere, "The Open Door," "Women Have Their Way" ; Tues.Eve.,Jan.28, "Living Corpse" ; Wed.Eve.,Jan.29, "The Open Door" and "Women Have their Way" ; Thurs.Mat.,Jan.30, "The Cherry Orchard" ; Thurs. Eve.. Jan. 30. "The Sea Gull." Seats four weeks in advance at Box Office and Town Hall, 113 West 43rd Street. -WILLIAM HARRIS, JR., PRESENTS - 'THE FIRST PLAY OF THE SEASON WITH TEETH IN IT." ROBERT LITTELL, WORLD. CRIMINAL CODE By MARTIN FLAVIN NATIONAL THEATRE with ARTHUR BYRON 41st St., West of 7th Ave. Evenings 8 :50 Matinees Wednesdays & Saturdays, 2 :30 ETHEL BARRYMORE ^eatre- 47th st- We3t of *™d™y Evenings 8:50; Matinees Wed. & Sat. 2:30 LEE SHUBERT Presents PHILIP MERIVALE IN DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY A COMEDY ABOUT LIFE 'BRAVE, AUDACIOUS, PROVOCATIVE"— Robert Garland, Telegram The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present RUTH DRAPER in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER SKETCHES Every Eve. including Sunday except Monday & Thursday nights at 8:50. COMFDY THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats., Thurs. and Sat., 2 :30. VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00. The Theatre Guild Presents METEOR By S. N. BEHRMAN C* hi \ \*A THE A., 52nd St. W. of Broadway VJCI11U Evgs. 8:50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:40 The Theatre Guild Presents RED RUST By KZRCHON & OTJSPENSKY Marfin Ras»It THEA., 45th St. W. of 8th Ave. iVidrilll DeCK Evg8. 8:40. Mats. Thurs & Sat. 2:40 Starting this Sat., Jan. 25th' OUTSTANDING DOUBLE-FEATURE PROGRAM SET LILLIAN GISH Cyclonic! in "WIND" a stirring, realistic drama which reveals her emotional powers to the fullest. directed by the famous Swedish director VICTOR SEASTROM Unusual Added A ttr action MARY PICKFORD in "THE MENDER OF NETS" directed by D. W. Griffith a relic of 1911 . . . pre- sented in the C hristoper H OBOKEN Morley man- ner. THE KAISER' — and on the same program — An Extraordinary Screen-Document i» in WAR and PEACE a remarkable close-up study of the Ger- man war-lord in many of his most Im- portant activities. . . a vivid panorama of the busy monarch and his contacts with important world-figures. FILM GUILD CINEMA Direction : Symon Gould 52 West 8th St., bet. 5th and 6th Aves. Popular Prices Spring 5095-5090 Continuous Daily Noon to Midnight Special Forenoon Prices: Sat. -Sun., 12-2 — 50c. Weekdays, 12-2— 85c. LAST 2 DAYS— Jan. 28-24— Thurs. Fri. "THE DEMON OF THE STEPPES" MATINEES : GOOD SEATS, ALL PRICES, AT BOX OFFICE! WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE AELISS "DISRAELI" (A Vita phone All-Talking Picture) CENTRAL THEATRE Broadway and 47th St. Dally 2:45 — 8:4* Sunday S — 6 — 8:4* American Premier Starts Saturday, January 25. "THE LAST NIGHT" (Wedding of the Revolution) A Powerful German Motion Picture of the French Revolution Adapted from Max Reinhardt's stage success "Revolution Hochzeit" ZZtU <if PlavLuco 55th St., East of 7th Ave. JJlD Ol. riayiJOUSc continuous from noon to Midnight "WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT" appears on the page following When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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134 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3369 history should be characterized by what the general public will consider a sober and uninteresting style; for the book is written with a surer knowledge and a keener insight than most so-called studies of the grand-siecle and would make an effective antidote to the propaganda of Bertrand and others. Despite the atten- tion given to the few shining lights of the sun-king's reign (Saint Simon, La Bruyere, Madame de Maintenon, Fenelon, Massillon, and Bayle), the general impression is of an interim of darkness and mediocrity between the age of Racine, who had been commanded by the king to "give up everything" in order to write a history of the reign, and that of Montesquieu. The author, whose merits as a social and political historian have already been sufficiently manifested, has here devoted himself exclusively to an analysis of literary productions. But there is enough evidence in the letters and belles-lettres of the day to show that war, royal selfishness, court extravagance, and bourgeois indifference to general suffering signified more than the dramatist's striving for stage effect or the memoirist's effort to justify himself by disparaging others. The title of the book, though misleading, is thus not altogether inadvised. The French Literature of Louisiana. By Ruby Van Allen Caulfield. Columbia University Press. $1.50. A valuable contribution to the records of regional litera- ture is made in this survey of French periodicals, books, and writers in the Creole corner of America, fragrant with the scents of old Europe. The colonial period and the early days of national history have elsewhere been surveyed; but of the later efforts to retain the French language in Louisiana and the pleasant, if not widely important, poems and novels and plays there produced this volume gives the fullest account. With brief biographical sketches and summaries of books, and an an- notated bibliography of a hundred pages, the book indicates pleasant paths to the browser and points out sources for the scholar. The volume is one of the publications of the Insti- tute of French Studies in Columbia University. Drama Ideal Corruption NO regular theatergoer who sees "Children of Darkness" at the Biltmore Theater can fail to recognize in it the hand of the man who gave us, something more than five years ago, that delightful ironic comedy "The Firebrand." To say that is to say that Edwin Justus Mayer has kept his memory green over a period of silence which Broadway reckons as roughly equivalent to eternity, and it is, besides, to say even more, for it is to recognize the fact that Mr. Mayer has a style so nearly unique that any example of it is obviously his own. The scene of the new play is ostensibly that of the private apartment where an eighteenth-century jailer keeps those of his unwilling guests who are able to pay for the privilege. Here a choice collection of villains practice upon one another the arts they had formerly cultivated in a wider sphere and, here, with the aid of the jailer's wanton daughter, they man- age to find full scope for their genius. But wit flies back and forth— for these are accomplished scoundrels. Cynicism, re- fined and perfected, is carried to ineffable heights. Vice achieves a consistent code so perfect that it becomes an inde- pendent art, and man, deprived of everything except malice and wit, becomes an amazing creature whom one may admire with- out scruple for the simple reason that his victims are no better than he himself. Success in a work of this kind depends, of course, upon the ability of the author to maintain a mood of ironic de- tachment, and this Mr. Mayer has found himself quite capable of doing. One of the characters remarks that "the most eminent poisoners have generally been of good family" and this observation will serve to suggest the tone consistently main- tained and supported by a steady flow of brilliant phrases, sometimes as brittle and almost as cunningly wrought as those of Congreve. When a thief has reminded the wanton daughter of certain amorous favors which she has granted him, she reminds him that it is "a lady's privilege to remember, but a gentleman's duty to forget," and nothing could be better than that unless, perhaps, it is the reply of the same daughter to another declaration of love, made this time by a poet: "There are three things which a man says with equal ease: 'I love you.' 71 'Madam, I regret that it will be impossible for us to mee again.' And bedded with!'" Yet polished phrases are only the ornaments of Mr. Mayer's writing. His greatest gift is a gift for comedy of the purest and most artificial kind, in which he leaves any real scene in order to create an imaginary world in which his fan- tastic yet clear-cut characters can function perfectly, and where, besides, they need be judged by no standards extraneous to themselves. He may call this world Renaissance Italy as he did in "The Firebrand," or eighteenth-century England as he does in the present play, but for him history is only a device for escaping from actuality, and the scene is really laid in one of the many provinces of the Realm of Comedy — in, to be pre- cise, that particular province where nothing except wit and villainy count, and where, therefore, wit and villainy can achieve a perfection wholly delightful because they are, in that world, the measure of all things. No one incapable of appreciating the comic possibilities of total depravity will enjoy this play. He will not perceive the charm of even Lord Wainwright (committed to prison because an inability to endure cant compelled him to poison "my wife and a few of her more intimate friends") ; he may even fail to understand how a comedy which contains nothing except wickedness can be wholly exhilarating. But such an unfortu- nate is incapable of enjoying any manifestation of the comic spirit, for that spirit demands that the mind take a moral holiday more complete than it can ever enjoy outside the realm of art and that, for once, it judge all things as though its burdensome spouse, the heart, had never existed. The trouble with the real world is that it is too badly mixed. In it, neither goodness on the one hand nor wit on the other is ever quite enough. But Mr. Mayer gives us a micro- cosm ideally corrupt and somehow delightful — perhaps because when we are in it we at least know where we are. The only pity is that he found it necessary at the end to introduce a touch of sentiment, for to suggest the possibility of virtue is not so much to relieve the corruption as to destroy the harmony of consistent depravity. Mary Ellis stands out from a generally excellent cast which includes both Basil Sydney and Eugene Powers — the latter very fine as the ineffable Lord Wainwright. On the American stage Miss Ellis is hardly equaled for parts which require a hoydenish yet sophisticated wit, and it is too bad that in these days so few plays give full scope to a talent most completely at home in artificial comedy. The new company established by Leo Bulgakov offers as its first production a performance of the familiar Gorki play, now called in a new and very slangy version "At the Bottom" (Waldorf Theater). The individual actors vary considerably in the finish and intelligence they bring to the play but the whole effect is good. It is worth seeing. Joseph Wood Krutch

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January 29, 1930] The Nation 135 WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT □ DEBATE □ LECTURES □ Plays to See •At the Bottom— Waldorf— 116 W. 50th St. •"Children of Darkness — Biltmore — W. 47th St. •Civic Repertory — 14th St. & 6th Ave. — See Advertisement. •Criminal Code — National — W. 41st St. •Death Takes a Holiday — Barrymore Theatre — 47th St., VV. of B'dway. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st St. E. of B'dway. ••Everything's Jake — Assembly — 39th St., E. B'way. •Josef Suss — Erlangers — 44th St., W. B'dway. ••June Moon — Broadhurst — W. 44th St. ••Meteor— Guild— W. 52nd St. •Red Rust— Beck— 302 W. 45th St. ••Strictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. •••Sweet Adeline — Hammerstein — Broadway & 53rd St. •••Wake Up and Dream— Selwyn — 42nd St., W. B'dway. •Drama. *»Comedy. ***Musical. Films Disraeli — Central Theatre — Broadway and 47th St. "Wind"— Film Guild— 52 W. 8th St. Art Exhibits "Painting in Paris" — Museum of Modern Art — 730 Fifth Ave., Jan. 18 to Feb. 16. Rodin's Bronzes & Drawings — Balzac Art Galleries — 102 E. 57th St.— Through Feb. 8. New Water Colors by John Marin — An American Place — 509 Madison Ave. — Month of January. Contemporary Belgium Painting, Sculpture & Graphic Art — Brooklyn Museum of Art — Opening Jan. 21. , A BITTER CHARGE f AGAINST WAR • "A FRAGMENT OF AN EMPIRE" NEWEST SOVIET FILM Beginning SATURDAY, JANUARY 25th. Love-stirring story of a man broken by War, who lost his memory and found himself in a new world. Heart-breaking agonies! Gripping revelations of the cruelties of War! CAMEO THEATRE 42nd St. & Broadway Continuous Performances HENRY COWELL Foremost Among America's Modern Composers will give four Illustrated lectures on CONTEMPORARY MUSIC Friday Evenings in February NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH 465 West 23d St. New York City A Momentous 3-Comered IJKRATK?;; Which Offers More to the Workers of the World? COMMUNISM, or ~ SOCIALISM, or / Scott CAPITALISM • NEARING says Communism Noted Sociologist and Lecturer Fenner BROCKWAY says Socialism Brilliant Labor Member of British Parliament Prof. Edwin R. A. SELIGMAN says Capitalism Foremost Economist, Columbia University Chairmen, SAMUEL UNTERMYER & ROGER N. BALDWIN Subject RESOLVED: That Capitalism offers more to the workers of the world than Socialism or Communism. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1930—8:30 P. M. MECCA TEMPLE— 133 W. 55th STREET Reserved Seats $1.00, $1.50, $1.75, $2.00 & $2.75 Reservations advisable now for best seat locations Obtainable by mail or in person at Civic Club, 18 E. 10th Street ; Columbia University Bookstore ; Rand School Bookstore ; 7 E. 15th Street, and New School Bookshop, 465 W. 23rd St. Also by mail or in peraon at offices of LEAGUE FOR PUBLIC DISCUSSION 11 W. 42nd St. Checkering 5789 or Spring 1716 (N. B. Tickets will be on sale at the Mecca Temple Box Office commencing this Sunday, Jan. 25th. Box Office Telephone Circle 1795.) COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY in the City of New York UNIVERSITY EXTENSION The Institute of Arts and Sciences announces Three Free Lectures on CRIME Its Treatment, Prevention and Cure by Dr. ALFRED ADLER Eminent Viennese Psychologist McMILLIN ACADEMIC THEATER N. E. Corner Broadway and 116th Street Also A Course of 14 Lectures on INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY (Fee $10.00) Tuesday Afternoons at 4:15 beginning February 4 and A Course of 7 Lectures on SELECTED PERSONAL PROBLEMS (Fee $5.00) Wednesday Mornings at 10:30 beginning February 5

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International Relations Section South Africa's "White" Problem THIS illuminating account of the present state of af- fairs in South Africa generally and in Natal in particular was written by a correspondent in South Africa for the New Statesman, from which we reprint it. The "black" election referred to was primarily a fight for the premiership between General Smuts, leader of the South African Party, and General Hertzog of the Nationalist Party. General Hertzog, who won the election, made the race question the main issue in the campaign with his slogan of "a white South Africa." General Smuts contended that the race issue should be kept out of politics. The "black" election of June last has already begun to bear fruit. Having deliberately appealed to the country's anti-black fears and prejudices, the government had to show that it was as good as its word and take any occasion that offered to uphold the white man's prestige (in the good old Back Veld way) and teach the natives a lesson and a proper respect for the forces of law and order. Recent happenings in Durban, where the new young Minister of Justice, Mr. Pirow, has sought to emulate Mr. Churchill's Sidney Street exploit, have doubtless had some notice in the cables. They are, perhaps, more significant as evi- dence of the European mental approach to our problems than of deep-seated native discontent — which no doubt exists — and "unrest" at the habitual manifestations of that mentality in pol- icy and in administration. For a long time past the natives of Natal have had good reason for discontent. In the older, more spacious days large numbers of native families found homes on European-owned farms as share-paying squatters. The 1913 Land Act made the shares system illegal, decreeing that natives should hold farm land only if they gave ninety days of "labor service." In Natal since 1913 there has also been a notable development of Euro- pean agriculture, with less room for squatter families of any kind, and increased pressure on those remaining as labor ten- ants. Evictions became common; those evicted, and others, re- moved to the "Reserves," which in turn have become uncom- fortably crowded — the result being a heavy drift, both from farms and from the increasingly crowded "Reserves," to the towns. The Natal natives, being proud but not very advanced or enlightened Zulus, with a common language and a strong Zulu tribal tradition, are likely to stand together in a common emergency better than the very mixed native community, say, of the Rand. The Zulus, moreover, have never taken to mine labor, but habitually prefer to take their chance of urban occu- pations in general service as store boys or as dock laborers. In spite, therefore, of the shortage of labor in the mines and else- where, urban wages in Natal have been even more than usually stagnant — by some reliable accounts showing little or no rise on pre-war standards. Meantime evictions from farms have continued, economic pressure generally has been intensified, and even rural natives have flocked to join the rather bellicose but perhaps inevitably ill-organized and not very effective trade union, the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union, or the I.C.U. Now to the small white community of Natal the Zulu War of 1879 is still a very live memory; quiet and peaceable citizens live in real dread of fire and murder on lonely farm homesteads. White Natal, moreover, is politically conservative, and in the worst sense "imperialistic" — readily entertaining a Times or even a Morning Post horror of the world-wide machinations of bolshevism, red, white, and black. For their own part these nervous Natalians have failed on the whole to meet even the urban problem of providing satisfactory living conditions for their hosts of town laborers; and native discontent, and for a time the I.C.U., have grown apace. In defiance of all evidence the I.C.U. is held to stand for sheer bolshevism, the precursor of something like a general Zulu rising. Twice at least I.C.U. offices in remote country dorps have been sacked by a European mob (without the white culprits being brought to book) ; and in June last a native boycott of municipal beer-shops in Durban led to riots in which (by the finding of a judicial inquiry) the high-handed intervention of white civilians was in large measure responsible for serious loss of life. Since June nothing at all has been done to allay native dis- content, and the well-sustained boycott of the municipal beer- shops has served to keep excitement alive. Meantime, by reason of poverty, of clumsy and defective administration, and to some extent perhaps by native design, collection of the relatively very heavy poll-tax had fallen into arrears. Periodical raids by the local police were none too effective, and, by the official account, on one occasion the natives counter-attacked and released forty of a band of some 150 arrested defaulters. This much, there- fore, may be said for Mr. Pirow's exploit, that in face of native discontent the all too normal police method of tax-collecting could not continue unless backed by an overwhelming show of force. Some time ago, accordingly, while the minister respon- sible for Native Affairs went off as if unconcerned to his peace- ful farm, his colleague of Justice, having first gazetted a strin- gent Riotous Assemblies bill for the compassing of future "agi- tators," collected a powerful force of police, himself took aero- plane to the scene of operations, and about three o'clock one morning stood by while the minions of the law routed natives from their beds, exacted salaams of respect, demanded tax re- ceipts, collected a "disappointingly" small number of "lethal weapons" (evidence of "Red" plots), and effected the arrest (not necessarily the conviction) of a few hundred of the 5,000 natives thus "rounded up." About six, as a parting shot, and as an "experiment," the gas squadron (themselves fully armed with gas-masks) dropped among the unoffending specta- tors thus rudely wakened from their beds apparently as many as three tear-gas bombs — "specially provided," says Mr. Pirow's official statement (to a Nationalist Party meeting), "for it is as harmless as it is effective, and will no doubt be extensively used in future native disturbances." Mr. Pirow himself was soon satisfied with the "complete success" of his demonstration and flew back to Pretoria, followed a few days later by his special police force, which had in the meantime similarly combed and scoured all the rest of Durban and its neighborhood. A few days later again it was announced (as it might well have been many months earlier) that the statutory Native Affairs Com- mission was being ordered to Durban to investigate and report on native grievances — the commission being a body of three with unlimited "powers" of advising the government, but no assur- ance of its advice being taken, or even made known for the edu- cation of the public. So the white man's power has been vindicated and a whole- some lesson of respect for the "law" inculcated — by methods of highly dubious legality. Mr. Pirow's is unmistakably the voice of the Back Veld to which the government made its electoral appeal; a young and inexperienced minister, who never in his life has had dealings with any but his own native servants, is as

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January 29, 1930] The Nation 137 confident as those he represents of his ability to govern the great native peoples of South Africa, as he would his own farm or kitchen, by sheer "benevolent" despotism. Natal is little if any better than Mr. Pirow and the Back Veld; what had a little more excuse in tire primitive days of the Zulu War, enforced "respect" and unbending despotism, must alone prevent a recur- rence of the events of far-away 1879 in the industrial conditions of 1929. If a more liberal and enlightened alternative government were in sight our plight were less desperate. But even while Mr. Pirow gallivanted in Durban, General Smuts, our one in- ternationally minded statesman and intellect, was shocking even staunch admirers by his deliverances on African policy at the Sheldonian Theater in Oxford. South Africans perhaps get their share of outside criticism and are always hotly resentful of such partial and ill-informed opinions. An outstanding South African representative like General Smuts might have been ex- pected to be careful to give the whole truth. At Oxford, on the contrary, he was inaccurate in his history — very politely chiding the missionaries and philanthropists for their past fail- ures, when the truth is that South Africans themselves forcibly prevented the carrying out of a "humanitarian" policy which might have saved them from the embarrassments of a native land problem, whose existence General Smuts himself faintly admitted. He was still more inaccurate in his description of present-day conditions. He painted an almost wholly fanciful picture of a native population — really barely half the total — comfortably placed in large "Reserves," sending their male folk out to work (he did not say the conditions are so severe that 50 per cent and more of the adults are perforce absent at any one time, though the Mandates Commission suggests 5 per cent as a maximum compatible with social stability) ; what time "the chil- dren attend the village school" and the "women keep the home fires burning"! General Smuts did indeed recognize the existence of another class, not quite so small as he and others commonly imagine, of completely detribalized, urbanized, and even educated natives who do not fit into this picture. In spite of them he plumped for a visionary scheme of "segregation," manifestly inclining to the now much-favored plan of separate and "communal" repre- sentation of natives, if they are to have any voice at all in the sovereign Parliament. But the Union of South Africa today is the monumental warning of the dangers of just such a class and "communal" representative system. For such purely native areas as remain, the plan may yet be tried; but in fact nearly half of our natives live and work and have their being in imme- diate dependence on farmers or other white employers, with interests inseparably bound up with those of the European com- munity. The sponsors of a communal franchise for natives make it abundantly clear that the representatives of natives shall be only a handful, thus threatening to perpetuate and in- tensify the present injustices which arise of necessity from the dependence of any conceivable South African government on what except for a few Cape seats is an exclusively white elec- torate. This white electorate is our real problem, since for political ends it is even encouraged in its prejudice of thinking of the natives as a "menace," not as an essential part of a greater whole. Nervous South Africans are as much to be pitied as blamed. Poor whites fear native economic competition and, as in Natal, memories of native wars are still so vivid as to confirm Europeans in Mr. Pirow's misplaced confidence in a "prestige" resting wholly on force. If the country is to be saved from itself it must have a sharp lesson — perhaps even now, in pain and travail, it is laboring under the birth of a new white men- tality. Mr. Pirow has had a poor press, and General Smuts has not wanted critics. European concern matches native re- sentment and discontent, and the state of tension revealed in the daily papers cannot safely continue. The handful of more en- lightened natives, acknowledged by General Smuts, are evidence that, in a community avowedly democratic, native policy cannot forever be a matter of dictation to the servants' hall. Hard as the lesson is to learn, the domination of Europeans must give way to the securer bonds of conciliation and consent. Contributors to This Issue Gardner Jackson is a well-known Boston newspaper man. Paul Y. Anderson is the national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Harold Kellock was one of the favorite students of Professor Woodberry. Joseph T. Shipley is the dramatic critic of the New Leader. Henry Hazlitt is literary editor of The Nation. Joseph Wood Krutch is dramatic editor of The Nation. Claude G. Bowers, of the editorial staff of the New York Evening World, is author of "The Tragic Era." Herbert Asbury is author of "Carry Nation." Walter Gutman is at work on a book of modern art. James B. Wharton is the author of "Squad." Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at New York University. □ LUNCHEON □ SIXTH SATURDAY LUNCHEON of the New York Chapter LEAGUE FOB INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY at the HOTEL WOODSTOCK 12:45 F. M., Saturday, January 25, 1930 THE PEOPLE'S COURTS—HOW CAN JUSTICE BE ASSURED? Speakers: MORRIS L. ERNST WILLIAM C. DODGE Lawyer City Magistrate NORMAN THOMAS Socialist Candidate for Mayor 1929 Chairman: BENJAMIN STOLBERG Make reservations in advance at the office of the L. I. D., 112 East 19th Street, New York City— Algonquin 6865 MEMBERS $1.00 NON-MEMBERS $1.25 Listen in on WEAF 1:45 P. M. Eastern Standard Time HEALTH FOODS "Eat for Health" Health Food Store Appetizing and and Nourishing Meals Luncheonette of Freshest Unprocessed 45-n East 34th St. Food-Stuffs (Bet. Park & Madison Aves.) Served at our Health Foods Distributors Health Food Counter \ Lexington 6926 Phones: ^ Ashland 6366 Ask for Catalog Health PtriodioaU ■ When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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STUDIO FOR RENT STUDIO to rent on 51st St., near Fifth Ave., for daytime use only ; good North window light ; steam heat ; rental $30 a month. Phone Volunteer 7396 evenings. APARTMENT TO SHARE SOME congenial young fellow will appreciate sharing my comfortable 3-room apartment ; quiet, cheerful atmosphere, located Washington Heights, right off Riverside Drive ; % hour Times Square. References necessary. Box 2278, % The Nation. D RESORTS D SON AQUA CLUB Lake Moheg-an, N. Y. The Haven for Sport Lovers. Ideal for recrea- tion and relaxation. Convenient for week-ends. Only 45 miles from New York. Sports Special programs for Skating, Hiking, Lincoln's & Washington's Skiing, Tobogganing. Birthday Weekends. For reservations call I'eekskill 1276 TJUSTIC Beauty for your relaxation and rec- ■*^- rration, convenient for week ends. 1V4 ■ours from Grand Central. Skating, Skiing and tobogganing. H1L-BERT HOUSE, Laka Mahopae, N. Y. Hill Friedberg, Prop. Tel. Mahopae 8M THE LAKE VIEW SILVEB ft C1MIK Surpassing Accommodations Atmosphere of Refinement Excellent Cuisine Moderate Rates 51 Midison At*. Phone l.ikrwood 287 Lakewood - New Jersey "DEAUTIFUL country, hills, pinegroves, won- derful views ; home-like atmosphere ; finest food: skating and other sports; 1% hours by Erie R. R. or route 17. ZINDOREST PARK Monroe. N. Y. Phone 122 F 8 □ EDUCATIONAL Q SCHOOL NOAH'S ARK A year-round home and kindergarten school conducted on modern principles. 56 acres on Croton Lake. Varied activities. Children of all ages accommodated for weekends. Railroad Station : Harmon, N. Y. For in- formation communicate with Erika Feist, R.F.D. 15, Yorktown Heights, N. Y. Tele- phone Yorktown 46 F-3. LANGUAGES FRENCH, SPANISH, ITALIAN, GERMAN, ENGLISH Conversational method. Native teachers. Private lessons, 75c, short course, 9 to 9 daily. 18th year FISHER'S SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES 1264 Lexington Avenue, N. W. Cor. 85th Street UNIVERSAL INSTITUTE OF I ATVPITAPF^ ITALIAN— GERMAN Li/YllVrUiVlylliS FRENCH— SPANISH Private lessons 75c (Daily 9-9). Native teachers. Simpllied conversational method. 18 years' ex- perience. Also neglected English education. 1265 Lexington Ave., Northeast Oor. 85th St RUSSIAN CLASS at Master Hotel 310 Riverside Drive, Studio 1703 Jan. 30th (Thursday) from 6:30 to 8 P. M. Phone Clarkson 1700, Miss Williams POSITIONS WANTED YOUNG woman of culture and personality, with concise and practicable knowledge of human nature, wishes part time position ; literary ability, versatility, and adaptability dominating traits. Box 2286, % The Nation. YOUNG woman wants an interesting job ; has had teaching and office experience, includ- ing semi-executive work in a large law office. Address Box 2283. % The Nation. CECRETARIAL service — typing manuscripts by •—' dictation or copy. Serena Bari Stone, 47 West 8th St. Stuyvesant 1232. UNIVERSITY graduate with 2 years' teaching experience, and 2 summers' work in Rhyth- mics at camp especially devoted to child psy- chology, wishes teaching position in Rythmics. Box 2284, % The Nation. YOUNG man, keen minded, well read, graduate of professional school, wishes position with publication, to write; salary not important where there is a chance for experience and advance- ment : best references furnished. Box 2285, % The Nation. "D HYTHMICS councillor, progressive chil- -^ dren's camp, in general vicinity of New York. Apt. 1, 491 3rd St., Bklyn., N. Y. South 6963. STENOGRAPHER typist, English - German, wishes evening position, publishing house, scientist or writer preferred. Box 2287, % The Nation. LECTURES THE PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE PROGRAM— Jan. 24-Feb. 1 AT COOPER UNION 8th Street and Astor Place at 8 o'clock. Admission Free. Friday, Jan. 24— DR. EVERETT DEAN MAR- TIN— The Psychology of Progress Psychological Factors in the Evolution of Reli- gion and the Influence of Belief on Social havior." HI Ethics and Social Science Sunday, Jan. 26— Dr. Kimball Young— "The ture of War." |5| Natural Science Tuesday, Jan. 28— Mr. William B. Curry— "The Theory of Light from Newton to Einstein." MUHLENBERG BRANCH LIBRARY 209 West 23rd St. at 8:30 o'clock. Monday, Jan. 27 — Dr. Mark Van Doren — The Autobiography of America — "Epitaph." Wednesday, Jan. 28 — Dr. Rexford Guy Tugwell — The Industrial Discipline — "Changing Ways of Life." Thursday, Jan. 30 — Dr. E. G. Spaulding — The De- velopment of Fundamental Ideas and Funda- mental Problems in Philosophy and Science. "What Is Progress?" Saturday, Feb. 1— Dr. Richard McKeon — The "" and the New Logic — "Ancient Logic and Si entific Ways of Thinking." :.:: DISCUSSION THE GROUP A Clearing House of Opinion Meets at Auditorium — 150 West 86th St. Tuesday, January 28th, at 8:30 P. M. OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD will speak on : RUSSIA "Land of Unlimited Paradoxes" Sunday afternoon at 4 P. M. (Feb. 2nd) Informal Discussion Group SEYMOUR A. SELIGSON will speak on : THEODORE DREISER (And his "Gallery of Women") Admission 50c Organized 1918 THE INTERNATIONAL CLUB 2 West 64th St. New York Sunday, Jan. 26th, 4:00 P. M. Lecture by NATHANIEL PEFFER, on "CHINA AND THE WESTERN POWERS." (China's Fight for Equality.") TEA. Admission, to non-members 50 cents. Saturday, Feb. 1st, 9:00 P. M. MID-WIN- TER DANCE and ENTERTAINMENT will be held in The Community Centre, 270 West 89th St., New York. Subscrip- tion : In advance $1.00. At door $1.25. Please Write For Our Complete Program. A CLEARING HOUSE FOR THE UNUSUAL The Nation Reader looks through these columns each week for information on the unusual If you have the unusual to offer — write us for our rates THE NATION When -writing to advertisers please mention The Nation 20 Vesey Street

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1930 No. 3370 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 139 EDITORIALS: ..- Economics King at Washington J»* Liquidating the War }'■» What Is Man? {^ Einstein on Peace J*e IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 145 NAVAL POLITICS AT LONDON. By Norman Angell 146 THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CENSOR: I. THE MACHINERY OF SUPPRESSION. By Henry Raymond Mussey 147 "CASH AND CARRY" LIFE INSURANCE. By Edwin S. Smith.. 149 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter CORRESPONDENCE J« CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 152 BOOKS, FILMS. DRAMA: Fulfilment. By Corinna Reiman Marsh }SJ The Pioneer Soul. By Henry Hazhtt J5J A Happy Scholar. By Lorine Pruette ;;\v;j ,i* Whither England and America? By William MacDonald 154 The Confederate President. By J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton 154 Russia Interpreted. By Joshua Kunitz. 156 The Great Dissenter. By William beagle is/ Books in Brief •„•••••, ^- • •;,• .' - ™V Y i?a Films: Screen Musical Comedy. By Alexander Bakshy 158 Drama: Direct from Moscow. By Joseph Wood Krutch 160 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Fascist Finance. By Francesco N ltti ">£ OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors TOHN A HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 34, Clifton Gardens, W. 9, London, England. IF THE NAVAL CONFERENCE in London has gone to work slowly and quietly we see no reason for discour- agement therein. Indeed, we count it as a good omen that there has been a great drop in the number of columns of forecasting, gossip, rumor, wild supposition, and anonymous assertion which came over the cables during the first days of the meeting. Our American correspondents over there are reported to be amazed that the conference quickly dis- appeared from the first pages of the British dailies. The latter are more accustomed than we to the slow give and take of international gatherings. Meanwhile, Ramsay Mac- Donald has given further proof of England's sincerity by ordering the complete abandonment of the two cruisers the Admiralty had under way, on which he temporarily stopped work last summer. We, on the other hand, despite Mr. Hoover's assertion to the contrary, are continuing to build the cruisers we had laid down. Furthermore, in London the French and Italians have locked horns on the question of ; parity, and the Americans appear to have won agreement to their demand that cruisers and smaller craft be discussed , before the battleship is considered. If this delay is trying to the American public let it utilize the time to send by letter J and by telegram to the White House and to London its \ insistence that something worth while be accomplished. LOUD IS THE WAILING in automobile circles because the proposed tariff against American motor cars, which, if adopted, will practically exclude our motor products from the market, has reached the French Parlia- ment. The only ray of comfort is that the Temps, the semi-official organ of the government, has come out against the plan on the ground that Tardieu does not care to engage in a tariff row with the United States just now. Whether this bill is in the nature of a bargaining move or not, there is no question of the danger of a pan-European combination against us comprising Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, and Czecho-Slovakia. The plan is to fix a quota of American cars for each country beyond which none may be imported. As for a higher tariff, Dr. Allmers, head of the German industry, is not in favor of it, because, he says, "we do not want increased prices, we only desire a larger share of the German market." He declares that there are today only seventeen German automobile factories compared with fifty-nine before the war, while the motor-truck manu- facturers have dwindled from thirty-nine to ten. If this six- nation combination becomes a reality it will have its politi- cal effect in England, where Mr. Snowden faces the united fire of the British manufacturers because he threatens to remove the existing protection against foreign cars. ON THIS SIDE OF THE OCEAN the Senate con- tinues slowly to mangle what is left of the House bill. It defeated the proposal to levy a duty on hides which Senator Hawes declared would add $100,000,000 to the cost of living of the American people. The National Shoe Retailers Association demands free raw materials and admits that, if the tariff on hides should stay on, it will increase the cost of shoes to the public and to the retailers. No vote has so clearly brought out the clash of interests between West and East as this one which leaves the West without a duty on hides and the East without its desired tariff on boots and shoes. Once more the line-up was wholly non-partisan. Senator Walsh, of Massachusetts, Democrat, who frequently makes low-tariff speeches, did his best to convince the Senate that putting boots and shoes and hides on the free list would ruin these two big indus- tries. If our information is correct, it is not so much foreign competition which has injured the industry but intersec- tional rivalry within the United States. By contrast Sena- tor Hawes, Republican, of Missouri, declared emphatically that Missouri produces more boots and shoes than any other State and that it is unequivocally for keeping them on the free list. As for the Progressives, even Senator Norris voted for the duty on hides, as did all the others of this group except Senators Blaine and La Follette. Finally, on January 27, the Senate upheld the duties on rayon. EXTREME BRUTALITY and lawlessness have again blackened the disgraceful record of the New York police. The occasion this time was a meeting which some two hundred Communists undertook to hold in front of the City Hall on Saturday, January 25, in protest against the

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140 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3370 shooting of a Communist picket by the police on January 17. As usual, the promoters of the meeting ignored the legal requirement of a police permit, and the hour chosen, just before one o'clock, coincided with the rush-hour exit of thou- sands of employees from nearby offices and shops. A mere handful of police, acting without violence, would almost certainly have sufficed to prevent the meeting and keep the crowd moving. Instead, a hundred patrolmen and twenty- five mounted policemen charged the crowd, clubbing, striking with their fists, and riding down men and women indis- criminately and driving them to refuge in buildings and the elevated-railway station. A reporter of the New York World was clubbed notwithstanding the display of his identi- fication card, and Robert Minor, editor of the Communist Daily Worker, was painfully injured. The responsibility for this outrage rests first upon the police ; next upon Grover Whalen, Police Commissioner, under whose sole authority the police of the city act ; and next upon Mayor Walker, who appointed Whalen and keeps him in office. AFTER THE CABINET MEETING on January 21 President Hoover announced, on the basis of informa- tion furnished him by the Department of Labor, that there had been a distinct increase of employment all over the coun- try during the ten days just past. According to an Asso- ciated Press dispatch, Secretary Davis said that January 1 actually marked the turn, but that it was not entirely evident until January 6, when reports showed a steady gain. On the day following President Hoover's announcement Frances Perkins, State Industrial Commissioner for New York, de- clared that figures at her disposal showed a steady decline in employment in that State since October. In a careful factual statement, quoting figures from more than 50 out of the 1,700 concerns regularly reporting, Miss Perkins pointed out that seven out of eleven groups of industries showed an actual de- cline in employment during the first fifteen days of January, while four showed a slight increase. By contrast with her information, based on actual statistical reports, she indicated that the Washington outgiving, purporting to show condi- tions during the preceding ten days, could not possibly have any adequate statistical basis. On the next day Secretary of Labor Davis, apparently without alleging a single definite fact in support of his previous statement, characterized as "unfortunate" any attempt to make "politics out of the situation." We agree with the secretary, but we do not think that Miss Perkins is the guilty party. THE EXTRAORDINARY FINANCIAL plight of Chicago has attracted nation-wide attention during the past week. With policemen, firemen, teachers, hospital nurses, and court and other employees all unpaid to the extent of more than $11,000,000, with no money to pay mothers' pensions or to buy coal for the schools and the county poor-farm, with $21,000,000 of unsecured debts, half of it representing unpaid bills and the other half im- properly diverted trust and other surplus funds, with a floating debt of $270,000,000 secured by short-term notes, in addition to $6,000,000 in outstanding judgments, and with the bankers finally refusing to buy any more tax-anticipation warrants, the city is in a state of virtual bankruptcy, and a citizens' committee which has finally come forward under the leadership of Silas Strawn with the proposal of a further loan of $20,000,000 has suggested conditions that resemble those of a receivership. Chicago and Cook County have a complicated system of government and taxation, with two dozen different bodies making separate appropriations and tax levies. The three heaviest spenders — the city, the county, and the school board — have for years spent their taxes a year before collecting them, being allowed under the Illinois law to borrow on tax-anticipation warrants up to 75 per cent of the tax levies. But beside that, the city has borrowed from its trust and surplus funds for the other 25 per cent, the county has piled up its outstanding bills till they now come to $7,000,000, and the school board has managed to spend $24,000,000 more than it took in between 1922 and 1928. Three-quarters of all taxes come from real estate, and the State Tax Commission in 1928 ordered a reassessment in Cook County. The work is still in progress, with tentative figures showing a reduction of $400,000,000 in Chicago and an increase of $300,000,000 in the "country towns" of the county. The latter, needless to say, are fighting the city vigorously. Meanwhile, Chicago has collected no real-estate taxes since 1928. Mayor Thompson in the crisis plays for political position, and Alderman Nelson raises a grave ques- tion whether acceptance of the Strawn committee's terms might not weaken, if it did not destroy, the confidence of the public in their elected officials. We do not see how anything of that sort could happen in Chicago. FIVE MEN ARE TO GO ON TRIAL at Charlotte, North Carolina, on February 24 for the killing of Mrs. Ella May Wiggins, textile striker who was shot during the disturbances attendant on the Gastonia strike last fall. The Nation, in its issue of January 8, stated erroneously that a trial for the murder of Mrs. Wiggins had already been held. The charge is second-degree murder, and Solicitor John G. Carpenter of Gaston County, who acted as prosecuting attor- ney during the trial of seven textile organizers convicted of the murder of Police Chief Aderholt, will prosecute this case also. Mr. Carpenter was outraged when petitions for a change of venue from Gastonia to Charlotte were received favorably by Judge Clement in the Gaston County Superior Court; he could not conceive the possibility of a fair trial not being held in Gastonia. Fortunately his associate in the trial, Attorney General Brummitt — sent by Governor Gardner to assist him — thought otherwise. Threats of violence and in- timidation directed at mill workers, printed in the Gastonia Gazette the day before Mrs. Wiggins was killed, were adduced with other testimony to show that a change of venue was necessary. Mr. Carpenter, who displayed the utmost zeal in the trial of the seven mill workers, will have an opportunity to show himself equally zealous in the cause of justice when the new trial commences at Charlotte. Gov- ernor Gardner has made it clear that he wishes justice to be done. And there are evidences that North Carolina is wincing under the charges of unfairness in the mill trials leveled at it by the rest of the country. MISSIONARIES IN CHINA are reported to have been greatly disturbed by the statement of Foreigr Minister Henderson in the House of Commons on January 22 that "the special treaty privileges possessed by Britisr missionaries have been or are in the course of being sur- rendered." As a matter of fact there is nothing new in the in 2

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February 5, 1930] The Nation 141 statement except a report of progress. The Chamberlain memorandum of December 18, 1926, laying down certain principles regarding the policy of foreign Powers in China to which Great Britain itself was prepared to adhere, clearly foreshadowed the relinquishment of all special legal privi- leges for foreigners and the recognition of the right of China to complete self-government. Mr. Henderson's statement, which was made in reply to a question, was merely an enumeration of the steps that have been taken in pursuance of a further offer of concessions made by the British Gov- ernment in a memorandum of January 27-28, 1927. The anxiety of the missionaries is based in part upon their fear that the strong anti-Christian agitation in China, joined to repeated depredations upon missionary property by lawless soldiers, may put an end to missionary work in the interior where the authority of the Nanking Government does not effectively extend. THE PARAGUAY-BOLIVIA difficulty has broken out again, with each country, as before, accusing the other of invasion of its territory and insult to its sovereignty, I and with Bolivia sternly announcing that while it would "never be guilty of disturbing the peace of America" it nevertheless feels "bound to take military measures" to de- fend its rights. Just what has happened is not clear, the authenticity of certain alleged Bolivian messages which the Paraguayan Government has published having been vigor- ously denied, but it seems to be agreed that there has been an armed collision in the disputed Chaco Boreal region and that one soldier on each side has been killed. The interest- ing thing about the row is that the protests and appeals of Paraguay and the denials and counter-charges of Bolivia have been addressed not to their great and good friend at Washington, high priest of pan-American comity and pro- tector of everything south of the Rio Grande, but to the League of Nations; and that the officials of the League, apparently with no fear of Washington before their eyes, are actually exerting themselves in an effort to induce Bolivia and Paraguay to keep the peace. Shades of Monroe! IF ANYONE UNACQUAINTED with the autograph market were asked to guess which of the later Presi- dents of the United States stood highest in value he would surely not guess the last one chosen from Ohio. Yet it is a fact that a holograph letter of President Harding recently brought the amazing price of $1,100. The explanation is that, in this day of letters dictated to a stenographer and transcribed on the typewriter, Harding wrote few letters in his own hand. Cynics insist also that as many as pos- sible of his letters were called in and destroyed after the oil scandals began to become public. Whether this is gossip or founded on fact, the truth is that because of the rarity of his letters Harding bids fair in the course of years to pass even George Washington as a prize for autograph hunters. A fine Washington letter of real historic value can be pur- chased for $2,500; his mere signature to a simple Revolu- tionary document brings $225. Lincolniana stand very high, while the demand for Benjamin Franklin items has also run up the prices. Yet one still hears of people des- troying letters of great value; the latest case is of a Maine woman who cut Lincoln's signature from a dozen unpub- lished letters of his and threw the letters away! IT IS WITH GREAT REGRET that The Nation chronicles the retirement from the management of the Columbus, Georgia, Enquirer-Sun of Julian and Julia Harris after ten years at the helm of that newspaper. They made a great paper, for they gave it courage, integrity, and conscience. They knew no class lines and yielded to no prejudices. Their minds were attuned to the needs of a new world and they had a vision which ranged far beyond the shores of their own country. In short, they were devoted patriots in the best sense. Unfortunately, they were not too good to be true but too good to last, and their paper has gone into other hands. Rightly the Pulitzer prize was awarded to their daily in 1925 for most distinguished civic service "in its brave, energetic fight against the Ku Klux Klan, against the enactment of a law banning the teaching of evolution, against dishonest and incompetent public offi- cials, and for justice to the Negro and against lynching." They made great personal and financial sacrifices, but they are responsible for a glorious episode in the history of the modern press of America. « T OURNEY'S END," the powerful war play that has •J been playing more than a year to crowded houses in New York, was presented by the New York company the other day for the cadets at West Point. It is reported that the performers scored the hit of their careers; nowhere have they heard such whole-hearted applause as greeted them in the United States Military Academy. And though at first one is encouraged by the spectacle of young men about to be soldiers applauding the picture of the ugliness and futility of modern warfare, one pauses for a second thought and won- ders if that was what they really were applauding after all. Those who lived through the last war saw in Mr. Sherriff's play meaningless sacrifice, unrewarded heroism, futile cour- age under fire. Men played the game, decently, uncom- plainingly, quietly, although they did not know what it was all about. But these youngsters at West Point, to whom the war which ended twelve years ago is a faint, boyish memory, watched Captain Stanhope go out from his dug- out into the sure death that was splintering around his head and thought — what? Did they, by any chance, think, as young soldiers from time immemorial have thought, how glorious, how sweet it is to die thus strongly and bravely? We who know better say that it is neither glorious nor sweet. But they might make the same answer that a young man of twenty-one made not long ago to one of thirty-five: "It's all very well for you to talk," he said. "You've had your war. And we'll have ours, too. See if we don't." Those who love peace must find an answer to this before they achieve their desire. WE DEEPLY REGRET that an error was made in our issue of last week in announcing in an editorial, The New Magazines, that the Symposium had been taken over by the Hound & Horn. This was not true; the Symposium will continue to be published as a separate quarterly under its present title. The Nation's statement was based on an advertisement which appeared in several periodicals announcing that the editorial and business affairs of the Symposium had been merged with those of the Hound & Horn. This advertisement, we now learn, was inserted when negotiations for such a merger were in progress.

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142 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3370 Economics King in Washington IF anybody doubts the extent to which economic interests have come to control our political life let him look to Washington. Wherever his glance may fall he will behold economic groups struggling to obtain what they con- sider fair treatment at the hands of the national legislature, or brazenly seeking to control our public life. Purely politi- cal issues have largely disappeared ; the difference between the two parties is simply the measure of their varying reactions to agricultural or industrial proposals. There is nowhere a clear-cut cleavage on principles between them, least of all now on the tariff, as to which it is merely a question whether the minority will or will not favor an arbitrarily fixed rate lower than the one proposed by the majority. Opposition has become a matter of degree. Take the numerous investigations now going on. The outsider at a distance rages at them, especially if he is a business man. He denounces the Senate and the Trade Commission as busybodies meddling in concerns other than their own. "If Congress would only tend to its business and let us alone," he says, "it would get its work done and business would be far better off." What he does not realize is that the Senate investigations are a legitimate and necessary part of its job ; that by its inquiries it is fulfilling a function for which we should have to create some other agency if the Senate were not there to play the role of general inquisitor. That Washington seethes with business investigations is not the fault of the Senate; the responsi- bility rests largely with the business men and organizations which create situations that compel investigation. It was not the Senate that was responsible for the oil-field scan- dals. The Senators who carried on that inquiry and those who are giving hours and hours to a review of the activities of Big Business in various directions would gladly, we believe, be spared this duty so that they could give more time to their regular law-making functions. For example, there is the inquiry into the propaganda methods of the electric-light companies and other public utilities. This was no gratuitous fishing excursion. The facts laid before the Senate were such as to compel it to move. On the floor of that body the fight was not as to whether there should or should not be an inquiry, for every Senator voted for it ; the only difference was that the Pro- gressives wanted the Senate itself to undertake it, and the majority put it into the hands of the Federal Trade Com- mission, many of them hoping, it must be admitted, that the thing would be buried there. The facts brought out by the commission related to the acts of the public utili- ties; it is the character of these facts, not the inquiry into them, which has scandalized the public. The inquiry into the radio situation was in its inception no mere hunting around for some new field for governmental snooping. From the beginning, government control of the radio has been taken for granted as absolutely necessary. What has given particular prominence to the recent testimony has been not merely the question as to how the great broad- casting companies were treating the various currents of opinion in the United States, and how impartially they were administering the great trusts committed to their hands, but whether the United States should or should not deliberately create an industrial monopoly in the field of air and land and under-water telegraphy. That issue was raised by Big Business itself. It cannot complain hereafter if the Senate deals often and loudly with this question. Again, for the inquiry into the lobby in Washington Big Business has only itself to thank. When it hires a man like Shearer and the various public-relations counsels who have appeared on the witness stand for preposterous financial rewards, it must pay the full price. Nor is it possible to offset this as the public-utilities companies have tried to do by showing how much their business is menaced by the activities of various civic bodies intent either on public ownership or a far more rigid control of public- service corporations. The one represents an open and above- board association of public-spirited persons who have nothing personally to gain by their propaganda; the other repre- sents too often an underhand and corrupting effort to impose the will of a small group upon the country. But the point we wish to stress is the inevitability with which questions like these drift into the arena at Washington. It is impossible to assert now that Congress has no right to spend its time on purely business affairs. Let an industry get into trouble, a canal go bankrupt, like the Cape Cod Canal, or weak railroads begin to lose ground, and the shoe is on the other foot. Then it is Big Business itself which declares that it is the primary function of Congress to take an interest in the particular industry affected and to safe- guard it from disaster. Even more striking is the profound interest awakened in Washington itself by the sparring between Congress and industry. Many there are interested in the naval con- ference at London, but what the more thoughtful legisla- tors and press commentators upon Washington events are most excited about is the power fight. It is here that the great battle is to be waged ; it is on this issue that men will be finally tried out as to whether they are for the old order of private privilege and private exploitation of great natural resources, or whether they wish the government to hold these resources for the people, and if necessary to operate them. The principles which will be established upon this issue will have a widespread effect upon all industry and upon the government's relation to it, and today the belief prevails that probing into the power question has not yet developed the most sensational facts. But whether this is so or not, there are other great questions awaiting the action of Congress. The whole problem of railroad consolidation comes next. Who shall profit by it? The railroads that save millions through consolidation, or the public, particu- larly the farmers, that so urgently needs lower rates? We have no doubt that if all government control could be removed the railroads themselves would unify the entire system in an extremely short space of time, just as it is obvious that if Congress does not prevent there will soon be one supreme power company in the United States. Eco- nomics is king in Washington. Who shall rule the king?

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February 5, 1930] The Nation 143 Liquidating the War PRECISELY what the members of the reparations con- ference at The Hague agreed to when, on January 20, they signed the protocol approving the Young Plan cannot be fully known until the texts of the twenty- odd documents are published. A curious indefiniteness has hung over the reported proceedings of the conference from the first. Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank, for example, stirred up a great political row in Germany by insisting that the report of the Young committee which he signed was not identical with the Young Plan which Ger- many was asked to accept, and even threatened to debar the Reichsbank from subscribing to the capital stock of the Bank for International Settlements; but no American correspond- ent, as far as we have noticed, took the trouble to point out wherein, if at all, his contention was well founded. More curious still, the bank plan, the most novel feature of the Young scheme and a matter of the greatest international importance, has hardly figured in the dispatches to the Ameri- can press at all. The main outlines of the great settlement, on the other hand, are clear. Two important modifications have been made in the reparations part of the Young proposals. The schedules of German annuities have been altered by deduct- ing the amounts which Germany will pay directly to the United States under the treaty recently concluded, and sanctions may be imposed upon Germany for default in its payments if the World Court finds that the default has been intentional. Preliminary arrangements are also reported to have been made for the mobilization of a part of the an- nuities in a $300,000,000 loan, and for the allocation of the loan among the world's financial markets. The United States, it has been intimated, will be looked to for a sub- scription of about one-fourth of the amount, but the loan itself probably cannot be floated before May. The vexatious question of the non-German reparations, with Hungary stubbornly opposing the claims of the Little Entente states, has been settled in principle only, the actual working out of the details of a complicated compromise being left to a small commission sitting at Paris. The most important administrative feature of the agreement is, of course, the approval of the Bank for Inter- national Settlements, the statute of the bank as drafted by a commission at Baden-Baden having, apparently, been ac- cepted without material change. It will be recalled that the bank, as originally planned by the Young committee, was to enjoy, in addition to most of the usual banking privileges, vast powers of participation in trade and industrial develop- ment wherever the directors chose to operate. The volume of adverse criticism which this proposal of a gigantic super- bank evoked evidently impressed the Baden-Baden commis- sion, for in drafting the statute they threw all these general provisions overboard and confined the bank strictly to the banking field as an agency for handling reparation payments. The bank, which is to be located at Basle, will have a capital of 500,000,000 Swiss francs (about $96,500,000), one- fourth of which must be paid in ; it will be entitled to a commission of one-tenth of one per cent on the payments which it handles; and it will have the use of non-interest- bearing deposits of 125,000,000 marks contributed one-half by Germany and one-half by Germany's creditors. A writer in the Frankfurter Zeitung estimates that the bank should be able to earn 14 per cent on its paid-in capital, but a sub- stantial part of its net profits will eventually go to reduce the amount of the German annuities. Legally, what was done at The Hague does not put the new scheme fully into effect ; first, because the protocol must be ratified by the various governments concerned and, second, because the bank cannot be organized until Switzer- land has removed a constitutional obstacle to the grant of a charter for more than fifteen years. The German pay- ments, however, will now be made under the new schedules. To the extent that the Hague settlement puts an end to a controversy which has embittered European politics for ten years, reduces Germany's burden, provides for the commer- cialization of the German annuities and their administra- tion through a specially organized bank, and removes all justification for the further maintenance of French troops in Germany, there will be profound satisfaction over what has been achieved. The uncertain element in the transaction is the bank, an institution managed by directors most of whom will be chosen with an eye to politics, subject to political pressure if its course is not satisfactory either to Germany or to any of the creditor governments, and so contrived, through its provision for American representation in its directorate, as to keep up, indirectly at least, America's connection with a reparations issue with which the American Government has repeatedly declared it would have nothing to do. What is Man? THE appearance of Volume I of the "Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences" (The Macmillan Company, $7.50) is another milestone marking the progress of the sciences that seek an understanding of man, and another achievement of American scholarship. The editor- in-chief, Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman, McVickar Pro- fessor of Political Economy at Columbia University, empha- sizes in the Preface the international character of the under- taking, and three-eighths of the 163 contributors to this first volume are foreign scholars. Yet the impression remains of a prevailingly American work, as was inevitable in view of the genesis and execution of the undertaking, and the mark of the Columbia group among the Americans is unmistakable. The project of such an encyclopedia was launched in 1923 after a good deal of previous discussion of the general idea, and the undertaking was definitely organized in the spring of 1927 under the sponsorship of the American Anthropological Association, the American Association of Social Workers, the American Economic Association, the American Historical Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Sociological Society, the American Statistical Association, the Association of American Law Schools, and the National Education Association. The work has been swiftly executed, and it is planned to bring out the fifteen volumes constituting the entire monumental undertaking in

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144 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3370 regular sequence at the rate of three volumes a year. We have learned to apply the methods of mass production not only to steel but to scholarship. The volume now in hand covers the topics (alphabetically arranged) from Aaronson to Allegiance. Professor Seligman in the Introduction points out that the social sciences have reached the point where their further development demands a clear recognition of their interrelations. Man after all is one being, not many; his economic activity, for example, is not to be wholly under- stood aside from a knowledge of his psychological reac- tions, his political organization, his religious and other insti- tutions, his habits, customs, manners, and morals. There may be reasonable doubt whether there can be such a thing as a genuine social science, but if there is to be such it must certainly be a science of man and not a series of disjointed sciences about man. Half the volume in hand, accordingly, is taken up with a useful survey, written by a dozen schol- ars, of the development of social institutions and thought in the Western world from the days of ancient Greece to the present, and an account, of more doubtful utility, of the growth of the social sciences as disciplines. It seems strange that in an undertaking of this scope there should be no apparent intention of considering the social thought of that half of the human race that lives east of Suez. After all, every passing day makes it clearer that the West must do its part in adjusting itself to the thought of India and China, instead of expecting the adjustment to be all in the other direction. The final test of a work of this kind must be its authoritativeness and usefulness, and not simply its general ideas. It is a fair question whether the completely satis- factory execution of a task of such magnitude would not really require the full-time cooperation over a period of years of a considerable group of ripe scholars, rather than the handling of the actual editorial work, in large part, by younger investigators, however competent ; yet the names of the editor-in-chief and the associate editor, Alvin Johnson, are a guaranty of the scholarly competence of the work, and the remarkable list of editorial consultants and the names of the contributors to this volume are evidence of a wide catholicity in the choice of collaborators. Probably no student would be wholly satisfied with every item in the book lists that accompany all the articles, but the biblio- graphical work appears to be generally good. The volume in hand contains many excellent articles by men of the first rank in their respective fields, and such articles cover an extraordinarily wide range of topics. What older ency- clopedia, for example, would have contained a discussion like that on academic freedom by Arthur O. Lovejoy? The treatment of advertising, we think, contains business-school ballyhoo as well as social science. Probably no two students would agree on just who was to be included in the biogra- phies that are to occupy a fifth of the entire space, but cer- tainly no one conversant with the difficulties of encyclo- pedia-making will question lightly the judgment of con- scientious editors either in choice of topics, in space assign- ment, or in the selection of writers. A complete appraisal must await the appearance of future volumes, but it is not too early to praise the boldness of the project, the breadth of the conception of social science that it embodies, and the speed and efficiency with which the work has been executed. Einstein on Peace PROFESSOR ALBERT EINSTEIN, who promul- gated a theory that turned the world of science up- side down, uttered by means of a cable dispatch to the New York Times the other day a theory of practical politics equally revolutionary and world-shaking. Professor Einstein has expressed the essence of the almost limitless discussions on disarmament and limitation of armaments more cogently than many naval conferences could do — or have done. We quote his remarks in full: It has now become a general recognized axiom that the giant armaments of all nations are proving highly injurious to them collectively. I am even inclined to go a step further by the assertion that, under present-day conditions, any one state would in- cur no appreciable risk by undertaking to disarm — wholly regardless of the attitude of the other states. If such were not the case it would be quite evident that the situation of such states as are unarmed or only partially equipped for defense would be extremely difficult, dangerous, and dis- advantageous— a condition which is refuted by the facts. I am convinced that demonstrative references to arma- ments are but a weapon in the hands of the factors inter- ested in their production or in the maintenance and develop- ment of a military system for financial or political-egotistic reasons. I am firmly of the opinion that the educational effect of a first and genuine achievement in the realm of disarma- ment would prove highly efficacious, because the succeed- ing second and third steps would then be immeasurably simpler than the initial one; this for the obvious reason that the first results of an understanding would considerably weaken the familiar argument for national security with which parliamentarians of all countries now permit them- selves to be intimidated. Armaments can never be viewed as an economic asset to a state. They must ever remain the unproductive exploi- tation of men and material and an encroachment on the economic reserves of a state through the temporary con- scription of men in the active periods of their lives — not to mention the moral impairment resulting from a pre- occupation with the profession of war and the moral processes of preparing a nation for it. This statement makes one or two points worth re- peating. First, that the makers of munitions and naval armament and the military and naval bodies which use them are primarily interested in their perpetuation. We may stop and ask ourselves if we are willing to make war for the double purpose of giving a general or an admiral a job and bestowing largess upon the owner of a munitions plant. Put in those simple terms, of course, the answer is a flat negative. The second point of importance in Pro- fessor Einstein's statement is that in all probability nothing in the world would happen to a country which announced that, irrespective of similar action in other countries, it pro- posed to scrap its armaments. We are willing to predict that any such epoch-making move on the part of a great nation would result in similar moves by other great nations. The way to disarm — we have said it times without number — is to disarm. It is refreshing to hear the world's most famous scientist say the same thing.

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February 5, 1930] The Nation 145 It Seems to Heywood Broun NO one outside the ranks gets any thanks for defend- ing Communists. Roger Baldwin, who would have stayed the clubs of the police, was to the little reds a "sanctimonious petty-bourgeois liberal." And they have been equally severe and silly in their criticism of Norman Thomas and of other Socialist leaders who were fighting for human rights at a time when most of the Communist crowd were still too young to wash behind the ears unaided. All this is irritating, and yet none but police would seriously contend that irritation was a proper justification for wholesale club- bing. The validity of Communist philosophy and practice is wholly irrelevant in the matter of the City Hall riot. Life can go on sweetly enough even if the left wing on occasion stoops to folly, but we of the City of New York are in a bad way if our police prove craven brutes disposed to go into a clubbing panic on the slightest provocation. The issue lies not between the extreme radicals and the uniformed force. This is a matter touching the entire citi- zenry. Communists may rest assured that I have no inten- tion of trying to make them my special wards. It is not sentiment so much as self-interest which impels me to suggest that there should be loud and insistent popular clamor for the immediate resignation of Grover Whalen. It is rather fortunate that one of the victims of the police delirium turned out to be a respectable business man having no connection whatsoever with the Communist Party. Solid and conserva- tive citizens have been disposed in the past to take police out- rages too calmly. If the victims were radicals or gangsters or suspected criminals many have said: "Maybe it wasn't legal, but after all they had it coming to them." It is well to bear in mind that once power gets on a rampage there is no telling just where it will stop. If conservatives were wise they would be the most pas- sionate defenders of civil liberties. After all, it is the stand- patter who has the biggest stake in the preservation of things as they are. It really is up to him to see that matters move smoothly. For instance, the New York Times should ring each day with editorial denunciation of police and mob vio- lence against I.W.W.'s, Communists, and the various sects which are preyed upon by the lawless elements of American communities. The Communist who is clubbed may carry round a painful injury. He may well bear the fierce per- sonal animosity of anyone who is put upon without good reason. But there is a singing in his heart as well as his head. After all he has managed to build up a case for his cause. The logic of the police seems even weaker than their courage. It has been the Communist custom to refer to the members of the force as "Whalen's Cossacks," and the police seem to feel that they have wiped out that stigma by clubbing women and charging crowds with men on horses. I must admit that the Communists have all the better of the argu- ment. They have gone at least a considerable distance in proving their case as far as New York police are concerned. And so I do not think that the fight against such out- rages should be left in the hands of Socialists or even liberals. After all, the people in these groups have never contended that the United States of Mr. Hoover was practically Utopia. They have admitted that here and there change of one sort or another might be essential in the governmental structure, both federal and local. The ones to do the worrying are the leaders of the groups in power. I do not quite believe the complaint of the left wingers that incidents such as the recent riot in City Hall Park are all a part of a capitalistic plot. It would amaze me to hear that any Rockefeller or Morgan had 'phoned to police head- quarters saying, "There will be red speeches on the steps this noon. Please get rough and club every head in sight." There must be more acumen than that among the captains of industry and finance. And still I must admit that many of them do not seem quite bright. Consider, for instance, the right of free speech. Here in America the defenders of it are almost always tabulated as radicals and enemies of the existing order. The Civil Liberties Union, for instance, has often been attacked by red-baiters and been charged with re- ceiving support from Russia. But, as a matter of fact, the extreme radical has no great interest in free speech. He is apt to class it as a luxury belonging only to the secure and sentimental. The Soviets have never scrupled to suppress the right at times when it interfered with what they felt was a vital program. Who then should adopt the orphan? Free speech has been largely nourished in this country by the liberals. But it seems to me that the child really ought to find a good home among the conservatives. Men who sweat at night about red and Russian plots surely should have sense enough to desire the fullest possible information about the plans and theories of all who would overthrow the government. I would not walk across a wide street to hear the average run of Com- munist oratory. I happen to be not specially inimical to the present system though I would much enjoy putting a new girder in here and there. But if the whole thing were to be uprooted I should not suffer much in any material way. Even if confiscation of private property set in the state would take only one of my suits and leave the other. I could afford to be rather apathetic about free speech and the dangers which arise from its suppression. When my millions are made I shall feel much more urge to be up and doing in the protection of those rights assured by the Constitution. If there were in some vault a box of mine filled with gilt-edged securities I would make it my business to pay close attention to every Communist argument so that I might controvert and answer it. Far from chasing reds off the steps of City Hall I'd build them a speaker's platform and say: "Come every morning, friends, and talk your heads off. And come in numbers so that I can watch you." Most of the agitation for an investigation of the recent police panic rests upon the advice that individual offenders be punished. Is it so soon forgotten that Grover Whalen himself proclaimed the doctrine: "There's a lot of law at the end of a nightstick" ? His rash words have come home to roost. He ought to go. Conservatives really can't afford to have such an effective propagandist for communism holding high office. Heywood Broun

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146 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3370 Naval Politics at London By NORMAN ANGELL London, January 14 THE British situation on the eve of the conference is an interesting and unusual one. One might have anticipated cries from the Conservative element of the Opposition to the effect that the defenses of the country were being endangered by the Labor Government. The issue is over the question of the battleship. The public seems to have seized pretty clearly the point that if there is to be any real reduction of armaments at all as the result of this conference, of a kind, that is, which will relieve the taxpayer or achieve a general appeasement of fears, then it can only come about through the virtual abolition of the big fighting ship, either by immediate scrapping, which is rather too much to hope, or by an agreement not to replace ships over 10,000 tons when their normal term of life expires. The support for this campaign comes to an amazing degree from Conservative quarters : the London" Times, the Spectator, Mr. Garvin in the Observer, and even in some degree from the Beaverbrook and Rothermere press. The very admirals themselves have in some measure joined in the campaign. Admiral Sir Charles Richmond, admit- tedly one of the ablest minds of the navy, has been writing a series of cogent and forceful articles, stressing the techni- cal absurdity of these monsters; and making it perfectly clear that they are not a type of ship which has any "police" justification such as can be pleaded for the smaller type of cruiser ; and that the only reason for their existence is that other nations possess them. Thus the Government, with strong pacifist leanings, is assured beforehand of a large amount of Conservative sup- port in a real measure of disarmament. Certainly any general opposition in public opinion could be discounted beforehand. Yet, say the critics, far from moving to the abolition of the battleship, the First Lord of the Admiralty has issued a statement to the effect that battleships will cer- tainly be replaced, and all he will permit himself to hope is that the new type of battleships will be less expensive than the old. The Government, then, is being criticized for not giving a lead to public sentiment. It is even charged that its position is less advanced than that taken by the Conserva- tive Opposition.* What is the explanation of this situation, so disappoint- ing to friends of the present Government on both sides of the Atlantic? Assuredly "there's a reason," and no criticism is valid which does not take it into account. The reasons may well include those which, for the sake of international good feeling and political propriety, a government cannot state publicly, reasons at which consequently one is obliged to guess. First, a government would place itself in a bad bar- gaining position by committing itself beforehand to a step like the abolition of the battleship. It may be that the * In cable advices received subsequent to the mailing of this article Mr. Angell points out that the situation has been materially changed by the later pronouncement of Prime Minister MacDonald which indicates a greater readiness to take decided steps toward disarmament than had been suggested by recent Government outgivings. — Editor The Nation. Government is holding this concession in reserve as a bar- gaining counter, to be used as a lever with, say, France in the matter of the submarine. The Government may desire to be in a position, that is, to say to France: "Abolish your submarines and we will abolish our battleships." If the British Government were committed beforehand to battle- ship abolition, it would have surrendered this bargaining power. One may question the wisdom of that line of ap- proach at this time, but the consideration may have weight. Furthermore, to an increasing degree it is becoming recog- nized that the political situation will be the determining factor of any real progress which is to be made. There is a point in the statement of the First Lord the significance of which seems to have been overlooked. Very adroitly he has considerably modified, if indeed he has not entirely abandoned, the British doctrine of "absolute requirements." All along, the British Government has taken the line that British naval needs, particularly in cruisers, are absolute, not relative to the strength of other powers ; that they are dictated by such constant factors as geographical position, amount of mercantile marine, length of lines of economic communication, and the rest of it. What America or other Powers were doing was, it was argued, of little concern to Britain and did not affect the problem. Such has been the formal thesis heretofore, but Mr. Alexander, the Labor First Lord, had to explain why Britain was demanding seventy cruisers in 1927 and fifty today. The explanation is, he says, that "we have to take account of the new position which has arisen through the signature of the pact of Paris by most of the nations, in- cluding all the major naval Powers . . . and improved world- political relationships." In other words, even in cruisers the need is determined by the political situation, by what other nations are doing. And if the political consideration applies to cruisers, it may be employed, as the Times points out, more cogently still "to justify a proposal to abolish battleships." It is to be hoped that the recognition of the plain truth that the whole problem of disarmament is in large part a political one will cause the Admiralty to play a more subor- dinate role than it did in 1927. In so far as the problem is political, the admiral has no authority to speak as an expert or specialist. He may speak with authority upon guns, ton- age, armor-plate. But these, after all, are subsidiary prob- lems. What is more important is the real significance and implication of the Paris pact, the League, the Covenant, the various treaties of guaranty, the future relationships of Britain with America and France — problems of political psychology and judgment for which, plainly, admirals as admirals have no more qualification to speak than upon foot- ball or Gilbert and Sullivan operas. It is to be hoped that public opinion in Britain will seize this point because, in the past, it has sufficed for a government to explain its reac- tionary attitude at a conference by saying: "We were guided by expert advice and could not fly in the face of Admiralty opinion."

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February 5, 1930] The Nation 147 The French memorandum, which seems to have created more uneasiness in America than in Britain, emphasizes the political side of the problem even more than the British statesmen have done so far. The French politics may be bad politics, but it is all to the good perhaps to have it brought home to us that the problem is first and foremost a political one, and that the technical question cannot be answered save on some political assumption. To answer the question, Are we adequately armed ? we must know who the enemy is likely to be, who are our allies. Until we can make some assumption on that point, plainly the technician has nothing to go upon. In the absence of a definite politi- cal starting-point he is obliged to assume the political worst and to make his technical recommendations in accord- ance with that assumption. The political problem at present is mainly one of Anglo- French relations. Lurking in the minds of so many of the French is the fear of Germany's ultimate challenge to the Versailles settlement. Germany grows; France does not. The present British Government has destroyed the last shreds of the entente cordiale. Does this mean, ask the French in effect, that perfidious Albion is going back on her undertaking to throw her influence against any disturbance by war of the status quo? Are such commitments as the Covenant embodies to fade away and be replaced by the more non-committal Kellogg pact? The Anglo- American rapprochement might give color to such a supposition. Thus the insistence in the French memorandum that France bases her position on the Covenant and not on the pact. It is pretty certain that the conference will be reminded again and again of this interdependence of politics and disarma- ment. France cannot, in so doing, be accused of incon- sistency, since that is the position she has taken in every conference she has entered. The Christian Science Censor I. The Machinery of Suppression By HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY THE best-oiled and smoothest-running publicity (and anti-publicity) machine operated in the United States during the twentieth century has been that controlled by the Board of Directors of the Mother Church, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massa- chusetts. It consists of a head publicity man (called the Committee on Publication) in Boston, a publicity man (likewise called the Committee on Publication) in each State, with two for California, and local publicity men (each called the Assistant Committee on Publication) in all the cities and towns where there are Christian Science churches. Each committee, be it noted, is an individual. No divided responsibility in Christian Science publicity. Back of these committees stands a little Gideon's band of about two hundred thousand loyal, enthusiastic, well- disciplined, and well-to-do Christian Scientists, on whom the committees never call in vain. Acting through these agencies, the directors have in re- cent years reduced unfavorable publicity to almost nothing, at the same time that they have secured columns and pages of free space for their lectures and other means of spreading their gospel. They have excluded the advertis- ing of rival groups of Christian Scientists from the press in some sections of the country, and have shut those rivals off from the channels of radio communication. They have prevented the publication of books and articles reflecting unfavorably on Christian Science and its Founder (to fol- low their own capitalization), and have caused to be with- drawn from circulation or have buried under a mountain of oblivion those whose publication they could not prevent. They have persuaded or forced educational authorities to withdraw from use in the public schools textbooks to which they objected, and by discreet representations they have * This is the first of a series of four articles. The second article, Ob- noxious Books, will appear next week. — Editor The Nation. even brought about changes in the books used in universi- ties. They have driven out of public libraries or have had placed on reserve shelves inaccessible to the public books that they did not like. They have employed against pub- lishers and bookstores that handle such books the method of persuasion, followed, if need be, by intimidation, and then local and nation-wide boycott. They have held over newspaper publishers the danger of advertising and other losses until they have reduced large sections of the press to a state of abject subjection; the Chicago Tribune, for example, did not get up its courage so far even as to pub- lish a review of Dakin's recent life of Mrs. Eddy for months after its publication, and until the publishers' cour- ageous fight had made it impolitic to neglect it longer. They have watched legislation in Congress and in all the States with the eyes of hawks, not only preventing the enactment of measures of health protection which they thought un- favorable to their cult, but pushing for laws that they de- sired, and in the State of Illinois, for example, securing the passage of the first law against slander by radio, with the avowed purpose of preventing the radio from being used to oppose Christian Science. The Christian Science Board of Directors had discovered and exploited to the full the possibilities of publicity and suppression long before such an animal as a public-relations counsel existed. The suc- cess of their publicity machine is another tribute to the genius of the extraordinary woman who planned this as well as all other features of the Christian Science organi- zation, and whose word is still law in that church, though nearly twenty years have passed since her death, if we may be permitted to use that word in connection with her. I have said that the Christian Scientists have the best publicity machine in the country. Particularly as an en- gine of suppression, there is nothing to be compared with it for effectiveness, taking everything into account. When

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148 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3370 Charles Scribner's Sons in August brought out Edwin Franden Dakin's "Mrs. Eddy. The Biography of a Vir- ginal Mind" they ran head on into that machine, and the machine undertook to ride them down, as it had done all too often with others who had challenged it. Happily, the publishers' sturdy fight has aroused public attention in an increasing degree, the press apparently is getting up its courage in some measure, and there is reasonable ground to hope that we may see the lid pried off. A new book dealing with Mrs. Eddy's life and belief, by H. A. L. Fisher, has appeared in England, and three books concerned at least in part with that remarkable woman are announced for early publication here. If the Christian Science publi- cation committees are to smother all these publications, they are likely to have their hands full. But in any case, it is full time for an examination of their methods of controlling public opinion. A little group of men whose direct adher- ents at their most numerous have counted less than two- tenths of 1 per cent of the people of the country have been able for a quarter of a century to suppress substantially all unfavorable truth regarding Mary Baker Eddy and the re- ligion that she founded. Why? How? Their own answer is simple and, I doubt not, genuine: They have the truth, and their critics have nothing but error. Their answer is at least a partial explanation of their success. Denying the validity of what most of us regard as evidence, they can devote themselves in all good conscience to the suppression of our truth because they honestly believe that it is error. In this particular it may be said of the great body of Christian Scientists that in a very literal sense their strength is as the strength of ten because their heart is pure. Most people hold absurdly exaggerated ideas of the number of Christian Scientists in the country. Mrs. Eddy herself sometimes spoke, and her followers not infrequent- ly speak, doubtless in entire good faith, of the "millions" of adherents of their religion, and the rest of the world have been inclined to take them at their own valuation — or numeration. Before doing so, however, the rest of us might do well to examine Article VIII, Section 28, of the church by-laws, which reads: "Christian Scientists shall not re- port for publication the number of members of the Mother Church, nor that of the branch churches. According to the Scriptures they shall turn away from numbering the people." Mrs. Eddy had an incorrigible aversion to un- controlled publicity, of which the above by-law is but one among many interesting expressions. Uncle Sam, however, perhaps unfortunately, is no respecter of church by-laws, so he counts Christian Science noses just as irreverently as he counts Jewish, Presbyterian, or Roman Catholic ones. The Census of Religious Bodies of 1926 reports a total member- ship of 202,098 in the 1,913 Christian Science churches of the country. For every Christian Scientist in the United States there are 20 Jews, 9 Presbyterians, 92 Roman Catholics; yet I venture the assertion that in the smothering field the 1 Christian Scientist has done vastly more than all the 121 others put together. Now for the actual structure of the machine. Mrs. Eddy made of her church itself a completely centralized or- ganization, in which her power was far more absolute than that of the Pope. All power is concentrated in the Mother Church, in Boston, and Christian Science churches all over the country are simply branches of that organization. The business of the Mother Church, according to the by-laws, is to be transacted by a self-perpetuating board of directors of five members, originally appointed by Mrs. Eddy, and during her lifetime removable by her. Since her death in 1910 they have become the ultimate source of power with the right to dismiss all officers (Article XXII, Section 3) and with authority over all the activities of the church, including the work of the committees on publication. Their absolute power is exercised without publicity, for according to Article I, Section 5, of the by-laws "members shall neither report the discussions of the Board, nor those with Mrs. Eddy." In studying church publicity, this centraliza- tion must always be remembered. Article XXXIII of the by-laws deals entirely with the Committee on Publication. The Mother Church (that is, the Board of Directors) appoints a Committee on Publica- tion, "which shall consist of one loyal Christian Scientist who lives in Boston, and he shall be the manager of the Committees on Publication throughout the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Ireland." During the decade and a half in which he held this responsible and powerful office Judge Clifford P. Smith really made it the most im- portant position in the whole organization, making of the Board of Directors, which is legally the source of authority, actually a body that in large part contents itself with ratifying the proceedings of its more able and active agent. Judge Smith has now resigned to become editor of the Christian Science publications, and has been succeeded by C. Augustus Norwood, a kind and friendly person who also bears the title of general counsel to the church. Judge Smith's grip on the organization, however, is in no way weakened by the new arrangement. Under the by-laws the Readers of the three largest branch churches in each State annually appoint in turn a Committee on Publication (consisting, it will be remem- bered, of one individual), California being divided into two parts. There are thus forty-nine State committees, in ad- dition to the committees for the Territories, the District of Columbia, and foreign countries, all working under the direction of the general manager in Boston. The assistant committees (individuals), locally chosen but ratified from above, in turn work under the State committees. The gen- eral manager may order no special action not named in the Manual (by-laws) of the church to be taken without con- sulting the Board of Directors and receiving their written consent. The Board of Directors may remove the Com- mittee on Publication of any branch church and name his successor, and it is the duty of the church to elect the per- son so named. The absolute centralization of power in the hands of the general manager and the Board of Directors is apparent. With her usual shrewdness, Mrs. Eddy pro- vided that the committees on publication shall generally be men, but that if there is no suitable man, then a woman may be chosen. In fact, there are a number of women act- ing in this capacity. It is the duty of the Committee on Publication "to correct in a Christian manner impositions on the public in regard to Christian Science, injustices done Mrs. Eddy or members of this church by the daily press, by periodicals, or circulated literature of any sort." He is to correct any false newspaper article, and if the correction is not promptly published by the offending periodical, then "this Com-

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February 5, 1930] The Nation 149 mittee shall immediately apply for aid to the Committee on Business," of which more in a moment. Nothing could be more innocent, and indeed laudable, than the purposes of the Committee on Publication; but nothing could be farther from these purposes than much of the actual work done by the central, State, and local committees, and by loyal members of the church working under their direction. Returning to the Committee on Business, we encoun- ter some of the black magic of the organization. It is a group of "mental workers" whose business it is to make the offending editor think the right thoughts. The Board of Directors have a group of these workers, who were formerly paid $50 a month, whose duty it is to "take up mentally" persons who are obstructing the will of the church. Some four years ago William U. Swan, a member of the church who was threatened with severe discipline, applied to the courts to restrain the directors. In the course of the re- sulting suit, James A. Neal; one of the directors, testified that this committee was in reality a group of mental workers subject to the Board of Directors and employed to work under their instructions for or against persons. When it became evident that counsel for Swan was going to bring out much evidence about the activities of such workers, and to compel the production of the books showing large pay- ments made to them, the directors secured an adjourn- ment, settled with Swan outside of court, withdrew their charges, and reinstated him as a member in good standing, rather than let these facts become public. The full story of the Committee on Business would make a book in itself. Our immediate concern, however, is with the com- mittees on publication. Judge Smith has been able, it will be observed, to pick his State committees, and they in turn to secure the appointment of others of their own kind in the cities and towns. The favor of the Board of Directors means prestige and dollars to all those who teach and prac- tice Christian Science; their disfavor, not only loss of stand- ing, but actual inability to make a living. Loyalty to Judge Smith and the directors has therefore been loyalty to one- self and one's pocketbook, and the organization has thus become ironclad. The committees and assistant committees of the country, meeting in Boston in 1921, reverently re- stated their clear conviction of Mrs. Eddy's divine inspira- tion and direction, and quoted with approval her words: "Eternity awaits our Church Manual, which will maintain its rank as in the past, amid ministries aggressive and active, and will stand when these have passed to rest." This done, they highly resolved as follows: Therefore be it resolved that we do hereby reaffirm our unwavering loyalty to and support of the Mother Church and to the Christian Science Board of Directors, who are specifically instructed by our wise Leader with the task of upholding and enforcing the inviolable rules of the Manual, in which worthy work they are entitled to receive and are receiving the wholehearted support of loyal Christian Scientists. The inviolable rules of the Manual, which are to last to eternity, require each member to reflect "the sweet ameni- ties of love," to be alert "to defend himself daily against agressive mental suggestion," "not intentionally or knowing- ly mentally" to "malpractice," not to "haunt Mrs. Eddy's drive when she goes out, continually stroll by her house, or make a summer resort near her for such a purpose," to "strive to promote the welfare of all mankind by demon- strating the rules of divine Love," and finally to "subscribe for the periodicals which are the organs of this Church." I have set down bits of this extraordinary hodge-podge, not for purposes of ridicule, but simply to illustrate the re- markable loyalty and the strange frame of mind that must characterize a body of persons who can accept such a diversity of rules as of equal authority and inspiration. And now I set down in that same category of everlasting rules of ab- solutely binding character the celebrated Article VIII, Sec- tion 12, of the Manual: A member of this church shall not patronize a pub- lishing house or bookstore that has for sale obnoxious books. The publicity organization of the Christian Science church is completely centralized and completely under the control of one man who is in daily contact with its most distant outposts. It is backed by a body of believers who do not discriminate sharply between their religion and their organization. This combination of organization and sup- port, under a body of rules such as I have illustrated, pro- duces a machine of unbelievable effectiveness. In the next article we shall examine its actual working. "Cash and Carry" Life Insurance By EDWIN S. SMITH LIFE INSURANCE in America has passed the hun- dred-billion mark. This event is receiving the ap- plause which Americans are always ready to give to evidences of their giantism. That it is an achievement and a milestone on the road to economic security, no one would deny, but let us at the same time not forget that commercial life insurance has still a few blots on its escutcheon. The Nation, in its editorial of October 9, amid the salvos in honor of the insurance companies, took a well- directed shot at the present status of industrial or weekly- payment insurance. This instalment insurance is the only form of insurance protection which our working people, generally speaking, enjoy. It is an extremely cumbersome and expensive device for both the companies and the in- sured. The number of lapses on policies is terrific. In 1928 it amounted to the equivalent of 60 per cent of the number of policies written that year. Nor does the insured who allows his policy to lapse get any return for what he has expended unless he had paid premiums for at least three years. In 1908 the status of industrial insurance was even less promising. In that year the Massachusetts Legislature passed a law permitting savings banks to write life-insurance policies and old-age annuities. This plan originated with Louis D. Brandeis, then a practicing lawyer in Boston, who had undergone a baptism of fire on the subject of insurance in the investigation of certain scandalous practices of life- insurance companies, practices now happily abandoned. Since the enormous expense of weekly-payment insurance lies in the cost of soliciting and of collections, Massachusetts pro- vided that no agents should be employed by the banks. If

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150 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3370 a man wanted insurance, he had to come of his own free will to the savings bank to get it. In other words, this was in- surance on the "cash-and-carry" principle, later widely ex- ploited by the chain stores on other kinds of merchandise. The results of the system in Massachusetts may be briefly told. On September 30, 1929, more than 80,000 policies were in force, totaling $67,000,000. Thanks in large part to the elimination of soliciting by agents, any insurable person who is a resident of Massachusetts can get straight life insurance through a savings bank at a rate about 26 per cent cheaper than the rate charged by com- mercial companies for ordinary life policies, and at half the cost of "weekly-payment" insurance. There is no elaborate paraphernalia of collection, yet the number of savings-bank insurance policies allowed to lapse amounts to less than 1 per cent of those written ! Truly a remarkable figure when placed against the lapse rate of commercial companies. The answer is simple. The insurance costs less, there is a sur- render value on every policy after premiums have been paid for six months, and the insured are those who want insur- ance protection enough to seek it. The over-zealous agent who sweeps the workingman or girl into an insurance policy which he or she cannot afford to carry is happily not in the savings-bank insurance picture. Not the least interesting feature of savings-bank insur- ance to the workingman is the reasonable rate at which he can purchase an old-age annuity. The increasing tendency of industry to slough off its older workers in favor of young blood makes the problem of annuities increasingly im- portant. A typical annuity arrangement under savings-bank insurance is as follows: Beginning at age 30, a man deposits $10.70 a month, and continues this deposit during thirty-five years, that is, until he reaches age 65, at which time he ceases to make deposits. The banks then begin to pay to him an annuity of $1,000 a year, this payment to continue as long as he shall live. It will be observed that during the thirty-five years his total deposits have aggregated $4,494. It is esti- mated that he will have received dividends back amounting to about $630, so that his life income of $1,000 a year has cost him net only about $3,864. For years the growth of savings-bank insurance as meas- ured by the number of banks operating insurance departments was slow. In 1912 four banks had insurance departments and there were no additions until 1923, when two more came in. In 1928 the number was ten. During 1929 there have been three further additions. One of these is the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank, the largest savings bank in the State. Another Boston bank joined the ranks in October, making a total of three banks in Boston and ten scattered through the State. In addition to the banks writing insurance there are over a hundred banks which act as agents to receive applications for insurance, which is placed with banks that operate insurance departments. The probable reason why the banks are becoming more enthusiastic about insurance is an interesting footnote to eco- nomic history. Economic systems, like other things, progress by accident as well as design. The last few years have given the trustees of savings banks some cause for worry. Deposits have been growing slowly. Increased spending by workers and the lure of the speculative market are perhaps the causes. During the nine months ending July 31, 1929, the percentage of withdrawals of deposits in the 196 Massa- chusetts savings banks was very much larger than for the year ended October 31, 1928. The amount on deposit (in- cluding interest credited) increased during these months only 2.99 per cent. Deposits made between November 1, 1927, and October 31, 1928, aggregated $417,615,555; but at the end of twelve months the net increase in the amount due depositors was only $135,342,767, equivalent to 32.4 per cent of the new money deposited during that period. Although savings banks are not organized for profit and the motives which prompt individuals to become trustees of these institutions are largely social, naturally the trustees take pride in having the banks move forward. On looking up the record of the banks which have operated insurance departments, they find life-insurance money tells quite a dif- ferent story from ordinary savings deposits. The insurance department of the North End Savings Bank received during three years premiums amounting to $166,867.47. At the end of the third year, with all ex- penses paid, all death claims settled, and a substantial sum set aside for dividends to policy-holders, it held in the in- surance reserve and surplus $139,704. In other words, it retained in its possession for the purpose of investment a sum equal to 83.7 per cent of the premiums received during the entire period. Similar figures for the Lynn Institute for Savings after six years writing of life insurance show a total of premiums paid in of $584,154. The insurance reserve and surplus at the end of six years was $410,219 or 70.2 per cent of the premiums paid in. Savings banks en- joy a vastly greater stability from their funds received through insurance writing than from deposits. As yet the dollars-and-cents accomplishments of savings- bank insurance need cause the commercial companies no great alarm. In 1928 the amount of savings-bank insurance written in Massachusetts was 1.56 per cent of the total amount written in the State in that year. Of the total pre- miums paid for insurance by Massachusetts people in 1928 the insurance departments of the savings banks received 1.27 per cent. A system which can write ordinary life insurance 26 per cent more cheaply is competition worth thinking about. Even if the companies themselves were inclined to discount the importance of savings-bank insurance, the insur- ance agents are unlikely to do so. Life insurance agents constitute a powerful economic group quite capable of making itself politically effective. Opponents of savings-bank insur- ance introduced a bill in the legislature during 1929 pro- viding that the total amount of such insurance which an individual could carry should be $5,000. The bill was de- feated, but it took work to do it. The roster of savings-bank trusteeships always embraces important men in the community. Among their number are directors of insurance companies and also of commercial banks, between which and insurance companies there is, for various reasons, bound to be a friendly feeling. How far this influence will tend to slow up the growth of savings- bank insurance is hard to say. There is certainly encourage- ment in the fact that the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank, which has a board of trustees particularly well endowed with bank and insurance company directors, has entered the ranks. Modestly but effectively, savings-bank insurance goes marching on. It is not in the least daunted because commer- cial life insurance is entering upon its second hundred billion.

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February 5, 1930] The Nation 151 In the Driftway AS his readers know, the Drifter is a great believer in color. He is devoted to neckties which conservative dressers class as "loud," and the last comment which he wants anybody to make when he indulges in a new suit of clothes is that it is "genteel." The Drifter does not wish to dress genteelly; he wishes to encourage if not compel people to turn and look back at him. Otherwise why bother to dress at all? Though, come to think of it, a failure to dress in any way might lead to most attention of all. The Drifter is on record as approving of the dyeing of one's hair when another tint than that granted by nature appeals to one as more becoming or beautiful. Nor should one be limited to the shades supplied in the not too-generous or imaginative original plan. The Drifter thinks that hair of emerald, heliotrope, or carnation would be an excellent innovation. So, of course, he is all in favor of the colored sidewalks recently laid in New Orleans — provided that the colors and designs are harmonious and beautiful. The colored side- walks, so one gathers from newspaper accounts, were lately introduced on a couple of streets at the suggestion of a neighborhood improvement association, the president of which argued, reasonably enough, that since gay colors were in vogue for roofs they might also be used with benefit in side- walks. Red and green were the colors selected, but even these old and conservative hues failed to win the approbation of all the citizenry. A local attorney, for instance, was moved to write to the president of the neighborhood improvement association as follows: I not only concede but proclaim the good work of your- self and your associates in beautifying the city. However, I think even you, who appear to revel in red, pink, blue, and lavender roofs, will come to realize the ugliness, incongru- ity, and bizarrerie of green and red as applied to sidewalks, and I predict you will some day regret the price you have paid for your advertising. You and your associates could have got your street talked about quite as much had you placed well-trained monkeys at strategic intervals along the thoroughfares — with the added advantage that the monkeys would sooner or later die. ***** BUT generally speaking the tendency toward using more color to brighten up and make gayer this drab old world is spreading so rapidly that it no longer needs cham- pions. Rainy days have been much less gloomy since women took to carrying cheerfully colored umbrellas, and it seems impossible to put out any shades in women's dresses too vivid to be popular. The brilliant scarlet confections of the present winter make even the most pessimistic of us want to live through to another spring. Decidedly the Scarlet Woman is the success of the season. In architecture color has been seeping in for a number of years. Though no American town has yet adopted to any large extent the gaily calcimined walls and brilliant roofs of various oriental, tropical, and Latin cities, the use of bright-colored brick and tiling — sometimes in good and sometimes in execrable taste — has grown so common that no one should object when New Orleans goes a step further and lays red and green sidewalks. The Drifter Correspondence Degrees and Wealth To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: General Jan Christiaan Smuts made many interest- ing observations in accepting the LL.D. conferred on him by Johns Hopkins University on January 16. But perhaps the most trenchant remark uttered on this occasion came from a mere undergraduate observer of the ceremonies. Amid hosts of trustees, faculty, and other persons generally supposed to inspire awe in youthful imbibers at our founts of knowledge, this unawed youth, apparently deeming explanation of his pres- ence necessary, remarked: "What we students are here for is to see a man without money get an honorary degree." Baltimore, January 20 Edgar Williams The Archbishop's Automobile To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I know that it is your custom to select from letters sent to you for publication such as seem to you the most im- portant or interesting. I cannot understand therefore your se- lection of the letter headed And There You Are! in your issue of January 15. I hold no brief for Archbishop Munde- lein or the Catholic church, and I thoroughly disagree with that church's position on birth control as well as on some other matters, but I nevertheless fail to see the justification for per- sonal flings at the archbishop or why a letter of that kind should be given preference over all that went into the waste- basket unless these were even worse. It goes to show that not even The Nation may be trusted to take on the functions of a censor. If the worst that can be said about Archbishop Mundelein is that he owns a $14,000 automobile, then I question the propriety of any Nation reader throwing stones at him. Whenever any prelate takes a stand on public matters that calls for a reply, let his statements be treated as those of any other man without bringing in irrelevant matters such as his ecclesiastical position. This seems to be a very hard thing for some who call themselves liberals to grasp. Baltimore, January 13 Samuel Danziger Idealistic Perversity To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The idealistic perversity of your editorial on the League of Nations fills me with despair. The League, we are told, has "permitted" this, and "been silent and complaisant" in the face of that. One might suppose that the League was a body quite separate from the nations of the world rather than a piece of machinery for facilitating such cooperation as their isolationist prejudices permit them to undertake. But for the evil influence of the League, one might judge from the tone of your article, such pacifists as Sir Austen Chamberlain, M. Poincare, and other leading statesmen would have realized long ago their dream of a united world at peace and disarmed. As for the Treaty of Versailles, Article XIX of the Cove- nant is the only international instrument specifically suggesting and providing machinery for the revision of treaties which need revision. How else do you propose to revise treaties? This

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152 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3370 is a practical question, and The Nation does not presumably advocate the traditional method of war. Or is it peace, but peace with honor, which you now espouse? After all, the League, as such, does nothing to discourage revision except revision by force. Surely clear-headed opposition to the League must take the form of saying either (1) that international machinery (as distinct from pacts and other pious gestures) is undesirable per se, or (2) that this particular machinery is radically de- fective. And it would only be reasonable to indict the ma- chinery if good results could not be achieved even when those using it sincerely desired to achieve them. The so-called fail- ures of the League are failures of governments which would have been no less surely in office if there had been no League, and of peoples who have failed to learn the plain lessons of the war. Its successes are largely pieces of international co- operation which could hardly have been initiated and carried through but for the organization and machinery which have been created in Geneva. It is a piece of machinery whose effectiveness is very greatly impaired by the absence of the United States, but, as your last paragraph so delightfully sug- gests, no doubt the time will come when the good little Ameri- can boys will be able to say to the naughty little European boys, "Now that you have learnt to play nicely, we will come and play with you." Oak Lane, Pa., January 11 W. B. CuRRY Nation Dinner To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The second annual dinner of the Nation Club of San Francisco will be held on Tuesday evening, February 11, at the Fior d' Italia Restaurant, 492 Broadway, San Francisco. Dr. Stanley Rypins will preside. Those wishing reservations will kindly get in touch with Sophie Greenburg, 775 Guerrero Street, San Francisco. San Francisco, January 20 Sophie Greeni;lrg Contributors to This Issue Norman Angell, author of "The Great Illusion" and editor of Foreign Affairs, is a Labor member of Par- liament. Henry Raymond Mussey is managing editor of The Nation. Edwin S. Smith is a Boston business executive who has given special attention to the working of savings-bank insurance. Corinna Reiman Marsh has contributed verse to vari- ous periodicals. Henry Hazlitt is literary editor of The Nation. Lorine Pruette is the author of "Women and Leisure: A Study in Social Waste." William MacDonald is a regular contributor of his- torical and political reviews to The Nation. J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton is Kenan Professor of History and Government at the University of North Carolina. Joshua Kunitz is author of "Russian Literature and the Jew." William Seagle is an assistant editor of the Encyclo- paedia of the Social Sciences. Alexander Bakshy, author of several books on the theater, writes on motion pictures for The Nation. Joseph Wood Krutch is dramatic editor of The Nation. AFTER MOTHER INDIA Harry H. Field Mr. Field, Miss Mayo — and Mr. Gandhi "Mr. Field keeps his heavy guns for those who have tried to controvert Miss Mayo's facts," says Lord Meston in the London Spectator. "Mr. Gandhi heads the list. He questioned the accuracy of Miss Mayo's ac- count of her interview with him. Mr. Field produces the summary of the interview re- corded on the spot, typed immediately, edited and passed by Mr. Gandhi himself." "Out of their own mouths," says the Mel- bourne Herald, "he condemns them. Mr. Gandhi is a case in point." $3.50 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 333 Madison Avenue, New York iDo You . . . Remember his wit, his candor, his eloquence, his generous sympathy, his good humor, his courage, his devotion? All the sweetness and clarity of the man live again in AN EAST SIDE EPIC THE LIFE AND WORK OF EYER LONDON by Harry Rogoff $2.50 Bookstores IVANGUARD M ken uriting to advertisers please mention The Nation

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Books, Films, Drama Fulfilment By CORINNA REIMAN MARSH Racked, the ample-bosomed hill Bears a lusty tree, Wearing, like a crown of peace, Her maternity. Wonder-bound, she cradles him On her velvet lap, Rich with dreams of springing boughs And of leaping sap. At her womb, her breast, he pulls With insatiate roots; Hers the honey and the wine Mellowing his fruits. The Pioneer Soul Australia Felix. By Henry Handel Richardson. W. W. Nor- ton and Company. $2.50. AS a small edition was published here in 1917 under the title of "The Fortunes of Richard Mahony," "Australia Felix" is not, strictly speaking, a new book. But it can be discussed as a new book, for on its appearance a dozen years ago it was almost completely ignored, in England as well as here, both by critical opinion and by the reading public. It was not until the publication last fall of "Ultima Thule," the final volume of the trilogy of which "Australia Felix" is the first, that Henry Handel Richardson came into genuine prominence. "Australia Felix" opens at the time of the gold rush of the fifties, and we meet Richard Mahony at twenty-seven as the keeper of a general store at Ballarat. It is a more nor- mal Richard than we find in "Ultima Thule," but with the germs of all the qualities that are later to become more pro- nounced— serious, with little exuberance or play in his make- up, sensitive, stand-offish, restless, impractical, almost fanati- cally honest and candid, and though fundamentally generous and tender in his instincts, subject to fits of unreasoning irritability; he is blunt, often tactless, and quick to resent fancied slights. He marries his Mary when she is only sixteen. Partly because of a general slackness in his part of the town, partly because of the resentment he has aroused for his outspoken opposition to the diggers' rebellion, trade at his little store begins to fall off. He is finally forced to abandon the store and try a re- sumption of medical practice. He moves to the west part of the town, where his practice grows. Induced by his lawyer to speculate in some mining shares, he wins an amount that immediately puts him into comfortable circumstances. But his betrayal by his friend Purdy, his quarrel with his most im- portant patient, and a series of his own illnesses combine to unsettle him; his practice dwindles; and over Mary's protests he tears up his Australian roots and takes her with him back to England. In so brief a summary the story seems flat and colorless. Yet even more than in "Ultima Thule," one is impressed by the richness and sweep of this novel. The many-sidedness of a man's life is presented with great skill. Surprisingly little attention is given either to romantic love or to the "sexual problem." This is surely not the result of any squeamishness; it springs partly from the character of the protagonist, but perhaps more from the fact that the woman who writes under the name of Henry Handel Richardson recognizes the absurd extent to which the overwhelming bulk of fiction overem- phasizes the role that sex — in the average novelist's sense — plays in the totality of our lives. She has an uncanny capacity, too, for dramatizing those day-to-day events which most novel- ists instinctively dismiss as too prosaic for detailed discussion; she enlists our interest powerfully, for example, not merely in Richard's recurrent financial difficulties considered as a whole, but in the most detailed elements of them. Not least of the novel's merits, considering "Australia Felix" and "Ultima Thule" together, is the subtlety with which it portrays the de- velopment of the characters of Richard and Mary and the change in their relationship. Yet I confess that "Australia Felix" interests me mainly as a portrait of the pioneer — of his courage, hardihood, enterprise, his generosity and gambling instinct, his easy camaraderie and democracy, his restlessness, his tendency to regard his present location, way of life, and living quarters as temporary, and hence his insensibility to the ugliness and makeshift character of his surroundings; above all, of the dominant materialism of his ambitions, with nearly all cultural interests squeezed out by the pursuit of sudden wealth. The book was undoubtedly to a large extent intended as precisely such a study. It is no accident that Richard, sensi- tive, reserved, cultured, impractical, and idealistic, forms so sharp a contrast to the typical pioneer, and that so much of early Australia is revealed through his eyes. Though this picture happens to be of the Australian gold rush of the fifties, it would serve almost as well as a picture of the fifties in California, or of all the early oil and mining towns of the Southwest. More than that: it helps us to see with renewed insight how deeply the outlook of the pioneer still colors our own national life. It is reflected still in our mere physical aspect, so that to the cultured European eye our architectural landscape wears a provisional, jerry-built, and impermanent air; and it remains, of course, in full flower in our glorification of business and material progress. Henry Hazlitt A Happy Scholar Memories of My Life. By Edward Westermarck. The Ma- caulay Company. $5. FEW autobiographies are introduced more mildly than these recollections of the famous anthropologist, who while sug- gesting that it may seem presumptuous to offer to the pub- lic such memories, takes comfort in the thought that he himself has always had a predilection for autobiographical sketches, even when of only slight significance in themselves. But memories which show the genesis and development of such important works as "The History of Human Marriage" and "The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas" cannot be insignificant. In "Memories of My Life" Westermarck gives a clear and charming picture of the simple, joyful life open to the true scholar today. He has devoted a long life to research into the folkways and mores of mankind, and it appears certain that he finds no cause to regret this early dedication. The quiet note of happiness struck in his autobiography makes a heartening sound in the midst of contemporary turbulence. A sickly child, cut off from many of the pleasures of his age, Edward Westermarck grew up to triumph over mountains

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154 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3370 and to stand on snowy glaciers where no one had been known to stand before. This encouraged him to think he might under- take the hardships of research among more primitive peoples, and for twenty-eight years he has been going back and forth to Morocco, gathering great store of material on the beliefs and customs of the people. As a young man his memory was poor, and once he heard that a professor had called him stupid; this disturbed him for a long time until he finally concluded that the professor's statement was exaggerated. It was Darwin who set him off on his early studies, and England has long shared him with his native Finland. Eighteen years were devoted to his second important work, and all his life shows a unity of purpose and performance almost quaint in a modern age. Here is almost a cloistered quiet and joy; it is well to be reminded that this may still be the lot of men who work with due humility and steadfastness at the tasks they love, and that the life of the scholar may still be, verily, a good one. LORINE PrUETTB Whither England and America? America and England? By Nicholas Roosevelt. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $2.50. MR. ROOSEVELT'S book appears to have been written with the London conference particularly in mind, and it may certainly be read with profit by any one who desires to understand the background of the British or Ameri- can approaches to the question of naval reduction and limita- tion. Primarily, however, it is a comparison of the positions of Great Britain and the United States today as world Pow- ers, and while what is said carries with it some obvious im- plications, it is not, in the usual sense, a work of propaganda for either country or for any cause. A comparison, well buttressed with statistics, of the natural resources, industrial development, and commercial and finan- cial expansion of the two countries, especially since the be- ginning of the present century, shows Great Britain holding on the whole, either actually or in prospect, second place. Ignorance and prejudice, as marked in the one country as in the other, have clouded an understanding of the situation, but the leadership which London still maintains over New York as the world's financial center is being offset by a steady in- crease in the American share of foreign financing; America's natural resources are better distributed and more readily accessible than those of Great Britain, and domestic produc- tion and foreign trade will unquestionably continue to grow. A fivefold increase in the past thirty years in the total volume of American production, and hence of trade, marks the United States as destined to "take the place of Great Britain as the leading commercial power of the world." Weighing the advantages and disadvantages of a mer- chant marine, Mr. Roosevelt finds no special gain in carrying national products in national ships, and he sees no likelihood that American merchant shipping will menace British super- iority "so long as the government remains in the shipping busi- ness," quite aside from the greater cost of building and oper- ating American ships. A state of war, on the other hand, at once creates different problems. The World War afforded strik- ing illustrations of the changed status of merchant vessels in the remarkable development of the convoy system, the use of fast British liners to defend the northern trade routes, and the notable performances of some of the German raiders. Neither laws nor treaties, however, seem to Mr. Roosevelt likely to avail to protect neutral commerce from interference by belligerents, and he even foresees a possibility that the United States, by insisting upon the freedom of the seas to a point where it became a party to a treaty intended to guaran- tee such freedom, might actually be placed in the position of a "moral outlaw" if it interfered with neutral British commerce. The Washington conference did not prevent Great Britain from getting the better of the bargain in the retention of ef- fective naval tonnage, and Mr. Roosevelt is severe in his criticism of Secretary Hughes for failing to realize "how anx- ious the British and Japanese were to see America's 1916 build- ing program stopped," and for "laying his entire hand on the table at the very first move" at the cost of losing "the only lever that might have helped him force through the entire pro- gram of limitation in all categories of ships." In a chapter in which he ably contrasts British and Amer- ican character and habits Mr. Roosevelt leaves distinctly the impression that the British people is losing its grip. "There are indications today," he writes, "of a mortal disease of the soul which, if sufficiently far advanced, may at last corrode the character — a combination of sloth, resistance to change, blindness, defeatism, and excessive temporizing which suggests a sick or exhausted civilization." He is hopeful, however, that better understanding may ultimately pave the way to "an enduring pax Anglo-Americana." On the soundness of that hope the London conference will, perhaps, shed some light. William MacDonald The Confederate President Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall. A Biographical Narrative. By Allen Tate. Minton, Balch and Company. $3.50. THIS latest study of the Confederate President is a singu- larly interesting piece of work. Based upon secondary material, chiefly the works of Dodd, Fleming, and Eckenrode, it makes no new contribution to our knowledge of Davis except what is to be found in the author's interpretation of him, but the story is presented with a freshness not hitherto associated with discussions of Davis. The work can scarcely be said to be a defense of Davis nor even to display a friendly attitude toward him, for it is on the whole sharply critical, but at the same time it attributes to him a larger measure of ability and, perhaps, more essential greatness than the majority of even his friendly critics have ever seen fit to put into print. Quite the most readable of the books about Davis, it gives the most vivid picture of the man that has yet appeared. Along with the easy lightness of the author's style go a certain coldness and hardness, easier to feel than to define. The author does not fail to show for his subject the judicial appreciation that every biographer should possess, but he mani- festly does not like him and apparently conceals irritation under a sort of frigidity. This impression may be due to the charac- ter of the interpretation. Mr. Tate is not hesitant about stating his conclusions — so little so, in fact, that one gathers that he was not hesitant in reaching them — and he writes with a sureness that only narrowly escapes being cocksure. Mr. Tate's assertions that "Jefferson Davis was a great statesman, perhaps the most disinterested statesman in Ameri- can history," and that his "character, his honor, his integrity were almost saintly" constitute a fairly complete description of his attitude toward Davis the man, but of Davis, the President he is much more critical. His contention that Davis's election is an "unsolved mystery" provokes the thought that perhaps Mr. Tate is not good at puzzles, or that he is not so familiar with the background of that election as a biographer of Davis should be. He feels that either Toombs, Yancey, or Rhett had a better title, since they were typical of those who precipitated secession and desired to make of it a revolution. Davis, in contrast, represented the conservative elements in the South

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February 5, 1930] The Nation 155 " — / went to the Canned Goods Fair, The prunes and the tunes were there'* Have you, too, heard the Cannery Tacbet— the tin-clad "Sound" opera and jazz numbers, so affably welcomed here by the delicatessen set. TO some theatre interests this is a heart-warming clamor. It means economy for them, hence greater profits. To persons of sound musical taste, it is ludicrous and impudent — an affront to the intelligence and taste of the theatre-going public. They see in the talkies no excuse for resort to Canned Music. If you, dear reader, are one of those who recognize that ma- chine-made sound cannot take the place of living orchestras and organists in the theatre ... if you deplore corruption of musical ap- preciation and discouragement of musical talent ... if you see no reason why you should forego the pleasure of real music in the theatre to enable an economy whose benefits you do not share, TREAT YOURSELF TO A SIGH OF RELIEF. SIGN THE COUPON BELOW. Then mail it! THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF MUSICIANS (Comprising 140,000 professional musicians in the United States and Canada) JOSEPH N. WEBER, President, 1440 Broadway, New York, N. Y. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation N-2 American Federation of Musicians 1440 Broadway, New York, N. Y. Gcnf.'emen: Without further obli- gation on my part, please enroll my name in the Music Defense League as one who is opposed to the elimi- nation of Living Music from the Theatre. Name Address City State

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156 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3370 which organized the Confederate government while eagerly anxious for reconciliation and reunion with the other States, and which never entirely escaped the thralls of that point of view. Revolution was not in their thinking. The Confederacy was to be merely a purified Union, one brought back to first principles. Mr. Tate is of course correct in his implied thesis that Davis was not the best President the Confederacy might have had, but he is weak in proving that anyone else specifically would have been better. And he overlooks the fact that since there is little likelihood that any of those mentioned for the post would have given Lee his opportunity, the days of the Confederacy might conceivably have been fewer. In his analysis of the defects of Davis as President Mr. Tate is on surer ground. He brings out clearly Davis's aloof- ness, his lack of contact with men, his inability to comprehend their motives. "He could not manage men and he was too great a character to let men manage him; that is the tragedy of his career." "He was a born compromiser of ideas; ... he was incapable of compromise with men. He was too proud, too sensitive to reproof, he rose in crises to great heights of disinterested feeling and responsibility, but being a chronic neurotic, the price he paid was continuous headache." "He was a giant ridden by dyspepsia and neurasthenia, morbidly sensitive and emotionally undisciplined; his emotional instability bulwarked behind a boundless intellectual pride. He lacked emotional resilience, and he could not read the meaning of events; he could cap the hour with a formula, he could analyze the theoretical significance of the passing moment, ... he could shatter the arguments of his shrewdest opponents, but he could not fathom the opponent's political cunning, or fore- stall its success. Davis's powerful will could not make up for the lack of emotional conviction, and he was doomed to the obstinate support of half-measures and, in his lack of vision, to the mere hope that it would all work out well in the end." "A constitutional pedant," he had little capacity as a practical politician, and pride of intellect, pride of conviction (his chief weakness), kept him from possessing any great capacity for popular leadership, particularly in the South which, in Mr. Tate's opinion, at the middle of the last century had "the best-informed political life this country has ever seen or is likely to see again." From the author's conclusion, based upon Dr. Eckenrode's work, that the military policy adopted by Davis was responsible for the defeat of the Confederacy, I must dissent. It is easy, of course, to point out numerous occasions when victory seemed almost within grasp, but the historian who ventures into the misty realm of what might have happened under a different set of circumstances or conditions is on dangerous ground. There were, too, other factors involved which were quite as decisive as military policy. It is undoubted that the insistence of Davis upon purely defensive war seems now a blunder, but the South then was quite solidly convinced that it was a wise and right policy. The division of the South into departments seems positively stupid in the light of today, but it was, I believe, but a part of a system adopted by the United States as well as by the Confederacy. Davis blundered in ignoring the importance of the West, but only the tremendous superiority of the North in men and resources prevented a similar blunder there. However reprehensible was Davis's prejudice against Joseph E. Johnston, it is not certain that he blundered in his conviction that Johnston could not win a campaign. And while thus disagreeing with Mr. Tate, I may disagree also with his contention that Davis's unshakable belief in Braxton Bragg was his only major blunder as Presi- dent, and agree most fervently that "it was a blunder of such magnitude that poor humanity must leave it to God alone to forgive." The cocksure quality of the book and its disregard of the fact that hindsight is so much more common than fore- sight appear to justify a criticism of detail and even of major conclusions which should not, however, obscure commendation of the book as readable, interesting, and thought-provoking. It is, as well, a real contribution to the literature of Jefferson Davis. J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton Russia Interpreted Humanity Uprooted. By Maurice Hindus. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $3.50. MR. HINDUS'S new book, though not quite so well written or so revealing as his "Broken Earth," is a fine attempt to describe and interpret practically every phase of Soviet life — "institutions, people, quests." A mere glance at the comprehensive table of contents and the pithy chapter headings — Religion, Property, Man, Sex, Love, Family, Peasant, Proletarian, Communist, Youth, etc. — suggests the unusually wide range of the author's interests and observations. Obviously, in view of the difficulty and magnitude of Mr. Hindus's undertaking (and we must always bear in mind the great complexity of the subject and the frequent and kaleido- scopic changes in the Soviet scene), occasional inaccuracies, contradictions, platitudes, and unwarranted assertions are almost inevitable, particularly since the author seems to excel in imme- diate sensation and artistic emotion rather than in scientific analysis. So fresh, so keen are Mr. Hindus's sensory perceptions that to him the mere process of seeing, hearing, touching things is in itself a glowing experience, a thrill. Hence, his naively hyperbolic style; hence, his rhythmic verbosity, his breathless repetitiveness, his chronic raptures. The Russian's atheism is always "riotous" or "defiant" or "hilarious"; the Russian's eyes invariably "sparkling" or "glowing" or "burning." History "bristles," contrasts "shriek." Yet through it all, and perhaps because of it all — for the Russian scene does invite hyperbole — the reader is made conscious of the terrific flux, the dynamics, the conflicts of the transition stage of the revolution. Old morals, decayed religions, tottering institutions, obsolete habits and attitudes and prejudices — everything is breaking, crashing, disappearing, and giving place to the new, the vigorous, the daring. There are savagery here and beastliness, self-sacrifice and heroism, drama and pathos and beauty. Where the author depicts, he wields his pen with authority. He knows his Soviet Russia; and one accepts his pictures, though heightened in color and lacking in the subtler shadings, unreservedly. When, however, Mr. Hindus attacks ideas, philosophies, intellectual currents, when he becomes an expositor rather than a narrator, he is less convincing and slips at times into the trite, the false, or the absurd. Here is a typical illustration: "I have often thought," he says gravely, "that fundamentally what distinguishes a Communist from other revolutionaries is his readiness to kill and to be killed." Surely this tidbit is not the result of repeated cogitation. In his historical data and his references to the Russian classics, again, Mr. Hindus is not always sufficiently vigilant. For instance, his entire discussion of the absence of the chivalric tradition in Russia and the effect of such absence on the present development of sexual and mari- tal relations is based on a somewhat inadequate mastery of historical antecedents. His references to the Russians of the tenth and eleventh centuries as "savage" and to Kiev as the place where the first printing-press was set up are wrong, while his branding of Lermontov and Pushkin, particularly Pushkin, as "tearful" poets is utterly absurd. But there is no need of multiplying examples. After all,

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February 5, 1930] The Nation 157 these are details which may lessen the value of the book for the pedant, but they do not at all need to affect the average reader. On the whole the book is sound, worth while, and a genuine contribution to the growing literature about the Soviet Union. It fully deserves a prominent place on the shelves of anyone interested in the subject. Joshua Kunitz The Great Dissenter The Dissenting Opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes. Arranged with Introductory Notes by Alfred Lief. Foreword by Dr. George W. Kirchwey. The Vanguard Press. $4.50. THIS book is a unique tribute of a kind that has never been paid, as far as I know, to any judge of the United States, not even to John Marshall. In one volume there have been collected here the dissenting opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes, with enough of his majority opinions to make clear his position. The value of such a compilation should lie far be- yond considerations of convenience. It must be not only a recognition of the great role which Justice Holmes has filled but also a means of continuing and increasing his influence. Thus in medieval times were collected the consilia of the great jurists — of an Azo, an Irnerius, a Bartolus. The reader will find here, however, touches of the twen- tieth century to disturb the analogy. Mr. Lief, who has ar- ranged the cases, has unfortunately been unable to restrain his wit. He has seen fit to prefix to the opinions titles of his own invention which can hardly be said to accord with the great issues they raise. I need only mention such inspirations as "What Price Water?", "Taxis and the Common Law," or "Uncle Sam as Tenant." He has also arranged the cases in groups which are not always happy, since they lead to arbitrary emphasis upon single aspects of the opinions. Such categories as "On Hampering Social Experiments" or "On Infringing upon Freedom" do express characteristic preoccupations of Jus- tice Holmes, but they have made it necessary to assemble the opinions that remain under such novel constitutional divisions as "On Usurping Power" and "On Escaping Taxes." This is not merely captious criticism. The arrangement adopted fails to show the element of growth in the constitutional doctrines of Justice Holmes. In 1906 he upheld punishment for construc- tive contempt even as against a defense that the charges were true; in 1923 he went so far as to ask the pointed and embar- rassing question, "How can it be pretended that the charge ob- structed the administration of justice when the judge seemingly was willing to condone it if the petitioner would retract?" Yet the latter case precedes the former. Only a simple chronologi- cal marshaling of the opinions could exhibit the achievement of that noble skepticism of Justice Holmes which is of even greater moment than any of his attitudes toward particular constitutional problems — a skepticism which has come to consist of constitutionally believing everything. It is this which makes him the great dissenter. Yet in this respect, too, he has not been appreciated in the all too brief foreword of four pages contributed by Dean Kirchwey. The latter, indeed, denies Justice Holmes the claim and the title. He points out that, after all, he has dissented in only one out of every eight or ten cases. I pass over the fact that obviously the average case involves only ordinary legal matters, not great issues. Dissent is not to be interpreted statistically. It recalls to me the method introduced some years ago by Charles Warren in defending the Supreme Court; after all, he said, it had held only fifty-three acts of Congress void. Is this a way to measure crises? It may, indeed, be that in a better constitu- tional world Justice Holmes would not be dissenting. The most When writing to advertisers An Important New Book THE LABOR INJUNCTION By Felix Frankfurter and Nathan Greene This is a comprehensive study of the labor injunc- tion in all of its phases. The legislative efforts to define and limit the use of the injunction in labor disputes are traced in detail, and the judicial appli- cation of the injunction, in Federal and State juris- dictions, is analyzed. The authors then give their views on the appropriate direction of future legisla- tion. The labor injunction has never been a more vital subject than it is today. No other book has treated of it so adequately as this. Price, $5.00 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 60 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. ■■>*«•■■■■■■ ••■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ai The Training School for Jewish Social Work invites social workers without professional prepara- tion and others, holders and prospective holders of a bachelor's degree, to whom a career of intrinsic interest and social usefulness is a primary considera- tion, to examine carefully its course of study in preparation for Jewish Social Work as a Profession The School prepares its students for every variety of social work in American Jewish Communities and Institutions. Scholarships and Fellowships ranging from $150 to $1,000 for each school year are available for especially qualified students. For full information turite to M. J. Karpf, Director The Training School For Jewish Social Work A graduate school 67-71 W. 47th Street, New York please mention The Nation

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158 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3370 damaging remark on constitutionalism ever made is contained in the opening sentence of one of his opinions which really should be quoted more often than it has been: "I also think that the statute is constitutional, and but for the decision of my brethren I should have felt pretty clear about it." But it is another matter to say that it is practically involuntary dissent to be compelled to point out that a steel laborer is not on an equality for purposes of bargaining with the United States Steel Corporation, or that the Nineteenth Amendment has not abolished all differences between men and women. For the vindication of these truths we need not, as Dean Kirchwey con- cludes, look to "the years to come." They have long been vin- dicated in public opinion, and even Justice Holmes's brethren have changed their minds and departed from the ideas once enunciated for the court by the naive Justice Peckham. Justice Holmes (and, of course, Justice Brandeis) dissenting, have not done so in vain. William S eagle Books in Brief Cyrano. By Cameron Rogers. Doubleday, Doran and Com- pany. $3.50. For the biofiction that enables these earnest days to enjoy the old excitement beneath culture's cloak, few figures are more providentially equipped than Cyrano de Bergerac. Bearing a bought coat-of-arms, this long-nosed libertine, best swordsman of swift dueling days, most savage satirist of a bitter age, stood always at the door of triumph as it closed, and died — his greatest work unpublished — struck by a falling beam. Perhaps, indeed, the legend Rostand has helped create has grown more real than the man; for Cameron Rogers, whose picture of Paris brings its streets to us in all their noisy jostling and crawly dirt, has not given life to the man who struts them. The swordsman seems drawn for Douglas Fairbanks; the man of letters lives the later years of a bolder Ichabod Crane. The bibliography, off-handedly including Sainte-Beuve's "Lun- dis" (eleven volumes), is content, for the greatest authority on Cyrano and the other libertine writers — F. Lachevre — with a reference to a magazine article. Those, however, to whom the presence of the booklist gives countenance will enjoy the romance that precedes it. The Iron Man and the Tin Woman. By Stephen Leacock. Dodd, Mead and Company. $2. Apart from his college work Mr. Leacock has written eighteen books, he says in a letter quoted on the jacket of this one. He goes on to say that he would sooner have written "Alice in Wonderland" than the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Well, here is number eighteen, and while it is far from being another "Alice in Wonderland" or even another "Nonsense Novel," it contains forty pieces of nonsense com- bined with satire which one wishes the right people might be forced to read. Some of the pieces are better than others; no humorist can be always at his best, but Mr. Leacock is one of those who is never at his worst. Instinct and Intelligence. By R. W. G. Hingston. The Mac- millan Company. $2.50. If we knew better what either of them were we might draw sharper lines between instinct and intelligence, though if the behaviorists should succeed in making of all human action a mere chain of reflexes to external stimuli the distinction would be lost. Major Hingston writes as a prebehaviorist, but the result is the same. Documenting his every statement with a series of observations on insect life in the tropical East, he con- cludes that some insects at least have memory and the ability to learn from experience — "intelligence." "Regarded from a psychological point of view," he says, "the brain of man and the brain of the insect possess the same fundamental qualities." Some of his evidences of intelligence might be defined as com- plicated instinct, but the old religious insistence upon a sharp line between intelligent man and instinctive beast is being whit- tled away from both ends. Any amateur philosopher is free to draw his own inferences and conclusions from the rich data here presented. The Picture Book of Sculpture. By Harold and Mary Fowler. The Macmillan Company. $2.50. This book is intended to interest children in sculpture and give them some understanding of it. There are illustrations representative of the work of different countries and periods, accompanied by clear, interesting, and undogmatic descriptions of the pieces and schools. The only fault is an inadequate representation of modern work. Tu Fu: The Autobiography of a Chinese Poet. Arranged from his Poems, and Translated by Florence Ayscough. Houghton Mifflin Company. $5. By arranging his verse in a sequence which records and comments upon his own development and piecing out the gaps with her notes, Mrs. Ayscough contrives to give us an auto- biography of the Tang poet whom the Chinese regard as "the Master." The book is additionally valuable for its coinci- dental treatment of Chinese poetry and history, but Mrs. Ayscough's translations are somewhat too literal to give pleas- ure. There is to be a second and completing volume. A Short History of Chinese Civilization. By Richard Wil- helm. The Viking Press. $4. Compact, scholarly, and understanding, this rather short book contains the matter of a political history, a social history, a history of the arts, the literature, and the religions of China, and in three of these fields can displace the best previous book on the subject. All that may be said in objection is that at times the author is too reverential. The book is handsomely bound and superbly illustrated. Films Screen Musical Comedy A GREAT deal can be said for as well as against the exact reproduction of a stage performance by means of the motion picture. But to stress this problem today would be to overlook the fact that the technical powers of the motion picture are still wholly inadequate for creating the illusion of a performance that is enacted within the walls of a theater. Nothing less than such an illusion can justify the use of the stage technique on the screen, and the penalty for ignoring this truth is a painful incongruity that often borders on the inept. Screen adaptations of musical comedies are par- ticularly open to criticism on this score. This season the Hollywood workshops have been turning them out by the dozen, with the majority of them patterned faithfully after the stage model. In the few cases where music and dancing were incidental and woven more or less intelligently into the story, the pictures were at least bearable, and occasionally, as for instance "Sunny Side Up," even quite entertaining. It is, how- ever, the attempt to adapt to the screen the conventional genre of the stage musical comedy that deserves greater considera- tion, in spite of the poverty of artistic thought which it represents.

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February 5, 1930] The Nation 159 D THEATRES □ LUNCHEON □ LECTURES □ ■LEO BULGAKOV- Teeatre Associates, Inc., presents AT THE BOTTOM "Really worth seeing." — Brown, Pott. by MAXIM GORKY New version by William L. Laurence POPULAR PRICES $2.50 to 75c Phone reservations accepted — Circle 1407 "A fine play" — Mantle, Newt. n,AI r\/~kT>T? THEATRE— 50th St.. Bet. 6th & 7th Aves. Eve., 8:50 W/\i-,JJWtvr MATINEES Thursday and Saturday. 2:30 Kenneth Macgowan and J. V. Reed present BASIL SYDNEY and MARY ELLIS in CHILDREN of DARKNESS A Rich Satire on Exploiters of All Ages by Edwin Justus Mayer, author of "The Firebrand" HIT TTl/IfiUl? THEATRE — 47th Street, West of Broadway DLL, 1 IWUIvEj Evenings, 8:60 — Mate., Wed. and Sat., 2:40. City Haul By ELIZABETH MIELE with HERBERT RAWDINSON A COMEDY ON MUNICIPAL POLITICS HUDSON THEATRE — 44th St., E. of B'dway Evenings 8 :60. Matinees Wednesday and Saturday 2 :40. IVIC REPERTORY 'M^.Sr 50c, $1, $1.60. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2 :30. EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Fri.Eve.,Jan.31, "A Sunny Morning" & "L'Invitation au Voyage" ; Mon.Eve.,Feb.3, "The Sea Gull" ; Tues.Eve., Feb.4 & Thurs.Mat..Feb.6, "The Open Door" & "Women Have Their Way" ; Wed.Eve.,Feb.5, "The Living Corpse" ; Thurs.Eve.,Feb.6, "Hedda Gabler." Seats four weeks in advance at Box Office and Town Hall, 113 West 43rd Street. -WILLIAM HARRIS, JR., PRESENTS - 'THE FIRST PLAY OF THE SEASON WITH TEETH IN IT." ROBERT LITTELL, WORLD. CRIMINAL CODE By MARTIN FLAVIN NATIONAL THEATRE with ARTHUR BYRON 41st St., West of 7th Ave. Evenings 8 :50 Matinees Wednesdays & Saturdays, 2 :80 ETHEL BARRYMOEE Theatre, 47th St., West of Broadway Evenings 8:50; Matinees Wed. & Sat. 2:30 LEE SHUBERT Presents PHILIP MERIVALE IN DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY A COMEDY ABOUT LIFE 'BRAVE, AUDACIOUS, PROVOCATIVE"— Robert Garland, Telegram The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present RUTH DRAPER in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER SKETCHES Every Eve. including Sunday (except Mon. & Thurs. nights) at 8:50 THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats., Thurs. and Sat., 2:30. VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00. COMEDY The Theatre Guild Presents METEOR By S. N. BEHRMAN #""1*1 1<1 THEA., 52nd St. W. of Broadway \_»U11U Evgs. 8:50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:40 The Theatre Guild Presents RED RUST By KIRCHON & OUSPENSKY Ma t* fin Ro^Lr THEA., 45th St. W. of 8th Ave. A rim OCLH Evgs. 8:40. Mats. Thurs & Sat. 2: 40 SEVENTH SATURDAY LUNCHEON of the New York Chapter LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY at the HOTEL WOODSTOCK 12:46 P.M., Saturday, Feb. 8, 1930 The Prisoner in Revolt— A Challenge to the Nation Speakers: JOHN BLACK, Ex-prisoner HASTINGS HART, Former President, American Prison Association Chairman: BENJAMIN STOLBEKG Make reservations in advance at the office of the L.I.D., 112 East 19th Street, New York City— Algonquin 6865. MEMBERS $1.00 NON-MEMBERS $1.26 Listen in on WEAF, 1 :1,5 P. M., Eastern Standard Time. RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 7 East 15th St. Alg. 3094 NORMAN THOMAS Tues., Feb. 4 "PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN SOCIALISM" 8:30 DOUGLAS HASKELD Wed. , Feb. 5 "THE STRUGGLE OF ROMANTIC ART" 8:30 MARK STARR Wed. , Feb. 5 "BRITISH LABOR PARTY" 7-10 DOMINIC d'EUSTACHIO Thurs., Jan. 30 "SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION 8:30 ABEN KANDEIi Tues., Jan. 28 "CENSORS AS CRITICS" 7:00 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY in the City of New York UNIVERSITY EXTENSION The Institute of Arts and Sciences announces Three Free Lectures on CRIME Its Treatment, Prevention and Cure by Dr. ALFRED ADLER Eminent Viennese Psychologist McMILLIN ACADEMIC THEATER N. E. Corner Broadway and 116th Street Friday evenings, Feb. 7, 14, 21. Also A Course of 14 Lectures on INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY (Fee $10.00) Tuesday Afternoons at 4:15 beginning February 4 and A Course of 7 Lectures on SELECTED PERSONAL PROBLEMS (Fee $5.00) Wednesday Mornings at 10:30 beginning February 5 Films, lectures, etc., continued on next page

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160 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3370 It scarcely needs pointing out that the conventions of musical comedy derive whatever meaning they have from being a frank entertainment on a stage that is physically connected with the audience. The characters suddenly breaking into song or forming themselves into dancing columns are never any- thing more than mere actors whose only concern is to enter- tain those who are watching their performance. For its part the audience expects from them nothing more. It disregards the absurdities of the plot or the antics of the characters, be- cause it never associates them with real life. The screen imitators of musical comedy seem to be ig- norant of this essential relationship between the actor and the spectator. They place their characters in perfectly natural surroundings, introduce them as perfectly normal people, and then make them behave as if they were escaped lunatics. Far be it from me to suggest that highly conventionalized acting is impossible on the screen. On the contrary, it is one of the things that the motion picture needs most, but the convention used must spring from the peculiar properties of the latter and not from those of the stage. Today the screen, in the strict sense of the term, is merely a neutral surface for carry- ing images, and only helps to emphasize the gap which divides the picture from the audience. But it is the only possible link between the two, and to make this link perform its liaison ser- vice the visual images must be hitched to the screen. In other words the screen must become a physical reality in the eyes of the audience, a part of the theater building which provides the graphic frame of reference for the very being of charac- ters in space, as well as for the form in which they are presented to view. By this means a motion picture will not merely be demonstrated, but will actually be performed before the spectator, and a basis will be supplied for conventionalized acting of every kind, including that of musical comedy. The absence of such cinematic approach in "The Love Parade" (Criterion) is particularly regrettable, for apart from its treatment of singing this picture is a very remarkable achievement in cinematic comedy. The surprising thing about "The Love Parade" is that its most telling comic effects are produced not by Mr. Chevalier's acting, which in this picture is only moderately good, but by the deft juxtaposition and contrast of scenes provided by Mr. Lubitsch's direction. In the field of light comedy Hollywood has no greater master than Mr. Lubitsch. One wishes there were the same avoidance of the obvious in "Sally" (Winter Garden). The picture shows the charm- ing personality of Miss Marilyn Miller to some advantage but is a routine piece of work in all other respects. Alexander Bakshy Drama Direct from Moscow SOME weeks ago the junior members of the Theater Guild were permitted to have their fling, and chose for the occasion the Soviet drama "Red Rust." The production has achieved a greater popularity than perhaps even the parties concerned had hoped for, and those who would like to know what the contemporary Russian theater is like can get a very accurate idea by paying a visit to the Martin Beck. Certainly the essentially realistic spirit of the piece is far more typical of the Moscow drama as I saw it some eighteen months ago than are any of the futuristic extravaganzas more often talked of here; and certainly its precise, rather literal-minded earnestness is as far from the vague pretentiousness of the communistic plays written by American experimenters as it is characteristic of the contemporary Russian playwright. Even the unconven- tional devices used in staging the piece are not employed in the interest of eccentric aesthetic theories, but solely in order to make possible the introduction of significant representations of every-day scenes, and that, as I have always maintained, is the key to all that is most vital in the Soviet theater, for it is, essentially, a theater closer and more literally faithful to the contemporary life of its audience than any other theater in the world. "Red Rust" concerns itself with the story of the downfall of a hypocrite — a hero of the revolution who is using his reputation and his gift for employing the catchwords of the new order for the purpose of furthering his selfish love of power. Moving against a background of tumultuous student life, it manages in the course of its action both to refer in some way or other to all the chief conflicts of opinion current in Soviet life and to offer a more stinging criticism of certain aspects of that life than those who have an exaggerated idea of the stringency of the communist censorship would believe possible. Its purpose is largely didactic, at least to the extent that it concerns itself with nothing which does not have an immediate social significance, and in that respect it certainly belongs to a type of drama pretty well played out in Western Europe and America, but, as no one who exposes himself to the tension and excitement of "Red Rust" can longer doubt, the Russians have revitalized the form. About their writing is a passion and an enthusiasm which inevitably take hold of even the spectator who has, in the abstract, no great interest in social experiment, and they indubitably make drama out of sociological material. Moreover, to say that is to say that they succeed where no other school of dramatists has succeeded in ten years past. I suspect that the reason behind this fact lies less in the appearance of any outstanding genius than in the atmosphere in which the contemporary Russian lives, for that atmosphere is one generated by an intense and hopeful preoccupation with social questions. The thesis drama of Europe was, or at least soon became, a weary and hopeless thing. Its authors had scant faith that anything would be accomplished, and they tended almost inevitably to write plays which ended, not triumphantly or even tragically, but simply on a note of depression. In Russia, on the other hand, the form into which such plays naturally fall is the form of melodrama — with the villain foiled and the hero on top. Change, at least, as they know from ex- perience, can come. The old order can pass, and even those who are farthest from believing that the millennium is about to arrive know that revolution is possible, and feel that where things can be different there is room to hope that they may be better. Hence revolutionary drama is real to them, and ab- stract questions of social justice seem immediately significant. In many respects "Red Rust" is characteristically naive. Its most theatrically effective scene — the scene in which the villain practices his speech while eating his lunch and at its climax proclaims, "Arise, ye children of starvation," with a full mouth, and a sandwich and a bottle of beer in either outstretched hand — is elementary in its irony. Moreover, the happy end is brought about with an almost childish simplicity, and the final curtain descends upon one of those orgies of flag-waving which are almost inevitable in any Soviet play, even if only, as was perhaps here the case, in order to convince the censor that the author is at bottom soundly communistic. But naivete is permissible when it can justify itself by an effectiveness as great as this play achieves, and when it can interest, as "Red Rust" does, an audience so remote from its passions as an American audience must be. Incidentally, the junior members of the Guild have every reason to congratulate themselves on excellent acting and direction. Joseph Wood Krutch

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February 5, 1930] The Nation 161 □ FILMS □ LECTURES □ D E B A TE □ , A BITTER CHARGE f AGAINST WAR • "A FRAGMENT OF AN EMPIRE" NEWEST SOVIET FILM NOW SECOND SENSATIONAL WEEK Love-stirring story of a man broken by War, who lost his memory and found himself in a new world. Heart-breaking agonies! Gripping revelations of the cruelties of War! R. K. 0. CAMEO THEATRE 42nd St. & Broadway Wisconsin 1789 Continuous Performances First American Showing beginning Sat., Feb. 1st. The World Tours of the Prince of Wales The engrossing and highly interesting official travel film of the tours of the Prince of Wales between 1920 and 1929. fUli ' East of 7th Avc* JDIO 01. I loj IIO USC Continuous from noon to Midnight. MATINEES : GOOD SEATS, ALL PRICES. AT BOX OFFICE WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE ARLISS In 44 DISRAELI (A Vlt&phone All-Talkin* Picture) 77 CENTRAL THEATRE Broadway and 47th St. Daily J:45 — 8:4S Sunday * — 6 — 8:4* FORUM ON CURRENT EVENTS Saturday 2 P.M. Admission 25 cents February 1 DR. IRA S. WILE Eminent Specialist in Child Psychology "THE DELINQUENT CHILI) AND THE DELINQUENT COMMUNITY" SALLENDRA NATH GOSE February 8 American Representative Indian National Council "THE INDEPENDENCE OF INDIA" WM. H. BRIDGE February 12 Creative Psychology RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 1 E. 15th 8t. Algonquin 3094 A Momentous o -Cornered I3EB.ATE!!! Which Offers More to the Workers of the World? COMMUNISM, or -. SOCIALISM, or / CAPITALISM Scott NEARING says Communism Noted Sociologist and Lecturer Fenner BROCKWAY says Socialism Brilliant Labor Member of British Parliament Prof. Edwin R. A. SELIGMAN says Capitalism Foremost Economist, Columbia University Chairmen, SAMUEL UNTERMYER & ROGER N. BALDWIN Subject RESOLVED: That Capitalism offers more to the workers of the world than Socialism or Communism. THIS SUNDAY, FEB. 2, 1930—8:30 P. M. MECCA TEMPLE— 133 W. 55th STREET Reserved Seats $1.00, $1.50, $1.75, $2.00 & $2.75 Obtainable at Civic Club, 18 E. 10th Street; Colum- bia University Bookstore ; Rand School Bookstore ; 7 E. 15th Street, and New School Bookshop, 465 W. 23rd Street. Also at offices of LEAGUE FOR PUBLIC DISCUSSION 11 W. 42nd St. Chickering 5789 or Spring 1716 Tickets on sale at Mecca Temple Box Office — Phone Circle 1795 AN Nl VE to R, PROGRAM Added Attraction Starting this Sat., Feb. 1st EXTRAORDINARY TRIPLE-FEATURE PROGRAM!!! VICTOR HUGO'S Immortal Drama "LES MISERABLES" a powerful film-version of the French Revolu- tion enacted in the ac- tual locale of the story by a cast of 10,000. — and on the same program — EVOLUTION a comprehensive cinema -exposition of the theory of man's derivation, by the producers of the "EINSTEIN THEORY" film. (American Premiere) H. 8. WELLS' "DAY-DREAMS" — a screen, fantasy by the famous Eng- lish Utopian — FILM GUILD CINEMA Direction: Symon Gould 52 West 8th St., bet. 5th and 6th Aves. Popular Prices „_ . 8prtn* ™95-m90 Continuous Daily ?<oon to Midnight Special Forenoon Prices: Sat. -Sun., 12-2 — 50c. Weekdays, 12-2— 35c. I ast 2 Davs— Thurs., Fri., Jan. 30-31 st— LILLIAN GISH in "THE WIND " and "THE KAISER IN WAR AND PEACE."

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International Relations Section Fascist Finance By FRANCESCO NITTI THE following article on the present economic situation in Italy is reprinted from the Manchester Guardian Weekly of January 3. Its author, Francesco Nitti, is an eminent economist and was Prime Minister and Minis- ter of Finance of Italy prior to the Fascist regime. He is now in exile. It is very difficult to procure exact information as to the finance of countries under a dictatorship. There is no check; parliamentary documents are valueless; the censored press in- spires no confidence. What can be said, however, is that dicta- torship finance is always bad. . . . There are very alarming symptoms in Italy. The real conditions of credit and industry are evidenced by the bills of exchange protested and the drafts not honored at due date: the number was 306,703 in 1922, just before the arrival of Fascism, and 743,972 in 1928. Declarations of bankruptcy are being avoided as far as possible; the courts are very tolerant. But the number of bankruptcies has increased in the same period from 3,828 to 12,103. A large number of banks have failed, and the most important industries are in difficulties. Ac- cording to the Bulletin Statistique of the League of Nations, last August Italy had 1,204 bankruptcies, Germany 845, France 811, the United Kingdom 357 and 286 windings-up of com- panies, and so on. Bearing in mind that Italian industry is only a small fraction of the industry of Britain, Germany, or France, the extreme gravity of the situation which has been produced through the suppression of all economic liberty is clear. The New York Wall Street Journal has examined the situation of the security market in Italy. Everything is con- trolled. Sales are not free, and quotations are purely artificial. Stockbrokers are compelled to send in returns of sellers. Stock- brokers in Rome have been imprisoned simply for having said that the quotations for certain securities ought to be lower. In spite of this, government stocks are falling every day; and even this is paradoxical. The result of every stabilization has been to raise the prices of government securities. In France and Belgium there were rapid increases in price after stabiliza- tion. In Italy no one believes in the stabilization of the lira, and .government stocks are falling daily although the existing prices are artificial. 3l/i per cent stock 1924 83.55 1925 76.29 5 per cent consolidated 97.28 94.49 1926 68.50 1927 66.49 1928 73.32 1929 (present price) 67.50 90.00 79.08 84.16 80.45 (The present prices include the December coupons, 1.75 for the V/2 per cent and 2.50 for consols.) It is well known that the word of the Fascist Government is of very restricted value. In November, 1926, it did not pay the treasury bonds which fell due, and compulsorily converted 23,504,000 of treasury bonds into a consolidated loan which had to be accepted at a very high price that is constantly falling. In 1931, 7,000,000 more treasury bonds will fall due, and it is known already that they will not be able to be redeemed. The thing which has especially upset economic conditions in Italy has been the stabilization of the lira. . . . Stabiliza- tion was effected at an absurd level on December 21, 1927. In the decree of stabilization the pound sterling was fixed at 92.46 lire and the dollar at 19.10. In round figures Italy stabilized at about 1 to Zl/z of gold parity, while France stabilized at 1 to 5 and Belgium at 1 to 7. Italy is much poorer than France and Belgium and her economic resources are very limited. This stabilization was a Bartholomew's Night for the national wealth. Its result was to render the taxation insupportable, the public debt excessively burdensome, and production very difficult. Expressed in gold, the central and local government expenditure in Italy is little less than that of France, which is at least three times richer. In order to maintain the artificial level of the lira (which cannot be kept up indefinitely), loans have been contracted in America, and the industrialists have also been compelled to contract loans, the aggregate exceeding $500,000,000. Nearly 9,000,000,000 lire have been lost in the operations of the treas- ury. Debts have been piled up, piled up continually. In order still to keep the lira steady, recourse is now being had to the reserves of the Banca d'ltalia, the only bank of issue. The bank's reserves of gold and of first-class foreign securities fell from 12,516,000,000 lire in March, 1927, to 10,240,000,000 at the end of September, 1929. It is not to be supposed that this re- serve actually exists in gold and securities. The figure is cal- culated in "paper gold," that is, by multiplying the actual quantity of gold or securities by the stabilization quota. The real reserve was equivalent eighteen months ago to £623,000,- 000, and has since dropped to the equivalent of £510,000,000.* It is falling daily, and it is almost impossible to get credits abroad. The trade balance has continually gone from bad to worse; the balance of foreign payments is menacing and is making it impossible to sustain the existing rate of the lira. Imports Exports Deficit {In millions of lire) 1924 19,381 16,529 2.8S2 1925 26,200 21,015 5,184 1927 20,375 15,632 4,743 1928 21,920 14,559 7,361 1929 (first 8 months) 14,675 9,593 5,082 {Gazzetta Ufficiale, February 21 and October 21, 1929.) The present year shows virtually the same deficit as 1928. Thus in five years the deficit has grown in round figures from £140,000,000 to £250,000,000. Italy is no longer a creditor but a debtor country. The merchant marine is passing through a severe crisis. Its revenues are only of limited importance. In the past the balance of payments was made good from two big sources of revenue. The more important of these was the money sent home by Italian emigrants. The other source was the expendi- ture of tourists; it has fallen nearly 40 per cent. . . . Italian emigrants are almost all anti-Fascist workers, and have no sympathy with the government and no confidence in the stability of the lira. The export of money is not free. But the rich Italians are convinced that the stabilization is only transitory, and that the lira will fall. They are secretly sending abroad all that they can dispose of. What is the cause of this situation? It lies primarily in the heavy expenditure of the dictatorship. In order to main- tain itself in power it has had to increase the public expendi- ture, undertake useless works, and appease a large number of * At 92.46 lire to the pound sterling, these figures would work out at £135,000,000 and £1 11,000,000.— Editor The Nation.

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February 5, 1930] The Nation 163 discontented people. The state budget is an insoluble puzzle. There is no real budget, since the government can do what it will by decree. Since the decree of June 5, 1926, a series of tricks have been resorted to to dissemble the expenditure. There are a large number of special accounts outside the budget. The current budget, which showed a small deficit, has in reality a deficit of nearly 2,000,000,000 lire. The waste is so serious that even under the Fascist regime an interesting document, the Report of the General Commis- sion of the Budget, presented to the Chamber on June 11 last, was compelled to admit them. This document admitted (page 30) that the real military expenditure had more than doubled between 1922-23 and 1927-28. Alongside the army, navy, and air service, there are six special militias for the defense of Fascism, with an enormous personnel. The police expenditure is three times as heavy as in France. According to the budget commission, the interest on the public debt increased from i 4,134,000,000 lire in 1922-23 to 4,674,000,000 in 1927-28; the expenditure on the state employees and functionaries from 3,558,000,000 to 4,376,000,000; the expenditure on pensions (Fascism has dismissed the best officials in order to make room for its faithful supporters) from 359,000,000 to 753,000,000; on the civil services (including personnel) from 3,257,000,000 to 4,745,000,000, and so on. Expenditure in the colonies has gone to so absurd a length that it amounts now to the equiva- lent of nearly £50 per head of the native population. . . '. Fascism has to spend lavishly; not only for its heavy mili- tary requirements, its swollen police, its six special militias, but , hundreds of millions of lire on continual and very active propa- ganda abroad. The discussion in the American Senate on the subject of the publications of Harper's Magazine is very interesting in this connection. Expenditure is incurred for purely political purposes in Austria, Hungary, and the Balkans. Albania has been armed, and in this poor and ill-endowed country more than £60,000,000 have been spent. . . . 280 * VISIT RUSSIA Short, low rate $ Winter trips from Including round trip passage and a five day complete service and sightseeing in Leningrad and Moscow. AMALGAMATED BANK Travel Dept. 11-15 Union Square, N. Y. O. or Amalgamated Trust & Savings Bank 111 West Jackson Blvd. Chicago, HI. For information on Spring and Summer trips, write for booklet "N." sJoDpe-B- ATHEISM Book catalogue FREE. Set of tracts, 10c. American Association for Advancement of Atheism, Inc. 119 K. 14th St. New York, N. V. LLOYD CABIN QUARTET The Luxury of Leisure LLOYD EXPRESS BERLIN STUTTGART MUENCHEN DRESDEN To England, Ireland, France, Bremen The Gaiety of Speed ^BREMEN . „,..,. EUROPA Every Lloyd Liner Carries Tourist Third COLUMBUS To England, France, Bremen # World's fastest Liner NORTH CEtMAN LIOYD *pi^ 57 Broadway New York, or your local agent 'XPIiORATTVE itiner- aries worked oat with reference to ioclal, economic, historic, artistic and scenic features. Visits to factories, schools, children's com- munities, collective farms and villages . . . art treasures, palaces and workers' rest homes . . . for the adventurous . . . camping in the Caucasus and study of primitive tribes. Small groups, each accompanied by a quali- fied American leader and Russian Interpreter. From $395 including express steamship pass- age. Literature available. Individual itineraries also exe- • cuted ▲ Independent year-'round • representation in Russia 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK .XMl^aBEN^RQ^D, When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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164 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3370 FOR THOSE WHO SEEK THE THRILL OF DISCOVERY IN GOOD BOOKS A MAGIC PASS TO HOURS OF DELIGHTFUL ENTERTAINMENT, THRILLING ADVENTURE AND years of appreciative ow?iership On January 30th We Announce for Publication — A Limited Edition of the New Dutton Spring Catalog in de luxe illustrated form You can obtain your copy, with our compliments, at no expense to yourself '(that IS; as long as they last) IN ORDER TO AVOID THE DULLNESS OF MOST CATALOGS, WE PRESENT A RADICAL DEPARTURE FROM THE CONVENTIONAL FORM Cover Design by HenrielU Price E. P. DUTTON & CO., Inc., 300 Fourth Avenue/NEW YORK □ FOR RENT □ FURNISHED ROOMS Manhattan Beach Hotel Manhattan Beach, N. Y. C. I" IVE in a modern fireproof hotel *-* by the seashore for less than In the crowded city — $9.00 per week and up for one; $12.00 per week and up for two. All hotel services Included. Tennis and handball courts. 37 minutes from Times Square (B.M.T. Brighton Beach Sta- tion). Phone Shcepshead 3000. '"FEN minutes Wall Street, all subways, sunny front and bed room, attractive, redecorated, continuous hot water in room ; also large rear hall room, facing garden. Moderate. 239 Dean St., Brooklyn. Triangle 7743. APARTMENT TO SHARE CITUATED midtown, young woman (Semitic) desires to share her interesting studio apart- ment (two rooms and kitchenette) with one or two congenial persons ; pleasant atmosphere ; extremely reasonable rental. Evenings Cathedral 9114. RESTAURANT 149 EAST 13th St. — (lose to 2nd Ave. An eating place of distinction — And a lot of it — A <|uiet place for a rendezvotie < Ih-^s Conversation OPEN SHELF THAT BOOK YOU WANT I We hold 2,000,000 of the best books — new, second-hand, out- of-print, rare — all subjects. Also Seta of Author*. Catalogues free (26 issued). Outline require- ments and interests. Books sent on approval. Foyles, Charing Cross Rd., London, Eng. BOOK MANUSCRIPT Wanted — Let us publish your book. The best service at lowest cost. Meadob Publishing Co., 27 Beach St., Boston. Mans. DEMOCRATIC YOUTH To help and encourage democratic youth to take its proper part in practical politics, to assist in making our government more intelli- gently progressive, is the purpose of Demo- cratic Youth. Published monthly at West Liberty, Ky., for young idealists who still be- lieve in democracy. Edited by Rosco Brong. Dime brings sample copy. Four months' trial subscription for 25c. POSITIONS WANTED DHYTHMICS councillor, progressive chil- dren's camp, in general vicinity of New York. Apt. 1. 491 3rd St., Bklyn., N. Y. South 6963. __ TARVARD law student desires job for sum- -^ ■*■ mer ; experienced chauffeur, lifeguard, swim- ming instructor, hotel clerk, waiter, and tutor. Anything will do. What have you? Box 2287, r, The Nation. (""ULTURED German lady, 36 years, trained ^ registered nurse, college graduate, experi- enced traveler, good housekeeper, unencumbered, wishes position. Box 2288. c/r The Nation. INSTRUCTOR of French, woman, open to en- 1 gagement 1930-1931. Address Box 2289, r, The Nation. '""pOO honest," comments one employer. With this handicap can you use and compensate experienced, capable, intelligent sales represen- tative or branch manager who can assume re- sponsibility. Box 2290. r/, The Nation. YOUNG MAN, 23, cultured and refined, desires to associate with gentleman as his assistant in a capacity where MUSIC shall be the chief interest. Extensive musical and literary back- ground. Box 2291, % The Nation. CLASSIFIED ADVERTISERS: Mail your classified ads so they reach us Friday, to insure their appearance in the issue of THE NATION on the stands the following Thursday. THE NATION 20 VESEY ST.. N. Y. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation □ EDUCATIONAL □ THE PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE PROGRAM— Jan. 31-Feb. 8 AT COOPER UNION 8th Street and Astor Place at 8 o'clock. Admission Free. Friday, Jan. 31— DR. EVERETT DEAN MAR- TIN— The Psychology of Procress "Psychological Factors in the Evolution of Morals, Taboo, Intuition, Reason and the Ides, of the 'Good.' " |g| Ethics and Social Science Sunday, Feb. 2 — Dr. Scott Buchanan — "Toward a Religion of Science." || Natural Science Tuesday, Feb. 4 — Dr. Gardner Murphy — "Psy- chology as the Science of Biography." MUHLENBERG BRANCH LIBRARY 209 West 23rd St. at 8:30 o'clock. Monday, Feb. 3 — Mr. Nathaniel Peffer- — "China: A Civilization in Disintegration." "The Real Problem of the Far East : Break-up of a Social Order." Wednesday, Feb. 5 — Dr. John Bartlett Brebner — Literature as Social History — "Where Literature Fails: The Half Told Tale." Thursday, Feb. G— Dr. E. G. Spaulding— The Ways and Means of Reasoning — "Reasoning in Aristotelian Logic : Terms, Propositions, Syllo- gisms." Saturday, Feb. 8 — Dr. Richard McKeon — The Old IUI and the New Logic — "Experience and Self- IBI Evident Truths." Learn How To THINK You Can Do Nothing More Important. A RECENT DISCOVERY BY President L. W. RAPEER, Ph.D., IX.D. How to Solve Life Problems Write RESEARCH UNIVERSITY, Washington, D. C. FRENCH, SPANISH, ITALIAN, GERMAN, ENGLISH Conversational method. Native teachers. Private lessons, 75c. short course, 9 to 9 daily. 18th year. FISHER'S SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES 12*4 Lexington Avenue, N. W. Cor. 85th Street UNIVERSAL INSTITUTE OF f 4 T\H~,TTAi"' 17 G ITALIAN— GERMAN L/ArNlyU/WyJl/^ FRENCH— SPANISH Private lessoas 75e (Daily 9-9). Native teachers. SimpHnsd conversational method. 18 years' ex- perience. Also neglected English education. 1265 Lexington Ave., Northeast Oor. 85th St. FRENCH INSTRUCTION FRENCH — modern instruction suited individual needs, or small group, by professional young native. Evenings. Rates fair — depending on kind and length lessons. Box 2268, % The Nation. DISCUSSION THE GROUP A Clearing House of Opinion meets at Auditorium — 150 West 85th St. Tuesday, February 4th, at 8:30 P.M. DR. FRITZ WITTELS ( Distinguished Psycho-Analyst ) will speak on : 'THE HYSTERICAL CHARACTER" Sundny nfternoon at 4 P.M. (Feb. 9th) Informal Discussion Group SEYMOUR A. SELIGSON will speak on: "WILL THE SUPERMAN OR THE MORON SURVIVE?" Tea will be served. Admission 50c Organized 1918

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1930 No. 3371 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 165 EDITORIALS: "Destructive and Never Constructive" 168 Spanish Dictatorship 169 Investigate Mr. Garvan ! 169 Rats and Profs 170 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 171 DIVORCE— AND AFTER: I. CHILDREN AND PROPERTY. By Morris Ernst 172 BOULDER DAM DYNAMITE. By Paul Y. Anderson 173 THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CENSOR: II. "OBNOXIOUS BOOKS." By Henry Raymond Mussey 175 IX THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 178 CORRESPOXDEXCE 178 INTERNATIOXAL RELATIONS SECTION: Aristocracy Declines in Hungary 180 MIDWINTER BOOK SECTION ALL TOO HUMANISM. By Henry Hazlitt 181 THE TWENTIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE. By Granville Hiclcs 183 REVIEWS AND POEMS: Lincoln and His Fate. By Allen Tate 185 A Man's Book. By Florence Codman 186 More Farewells to War. By Clifton P. Fadiman 186 To One Under a Mountain Cloud. By Witter Bynner 187 Sanctuary. By Babette Deutsch 187 Salt in the Sauce. By Carl Van Doren 188 Herbert Read, Critic. By C. Hartley Grattan 188 As If a Skeleton Were Singing. By Mark Van Doren 190 Martin Luther. By Karl F. Geiser 191 A Comedy of Errors. By Alexander Goldenweiser 192 The Testament of Beauty. By Eda Lou Walton 193 History and Warning. By Henry G. Alsberg 196 A Modern Don Quixote. By H. Sheehy Skeffington 197 Books in Brief 199 Music: Opera in English? By Hubbard Hutchinson 201 Drama: Retrospect. By Joseph Wood Krutch 202 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 204 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation. New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 34, Clifton Gardens, W. 9, London, England. THE SERIOUS ILLNESS of Chief Justice Taft, which has led him to resign his high office, will be the occasion of universal regret among his countrymen, who in spite of all differences of judgment have yet held him in high honor and esteem. In nominating Charles Evans Hughes as his successor, President Hoover has missed one of his greatest opportunities for public service. The entire career of Mr. Hughes since his first term as governor of New York has been a perpetual disappointment to thought- ful liberals. An able lawyer indeed, he yet has a narrow- ness of understanding, an unteachable stubbornness, and an arid self-righteousness that disqualify him for high judicial service, as his record in the Supreme Court and during subsequent years indicates. When he left the supreme bench to grasp at the bauble of the Presidency, he dragged in the dust the court's proud tradition of aloofness from political ambition. He sat in the Harding Cabinet with his lips sealed during all those years when the Ohio gang and Albert B. Fall were dragging down that Administration to a well- nigh unprecedented level of infamy and disgrace. His con- duct of our foreign affairs was marked by a narrow and uncomprehending insistence at all costs on the most extreme interpretation of American property rights, notably in our oil diplomacy and our relations with Mexico and Russia. His appointment to the Supreme Court at this time when a learned, intelligent, and liberal-minded jurist is so sorely needed is little less than a public disaster. RUMOR AND COUNTER-RUMOR go out from London, where the delegates to the naval conference are now buckling down to work. It seems to be agreed, however, that the chances are excellent at least for postpone- ment until 1936 of battleship replacements provided under the Washington treaty, and the immediate reduction of Brit- ish, American, and Japanese capital ships to numbers which, under that agreement, would not have been reached before 1936. The welcome news also comes that Great Britain proposes to drop from its building program two more cruisers in addition to the Northumberland and the Surrey, making four in all. This is encouraging evidence that the Mac- Donald Government has faith in the outcome of the nego- tiations. Such evidence is perhaps more informing than the jockeying of the delegates for position, for, as John L. Bal- derston points out in a special cable to the World, "when it comes to figures, our delegation, like every other, must take a nationalistic position, and thereby will incur sharp criticism." The demands of the technical experts in the vari- ous delegations should not be allowed to override the judg- ment of the statesmen in the conference, who see that security is not to be attained simply by the process of building more ships or of persuading other nations to build fewer. The task of the conference is at bottom political and not purely naval. FREEDOM FOR THE FILIPINOS has now become the football of purely selfish interests. The American sugar barons and others affected by the competition of the islands are pressing hard for their release from American control in order to put on tariffs against their products. On the other hand the Hawaiian planters are making the most urgent representations that if the Filipinos are to be excluded in the future under our immigration laws Hawaii will be ruined by lack of adequate labor. California has for the moment transferred its dislike of the Japanese to the Fili- pinos, of whom no fewer than 13,000 are now residing in that State and menacing the lives and the happiness of the 4,400,000 white Americans who reside there. Filipino homes have been bombed and riots have occurred ; in addition, Fili- pinos have been barred from all boxing-rings in California and are being ruled out of dance halls to which white women resort. Senator Johnson of that State has, by the way, dis- tinguished himself by refusing to advocate the release of the islands on any other ground than justice to them. Repre- sentatives of three large agricultural organizations have come out for Philippine independence to help the American farmer,

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166 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 and the American Federation of Labor has swung into line. Senator Vandenburg, Republican, of Michigan, has just in- troduced a bill proposing the establishment of a "Common- wealth of the Philippines," with a scheme of progressive autonomy which will result in complete American with- drawal within ten years. This bill was referred to the Senate Committee on Insular Affairs, which is also consider- ing the King bill for immediate independence. It really be- gins to look as if freedom for the islands might be in sight. AS FOR HAITI, the Senate has refused the President his commission to investigate affairs there but has voted him $50,000 for any sort of analysis he chooses to make — at that price — of the island. It is doubtful if Mr. Hoover can get a good commission with all the necessary trimmings for the modest sum he may now spend. But as Senator Blaine of Wisconsin has pointed out more than once, with increasing bitterness each time, the facts with regard to Haiti are already at the President's disposal if he wishes to make use of them. The signs multiply that the Administration is more and more favorable to the with- drawal of our military power from the island as soon as possible. It would undoubtedly be a great step forward if General Russell were recalled. His panic at the time of the last bloodshed when he called for 500 additional marines has served at last to awaken Washington to the fact that he is not the man for the place. But Senator Blaine does little good to his cause by quoting, in his remarks on the Haitian commission, from a speech by the newly appointed Senator Grundy — made before he entered the Senate — in which he disparaged Mr. Hoover's legislative experience. More to the point is Senator Blaine's remark that the only achieve- ment to which the American officials in Haiti can point with pride is the fine system of roads, "built so that Ameri- cans can speed through the country in high-powered cars." There is no doubt that we have been in Haiti too long. A commission could only tell us to get out. ANOTHER POWER GRAB threatens to be consum- mated shortly unless Assistant Commissioner Scatter- good of the Indian Bureau succeeds in his stalwart effort to defeat it. Last August the Federal Power Commission indi- cated its readiness to turn over to the Montana Power Com- pany five sites on the Flathead River, in northwestern Mon- tana, acquired by the Indians by treaty in 1859 and reserved to the tribe when the rest of the reservation was opened to settlement. Later statutes and executive orders guaranteed to the Indians the full amount of rentals from licenses under the Federal Power Act. In 1927 the Indian Bureau or some of its members, under the previous commissioner, instigated an agreement, to which the Federal Power Commission and the Montana Power Company were parties, under which the rentals were to be divided and the Indians allotted a minority share, but this high-handed and illegal transaction was upset by Congress, partly in 1928 and finally in 1929. The Fed- eral Commission is now considering the award to the Mon- tana Power Company of the power rights for an annual rental of about $100,000, a sum which Mr. Scattergood, in an able cross-examination of the power-company representa- tives at recent hearings, showed should be at least twice as great. The spectacle of an official of the Indian Bureau actually trying to obtain for the Indians the rights of which the Bureau sought to deprive them has been so unusual as to raise hopes that Mr. Scattergood, who has no fear of cor- porations before his eyes, may be able to prevent the gross injustice that is apparently planned. THE MOST SHAMELESS piece of repudiation we have seen in a long time was committed the other day by President Green of the American Federation of Labor. In an address at Richmond, on January 26, Mr. Green said : We were not in Marion, North Carolina, when six lives were lost, nor in Gastonia when Communists appeared and an officer of the law was killed. Had the A. F. of L. been operating in those communities, these tragedies would not have occurred. This statement is quoted from the Richmond Times-Dis- patch of January 27, and has been confirmed by responsible persons in Richmond. It is impossible to think that Mr. Green did not believe what he said ; accordingly it can only be that he was grievously misinformed. For the sake of his own reputation and that of the American labor movement, it is a pity that someone did not point out to Mr. Green the following facts with regard to Marion, North Carolina: Workers in Marion started organizing in the spring of 1929, called in an organizer of the United Textile Workers, the A. F. of L. organization in the textile industry, and were granted a charter by the U. T. W. The strike begun on July 11, 1929, was conducted under the supervision of the national office of the U. T. W. Shortly before the settlement of the strike an A. F. of L. organizer, Edward F. McGrady, was in Marion and discussed the terms of settle- ment with the employers and representatives of the governor of the State. The settlement made by Alfred Hoffmann, the U. T. W. representative, was along the lines indicated by McGrady. When this settlement was ignored by the head of the Marion Manufacturing Company, two vice-presidents of the North Carolina State Federation of Labor, also an A. F. of L. organization, helped with further negotiations. The U. T. W. has been taking part in the defense of the strikers under charges in connection with the strike and in the prosecution of deputy sheriffs who shot and killed various strikers. These are not all the facts that Mr. Green would do well to study, but they are enough. The A. F. of L. was at Marion, as it should have been. To deny it is to deny the federation the reason for its existence. A YEAR AGO February 10 John Barkoski, coal miner, died of injuries sustained following his arrest by three coal-and-iron policemen employed by the Pittsburgh Coal Company. When Barkoski was brought to the hospital in which he died, Dr. Herbert M. Fleming examined him. This is his report : He was in a very critical condition, pulseless and un- conscious. His left lung was perforated, several ribs were fractured, and he had a possible skull fracture. He was covered with bruises and bleeding from numerous cuts. He was bleeding at the mouth, his eyes were glassy, there was a depression in his head, and the left side of his chest was crushed in. His left lung had evidently collapsed. He was suffering from extreme shock and was on the verge of death, with heart action failing. There was also an injury to the abdomen, accompanied by paralysis of the intestinal tract.

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 167 A few months later the company "settled" with Mrs. Barkoski for $13,500. Last fall the three policemen were acquitted of second-degree murder in connection with Bar- koski's death at a trial which was described in our issue of October 16. Two of these men, Walter J. Lyster and Harold P. Watts, have now been convicted of involuntary manslaughter, though Watts admitted that he had struck Barkoski "more than twenty times" on the head. The third policeman, Frank Slapikis, was acquitted on the same charge. "Involuntary manslaughter!" One hesitates to think what might, in Pennsylvania, constitute murder in the first degree. THE PRESS LORDS, as they are jovially known in Great Britain, stubbed their toe sharply in putting forward once more the plan for a protective ring fence around the empire with free trade inside. The proponents of similar measures have been beaten so often and so dis- astrously that it takes courage to bring forward the ill-fated proposal again. None the less, the empire must be saved by the method of reserving the empire market for the British manufacturer, so Beaverbrook, to the accompaniment of ap- plause from Rothermere, once more trotted out the old scheme in the form of a motion that the "opinion of the House of Commons is that the empire should be developed as a single economic unit with internal free trade as the ideal, and that His Majesty's Government be urged to open negotiations with other governments of the empire with a view to the formulation of a policy designed to secure that the purchasing power of the empire shall be directed pri- marily to the full employment of the inhabitants of the empire." In the debate in the Commons the proposal got support of a kind from half a dozen Conservative back- benchers, but Stanley Baldwin was absent and Winston Churchill, the only important Conservative leader present, said not a word. In the debate Lloyd George declared that there were only two objections to the scheme. The domin- ions will have nothing to do with it because they want to protect their own manufacturers against the mother country, and England will not touch it because it involves putting a tax on food and materials coming from outside the empire, and she cannot afford that luxury. Mr. Snowden, for the Government, rejected the whole plan. The debate was so annihilating that no one even ventured to call for a vote. ON JANUARY 30 (two weeks too late) Arthur L. Endicott, Controller of Harvard University, gave out a press statement explaining the discharge of the cleaning women from Widener Library described by Gardner Jack- son in our issue of January 29. It had nothing to do with wages, but was in pursuance of a policy adopted last April of replacing women by men. At that time the Minimum Wage Commission was notified of the proposed change. Just why it was thought necessary to notify the commission, unless that body had been objecting to the employment of women at less than the prescribed minimum, Mr. Endicott does not explain. He does specifically state that the dis- charge of some of the women was hastened by the receipt on December 18 of a peremptory notice from the commis- sion threatening to publish the name of the university as a non-complying employer if on December 26 any of the women were still being employed at less than the prescribed minimum of thirty-seven cents an hour. Nor does Mr. Endicott deny that up to December 18 last the university had been paying its cleaning women less than the thirty- seven-cent rate fixed as the minimum by commission decree as far back as February 1, 1921. While Mr. Endicott's statement, then, perhaps rubs off some of the sharp corners, it does not, so far as we can see, put the university's employ- ment policy or its legal position in any more favorable light. What it does do is to indicate that the controller's office is run with more brains and finesse than were displayed in the blundering statement of facts with which President Lowell spilled the beans in his letter of December 30. GREAT EVENTS MAY FOLLOW upon a little- noticed decision of Judge Norman L. Jones of Illinois refusing to dissolve a court order under which the officials of the Illinois district of the United Mine Workers' Union were protected from summary discharge by the International President, John L. Lewis. Into the details of the bitter quarrel between President Lewis and the State organization we have not space to go. It is enough to say that the trouble arose out of Mr. Lewis's inability to control the Illinois miners' organization as he wished and from his settled policy of crushing all potential rivals in his union by fair means or foul. The controversy has brought to light the tragic break- down, under President Lewis's leadership, of a once mighty union. Oscar Ameringer's vigorous pen in the Illinois Miner has exposed a shocking debacle. A union that in 1921 had 515,243 members had in 1928 only 269,425. It still holds the anthracite field in Pennsylvania, but its strength is almost completely broken in all the bituminous fields except Illinois. If the powerful Illinois organization wins its fight it is probable that Lewis will have to go or that the union will be split. If the Illinois miners will now adopt progres- sive policies there is a very good chance that first in the United Mine Workers' Union and afterward in the whole A. F. of L. they may be the successful pioneers for a new and more adequate labor program. A SAD SPECTACLE was enacted the other day at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. The date was Febru- ary 2; the principal actors were one ground-hog in a state of captivity, one Head Keeper, and six assorted boy scouts, newspaper photographers, and mildly interested bystanders. The performance, of course, was to illustrate the old legend that on February 2 if the ground-hog, emerging from his hole, sees his own shadow, he at once digs himself under again and the inhabitants of this hemisphere are plagued with six weeks more of winter. But the New York ground- hog was so completely enervated by the refinements of cap- tivity as to be incapable of digging his own hole. The Head Keeper performed this office for him. Then, with cameras trained on him, he (the ground-hog) was released in the vicinity of the artificial hole. He observed his shadow well enough, but the hole he would have none of. When he was forcibly thrust into it he emerged several fractions of a sec- ond ahead of the fastest-clicking camera shutter on record. Thus the advent of spring remained unannounced and the photographers went home without a picture. To our mind the ground-hog was the only member of the party who acted like a sensible human being. We commend the whole matter to the attention of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

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168 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 "Destructive and Never Constructive" THIS is the reason just given by a reader for failing to renew his subscription to The Nation. It is a criti- cism familiar enough to every editor who ventures to exercise his critical faculty, and it is usually welcome as proof that the editor's criticisms are making themselves felt suffi- ciently to disturb the equanimity of some persons. Indeed, the phrase has become a shallow slogan, a canting bit of superficial thinking, an easy bromidic formula for those who neither ponder deeply nor rise above the banalities. It has never been long absent from our mail despite the most ardent championship of numerous reforms, of many new points of view, of much worth-while legislation, of a whole group of policies many of which, such as woman suffrage, have long ago become the law of the land. In this last case we wel- come the recurrence of the charge because it gives us the opportunity, not of defending ourselves, nor of pointing out that to be constructive one must, like the builder who replaces one structure with another, first tear down the old one, but of restating our position with a special view to the present political situation and the coming Congressional elections. We pointed out last week the complete dominance of economics in the activities of Congress, and the prospect that this tendency will not decrease but increase; that more and more the public and its representatives must deal with ques- tions of business and the control thereof by the government. The greater the growth of our colossal capitalistic structure, the greater the need of protecting the people and their birth- right from the aggressions of Big Business, the greater will become the preponderance of purely business issues in our legislation and the necessity of pressing for economic reforms. Among these we list first a radical and far-reaching lowering of the tariff and the ending of the tariff graft as the most constructive method of aiding the farmers and the manu- facturers, not to mention the creditor nations which must repay us the huge sums they owe for loans and, in the case of Germany, reparations. Nothing, we believe, would do more to aid the country to dispose of that surplus production which begins to threaten the progress of industry and agri- culture because it can not be marketed abroad at adequate prices. Closely coupled with this is the question of the un- employed, now numbering, according to the American Fed- eration of Labor, not fewer than 3,000,000 souls. In 1921 President Harding's Conference on Unemployment brought in a most admirable analysis of the subject. Nothing was done about it. Once more we urge the necessity of a com- prehensive unemployment program, embodying the findings of the past ten years, to meet this growing menace. Next in importance comes inevitably the question of power. Our attitude on this needs no restatement, but every hour renders more vital the saving of what is left of the country's resources. It is almost too late ; but he who would do constructive service can ask for no more useful field for patriotic activity — that is, if he favors, as we do, public con- trol of the generation, transmission, and distribution of power. Each day brings proof that this is the greatest pending issue of the winter in Washington. It jumps out of every corner; it lurks behind several of the investigations, and it has been the source of the most dangerous propaganda of recent years. The rise of the power industries makes more parlous the plight of the coal mines. Hence we renew our suggestion that steps be taken, as in England, to reorganize the whole industry, to cut out the colossal waste, the foolish competition, the uneconomic delivery of coal to distant points instead of to nearby markets. As for our railways, for years past we have advocated government ownership and, if neces- sary, operation of railoads and pipe lines. The recent con- solidation proposals have merely strengthened us in our con- { viction that no half-way measures will suffice ; we are I certain that if there were no anti-trust laws and no Inter- > state Commerce Commission the railroads themselves would before this have been in the hands of one gigantic holding ' company, as the steel companies would be in another. We need not rehearse here the many measures for the benefit of the workers in industry which we have put for- | ward. We agree that labor should be protected by social insurance from the hazards of accident, ill-health, unemploy- ment, and old age, and be safeguarded in its right to collec- tive bargaining; we are for militant, honest, and far-sighted leadership of the workers, in contrast with much of their present-day organization, and we favor their use of the politi- ' cal machinery to advance themselves. The Nation was founded in 1865 primarily to champion the rights of the then lately freed men and women of color, and has never ceased to do so in the field of either economics or politics. It I is opposed to caste of any kind. It continues to seek equal rights for women, to uphold their right to their children and to economic and social independence. Finally, The Nation has demanded, as a measure of the highest value look- ing to the safety of America and the peace of the world, the ! immediate demilitarization of the United States. Here a j destructive measure is in the highest degree constructive, if i only because it would muster out those military and naval minds which menace personal liberty and freedom of thought, | which have kept the country in a state of alarm as to war , from the day when we acquired a great navy and enor- I mously increased our army. We are, like all humane and thoughtful persons, for the substitution of conciliation, arbi- ' tration, and court processes for the utter folly, futility, and j wickedness of war. Why go on ? Today we merely wish to urge again that j the American people cease from being bamboozled any longer by the party Dromios of our politicial life. No real progress I can come out of either of them ; neither has a program in keeping with the changing conditions in our capitalistic life ; both are alike in their present policies, the difference being, as we have said so often, merely one of degree. We trust that under the leadership of the League for Independent Political Action and similar bodies there will be a determined effort to put some true Progressives into the field next fall. There is Senator Norris seeking reelection in Nebraska; for him there should be a nation-wide rally, for his disappearance from the Senate would be a national calamity. But above all there are standards to be raised to which all men may repair.

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 169 Spanish Dictatorship T HE resignation of Primo de Rivera, dictator of Spain, and the installation of the Berenguer cabinet pledged to a return to constitutional government, very naturally encourage liberal hopes both in Europe and in America. But it would be a mistake to argue from this event that the era of dictatorship in Europe is passing, or that democracy is soon to come again into repute there. Most particularly it would be a mistake to found upon the de Rivera resignation any hope of the speedy dissolution of the Mussolini regime in Italy. What has happened is merely this: General Primo de Rivera, who came into power as a result of a deal with other officers of the Spanish army, has not been clever enough, despite his control of government patronage, to keep his fellow-generals loyal. They have accordingly designated another general, as a result of another deal, and persuaded King Alfonso to accept him as premier. The new premier, seeking popular slogans as politicians do, talks about con- stitutionalism where his predecessor talked about "efficiency" and "the emergency." Doubtless the change of regime means a relaxation of censorship over press and public assemblage. Doubtless some i thousands of Spaniards engaged in politics will breathe more freely from now on. But essentially what has happened is that one military man has succeeded another. If any revolu- tion has taken place in Spanish politics, it has been a revolu- tion in the barracks, not in the plaza. The public demon- strations of university students and republican sympathizers appear to have been little more than casual parades easily broken up by the police. Labor has nowhere been in evi- dence during the crisis. Barrack revolutions have always been common in Europe, especially since the war. In Spain, as in Poland, Bulgaria, and — until lately — Greece, the army rules the government. It rules for the simple reason that the gov- ernment is perpetually bankrupt, cannot pay its army, and therefore cannot control it. The army — which, politically speaking, means the higher officers — lives off occupied terri- tory through multitudinous forms of graft and exactions. Accordingly the army in Spain is an autonomous political force — the only one which can hold up its head and dictate to the King in a crisis. Now the reason why, in these backward European countries, the civil authorities cannot control the military is that they cannot control their own revenue. Generally taking big bribes themselves, they must permit their petty servants to take petty bribes. In a country where you must tip the postman in order to secure delivery of a registered letter, where your tax assessment depends on 1 your family relationship with the assessor, there can be no ' such thing as a civil service in the sense in which the term is , understood, for example, in Germany. The personal dictatorships which have been plaguing the backward nations of Europe are but an expression of the lack of any real civil authority in those nations, expressed through a competent and self-respecting civil service. And nowhere has civil authority been more corrupt and de- moralized than in Spain. There a physically vigorous and morally self-respecting people has inherited the evil usages of centuries of autocracy, and has accepted them as the natural order of things. Thus, with no lack of material wealth or moral stamina, the Spanish people has permitted itself, for more than a century, to be ruled by the military juntas. In one sense, liberals are inclined to take these Euro- pean dictatorships too seriously. They assume that a dicta- torship is a vicious extraneous tyranny, arbitrarily suppress- ing the wholesome established customs of a nation. But the fact is that where such barrack dictatorships are possible it is because tyranny — whether that of the local postman or the local tax assessor or the provincial governor — is an accepted part of political life. The fundamental tyranny is that of corrupt civil government. The dictatorship is only the big noise. But in another sense, liberals do not take these dictator- ships seriously enough. They assume that when one dicta- tor, like the late unlamented Primo, has "abdicated," the nation over which he ruled has suddenly become liberated. The present rejoicings over the departure of de Rivera tend to take for granted that all Spain's ills have been due to him alone. But in fact he did not cause them; he only profited by them. He goes, but they remain. The big man will continue to collect the money. The little man will continue to pay it. And when the members of the officers' club begin again to quarrel over the allotment of graft, the common soldiers of one regiment will again be sent against the machine-guns of another regiment as they have been sent three times in the past seven years. Investigate Mr. Garvan! FRANCIS P. GARVAN, president of the Chemical Foundation, and before that Alien Property Custo- dian in the good old days of A. Mitchell Palmer and the Harding gang, appears to have worked himself into a great state of mind over a German menace as terrible in its way as was the other German horror that passed into history a decade and more ago. His latest exhibition of nerves takes the form of a violent attack, first in a deposition solemnly laid before the United States District Court at Boston, then in a heated interview for the special benefit of the press and the public, and finally in a formal complaint to the Bureau of Securities of the New York Attorney General's office, upon a number of American citizens, among them the editor of The Nation, whom he accuses either of carrying on German propaganda in this country or of aiding an alleged plot of the German dye interests to throttle the American dye industry and bind American industrial chem- istry hand and foot to the conquering chariot of the Hun. This is pretty fearsome, but Mr. Garvan is out to save the nation from disaster, and he lays about him with no regard for whom he hits. The immediate occasion of his outburst was the action of Attorney General Mitchell, highly questionable, as it seems to us, in ordering a discon- tinuance of the suit of the United States against A. Mitchell Palmer and others for alleged fraud in misrepresenting the assets of the Bosch Magneto Company to the amount of rather more than half their value, thereby depriving the United States of some five and one-half million dollars which

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170 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 it should have had when it plundered the German-owned corporation of its property by way of making the world safer for democracy. In directing a dismissal of the suit, which was begun in 1926, Mr. Mitchell explained that in view of the act for the settlement of war claims and the action taken thereunder the financial interest of the United States in the property now amounted to not more than $44,000, and that since the prosecution of the case had been very ex- pensive it seemed better to drop it. Moreover, three of the four special assistants employed by the government were agreed that there was no evidence to sustain the charge of collusion and fraudulent representation. This let out Mr. Garvan, as the Supreme Court let him out when it declined to disturb the transaction by which the valuable patents of the German corporation were turned over to Mr. Garvan's Chemical Foundation for a song. Mr. Garvan, however, is not satisfied. He wants the scalps of Senator Moses of New Hampshire, Otto Kahn, Paul War- burg, and others for their complicity in some kind of col- lusive scheme to "throttle the American dye and chemical industries through the establishment of a tariff based on foreign valuation of the necessary chemicals rather than the American valuation." He sees Senator Moses picking Mr. Kahn as a campaign treasurer because Mr. Kahn "would furnish the money for the election of Senators who would vote upon the question of valuation," presumably in the German interest. "German propaganda," he shrieks, "is again eating into the vital problem of the life or death of the second great industry in the country." Undeterred by the flat denials or dignified silence of the men whom he accuses, he has gone on to bespeak the aid of the New York Bureau of Securities in an investigation of a recent flotation of $30,- 000,000 of debentures of the American Interessen Gemein- schaft Chemical Corporation by the National City Company, in support, of course, of the same abominable Germaniza- tion of his pet industries — an invitation which was promptly declined on the ground that no evidence of fraud or mis- representation in the issuance of the debentures appeared. We are not disposed to dismiss Mr. Garvan's diatribes as only another instance of hang-over from war hysteria. We are all for a rigorous investigation of the whole business, but not, we suspect, exactly of the kind that Mr. Garvan desires. The investigation that we want to see is one directed straight at Mr. Garvan and his Chemical Foundation. It is time that the Senate, now that the integrity of one of its most prominent members has been assailed, should investi- gate down to the ground the whole matter of the German patents and the use that has been made of them. The Chemical Foundation paid $250,000 for some 4,500 patents widely believed to have been worth many times that sum. It has given away since its organization millions of dollars. How much were the patents worth when the foundation got them at about fifty dollars apiece? How much does it re- ceive from its licenses, what are its assets and liabilities, how much of the stock do Mr. Garvan and his family own, and to what extent are they interested as stockholders in other corporations? In view of the part that the government took in starting this rolling ball of wealth, the government is entitled to know what has been done with it and whether or not the financial record is clear. The Nation calls for an immediate investigation by the Senate of Mr. Garvan and his patriotic enterprises. Rats and Profs THE "feed-the-prof" movement, which gained consid- erable impetus in the years just following the war, has lately enrolled a recruit in the person of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the hustling young president of Chicago University. After declaring flatly in his inaugural that we cannot now get the kind of men we want to go into educa- tion, President Hutchins went on to say: "The only method by which we shall approach our goal is by paying salaries that will enable the universities to compete with the business world for the best men." In his address at the trustees' dinner this upstanding young captain of education gave greater definiteness to his thought by commending to the imagination of his hearers "the picture of a faculty of one hundred men and women, all getting, and deserving, $50,- 000 a year." We have looked on this picture, as requested, and it gives us furiously to think — which, it must be con- fessed, the addresses of university presidents all too rarely do. Years ago a great scientist was telling us about his studies of the intelligence of rats. His experiments had not proceeded very far at the time, but he had reached one tentative conclusion, namely, that his rats learned faster if he kept them a little hungry. We certainly believe that pro- fessors ought to be able to live in reasonable material comfort. Certainly they ought not to be obliged to spend their time doing hack work in order to keep the wolf from the door. The suggestion of President Hutchins, however, even though we do not take his illustrative figures too seriously, seems to us to raise a distinctly different issue. Frankly and seriously, we are confident that one cannot raise the real quality of the teaching and investigating pro- fession by the device of putting the professor on the same level of economic privilege with the bank president and the successful insurance salesman. Lest we be misunderstood, we hasten to add that we are heartily in favor of adequate pay for college and university teachers and that we do not con- sider existing salary schedules in general adequate. As far as we can learn, the pay of professors never was satisfac- tory, and — again at peril of being misunderstood — we hope it never will be. Fifty-thousand-dollar salaries, or even much lower salaries, are possible for only a few people; there is not wealth enough produced to provide them for more. Boost the professors as a group into the high-salaried class, which would seem to be the idea of President Hutchins and those who think with him, and you do two bad things. First, you multiply further, as the university business schools are already doing, the number of hustling business men in our faculties. Second, and vastly more important, you create a strongly intrenched university vested interest in the status quo. That is bad enough at best ; rich professors are all too frequently social bourbons. Make all professors rich, and as professors are human beings, you almost inevitably set the universities as a whole to defending things as they are, in- stead of formulating the intelligent criticism that is an essen- tial part of the process of orderly social change — a process never more essential than today. By all means pay the pro- fessors a decent living wage ; no man "deserves" more. But as you value their indispensable services, do not give them economic privilege, or they will turn again and rend you.

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 171 It Seems to Heywood Broun PRACTICALLY all the parsons are worried about the American home. It seems that it is being destroyed. Of course it was saved by prohibition, but other monsters have arisen to threaten its existence. Wrenched aut of the grasp of the saloon, it is now endangered, I hear, by the radio, canned vegetables, apartment houses, and mod- :rn dancing. If I were a home I rather think I should resent :he over-eagerness of my champions. They act as if the thing :hey undertake to preserve were so weak and pitiful that it Trust go down before the gust of any new enthusiasm. After ill, the home is much older than these dragons which are said :o be capable of devouring it. I never could understand why dancing should be listed imong the dangers. The so-called modern steps are twenty ,'ears old by now and life has gone on much the same. When irst the grizzly-bear and the bunny-hug were sprung upon in affrighted world I was a youth just turning from my teens. My parents, aunts, and uncles — in fact everybody's tunts and uncles — said that this was the end. Rome fell, I ,vas informed, to precisely such barbaric strains. If young nen and young women could get upon a public dance floor ind lope about in close embrace, what became of marriage, lonor, and long engagements? My own cherubic countenance was closely scanned for .tray vine leaves. Unfortunately none was found. I say un- ortunately, for in spite of earnest efforts it was impossible for ne to be ruined by the new dance steps. I could not even earn them. Just what relation they bear to the accepted :apers of the day I am not sufficiently expert to say. How- :ver, it seems that neither the waltz nor the polka has come )ack entirely. At least that is my impression based upon a ew casual visits to cabarets. And it does not seem to me hat moral fiber has altered much within the generation. Jke the dance steps it has become fairly stabilized. I can't pretend that my failure to become a gilded, >rancing butterfly should be set down to my credit as a irtue. I was saved from this fate worse than death through ack of character. As a boy I painstakingly learned the two- tep. For this I deserve no praise. It was not a very good wo-step and it was also compulsory. Only a vigorous appli- ation of parental influence carried me through. Possibly 'through" is not a fitting word to be applied to one who .lways found it necessary to say to his partner, ''Watch out iow, I think I'm going to reverse." After breaking away rom home ties I began to backslide. Those were the nascent lays of new dancing and the steps changed almost daily. I acked the hardihood to keep pace. Cravenly I quit and lumped into a job. Learning to dance seems to me much like learning how jo run an automobile. "Think of the fun you'd have if you ould drive your own car, provided you had a car," say my notoring friends. But my mind dwells instead upon the gony which must be experienced by all who seize the wheel or the first time. A preliminary experimental bout with sew York traffic would take fifteen years off my life. That K'ould leave such a brief remainder that it is hardly worth rhile speculating upon the joys which might be mine once I became an expert chauffeur. And something of this fearful apprenticeship must enter into the life of even the most pro- ficient dancer. As he whirls madly and gloriously across the brilliant ballroom his triumph must be modified by the still present memory of the day when he had to say : "Will you tango with me and please excuse the fact that this is the first time I ever tried it?" Nor did he succeed, then, in building up any great self-assurance by adding quickly: "Of course I've studied the steps at home and taken sixteen lessons through the mail." Rarely does one see a dancer who has reached complete and easy joy in his pastime. However carefree the feet may be, something of the old strained look around the eyes per- sists. Every close observer must have noted the set expres- sion upon the faces of all participants. There is hardly one who might not serve as a model for General Grant exclaim- ing: "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." No form of national activity is half so conscientious as dancing. Up-to-date physicians, I understand, prescribe it as a tonic and a penance for patients growing slack in their attitude toward life. At a cabaret recently a man pointed out a dancer in the middle of the floor and said : "That woman in the bright red dress with the sea-green bows is sixty-six years old." I was properly impressed and he con- tinued his narrative. "Her story is very interesting," he told me. "Two years ago she went to a neurologist because of a general physical and nervous breakdown. The physician said to her, 'Madam, your trouble is not so much that you are growing old as that you are ready to admit it. You must fight against it. Think of Texas Guinan. Think of Fanny Ward. You must hold on to youth as if it were a horizontal bar and chin yourself upon it.' " I looked at the woman more closely and observed that she was obeying the doctor's orders literally. Her fight was a gallant one. Dancing had served to keep down her weight and improve her blood pressure. But there was not the slightest suggestion that she was enjoying herself. Quite obviously it would have pleased her very much to let go of the horizontal bar, thumb her nose at the jazz band, and behave in every respect as an ancient and dignified gentle- woman should behave. Character had her stymied off from comfort. Having bought advice she was intent upon using it. And as I looked over the entire assemblage I could see no one who seemed to be dancing for the fun of it. A few took a pardonable pride in the perfection of their fancy steps, but that emotion was not quite akin to joy. They were dancing for exercise, or for prestige, or to fulfil social obligations. All this is admirable in its way but I have not sufficient faith in the persistence of human gallantry to believe that it can last forever. The home will get every last one of the dancers yet because it is so much easier to loaf in an arm- chair than to keep up the good fight against indolence, age, and the selfishness of comfort. Heywood Broun

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172 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 Divorce — and After I. Children and Property By MORRIS ERNST AT least one out of every eight married or formerly married adults in the United States is living sepa- rate from a spouse. Statistical information on this matter is entirely inadequate. It is highly probable, however, that the federal census now being taken will record more than four million divorced adults. The number of persons living separate by agreement without divorce is nowhere recorded, but may well exceed four million. Legal separa- tions by annulment and separations indicated by prosecution for desertion total tens of thousands. The courts separate by divorce or other proceedings more than 500,000 persons a year. The legal machinery of divorce and separation oper- ates, and has been operating for years, in every State except South Carolina. Yet we have learned practically nothing about the situation created by divorce. The adjustment of the custody of children, payment or non-payment of alimony — of these and many other problems that confront each appli- cant for divorce or separation we know little or nothing. Much has been written about the causes of divorce, but little attention has been paid to divorce in action. In the United States our hypocrisy has delayed honest consideration of the problem. Our older attitude toward divorce is indi- cated in the caption of Article I, Section 9, of the New York State Constitution, which runs in part as follows : Divorce, Lotteries, Pool Selling, and Gambling, Laws to Prevent. This attitude has made its impress on our entire treatment of the problem of marital collapse and prevented us from making any real attempt to find the best methods of procuring emo- tional adjustment for the millions of persons en route from one adventure to another in the universal search for a monogamous life — for, say what we will about the short- comings of monogamy, practically every person, and particu- larly the one involved in divorce proceedings, yearns for one mate to cleave to for ever and a day. In our great national domestic turnover the State-rights dogma has resulted in one real benefit — the establishment of forty-seven different experiment stations as to grounds for divorce. Yet in not one State have we collated data which might serve as a basis for changes in the laws or advice as to methods of later adjustment. Society has rejected the courts in this sphere of life as in others. Most couples prefer to work out their own private arrangements rather than submit the problem to the jurist, who, because he sits at the review- ing stand, should really be better informed than others in the community. We need consideration of the detailed diffi- culties growing out of separations. Too easily do men and women approach divorce without contemplation of their new relations to property and children. After the couple have permitted themselves to become emotionally committed to the idea of divorce, then for the first time usually is there calm consideration of the meaning of division of furniture, separa- tion from children, and payment of alimony. * This is the first of a series of articles, week. — Editor The Nation. The second will appear next How are these distressed adults, intellectually cloudy in this period of emotional strain, to work out the solution for the children? They are likely to believe honestly that the welfare of the children is the most important considera- tion. But the difficulties of dividing offspring and wealth cannot be disposed of by Solomon's gesture at bisection. Moreover, how is the news to be broken to the children? Shall there be a family conference or should each parent buttonhole each child separately, or should the teacher or doctor do the explaining? Let us examine a hypothetical couple bent on divorce. John and Mary have been married for some years. They have two children, and they have some money saved; both may have potential earning power. The separation may be accompanied by an emotional disturbance involving another man or woman. At any rate, the day comes for working out the details of the new lives. All their friends "and their sisters and their cousins and their aunts" have proffered suggestions, each with that great inward joy which arises from a feeling of emotional superiority. John and Mary, exhausted, go to lawyer, doctor, or priest in search of a working formula. Shall Mary have custody of the children? Shall they be divided by sexes? John is likely to proclaim that he cannot live without his male heir, but aren't most men bored even with their own children if they have to spend more than an hour a day with them ? Then the suggestion is made that the mother shall bring up the children, with provision for the father's right to visit them. Is this to be determined upon respective sexual or other alleged tokens of guilt? What a melee of complications this right of visitation cre- ates! Visit where? Visit when? At the mother's home? What if she remarries? Many a father will feel that he cannot enter the home where the former wife is living with another man. And if the children are allowed to visit John, Mary agrees — unless John is to marry that particular fiend- ish woman who has wrecked her home. Shall the children be shifted between the two new homes? If so, shall it be by years, by seasons, by school periods? If the children live with the mother, does the father have prior rights as to vacation periods? How these adults can battle to be with the children for Christmas Eve! What a mad race to buy the affections of the children by all sorts of bribery! Will the adults learn that the one sure way for either of them to lose the affections of their offspring is to "knock" the other spouse? Who shall select the schools? Would it be better to send the children to boarding-school than have them run the risk of feeling the loss of security so often experienced by a child of separated parents? The mother goes Freudian and the father reverts to ancestral homeopathy. Who shall have the power to call in the doctor? All these aspects of the agreement which sooner or later must be recorded in legal form, complicated though they be, are relatively simple until the distressed couple copes with

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 173 the problem complicated by the remarriage of either party. Then jealousy and pride strut into the conference. And what of alimony or the children's support? What share of the man's wealth should be set up in trust as a guaranty for the children's upbringing and education? Must Mary agree to make a new will? What if some of the parents-in-law have large wealth and are suffering from old age? Surely Mary and John cannot avoid contemplating the possibilities of outside revenues and the diminution of alimony. Many couples can approach money problems with civilized attitudes. Sometimes they are civilized by the influence of consciousness of guilt. If the man has been the cause of the split, how generous he becomes in the matter of alimony! But this mood wears off as negotiations proceed. Should the support continue after the wife remarries? The question is perplexing. John wants Mary to marry — it will make him feel at ease when he goes off with Heloise. Still, it does arouse bitterness to think of another man living off his money. At times the cash adjustments are simplified by absence of progeny, but then other factors intervene with greater promi- nence. What if Mary gave up her job when she married John ? Does the adventure with him, or the length of it, create intangible obligations? Concerning this situation, which is fairly typical, we have no usable information. Twenty-two thousand persons were legally divorced in 1870; 110,000 in 1900, nearly a quarter of a million in 1916, and approximately half a million in 1929. Were the second marriages of these groups more successful than the maiden adventures? What testimony can the children of divorcees present? Do our doctors, lawyers, clergymen know anything at all about the adjustments to be made by separated spouses? How do Catholics — permitting separation though banning divorce — work out the problems discussed in this article? We know that Texas has 17,000 divorces to 85,000 marriages; Ohio and California have about 15,000 divorces to 60,000 marriages, while good old licentious New York has 5,000 divorces to 118,000 mar- riages; if you add all of Nevada's annual crop of 3,000 divorces to the New York figures, it still leaves New York more than three times as monogamous as Texas. What does this mean, and of what use is such information when what we really want to know is how much, if at all, divorce helps toward the making of better marital adjustment? A national stock-taking would require, among other things, checking up the arrangements made by divorced or separated couples, an analysis of the results on the adults and the children, and the correlation, if possible, of these re- sults with the grounds for divorce. At present each person unhappily mated must learn everything for himself as if he were the first to break away from the family hearth. Some- how, for the benefit of those who have become involved and will continue to become involved in marital difficulties, we must find a way of collecting and organizing for use the enor- mous accumulating body of experience. Boulder Dam Dynamite By PAUL Y. ANDERSON Washington, February 1 LET us suppose that a number of States and munici- palities seeking cheap electric power have succeeded, over the prolonged and bitter opposition of certain private power interests, in inducing the government to build a large hydro-electric plant with public funds; let us suppose that the private power interests, having lost the fight, have the incredible nerve to ask that the power be given to them instead of to the States and municipalities which made it possible — is it reasonable to suppose that any admin- istration would even momentarily consider granting such a request? Obviously it is not. Yet that is exactly the situa- tion with regard to Boulder Dam as this is written. It is monstrous, shocking, incredible — and true. The facts about that long struggle are well known. Arrayed on one side were the States and cities which wanted Boulder Dam built in order that they might have flood protection and cheap power. Arrayed on the other side were the Southern California Edison and associated companies which opposed the project because it would either deprive them of business or compel them to reduce rates, or both. Notwithstanding the strenuous and sometimes unscrupulous tactics employed by the power companies, the States and municipalities won. Congress not only voted to build the dam, but it expressly directed the Secretary of the Interior, in disposing of the power, to give preference to the States, municipalities, and other political subdivisions. These latter very promptly ap- plied for every kilowatt of power that could be generated at the dam. Then, to the undisguised amazement of those States and cities — and of Congress — Secretary Wilbur an- nounced a tentative plan under which one-fourth of the power, and two-fifths of the control of the plant, would be allotted to the Southern California Edison and other com- panies associated with it in the anti-Boulder Dam campaign. The scheme violated the spirit of the law and divided con- trol between hostile elements. ***** ON its face the plan seemed indefensible on any rational or respectable ground, and no attempt was made to conceal the disappointment of the States and municipalities, or the resentment in Congress. But something more ominous was in store. Within the past few days Secretary Wilbur has propounded to Solicitor Finney of his department a series of questions, the purport of which was this: Would I be legally warranted in ignoring the preference rights of the States and cities and giving the power to "other appli- cants," if I decided that the "other applicants" offered better financial security and greater contractual responsi- bility? It seems impossible to mistake the purpose which inspired the questions. And nobody familiar with Solicitor Finney's record could doubt what his answer would be. Solicitor Finney, who advises Secretaries of the Interior as to their legal authority for doing the things they wish to do, furnished the celebrated opinion that the then Secretary, Albert B. Fall, was legally authorized to lease the Teapot Dome and Elk Hills naval oil reserves — which the Supreme

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174 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 Court, in an even more celebrated opinion, rather drastically overruled. He did not fail Secretary Wilbur any more than he had failed Secretary Fall. After sweating man- fully for several days and nights he produced a document which declared that "the public interest" was the Secretary's paramount concern, and that the paramount element in "the public interest" was financial security and contractual responsibility on the part of the recipients of the power. The preference rights guaranteed the States and municipali- ties by Congress, he stated, would be amply conserved by providing that they could make subsequent applications for power to the parties receiving it from the Secretary. In other words, the will of Congress would be fulfilled if Secretary Wilbur awarded all the power to the Southern California Edison and its associates, on condition that the States and cities might afterward try to get some of it away from them! One could almost hear the companies adding under their breath: "Try and get it!" ***** UNLESS this writer is mistaken, the Administration in this instance is monkeying with the largest stick of dynamite it has handled thus far. Congress does not relish having its acts flouted by any Cabinet member, and Cali- fornia is reported to be in a fair frenzy over the prospect of being tricked again by the power interests. Hiram John- son's present temper on the course of events can only be descrbed as homicidal, and as a political "killer" Hiram is almost without a peer. Of course Mr. Hoover knows all about these maneuvers. A good many discerning people knew, or felt they knew, what the most important issue was in the last Presidential election. Events are vindicating their judgment. The issue was whether the natural power re- sources of the government would be turned over to private exploitation. But wouldn't it be an interesting situation if President Hoover were compelled to go before the Republi- can National Convention in 1932 without the votes of the California delegation? ***** IT grieves me profoundly to relate that the Young plan for a merger of radio, cable, and telegraph communica- tions is quite dead. Conceived — as Owen D. Young him- self has confessed — in patriotism, and born — as the world knows — to the plaudits of the press, it has perished at the hands of a lamentably unimaginative Senate committee, ably assisted by a number of witnesses who knew exactly what Mr. Young's Radio Corporation had done to them, and why. The official obsequies may occur any day. Nota- ble among those who had a recent part in the frustration of this magnificent conception was Walter S. Gifford, presi- dent of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Dignified, as befits the head of the world's largest corpora- tion, and suave beyond description, Mr. Gifford neatly pointed out that a monopoly in international communications would require the acquisition of his own company, which is preparing to lay a huge talking cable from Newfoundland to Ireland. As for the threat of British competition, which so agitated Mr. Young, Mr. Gifford did not rudely char- acterize it as a "bogy" ; he merely indulged in a slight smile and said : "I am not impressed by it." Oddly enough, how- ever, the most grievous thrust was delivered not by the four- billion-dollar Mr. Gifford, but by the twenty-nine-year-old Detroit policeman who told in simple language what hap- pened to Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and other cities when they sought to instal police radio systems for use in capturing criminals. Mr. Young's messianic Radio Cor- poration promptly confronted them with two alternatives: the first, that of being sued for patent infringement if they built their own equipment; the second, that of purchasing the equipment from the Radio Corporation at prices ranging from two to four times what it would cost to build it. The city of Detroit, ignoring all threats, proceeded to build its own system, whereupon the Radio Corporation refused to sell it the transmitting tubes which are vital to its operation, and of which the R. C. A. has a monopoly. The Detroit police department is compelled to get along with tubes bootlegged to it by local broadcasting stations! Neverthe- less, the results have been astounding. The witness, Lieu- tenant Kenneth R. Cox, and Police Commissioner Rutledge told of an immediate reduction of 54 per cent in the number of burglaries, and an increase of 45 per cent in the number of captures and convictions. Murderers were surprised at the scene of their crimes. Bank bandits were surrounded and killed or captured before they could leave the banks they were robbing. Burglars were caught in the act. The police radio system, which Cox perfected while serving as a patrol- man in the daytime and amusing himself with radio experi- ments at night, was pronounced by Commissioner Rutledge to be "the most effective aid devised for the apprehension of criminals during this century." It largely nullifies the advantages of quick getaway afforded by the automobile. WAS the attitude of the Radio Corporation affected by these salutary results? It was not. When Cox was summoned to crime-ridden Chicago to instal a similar sys- tem, that unhappy city was immediately faced with the R. C. A. ultimatum: "Buy from us, or be sued." God knows Chicago needed anything that would reduce crime, and the world knows it couldn't afford to be sued. "The result," Lieutenant Cox testified, "is that Chicago is paying $117,000 for equipment, when it could have built a far superior system for $48,000." "And this," exclaimed Sena- tor Wheeler, "is the corporation that was organized for patriotic reasons!" All of which, obviously, prompts the old question: When does the Department of Justice intend to act? ***** THE Senate Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to American Consumers, sometimes known as the Pro- gressive-Democratic coalition, is wobbling badly these days. The strain of defeating the sugar steal apparently was too much for it, and during the ensuing relapse it failed to repel one of the most daring and mysterious forays yet carried out — that of the rayon interests. Because of the desertion of fifteen Democrats, the duty on rayon was increased to forty- five cents a pound, notwithstanding the demonstrated fact that the rayon industry in this country is largely controlled by German and British capital, and has been showing profits of as much as 300 per cent. There was a strange aspect to the whole affair. Virtually no attempt was made to defend the increase when Senators Wheeler and Norris exposed its significance. Its supporters simply sat mute with an air that seemed to say: "Talk your heads off — we have the votes." They did have them, and a lot of us are wondering how they got them.

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 175 The Christian Science Censor II. "Obnoxious Books'" M By HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY ARY BAKER EDDY was a tragic figure. Pro- claiming the omnipotence of all-embracing Divine Love, she was perpetually tormented by the "claim" of physical disease and the fear of "malicious animal mag- netism," and her last years were passed within the deep Mrs. Eddy at first attempted to reply, but succeeding chap- ters, abundantly fortified by detailed evidence with support- ing affidavits, were too much for her, and she gave it up. The McClure's articles and other material were pub- lished by Doubleday, Page and Company in 1909, as "The shadows. Building her whole system on publicity, she was Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian obliged to conceal from the public and from her own follow- Science," by Georgine Milmine. Despite all denials by the ers many of the facts of her own life. Her enforced retire- church, Miss Milmine's story stands today substantially un- ment from the prying eyes of a curious public and even of her shaken. What was to be done? The directors induced a reverent adherents became necessary to the spread of her wealthy Christian Scientist to buy from the publishers the gospel, and systematic suppression of a whole body of facts copyright and the plates, which latter were promptly de- was an essential means of spreading the Truth. From the stroyed. Copies of the book are now so rare that they bring every-day point of view, it was plain fraud ; from that of the devout believer, it was the service of Divine Mind. If any misstatement or misrepresentation appeared, it could not be countered by a presentation of all the facts; the only weapon available was suppression. In the spring of 1904 Mrs. Eddy learned that Fleming H. Revell and Company, who in 1903 had published a vol- ume of Christian Science poems, were issuing a virulent attack on Mrs. Eddy and her distinctive doctrine writ- ten by one of her most implacable enemies, and that an inquirer for the poems had been sold the hostile book. Thereupon she penned the celebrated by-law forbidding church members to patronize booksellers or publishers who have obnoxious books for sale. The rule has been invoked occasionally, I am informed, against members, but its chief use has been in clubbing the book trade. During the year 1906, following the dedication of the enlarged Mother Church and the enormous attendant pub- licity, the New York World began a sensational campaign to learn and make public the facts about the physical condition of Mrs. Eddy, then eighty-five and living in retirement at Concord. All sorts of wild rumors were afloat. McClure's Magazine was announcing a startling series of articles by Georgine Milmine on Mrs. Eddy's life. On December 28, 1906, Mrs. Eddy wrote to her church officers: Please watch the movements of the last Literary Digest that has called the attention of its readers to McClure's articles on me and after McClure's next article appears or even before it does request in our periodicals that every Christian Scientist who has subscribed for the Literary Digest or for McClure's Magazine discontinue his subscription. Fortunately the officers were wiser than their venerable Leader. They had no wish to tempt legal action by publish- ing a boycott, so the matter was handled in the usual way through Alfred Farlow, Committee on Publication. He communicated with his State committees; they passed the word on; and soon hundreds of letters from the faithful were pouring in on McClure's and any other magazines that mentioned the biography. Nevertheless the story proceeded. * This is the second of a series of four articles. The third, on Freedom of the Press, will appear in the issue of February 26. — Editor The Nation. from $25 to $100. Something had to be done to offset the devastation wrought by Miss Milmine's work. A friendly newspaper woman, Mrs. Sybil Wilbur O'Brien, prepared a series of articles on Mrs. Eddy which appeared in an obscure Boston publication called Human Life. Alfred Farlow, Committee on Publication, arranged with two loyal Christian Scientists to finance Mrs. O'Brien for further research and to publish her book, which in addition to her articles was to contain other material, some of which Mr. Farlow had already gath- ered. The proposal, he said, had Mrs. Eddy's sanction, and would have the full support of the Mother Church. By a contract of April 22, 1908, Mr. Farlow was appointed "arbitrator of all differences, if any, which shall arise here- under, and his decision shall be final and binding concerning such differences." The Committee on Publication thus had absolute final control. If ever there was an official biography, it is this one. When the book was ready for publication, Mr. Farlow received word from Mrs. Eddy that it must be suppressed, because, as it later appeared, she feared even such publicity as it gave to her earlier life, notably, her debt to P. P. Quimby, the mental healer. For months she remained ada- mant, and on September 23, 1908, Calvin Frye, her factotum, received from Archibald McLellan, chairman of the Board of Directors, a letter notifying him of the danger of a law- suit to compel publication. I quote in part: Mr. Elder [Mrs. O'Brien's attorney] states that Mrs. O'Brien has a contract with the publishers by which, if she so elects, she can compel them to publish the book or pay her substantial damages. He does not think she is in the frame of mind to do this now, but should she change her attitude to one of unfriendliness such a suit would be troublesome because it would allege a conspiracy to stop the sale of the book and to kill her literary reputation. . . . The position of Streeter and Elder is friendly, and they have given me this information as a warning of pos- sible danger. Next day the ban was lifted, the Leader having decided that the possible dangers of publication were less than those of a suit, with its attendant publicity. Thus "The Life of Mary Baker Eddy," by Sybil Wilbur, official biography of the

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176 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 Founder, since circulated by the directors in thousands of copies all over the world, saw the light. It is the one source to which inquirers are always officially referred for informa- tion about Mrs. Eddy. In an advertising campaign designed to offset the Dakin book, the officials describe it thus : The Authentic Biography. The Life of Mary Baker Eddy, Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. A highly interesting chronicle based on exhaustive and unprejudiced research. It is devoid of invention but is abounding with facts. . . . This life of Mary Baker Eddy was printed in a mag- azine of popular circulation before it was acquired by the Christian Science Publishing Society. It was written prior to the author's interest in Christian Science. Of the work itself it is hard to speak with restraint. It is absolutely without documentation or authentication, and in fact resembles nothing else so much as the most pious lives of the medieval saints. Indeed, I should just as soon go to one as to the other in search of facts. I give one crucial in- stance. In a chapter added after Mrs. Eddy's death occurs this passage: "She retired to her bed that night not to rise again in this world. . . . She was conscious that her students were opening their minds to the realization of life ; this con- scious thought was, as it had been for fifty years, her great and only physician" [italics mine]. On December 29, 1928, a well-known man who is a former member of the Board of Directors and of the Board of Trustees under Mrs. Eddy's will, wrote to the latter: "As you well know, Mrs. Eddy employed physicians professionally, and took drugs on numer- ous occasions during the last ten years of her life." He accordingly protested against the use of trust funds to circu- late a book containing the statement quoted above, and de- manded a reply by January 15. On January 9 the trustees replied: "The sentence partly quoted in your letter is to be revised so that there can be no question as to its being in accord with the facts. It can be and probably would be cor- rectly construed as it is." Note the outcome. In the Christian Science Sentinel of January 26, 1929, and in the Christian Science Journal of March, 1929, there appeared the following statement by the Board of Directors: As we are informed, Mrs. Eddy did not, at any time after 1866, believe in the use of any drug as a cura- tive agent in connection with the practice of Christian Science. Nor did she, at any time after she became a Christian Scientist, either use a drug or allow one to be used for her, except as she employed, in a few instances, an anaesthetic for the purpose of temporary relief from extreme pain. This would seem to be a precise admission of exactly the charge made. Nevertheless, the Wilbur biography, now being officially advertised to the public as above, contains the original passage word for word, and the interests of truth are safeguarded by an asterisk and this footnote: "See the Christian Science Journal, March, 1929, page 669." Need- less to say, it is a rare reader who will have convenient access to a file of the Journal, and an almost non-existent one who will look up the reference. One of the favorite texts in Christian Science is: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." I return to the troublous days of 1906-8. My older readers will recall the celebrated "next friends" suit of 1907, in which an unsuccessful effort was made to prove Mrs. Eddy, then eighty-six years old, mentally incompetent to manage her property. Michael Meehan, then editor of the Concord Patriot, thought to turn an honest penny by pub- lishing the essentials of the record. His book, "Mrs. Eddy and the Late Suit in Equity," 1908, is extremely friendly to Mrs. Eddy; nevertheless the Leader said, "Thumbs down." The entire edition was bought up and shipped to Boston, where it was stored in the basement of the Christian Science Publishing Society's building. Following the outburst of 1906 and 1907, the church, despite the efforts of its enemies, apparently enjoyed a period of relative immunity from "persecution" by publicity, notwithstanding the death of Mrs. Eddy in 1910, the conse- quent fierce struggles in the church itself, and the long series of resulting lawsuits. Certain records evidently went quietly and safely to rest in the archives of the Mother Church, where they could not trouble the memory of the Founder. In 1921, however, there appeared in Volume IV of the Cam- bridge History of American Literature, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, a chapter entitled Popular Bibles: The Book of Mormon and Science and Health, by Woodbridge Riley. It was a critical and hostile account of the origins of the book by Mrs. Eddy, whom the author in his opening sentence described as "the thrice-married female Trismegistus." The church artillery was at once unlimbered, and the publishers precipitately withdrew the work, getting out another edition containing a new chapter under the same title, written by Lyman P. Powell. I have tried in this brief list of instances to show some- thing of what may be publicly known of actual book sup- pression by official church agencies. What, if anything, lies unknown in the records of the publication committee I have no means of telling. My last example is both the most recent and the most revealing, though entirely consistent with what went before. It is the suppression in 1927 of Adam H. Dickey's "Memoirs of Mary Baker Eddy." Mr. Dickey, one of the most devout disciples of the Founder, lived in her family during the last three years of her life, and one of her last official acts was to make him a mem- ber of the Board of Directors of the Mother Church, in which capacity he served up to the time of his death in 1925. Shortly before his death he wrote out of his records the little book above mentioned, in fulfilment of a solemn promise made to Mrs. Eddy in 1908. As he relates the incident: "If I should ever leave here," she repeated, "will you promise me that you will write a history of what has transpired in your experiences with me, and say that I was mentally murdered?" I answered, "Yes, Mother, I will." ". . . Will you swear before God that you will not fail to carry out my wish?" . . . "Mother, I swear before God that I will do what you request of me." The book is an astonishing first-hand document, setting forth various intimate details of the life and conversation of this extraordinary woman during her last three years, all reverently set down by one who saw her as without human weakness. However incredible the story may appear to others, it contains no word that could offend the most orthodox Christian Scientist, being written in a spirit of unquestioning loyalty and obedience to Mrs Eddy, and of absolute faith in her teachings. It is in fact a picture of a pain-racked old woman, full of human weaknesses and foibles, but carrying

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 177 on majestically against a host of enemies within, and ruling her household with a rod of iron. It deserves lengthy quo- tation, but the exigencies of the copyright law and strict space limits forbid more than a few brief samples. On his second interview Mr. Dickey learned, to his astonishment, that as Leader of a great Movement Mrs. Eddy had many enemies, and that she had much to combat in the way of "aggressive mental suggestion, intended to injure or affect her physically." He learned that her house was filled with mental workers, who divided the night into two-hour watches. During the worker's watch it was his duty "to counteract the malicious evil influence of mortal mind directed against our Leader and her establishment." When a watch was kept, that is, "when the mental worker was successful in freeing our Leader from attacks during that time," he was commended next morning; but when a watch was not kept, "and they were far more frequently not kept than kept," then he was rebuked. The workers were urged that they must "handle animal magnetism and defeat the mental murderer and mental assassin who are working to defeat this Cause." It is a pitiful tale of a vain fight against death. Mr. Dickey learned that while the Leader often gave what seemed bad reasons for her actions, yet "in following the direction of Divine Wisdom, she never made a mistake. Often I heard her say with great impressiveness that in over forty years of church leadership, she had never made a mis- take, a record that is most truly remarkable." Most truly so! Says Mr. Dickey: She told me that every government, every organiza- tion, every institution of whatever kind or nature, to be successful, must have one responsible head. That is why she placed herself at the head of her own church, because mortal mind could not be trusted to conduct it. . . . Indeed, she told me, with pathos and earnestness, that if she could find one individual who was spiritually equipped she would immediately place him at the head of her church govern- ment. Mr. Dickey saw Mrs. Eddy bring Calvin Frye out of a cataleptic seizure, and we read that "Calvin Frye had passed through what mortal mind calls 'death,' and the grave had been cheated of its victim by our Leader's quick and effective work." One of the orders issued to the mental workers early in Mr. Dickey's experience was to "make a law that there shall be no more snow this season," and he found that "Mrs. Sargent was the one to whom was especially assigned the work of watching the weather and bringing it into accord with normal conditions." Enough of excerpt and quotation. The whole record breathes the most absolute faith in Mrs. Eddy and the most pious devotion to her memory. And now what happened ? After Mr. Dickey's death his widow, likewise a devout Scientist, proceeded to print the little book and distribute it among Mr. Dickey's former students — apparently a most natural and fitting course of action. When word of this reached the directors, they called Mrs. Dickey before them and required her to recall every copy, so that only three are now certainly known in this country, the two copyright copies in the Library of Congress and a photostat in the New York Public Library. Under date of December 16, 1927, the directors addressed to Mr. Dickey's pupils an illuminating letter, from which I quote: . . . We have only words of praise for Mr. Dickey's teaching and admiration for his staunch and fearless stand in defense of our Leader and her teachings. . . . Our astonishment then was great beyond expression when we read the book, "Memoirs of Mary Baker Eddy," and found it contained so much that would be harmful to make public. . . . We found too that a grave mistake was made by Mrs. Dickey in publishing the book without direct instructions from our Leader, for even Mr. Dickey himself does not claim that he was authorized to publish, but merely to write, a "history.". . . It was imperative that the book should be recalled, if possible, before it might fall into the hands of those who were hostile or reach minds too immature to absorb it unscathed. . . . Mr. Dickey's observance of our Leader's wishes for seclusion . . . makes it difficult to see how, after the lapse of so many years, he could be led to assent to such things as this book contains being broadcast to an unsympathetic public. . . . ... it [the book] is unjust and therefore contrary to the Manual ... in that it claims to be a history and yet gives a large place to trivialities and subordinates the grandeur of our Leader's life-purpose. It is also unjust because it accentuates her human characteristics and touches but slightly upon her spiritual nature. ... It is also unjust because comparatively little is said about Mrs. Eddy's transcendent wisdom, her steadfast reliance upon God, and her enduring love for her fellow-men. . . . The enemies of our Cause would gloat over the mis- leading picture the book presents, and even the unbiased public are drawing conclusions that are unjust and injuri- ous. . . . It has been maintained that Mrs. Eddy's request that Mr. Dickey write a "history of his experiences" would have been fully complied with had he deposited his writings relating to her for preservation in the files of the Mother Church, as others of her household have considerately done. It is well to keep in mind our Leader's words . . . "If spiritual conclusions are separated from their premises, their nexus is lost, and the argument, with its rightful con- clusions, becomes correspondingly obscure. The human history needs to be revised, the material record expunged." On the face of the record the Board of Directors con- vict themselves of determination to conceal the full facts of Mrs. Eddy's life and thought, even as recorded and inter- preted by one of the most trusted of their own number, from the public and indeed from the ordinary members of their own church. The incident shows with shocking clearness their conception of the "truth" to which they profess unswerving devotion, and of the "injustices" which, it will be recalled, it is the duty of the Committee on Publication to correct. The "truth" is that which shows Mrs. Eddy's "transcendent wis- dom, her steadfast reliance upon God, and her enduring love for her fellow-men"; the "injustice" is anything which shows her "human characteristics." It is a hard job creating new incarnations of God in these days of documents and full in- formation, and the directors are perhaps entitled to some sympathy in their task, but no one need rate too highly their professions qf devotion to truth as that term is understood among every-day men. The other illuminating aspect of the incident is Mrs. Dickey's part in it. "To that end" [the recall of the book],

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178 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 say the directors, "Mrs. Dickey obligingly complied with our suggestion to write each known holder of the book, request- ing its return." And she not only requested its return, but got it returned. Such discipline was known in medieval monastic orders, but is rare in modern times. When it is recalled, however, that the very livelihood of a Christian Science practitioner is held at pleasure of the directors, who may remove his card from the advertising columns of the church periodicals, or even put him out of the church, such obedience is more readily understood. The machine grinds on. In the Driftway THE modern version of Little Lord Fauntleroy has been synthetically assembled by certain professors at Teach- ers College, Columbia University. The 1930 Cedric, aged two to five years, is qualified as follows: He is cooperative, friendly, prompt, and generous, and he exercises self-control when it is necessary. He says "thank you" and "please" without adult suggestion, turns his head when he sneezes, and covers his mouth when he yawns. He does not try to boss, pinch, or tease his companions, particularly those younger and smaller than himself. He does not write im- proper epithets on brick walls, talk with his mouth full, lick his plate, carry tales to his teacher, or bite anybody. THE DRIFTER is always interested in rare fauna and flora, and he hereby offers a prize of three waistcoat buttons and a folding buttonhook to the teacher, parent, or professor who will bring before him in the flesh this Paragon of Polite Perfection. Speaking of buttons, the modern polite infant can also button his clothes even in the back and can himself without aid put on his galoshes. But this is to digress. For, after all, we are at present concerned not with motor efficiency, which in a motor age is probably developing with great rapidity, but with Character. The modern perfect boy is full of it. And if there is even a modicum of truth in the reports about him, he will cause to disappear in a cloud of smoke the popular notion of the male child which has been prevalent for hundreds of years. Until Mrs. Bur- nett created her velvet-frocked young lad, nobody even thought that boys ought to be polite and nice. Since Lord Fauntleroy appeared to plague his contemporaries, these contemporaries have been trying their best to prove him a figment of a sentimental imagination. If this time-honored state of affairs is to be changed about, the Drifter does not know whether to applaud or to weep. ***** TWO items in the Teachers College prerequisite for perfection interest the Drifter particularly. One is that the modern young gentleman likes to go to school. Now the Drifter, who spends some of his time in the company of young children for purposes of scientific observation only, has remarked that this phenomenon is in fact true. There are actually schools today to which children like to go. Children are fidgety on Saturdays when they are obliged to remain at home. They hop on one foot for joy mornings when the hour for school approaches and they come home, snail-fashion and abstractedly, when school is let out. This is surely one of the marvels of our present age, and modern educators who have wrought this miracle should receive the thanks of a grateful public. If the Paragon likes school, therefore, he is not necessarily a freak. One more encourag- ing item occurs in the list of his qualifications. If a young person of the opposite sex should chance in a playful moment to snatch his hat he will — place his hand on his heart, bow low, and remark softly: "You are welcome, madam, to such of my attire as you may, for any purpose, desire." Will he? He will not. He will knock her down like a man! This makes everything all right. Boys are still boys, in spite of a tendency to say "please." The Drifter is inclined to suspect, moreover, that in private they lick their pudding dishes. After all, teachers are not ubiquitous or omniscient. And their pupils are probably still not above guile. The Drifter Correspondence The Watch and Ward Objects To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Since I have another occupation in life it is impossi- ble for me even to attempt to answer the many uninformed, misleading, and unfounded statements which have appeared in the press during the past weeks concerning the nature and purpose of the Watch and Ward Society of which I have the honor to be president. I cannot allow, however, the article in The Nation of January 15 with the telling title, My Brother's Peeper, to pass without comment. I am passing over some of the details connected with the Dunster House Book Shop case, which we are not discussing so long as this case is still pending in the courts. I might remark parenthetically that the book for which Mr. Jackson offers a quasi-apology was declared by counsel for the defense to be an "utter abomination." And I might add that the state- ment that when our agent was told that the book was not at hand, he "was persistent and persuasive and suggested that there might be ways of getting one," which Mr. Jackson states as a fact, is a point on which the evidence was in decided con- flict. Or take the case of Joseph Farrell. When employed by us in 1922, he had a clean record. He was an agent in only a few cases and his connection with this society ceased in 1922. It was years later that he went wrong. My special interest, however, was centered in the descrip- tion which Mr. Jackson gave of our activities. It would ap- pear from what he has written that we focused our efforts on inducing crime. No one who understands our work could make such a suggestion. For years our organization conducted an arduous campaign to correct the abuses in burlesque houses when obscenity was rampant. As a. result, a set of regulations was adopted by the city of Boston and approved by the Theater Managers Association which placed productions of this parti- cular type far above the level to be found elsewhere. Again, in response to many complaints from the head masters of the most prominent schools in New England, a determined effort was made by our society to mitigate the nui- sance of the cheap story magazines. This culminated in a con- ference with the publishers of this type of story magazine, as the result of which they improved the reading matter to such an extent that the complaints ceased. Compared with our work in other directions, the recent Book Shop case was the merest incident. Boston, January 13 Raymond Calkins

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 179 Public and Private Interest at Boulder Dam To thb Editor of The Nation : Sir: Will you permit me to correct a few of the many misleading statements made in the article written by Miss Ruth Finney in The Nation of December 11, entitled, Secretary Wilbur at Boulder Dam? It is not true, as stated by Miss Finney, that "there has been no dispute as to the equal accepta- bility" of the plans of the municipalities for using power from Boulder Dam. The fact that the monopolizing of Boulder Dam power by a small minority of eight of the cities of south- ern California is contrary to the "public interest" of the 950,000 inhabitants of the eighty-three cities and the 700,000 people who live on the 50,000 farms only served by power-company lines, would appear to be so clear as not to involve dispute. Miss Finney argues principally on behalf of the "smaller cities" and what she says gives the distinct impression, no doubt unintentionally, that the smaller cities are all joining hands with the city of Los Angeles and clamoring for Boulder Dam power in an attempt to keep it away from the power companies. The fact is that 228,000 inhabitants of seven smaller cities secure their power through unregulated, non-tax-paying municipal dis- tributing systems, whereas 950,000 inhabitants of eighty-three other smaller cities secure their power from the power com- panies and are applicants for Boulder power only through these publicly regulated, tax-paying electric utilities. If Boulder Dam power is to be distributed in the "public interest" shall we ignore these eighty-three smaller cities and their 950,000 people? Miss Finney says that in the twelve years the city of Los Angeles has operated its distributing system it has forced reduc- tions in power rates which have saved the people $25,000,000. Such a claim is not only untrue; it is ludicrous. This figure is no doubt arrived at by taking the total of all rate reductions in southern California within the last twelve years and crediting it to the municipal system of Los Angeles. It credits no reduc- tion to voluntary action of the companies, induced by lowering costs and greater efficiencies — an inevitable reduction — no reduc- tion to regulation, but credits it all to the fact that a municipal system was in operation in a fraction of the territory involved. The municipal system of Los Angeles had the same effect, and no more effect, in reducing rates in this territory that it had in reducing rates in Salt Lake City and Washington, D. C. where rates have been reduced over the same period in comparable amounts. Miss Finney says that if the city of Glendale is allowed to buy Boulder Dam power from the government "it will have to pay only 4 or 5 mills per kilowatt hour." In fact the cost of Boulder Dam power, if the city itself is to undertake to deliver it into its distributing system, would be not less than 6^ to 7 mills. To compare this with power purchased from the South- ern California Edison Company, there must be added 1.55 mills, which is the amount per kilowatt hour which the company re- turns to the public in the form of taxes. The city now pays the Edison Company 9 mills. Its possible, though improbable, saving by securing Boulder Dam power would be from Yz to 1 mill per kilowatt hour. And this allows nothing for stand-by service, which means that the inhabitants of the city would be under the peril of interrupted service because of sole depend- ence upon hydro-electric power supply with its source 250 miles away. Finally, Miss Finney finds approval of the claims of her municipal-ownership friends in the fact that their claims were loudly voiced by a dozen of their representatives, while the utili- ties and their 2,000,000 customers were heard from only by a single, lone, and weak voice — that of myself. If this issue is to be decided on the basis of loud clamor, if mere vociferousness is to be mistaken for argument — in short, if the Secretary of the Interior should be "taken in," as Miss Finney has been, by a demonstration staged for that purpose under the direction of a small coterie of municipal-ownership enthusiasts, then the inter- est of the great majority of the public in this project is doomed. Los Angeles, December 21 W. C. Mullendore Ruth Finney Replies To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: To discuss with Mr. Mullendore the meaning of "public interest" is a difficult thing since his conception of it, shared only, so far as can be learned, by E. C. Finney, so- licitor of the Department of the Interior, is foreign to the con- ception of members of Congress who framed the federal water- power act and officials who have administered it in the past. What he fails to take into account is this: The only per- sons to whom Boulder Dam power will be valuable are those who can purchase it direct from the government. It will be valuable to them because they will not have to pay a price which includes profit to a private corporation. The "public interest" of 950,000 customers of the Southern California Edi- son Company will not be served in any way by giving that company all the power generated at the dam. The Edison Company does not deny that these customers will have all the power they need in any case. It does not promise that the price will be lower if the company gets Boulder Dam power. The seven cities asking for power ask for it because they own municipal distributing systems and can save their residents money if they buy power wholesale from the government at less than they would pay buying it wholesale from the Edison Company. Under Mr. Mullendore's interpretation of "public interest" the only thing accomplished would be denial to these cities of the right to buy power from the government instead of from Mr. Mullendore's company. The claim to a $25,000,000 saving in rates through munici- pal ownership in Los Angeles which Mr. Mullendore finds ridiculous has been augmented since he wrote his letter. The most spectacular example of what municipal power has meant in rates to southern California is found in the city of Pasadena. When the city first put its street-lighting system into operation the Edison Company dropped its power rate from 15 to 11^4 cents per kilowatt hour. The company undercut municipal rates until it reached a low level of 4 cents per kilowatt hour and the State legislature prohibited the furnishing of electricity at discriminatory rates which made it necessary to recoup losses by higher rates in other communities. Mr. Mullendore's arithmetic, in his next paragraph, seems decidedly questionable. In the first place, no accurate figures are available as to what it will cost southern California cities to deliver Boulder Dam power into their distributing systems. Even the government's announcement of a 1.63 mills per kilo- watt hour price at the dam is only tentative. Officials of Burbank and Glendale testified at the hearing of the Department of the Interior that they estimate the total cost of bringing power to their cities at 4 or 5 cents a kilowatt hour. They now pay the Edison Company 9 cents a kilowatt hour. Mr. Mullendore's figure of 6l/i to 7 cents is likewise an estimate, and an outsider's estimate. As for the "demonstration under the direction of a small coterie of municipal ownership advocates," the gentlemen who appeared before the Secretary of the Interior last Novem- ber and in unspectacular manner asked a larger allocation of Boulder Dam power were the duly elected or appointed mayors, city attorneys, and city engineers of duly incorporated cities which years ago adopted municipal ownership as desirable. Washington, January 28 Ruth Finney

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International Relations Section Aristocracy Declines in Hungary THE aristocracy of Hungary, that last stronghold of feudalism to be found in Europe, is crumbling to pieces, according to the writer of the following article, which we reprint from the Manchester Guardian Weekly. It is interesting to note that the decline in power and in wealth of the aristocratic class in Hungary, while due in part to political upheavals, is to a much greater extent the result of the machine age and the industrial revolution, which came late but inevitably to Hungary as to the rest of Europe. Speaking at a recent meeting of the Hungarian United Government Party, Count Bethlen foreshadowed the possibility of the abolition of the institution of entail in Hungary. The kings of Hungary had the right to declare the huge estates of some of the prominent noblemen as inalienable, the eldest son inheriting the entire entailed fortune. A commission is now investigating whether this privilege should be maintained or abolished. This is a very remarkable development, because Hungary has often and accurately been called the last bulwark of feudalism. In Rumania the land reform deprived the nobility of the greater part of their estates, and though some of the rich bojars managed to save some of their domains and power for a time, the Maniu regime has pushed them into the background. The Junkers of Germany are no longer a privileged class of heredi- tary rulers. In Jugoslavia the land reform has broken up the big estates of the former Magyar and Croatian owners. The Hungarian counter-revolution of August, 1919, enabled the Magyar aristocrats and feudal nobles to regain their lost politi- cal position, and a superficial study of the situation would indi- cate that they had also reestablished their economic predomi- nance; but the frequent complaints of the Budapesti Hirlap, the newspaper of the Magyar upper classes, indicate that the nobility are faced with many difficult and anxious economic problems. Before the war no class in any European country held such power as the Magyar aristocrats. Their political and economic influence was comparable only to that of the English nobility at the end of the eighteenth century, and as a class they were even more exclusive than the English peerage. In those days the aristocrats possessed fortunes as well as pride. The estates of Count Michael Karolyi, which subse- quently were confiscated by the counter-revolutionary regime, amounted to 500,000 acres of rich arable land. The estates of other aristocrats, such as the Eszterhazys and Count Schoenborn, were about the same size. One-third of pre-war Hungary's agricultural land — and before the war this was a country of 22,000,000 people — was owned by less than 3,000 magnates. These large domains were, as a rule, badly mismanaged. They were not intensively cultivated, and a great part of the yield disappeared through the machinations of the agents. Yet even with this poor administration they yielded their owners enormous revenues, which were spent in extravagant and riot- ous living. A century and a half ago one of the mighty Prince Eszterhazys used a painting by Titian for the lining of his gor- geous fur coat; another of the same family decorated his "disz- magyar," the national costume of the Hungarian nobility, with thousands of pounds' worth of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. One of the uncles of Count Michael Karolyi sent a bottle of ancient and delicious Tokay wine by special train to an English lady whom he admired. Count Laszlo Szapary, who a few years ago was Hungarian Minister in London, brought before the war a famous gipsy band by special train to Marienbad for the entertainment of King Edward VII, who greatly ad- mired the gipsy music. The great incomes which made possible this sybarite life were first threatened in the eighties of the last century. In 1883 the competition of Russian and American wheat began to be felt in Hungary. Wheat prices fell, and agrarian protection through high tariffs gave only a partial relief. The choice lay between starting a more intensive cultivation of the extremely rich soil or curtailing the old extravagance. The Hungarian aristocrats followed neither course. The riotous living was continued; at parties which often lasted two to three days (and nights) the wine and champagne flowed as amply as ever before, and the gipsy bands had to play unceasingly for ten to fifteen hours, often playing the very same tune, the favorite melody of the aristocrat or his lady, for half a day. Their lordships con- tinued to gamble, and while some, like the lucky Nicholas Szemere de genere Huba, who won 1,000,000 crowns, or £40,- 000, from Count Potocky, the Polish nobleman, in one night of card play, increased their fortunes at cards, more lost their incomes and estates. The end of the century saw the impov- erishment of the aristocracy, especially of those who owned medium-sized estates of from 500 to 1,000 acres. These lost lands passed into the hands of Jewish financiers or of foreign princes like Prince, later King, Louis III of Bavaria or Prince Hohenlohe. The passing of the gentry was almost simultaneous with the rise of industry and commerce in Hungary. Sugar refin- eries, ironworks, and textile mills were established, but the owners of these factories were either Jews who had got rich in commerce, or foreigners, especially Germans. Had the Hun- garian aristocrats gone over to industry as the English noble- men did during the industrial revolution, they might have saved themselves. But work was considered beneath a gentle- man's dignity in Hungary at the end of the last century. And this attitude was encouraged by the Premier, Coloman Tisza (the father of Count Stephen Tisza). To save the small gentry he created a new bureaucracy, and put the ruined aris- tocrats and noblemen in governmental positions. Another crisis came at the end of the World War. Two- thirds of Hungary's territories were taken away and given to the new Succession States. The new regimes confiscated the estates of the Magyar nobility in these territories, and dismissed the Hungarian gentry from the government posts which they held. The new regime established by the counter-revolution of 1919 tried to place these aristocrats in positions in industry and commerce which had formerly been left to foreigners and to Jews. The lists of the boards of directors of large banks and industrial enterprises are resplendent with ancient aristocratic names. Their incomes from these sources, however, are not large enough to support the aristocrats in the life to which they have been accustomed. And the low prices of agricultural products give the landowners little return, so that though Hun- gary is the only agrarian country in southeastern Europe in which land reform, at least on a sweeping scale, has not been carried through, the aristocrats, in face of the very low return from their estates, are slowly being forced to sell their lands to the thrifty peasants.

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Th e MIDWINTER BOOK SECTION Nation Vol. CXXX, No. 3371 Wednesday, February 12, 1930 // He apprehends what is behind the masks human beings wear"* TAMARA "There is something mysterious, taciturn, and criminal in her unhurried speech, in the evasive glance of her deep and dark-gold eyes from under the long, lowered eyelashes, in her manners, her sly smiles and into- nations of a mooest but wanton would-be saint...." PLATONOV "I am a vagabond and am passionately in love with life. I have been a turner, a compositor; I have sailed as a stoker on the Azov Sea, have been a fisherman on the Black; I have loaded watermelons and bricks on the Dnieper, have ridden with a circus, have been an actor. And never did need drive me. No, only an immeasurable thirst for life and an insup- portable curiosity. 3y God, I would like for a few days to become a horse, a plant, or a fish, or to be a woman and experience childbirth; I would like to live with the inner life, and to look upon the universe with the eyes of every human being I meet. . . . JENNIE "He distinguished her from the rest of the girls and almost respected her for her abrupt, refractory, and impudently mocking character. And now by her flam- ing, splendid eyes, by the vividly and unevenly glowing unhealthy red of her cheeks, by the much bitten parched lips he felt that her great, long ripen- ing rancour was heavily surging within the girl and suffocating her. . . ." HORIZON "All the shady world — the proprietresses of brothels, cocottes solitaires, go-betweens, madams of houses of assignation, souteneurs, touring actresses and chorus girls — was as familiar to him as the starry sky to an astron- omer. His amazing memory, which permitted him prudently to avoid notebooks, held in mind thousands of names, family names, nicknames, addresses, characteristics. . . ." THE By ALEXAND At all bookshops UPRIN $3.00 *"Kuprin is a realist with no squeamishness at de- picting the more sordid phases of existence. . .His powers of characterization are remarkable. He ap- prehends what is behind the masks human beings wear and portrays them with merciless truth." —Harry Hansen in the N. Y. World BERNARD GUiLBERT GUERNEY, PUBLISHER, 136 W. 23rd St., N. Y. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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IV The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 * WlnnS tkt ntxt THE EARTH FOR SAM W. Maxwell Reed From the beginning of life to the beginning of history, the story of Moun- tains, Rivers, Dinosaurs and Men. The 250 photographs with their titles make a connected account which may be read separately. A book which will be read with excitement by everyone between 8 and 80. *a4 Ha mi/iutf j. ot% Jt*ik\ n*mbtf four* A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN Virginia Woolf "While it glances in a spirited and good-tempered way over conflicts old and new," says the London Times, "it is really always bent on more intrinsic matters. .. A love of life, a love of free- dom and of letters." "At long last," says Walter Yust, "a woman of rare sensibility writes calmly and frankly and humorously, in defense of women." $2.00 A \Ja THE WOMEN OF CAIRO Gerard de Nerval "Beneath the magic pen of de Nerval that now-extinct life lives as the life of ancient Bagdad and Bassora palpitates in the Arabian Nights." — London Sunday Times. This is the only available translation of one of the master- works on the Old East. 2 vols. $7.50 THE FOREIGNER IN THE FAMILY by Wilfrid Benson "An excellent bit of inter-racial satire," says- the N. Y. Times of this novel about a French- man visiting his English in-laws. "It has the life of comedy and the charm of wit." $2.50 WALTHER RATHENAU Count Harry Kessler "The absorbing biography of an extraordi- nary man," says James W. Gerard, former Ambassador to Germany, in the N. Y. Sun. The European Henry Ford. $3.75 ,i t*H| FREE a novel by BLAIR NILES author of CONDEMNED TO^DEVIL'S ISLAND ELLEN GLASGOW writes en- thusiastically — "I finished 'Free' late last night, and I am still stirred .by its beauty and pathos. The book is quiveringly alive. Every person, object, sight, sound, smell seems to spring out from the pages. I feel as if I had lived in that scene of despair; and your touch on the heartstrings is unerring in its precision and tender- ness." $2.50 AFTER MOTHER INDIA by Harry H. Field A necessary companion volume to your copy of Mother India. $3.50 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, 383 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK Wh*n writing to a&vtrtistrt pltasg mention The Nation

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Midwinter Book Section All Too Humanism By HENRY HAZLITT OF all the strange crazes that sweep semiannually over American criticism, surely none will seem odder to the future literary historian than the pres- ent attempt to pump life into that particular rationalization of reaction and gentility that passes at present under the name of humanism. Before we examine the logical creden- tials of this doctrine, we may profitably ask ourselves what it is that is impelling young writers at the moment to announce their conversion and to take the humanist vows. We find a number of motives, some of them more creditable than others. There is, to begin with, a reaction from the cult of unintelligibility and incoherence, and .from the new barbarism and the tough-guy school of literature; and this reaction is to a large extent sound. Further, the younger generation is impressed by the fact that the human- ists seem to have a wider knowledge of the literature of the remote past than most of their opponents. And again, in so far as humanism may be thought of as a form of classi- cism, it was bound to follow upon an era of romanticism. Just as a period of traditionalism is succeeded by one of revolt, so revolt in turn is succeeded by revolt from revolt, i.e., by another wave of traditionalism. Historic perspective should enable us to hazard the prediction that the wave of traditionalism just beginning will probably go farther; but it should also enable us to predict that it in turn will not be permanent. Behind this endless see-saw are two main causes. Either traditionalism or revolt, when it reaches a high point, tends to discredit itself by its own excesses. And even if it does not, critics tire of the old theories and the old gods, and want new theories and new gods, if only for the sake of something fresh to talk about. Hence the present shouts of down with Mencken, down with Dreiser, down with Lewis, down with Cabell ; hurrah for the youngsters under thirty and the critics over sixty! It is the same motive, at bottom, that periodically leads a bored and restless voting public to turn the Republicans out and put the Democrats in. This phenomenon is recurrent and immemorial, both in politics and literature. It deserves a special name. We might call it, after its most famous victim among the Greeks, the aristidization of old heroes. Perhaps an even deeper appeal of humanism is an appeal that authority has always made, and now makes with par- ticular force. Amid the blooming, buzzing confusion of new discoveries, doctrines, theories, isms, opinions, it is peaceful, it saves a great deal of anxiety and mental effort, to bow one's head to a traditional authority. Further, many of the conclusions of science, particularly when one does not under- stand them, and imagines that they imply a purely mechan- istic view of the world, seem depressing, and the "new humanism," and even better the old-time religion, appeal as quiet and comforting sanctuaries. It is this that lies behind T. S. Eliot's adoption of Anglo-Catholicism, and the human- ist's dislike of what he calls "naturalism." Of course, if you decide to let an authority give you cut-and-dried answers to your problems, there is still the problem, hardly less diffi- cult, of deciding which authority shall do it. In practice, however, that problem has not troubled the religious branch of the humanists at all. There is not the slightest possibility that any one of them will emerge as a Buddhist or a Zoroastrian ; they allow the problem to be decided for them by geography and social considerations: Mr. Eliot is an Anglo-Catholic because he is a British citizen. The humanists, as I have already implied, are not very well acquainted with science. And this, I think, as well as the uncomfortable conclusions to which they imagine science leads, accounts to a large extent for the fact that they seldom refer to science except to depreciate or to patronize it. In brief, they rationalize their scientific ignorance. They wish to convince themselves that knowledge they do not possess is not knowledge of the first importance. If one knows Greek, but not physiology, then it is well to dismiss physi- ological knowledge as merely "utilitarian," first being care- ful to imply subtly that utilitarianism is identical with philistinism. At all events, a good humanist knows how to emerge with the conclusion, or at least the innuendo, that literary studies, particularly if they are of literature far enough in the past, are the only kind with a genuine cultural, or as he would put it, a genuinely "human," value. Not least among the causes for the present vogue of humanism is the desire of the critic to have a theory, a "philosophy," a "point of view." If he does not give clear evidence of such a philosophy, or if it is merely implicit in his criticism, he is likely to be accused of being devoid of "ideas." It is convenient for him to have a philosophy that he can state explicitly, and that has already been neatly labeled. He yields to the temptation to take someone else's philosophy, ready made, and to take all of it, coat, vest, shoes, socks, trousers, without too curious a scrutiny. If, finally, we include those youngsters who are going in for humanism for no better reason than to be on the band- wagon, we have listed virtually all the main motives behind the new movement. When we come to examine the meaning and validity of humanism as a doctrine, we are confronted by the initial difficulty of deciding (as space limitations forbid dealing with all of them) just whose humanism we are going to examine. There are apparently grave differences among the humanists themselves. There is, first, the schism between the religious and non-religious humanists. The most im- portant recent criticisms have been made from the religious standpoint. Mr. Eliot, criticizing Mr. Babbitt, has main- tained that the humanist point of view is at bottom "auxiliary to and dependent upon the religious point of view." And Allen Tate has insisted that "religion is the sole technique for the validating of values." Further, the European humanists do not seem to have too much respect for their American brethren. Ramon Fernandez, translated

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182 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 1 by Mr. Eliot in the January Criterion, goes so far as to say that the American humanists "do not seem to have tested their notions by a rigorous critique, and are easily entrapped in their own pretensions." It is the doctrines of the American humanists that now concern us, so we shall turn to their acknowledged leader, Irving Babbitt. It is probably fairest to begin with his latest encyclical, which appears in the February Forum. What first strikes the reader who has had any acquaintance with exact reasoning is the amazing looseness with which Mr. Babbitt, as well as all the other humanists, employs crucial terms. Around each of these terms hangs a heavy fog. There is first the word "humanism" itself, which Mr. Babbitt confesses he has not been able to make clear in a series of volumes. Then there is "standards." Then there is "humanitarianism." Finally there is "nature," with its derivatives "natural" and "naturalism"; and these are used more loosely than any of the others. Stuart Mill once devoted a long essay entirely to the confusions and fallacies inherent in various uses of the word "nature," but he might just as well never have written so far as Mr. Babbitt is concerned. Mr. Babbitt falls into the same fallacy as his arch-enemy and mighty bugaboo Rousseau ; the only difference being that Rousseau was all for freeing and glorifying something that he thought of as "the natural man," and Mr. Babbitt is all for suppressing something that he calls "the natural man." At one time the reader of humanist propaganda will find the word "naturalism" applied to Rousseau's naive doctrine of "back to nature," and at another time the word will refer to the scientific investigation of natural processes; and the ill repute that attaches to the term in its first sense will somehow be carried over to the second. But Mr. Babbitt commits this sin of ambiguity and vague extension on a far greater scale when he comes to the word "Rousseauism." Now Rousseau was an extremist, and in many ways an ass, and it is very easy to discredit some of his more important views. But Mr. Babbitt takes advantage of this fact to attempt to discredit every view, no matter how well established, that is either superficially similar to one of Rousseau's, or may be made to seem so; and he attempts further to strengthen his case by pretending that the views he is attacking have their historic origin in Rousseau. The trick is an ancient one; indeed, it is accurately de- scribed in that ironic little masterpiece, "The Art of Contro- versy," in which Schopenhauer lists, numbers, and names the various shady stratagems for getting the better of an oppon- ent in a dispute. Mr. Babbitt's two main controversial devices fall under Stratagems I and XXXII. The first "consists in carrying your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits ... so as to exaggerate it." Stratagem XXXII consists in putting your opponent's assertion "into some odious category; even though the connection is only apparent, or else of a loose character. You can say, for instance, 'That is Manichaeism, ... or Spinozism, . . . or Naturalism,' . . . and so on. In making an objection of this kind, you take it for granted (1) that the assertion in question is identical with, or is at least contained in, the category cited — that is to say, you cry out, 'Oh, I have heard that before'; and (2) that the system referred to has been entirely refuted, and does not contain a word of truth." Substitute the word "Rousseauism" above, for any of the isms listed, and you have almost the entire Forum argu- ment of Mr. Babbitt uncannily anticipated and summed up. Yet it is probably unjust to Mr. Babbitt to imply that he has employed this dialectical device as a conscious trick. The man is too sincere for that, and he has been arguing this way for too many years. Rousseau and his doctrines have become an obsession with him — one might almost say a monomania — and they play for him the role that the devil and his temptations did for the medieval saint. That is why Mr. Babbitt can accuse any one who does not agree with him of "Rousseauistic emotionalism" with the same facility as the late Mayor Hylan could accuse all his critics of being tools of the traction trust. But all this means that it is impossible to take Mr. Babbitt seriously as a thinker. His antagonism to Rousseau distorts all his views, if it does not actually dictate most of them: it drives him tc an opposite extreme; he is clearly a victim of "the subservience of con- tradiction." No reader can go very far with him, moreover, unless he is willing to take over a shallow and jerry-built meta- physics and an antiquated psychology that insist first on a dualism between man and nature and then on another dualism between what Mr. Babbitt calls our "expansive de- sires" (the existence of which we are obviously meant to deplore) and what he calls "the higher will." Nearly all of his writing comes down to a mere shuffling of these terms, neatly set off against each other in pairs — "humanism" against "naturalism" or "Rousseauism," "emotionalism" against "reason" (the latter, of course, being identified with humanist doctrine), "expansive desires" against "higher will," and so on, until the reader has had enough. Mr. Babbitt does not use these terms for simple reference, but emotively — that is, they are mere signals for certain hoped- for attitudes on the part of the reader. It is not necessary to spend much time over the "con- structive" side of Mr. Babbitt's doctrine. "Decorum is supreme for the humanist." "The humanist exercises the will to refrain." The insistence, you will notice, is always on the purely negative virtues. Apply them to literary criticism. We are above all to judge a writer, not by his originality or force, not by his talent or genius, but by his decorum! That is, we are to praise him for a virtue within the reach of any learned blockhead. And we are presum- ably to denounce him if he lacks the virtue of decorum — i.e., we are to denounce Villon, Rabelais, Marlowe, Shake- speare, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Dostoevski, Melville, and Whit- man. As for "the will to refrain," it is the outstanding merit of the cartoonist Webster's hero — the Timid Soul, Mr. Caspar Milquetoast. Enough of Mr. Babbitt's humanism. Paul Elmer More's, or Norman Foerster's is no better. A small clique of the self-anointed have arrogated to themselves a name that stood, in the fifteenth century, for a genuinely liberating atti- tude, and degraded it to a synonym for a hide-bound aca- demicism. The whole doctrine has become little more than a rationalization of neophobia and a piece of special pleading for the genteel tradition. At its best, it is a mere revival of a singularly dogmatic and narrow classicism. There are, of course, sound criteria in the classic tradition, unduly neg- lected in the criticism of the last decade. But the critics who wish to apply these criteria will be well advised if they do not load themselves down with the millstone of dogma that the humanists are so eager to hang on their necks.

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 183 The Twenties in American Literature By GRANVILLE HICKS A SURVEY of the twenties is rather sad business. Ten years ago the chorus of rejoicing was loud and hearty ; today we listen patiently to wails of despair and outbursts of denunciation. Ten years ago the sour notes of dissension were drowned out by blissful prophecies of a renaissance; today the surviving dissenters find their tri- umphant "I told you so" blending with the lamentations of the younger critics. Short as a decade is, it is not altogether easy to remem- ber how promisingly the twenties began. Nineteen hundred and twenty was the year of "Main Street," "Poor White," "Miss Lulu Bett," "The Age of Innocence," and "The American Credo." It was the year of "Smoke and Steel," "A Few Figs from Thistles," "The Three Taverns," and "Beyond the Horizon." It is little wonder that two com- paratively restrained critics, writing in 1924, stated that 1920 began a new age in American literature. We all know what critics today are saying about the authors who looked so impressive a decade ago. We are told that Cabell is essentially naive, that Lewis is only one short step ahead of George F. Babbitt, that Anderson is diffuse and befuddled, that Dreiser has neither insight nor capacity for clarification, and that Mencken is merely a noisy dissemi- nator of quarter-truths and boob-catching platitudes. It is pointed out to us that Masters is still a man of one book, that Sandburg's violent affirmations have ended in chilly gloom, that Imagism and Amy Lowell are buried in the same unremembered grave, and that O'Neill looks as futilely as ever beyond the horizon. With more than one of these judgments I find myself forced to agree; and yet I doubt if any fair survey of the twenties can be content with so curt a summary. We need a vigorous analysis of the defects of the middle generation, but there is a place also for a careful weighing of its accom- plishments. Second thought reveals, I believe, that the critics who in 1920 hailed the beginnings of an American renais- sance were not altogether asinine. We may grant that they should have seen more clearly certain distressing weaknesses in the novels and poems of that year; but that the virtues they applauded were either trivial or non-existent is not so certain. Let us take the case of James Branch Cabell, whose reputation, judging from the reviews of his latest work, has been as thoroughly deflated as that of any writer of the period. If we can forget for a moment the diminution of Cabell's resourcefulness and the monotony of his slight varia- tions of a single theme, if we can bring ourselves to look at "Jurgen" through the eyes of 1920, we may be able to see why the book was legitimate ground for hope. Here was a work that disregarded the pale proprieties of Victorian reti- cence and poked fun at sacred conventions, written in a style that, though it was artificial and derivative, was at least evidence of self-conscious craftsmanship. The book could scarcely be said to represent the pinnacle of sophistication, but in 1920 it was reasonable to think that the man who had written "Jurgen" would write better books and would in- spire others to the achievement of a wise and mature irony. By a similar readjustment of perspective we may per- ceive values — and rather more important values — in the Main Street school. Of course Lewis's picture of Gopher Prairie was distorted ; how could he be unaffected by fifty years of a fiction that sentimentalized the village? Un- doubtedly his treatment of his characters and his implied criti- cisms of American values were superficial ; in what school might he have acquired the deep insight that could find mean- ing in the trivialities of small-town life and give form to the chaos of post-war America? But in "Main Street," with its mass of photographic detail and its veracious reproduction of the native speech, there appeared the possibility that some- thing of the real United States might find its way into literature. "Main Street," moreover, did not stand alone. When we survey the years from 1890 to 1920 we see a little group of writers, usually neglected and frequently damned as inde- cent, trying to come to some sort of terms with the America they knew. We find their work blemished by survivals of Victorian dogmas and Victorian fears, and sometimes marred by the irrelevant zeal of the muckraker. When we come to 1920 we see a dozen men and women essaying the same task, and approaching it with fewer false assumptions and greater resolution. It may be said that their superiority lay in a better sociological rather than a better literary equipment, but the superiority was there. Anderson's short stories, for example, portray the frus- trations of rural life, the occasional moments of beauty in commonplace existences, the struggles and defeats of the inarticulate ; and "Poor White" reflects, in however distorted a fashion, the human consequences of America's industrial progress. More subtly, more tenderly, and more compre- hensively, the stories and novels of Willa Cather deal with the frontier. In such works, and in "Moon-Calf," "Miss Lulu Bett," and other novels of the early twenties, the critic saw evidences that American writers had the will to utilize American themes and were fumbling their way toward a form and method that would serve their purpose. There is no particular merit, someone may object, in the utilization of national themes. That is true, and yet those are the themes which American writers most naturally adopt and which most fully challenge their powers. When we have a great literature those themes will not be neglected, and any step toward their utilization has its value. It should be unnecessary to show how American poetry, shaking off at last the paralyzing hand of Victorian diction, found new vigor in the treatment of indigenous subjects; or how criticism, seeking to defend and interpret the new litera- ture, brushed aside the timidities and stereotypes of the academicians. And it is also unnecessary, I fear, to dwell at length on the disappointment of the hopes which the early twenties raised. The precise nature of that disappointment may be summarized in a single sentence : What was a prom- ising beginning remained only a beginning. As a result, the middle generation is important only in so far as it may have

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184 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 succeeded in clearing the path for something better to come. Why the writers of the twenties did not develop, why hatred for shams did not grow into a demand for realities, why a desire to treat the untouched aspects of American life did not become a desire to treat the whole of American life, why the quest for unvarnished truth did not lead to a quest for unblemished clarity, it is not easy to explain. Perhaps it was simply a case of the absence of genius ; perhaps it was be- cause popularity was too easily won ; perhaps it was because our national life is as yet too chaotic to lend itself readily to the purposes of the artistic imagination ; perhaps it was because the critics themselves mistook means for ends and substituted enthusiasm for discrimination. But whatever the explanation, the tragedy of the twenties is apparent. The burst of activity with which the twenties began and the subsequent downfall of the middle generation are, however, only half the story of the decade that has just passed. We must also examine the newer movement, which is at least partly a definite reaction to the earlier develop- ments. Since we are today part of that movement it is not easy for us to describe it, but we cannot leave it out of the reckoning. The reaction is most apparent in the sphere of criticism. Ten years ago impressionism dominated the field. It was baldly stated in Mencken's cackling-hen theory; it was refined and somewhat systematized in Lewisohn's romantic individu- alism ; it was subtilized and given philosophic standing by Spingarn and the Croceans. Today the swing is toward stan- dards. In its extreme form the demand for standards has led to the adoption of the program of Babbitt and More. If we must have standards, some of the critics seem to be saying, let us get them ready made. Humanism, emboldened by the acquisition of these converts and encouraged by the debacle of the early twenties, is transferring its pulpit from the academic halls to the pages of the popular magazines, and its evangelistic campaign is getting results. But Babbittean humanism, though it assumes the con- trary, has no monopoly in this matter of standards, nor does it find the impressionists its only enemies. A most cursory examination of contemporary criticism calls attention to Clifton Fadiman's pleas for more emphasis on technique and more study of European products, to Irwin Edman's labors of mediation in philosophy and literature, to Edmund Wilson's careful, appreciative, and discriminating studies of contemporary authors, and to Yvor Winters's emphatic and original essays on poetry. The school of Van Wyck Brooks has clarified its principles so that its critical dicta rest upon a firmer and broader foundation than that of ten years ago, and it has given us such creditable works as Lewis Mumford's "The Golden Age" and "Herman Melville," Newton Arvin's "Hawthorne," and T. K. Whipple's "Spokesmen." These critics have not found it necessary to promulgate the fourteen points of their literary credos, but it is a mistake to assume that they are without their guiding stars. Quite as strongly as the humanists, they repudiate the theories of impressionism. In poetry the reaction has centered in T. S. Eliot. There are unmistakably romantic elements in Eliot's work, but his rejection of the expansiveness of Sandburg and Lindsay, his substitution of compression for diffuseness, and his choice of subjects — all distinguish him from the poets of Louis Unter- meyer's renascence. Moreover, many of the poets whose early work Eliot influenced have moved even farther from the position of the middle generation. At the same time there have been many capable poets quite unaffected by Eliot's work. As a result, the diversity of modern poetry is its most obvious quality, and — which is as it should be — it is impos- sible to include even any considerable portion of contem- porary verse within a single generalization. It is clear, however, that some of our poets are con- sciously opposed to middle-generation ideals, and that almost all of them have found new aims and new methods. If one thinks of Yvor Winters and Hart Crane, of Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, of Leonie Adams and Louise Bogan, and of Archibald MacLeish and Phelps Putnam, one sees the change that has taken place in American poetry since the days of Sandburg, Masters, and Lindsay, of Amy Lowell, H.D., and John Gould Fletcher. Even Robinson and Frost we admire for different reasons than those offered in 1920. We are wise to avoid extravagant encomiums, but we have little reason for complaint about the present state of poetry. The novelists, however, are less impressive. The influence of the older school continues, and too often its faults have been more persistent than its virtues. Where newer methods are apparent their merits are not entirely clear. The new barbarism, as it has been called, is frequently an exaggeration of some of the less admirable qualities of the middle-generation novelists. The preoccupation with form displayed by Thornton Wilder and one or two others has as yet yielded nothing extraordinary. The shadow of Joyce hangs over many of the younger writers, and so far it has seemed to blight their talents. One watches with interest — but not without perturbation — the careers of Elizabeth Roberts, Glenway Wescott, and Ernest Hemingway. One must approve the increase of objectivity and the growing concern with technique, and one can sympathize with the determination of the new generation to have nothing to do with the easy satire of Lewis, the autobiographical methods of the Moon-Calf school, and the amorphous grotesqueness of Dreiser ; but so far there is little enough to which we can point with pride. If we try to estimate in a semi-statistical fashion the literary progress of the twenties, as Stuart Chase has recently sought to calculate the economic progress, we arrive at re- sults as mixed as his and quite as conducive to only a greatly restrained optimism. We record that the decade began with the production of works that actually raised the level of American literature and that gave promise of a healthy and fruitful development. But we must place over against that the fact that the promise was never kept. We find that in the second half of the decade a different kind of activity began, and we may enter on one side of the ledger the improved state of criticism and the satisfactory condition of poetry. On the other side, however, must be mentioned the dubious situation of the novel and the danger that the reaction in criticism may lead to stultifying excesses. One more entry we may make on the credit side: we may legitimately note the popular interest in books. The enthusiasms of 1920 stimulated the general reading of poetry, drama, and the more serious novels, and this interest has not diminished with the deflation of enthusiasm. We cannot at present determine the value of the book clubs, the cheap books, the large sales. We can see the evils of the various forms of literary racketeering, the teas and other circus

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 185 stunts, the log-rolling, the canned reviews, and the culture- over-night advertising. But a lively and widespread interest in books is intrinsically no evil and potentially a good. One result of the popular concern with books is a greater interest in criticism. Now that the most academic of all critical theories has become a subject of popular discus- sion, it should be possible for any competent critic to win a hearing. I think — perhaps because I hope — that the interest in humanism is only a fad ; if so, the very fact that it has become a fad may prevent it from having any deep or lasting effect upon literary taste. But it will be lamentable if the vogue of humanism does not provide an opportunity for the formulation and presentation of truly humane and philo- sophic views of literature. We have critics, as I have indi- cated, capable of accomplishing such a task, and they can do much to provide for the writers of the future a well- informed, alert, discriminating group of readers. Perhaps a survey of the twenties is not so melancholy an affair as one might think. Repressive taboos and conventions have been cleared out of the way; sad experience has at least indicated the nature of one or two tempting blind alleys; popular interest has been aroused. Professor Perry's salmon may not be running, but I have no intention of throwing away my fishing tackle. Lincoln and His Fate Lincoln. By Emil Ludwig. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. Little, Brown and Company. $5. HERR LUDWIG has, I believe, visited the United States, but this book is his first invasion of us that succeeds, in both senses, in living off the country; his strategy, therefore, like General Sherman's, is perfect. As one scans the long list of this author's publications in English, and pauses at the number, of copies of each that have been sold, one cannot doubt that he is the most popular biographer of our time. Even a cursory inspection of the books themselves yields up the reason why. He is our sole master, among the many falsely so acclaimed, of the art of making history out of fiction and of reversing the process and making fiction out of history; it is the art of conjuring up the intimate historical background, of re-creating, or of simply making up out of whole cloth, the total setting of an event. The method strongly resembles the Gestalt theory of psychology, or would resemble it if that theory were a metaphor and not a labora- tory technique; if the Gestalt psychologist should lose the dis- tinction between observation and invention. Herr Ludwig was aware of the difficulties besetting the path of all Lincoln biographers. He was properly sensitive at the outset to the implications of the task for a foreigner. And he warns us that the American pioneer background, being specially difficult for a modern European to understand, may have betrayed him into mistakes of detail and of historical evaluation. He has consulted all the leading authorities, and yet, says he, "The art of portraying human characters cannot be achieved by merely studying historical documents; it is prac- ticed and learned in a never-ending study of living men and women." This theory of biography is not unlike a certain lady's theory of masculinity, which was so complete and per- fect that in the end she could not tell one man from another and decided that she might as well have affairs with them all. One can easily imagine that, wishing to write about Henry, she would indifferently use her recollections of James and John; all of them being male and human, the same destiny and fate pursues them all. The sole prerequisite to writing about Henry would be an immediate, intuitive, a priori insight into the workings of his "soul," a method of procedure serenely beyond evidence and dispute. I quote Herr Ludwig: In those days, however [twenty years ago], I wrote poetry and no biographies, but in my way I studied Lincoln's life portrait as one of the most human heads ever created. When I began work, his figure was familiar to me, without my knowing much of the external history of his life. Again: ... I can only beg them [the readers] to consider the portrait as a whole and not to be too critical of the minute parts. Lincoln's career, more than that of any other man in history, is so grandly conceived by Fate that the first act is illuminated by the last, and every scene is bound together by dramatic destiny. The miraculous formula, therefore, is this: Add together three pieces of invention, two pieces of misunderstood evidence, six- teen purple metaphors (mixed), and a great historical figure, and you get exactly nothing until you invoke Fate, who can add two oranges, three apples, and one prune, and get six bananas. The first scene is a log cabin in Kentucky where the boy Lincoln is developing a mother-fixation. One expects a speedy return to the womb and the information that after all there will not be a story to tell. Fortunately, however, this theme, like a theme in a Russian symphony, gets lost, in a growing consciousness of class struggle and hatred of slavery. From here on the story moves rapidly, even breathlessly and affect- ingly. For Herr Ludwig is not only a master of invention and of fate; he is a master of narration. You may find a score of inaccuracies in as many pages, but they do not keep you from reading on to the end. Borne on the tide of narra- tive there is a character called Lincoln, enough like the Lincoln we have come to know to make him recognizable; the tide sweeps over a social and political background that is vaguely familiar. We are willing to pass over the slight but cumulative distortion of background and character in order to hear the perfectly self-confident story-teller to the end. The author makes little pretension of dealing in full with the political background of Lincoln's early life, or with the complicated political and military situation of the Civil War. Yet he achieves a remarkable effect of completeness because he succeeds in relating all the cross-purposes of that era to a single libertarian idea, which need not be described here, and because this idea is focused almost entirely upon Lincoln. This is the "dramatic destiny" that Herr Ludwig speaks of; its chief principle of action, we begin to suspect, is main force. For the simple facts will not sustain such a view of the first half of our nineteenth century, and Lincoln's early life will not bear it for a moment. Fate is capable of much, but it cannot make Lincoln an abolitionist ab ovo. One cannot believe that the remote origin of the Lincoln family in New England suffused the Lincoln germ-plasm with anti-slavery doctrine : slaves were still held in New England long after the Lincolns had settled in Vir- ginia. Nor can one wholly believe that the Southern mem- bers of the Constitutional Convention were alone unwilling to send their slaves back to Africa; they were as unwilling as the New England members, who sold theirs to the Southern members. Fate is to blame for such Procrustean evidence: fate must have a clean-cut issue, with the opposition homo- geneous on each side — the one all good, the other all bad. Nor can one believe that Lincoln's anti-slavery attitude, which was the attitude of a majority of the slaveholders, rose out of a feeling of class hatred, that his sympathy for the under-dog

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186 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 was the other side of his hatred for the rich. Nor, in this connection, can one believe that his hatred of the rich was a phase of his resentment against the mythical Virginia gentle- man who was supposed to have been his grandfather; Ludwig admits the mythical character of this story, yet he continues to use it as one of the chief motivating forces in Lincoln's career! No one but a blind partisan of freedom, as this was con- ceived in 1850, could explain the great compromise of that year as a concession to the South: Herr Ludwig, of course, is not such a partisan, but it does sound better to have the noble cause making concessions to the ignoble adversary, whom, in spite of everything, it would have to chasten in the end. This is fate again. The most beautiful example of Herr Ludwig's use of the Weird Sisters is his account of the Booth conspiracy. This conspiracy was not isolated; it was part of a greater one under- taken by accredited Confederate agents which nearly resulted in the burning of New York and in various uprisings every- where in the North. Booth was thus not an obscure maniac, but the instrument of a larger fate — a fate, incidentally, that was to degrade one of the greatest of men to a mob martyr. The conspiracy succeeds, but just retribution overtakes the conspirators. Instead of mentioning Mrs. Surratt by name and telling us that she was never proved to be an accessory to the crime, Herr Ludwig only alludes to her as a "Maryland lady," and lumps the so-called conspirators together as "Southerners all." Ah, those Southerners! They must have been a bad lot. It is a fascinating book, as about one hundred thousand readers will see for themselves. Allen Tate A Man's Book Coronet. By Manuel Komroff. Coward-McCann. $3. NEITHER Coleridge nor Mrs. Woolf would, I believe, call this book the product of an androgynous mind. It is stamped with an unmistakable masculinity, a quality in no way to be confused with that which goes by the same name for the contemporary novelists who strive so desperately merely to establish the degree of their hero's virility or resis- tance to alcohol. Mr. Komroff 's attitude is far more subtle, sophisticated, and traditional. It is evident in his delineation of women, and especially in his treatment of episodes. The de- scription of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow is purely factual; the temptation to permit an emotional interpretation — a woman's temptation — or the necessity to bestow the embellishment of wit upon the incident — the necessity of the androgynous mind such as shows itself in Stendhal's account of Waterloo — is absent. Mr. Komroff deals with war as a warrior would, as a surgeon deals with an operation, as a fact, something which is and which must be gone through. He also deals with women in the same way, with the result that, to a woman, his heroines are lifeless creatures. Fortunately, women are secondary to his theme. Primogeniture being strictly a masculine affair, the crown never graces a woman's head, and adventure, in fiction at least, being masculine too, the ladies are unimportant. "Coronet" is a romance in the best and most spirited mean- ing. It has adventure and extravagance together with that greatest of all virtues of its kind — plausibility. It relates the history of a crown from the time it is wrought by a Florentine goldsmith during the Renaissance, through a century's sojourn in Russia, to the day it is listed among the assets of a titled husband for a Chicago packer's daughter. There is the sug- gestion that the title offers, beside the subject for a plot, the idea of a symbol, that it signifies rank, power, and vainglory, and that the intention of the book is to show that these are evil things, mutable but persistent. The suspense and interest of the story, however, arise from the author's talent. The prestidigi- tation of truth and fiction is flawless — Napoleon, Mademoiselle Georges, the Burins and the Jobeys, Chopin, Balzac, and the Mallets, each is as convincing as the other. The racial and individual stamp is placed on the characters with fine accuracy. Always there is movement and change, a coherent stride in the narration. Florence in the seventeenth century, avaricious, pompous, colorful; Paris under the first Napoleon, nouveau riche, ambitious, vulgar; Moscow and the retreat through Russia, grim, heroic, useless; pre-war Germany and its uni- versities, theoretic, beery, militant; Chicago in the twenties, acquisitive, shrewd, naive — these are the circumstances and in- terpretations, the contrast and variety, the broad range of the setting. Among these scenes is traced the record of five civiliza- tions in a simple, direct language which by its very plainness, like the language of a chronicle, lends worth to the deed. "Coronet" should be a particular solace to those discomfited by the more effeminate literature of the day. Florence Codman More Farewells to War Good-bye to All That. By Robert Graves. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $3. All Our Yesterdays. By H. M.Tomlinson. Harper and Brothers. $2.50. AS was to be expected, the law of diminishing returns has set in. The first shock of horror caused by "All Quiet" has subsided ; and the reading public has settled down to get what it can from the war-book avalanche in the way of morbid thrills and sadistic enjoyments. The propaganda value of volumes such as these by Captain Graves and Mr. Tomlin- son is consequently very slight; and so it is pointless to discuss them as "revelations" or as "searing documents." They are, of course, written by civilized and intelligent men (Graves, at any rate, was intelligent by the time the war got through with him, and Tomlinson has never been anything else), which is to say that they bring against war the bitter and inexorable indict- ment which we should expect from sensitive human beings. I would not even think it worth while to mention this fact were it not that some critics are already beginning purposely to mis- interpret these books; the inevitable counter-reaction of the arm-chair militarists has begun. One English critic (it was Bonamy Dobree) in the course of a review of a number of war books (among them, I believe, Mr. Graves's) spoke sol- emnly of "the almost mystic need of man to test himself against horror," and went on to affirm that "war is still the supreme experience to multitudes of men, and the assurance that they can master fear [is] an overwhelming necessity." It is against this sort of nauseous balderdash that we must guard ourselves; it is from such heroic tosh that honest men and writers such as Graves and Tomlinson will suffer. Because they cultivate a sort of gentlemanly reticence and press their indictments more subtly than the Germans, it may be difficult for some unconscious jingoes to realize that they are as bitter, as disillusioned, as even the most ardent pacifist could wish. It is the quality of that disillusionment and the manner in which it seeks to find its expression in art that are interesting in these two writers, rather than the specific revelations of bru- tality and stupidity (particularly in the case of "Good-bye to All That") which appear to have engrossed English readers. (Why presumably intelligent people should be shocked to learn that their military leaders were bull-headed and "inefficient or that there was little patriotism in the trenches is beyond the power of conjecture.)

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 187 The interesting thing about Graves's autobiography is not that he tells the truth about the war but that it took him so long to discover it. When 1914 broke he swallowed the horror whole. He was only nineteen, of course; but, more importantly, he was a public-school product. It is fascinating to trace the slow transformation in his character. He was brought up to be a member of the English governing class but, even as a child, he persisted in thinking for himself. He was a poet and a rebel — but not quite enough of either. Though he did not know it, by the time he had reached the age of nineteen he had been carefully stuffed with the English brand of athletic idealism. He never questioned the reasons for England's entry into the war; and though he was not at any time a patriot (in the sense of an imbecile), the public-school hangover lasted quite a while. One of the dullest — but most revealing — sections of the book describes — not ironically but with a casual, objective pride — the "glorious history" of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Graves's regiment. The mental immaturity so carefully fostered by the British bureaucracy is beautifully exemplified by the frank contrast Graves draws between his own war attitude and that of his brother-poet Siegfried Sassoon, who refused to continue fighting. Even after Graves was badly wounded and was in line for a discharge, the old poison of his public-school training — plus his disgust with wartime England — made him reply to the examin- ing officer: "No, sir, I should be much obliged if you would pass me fit for service overseas." It is the "gentleman" in him speaking — the ideal which Sassoon threw overboard in short order. "It was suicidal stupidity and credulity, he [Sassoon] said, to identify yourself in any way with good form or gentle- manliness." How Graves gradually lost his childish Kipling- esque pride in his regiment, how under the stress of actuality he began to throw off the educational fetters his country had so carefully forged around him, how when the war was over he realized that he had attained his mental growth (at the expense of four years of horror and the partial maiming of an excellent poetic faculty) — there is the story of "Good-bye to All That." It is a typically British-upper-class document — except that here the man was forced by his intelligence to turn his back on his own class. Mr. Tomlinson's book is a much more ambitious piece of work, maturer, deeper-toned. It is not a personal confession disguised as a novel, but a serious attempt to penetrate back of the causes, not merely of this war, but of all modern strife. His story begins in the days of Mafeking and Bloemfontein and aims to show the unbroken continuity of the war psychology of which each separate conflict is merely a manifestation. The attempt has been made, and I think successfully, to rise above simple indignation and horror into those serener and more con- templative heights to which the author of "The Dynasts" at- tained. The war is strained through that fine and brooding spirit which is uniquely Tomlinson's, and its essence distilled in a prose which is scrupulous to the last degree. It is impossible to find fault with Tomlinson's point of view, despite its occa- sional abstractness and a slight tendency to a sort of sad and cosmic tolerance, modified, however, by a consistent irony. As the work of a reflective, beautifully tempered spirit, "All Our Yesterdays" cannot be too highly praised; but as a novel it leaves much to be desired. In his domain, which stretches from the journalistic commentary to the philosophical essay, Tomlinson is supreme; but neither "Gallions Reach" nor "All Our Yesterdays" convinces me that he is a novelist. I find the structure of this book confusing and disproportionate. I cannot understand the necessity for the long Conradian Nova- bambia section which, while it is beautifully written, is a pretty complicated mechanism to set in motion merely to show us how the colonial ambitions of rival governments produce the germs of war and confound the beneficent morality of science. But the main difficulty lies, I believe, in the wanness of Tomlinson's characterization. He has too acute and original a mind to produce a rubber-stamp character; but he thinks about and" around his people so much and he is so careful to relate them to the mood and the ideology of his narrative that they become, in the end, the efficient tools of a brilliantly gifted essayist rather than the urgent, four-dimensional creations of the born novelist. This is true of his men, particularly Jim Maynard and Charley; but even truer of his women. If one may be permitted to view "All Our Yesterdays" as a long essay on the roots of war, an essay both reflective and dramatic, which utilizes a half-dozen characters somewhat in the manner of an old morality play, one must place it very high. But it was intended to be a novel; and, as a novel, it does not seem to me quite to deserve all the rhetoric that has been showered upon it by the professional critics. Clifton P. Fadiman To One Under a Mountain Cloud By WITTER BYNNER Why, when I know how steadfast nature is And human love how fickle, how untrue, Why in the openness of daytime blue, Or why when the mountain-cloud vanishes, Leaving the peaks miraculous like this With frozen snow and all the trees made new Like veins in flesh with the warm blood flushing through From blood of sunset, why do I count on you Above the quiet of the setting sun, Above the immortal earth that no man wills, Above the night's moonlit oblivion, And spend my thrift upon these passing thrills Of touch, soon to be mortally undone Within the glory of the darkening hills! Sanctuary By BABETTE DEUTSCH Paint — sullen blues, low muted reds, and hot Yellows that blaze, netting the South alive ; Hills, houses, body's grace, three fruits, a pot: Shapes whose sheer poise throbs like a secret hive. . . . Sound — climbing out of time and over time, The issue and the womb ; sweet sound, the pit Dissolving bone and marrow as in lime, While the fugitive spirit's laughter floats over it. . . . Though the strong minds that patterned sound and paint Are quenched, though all our joy in them attend The sure humiliation of our end, These are the tabernacle beyond taint, Even as those holy doors that anciently Women stricken clutched, to prop a bold infirmity.

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188 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 Salt in the Sauce Not en the Screen. By Henry B. Fuller. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. THOSE bad sociologists who are sometimes thought good literary critics must have a hard time explaining Henry B. Fuller in terms of his environment. All his life he lived in Chicago, and all his life he spoke in the quietest voice to be heard from any man of letters in America. Nor did he, as the bad sociologists might hasten to suggest that he did, lower his voice out of any sense of inferiority in the presence of Chicago. One of the most informed and most intelligent of the novelists of his day, he had a courage to match his mind. He cut off heads (as in "Under the Skylights") no less thor- oughly because he did it politely, and ventured upon perilous themes (as in "Bertram Cope's Year") no less firmly because he did it delicately. If he spoke quietly it meant only that he had by nature a quiet voice. In any other age, though he might have used a different form or idiom, he would have spoken in the same pitch. And in any other age, though he might have been heard more easily, he would not have been heard much more widely than he was. Human ears are not sensitive enough. Mr. Fuller's posthumous "Not on the Screen" was plainly suggested to him by the contrast which suggested Elmer Rice's "Voyage to Purilia" — lately a serial and a bore in the New Yorker. Life on the motion-picture screen, it occurred to both of these writers, is remarkably unlike life anywhere else. Mr. Rice proved his point by laying his action in the imagined universe of the movies, and then, as it happened, blunted it by multiplying his evidence till ingenuity became monotony. Mr. Fuller laid his action in a more substantial universe, only now and then pointing to the contrast between what does take place and what might, in the movies, have taken place. In the end Mr. Rice had made a picture puzzle too full of tricks, and Mr. Fuller had made a novel almost full of flesh and blood. To that extent the quiet voice has been justified. Still, the novel is not quite full of flesh and blood, or at least the blood never hurries and the flesh never demands. There is, for example, a love story which brings a young man and a young woman to an engagement five chapters before the end, but there is not a kiss between them anywhere in the book. The only approach to any such carnal gesture is a mere attempt on the part of the villain. The absence of a kiss, surely lawful in these circumstances, is a symptom of the gen- eral absence of salt in the characters, wherever else it may be in the story. The novelist has chosen to follow a strictly clas- sical pattern in an account of a young man who comes to the city, slowly makes his way, meets and courts a girl, distances rivals and overcomes the opposition of her family, and wins her and a reasonable prosperity at about the same time. The movies have taught the readers of fiction to expect a great deal of thunder and lightning in such a plot. It is Mr. Fuller's point that, on the whole, nothing more need be expected than a few rainy days and a little discomfort. To press the point he leans backward, guarding against outward excitements and incidentally suppressing most of the natural inner excitements as well. This formal pattern, this respectable decorum, however, turn out to be far from fatal to the book. Though Mr. Fuller left the salt out of his meat he put plenty of it in his sauce. He disappoints romantic expectations with a contagious delight. Holding his narrative tight in a classic mold, he permits himself the freedom of an unceasing classic irony which plays over the action in every sentence. That irony, being fully conscious, somehow warms the story as by reflected light. Even where it is prim it is bright and shrewd. Even where it is most reticent it always pierces in its quiet way. It demands that the reader meet the writer on the common ground of a critical intelligence which can smile over the drama here presented, but it can be counted on to please any reader who occupies that ground, slyly beguiling him from page to page, through episodes that are humorous because they are so actual, to a conclusion that is convincing because it is so unemphatic. Carl Van Doren Herbert Read, Critic The Sense of Glory. By Herbert Read. Harcourt, Brace an Company. $3. HERBERT READ appeals to the writer as one of the most important of living English critics. Though he is not yet well known in this country, it is my con- viction that "The Sense of Glory" will bring him a wide audi- ence among intelligent readers. From my point of view he is a more worth-while critic than T. S. Eliot, and there is every reason to hope that his influence will become as great as Eliot's. For Read accomplishes the difficult task of combining four ele- ments that are necessary to a complete criticism in this genera- tion. He bases his critical methodology on science. He has a remarkable capacity for defining terms. He can live into the minds of diverse writers and clearly and sympathetically explain them. And he offers an ideal for the literary life which, while one may regard it with dubiety, still does not offend one. The first requirement for a truly modern literary criti- cism is that it incorporate into its methodology the relevant contributions of the ancillary sciences. Read meets this require- ment excellently. In his "Reason and Romanticism," a some- what fragmentary and inadequate book in many ways but in- dispensable to an understanding of Read, he states emphatically this necessity. For instance, to illustrate his method of incor- porating science into his procedure, he devotes considerable space to elaborating his conception of the possible contribution of psycho-analysis, particularly that of Jung, to literary criticism. Read takes up Jung's conception of the two major types of mentality, the extrovert and the introvert, and makes excellent use of it. He uses Jung's definitions of the peculi- arities of these types to show that so-called romantic and clas- sical literatures are but the logical literary expressions of the two types of minds. In this way he leads up naturally to that eclecticism which allows him to write sympathetically of Sterne, Swift, the Brontes, and Smollett. His ability to define terms also emerges .in "Reason and Romanticism," particularly in his brilliant essays on metaphysi- cal poetry and on comedy. This passion for the exact use of terms, this ability to dissociate ideas and arrive at an exact meaning for loosely used terms, is necessary today when litera- ture is being rescued from the hands of careless thinkers. Though this sort of thing can quickly run into idle pedantry (witness the exercises of Irving Babbitt), at its best it is immensely fruitful. And in Read you have it at its best. Observe it at work in "Phases of English Poetry." Read's literary ideal has been implicit in all of his books, but it emerges most clearly in "The Sense of Glory." T. S. Eliot did Read a distinct disservice when he asserted that Read was a sort of neo-Thomist. He is not, if I understand him; and his only admiration for St. Thomas is for the latter's immense ability to define terms. The truth is that Eliot has reached the stage where he must perforce find Him under the bed of everyone he happens for some reason to admire. Read, with his scientific bias, could not be a neo-Thomist. (Inci- dentally, he remarks that there is no scientific tradition in Eng-

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 189 Nation Readers Will Find These Seven Books. Worthwhile More than Biography — the Human Story of the Qreat American LINCOLN By EMIL LUDW1G Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul A full-length life of the martyred President from his obscure beginnings to his tragic end— told in the same penetrating manner as this eminent German biographer's lives of Napoleon and Bismarck, It is an extremely vital and sympathetic portrait of Lincoln that Ludwig has given us in this new biography — one that will be widely read and warmly appreciated. With 15 illustrations, principally portraits, from the Frederick H. Meserve collection. A large octavo of 505 pages. Cloth. $5.00 THE SUNKEN FLEET By Helmut Lorenz One of Germany's naval heroes, writing often of his own exploits, tells a moving and unusually vivid story, re- vealing, for the first time, many German naval opera- tions during the World War. Translated by S.H. Cross. $2.50 THREE WOMEN: St. Teresa, Madame de Choiseul, Mrs. Eddy By H. E. Wortham Intimate, graphic and witty prose portraits of three women whose qualities made them a power in their own day and beyond. With 3 illustrations. An Atlantic Book. $3.50 A LANDLUBBER'S LOG: Around the World as Sailor and Tramp By ARTHUR WARNER "Mr. Warner's book seems to me one of the truest I have ever read. He turns out to be one of those travelers — like Richard Henry Dana, John Muir and Jack London — who know how to make the literal truth more charming than any set of- symbols or any system of ideas we might be disposed to dress it in. Mr. Warner is one of those valuable persons who take a quiet pleasure in everything they see or do. Everything has its point for him, everything rests comfortably in its natural setting. The result is that we once more are reminded that the earth is a good wide place chiefly remark- able for its reality." — Mark Van Doren in The New York Herald Tribune. $3.00 THE WRIGHT BROTHERS: Fathers of Flight By John R. McMahon The first complete account, based on unpublished letters, diaries and data obtained from the family, of the great inven- tors and their achievements. With 24 illustrations. $2.50 THE DECISIVE WARS OF HISTORY: A Study in Strategy By Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart A challenging analysis of campaigns from the Persian invasion of Greece in 490 B.C. to the end of the World War, by a famous military critic. 8 maps. An Atlantic Book. $4.00 COLUMBUS : Don Quixote of the Seas By JACOB WASSERMANN Translated by Eric Sutton This biography by a famous novelist, with whom the history of Columbus has been a life study, aims at discovering the real man behind the legend and romance. And there emerges a strange, dark, entrancing figure, a dreamer with little sense of reality, a man full of weakness and even failure, when not inspired by his mighty idea. Wassermann pictures Columbus with urbanity, humor and detach- ment. He is unsparing, but never unsympathetic, and his novelist's insight and his research into the sources have enabled him to re-create this tremendous human being — no longer a figure on a pedestal — but heroic in his achievement. With 8 illustrations. - $3.50 • These hooUs are for sale at all Booksellers Boston LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY Publishers When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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190 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 lish criticism, which makes his task extremely difficult.) His literary ideal is quite other and is expressed in the title of the book under review. Unfortunately, he nowhere states exactly what "the sense of glory" means, though he insists that we should recover it. But from a close reading of this book I hazard the opinion that his argument runs something like this: Admit- ting that the world at present is immensely depressing to sen- sitive mentalities, as depressing as Aldous Huxley at his worst would have it, we must nevertheless live and work as if life were important — at the top of our bent, bring all our facul- ties to the service of the search for truth and to the creation of a sustaining philosophy for living. The difficulty comes with the as if. It is an assumption difficult to make. Most of us do assume some such position, whether consciously or unconsciously, but when we are called upon to live with a deliberately assumed sense of glory, we balk. It seems a futile exercise in raising ourselves by our bootstraps, and we cannot but point out that Read's examples do not help us much. We feel more sympathetic with subjects like Swift than with Froissart, Malory, or Hawthorne, though he analyzes and presents them all with equal brilliance. It is not that we do not admit the value of the literature these writ- ers produced, but that we cannot assume the attitude toward life which they unconsciously assumed. Unless the sense of glory grows out of our life naturally and inevitably, it will simply be another ideal offered to us, and rejected — a more sensible ideal than Anglo-Catholicism or the Sense of the Whole, but in the end just as useless. To close this review on a note of praise, I call to the reader's attention the essay on Henry James and especially the eloquent closing pages. C. Hartley Grattan As If a Skeleton Were Singing Circumference. Varieties of Metaphysical Verse, 1456-1928. Edited with a Preface by Genevieve Taggard. Covici- Friede. $6. IN the preface to her bold and far from commonplace anthol- ogy Miss Taggard has attempted one of the most difficult of critical tasks — the definition, namely, of that kind of poetry which Dr. Johnson none too wisely called "metaphysi- cal." The poetry to which Johnson applied this word had been written the century before by Donne and Cowley and a hun- dred other ingenious men. The poetry which Miss Taggard has in mind, and of which she gives us many examples, was written not only in that century but in the century of Johnson himself and in the two centuries following him — is written, indeed, with particular success today. Johnson was not in his own opinion paying this poetry a compliment when he gave it such a name; he was pointing, rather, to a species of poetic error. Miss Taggard bestows the term in all reverence upon that kind of poetry which she considers best. Another difficult critical task would seem to be the reconciliation of Dr. Johnson and Miss Taggard. They agree rather nicely, as a matter of fact, when it comes to describing metaphysical poetry. Johnson employed a different language, but his emphasis, like Miss Taggard's in part, is upon the ingenuity of the stuff — that ingenuity which once went under the name of wit and in the seventeenth cen- tury went often under the name of fancy. "Wit," William Davenant had said, "is the laborious and the lucky resultances of thought. It is a web consisting of the subtlest threads; and like that of the spider is considerately woven out of ourselves. Wit is not only the luck and labor, but also the dexterity of thought, rounding the world, like the sun, with unimaginable motion, and bringing swiftly home to the memory universal When writing to advertisers HARPER BOOKS DISCUSSED THIS SPRING Pure Gold By O. E. Rolvaag, Author of "Giants in the Earth" and "Peder Victorious" • • • The Story of the grim power with which the gold of itself and in its symbo- lism as money, fastens its claws into the souls of two human beings. An immensely powerful picture, standing as if hewn in granite." — The Booh Review $2.50 The 42nd Parallel By John Dos Passos . . . The first novel in five years by the man of whom Sinclair Lewis said, "Dos Passos may be, more than Dreiser, Cather, Hergesheimer, Cabell or Anderson, the father of humanized and living fiction — not merely for America, but for the world!" $2.50 The Missing Masterpiece By Hilaire BellOC, with inimitable drawings by G. K. Chesterton ... 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"An excellent, carefully written and thoroughly adequate biography." —/V. V. Eve. Post lllus. $4.00 A Diary of ST* Helena Containing the conversations of Napoleon with Sir Pulteney Malcolm 1816-17. $2.50 please mention The Nation

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 191 surveys." A metaphysical prose-poem in itself, this definition ; and it speaks in praise of processes which Johnson on the whole condemned — processes resulting in conceits, tortured images, and overelaborate originality. Miss Taggard praises them once again. They produce for her "the concrete word," "the dazzling concept"; they are the sign of a poet "born with a salty sanity in his bones," and "with a coldness that makes it possible for the mind to probe itself, as it writes of itself, lavishly and unmercifully." They are the processes through which, if we are good poets, we learn "to give an idea no form but itself, to show it as organic by an inner music, as if the bones of a skeleton were singing in their own rhythm." People write well when they write about metaphysical poetry. Miss Taggard does; Dr. Johnson did, and Dryden, and Davenant. And no wonder, since the thing in itself is so wonderful. But they all seem to be writing about different things. Miss Taggard has her own special moral, which is, finally, that "for the metaphysical poet Science is the freedom of the universe, liberating a vast unused mentality; the excite- ment of enormous sweeps, the dizziness of looking in all directions at the surrounding fact." This is interesting and fine, but I should say something quite different, since difference is in order. I suspect that the metaphysical poet is never so uncomfortable as when he is free; that he abhors vastnesses of mentality; that he wants no enormous sweeps. He inhabits instead a precious and terrible little world of his own making — one he has made, perhaps, in defense against these open spaces, and one in which he plays with nothing more momentous than combinations — sometimes lucky, sometimes laborious — of curi- ous ideas. His world is his own intellect, his personal mind, and it is no bigger than a nutshell; but fuller, for it has an infinite number of cavities, and much sweet meat, and many worms. Miss Taggard's own favorites, Donne and Emily Dickinson, were personal in this fashion. My notion is that science has nothing to do with the case. Yet I could never prove Miss Taggard wrong, and at any rate she is to be thanked for having brought up the whole subject again in a few highly suggestive pages. Her collection of poems, from William Dunbar to T. S. Eliot and many another modern, is of course a rich one. In some instances I could not fathom the principle of inclusion — as when, after a demonstration in the preface that Milton and Keats are not metaphysical poets, I found poems by Milton and Keats. It would have been better to be strict and leave them entirely out. Donne is the hero of the collection, natur- ally, but Herbert and Vaughan are fully represented, and Emily Dickinson only somewhat less fully. Among the Ameri- can contemporaries of Miss Taggard the note seems to be struck best by Leonie Adams, Louise Bogan, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Phelps Putnam, Allen Tate, and Wallace Stevens. Mark Van Doren L Martin Luther Martin Luther: A Destiny. By Lucien Febvre. Translated from the French by Roberts Tapley. E. P. Dutton and V Company. $3.75. \ f ERE is an excellent book that deserves, but does not , require, a long review, for it may be commended un- \ qualifiedly as one of the best written and most inter- esting biographies of recent years, and it seems to have lost nothing through the translation. The author tells us in his preface, however, that it is not a biography, "nor yet an esti- mate. The plan has been rather to plot the curve of a destiny which was simple but tragic; to establish accurately the few genuinely important points through which it passed . . . and When writing to advertisers New Books Worth Owning The Testament of Beauty By ROBERT BRIDGES, Poet Laureate "Places him with the Masters." — Lola Ridges in the N. Y. Eve. Post. "A noble experiment." — Percy Hutchison in the N. Y. Times. Best selling non-fiction in England. 1000 copies sold on publication day in United States. Recommended by Book-of-the-Month Club and Literary Guild. $3.50 TRADITION and EXPERIMENT in Present-Day Literature T. S. Eliot, Rebecca West, Edmund Blunden, Ashley Dukes, Edith Sitwell and others chart the currents of the modern novel, poetry, drama, biography and criticism. $2.50 MODERN COSMOLOGIES By Hector Macphersom The story of man's expanding vision of the proportions and size of the universe from the sun-worshippers and astrologists of Nineveh and the homocentric philosophers of 300 years ago to modern scientists, who place our solar system as a small spiral among two million systems. A book of solid facts that will fire the imagination. $2.50 WAR AND PEACE (7 volume edition) By Leo Tolstoy Tolstoy's greatest novel in one volume, on Oxford India paper, 1,584 pages, \% in. thick. It is the unexpurgated translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude, authorized by Tolstoy himself. $3.00 POEMS OF JOHN DONNE Edited by H. J. C. Grierson The extravagance and revolt of his early poems have made Donne popular in our rampant age. Collectors will welcome this edition as the most authentic and inexpensive to be had. $2.50 TEN GREEK PLAYS Of Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes The cream of Greek Literature, translated by Gilbert Murray, and others, have been hitherto available only at 90c each. The most popular of these famous translations, in one volume, is an obvious bargain at $3.50 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 114 Fifth Avenue, New York please mention The Nation

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192 thus finally to open up, with respect to this singularly forceful character, the basic question of history, the question, namely, of the relationship between the individual and the mass, be- tween personal initiative and public necessity." The central thought of the book could not be better stated. M. Febvre por- trays in a fascinating style the dramatic struggle between the complex soul of Luther and the social forces of his time; he has also succeeded in giving his subject an excellent historical set- ting, through his intimate knowledge of the period, without encumbering it with too many details. Though popularized, this is a biography not lacking in keen psychological analysis or scholarship. In the opinion of the reviewer, the book is not inferior in quality or interest to the writings of such inter- preters of character as Lytton Strachey or Andre Maurois. Karl F. Geiser A Comedy of Errors The Man a Woman Marries. By Victor Cox Pedersen. Minton, Balch and Company. $2.50. AS a subject for literary discourse matrimony is gain- ing steadily. Last season brought us an elaborate statistical survey by Macgowan and Hamilton and another by Groves and Ogburn, and there were scores of minor studies and hosts of articles. To this list must now be added Dr. Pedersen's "The Man a Woman Marries." Without losing time on loose talk the physician plunges in medias res. The first section of his book is devoted to a matter-of-fact discussion of the mechanics and physiology of sex, a discussion that would do justice to a book on biology. The reader is encouraged: perhaps, at last, an objective analy- sis of the entire subject without sentimentalities! He is, however, doomed to disappointment. The very next section introduces a prehistoric retrospect bristling with inaccuracies. We are told that the "social standing of early races is indi- cated by the weight and complexity of their brains" (page 36). One is not quite sure just what this means, but no matter — it is wrong anyway. Then an oft-buried ghost arises: "The earliest organization of society was matriarchy" (page 39). The author has read Lowie's "Primitive Society" but he has not read it well enough. Again: "Capture of women of a neighboring tribe is exogamous activity rudely securing a mate outside the territorial, social, and political relations of the group of the man" (page 40). But where does the author find evidence of such "capture"? As to "exogamous activity," it always refers to intermarriages between clans or other groups of assumed relatives belonging to the same political and, usually, territorial unit. Next comes Morgan's old list of the stages of the family (page 41). The stages, we are told, "are theoretical but probably final" (meanwhile Lowie's book, dis- proving the stages, lies by unopened). The list, as given, would not mean much to the lay reader; does it to the author? Nor is there relief when the author returns to history and modernity. The confusion here encountered is truly amazing. This is what we read on page 61 : Other attributes toward the loved one which sex underlies are: 1. Jealousy or resistance to interference; 2. Desire to share all burdens; 3. General obligation; 4. Patriotism and humanitarianism or extension of the obligation to community, country, and race; 5. Modesty and prudery strangely lead to needless strain and com- bat contradictory to parental impulses; 6. Indecency and immodesty affect both sexes and spring from mental de- fects and lead to moral excesses. They are abnormal reversions to the ancestral type of mind. The rest is an alloy of evolutionary orthodoxy — in the classical manner — and puritanical morality. Monogamy may When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation "Brimming with Human Interest" FOR THE DEFENCE The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall By EDWARD MARJORIBANKS Unflagging Interest "A vast mine of criminal literature. The reviewer, to whatever pitch of interest he may have been aroused, and to what un- flagging attention he may have been held, cannot in any wise reproduce the book . . . Brimming with what is commonly called 'human interest.'" — New York Times. Thrilling Biography "It is by all odds the most inspiring and thrilling biography now available ... A book that sparkles with keen logic matched against the tricks and the devices and best brains of criminal detection." — Brooklyn Eagle. A Nudge to Connoisseurs "Well worth buying, if only for the large, generous portions the author supplies of accounts of his subject's most celebrated cases. And most of the best ones in England these forty years are set out again in these pages. Once more a nudge to connoisseurs." — William Bolitho in the New York World. FOR THE DEFENCE Fifth Large Printing At all Bookstores $5.00 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 193 be all right, but may we assume, just like that, that it is, or that it is superior to polygamy? With reference to women the author has good intentions; he fights valiantly against all assumptions of sex inferiority, yet we read with reference to school work (page 214) : "The girls are the more faithful in effort. The boys have a deeper grasp of any subject"; and a little farther on: "All general characteristics of the sexes are mutually helpful." Birth control is rejected, and as a recipe for "sexual balance" we get this: "Regular exercise — indoors where outdoors cannot be had — simple not stimulating diet, inspiring, cultural, not suggestive, salacious reading, actual accomplishments not idleness." We fear for sexual balance! In a book on the man a woman marries, one might ex- pect an analysis of physical traits likely to affect sexual selec- tion, something of the compatibility of types (Goethe's "affini- ties"), some comments on respect for personality, on personal freedom, on the shift of attitudes ushered in with the arrival of the "modern woman." Of all this not a word; instead, numer- ous and often highly veiled uses of the word "consideration": a man (the one a woman marries) must have consideration. With this assured, the woman may go ahead. Alexander Goldenweiser The Testament of Beauty The Testament of Beauty. By Robert Bridges. Oxford Uni- versity Press. $3.50. ROBERT BRIDGES, Poet Laureate of England, was born in 1844; he has lived, therefore, through three lit- erary periods and has seen three well-defined shifts of scene. As a young man he must have been influenced by all that concerned Alfred Tennyson in his poetical epitomizing of the Victorian Age: its religious doubt and insecure faith, its attempt at fortification against the scientific revolution, its moral primness and ugly industrialism. Later he endured the nineties, fin de siecle, a period of pessimism and sensualism whose main dogmas were Impressionism and Art for Art's Sake; and at last he came upon the contemporary scene: he saw Science conquer, and a new Psychology begin to question even the integrity of the thinking mind ; he saw Industrialism in com- plete command of human lives, and, worst of all, he lived to watch a war blot out all evidence of spiritual progress. He has continued after that war to observe a disillusioned group of men who have never known youth or idealism. Now, in the face of all this evidence against faith and hope, he has had the courage to publish, in his eighty-sixth year, his Testament of Beauty, a long poem comparable in its purpose of teaching and prophesying to Wordsworth's Prelude and Excursion. In this poem Mr. Bridges rededicates himself to the creed announced in 1876 in his "Growth of Love": I will be what God made me, nor protest Against the bent of genius in my time, That science of my friends robs all the best, While I love beauty and was born to rhyme. "The Testament of Beauty" is not a protest; it is an argu- ment and, to Mr. Bridges, a proof that Beauty will prevail, that all forces work toward a greater spirituality in men and toward a consequent greater Art; it is indeed a survey of the past with intent to force the conclusion that man's moral and aesthetic progress is one and the same, and that this progress points necessarily toward a conventional morality and religion. The compulsion toward religion remains important to his argu- ment, but the religious emotion is lost through the author's attempt to use such modern abstractions as Force, Mind, Law, when he means God. If Mr. Bridges's argument remains un- convincing in view of the discoveries of history, science, an- INTELLIGENT BOOKS Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Uirgincd Mind by Edwin Franden Dakin A new popular edition of the biography booksellers are boycotted for selling, which contains new material as well as every word in the five-dollar edition, of which three large, printings have been completely sold. Heywood Broun declared: "This amazing woman looms three-dimensional, credible, and engrossing from his pages. ^t tjje amazing pr{ce 0J §2.oo Loo\Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe " Lifts contemporary fic- tion into the realm of pas- sionate and penetrating poetry." — Irwin Edman. Third large printing. $2. 50 Essays by James G. Hune\er Selected with an introduc- tion by H. L. Mencken "The essays glow with im- perishable fire." — Harry Hansen, New York World. $3-50 A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway 4 'A remarkably beautiful book." — The Nation. 4 'Here is genius.11 — Fanny Butcher, Chicago Tribune. 4 'The best novel by any living American." — Heywood Broun. "Modern writing at its finest." —The New Yorker. $2.50 Seledled Poems Poets, Farewell / of Qonrad Aiken by Edmund Wilson " He is America's outstand- ing maker of brilliant verse." — Percy Hutchi- son in the New York Times. S3.00 Poems from a pen that is gay, satirical, beautiful, sophisticated. $2.00 At all boo\stores Charles Scribner's Sons / New York When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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194 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 thropology, and psychology, if the proof is based upon an ephemeral idealism with which we today have little patience, this may not necessarily condemn the poem as poetry. Many a poet has gone badly astray in manipulating argument. But since, with the exception of the gracefully medieval tone of the Introduction, poetry here is freighted much too heavily with argument and philosophical jargon; since, indeed, most of "The Testament of Beauty" cannot be called poetry at all — even in its ineptly applied literary echoes of earlier poets, its pallid allegory, archaisms, inversions, and rhetoric — but is rather a prose tract cast into verse, we may consider its logic and its argument rather than its poetic quality. Doubtless Mr. Bridges himself realizes something of the difference between the technique of this, his latest work, and the quality of those delicate and charming lyrics by which he is most likely to be remembered; doubtless he would lead his readers to a con- sideration of his thought, for he has, in his Testament, taken the tone of an instructor. "The Testament of Beauty" is divided into an Introduc- tion announcing that the poem is to be a Vision, and then into three parts, Selfhood, Breed, and Ethick. The Vision becomes in the second part much less allegorical and much more argu- mentative than the Introduction leads us to expect. The sym- bols are the two horses and their charioteer as employed in the apocalyptic imagery: The Vision of the Seer is Truth's Apocalypse, yet needeth for our aid a true interpreter. The names of the two horses are Selfhood and Breed, the charioteer is Reason. Selfhood, the first horse, is the Ego, the selfishness in human beings, but this force may and does grow more altruistic: Selfhood is fundamental and universal in all individual Being, and that thru Motherhood it came in animals to altruistic feeling and thence after in men rose to spiritual affection. Breed, on the other hand, is the instinct to propagate and is defined as follows: Now Breed is to the race as Selfhood to the individual; and these two prime Instincts as they differ in purpose are independent each from other, and separate as are organic tracts in animal body whereby they function; and tho' Breed is needful alike to plants and animals, yet its apparatus is found in animals of more special kind; and since race-propagation might have been assured without differentiation of sex, we are elect to guess nature's intention from its full effect in man: Breed, too, develops toward a higher spirituality: Breed then together with Selfhood steppeth in pair, for as Self grew thru' Reason from animal rage to vice of war and gluttony, but meanwhile uprose thru' motherly yearning to profounder affection, So Breed, from like degrading brutality at heart, distilleth in the altruism of spiritual love to be the sublimest passion of humanity, with parallel corruption; The evolution of both Selfhood and Breed toward higher spirit- uality may be brought about through Reason, which, in turn, develops its special science of individual and social Ethick- But before this satisfactory sublimation may be reached, the poet is put to some difficulties of argument and proof which should detain us. The chief difficulty in proving the growth of Selfhood toward altruism is war. How can war be considered as a step toward progress? How is Mr. Bridges to explain this latest catastrophe, if we have progressed very far toward spiritual evaluation? VICTOR HUGO by Raymond Escholier For the first time the real romance of this greatest of French poets and novelists is revealed. "Escholier is acquainted better than anyone else with the corre- spondence and the archives of the poet. He has written a book that is thoroughly accurate and that could not fail to be interesting, for Hugo's life is quite beauti- ful."— Andre Maurois $5.00 FIREHEAD by Lola Ridge "The exquisite understanding of this poem combined with the music of its verse makes it inevitably the most important writing in its field." — New York Post $2.30 FROLIC WIND by Richard Oke "A staunchly built tale of four sisters who lived with their peacocks on the estate at Pagnell Bois. Has a malicious sparkle. "-N.Y. Tilt- £rdm."Dclicately funny, tendcraad wise." F.F. Vandt Watir $2. 50 OREGON DETOUR by Nard Jones "A tough-fibred epic of love and death in the Oregon wheat country." — New York Post .... $2.30 IDOLS BEHIND ALTARS by Anita Brenner A book not about Mexico, but of it. "A noble book and a gallant intellectual achievement." — William Soskin . $3.00 THE OMNIBUS OF CRIME by Dorothy L. Sayers A volume that will in years to come clearly stand as the classic anthology of stories of mystery and detection. . $3.00 JOHN BROWN The Making of a Martyr by Robert Penn Warren An intensely vivid portrait of the blackbrowed zealot of Pottawa- tomie and Harper's Ferry. Illustrated . $5.00 BREWER & WARREN, Inc. 6 E. 53rd St. NEW YORK When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 195 And of War she (Reason) would say: it ranketh with those things that are like unto virtue, but not virtue itself: rather, in the conscience of spiritual beauty, a vice that needeth expert horsemanship to curb, yet being nativ in the sinew of selfhood, the life of things, the pride of animals, and virtue of savagery, so long as men be savage such it remaineth. \ statement meaning, I take it, that man is still savage. Under Breed Mr. Bridges is forced into a discussion un- :ongenial to him concerning sex and marriage and the :hanging attitudes toward these. After a brief history of lations who have been ruined through immorality, and a brief listory of marriage from its lower forms of polygamy and >olyandry, he makes this statement: Now 'tis a backsliding and treason against nature when women will unsex their own ideal of Love, and ignorantlv aiming to be in all things as man, would make love as men make it — tho' Sappho did thatt, who rare among women for manly mastery of art, A Nonsuch of her kind, exceeded by default, nondescript, and for lack of the true femine borrow'd effeminacy of men, the incontinents, who, ranking with gluttons in Aristotle's book, made a lascivious pleasure of their Lesbian loves; kVomen, the poet concludes, are made not to be artists but •ather to be mothers ; as artists they can only ape men or ape Sappho, but as mothers they are unique and unexcelled. As :or the history of marriage it proves the supremacy of monog- imy, and he clinches his argument with this final analogy: Refusal of christian marriage is, as 'twer in art to impugn the credit of the most beautiful things because there are so few of them, and hold it folly to aim at excellence where so few can succeed. With these problems decided upon, Mr. Bridges can con- clude that the boundary between Matter and Mind will became ixed, that terrestrial life will evolve toward conscience, and inally, that through personal prayer: Reason (say I) wil rise to awareness of its rank in the Ring of Existence, where man looketh up to the first cause of all ; and wil itself decree and order discreetly the attitude of the soul seeking self-realization in the vision of God and The attraction of this motion (this evolution) is our consience of it, our love of wisdom and of beauty; and the attitude of those attracted wil be joyful obedience with reverence to'rd the omnificent Creator and First Cause, whose Being is thatt beauty and wisdom which is apprehended only and only approach'd by right understanding of his creation, and found in that habit of faith which some thinkers have styled The Life of Reason. And it is to this Life of Reason the poet would persuade us. This heavily documented argument is offered as proof of the -volution of all baser instincts toward a higher spirituality. If he persuades us more directly through the one or two more exalted lyrical passages in the Introduction and in the closing Vision of a Sunset throughout the world, then this is nothing more than a statement that Poetry is not a vehicle, save indirectly, for teachings or philosophy, but may persuade only by the stirring af the emotions, a truth which Mr. Bridges regretfully acknowl- edges in closing: Verily by Beauty it is that we come at Wisdom, yet not by Reason at Beauty: and now with many words pleasing myself betimes I am fearing lest in the end Everywhere A Best Seller "A romance on the grand scale. Grand writing." — New York Sun. "The sensa- tion of the moment in book circles." — Chicago Tribune. "Runs at breakneck speed from the Italian Renaissance to 1919. For sheer story telling it would be hard to match. ' '— N. Y. Herald-Tribune. $3-00 CORON ET By MANUEL KOMROFF OUR SINGING STRENGTH An Outline of American Poetry (1620-1930) By ALFRED KREYMBORG "A glorious book — the richest survey of American poetry that has ever been written." — John Hay ties Holmes $5-00 KING SPIDER Some Aspects of the Life of Louis XI of France By D. B. WYNDHAM LEWIS Author of "FRANCOIS VILLON" With this book in your hands you can "spend an evening altogether delightful and profitable, in the company of Louis XI and his contemporaries." — Saturday Review Illustrated $5-00 THE TWO FRONTIERS By JOHN GOULD FLETCHER Russia and America compared and differentiated. "Profound and fascinating" — Lewis Mumford. "A powerful and stimulating conception of human history." — John Carter $3.00 DISARMAMENT By SALVADOR de MADARIAGA Selected by the American Peace Foundation as one of the fifty best books on the subject of International cooperation for world peace. $5-00 C O WA R D - M c C A N N 425 Fourth Ave., New York When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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196 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 I play the tedious orator who maundereth on for lack of heart to make an end of his nothings. Wherefor as when a runner who hath run his round handeth his staff away, and is glad of his rest, here break I off, knowing the goal was not for me the while I ran on telling of what cannot be told. Eda Lou Walton History and Warning By Oscar Jaszi. D The Dissolution of the Hapsburg Monarchy. University of Chicago Press. $3. R. JASZI must be accounted one of that rare band which was wise and courageous before the cataclysm of 1914, and whose members, before that time, protested against policies leading inevitably to disaster. Of post-war seers there have been plenty, but this other species is less frequently en- countered. Dr. Jaszi wrote, long before the war, warning Hapsburg bureaucrats and Magyar super-patriots against a stupid policy of oppressing the subject nationalities of the Dual Monarchy — a policy which would inevitably precipitate a con- flict in the Balkans and involve the whole of Europe. In vain he pleaded for concessions to the Slav elements — the Czechs, the Croats and Serbs, and the Rumanians of Transylvania. His own countrymen, the Hungarians, were more obstinate even than the Germans of Austria, and proved relentless in their determination to make of Hungary, in which they them- selves constituted only a doubtful majority, a "unitary state" with one nationality and one language. As a reaction against this ruthless oppression, there developed Rumanian and Serbian irredentism. Dr. Jaszi is of the opinion that, even if the Arch- duke had not been assassinated at Sarajevo, some other incident would undoubtedly have precipitated the clash between Austria and Serbia. Unfortunately for humanity, this small band of honest prophets to which Dr. Jaszi belongs proved to be voices cry- ing in the wilderness. The great army of eager conformists, led by patrioteers, marched gaily over the precipice. In most coun- tries the Cassandras of pre-war days, the Russells, the Mac- Donalds, the Rollands, have been reinstated in public opinion and in many cases have become leaders of thought and action. But Dr. Jaszi still has the distinction, one might almost say the honor, of being an outlaw. Hungary, stupidly truncated and mutilated by the peace treaties, writhes under a Magyar- megalomaniac dictatorship, obsessed by hope of recovering its lost provinces, and therefore insanely intolerant of such men as Jaszi, who refuse to sacrifice historic truth to chauvinist convenience. Dr. Jaszi may count himself happy in his profes- sorship in a peaceful Ohio college. Could the Horthy govern- ment lay hands on him inside Hungary, he would probably soon find himself in a Budapest prison, for in his latest volume he has repeated in more detail and more convincingly his indictment of Hungarian misrule before the war and even up to the moment of the breakdown in 1918. In masterly fashion he sums up the causes of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For one thousand years the Hapsburgs had been trying to weld a real state out of a con- glomeration of races and nationalities possessing various lan- guages and religions and economic necessities. A number of circumstances aided them in their task, and had they taken ad- vantage of their opportunities they might have created gradu- ally, by a process of wise evolution, a federal state something like the Swiss Federation, but, of course, on a much greater scale. In that event the Dual Monarchy would have become the leader of the Slavs and would have attracted into its orbit all the Balkan peoples. The experiment failed largely because IWhat Manner of Man Was He? "Before he lost consciousness he requested that no charge be brought against the driver of the car that had struck him." The life story of this man is told in AN EAST SIDE EPIC THE LIFE AND WORK OF EYER LONDON by Harry Rogoff $2.50 Bookstores A N G U A R D An Important New Book THE LABOR INJUNCTION By Felix Frankfurter and Nathan Greene This is a comprehensive study of the labor injunc- tion in all of its phases. The legislative efforts to define and limit the use of the injunction in labor disputes are traced in detail, and the judicial appli- cation of the injunction, in Federal and State juris- dictions, is analyzed. The authors then give their views on the appropriate direction of future legisla- tion. The labor injunction has never been a more vital subject than it is today. No other book has treated of it so adequately as this. Price, $5.00 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 60 Fifth Avenue New York, N. Y. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 197 the Magyars in the Hungarian half of the empire refused to lend themselves to a policy of conciliation. For, in spite of many mistakes and stupidities, Austria and her dependent crown lands, through years of clash, gradually developed a system un- der which the subject nationalities and the racial minorities received pretty complete local autonomy, and, in the national parliament, representation by deputies democratically elected by universal suffrage. Dr. Jaszi believes that the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy was well on the way to a solution of its racial and nationalist conflicts before the war. But the Mag- yars, who in 1848 had themselves been obliged to fight for free- dom, would permit freedom to none of the other races in Hun- gary, and suppressed all aspirations in that direction with clubs of the gendarmerie, bayonets of the army, and every variety of legal chicanery, browbeating, and corruption. It was Budapest that finally forced Vienna into the conflict with Serbia. Hun- gary dared not permit a strong Serbia to grow up at her south- ern frontiers, a Serbia whose independence would inspire the Serbs and Croats in Hungarian bondage to demand liberation. This is not the place to enter into details regarding Dr. Jaszi's masterly work. For students it must serve almost as a textbook of Middle European evolution before and during the war. But the work has also a very deep significance for all who are interested in the future of Europe and the prevention of another world conflict. Procrustean peace treaties have scattered the same explosives that blew up the Hapsburg monarchy throughout Middle Europe, from the Baltic to the Aegean. There are now a number of Austria-Hungaries in petto — Czecho-Slovakia, Rumania, Poland, Jugoslavia. And there are, to say the least, two very definite irredentist areas, Hungary and Bulgaria. All of the first category, Czecho- slovakia perhaps excepted, are committing exactly the same blunders, but with exaggerated brutality and stupidity, that Hungary committed before the war, and Hungary is behaving in much the same manner as did the old Serbia. Unless the outside world takes a hand, we are likely to see history re- peated. Dr. Jaszi's book, through its profound analysis of the causes of the Austro-Hungarian failure, warns us of the dan- gers of the present situation and shows European statesmen a way out through conciliation and federalism. The work is a liberal education in Central European politics, not only of the ante-war period, but of today as well. Henry G. Alsberg A Modern Don Quixote Agin the Governments : Memories and Adventures of Sir Francis Fletcher Vane. London: Sampson, Low. 16s. SIR FRANCIS VANE is a modern Don Quixote, the wind- mills he tilts at being powers and principalities in their British and Italian manifestations. His book of memo- ries and adventures is a vivid record of his rebellions, major and minor, including youthful revolts against fagging in Eng- lish public schools and ragging in the army; passing on to protests against the British burning of Boer farms and the shooting of the wounded Boer commandant Scheepers, and culminating in his struggles against the "Brass Hats" in Ireland and his encounters with Mussolini in Italy. Sometimes he is successful in his knight-errantry, sometimes defeated, yet even in failure he comes off with glory. Owing to his mixed ancestry (English Puritan and Irish Catholic rebel in equal parts) Sir Francis has curious and at times baffling reactions. A soldier by choice and by profession, yet a pacifist, an imperialist yet a rebel, an aristocrat through and through with the outlook and prejudices of his caste, yet Labor in sympathy — he stood as a Labor candidate in When writing to advertisers THE GROWTH AND DECADENCE OF CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT By J. 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The magnum opus of one of our most eminent historians. $5.00 AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY By CLARK WISSLER An excellent study of primitive society by a prominent anthropolo- gist. While emphasis is naturally placed on the social aspects of primitive life, attention is paid to all phases of this many-sided subject. A guide to an orientation in human society as a whole. $3.50 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY One Park Avenue New York Have you read this great book — the crowning work of America's fore- most philosopher? J OHN D EWEY "The Quest for Certainty reinforces Dewey's position as the most original and important American thinker of our time." — Henry Hazlitt in The Nation. "This book was written to open a road to freedom for men in a world of science and machines — to provide an in- strument for the use of intelligent people in the solu- tion of practical affairs." — The New Republic. 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198 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 the khaki election of 1918 — his salient characteristics are moral courage and humor, qualities rare among militarists. Yet, though he hates war he goes, as Heywood Broun would put it, yodeling into every fray and foray. In that "mixed pack" he calls his ancestry Sir Francis has a forbear, he tells us, who "went out in '98 with Lord Edward Fitzgerald, escaped to America, and fought the English at Baltimore," and he is a lineal descendant of the irrepressible Sir Harry about whom Cromwell used to wail: "Harry Vane, Harry Vane, will no one rid me of Sir Harry Vane?" The query is one that many a "Brass Hat" must have repeated at various points in his descendant's career. In a foreword to the work George Russell (JE) pays Sir Francis this deserved and happily worded tribute: I first met Sir Francis Vane in Dublin in 1916. . . . He was with the British army, and there is nothing more difficult than to be part of a military organization, ex- cited by warfare, and at the same time never to forget those more ancient loyalties of the soul to justice and our common humanity, from which so many divest them- selves in war. I remember Sir Francis, Nevinson, Ham- mond, and some others, who made it possible for us not to cast another people entirely out of our hearts. His allusion is to the valiant part played by the author during the war in Ireland, when he set himself the gigantic task of exposing certain atrocities committed by the military machine and condoned by the higher authorities in Dublin Castle and at Westminster, notably the Portobello Barracks murder of three Irish editors, Sheehy Skeffington, Dickson, and Maclntyre. Finding that the murderer of these men, Captain Bowen-Colthurst (who put the prisoners against a wall and shot them out of hand) was promoted some days afterwards, Sir Francis (then Major Vane) crossed to Lon- don in order to bring the matter personally before Lord Kitchener and Prime Minister Asquith, only to learn that Kitchener's telegram ordering the instant arrest of the guilty officer had been suppressed by Sir John Maxwell. Later Captain Colthurst, brought up before a court martial (forced upon the authorities by the publicity given the affair), pleaded insanity and was put into Broadmoor asylum during the King's pleasure, whence he was released after a brief period. Major Sir Francis Vane, however, was deprived of his rank and military title and relegated to unemployment as a result of his efforts to bring those responsible to book. Sir Francis publishes the correspondence that passed between him and ex- President Roosevelt about the affair; this too was suppressed by the military censor, and the author was refused passports during the war to America and, later, to Italy when the illness of Lady Vane caused him to apply. Afterwards, when he did get to Italy, he came up sharply against Mussolini's military machine, as he was bound to do, in connection with the formation of the Boy Scouts organization, and before long had to leave the country. II Duce had no more liking for types like Sir Francis than the British Government had at home. In addition to his earlier works, "Pax Britannica," on the Boer war, and "The Other Illusions of War," Sir Francis wrote "The Easter Rising" and a volume of war stories. These latter were suppressed. "Both," he adds, "were from the imperial point of view, but had too much truth to suit the digestion of the authorities." It is to be hoped that he may now go ahead and print them. Considering his many mu- tinies it is surprising that Sir Francis has managed to escape alive, more astounding still that, in spite of all, he should re- main faithful to his imperialist creed. To this last he appears to be unaccountably and incurably attached. This modern Aristides has many of the characteristics of his Greek proto- type who did not survive. H. Sheehy Skeffington LENIN Collected writings of V. I. Lenin, including docu- ments, explanatory and biographical notes. THE IMPERIALIST WAR $3.00 and $4.00 THE REVOLUTION OF 1917 2 Vols., Ea. $3.00 and $4.00 THE ISKRA PERIOD (1900-1902) 2 Vols., Ea. $3.00 and $4.00 MATERIALISM AND EMPIRIO-CR1TICISM $3.00 and $4.00 The Fight for a Program, The Bolshevik Party In Organization and Tactics Action (1904-1914) (1893-1904) $1.25 I $1.50 S3 THE MARXIST LIBRARY S3 Beginning a library of classics of Marxist literature. FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF MARXISM by G. V. Plekhanov IMPERHLISM AND WORLD ECONOMY by N. I. 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Look for the Circular Trade-Mark Purchase of your bookseller; or send order and remittance direct to its; or write ft information. Free specimen p'iges if you mention this magazine. ^^m G. & C. MERRIAM COMPANY Springfield, Masa. mm. iif I riirViiiiiiiiiniriiri i Whtti writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 199 Books in Brief A Guide to the Principal Sources for Early American History (1600-1800) in the City of New York. By Evarts B. Greene and Richard B. Morris. Columbia University Press. $7.50. This is the most important contribution to the bibliography of American historical material in the city of New York since the late Herbert L. Osgood prepared for the Public Archives Commission of the American Historical Association, in 1900, his guide to the records in the city departments. Both printed and manuscript sources are included under general topical clas- sifications, and the locations of the documents are indicated; certain notable collections, however, are listed under the insti- tutions in which they are found. The guide is incomplete only in that it does not as a rule include secondary works and single-volume titles among printed books, and pays no special attention to genealogy, but with these exceptions the listing is all that could be desired. The editors cannot be too highly praised for the intelligence and thoroughness with which they have carried through their laborious task. The Sword of the Soul. By Roger Chauvire. Translated from the French by Ernest Boyd. Preface by James Stephens. Longmans, Green and Company. $2.50. This Frenchman's version of the events in Ireland during the early days of the war is far superior to the usual novel written by foreigners about other people and their crises. Mr. Stephens unwittingly reveals the author's chief defect in his preface: "If we are imperturbably just to the personae en- gaged we are, by that fact, bound to be unjust to the drama that involves them. And from the point of view of a story- teller the action that is under narration is of infinitely greater importance than are the characters which it engages." The drama which M. Chauvire unfolds is social and political — a detached document of revolutionary Ireland. Not one of the characters has any real existence; and one closes the book with the feeling that he has been reading a discursive exposition of the seething forces behind the Irish outbreak, not a rounded and developed story. From the standpoint of analysis, on the other hand, the book is sound, and it shows without partisan- ship the various elements caught up in the struggle during its most critical and moving moments. That propaganda can join hands with poetry is shown in the long excerpts from Kathleen ni Houlihan which the author presents, but M. Chauvire has no place for poetry or partisanship. The book may be recom- mended to those who prefer their history in the palatable form of a novel. A Stranger in Paradise. By J. Anker Larsen. Translated from the Danish by Ruth Castberg Jordan. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. This is the story of Hans Larsen, a Danish peasant boy whose dreamy, religious nature so impressed itself on his com- rades and elders that when he died, still in his youth, he had planted the seeds whose growth was to transform his village into a little paradise. For those who like Mr. Larsen's other religious novels or find in themselves a kinship with the mystic mind, "A Stranger in Paradise" should prove inspiring. To others it has little to offer except sincerity and vagueness. Windlestraws. By Phyllis Bottome. Houghton Mifflin Com- pany. $2.50. When Jean Arbuthnot goes to Windlestraws to become Sir Reginald Falconer's secretary, she becomes involved in one of the most unusual love triangles in recent fiction. The story When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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200 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 tells how her presence further complicates the situation, how she extricates herself, and what becomes of the three aristo- cratic and tortured souls. As a novel "Windlestraws" is more than a mere thriller, for it is well written and contains pas- sages that show more than superficial knowledge of character and human emotion, but the male reader would be inclined to criticize the book as a thoroughly feminine one — one in which the masculine characters, though sympathetically dealt with, are seen as in a glass darkly. How We Lived Then— 1914-1918. By Mrs. C. S. Peel. Dodd, Mead and Company. $4. A valuable record of what people — particularly English people — wore, ate, and even thought during the most desperate years of the present century. Women war workers, V. A. D.'s, the Red Cross, the nursing homes run by rich women who had never worked before in their lives, the lonely boys home on leave, the shops of German grocers and drapers stoned by irate Londoners — Mrs. Peel has forgotten none of them. She has set down itemized lists of rations for noncombatants and soldiers; she has tabulated prices of food and clothing and shelter; she includes pictures of the food demonstrations when rations were scarce, of great municipal kitchens, of Queen's meat cards. One remembers how dreadfully important the question of food was in those days. Those who lived through the war will recall many other things as they turn over Mrs. Peel's pages. For the most part she has set down her facts and let them speak for themselves; and they speak eloquently of courage and despair, of privation and plunder, of hunger and disease and sacrifice — all happening to quite ordinary persons hitherto strange to these more primitive emo- tions. Nor will the record be less valuable to a generation to whom the war is nothing more than hearsay that reached them in the nursery. They, too, can read with profit and learn that war is less adventure than drudgery, less glory than plain hunger and cold. The Big American Parade. By E. Haldeman-Julius. The Stratford Company. $3. Through more than 400 pages Mr. Haldeman-Julius pours out facts regarding American civilization and his not very cogent comments upon them. He touches upon materialism, jazz, morality and immorality, automobiles, the World War, de- mocracy, prohibition, culture, and many other matters without any apparent logical procedure, until the reader is tempted to ask him the question which forms the title of one of his chap- ters— where are we headed? Occasionally he becomes stern in his supposedly critical survey, but not for long; his bubbling optimism soon bathes the offending item in a liquid rainbow. This cheerfully superficial temper may be illustrated by his re- mark that "the only thing which can be alleged against" Ameri- can materialism is that it is not fully or justly enjoyed by all. Its effect upon our attitude toward life, its influence upon our ideals in education, politics, and other activities — these considera- tions are evidently unimportant. Mr. Haldeman-Julius is capa- ble of even this spread-eagleism: "In art, in literature, and in thought generally America is far ahead of any previous time." We do beat all creation in modesty and sense of humor. THE DIVORCE AND SEPARATION OF ALIENS IN FRANCE. By Lindell T. Bates. Grounds and defences, power and jurisdiction of courts, procedure, rules of evidence, alimony, separation agree- ments, division of property, etc. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS. Price $7.00 M LAND OF BEAUTY The exciling present and ihe golden past form one harmonious pattern in Germany. Music festivals echo with golden thunder. Deep forests and emerald lakes lure the hunter and angler. Lake and sea resorts sparkle with gaiety, golf, tennis and swim- ming. Horse and motor races give thrilling panoramas. Everyone dances in vivid cabarets; while walled towns retain a legend- ary splendor. Old-world hospitality, mod- erate prices, no vise charge. Every form of sport and culture invite the traveler to Ger- many for a holiday of ever-changing delight. "Going to Europe" means going to Germany GERMAN TOURIST INFORMATION OFFICE 665 FIFTH AVE. NEW YORK. N. Y. Please send me Illustrated Travel Brochures on Beautiful Germany. 18 Name XPLORATIVE itiner- aries worked oat with reference to social, economic, historic, artistic and scenic features. Visits to factories, schools, children's com- munities, collective farms and villages . . . art treasures, palaces and workers' rest homes . . . for the adventurous . . . camping In the Caucasus and study of primitive tribes. Small groups, each accompanied by a quail- fled American leader and Russian interpreter. From $395 including express steamship pass- age. Literature available. Individual itineraries also exe- • cuted a Independent year-round • representation in Russia 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK Wlien writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 201 Music Opera in English? THE recent and excellent performances of the American Opera Company again raise the vexed question, and seem to answer it by their success. At the cost of time and research they have secured new translations. Is this effort to present music-drama in a language in which it was not con- ceived justifiable? The clamor of American audiences for foreign opera pre- sented in our tongue is caused, I think, by a sly duplicity in the character of opera. People who would never brave a symphonic concert flock to its doors because it offers them a "story," that most immediate appeal to the imagination. It cunningly per- suades them in with the promise of a tale to be told and then, quite aware of its inability to make that tale clear, traitorously hands them the sop of a plot synopsis and goes about its chief business — the unfolding of a structure of sonority. Obviously its trick succeeds, for the opera-goer does not — at least in large numbers — walk out. He applauds. Stirred by the more subtle, more potent draft of music, he would be quite content did not the initial promise linger in his mind, haunting him, if he is faced by a foreign libretto, with the sense of having been cheated. When the spell of the music is dissipated he voices his suspicion loudly. The attempt to answer him is opera trans- lated into English. Hence the argument is advanced that it is more important for an audience to understand the text of an opera than to hear it in its native language; that the gain in clarity secured by following the plot more than compensates for the inevitable dis- tortion caused by a translation. This deformation no one can deny. Either the note values are changed and the shape of the phrase consequently is altered to accommodate the accent and cadence of the new words, or the musical pattern remains intact while the new text is warped to fit it. This attempt to force a linguistic stepmother upon the musical line in place of the parent-language which gave it birth inevitably produces, like other artificial domestic makeshifts, results which vary from the comic to the disastrous. And since that dual entity, music and text, forms an essential part of the orchestral score, and the score itself is an element far more vital to lyric drama than plot or dialogue, the whole attempt to give foreign opera in English reveals itself as a mistake in emphasis. Structure is sacrificed to circumstance. As if this were not enough, the solid fact confronts us that at least half the text of most opera in any language is unin- telligible under the best conditions. One has seldom heard clearer diction than that of the American Opera Company. Yet despite this, entire flocks of words vanished in a forest of other sounds — in the crescendi of orchestral voices, in the prolonga- tion of syllables upon a florid phrase, in short, in the inherent organism of lyric drama. An opera text is not capable of con- veying clear information as to whither the hero is bound or why the heroine finds herself being married to the wrong man. Nor are these data of primary concern to production or auditor. The latter thumbs his synopsis studiously for a time, then, toward the end of the first act, relinquishes the brain-splitting task of attending to two things at once and settles back to enjoy the music as the wily Dame Opera had all along intended that he should. Certainly his concern for the "story" is not valid enough to warrant tampering with text and music in an im- possible attempt to achieve the revelation of the entire text. There remains, then, native American opera. In its dedi- cation to the production of a new work of this kind each year, the American Opera Company answers a demand and sets an When writing to advertisers THIRTEEN YEARS OF LIVING FAME By JEAN-RICHARD BLOCH Ihirteen years of living fame preceded the publication of " — And Company" in America — thirteen years of continental ac- claim, which began with a salute to it by ROMAIK HOLLAND, ARNOLD BENNETT, PAUL CLAUDEL, ISRAEL ZANGWILL, and ANDRE GIDE as a masterpiece comparable to Balzac's Human Comedy, and which continued with an increasing awareness of its magnificent strength and essence through the literary circles of Europe. Today, American critics spontaneously re-echo this impressive concert of apprecia- tion, and hail " — And Company" in its dis- tinguished translation by C. K. Scott- Moncrieff, as a saga of the first magnitude. Van Wyck Brooks —Built on the scale of tht masterpieces of French liter- ature. Waldo Frank — A monumental work of far horizons. Herald -Tribune — A vast epic — one of the richest achievements tn the history of literature. New York Times— Has all the earmarks of a major work. 0Jv>Tm\ from the Inner Sanctum of Simon and Schuster . . . at all bookshops $3.00 FEBRUARY CHOICE of BOOK LEAGUE of AMERICA DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR! NEWEST FICTION and NON-FICTION by messenger anywhere in Manhattan OUT-OF-TOWN PARCEL POST SERVICE (Postage Additional) Transit time allowed 25^ RENTAL PER WEEK $1 Life Membership 20% Membership Discount on all purchases. Some of the 300 titles on our current list: AH Our Yesterdays— H. M. Tomlinson Coronet — Manual Komroft* The Mauiizius Case — Wassermann Look Homeward. Angel — Wolfe Good-Bye to All That — Graves The Voyage Home — Storm Jameson Bitter Waters — Heinrich Hauser Farewell to Arms — Hemingway Pearl Diver — Victor Berge Daughters of Eve — Bradford Million Pound Deposit— Oppenheim Shepherds in Sackcloth — Kaye-Smith Australia Felix — H. H. Richardson The Hidden City— Philip Gibbs Iron Man — W. R. Burnett Young Man of Manhattan — Brush Shadows of Men — Jim Tully "& Co." — Jean-Rlehard Bloeh I'm Lucky At That — David Betts Gallery of Women — Dreiser Diana — Emil Ludwig It's a Great War — Mary Lee God Have Mercy on Da — Scanlon Man with Squeaky Voice — Walling Dr. Krasinski'8 Secret — Shlel Four Square — John R. Oliver Casanova — Guy E. Endore King Spider— Wyndham Lewis Franklin — Bernard Fay Tnelve Against the Gods— Bolitho Autobiography of America — Van Doren New Worlds to Conquer — Halliburton Marriage & Morals— Bertrand Russell The Meaning of Culture — Powys Up to Now — Alfred E. Smith Mrs. Eddy — Edwin Franden Dakin Beethoven— Romain Rolland Stretchers — Frederick A. Pottle July 'H— Emil Ludwlg Tragic Era — Claude G. Bowers Free — Blair Nlles Pure Gold — O. E. Rolvaag 42nd Parallel — John Dos Passos Yama — Alexandre Kuprin Card 13 — Lee & Ford Testament of Beauty — Robt. Brldgea Lincoln — Emil Ludwlg Rise of Amer. Civilization — Beard The Human Mind — Karl Mennlnger Escape — Francesco Nitti Check 5 titles above and one of your selections will be sent with complete list. Mall $1 with your name and add rem. Books may be taken weekly or semi-monthly. Start and stop when you choose. Rental bill rendered monthly. THE BOOK-A-WEEK SERVICE Dept. 34, 45 West 45th Street, New York City please mention The Nation

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202 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 example which cannot be highly enough praised. It provides a vehicle for American composers and librettists who might be otherwise unheard. This season's offering, "Yolanda of Cyprus," under Mr. W. Rosing's direction, was buoyant, uni- fied, truly dramatic, and beautiful to look at. If it lacked the golden voices of older organizations, it was also refreshingly free from the familiar vanity of singers who out-yell their col- leagues and turn drama into a series of recitals. The text, adapted by Cale Young Rice from his play, was set by Clarence E. Loomis (who has also produced, with Mr. Rice, another opera, "A Night in Avignon"). This music has been dis- missed as merely imitative of Debussy and Puccini. While it certainly did not "enlarge the boundaries of musical art," it bal- anced the lack of strongly original elements by dramatic power, certain passages of high poetic quality, and the well-knit devel- opment of its substance. As the composer's task was to furnish music that would keep house with a sixteenth-century romance, he should not be too severely censured if his score in no way reflected contemporary America or utilized its material, but on the contrary sought an idiom compatible with the illusion of a legendary past. The resultant unity of impression unques- tionably gained by a poetic text written in the language of the listener — whenever the exigencies of opera permitted it to be heard. But this double aesthetic value was achieved, it must not be forgotten, without malforming the musical line as con- ceived. On these grounds — and on these only — opera in Eng- lish may be justified and welcomed. Hubbard Hutchinson Drama Retrospect ABOUT the middle of the season theatrical production usually pauses for a week or more and thus affords to the chronicler an opportunity for retrospect. This year, however, the number of failures was so unusually high that managers who had playhouses on their hands were not disposed to relax, even for a week, in their efforts to keep them open, and the usual opportunity did not present itself. Accordingly, and at this late date, I must make it for myself. Last year I prophesied that the popularity of the "hard- boiled" melodrama would not survive into the present season, and in that, at least, I was right. There have been no success- ful plays in the manner of "The Front Page" et al., and this type of entertainment, which was, a year ago, all but sure fire, seems to have disappeared from the theater together with the various examples of the back-stage school founded with the production of "Broadway." And though the critic need not much lament the passing of either, the manager is unfortunate in having found no new formula to serve him in place of the two just worked to death. Even the more or less perennial detective play has scored only one conspicuous success — "Sub- way Express" — and accordingly the laments always heard on Broadway have been this year a little more distressing than usual, though the plain truth of the matter is that, whatever the magnates may say, there is still no difficulty in competing with the movies and the radio when the public is well enough pleased with any particular play. "Street Scene" has entered on its second year and there is no reason to suppose that "Strictly Dishonorable" will not last out at least the present season. The theater may be in a bad way from the standpoint of the business man, but it is hard to maintain that the public no longer cares for the spoken drama as long as there is even one play to which it is almost impossible to secure tickets. □ THEATRES □ LEO BULGAKOV Theatre Associates, Inc., presents AT THE BOTTOM "Really worth I seeing." — Brown, Post. by MAXIM GORKY New version by William L. Laurence PRICES $2.50 to 75c Phone reservations accepted — Circle 1407 "A fine play" — Mantle, Newt. WAT HORF THEATRE— 50th St., Bet. 6th & 7th Aves. Eve., 8:50 nnj^i^vixr MATINEES Thursday and Saturday, 2:30 Kenneth Alacgowan and J. V. Reed present BASIL SYDNEY and MARY ELLIS in CHILDREN of DARKNESS by Edwin Justus Mayer, author of "The Firebrand" T»Tf TH/ffklH? THEATRE — 47th Street, West of Broadway 13 1L. 1 iYHJIYTi Evenings, 8 :50— Mats., Wed. and Sat., 2:40. City Haul By ELIZABETH MIELE with HERBERT RAWLINSON A COMEDY ON MUNICIPAL POLITICS HUDSON THEATRE — 44th St., E. of B'dway Evenings 8 :50. Matinees Wednesday and Saturday 2 :40. CIVIC REPERTORY K^nio6 60c, $1, $1.50. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2:30. EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Fri.Eve.,Feb.7, "The Open Door" & "The Women Have Their Way" ; Sat.Mat.,Feb.8, "Peter Pan" ; Sat.Eve.,Feb.8, "The Sea Gull" ; Mon.Evc.Feb.lO, "The Sea Gull" ; Tues. Eve.,Feb.ll, "The Living Corpse" ; Wed.Mat.,Feb.l2, "Peter Pan" ; Wed.Eve.,Feb.l2, "The Open Door" & "The Women Have Their Way" ; Thurs.Eve.,Feb.l3, "The Sea Gull." Seats 4 weeks in advance at Box Office & Town Hall, 113 W. 43rd St. -WILLIAM HARRIS, JR., PRESENTS- THE FIRST PLAY OF THE SEASON WITH TEETH IN IT." ROBERT LITTELL, WORLD. CRIMINAL CODE Bv MARTIN FLAVIN NATIONAL THEATRE with ARTHUR BYRON 41st St., West of 7th Ave. Evenings 8:50 Matinees Wednesdays & Saturdays, 2 :30 ETHEL BARRYM0RE Theatre, 47th St., West of Broadway Evenings 8 :50 ; Matinees Wed. & Sat. 2 :30 LEE SHUBERT Presents PHILIP MERIVALE IN DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY A COMEDY ABOUT LIFE 'BRAVE. AUDACIOUS, PROVOCATIVE"— Robert Garland, Telegram IS LIQUOR A MYTH? THE ONLY WAY TO REALLY KNOW IS TO SEE EVERYTHING'S JAKE! THE KIP-ROARING ALCOHOLIC COMEDY by DON MARQUIS "GOOD, ROBUST FUN"— JV. Y. Times— "A RIOT"— Benehley, New Yorker ASSEMBLY Theater, 39th St., E. of Bway. Eves, at 9. Mats. Tues.&Sat. 3 The Theatre Guild Presents METEOR By S. N. BEURMAN p. "IJ THEA., 52nd St. W. ot Broadway VJUlIU Ergs. 8:50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 3:40 The Theatre Guild Presents RED RUST By KIRCHON & OTJSPENSKY LAST WEEK Ma ■*!-;» Ro^lr THEA., 45th St. W. of 8th Ave IViariin DeCK Evg8. 8:40. Mats. Thurs & Sat. 3:40

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February 12, 1930] The Nation 203 WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See •At the Bottom— Waldorf— 116 W. 50th St. ••Children of Darkness— Biltmore—W. 47th St. ••City Haul— Hudson— 44th St., E. of B'dway. •Civic Repertory — 14th St. & 6th Ave. — See Advertisement. •Criminal Code — National— W. 41st St. •Death Takes a Holiday — Barrymore Theatre — 47th St., W. of B'dway. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st St., E. of B'dway. ••Everything's Jake — Assembly — 39th St., E. B'dway. •Josef Suss — Erlangers — 44th St., W. B'dway. ••June Moon — Broadhurst — W. 44th St. ••Meteor— Guild— W. 52nd St. •Red Rust— Beck— 302 W. 45th St. ••Strictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. ••Sweet Adeline — Hammerstein — Broadway & 53rd St. ••Wake Up and Dream — Selwyn — 42nd St., W. B'dway. 'Drama. "Comedy. First Nights Dishonored Lady — Empire — 40th St. & B'dway. Out of a Blue Sky— Booth — 44th St. W. of B'way. Rebound — Plymouth — 45th St. W. of B'dway. The Boundary Line — Forty-eighth — 48th St. E. of B'dway. Films Across the World — Cohan — 43 rd St. & B'dway. Disraeli — Central Theatre — Broadway and 47th St. Paris Bound — Little Picture House — 151 E. 50th St. Sunrise— Film Guild— 52 W. 8th St. The Rogue Song — Astor — B'dway & 45th St. Concerts and Recitals Paul Althouse — Barbizon Concert — Sun. Eve., Feb. 12. Harold Bauer— Town Hall— Sat. Aft., Feb. 15. Copeland Sessions Concert — Steinway — Sun. Eve., Feb. 9. Mischa Elman — Carnegie — Sun. Eve., Feb. 16. Heifetz — Carnegie — Wed. Eve. Feb. 19. Frieda Hempel — Carnegie — Fri. Eve., Feb. 14. Friends of Music— Mecca Temple— 133 W. 55th St.— Sun. Aft., Feb. 9 — Bach Program. Manhattan Symphony — Mecca Temple — Sun. Eve., Feb. 9. Martinelli — Carnegie — Tues. Eve., Feb. 18. Orchestral Concerts for Children — Philharmonic Symphony — Carnegie — Sat. Morn., Feb. 8. Philharmonic Symphony — Carnegie — Thurs. Eve., Feb. 13; Fri. Aft., Feb. 14; Sun. Aft., Feb. 9. Students Concerts — Philharmonic — Carnegie — Sat. Eve., Feb. 8, 15. Tales of Hoffman — Grand Opera for Children — Town Hall — Sat. Morn., Feb. 22. Tito Schipa — Carnegie — Mon. Eve., Feb. 10. Art Exhibits Contemporary Belgium Painting, Sculpture & Graphic Art — Brooklyn Museum of Art — To Feb. 23. "Painting in Paris" — Museum of Modern Art — 730 Fifth Ave., Jan. 18 to Feb. 16. Painting by Picasso & Derain — Reinhardt Galleries, 730 Fifth Ave.— To Feb. 21. Events Abroad D FILMS D RECITAL □ Week commencing Sat., Feb. 8 «vyivxi^j-f x and gat>j 2 .30 VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 CARNEGIE HALL, Mon. Eve., Feb. 10 RECITAL BY TITO Schipa CELEBRATED TENOR MGT. EVANS & SALTER (Mason & Hamlin Piano) Bayreuth Festival Plays — Muck, Toscanini, Elmendorff, Siegfried Wagner Conductors — July 22 to Aug. 21. Oberammergau Passion Play — Munich — May through Sept. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation MATINEES : GOOD SEATS. AT J, PRICKS, AT BOX OFFICB WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE ARLISS In 44 DISRAELI (A Vltaphone All-Talking Picture) *» OEHTRAL THEATRE Broadway and 47th St. Dally J:46 — 8:41 Sunday 8 — 6 — 8:4*

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204 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3371 At least six pieces indubitably worth making the effort to see have been produced since September, but they are too va- ried in manner and intention to suggest a development in any particular direction, unless I may permit a wish to father a thought and maintain that in "Strictly Dishonorable" and "Chil- dren of Darkness" we have a sign that we are at last begin- ning to write the kind of pure comedy which seems to me so definitely indicated by our civilization and our mood. On the other hand, the admirable fantastic comedy called "The Com- modore Marries" was a prompt failure, and it is difficult to find any unity in a group of worthy successes which includes pieces so diverse as "Meteor," "Berkeley Square," "Rope's End," and "The Criminal Code." I am reduced to the neces- sity of bestowing a few blue ribbons as follows: For the best individual performances: to Walter Huston in "The Commodore Marries," to Alfred Lunt in "Meteor," and to Mary Ellis in "Children of Darkness." For the best production of a standard play: to Eva Le Gallienne for "The Sea Gull." For the best revue: to the authors of "Fifty Million Frenchmen." For the wittiest line: to Preston Sturges for the remark of the tenor in "Strictly Dishonorable" — "The only thing which can sing and keep its shape is a bird." Joseph Wood Krutch □ COURSES □ LECTURES □ Contributors to This Issue Morris Ernst is a New York attorney with wide experience in divorce proceedings. Paul Y. Anderson is the national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Henry Raymond Mussey is managing editor of The Nation. Henry Hazlitt is literary editor of The Nation. Granville Hicks is assistant professor of English at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Allen Tate is the author of "Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall." Florence Codman is a regular contributor of reviews to The Nation. Clifton P. Fadiman is head of the editorial department of Simon and Schuster. Witter Bynner is co-author with Kiang Kang-Hu of '"The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology." Babette Deutsch will publish in February a book of verse, "Fire for the Night." Carl Van Doren, a contributing editor of The Nation, is editor-in-chief of the Literary Guild. C. Hartley Grattan is the author of "Bitter Bierce." Mark Van Doren is editor of "An Autobiography of America." Karl F. Geiser is professor of political science at Ober- lin College. Alexander Goldenvveiser is a well-known anthropolo- gist. Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at New York University. Henry G. Alsberg was for four years traveling Euro- pean correspondent of The Nation. H. Sheehy Skeffington is well known for her connec- tion with the movement for independence in Ireland. Hubbard Hutchinson has contributed articles on music to various periodicals. Joseph Wood Krutch is dramatic editor of The Nation. Building for Happiness The common impression that social work is primarily concerned with salvaging unfortunates is only partly correct. Social work is concerned not only with normalizing the socially maladjusted individual but also with building up a happier and culturally richer community life. In Jewish social work the oppor- tunities for constructive work are especially numer- ous and promising. Have you chosen your career? If not, you should examine carefully the advantages, both tangible and intangible, of Jewish Social Work as a Profession A number of scholarships and fellowships ranging from $150 to $1000 for each school year are available for especially qualified candidates. For full information <write to M. J. Karpf, Director The Training School For Jewish Social Work A Graduate School 67-71 W. 47th St., New York City THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH "A workshop of new ideas" COURSES BEGINNING FEBRUARY 7 by Henry Cowell — A WORLD SURVEY OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC A study of the current musical trends in Europe, the Orient and America by an outstanding modern composer. Four lec- tures, illustrated at piano. Fridays, 8:20-9:50 P.M. Fee for entire series, $5. by Harry Elmer Barnes MODERN PROBLEMS IN THE LIGHT OF SOCIOLOGY A consideration of the more important contemporary social problems from the psychiatric point of view. Twelve lectures Fridays, 5:20-6:50 P.M. Fee for course, $15. THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN INTELLECTUAL LIFE The genesis of prevailing mental attitudes in contemporary society and the transformations of outlook on the part of the intellectual classes in western civilization. Twelve lectures, Fridays, 8:20-9:50 P.M. Fee for course, $15. Write for catalogue 465 WEST 23RD STREET NEW YORK, N. Y. DR. G. S. BECK will speak on Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West" at Temple Emanu-El 65th St. and 5th Ave. on Saturday evening , February 15 h. at 8:15 under the auspices of American Women's Ort. Admission free When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1930 No. 3372 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 205 EDITORIALS: The New Chief Justice 208 Unions with Brains 209 Star Spangled Banner 209 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 210 DIVORCE— AND AFTER: II. SEPARATION WITHOUT DI- VORCE. A Personal Narrative 211 HARVARD "EXPLAINS." By Gardner Jackson 212 SECRETARY WILBUR AND BOULDER DAM. By Ruth Finney. . 214 MEXICO INSTALS A PRESIDENT. By Lyle C. Wilson 216 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 217 CORRESPONDENCE 218 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 218 BOOKS, FILMS, DRAMA: Cocoon. By Ruth Lechlitner 219 Tradition and Experiment. By Henry Hazlitt 219 Chain-Store Civilization. By Norman Thomas 219 Spring-Rice's Career. By Royal J. Davis 220 Sir Francis Bacon. By Donald A. Roberts 222 "— Lasst Uns zu Grunde Gehen!" By Fred T. Marsh 222 The Case of Ambrose Bierce. By Granville Hicks 223 Books in Brief 224 Films: A Soviet Fantasy. By Alexander Bakshy 226 Drama : Gopher Prairie, Spain 226 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Security and "Sanctions" 229 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editok Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN* A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign, countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 34, Clifton Gardens, W. 9, London, England. THE LONDON NAVAL CONFERENCE made marked progress in the week ending February 8, and, as we go to press, is tackling the submarine question in a plenary session. Both our own delegation and the British submitted concrete proposals on successive days, the latter far more to our liking than our own. The MacDonald pro- posal is for eventual abolition of all battleships, a construc- tion holiday until 1935, with the number of capital ships reduced by 1931 to the number proposed for 1936 by the Washington treaty, and the limitation of their size to 25,000 tons each. Destroyers would be limited to 200,000 tons, aircraft carriers to 100,000 tons with a maximum size of 25,000; the abolition of submarines is urged and failing that their limitation in size and number to make them a purely defensive force. The American proposals would equalize the British and American fleets by 1931 instead of waiting until 1942 and effect the immediate reduction of the battle- ships to fifteen vessels apiece. Why these fifteen should not be abolished now is beyond our comprehension. The cruiser deadlock between the two countries is to be broken by giving eighteen large cruisers to the United States to fifteen for England and a larger number of small cruisers for the British, each country to have the option exactly to duplicate the cruiser fleet of the other. The Americans are for the abolition of the submarine but weaken their case by con- ceding that it is unobtainable. Altogether there is far too much splitting of hairs, but at least it now appears certain that the conference will end without the favorite jingo charge since the Washington treaty that the British are ahead of the game. THE TARIFF DEBATE has dragged along for an- other week with the usual voting up of some schedules and down of others and with the honors going to Senator La Follette. But his attack upon the American valuation plan, as a basis for levying duties on imports of coal-tar dyes and other chemical products, failed to induce the Senate to amend the bill. Mr. La Follette boldly stated that the American chemical industry was being favored because of contributions made by its representatives to the two political parties in the last campaign. He showed that the Republi- can National Committee had received $117,000 from the leading men of the chemical industry, while $335,000 went to the Democratic National Committee. The latter amount was contributed by three men, John J. Raskob, $260,000, P. S. Du Pont, $50,000, and the familiar Francis Garvan, $25,000. Fortunately the coalition was able to win six roll- calls, reducing the proposed rates on various chemicals. Cement was continued on the free list by a vote of 40 to 35, with Senator Copeland, of New York, appealing vainly on behalf of the poor cement workers of his State who are, he asserts, suffering grievously from the low-wage competition of our former Belgian allies. The other Senator from New York took the opposite viewpoint. In every vote now party lines are totally abandoned and sectional differences appear. In the main, however, the coalition of insurgent Republicans and Democrats is accomplishing a good deal in whittling down the proposed committee rates. THE HAITIAN COMMISSION appointed by Presi- dent Hoover has at least two excellent members: William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette and James Kerney of the Trenton Times. We confidently believe that they will undertake their important mission with open minds and a determination to find a way for us to withdraw from the island at the earliest possible moment. Of the other appointees, W. Cameron Forbes, the chairman, is of the utterly conservative, Leonard Wood school of imperialism. It is only fair to say that his administration of the Philip- pines was well above the average, but it was not marked by any zeal to fit the Filipinos for early independence. As for Henry P. Fletcher, his discouraging record as Ambassador to Mexico, where he stood with the interventionists, is clearly on record. The fifth member, Elie Vezina, is an unknown quantity. For the rest, not one of the many persons who have especially studied the situation has been appointed, nor has an American colored man. It is, as a whole, so discouraging a commission that we prefer to dwell at this moment upon President Hoover's recent statement that "the primary ques- tion which is to be investigated is when and how we are to withdraw from Haiti." This is the first time an American

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206 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3372 President has recognized that our primary problem is how to get out, not how to stay in. Other portions of his statement had the usual political flavor, especially the formal and un- deserved compliments to General Russell and his administra- tion of the island. But at least our Chief Executive has taken the first definite step on the right road. LIFE IMPRISONMENT after four convictions for shoplifting was the sentence received the other day by Ruth St. Clair, confessed drug addict, in New York City. The first woman to receive a life sentence under the Baumes laws had committed four thefts from department stores over a period of ten years. She had served a year in Auburn for her first offense, the theft of a coat, which seems in itself harsh enough. Now, after three other thefts, Mrs. St. Clair receives a mandatory life sentence after pleading guilty. We have therefore the spectacle of a woman for whom prison did nothing in the way of reform being sentenced to prison for the rest of her life — she is now twenty-nine years old — not to make her over into a better citizen but evidently to protect society against her. In return, the taxpayers of New York will pay her board and lodging and furnish her with clothing of a sort for a possible thirty-five years and perhaps longer. It is encouraging to record that after appeals by Judge Levine, who pronounced sentence, Chief Magistrate McAdoo, and District Attorney Crain, Governor Roose- velt has announced that he will at once begin a study of the case with a view to shortening the sentence if possible. As it stands, the case is certainly one of the most striking examples of the complete brainlessness of our prison system, not to mention its brutality. The latter is also clearly evi- denced by the release from Sing Sing, after serving twenty years of a thirty-nine-year sentence, of Frank Singer for the theft in 1909 of $51. Singer came out of jail unable to fasten his own collar or to tie his necktie. A benevolent State had bestowed on him $10, he had $45 of his own, and he had earned, at the rate of 1^2 cents a day, $35.98 in prison. Thus endowed and, one trusts, completely "reformed," he reentered a waiting world. THE RESIGNATION of William A. Prendergast as chairman of the New York Public Service Commis- sion brings into sharp relief the critical situation that exists in public-utility regulation the country over. As the climax of months of criticism, the Community Councils of New York City on January 27 sent Governor Roosevelt a letter demanding the removal of Mr. Prendergast on the ground of corporation bias. His resignation was due to a sharp dif- ference of opinion between him and the Governor. Mr. Prendergast holds that the commission has "quasi-judicial functions" ; that its job is to hold the scales even between the utilities and the consuming public. The Governor main- tains that its task is to protect the consumer against the utili- ties. The World in a bewildered editorial confesses that it cannot tell which is right. Meanwhile, the telephone com- pany, acting under the decision of a federal court, on its own responsibility puts into effect an intrastate schedule of ad- vanced rates, with 20 per cent of the increase temporarily shaved off by the feeble last-minute order of the commission. Some fifty-nine cities of the State are reported to be prepar- ing to fight the increases. Every one can see today that in New York as elsewhere regulation unhappily does not regulate. A DECENT RESPECT FOR LAW and public opinion animated the police of New York City on Tuesday, January 28, in their handling of a Communist parade in connection with the funeral of a Communist worker. On the previous Saturday the police had charged a crowd of Com- munists and others about the City Hall and brutally clubbed and beaten whoever came in their way. On Tuesday they "courteously but firmly" kept the funeral procession in line and guarded the route to the cemetery. Even the open-air speeches denouncing capitalism were not interfered with. For this peaceable outcome of what it was feared might be an- other riotous performance the police are to be commended. It all goes to show that the police can handle a crowd with- out resort to clubbing and punching, and that they react . handsomely to the right sort of orders from their superiors. Police Commissioner Whalen has emitted some fine remarks i about courtesy and self-restraint on the part of the police, but ' it is time he waked up to a realization that what happened on January 28 should be the rule not the exception. DISCRETION AND VALOR are the means which Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald has used to dis- arm the opposition of the House of Lords to the unemploy- ment-insurance bill. The government bill as sent to the Lords contained no time-limit, but the Lords amended the bill by limiting its operation to one year. The Government was thus confronted, as Mr. MacDonald explained at a meeting of the Labor Party, with three possibilities. Either the amendment must be accepted, in which case the Lords would win; or it must be rejected, in which case the bill would automatically fail ; or the amendment itself must be amended. The last course was approved by the House of Commons, the principle of a time-limit being accepted but with the limit placed at three years. As the Lords are not thought to care much what the time-limit is so long as there is one, the approval of the bill by the upper house is regarded as assured. Thus has another "crisis" been discreetly averted. If Mr. MacDonald had insisted upon the constitutional claim of the Commons to have its bills accepted by the Lords without change in principle or essential substance, he would probably have had to go to the country on that issue. The important thing, after all, is to get the unemployment scheme into operation as soon as possible. THE SHOOTING OF PRESIDENT RUBIO of Mexico just after his inauguration will not precipitate another revolution in that country or make it necessary for Washington to get the United States Army and Navy ready for "developments." The assault, fortunately without too serious consequences for President Rubio and the others who were injured, appears to have been one of those acts of politi- cal foolishness to which every head of a government is always more or less exposed. Miguel Flores, the young man who did the shooting, is reported to have been a follower of Vas- concelos, the defeated candidate of the Anti-Reelectionist Party in the recent presidential election and the political rival of President Rubio. The story that the attack was part of a plot to exterminate the entire Cabinet, throw the affairs of the country into confusion, and enable the Vascon- celistas to seize the government is, however, to be taken with all reserve pending further investigation. The fact that the retiring President, Portes Gil, is Minister of the Interior in

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February 19, 1930] The Nation 207 the Rubio Cabinet and the ranking Cabinet officer carries an assurance of firm and competent executive direction of affairs until President Rubio is able to assume his duties. WHILE COMPTROLLER BERRY of New York issues a report giving six reasons why that happy city can never "go broke," New York's sister metropolis on the shores of Lake Michigan continues its celebrated plan of pay- less pay days. On February 2 Chicago argued before the Supreme Court of the United States for seven additional years' diversion of Lake Michigan water after 1938 because it has no money to build sewage-disposal plants. On Febru- ary 3 Silas Strawn issued a new ultimatum on the terms of financial salvation laid down by his "Citizens' Rescue Com- mittee." On February 4 the city council promised complete cooperation with the Strawn committee and at the same time pledged friendly relations with H. Wallace Caldwell, presi- dent of the Board of Education, who was attacking Mr. Strawn and urging the independent marketing of tax-antici- pation warrants. On February 5 Mr. Caldwell left for New York to sell such warrants, if possible, in the purlieus of Wall Street. On the same day Chicago reported its seventh murder within a week, with the police hunting vainly for clues. On February 6 the city administration headed by Mayor Thompson was reported to have decided on its own plan of meeting the financial situation and to have determined, if that plan failed, to make war on the "reformers," the Strawn committee, and the bankers, with Mr. Caldwell flooding the homes of the city with propa- ganda through the school children. Life in these simple country villages of ours does not lack interest ! NELSON T. JOHNSON, our new Minister to China, set an admirable example to other newly appointed dip- lomats on his recent arrival at Shanghai. He declined to dis- cuss political affairs, saying, "I have arrived with an open mind and will strive to keep my mind open, for nothing gets into or comes from a closed mind." Mr. Johnson, whose instructions are to reside near the seat of the Chinese Gov- ernment, is a "career man" who has come to his present posi- tion by promotion from within the service, after having enjoyed the advantage of a considerable period of residence in China. Knowing the Chinese language and people, appre- ciating at once the richness and value of the Chinese culture and its fundamental differences from our own, viewing sym- pathetically the profound movements of social advance now under way in the Orient, and understanding that great his- toric movements require time and patience for their con- summation, he would seem almost ideally fitted for the diffi- cult role of international interpreter at this critical stage of the relations between East and West. SOME OF BROADWAY'S PRETTIEST actresses stormed the capitol at Albany the other day and per- suaded an Assembly committee to report in favor of the Langdon Post amendment to the Wales act, which will prohibit the arrest of actors playing in a show prosecuted under the obscenity act. The deference of the legislators is a tribute not only to the charm of their fair assailants, but to the logic of the demand made. It is outrageous that when a play is alleged to be obscene the players in it should be assumed to be guilty. In any case, the actors are pro- fessional persons working under contract. It is not their function, but the function of the courts, to decide whether a given play is obscene. They are only too happy to dissociate themselves from a vicious play, as their trade union, the Actors' Equity Association, has consistently stated. But learned judges themselves are often puzzled to decide what is obscene and what is not, and it is unreasonable to demand that actors shall constitute themselves individual courts of justice, and suffer a night in jail if the police allege that they have guessed wrong. The wholesale arrest of actors, which is one of the more manifest absurdities of the Wales padlocking law, has occurred several times in the past two seasons. The Langdon Post amendment should be only the prelude to the repeal of the Wales law. A THOUSAND PERSONS in Marion, North Caro- lina, are dependent on the Federal Council of Churches and the American Friends' Service Committee for food and medical care. These are the strikers and their families out of jobs and dispossessed from company houses after their protest against the twelve-hour day and a weekly wage averaging only $13. The relief agencies want $1,000 a week to care for them and any clothing they can get besides. It is obvious that a dollar a week per person will not maintain these workers in a state far removed from starvation. But such a state must be familiar enough to them, in addition to cold and disease. In case the point is of interest to any person desirous of giving contributions, these strikers are not "foreigners" but American-born citi- zens, as native as the soil they live on. They are the victims of the advance of industrialization in the South. They have done nothing but object to a standard of living and a work- ing day far below the requirements of health and decency. No demands for help at present seem more logical, more pressing, or more worthy to be answered. Checks may be sent to the Federal Council of Churches, 105 East Twenty- second Street, New York City. THE PROMOTION MANAGER of The Nation on January 27 sent to the Christian Science Monitor for insertion in its Eastern Region edition of January 31 an advertisement of our issue of February 5 containing the first article in the series now running, The Christian Science Censor, together with advance proofs of that article. On February 7 he made inquiry by mail concerning the placing of the advertisement and asked for a copy of the issue con- taining it. On February 10 he received, in an envelope postmarked Boston, February 8, 2:30 p. m., a letter dated January 31 from the advertising manager of the Monitor, reading as follows : We acknowledge with thanks the advertisement which you sent us, headed "The Christian Science Censor." Consideration has been given to this advertisement, also to advance proof of one of the series of articles which is to appear in The Nation, and we must respectfully de- cline to accept this advertising. Naturally, the authorities of the Mother Church prefer not to have the attention of their followers and other readers called to the methods described in these articles, and they can perhaps scarcely be blamed for refusing our advertise- ment. The third article in the series, dealing with freedom of the press, will appear in our next issue.

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208 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3372 The New Chief Justice WE consider President Hoover's choice of Charles E. Hughes to be Chief Justice of the United States a bad appointment. We are well aware that nearly every newspaper has praised the selection, even the New York World — shades of its great editor, Frank Cobb! — while the Baltimore Sun has kept an amusing silence. To the average man it will doubtless seem an admirable choice. Is Mr. Hughes not the recognized leader of the American bar? Was he not a member of the Supreme Court for six years? Is he not also a member of the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague? What could be more fitting? To these questions we reply that we admit without qualification Mr. Hughes's technical fitness. As to his abil- ity there can be no doubt. Though nearly sixty-eight years of age he is in perfect health, alert, and vigorous. If these things alone constituted a great chief justice there would be nothing more to be said. But these are all in all minor qualities, some not even essential. There is the case of Jus- tice Holmes who at eighty-nine years shows no evidence of failing mental power — how happy a gesture it would have been had Mr. Hoover promoted this great American if only for a brief span! It is not age or youth which counts, but the point of view, the flexibility of a mind, its openness to new ideas, new trends, new social developments. What makes Mr. Hughes's appointment so regrettable is that here is a fixed, set, intolerant mentality, closed on various issues, and deadly conservative. During the six years he served in the Supreme Court he ranked as neither a liberal nor a pro- gressive. He was in the main with the majority and he took his positions with a puritanic belief in his own righteousness and the supreme wisdom of his own opinions. A more dangerous type of mind in this hour of the world's develop- ment it would be hard to find. Let those who doubt recall some of his acts as Secretary of State — his attitude toward Mexico, toward Russia, his exclusion of the Karolyis and others whose opinions for one reason or another Mr. Hughes disliked, his worship of property rights, and, afterwards, his readiness to take retainers from any great corporation, any master of privilege. We have said before, and we repeat now, that there is something profoundly alarming in this type of mind when it reaches high office deeply inoculated with the poison of a self-righteousness which identifies one's country and its needs with one's own opinions. It is bad enough when a man of this type is in an office like that of Secretary of State, but there at least he can be checked by public protest, by the opinions of the Congress. As Chief Justice he is in a sense beyond the control of public opinion. He cannot be overruled; his is the last word if the majority is with him. The court is now so constituted that it will defend the status quo with him to the uttermost — unless Congress itself overrules its decisions by new legisla- tion. Then we would remind our readers of the damage which six years on this same court did to Mr. Hughes. He went on the bench the respected and admired Governor of New York, who had been a consistent and determined advo- cate of the people's rights — not merely the policyholders in insurance companies, but the plain people in whose behalf he created the Public Service Commission to regulate the public utilities, by appealing over the heads of party bosses to the people of the State. He came off the bench — to wage his weak and futile and intellectually pitiful campaign for the Presidency in 1912. Few contrasts could be greater than that between the Hughes of 1906 and the Hughes of 1912. This man the best choice to head the Supreme Court, this Charles E. Hughes who only recently was fighting before that court the case of the Interborough Rapid Transit Com- pany in order to weaken the force of the public-service regulation he himself as Governor championed? This lawyer who took a brief for the insurance companies in a vain effort to aid them in avoiding payment on their policies to all Russian citizens? This man who was part and parcel of Mr. Harding's rotten administration and to this day has never found the opportunity to characterize the unparalleled record of graft and corruption and criminal carelessness which marked the Cabinet of which both he and Mr. Hoover were unscathed but silent parts? No; there was Harlan Stone to be had right on the Supreme Court — official circles were so certain of Justice Stone's appointment that it is obvious there was a sudden change of mind by Mr. Hoover. But there were other judges here in New York State, to speak of no other, who would have brought fresher and freer minds to the supreme judicial office in the land. These next few years may well be epoch-making. The over- whelming growth of great capitalist organizations, the ex- traordinary combinations of great companies going on under our eyes — encouraged by the Congress in the case of the railroads — these and other events reveal in part what is ahead. And what is needed at the head of the supreme tribunal is not a closed mind but one aware that the world and the old order change and must change; that to progress at all we must grow away from the narrow, nationalistic, and outworn individualistic kind of life to which Mr. Hughes is so completely and intolerantly devoted. More- over, the Chief Justice is the administrative head of all the United States courts — courts that are carrying on, through their administration of endless receiverships of every sort of business, a bigger business than the United States Steel Cor- poration. These same courts are swamped by the vast multitude of prohibition cases. At sixty-eight the span of administrative ability is short, however long one may still be capable of legal opinions. But this, though important, is less important by far than the question of the mental attitude of the judge, and there, as we said last week, Mr. Hughes's appointment seems little less than a public disaster. That Mr. Taft is a conservative, that he has had little knowledge and understanding of the problems of the under- dog, is true. Life for him has been from the beginning smooth, easy, successful. Yet for all his failure to take the progressive side he has shown evidences of pliability and he never has thought himself of the anointed and the in- fallible. We consider the change in the chief justiceship grave indeed, particularly if it is a portent of what Mr. Hoover's future appointments to the Supreme Court will be.

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February 19, 1930] The Nation 209 Unions with Brains Star Spangled Banner THE two most interesting trade unions in the United States today are in the garment trades. The Amalga- mated Clothing Workers in the men's clothing in- dustry and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in the field of women's wear have consistently applied brains to the solution of the practical problems facing them and have at the same time kept untarnished the social ideal- ism of their Jewish socialist theories. As a result they have managed to give fresh hope to those who believe that labor organization is essential to a modern democratic society. The older union technique consisted in organizing the workers by hook or crook, and then taking the employer by the throat and compelling him to give up the most that he could be made to yield in the way of wages and hours. That technique worked fairly well until the employers learned the trick of organizing themselves into groups to fight the unions or until industries became organized into great trusts under unified management. Then the old union leadership was bankrupt. It had no tactics to meet the new conditions and no ideas by which to live. Consequently, de- spite the great growth in numbers that came with the war, American unionism has gone through a long period of in- tellectual sterility and practical impotence. A powerful organization like the United Mine Workers, failing to ad- just itself to the new conditions, has been broken to pieces on the rock of stubborn economic facts; while the building trades, the heart of the American Federation of Labor, though managing by various devices to maintain a high I wage scale for their limited membership, have yet lost all significance for the great body of workers whom they can see no way of organizing. Among the clothing workers we behold a different scene. The International Ladies' Garment Workers have just called a great strike in New York to bring about the organi- zation of the dressmaking industry, having successfully ac- i complished that result for the cloak and suit industry by I the strike of last summer. Faced with the fact that their earlier success in forcing union standards on the big fac- tories by the older methods was simply hastening the : process of driving the industry out of those factories into the little sub-contracting shops and sweatshops, they broadened their conception to the actual organization of the whole industry, so that no one should be able to take advantage of sub-standard labor conditions. Further, they succeeded in having impartial machinery set up for the pro- tection of employer and employee alike against unreason- able demands, thus obtaining for themselves a position of power and partnership in the industry. To those who fear the destructive effect of "radical" ideas, we commend a consideration of the activities of the International Ladies' Garment Workers. Without surren- dering their socialist principles these hard-headed unionists, who have consistently remained in good and regular stand- ! ing with the American Federation of Labor, have come 'forward with a series of constructive plans for the stabiliza- tion and upbuilding of the industry in which they make I their living. What "conservative" organization can show I an equally good record? THE Linthicum Bill, making the Star Spangled Ban- ner officially the American national anthem, has been reported out of House committee and appears well on its way to being enacted into law. The five million Americans who, at the instance of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and other patriotic societies, are alleged to have peti- tioned Congress to this end did not, of course, realize what they were doing. For the Linthicum Bill would make hatred of a great, friendly nation an official sentiment of the United States. Opponents of the Linthicum Bill are at a disadvantage because the impression is about that in criticizing the Star Spangled Banner they are somehow committing an unpa- triotic act. It is generally believed, and recklessly asserted by the proponents of the bill, that the song is already our national anthem and that Congress is merely being asked to ratify an existent fact. This is not true. President Wil- son in 1916 designated the song not as the national anthem but merely as the tune to be played — rather than sung — at certain official ceremonies. There happened to be at the time a departmental demand for such designation, and this song was the one named since it already had quasi-official recognition by the Navy Department — probably because it was the one which the naval bands were most accustomed to play. Not wishing to stir up controversy just then, Presi- dent Wilson followed such precedent as existed and des- ignated the same tune for the army and other departments. This hasty official act does not prevent us from saying what is admitted by all objective critics: that the tune is mediocre, awkward, and unsingable by the ordinary voice; that the verses are stilted, obscure, and entirely without poetic merit; and that the origins of the music and words do not befit the dignity of a national anthem — if we must have one. The tune, as disclosed in an official report to the Library of Congress in 1909, was originally the "consti- tutional song" of the Anacreontic Society, which met at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, London, and was given to generous libations and to "songs not exactly calculated for the entertainment of the ladies." This "con- stitutional" doxology urged the members not only to drink heartily, but also to "entwine the myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine." Taken at twice the tempo now commonly used, it was a raucous and rollicking air. The poet of the Star Spangled Banner was a Balti- more lawyer. His verses, written for vaudeville perform- ance, celebrated an episode in the War of 1812. They are in the bombastic style of music-hall ballads of the time and are unintelligible without a gloss. But if they mean any- thing, they mean hatred of the foreigner and contempt for the British nation; they rejoice that the blood of the "hire- ling band" has "washed out their vile footsteps' pollution." This was all very well for a momentary jubilation after a threatened invasion. But it is an entirely different matter to make the passion of such a moment the consecrated credo of the United States. At a time when we are seeking, for the sake of the world's peace, an honorable understanding with Great Britain, it is not seemly or sportsmanlike to en- shrine official insults at her in third-rate verse.

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210 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3372 It Seems to Heywood Broun I MAXWELL BODENHEIM wants to ask a ques- tion. "Do you believe," he inquires, "that personal attacks, false or true, should be included in articles which purport to be reviews of an author's book? Do you believe that a critic should confine himself to an opinion of the literary values and the importance and originality of a book without intruding his emotional reactions toward the author as a man in daily life?" Fortunately these are not questions which can be an- swered with a simple "Yes" or "No." There is also need of definition. Although Mr. Bodenheim proceeds to cite his own particular grievance against a reviewer his question is couched in more general terms. The subject is debatable. I believe I am against Mr. Bodenheim. For instance, let us assume that a new war novel comes out. I may happen to have information, personal or otherwise, that the author is a pronounced pacifist and that his book was written with the desire to arouse sentiment against war. I think it is my privilege to note this fact in my review. It is not necessary that I should confine myself wholly to palpable and printed evidence. After all, the critic's function is to explain and interpret the thing he criticizes. Something of the author himself remains upon the page even after he has completed his job and the book is bound and sold. In explaining the author, one may well make the quality of the book more understandable. I do not see how it is possible to draw a sharp line between the individual and his performance. To be sure, there are certain facts about an author which I would not care to drag into a review even though I might be perfectly sure of my ground. But even here I must set up the rather feeble excuse of a partial devotion to good taste. It would embarrass me to say in reviewing a novel, "The author happens to be a notorious drunkard." Yet an argument can be made for even such an intimate revelation of an artist's private life. Surely such a fact, if true, is not irrelevant. If the book concerned mod- ern American life, its tone and its emotion might very well be colored by the creator's violent revolt against Volsteadism both in theory and in practice. Some years ago there was great commotion because a literary critic indicted a love story by remarking that the author was a spinster. I hasten to add that it was not my review which brought this severe accusation. I think I would have hesitated to go into the delicate problem of an author's sex experience or lack of it. And yet I cannot main- tain that the critic was wholly beyond the domain of legiti- mate reviewing. The book quite possibly could have been vastly influenced by the author's lack of sophistication. As it happens, I would not think of contending that no one can write about Du Barry unless she has been Du Barry. I myself intend some day to write a story based on the life of Casanova. When it is published I shall freely grant any critic the right to mention the fact that I have had no share in such interesting romances as brightened the life of the hero. If the critics stress this point it might well be termed an attack upon my ego and my reputation. But any man who writes for publication must accept the fact that he has made himself, by his own act, fair game for friend and foe. Once upon a time, it might have been sufficient to say that the critic should confine himself wholly to the matter set before him within cloth covers and leave the author and his life and habits quite alone. It becomes increasingly diffi- cult to maintain such a position. I happen to belong to the school which firmly believes that every novel is autobiographi- cal. Even though the writer takes the characters of his story to an unknown city situated on the other side of the moon, still he travels with them. He is writing himself down on paper. How, then, is it possible to leave him out of any comprehensive report upon his poem or play or story? Since he has not left himself out of the story why should the critic leave him out of the review? If Texas Guinan were to write a novel of life in an English parsonage I think any account of the tale would be wholly inadequate if it contained no mention of the fact that Miss Guinan is a night-club hostess. There was produced during the present theatrical season a poor play by a dramatist of undoubted power. It dealt with marriage. The critics made only veiled refer- ences to the undoubted background of the production. It so happened that this was a play about marriage by a young man whose own marriage had but recently collapsed with much attendant bitterness and recrimination. There was no mention of this in the reviews. Naturally enough the critics would be embarrassed to deal roughly with a fine fellow whose soul was still harassed by tribulations. I admit that I would never have brought the matter up into a news- paper review had I been under assignment. And yet only those who knew and understood the personal adventures of the author could have had any comprehension of the curi- ously acid and almost petulant quality which ran through the play. I admit that there are places where in all humanity and mercy the line of revelation must be drawn, but it is non- sense to say that the personality of the author is none of the reader's or the critic's business. Everybody will concede that the public has a right to know that the author of "All Quiet on the Western Front" is a German who served in the army during the Great War. Such facts help us to under- stand and appreciate his point of view. It may be equally | useful for us to know in the case of a novel concerning mar- riage whether it was written by an ex-husband, one about to give hostages to fortune, or one still holding the franchise. Reticence is an admirable quality under certain circum- stances, but it is almost the chief foe of literature. It is an adornment when worn by a gentleman, but a millstone round the neck of any author. It is well enough that we should discourage vulgarity when it rises up to smite us in our own actions or those of our friends, but there will be precious little stuff of any moment written when Emily Post has com- pleted her conquest of the United States. Only a cad can write a first-class biography. It may be a grave offense to kiss and tell, but I fear me that fiction of the first rank can- not be obtained without some such loss of grace. Heywood Broun

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February 19, 1930] The Nation 211 Divorce — and After II. Separation Without Divorce A PERSONAL NARRATIVE OUR separation has been on the whole a happy one. As things have worked out, each of us has got out of it about everything that would have had to be fought for if the arrangement had been determined by a contest in the courts. Of course each of us has had to make sacrifices — some of them pretty heavy — which it is proper to charge up in the reckoning as the price of the mistakes we both made in the begin- ning. I think neither of us is any longer disposed to put all the blame on the other, but my wife undoubtedly feels as certain as I do of having grievances. I am convinced, without any mis- givings, that separation was the wise and necessary course, and I trust that my wife is likewise convinced that it was the only solution. Our first mistake was in marrying too young. If we had waited another year or two, my wife would have had time to learn that she was inseparably bound to the church — the church that so wisely warns her children against "mixed marriages." As it was, we married during a lapse of faith on my wife's part, which made it possible for her to assure me quite sincerely that the formal waiver of rights over the education of possible children which I had to sign would have no more force than I should choose to give it. I was too young — only twenty-three — too ignorant of the ways of Mother Church, and too much in love to know that lapses of faith are temporary as a rule and that assurances given off the record are mere chaff before the winnowing breath of Mother Church, while the solemn pledge of an unbeliever is binding forever. Another thing that I did not know at the time but was immediately to learn was that a family of children is the probable consequence of every marriage in which Mother Church has a hand. The first child was on the way before the first year of our union had passed. The economic problem promptly became acute and remained so through all the years that we remained together. How acute the problem became may be judged by the fact that the number of children was ultimately six. The frictions and anxieties \ that accompanied this family increase were aggravated by my ever-intensifying disapproval of the religious training to which the children were subjected. I here attempt no justification of my failure to take heroic measures for family limitation, nor do I offer any excuse — other than my quix- otic regard for the promise I had made not to interfere — for my inability to cope with the educational problem. Fundamentally the trouble was that in spite of everything we continued for a long time to have a good deal of affec- The first article in this series, published last week, indicated the problems of adjustment created when families are broken up by divorce or separation. The present article, to be followed by others of like char- acter, is a personal statement, necessarily anonymous, for whose authenticity we vouch to our readers, of the way in which those problems have been met in a par- ticular case. — Editor The Nation. tion for each other. Besides, the children were all of them children to be proud of and made an additional bond that kept us together past the point when expediency should have separated us. It would have ultimately become impossible for me to remain a member of the family without insisting on a modi- fication of the part the church was playing in the upbringing of the children. That would have meant an atmosphere of contention which would have made everybody un- happy. The contest would have been one which I could not hope to win, and sooner or later it would have taken the form of a contest for the affections of the children. On the economic side there was nothing in prospect for us but growing debts and ul- timate ruin. There was at least a chance that the worst features of the threatening future might be avoided if we broke up the partnership and worked out a new solution. This much of the background is necessary for the under- standing of the terms of our home-made separation. When it came the decision was mine, and it was my abrupt act that made it effective. We have been separated for about ten years. There was no stipulation as to what rights, privileges, and exemptions either one should claim. By voluntarily giving up all claim on the children, I immedi- ately removed the most formidable issue from the area of possible dispute. It was tacitly understood that I should contribute whatever I conveniently could to the support of the family. With the exception of one trying period when I was not earning enough to support even myself, my wife has accepted the situation as she found it without complain- ing that she was ill-treated. But as I have not been able to carry the whole financial burden alone, my wife herself has been forced to go to work in order to maintain the stan- dard of living which she considers appropriate. This she has done with commendable courage. Her work is dignified and congenial and is of a sort for which she has special qualifications of training and temperament. The fact that she has had a free hand in bringing up the children must go far toward reconciling her to the hardships in her situa- tion. All the children have received or are receiving their education in religious institutions. One of them is a nun. If my wife has ever used the advantages of her position to turn the children against me, I have seen no sign of it. Of course all of them but the oldest — a boy who left home and the church soon after my defection — are sorry for me and pray diligently for the salvation of my heathen soul. The reason our first-born struck out for himself at the age

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212 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3372 of sixteen was that he had grown weary both of the hot- house atmosphere of the home and of the demands made upon him by the church. He is now happily married and successful in business. He and his wife and I are great friends. The young man and I have the utmost respect and esteem for each other, as well as a warm affection. My acquaintance with the two youngest children was too brief to make any impress on them that is likely to last. That is a part of my sacrifice. The other two children — both attractive and amiable girls — have paid me the spontaneous tribute of genuine affection, where I might have expected nothing better than indifference or tolerant kindness. My sacrifice, so far as they are concerned, is in the fact that, owing to distance and the high cost of travel, I cannot see them as often as I should like. I have never raised the issue of taking any of the children to live with me. The answer to such a demand would be that I was free to rejoin the family whenever my desire to be with them grew strong enough to impel me to that step. My wife might well claim also that as she has had the sole responsibility for ten years of managing the family and keeping up the home, she is entitled to keep the children near her instead of intrusting them to the dubious influence of a truant father. According to the conventional view, the worst dis- advantage of the arrangement I have described is that it has deprived the children of what is called "a father's care." But I discount that. It was better that they should grow up in peace and piety than that they should have had a father about the place who would daily, before their young observ- ant eyes, be turning into a sour, unsympathetic old grouch. As it is now, when they do occasionally see their father, they meet him as a friend and find him a fairly mellow and kindly old party whom they cannot help liking, though they expect to see him damned at last. As the account checks up in the end, my wife and I have both got what we felt to be most important. My wife, after enjoying, not without hardship, the companionship of the children in a peaceful and fairly comfortable home, has the assurance of sharing her eternal reward, unless something goes wrong, with all of them but one. As for my part in the bargain, I have won for myself, not without sacrifice, a sort of freedom that makes it possible for me to live my life about as I choose — that is, in interesting occupations, in normal comfort, in total release from exactions by the conscience of others, and under adequate provision for my mental, moral, emotional, and physical health. I believe these blessings were worth the prices we paid for them. Harvard "Explains" By GARDNER JACKSON Boston, February 3 IN answer to widespread criticism, Harvard University has officially explained to her alumni, in a statement by Arthur L. Endicott, controller, that the sudden dismissal of twenty scrubwomen from Widener Library "had nothing to do with the decree of the Minimum Wage Commission except the time at which the change was made." The statement, prepared last week for the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and issued to the Boston newspapers, contradicts the letter to the Reverend William H. Duvall of Cambridge in which President A. Lawrence Lowell said: "I find that the Minimum Wage Board has been complaining of our employing women for those purposes at less than thirty- seven cents an hour, and hence the university has felt con- strained to replace them with men." The minimum-wage decree covering "office and other building cleaners" was published from the State House on December 30, 1920, to take effect February 1, 1921. Igno- rance of the decree cannot be pleaded. In the first place, under the law copies of it were automatically sent to em- ployers for prominent posting in restrooms of cleaning women. Harvard thus received copies soon after it was published. In the second place, an inspector for the Mini- mum Wage Commission inspected Harvard early in 1922 on the basis of the thirty-seven-cent decision. The Harvard official did not show the inspector the pay roll but insisted that they were paying wages satisfactory to the commission. This conversation was reported to the commission and should be a part of the record at the State House, if that record is intact. The dismissal of the women at the library dis- closes the fact that Harvard was, in truth, paying the women thirty-five cents an hour — two cents under the mini- mum standard — in 1922 but was able to assure the inspector that the wages were satisfactory to the commission on the strength of "an understanding" with a majority of that body. This "understanding," fortified by subsequent con- ferences and correspondence, including a conference at the State House in 1925 between the commission and "Nelson Perkins" — presumably Thomas Nelson Perkins, member of the Harvard Corporation (now president of the Boston and Maine Railroad) — enabled Harvard to evade the law in comparative peace till the last inspection which took place in February, 1928. At that time inspectors for the commission persuaded that body to try to make Harvard increase the wages of the women to conform to the decree. Mr. Endicott, in an in- terview with a New York newspaperman following his offi- cial explanation, was blunt in saying that he had an "under- standing" with the commission that the women's wages were "all right." Hence the relative lack of trouble — over two cents an hour — from 1921 to 1928. It is, as the World has said, "incredible . . . like a chapter from Dickens." The first part of Mr. Endicott's official explanation describes the reorganization, started in 1921, of the Harvard buildings administration under a central head. It says next: "The new policy was approved in April, 1929, and at that time I wrote the Minimum Wage Commission that we pro- posed to replace the women cleaners in Widener Library with men as soon after July 1, 1929, as we had opportunity to find other employment for the former. It was not at all a question of wages; it was the question of following the policy which we had found from our experience to be eco-

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February 19, 1930] The Nation 213 nomical and efficient." Why did Mr. Endicott write to the Minimum Wage Commission if wages were not at issue? And what about the wages from April till the end of the year, when the women were dismissed ? Further on Mr. Endicott says: "In October, after giving entirely adequate notice, we replaced some of the women who were the least capable and we notified the Minimum Wage Commission that we wished a little longer time in order to find other employment for the remainder." Again, why did Mr. Endicott notify the Minimum Wage Commission if Harvard was violating no wage decree? I have talked with twelve of the women since Mr. Endicott's statement was issued. They all emphatically deny that any of the group was given advance notice. They received their written notices the day the discharge took effect. When the Minimum Wage Commission sent its ulti- matum of December 18, 1929, threatening that if on Decem- ber 26 any of the women were still employed in the library at less than the thirty-seven-cent rate, it would exercise its right to publish a notice to the effect that the university was not complying with its decree, Harvard immediately dis- missed the remaining women. The hope was expressed in their notes of dismissal, as in the case of the earlier dismis- sals, that other work would be found for them at the univer- sity. "All of the women whom we discharged in December," continues Mr. Endicott, "have either been offered work or given employment, with the exception of two. In the case of one, her son has been employed." Four of the women, Mrs. Selina Taylor, Mrs. H. Sullivan, Miss Catharine Donlon, and Mrs. H. Malloy, went to work almost im- mediately from the library to the dormitories — on their own application — at the reduced rate of thirty-two cents an hour for so-called chambermaid work, though, by their own account, this work involves as much scrubbing as the library work. (Harvard officials asked the commission that these dormitory women be classified as chambermaids, a category outside the minimum-wage law.) Two more of the women, Mrs. Annie Mclntyre and Mrs. Hannah Hogan, so Mrs. Mclntyre told me, were sent for and offered temporary work as substitutes in the dormitories at the thirty-two-cent rate. Since they wanted steady jobs at the minimum-wage level, they refused this offer. Four others, Miss Annie J. Corcoran, Mrs. Catharine Curran, Miss Margaret O'Con- nors, and Mrs. Emma Trafton, told me they have not been offered any kind of work at Harvard since their discharge. None of the group dismissed on November 1, 1929, has been offered work as I write this. Thus four of the twenty women dismissed are at work at Harvard and two were tendered temporary work. Mr. Endicott's statement gives a very different impression. At one point Mr. Endicott's statement says: "It is not customary in industry, I believe, to pay employees hired by the hour for time when they are out sick, or for vacations. i In the case of these women we have done both, and the \ amount of pay received on account of sick leave and vaca- \ tions much more than equaled the difference about which the ! Minimum Wage Commission has complained." Each of j the twelve women whom I have interviewed since Mr. I Endicott's statement was issued vehemently denied to me that they or their associates ever received a penny from '> Harvard for sick leave or when out because of injury. "We were paid by the month," declared Miss Corcoran, "and pay for the days we were out sick was always taken out of our money at the end of the month. I don't know how he dares say such a thing." Miss Corcoran had worked in the library for ten years. The vacation pay, the women said, consisted of one week's pay for a six-day week of three hours a day at thirty- five cents an hour — a total of $6.30, even though the major- ity of the women worked five hours a day — from 6 a. m. to 11 a. m. Mr. Endicott may fairly be asked how that vacation pay of $6.30 a year "much more than equaled the difference about which the Minimum Wage Commission has complained." The vacation pay amounted to $56.70 for each woman during the approximately nine years that Har- vard was ignoring the minimum-wage law. Compare these figures with the $31.20 a year which the increase of two cents an hour asked by the Minimum Wage Commission would have meant to each woman, or a total of $280.80 for each woman who had been there during the almost nine years in which the decree was in effect. The majority of the women had been at Harvard ten years or more. Mr. Endicott's statement minimizes the importance to the women of the wages paid them for their work at Wide- ner Library. It is true that some of them had other cleaning jobs in the afternoons. "But," says Mrs. Mclntyre, echo- ing all her associates, "who gets up at 5 a. m. every morning winter and summer to go to a job unless the pay means a lot to her? It's no joke, I can tell you. And this was steady work — thirteen years of it for me." In his concluding paragraph, attempting to justify the replacement of the women by men, Mr. Endicott asserts: "We have not at any time attempted to violate the Minimum Wage Law." There is no need to argue with him. The facts speak for themselves : the Minimum Wage decree became effective February 1, 1921; the first inspection took place early in 1922; the women were dismissed November 1 and December 21, 1929, about eight years later, under pressure from the Minimum Wage Commission. To delegations of protest Mr. Endicott has shown noticeable irritation at the Minimum Wage Law as inter- preted on the ground that all Harvard employees would want pay based on minimum-wage levels if the scale had prevailed for the Widener women. His stock conclusion for all questioners is that employees would rather work at Har- vard for lower wages because of "pleasant working condi- tions" and because there is a certain "prestige" about work- ing at Harvard University! It is rumored that certain prominent citizens who have the moral health of Harvard at heart are assembling facts with a view to requesting that the university pay to these scrubwomen the additional two cents an hour which it should have paid them during the years after the State set the thirty-seven-cent minimum. That amount of money would come as a substantial blessing to some of the women and it would not put too great a strain on the finances of Harvard University, since it would amount in all to some- thing under $5,000 for the twenty women. Such an act of penitence, though it might ruffle Harvard officialdom, would have an extremely salutary effect upon those Olym- pian dwellers. Moreover, it might be useful, especially to the workers whom the Minimum Wage Commission is sup- posed to protect, if that body were asked to explain why Harvard was permitted to evade its decrees for nine years.

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214 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3372 Secretary Wilbur and Boulder Dam By RUTH FINNEY Washington, February 10 THOUGH liquor has monopolized the speeches and the statements and the headlines in the capital this winter, it is water that is engaging the serious concern of those with most at stake in Washington. In and out among all other questions, among the noisy sham battles and the grim quiet struggles, the water-power issue seeps and flows. In the Northwest an ally of the Electric Bond and Share Company is trying to secure control of power on the Flathead River. All the private interests that have wanted Muscle Shoals are uniting to make sure of success in their next attempt to get it. Before the Federal Trade Commission, power companies are attempting to justify their financial, operating, and propaganda methods. The Federal Power Commission, titular guardian of the public's power resources, is under fire from several directions. Most serious of all, the Federal Water Power Act itself, Magna Charta of public power development, faces nullifica- tion. The power from Boulder Dam, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is being leased. Since last June, Secre- tary of the Interior Wilbur has been working on plans for the disposal of this power. Congress looked on passively while the Secretary re- jected the plan for a government-built, equipped, and oper- ated power plant, as made possible by the Boulder Dam Act, and announced that he would sell the falling water at the dam, an alternative method of financing the project which friends of the measure expected him to resort to only if all others failed. Congress exhibited slightly more concern when he announced a tentative allocation of power giving almost one-fourth to private power companies, although States and cities, expressly given a preference right in the Boulder Dam Act, were asking for all the power. Little was said, however, because those most familiar with the matter thought the Secretary would find, when the legal business of drawing contracts was begun, that State and municipal applicants must be given the power they wanted. Secretary Wilbur's next move was to put certain ques- tions concerning the Boulder Dam situation to his legal adviser, E. C. Finney — the same Finney who figured so prominently in the Teapot Dome and Elk Hills oil cases. Solicitor Finney's answers constituted an interpretation of the Boulder Dam Act and the Federal Water Power Act which swept away, in effect, all the preference rights pro- vided for public agencies. He said, in answer to Secretary Wilbur's leading questions, that the Secretary would be justified, in the "public interest," in ignoring the preference rights of States and cities if "other applicants" offered better financial security and greater contractual responsibility. Congress first looked at this opinion in dazed silence, and then roused itself to insist that it should know better than any department solicitor what it means when it writes law. And now, for its water-power act and its integrity as a law-making body, Congress has taken up the cudgels and is preparing to fight. Senator George W. Norris, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has sounded warning that to permit Solicitor Finney's opinion to be adopted as the basis for power contracts will leave the executive branch of government free to nullify any act of Congress at any time. Senator Hiram W. Johnson, one of the authors of the Boulder Dam Act, has expressed dismay and a determination to fight. Representative Philip D. Swing, co-author of the act, has prepared a brief, warning the Administration that "to graft into a law by interpreta- tion a policy that Congress had deliberately declared should be no part of that law is executive usurpation." During the years when the Boulder Dam bill was pending in Congress the private power companies, with one voice, fought it. They said the government must control floods on the Colorado but must not generate power at its dam, because to do so would be "red." Once the bill was passed and authority given for a great public power develop- ment, the Southern California Edison Company and the Southern Sierras Power Company began asking for all or part of that power. But southern California cities wanted the power also, to supply to their people over publicly owned distributing systems and to pump their drinking water. Together with the State of Nevada, they asked for more power than Boulder Dam will produce. The Boulder Dam bill had been framed with these needs in mind and the pro- vision to meet them. The cities had done battle for it for years because they were sure it safeguarded their interests. Mr. Wilbur, however, said he believed the Edison Company and its associates should be given a share of the power. He ! tentatively allocated to them about one-fourth of the output, an amount as great as that given Los Angeles and more than four times as great as that given smaller cities. He provided that Los Angeles and its ancient enemy, the Edison Com- pany, should jointly equip the Boulder Dam power plant and jointly operate it. Los Angeles and her smaller neighbors protested and claimed a right to priority over the company in allocation of power. They pointed to the wording of the Boulder Dam Act. This act had been drawn with just such a controversy in mind, and its authors thought it was drawn in such a way as to leave no doubt as to what must be done. It provided that the States of Nevada, Arizona, and California should have first opportunity to buy power within a limited time. After that, conflicting applications were to be settled by the Secretary of the Interior "with due regard to the public in- terest and in conformity with the policy expressed in the Fed- eral Water Power Act" — a policy contained in these words: The commission shall give preference to applications by States and municipalities, provided the plans for the same are deemed by the commission equally well adapted, or shall within a reasonable time, to be fixed by the com- mission, be made equally well adapted, to conserve and utilize in the public interest the navigation and water re- sources of the region. In the past the Federal Power Commission has given preference to State and municipal applications for power because of this wording. But the commission was wrong in

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February 19, 1930] The Nation 215 that interpretation, says the Southern California Edison Company in effect, for the "public interest" in the present case requires that Boulder Dam power be allocated to the com- pany, because the company has almost a million customers. Secretary Wilbur, already on record as in substantial agree- ment with this view, put to Solicitor Finney these questions : What is meant by the public interest? What body of people comprises the public as the act uses the term? Is the interest referred to as public the government's re- sponsibility to the whole people of the United States or is it the interest of the area to be immediately served by Boulder Dam power, or is it the interest of a particular part of that area? Mr. Finney replied as follows: Public interest is one of those broad terms like "public policy" capable of different legitimate interpretations in the discretion of the officer called upon to administer it. The interest referred to is primarily the government's responsi- bility, financial or otherwise, to all the people of the United States for the greatest good to be derived from this project, the cost of which is to be advanced from the public treasury. The term "public interest" is the domi- nant consideration. . . . The primary public interest is in the soundness of the contracts and the solvency of the contractor, not in the corporate or municipal char- acter of that contractor. . . . The public interest requires . . . equality of access to Boulder Dam power by areas composing the region in proportion to the needs of the applicants. This means, said Representative Swing in his answering brief, that "you [Secretary Wilbur] have asked your ad- viser in what direction to travel to reach your goal and he has answered, 'In any direction you choose to proceed.' ' The words "public interest" used in the Boulder Dam Act [continues the brief] were intended to mean exactly the opposite of private interest. . . . If the solicitor's opinion is to be accepted that the words "due regard to the public interest" must be con- strued as a check upon preference rights given municipali- ties by the Federal Water Power Act, then indeed a strange irony of fate has here played its part, because by this contention the municipalities are to be grievously injured by a weapon forged by them as an aid for the de- fense of their rights. The effort of the solicitor to introduce the foreign factor of finance in the interpretation of public interest to subordinate the preference rights of municipalities was not contemplated by Congress and must not be counte- nanced. The financial interest of the United States was safeguarded in other sections of the act. Congress meant and intended and declared that when- ever possible the public, that is the people, should get the benefits of the development of this great public resource through their own public agencies, direct and at cost, without . . . paying profits to a private power corporation. It is customary in disputes of this sort to search through debates of the Congress that enacted a law in order to arrive at a clearer understanding of its intention. The Sixty-fifth Congress passed the Federal Water Power Act. When the act was pending it considered two alternative ways of treat- ing the section about preference rights for public agencies. lit was proposed at that time to leave the question of pref- erences to the discretion of the power commission. This proposal was debated in the House of Representatives and voted down. The House instead adopted the section that is now law. In the Senate debate it was referred to as making mandatory the recognition of municipal and State projects. This interpretation was not challenged. The section became part of the law as enacted. In the year following, the Sixty-sixth Congress strengthened the position of public agencies by providing that even when the Federal Power Commission found plans of a private company more acceptable for utilizing the water resources of a region, public agencies should be given a chance to make their plans equally acceptable. This amend- ment, Congress believed, closed the door to any possible attempt to defeat preference rights for public development. If a city could adopt a corporation's plans, the question of difference in suitability therefore could not arise. There is still other evidence to show the frame of mind of Congress on this question as recently as December, 1928. Senator Reed of Pennsylvania offered an amendment to the Boulder Dam Act providing that the government should not con- struct, equip, and operate a power plant at the dam unless it failed to find anyone else willing to do so. The amend- ment was defeated. With the policy of federal power development established, no attempt was made to attack the subordinate rights of States and cities. It was thought to be futile to do so. And the question would never have arisen if Secretary Wilbur had not departed from the approved plan for a government-built and operated power house. Mr. Wilbur asked another question that is even more significant, and Mr. Finney made another answer that is even more amazing. To appreciate them it is necessary to remember that the Boulder Dam Act says that no applica- tion of a city or State for power shall be denied or an application in conflict therewith granted on the ground that bonds have not yet been voted to finance the proposed work. Secretary Wilbur wrote to Mr. Finney: If Los Angeles and other municipalities cannot now execute enforceable contracts meeting reasonable financial requirements of the Secretary, what would be the duty of the Secretary under provisions of the act that an applica- tion is not to be denied because of the necessity for a bond issue? Would he be authorized to make contracts with other bidders preserving to the preference claimants the right to contract for part of the power if enforceable contracts are tendered within a designated time? The Solicitor wrote to Mr. Wilbur: This proviso is not designed to tie the hands of the Secretary pending the authorization and marketing of the bond issue so long as the right of the preference claim- ants to contract for power allocated to them is preserved. He went on to explain that while the Secretary could not grant an application in conflict with the city's, an applica- tion and a contract were two different things, and a contract would be proper that preserved the right of a city to contract within a reasonable time "when, as, and if the necessary bond issue is authorized." To Los Angeles, whose bond issues have been defeated before now by the Edison Com- pany, this has an ominous sound. Representative Swing points out that "private companies once having secured control of the power would be forced by self-interest to immediately engage in a political campaign in every city that was an ex- pected beneficiary to defeat, if possible, the bond issue."

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216 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3372 Not power, but the right to batter and bruise them- selves fighting for it, may be the privilege of the cities of the Southwest under the bill for which they worked so many years, with such high hopes. Congress will have the last word in this fight because it alone can appropriate money to build Boulder Dam, and, in appropriating, it can make any requirements for use of its money that it sees fit. It can, if it will, exert a substantial veto over any contracts Secre- tary Wilbur makes. The more or less spectacular aspects of this controversy may, it is possible, focus new interest on the duller aspects of the general power war. No one denies the importance of proper accounting in the Federal Power Commission, where companies, unless curbed, may build up vast and fabulous capitalization claims to serve as the basis for future recap- ture proceedings and future rates. But neither is anyone fired with potent indignation about it. The issues are diffi- cult to present now. There are so many things to be done. The Boulder Dam fight, on the other hand, has immedi- ate interest for all parts of the country. On its outcome hangs, to some extent, the fate of Muscle Shoals and of every other water-power project, great or small. Senator Norris declares that its outcome will determine who shall make the law of the United States. Mexico Instals a New President By LYLE C. WILSON MEXICO accomplished a change of administration on February 5 under circumstances promising more good than evil, greater success than failure, better conditions rather than worse. But it is only a prom- ise. As Emilio Portes Gil departs and Pascual Ortiz Rubio enters the presidential palace, from opposition throats comes the challenging accusation of fraud, duplicity, and murder. And unhappily, within two hours of his inauguration Presi- dent Rubio is struck down by the bullet of a would-be assassin whose act reminds us of the constant threat of death that overhangs the chief executive of our southern neighbor. Fortunately, the wound seems not to be mortal. Jose Vasconcelos was Rubio's defeated opponent for the presidency. Vasconcelistas proclaim that Ortiz Rubio was elevated to that office by a combination of violence and thievery at the polls by which the National Revolutionary Party prevented the people from making effective their col- lective enthusiasm for Vasconcelos. Some measure of fraud did prevail in Mexico on election Sunday. There were in- timidation and violence at various polling places, on the evi- dence of the Mexicans themselves, and denial of the franchise with no more justification for it than ability to exert essential force. That Vasconcelistas suffered most from this crime against democracy appears indisputable. But that Vascon- celos would have been chosen under ideal conditions is sub- ject to doubt. The margin of his defeat seems too great. In view of Mexican electoral practices, it must be doubted that Vasconcelos himself could have expected election. In their effort to prevent machine control of electoral procedure, the Mexicans have leaned over backward so far that instead of protecting their polling places they have polluted them with good intentions gone wrong. At the cornerstone of Mexico's elaborate system of protection for the polls is a prescribed precinct procedure designed to prevent govern- ment officials — minions of the party in power — from con- trolling the ballot. The first eleven qualified, ordinary electors, privately employed or unemployed, who arrive at the polling place must organize the precinct voting machinery, pass on qualifications of other voters, supervise and report the poll. Under these conditions the precinct is likely to be carried by the candidate whose supporters first reach and organize the precinct polling place. Picture such a pro- cedure in New York. It needs no strain on the imagina- tion to understand that Tammany would be first on the job even in precincts where registered Republicans were scarce. And Tammany would be charged by the Repub- licans with stealing precincts which Republicans couldn't have won even if every Republican in the district had been allowed to vote twice. That seems to approximate what took place in more than a few places in Mexico last November. Whether such tactics produced ballots essential to Ortiz Rubio's election cannot be said, at least by this writer. He believes it did not. Violence by Ortiz Rubio's henchmen provoked the editor of El Dictamen of Vera Cruz to discuss the matter on November 19 beneath the caption, Our Democratic Failure. "In this port," the editor related, "we saw them [the government faction] gaining possession of polling booths which they could not secure in any other way by shooting ; we saw that the polling lists were defective in order to hinder the voting of members of the opposing party; that the ballots of the opposing party were not accepted." Elsewhere, among comparatively impartial observers, emphasis was placed rather upon the relative absence of violence last November as compared with prior elections. But more important than this abatement of violent folkways was the presence of two parties in the field instead of one, even though the margin between their polls was tremendous. And the trend from militarists to civilians for the presi- dential office is significant from whatever standpoint Mexico may be surveyed. Portes Gil is a civilian but he also is a political accident. Ortiz Rubio is a civilian, an engineer by coincidence, but no accident. He or his like was inevitable soon in Mexico if the republic was to prevail. True, Ortiz Rubio holds office largely by grace of General Plutarco Elias Calles, Mexico's strong man. It is also true that Calles's support is practically synonymous with the support of the army. But within ten years the Mexican army has changed. A new crop of generals has succeeded the revo- lutionary veterans whose high-handed and repeated recourse to rebellion gradually disposed of them via courts martial and firing squads. The newer militarists are Calles's pupils, not his peers. The brighter stars of Calles's Cabinet, in general, owe allegiance to the new President. For the present, at least, Ortiz Rubio may count upon useful support from the labor

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February 19, 1930] The Nation 217 group and the agrarians. Their interests will not always coincide and it remains to be proved that Ortiz Rubio is strong enough to maintain political discipline. The National Revolutionary Party, of which Calles was the founder and Ortiz Rubio has become the nominal head, has its blocs and insurgents. Already Rubio's campaign support is dividing into cliques, one recognizing Calles as the man behind the throne and the other insisting that Ortiz Rubio shall lead as well as march in front. The new President's policies must be founded upon the necessity for keeping his mixed support contented. It is axiomatic that no Mexican rebel- lion can succeed without at least negative assistance from the United States Government, for rebels must have arms and munitions. Therefore, foreign policy number one in Ortiz Rubio's administration will be to cultivate American friendship. That Washington will not rebuff but will wel- come that policy is a fact to inspire hope. The unprece- dented official welcome given the Mexican President-elect in the American capital foretold much, specifically that the Morrow era of Mexican-American relations will not fade if the United States can prevent it. With American good-will in mind, Ortiz Rubio will modify the land-seizing agrarian policy somewhat, especially with respect to seizure without immediate compensation. That means some slowing-up of the seizure program and the new President must travel that road carefully, for his agrarian supporters are land-hungry. Ortiz Rubio hopes to liberate isolated communities by provision of roads. Mexico will sow pesos and reap schoolhouses if the pesos can be had. Above all, Ortiz Rubio will look to his credit at home. The army will be paid regularly. It is very necessary to pay the army regularly. Not long after Ambassador Morrow went to Mexico he advised President Calles that the best of all policies to follow would be to maintain his credit at home before satisfying creditors abroad. The current budget set aside 26,000,000 pesos for the public debt, but the proportion to be devoted to international obligations is not established. Foreign bankers and investors, particularly private investors, are not happy as they contemplate this situation. They do not appreciate the advice Morrow gave Calles. They hope Ortiz Rubio will forget about it. They have received al- most nothing since 1914. Short of a Dawes plan for Mexico it appears they will not soon receive more. The idea of a Dawes plan — in which Mexico's capacity to pay would be compared with her obligations, and the two, somehow, be made to balance — has been discussed informally. Such pro- cedure would reduce Mexico's current international debt, which amounts to 1,900,000,000 pesos. The appointment of Calles to the Mexican National Railway Administration may foretell a beginning of a better day for the investors. At present the railway operates at a loss, its pay roll choked by political employees. It is a personnel problem that Calles must undertake. The howls of the discharged will echo along the right of way, and it would not be surprising if a bridge here and there were con- sumed in fiery protest. But once purged of graft, and freed from revolutionary destruction, the railway may thrive and its bondholders fatten. Meanwhile, two essentials to Mexican well-being have already been achieved : the first is Washington's substitution of understanding for suspicion in Mexican-American rela- tions; the second is the armistice in religious warfare. In the Driftway CHARLES H. INGERSOLL, one of the brothers who made the dollar famous by the manufacture of a watch, who is now trying to perpetuate the dollar's reputation through making a fountain pen, writes in regard to an idea of his "which one of your recent articles reminded me of — namely, a fleet of sailing vessels plying regularly across the Atlantic, designed primarily for passengers." The idea "may be a crazy notion," Mr. Ingersoll goes on to say, "but I think there would be plenty of patronage." And the patronage would come "not only from the idle rich" but from "millions of people, with more or less sporting blood, some of them desiring long passage and all enjoying the sea and sailing." Also "there might be a price consideration which would settle the question of popularity. If the over- head were small enough, for the average wage person the saving in dollars might offset the time wasted." BEFORE going any farther the Drifter must rap Mr. Ingersoll on the knuckles for the final word in that last sentence. Probably Mr. Ingersoll did not actually mean "time wasted" or he would not have broached the main suggestion, but the idea that time spent in the manner described would be wasted is so typical of American thinking that the phrase slipped unconsciously into Mr. Ingersoll's letter. As to the scheme proposed, the Drifter thinks so well of it that if he had a little money to play with he would like nothing better than to carry it out. These words are chosen advisedly. The financial possibilities of the project do not appear so rosy that a man would be justified in putting into it any hard- earned capital on which he had to live, but if one had a little extra — if one ever does have that — the venture would be a fascinating one and in the end might turn out profitable to boot. The Drifter cannot envisage Mr. Ingersoll's "mil- lions" of passengers, and the word "fleet" sounds a bit ambi- tious. Probably four vessels would be enough. Allowing thirty days for the trip across the Atlantic Ocean, this would make possible a schedule of semi-monthly sailings — quite sufficient with which to start. THE Drifter does not believe that sailing vessels could be run so cheaply as to attract passengers for financial reasons. But this would not be necessary for the success of the project. This is a day in which there is a pronounced urge to get away — especially for one's vacation — from the conventional and the mechanical. People are glad to pay more nowadays to live in primitive fashion in summer camps than it would cost them to have all the com- forts of a first-class hotel, and among persons having vaca- tions of two to three months there must be many who would jump at the chance to go to Europe on a windjammer. Probably it would not be worth while to operate a trans- atlantic service for more than six months of the year, but the ships need not be laid up for the rest of the time. Winter sailings could be arranged to West Indian or South Ameri- can ports, or cruises could be organized — to the South Seas or other warm and quiet waters. The Drifter

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218 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3372 Correspondence A Farmer Subscribes To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: When I read in certain Eastern papers of the remark- able prosperity you have had during the past eight years, I rise to reply: "It never touched us here in the wheat belt of northern Montana." The agricultural marketing act has engendered a new hope but many fear it will prove a dud. The only way to make ends meet is to cut one's standard of living. I am trying out The Nation, hoping the editor will have the vision to see this far west. Today at my local elevator it takes five and one-third bushels of No. 1 Northern to pay for your magazine for one year. This would bread the editor for twelve months, I know. You seem to have a passion for justice so I am hoping we may be good friends. Homeland, Montana, January 17 P. T. Anderson (< Darkness for Light" To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: Please discontinue my subscription to The Nation. If you care for a reason, you can find it in a book, a copy of which you may have in your morgue, the Bible. I refer you to Isaiah, fifth chapter, twentieth verse. Oregon, III., January 14 D. A. Richardson One of the Real Heroes To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: If you are accepting supplementary nominations for your Honor Roll for 1929, I should like to propose the name of Elmer Smith, the labor lawyer of Centralia, Washington, who, without remuneration, without publicity, and with only a handful of supporters, has given ten years of his life, his health, his professional standing (the State bar association dis- barred him in an unsportsmanlike attempt to silence him) to an unflagging agitation for the release of eight men railroaded to prison under sentences of twenty-five to forty years for defending their union hall against a mob of lynchers. I con- sider him one of the real heroes of the present time. New York, January 24 Frederick A. Blossom A Soviet Prison To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I hope that Winthrop D. Lane, who wrote the article, Science and Crime, will soon make a trip to Soviet Russia so that when he writes again about prisons, he will also speak about prison conditions in the Soviet Union. A visit to a long- term prison here was of considerable interest to a group of about a dozen Americans. We entered, went all over the place, and were permitted to speak freely to the prisoners with no guard present. Since we were not searched, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have passed guns and saws to the prisoners, but escapes were unknown, according to the head guard. We saw the prisoners working in the factory. We spoke to them (the guard was not present) and were informed they work eight hours a day, for which they are paid. Later we saw the inmates in their cells, having dinner. The food was plain, but tasty and nourishing. A loud speaker in each cell supplied music during the meal. There was also a library and clubroom which they could visit after working hours. The prisoners mentioned that there was no corporal punishment. The only complainers were two ex-commissars who had taken graft and felt unjustly treated because they were there "for nothing." Moscow, January 9 Harry Jaffe Boy-Scout Militarism To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: A bill has been introduced into the New York Assem- bly which proposes to make boy-scout training compulsory in the public schools of this State for boys of ten to eighteen, and requires as well that they devote a considerable part of their present leisure, non-school time for this purpose. Such a law would introduce military training into our public schools, under the seemingly innocent guise of boy-scout work. The measure cannot pretend to be simply for the better physical training of our children in the grammar schools. If it were intended to accomplish this purpose, the extension of gymnasium and playground facilities, together with the present exercises practiced in the schools, would be ample to satisfy this object. The proposition requires for its execution the wearing of uniforms, submission to "commanders," drills, and all the rou- tine and paraphernalia of the scouts. It is plainly conceived in a military spirit with a view to advancing the idea of military practice and preparedness among the children in our schools. I respectfully submit that such a law would be out of harmony with the democratic ideals and the best traditions of our Re- public, and certainly not in line with the efforts of the United States to help bring about international peace. New York, February 3 Abraham A. Conan Contributors to This Issue Gardner Jackson is an independent and courageous Boston journalist. Ruth Finney has covered the story of Boulder Dam since 1923 for the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance. Lyle C. Wilson is a Washington newspaperman spe- cially conversant with Latin American affairs. Ruth Lechlitner frequently contributes poetry to the magazines. Henry Hazlitt is literary editor of The Nation. Norman Thomas is one of the directors of the League for Industrial Democracy and a contributing editor of The Nation. Royal J. Davis is a member of the editorial staff of the New York Evening Post. Donald A. Roberts is a member of the department of English at the College of the City of New York. Fred T. Marsh writes occasional book reviews for The Nation. Granville Hicks is assistant professor of English at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Alexander Bakshy writes on motion pictures for The Nation.

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Books, Films, Drama Cocoon By RUTH LECHLITNER Some supple creature, smooth as jade, and still As a tenacious sphinx upon the green Protective leaf, set her small mouth at will To taste the flesh of summer. Carven clean This branch, lace-ribbed, is frescoed on the bough And braced to catch the web, to hold a skein For the swift spinner and the silk that now Cradles a sleeper from the bitter rain. What word is woven with this little death From the neat pattern of a dream, to wake The mummy-chrysalis, to stir the breath Within this brittle case, and deftly shake From its thin sheath the fearful, folded wing Out on the green, young branches of the spring? Tradition and Experiment Tradition and Experiment in Present-Day Literature. Ad- dresses Delivered at the City Literary Institute of London. Oxford University Press. $2.50. THE most useful terms of literary criticism are ghosts; the hand passes through them, grasping nothing solid. From a volume such as this, the reader expects to emerge with his ideas sharpened and clarified; he is likely, instead, to find himself more in a fog than ever. Here are essays by ten writers, writing by pairs on five branches of literary art, the first of the pair discussing his branch in relation to tradition, the second in relation to ex- periment. One looks for clean divisions of opinion, for a series of five debates. One finds, in fact, that not a single contributor has been willing to throw in his lot entirely either with tradi- tion or with experiment, nor does he even seem willing to admit that he knows precisely the difference between them. R. H. Mottram, opening with a paper on Tradition in the Novel, begins by remarking that "the general tradition in the English novel, as in anything else that is English, is to have no strongly marked tradition," and adds that "it would hardly be too much to say that the tradition of the English novel is experiment." J. D. Beresford, writing on Experiment in the Novel, confesses that he is confronted by the same difficulty — that of "defining a recognizable tradition in English fiction to which I might conclusively point the exceptions." And he, too, concludes that "our best novelists have always been experimenters." In spite of these remarks, both Mr. Mottram and Mr. Beresford do try to characterize the tradition of the English novel, and add point to their original misgivings by disagreeing on a simple question of fact, for Mr. Mottram thinks that tradition "in the main ... a weakly romantic one," while Mr. Beresford is equally confident that "the tradi- tion of the English novel has always been realistic in the main." But then, if we cannot tell the difference between tradition and experiment, how can we be expected to know the difference between realism and romance? Mr. Beresford makes the point that the great novelists whom we now look back upon as traditional were in their own time experimenters. Those of their experiments that failed, or were for some reason inimitable, are still regarded as experiments; but most of their experiments inspired succeed- ing authors to copy them, and "this successive copying is the sole means by which an experiment becomes in the course of the centuries an accepted tradition." When we come to Tradition in Drama, we find Ashley Dukes reminding us once more that "tradition is surely no more than the fruit of successful experiment." C. K. Munro, supposedly writing on Experiment in Drama, gives in fact very little attention to that subject, but wanders off into a considera- tion of the nature of art in general. Nor is he the only con- tributor who can be accused of departing from his assignment. T. S. Eliot, under the title of Experiment in Criticism, devotes merely his first paragraph to all that he has to say about the dubious distinction between "traditional" and "experimental" work in literary criticism, and thereafter writes about the changes in the last century in the scope of the critic's knowl- edge, and about our curious modern habit of living in the future: "We hardly have time to get any fun out of what is being written now, so concerned are we about the quality of what may be written fifty years hence." Much of the confusion that surrounds these discussions of tradition and experiment is the result, I think, of the vagueness of both terms; for the meaning of each is indefinitely extensi- ble. There is a sense in which writing of any kind is impossi- ble without tradition. The reader of this review can under- stand it only because each word is to him not an unintelligible black smudge on a white background, but a symbol which has the meaning, or group of meanings, that tradition has given to it. On the other hand, nearly every sentence, no matter how ordinary, is to some degree an experiment: it is an assembling of words in a unique and hitherto non-existent order. We do not ordinarily recognize experiment as such unless it is an un- usual type of experiment; and we do not recognize tradition as such unless it is not all-pervading. Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, for example, have sharpened our notions of what we mean by a traditional sentence and a traditional word. Of all the writers in the present symposium, it has re- mained for Edith Sitwell, writing on Experiment in Poetry, to offer as satisfactory a brief summary of the respective roles of tradition and experiment in literature as we are likely to get: The truth is, that the great poet is, in almost every case, both a traditionalist and an experimentalist. He does not forget the discoveries made and the examples shown by his great predecessors, but, at the same time, he must bring some freshness into the language, some technical in- novation, some new discovery of the world of sight or sound, else he is merely an echo, and will not take his place among his predecessors. Henry Hazlitt Chain-Store Civilization The Passing of Normalcy. By Charles W. Wood. B. C. Forbes Publishing Company. $3. CHARLES W. WOOD is a writer with a knack for shrewd observation and a skill in a sort of writing that is easy to read. These gifts he is now applying to the new gospel of salvation by Big Business, which, it seems, has discovered or is discovering that the way to prosperity is to make everybody prosperous. We are to be saved by scientific mass production. Mr. Wood's latest book is a sermon on this theme with Marion, Ohio, as its background and the role of the chain stores as its principal preoccupation. Indeed, as Mr. Wood explains with scrupulous honesty, the book grew out of a

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220 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3372 suggestion from the chain-store men, and the study was some- what aided by them although the results were not quite in line with their desires. Mr. Wood makes no Middletown study of Marion, but he does make some sound and shrewd observa- tions about it, and tells us rather vividly how and why the old days of normalcy are passing — which is a very different matter from proving the adequacy of his gospel. It remains to be seen how far he can convince even the business leaders to whom he appeals. And if he convinces them, there are still problems inherent in landlordism, Wall Street speculation, and the whole profit system which make this reviewer pretty skeptical about the capacity of Big Business as we know it to achieve that "more abundant life for everybody" which Mr. Wood thinks is its logical object. But the book contains a prophecy which ought to warm the hearts of thousands of underpaid employees of chain stores. Mr. Wood is sure that those stores "will some day take a conspicuous leadership in the movement for higher wages." Here's hoping. Norman Thomas Spring-Rice's Career The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. A Record. Edited by Stephen Gwynn. Two volumes. Houghton Mifflin Company. $10. TWO young men, one an American, the other an English- man, crossed from New York to London in November, 1886. The Englishman had been told of the American, who had just been defeated in the election for Mayor of New York, and introduced himself. The acquaintance ripened into friendship so rapidly that within a month the Englishman was acting as best man at the American's wedding in London. Fif- teen years later the American was President of the United States; twelve more years and the Englishman was British Am- bassador at Washington. Romance would have had Roosevelt President when Spring-Rice was Ambassador, with the two joining hands to take the United States into the war beside Great Britain. History, which is made of sterner stuff, sent Spring-Rice to Washington as one of the secretaries of the Brit- ish legation in 1887 for a year, sent him back in 1889 for two years, again in 1894 for a year, in 1905 for a visit of a few days, and finally in 1913 for what were destined to be the last five years of his diplomatic career and of his life. Thus he served at Washington for considerable periods in the administrations of three Presidents — Harrison, Cleveland, and Wilson — but his activity there during the Presidency of the friend with whom he had stood up as best man was limited to the brief visit in 1905 when he was first secretary of the British embassy at St. Petersburg. The war between Russia and Japan was approaching a crisis, and Roosevelt suggested that Spring-Rice, who had rather unconventionally been sup- plying him with information from the Russian capital, should give him the benefit of his knowledge and judgment in person. Hence the extraordinary visit, which was followed a few months later by Roosevelt's proposal to the two belligerents to send representatives to a peace conference — a move which resulted in the treaty of Portsmouth. When Spring-Rice first came to Washington he was an al- most total stranger, but in a short time his capacity for mak- ing friends — one of his strongest traits — had brought him into the circle of what Mr. Gwynn characterizes as "perhaps the most distinguished group of men and women that America could then show." It was the group of which Henry Adams was the center and which included John Hay, whose house was near that of Adams, Senator Cameron of Pennsylvania, Senator Lodge, Roosevelt, and in particular two brilliant women, Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Lodge. Throughout his subsequent ab- sences from Washington — at the British Foreign Office 1888-89, at the British legation in Tokio 1892-93, at the British embassy in Berlin 1895-98, at Constantinople 1898-99, at Teheran 1899- 1901, at Cairo 1901-2, at St. Petersburg as first secretary of the embassy 1903-6, at Teheran again, this time as minister, 1906-7, in England 1908, at Stockholm as minister 1908-12 — wherever he happened to be, he maintained his connection with his American friends by a stream of letters. These letters and the friendships they preserve bulked so large in his life as to justify their part in the title which Mr. Gwynn has given to his volumes. One other friendship has an ironical piquancy which ren- ders it worthy of mention. Among the letters which Spring- Rice received congratulating him upon his appointment as Am- bassador to Washington, was one from Vienna beginning: "Dear Springy, Hurrah three times for your appointment to Washington. Now I have made up my mind to go there too . . ." It was from Count Dumba, between whom and Spring-Rice a close friendship had been formed at Stockholm. Dumba did go to Washington, where the friendship was renewed, but was sent home in 1915 for having encouraged plots to cripple American munition factories which were turning out great quan- tities of war material to be used by his friend's country against his own. The crucial test of Spring-Rice as diplomat came with the outbreak of the World War. His delicate task was to uphold Great Britain's interference with American commerce and at the same time to create and strengthen sympathy for the cause of the Allies. In the very nature of the case it was a task which was incapable of perfect performance. Spring-Rice met it partly by urging his own government to yield where vital interests were not at stake, partly by reminding the govern- ment to which he was accredited of the forbearance shown by English laborers who were thrown out of work by the cotton blockade in our Civil War. He advised against propaganda as not only useless but mischievous. Even after the United States entered the war, when it was proposed that the Pilgrims Society return the compliment of its London namesake and give a dinner in honor of the British Ambassador, Spring-Rice replied, "I still think silence is best." For this reserve he was criticized and his policy was reversed by the flamboyant North- cliffe during the short time the publisher was in this country as head of the British war mission, but Spring-Rice had on his side the impressive example of Ambassador Jusserand. Moreover, his common sense told him that if in similar cir- cumstances the United States would have acted very much as his own government was acting, it was equally certain that Great Britain would have acted very much as the United States was acting. The measure of his success and, accordingly, of the wis- dom of his policy is found, not in the fact that the United States finally threw its sword into the scale against the Central Powers — his biographer discountenances any such preposterous allegation on his behalf — but in the more modest although far from unimportant fact that "he kept the way clear of un- appeasable quarrels ... so that when a sense of America's own interest urged America to enter, there was no envenomed feeling against Great Britain to check that impulse, nor any diplomatic complication to hold America back." While there are no political revelations of significance in these volumes, there are pictures to which future historians may well turn for an understanding of the time. One of them is contained in the crisp sentence, appearing in a letter to Sir Edward Grey in September, 1916: "The nation is anti-Ger- man, anti-British, and somewhat pro-Ally." More strikingly significant is an analysis of the political psychology of the almost inaccessible man who was head of the American government during Spring-Rice's ambassadorship:

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February 19, 1930] The Nation 221 TEN YEARS of ACHIEVEMENT HAVING made permanent its place in New York as an institution setting new precedents in higher education by the establishment of its curriculum of adult educa- tion, The New School for Social Research plans ending the first year of its second decade in a new and modern building. You May Become Identified with this New Project The building is to be erected at a total approximate cost of $780,000, for property and construction. Ground has already been purchased at 66-72 West Twelfth Street. An issue of $500,000 Six Per Cent Twenty-five Year Income Bonds will finance the build- ing and equipment costs. Already close to $400,000 has been subscribed. Bonds may be purchased in denominations of $1,000, $500 and $100. Will you become identified with this well established institution of higher education through the purchase of one or more bonds? re Proposed Building a t 66-72 West Twelfth Street SETTING A NEW PRECEDENT IN MODERN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN Joseph Urban, famed throughout the world for his unusually beautiful, yet eminently practical modes of design, reaches new heights in his plans for this new building. He has combined the appreciation of the artist for color and effect with the sense of utility of the most efficient architect. The result is startling in its radical departure from the ordinary. The NEW SCHOOL for SOCIAL RESEARCH Alvin Johnson, Director 465 West 23rd Street New York THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH 465 West 23rd St., New York, N. Y. Please send me full particulars of how I may purchase Six Per Cent Income Bonds to help the erection of the New School Building. he building is a step ahead of today. In- deed, it may also be a step ahead of the cen- tury. But it is strictly in sympathy with the high standards of the curriculuum which have been a part of the New School for the last decade. Name Address When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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222 The Nation [Vol 130, No. 3372 I have been in Russia, Berlin, Constantinople, and Persia, which are all popularly supposed to be autocratic governments. But I have never known any government so autocratic as this. This does not mean that the President acts without consulting the popular will. On the contrary his belief and practice is that he must not lead the people until he knows which way they want to go. But his inter- pretation of the oracle is his own secret, he consults it alone, he makes his own interpretation, and he acts ac- cording to his own judgment of what the people desire should be done. To curse him as many people do would be as wise as to curse the weather, or rather as to curse the weather-cock. But the mysterious way in which he moves makes everything a matter of divination rather than diplomacy. The F. O. [Foreign Office] used some- times to say the same of Lord Salisbury. It is impossible even for his closest associates to foretell what he will do, for even his most intimate advisers do not know what other advisers had access to him and his left hand knoweth not what his right hand doeth. Spring-Rice's recall at the beginning of 1918 was made in a cablegram which, although courteously worded and apologiz- ing for its "telegraphic bluntness," unavoidably had the ap- pearance of a censure. He had expected to be succeeded shortly by "some prominent and well-known British statesman" and his successor was no less a personage than Lord Reading. Never- theless, the suddenness of the event was a shock. A few weeks later, while in Ottawa on his way home, he became unconscious and in a few minutes was dead — of what "in the old days," wrote Senator Lodge, "used to be termed a broken heart." He had not lived to see the outcome of America's entry into the war, but that entry itself, by aligning the English-speaking nations side by side, had realized a long-cherished dream. Royal J. Davis Sir Francis Bacon Sir Francis Bacon: The First Modern Mind. By Byron Steel. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $3. OF all the notable Elizabethans Francis Bacon stands most in need of a fresh and fearless evaluation. He is ripe for the treatment known as debunking, but Mr. Steel has not chosen to accept either the hints so obviously offered by Lytton Strachey or his own legitimate opportunity. In a popular and somewhat undistinguished style — so sim- plified that he defines, explains, and discards as worthless the whole system of the Schoolmen in one short paragraph — Mr. Steel narrates the undisputed facts of Bacon's life. By an effective use of excerpts from Bacon's letters, and a clear por- trayal of each step in the long and devious road he trod to his short-lived eminence, the author shows Bacon in all his moral and spiritual nakedness. His fawning upon Cecil and his tire- some boasting to the King of scholarly aims appear clearly as the essential falsehoods they are. The controversial places in Bacon's life, however, receive scant attention. If he is called "the first modern mind" his biographer must justify his claim to the title. Did he leave Cambridge principally because the curriculum was unbearable? What claims to distinction at the bar could he offer in disputing high judicial offices with Coke? If he is to take precedence over Roger Bacon, an avowed em- piricist, and over his contemporaries, Galileo and Kepler, in what respect was he greater or more modern than they? Does his scientific reputation rest more on his literary skill than on his laboratory achievement? Did he create the concept of in- ductive reasoning or did he merely give expression to a preva- lent, though as yet not clearly defined, idea? With these questions and others like them the biographer of Bacon must deal. Partly by the antics of the Baconians and partly by the adulation of those who, without careful investiga- tion, have put Bacon forward as a great lawyer and a pioneer natural scientist his fame has become the subject of much doubt. The shortcomings of his character have been sufficiently dealt with; Aubrey told the whole story when he said that Bacon had the eye of a serpent. Everyone acquainted with the subject knows that Bacon was the viper Mr. Steel a little reluctantly pictures. What was needed, and is still needed despite Mr. Steel's effort, is a dispassionate scholarly study of the discrep- ancy between Bacon's utterance and his character, and of the actual nature of his scientific and legal attainments. Donald A. Roberts "— LasstUns zu Grunde Gehen!" A Roman Holiday. By Don Ryan. The Macaulay Company. $2.50. THE Western World is on the decline; so let us eat, drink, and be merry. The strong man is at one with his age, embraces its destiny — and likes it; nor strives to swim upstream against the remorseless current which bears along with it all cultures, swelling into civilizations, into the stagnant sea of fellahdom. The present age is "contemporary" — to use the word in its Spenglerian (I was about to say Pick- wickian) sense — with the latter days of the Roman Empire, the final stage of classical civilization. Quite appropriately, Mr. Ryan has dedicated his new novel to Oswald Spengler. Appropriately, too, he has chosen for his protagonist a woman with a man's mind, an uprooted woman who in girlhood has run away from a sordid home to become a hooch dancer in Tia Juana. But that is only the first step, for Diana is not only ambitious, she is a reader, an intellectual, who learns from the philosophers and poets as she goes along. She works her way to Hollywood, gets into the movies, and rises to stardom — only to have her career shattered by a scandal that rocks the motion-picture world. But with the help of the Negro comedian who has always loved her she eventually rises to even greater heights, for now she has read Spengler and her ambition flares up to make the talking picture the true art vehicle of this decadent age. All through her career Diana uses men when it serves her purpose and proves herself stronger than any of them. Opposite her, through the first half of the book, plays Tom Egan, a young man of family, also intellectual, but a man without ambition, to whom life has lost meaning — a man whose blood has run thin. Comes the war. Egan goes through with it brilliantly, but it gives his character the final shove into dis- solution. When he rejoins Diana he is jaded, seeking only the "kicks" he can get out of life — women, dope, perversions. Finally, after an orgiastic party given by Wally Mead, the film star, where liquor and narcotics and "strange sins" (as Oscar Wilde loved to say) are freely indulged in, where a cast-off classical professor describes in noble language the visions of a hashish dream, lapsing into Latin when he comes to the obscene portions, Egan commits suicide in the old Roman manner — to the strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Mr. Ryan — with a bow toward Aldous Huxley — has written a Hollywood Satyricon, using a moving-picture tempo, with overtones of Spengler, Nietzsche, Freud, Ouspenski, and the new physics. Strangely enough, the learning, though thrown into the book in great chunks, does not seem to retard the pace of the story; for even if it is not — as has been claimed for it — a Spenglerian novel, "converting a philosophic theory into a living reality," yet it is certainly a glamorous Hollywood novel. And Mr. Ryan would probably say that Hollywood was the

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February 19, 1930] The Nation 223 Western World in microcosm — with lighting effects; that he who has seen Hollywood has seen the world. There is much in this audacious book that seems to this reviewer quite absurd; and there are some things about the extraordinary and fascinating heroine that seem to him in- credible. But this is the most interesting novel ever to have come out of Hollywood. It could never have come from any- where else. That is its curse as well as its significance. Fred T. Marsh The Case of Ambrose Bierce Ambrose Bierce: A Biography. By Carey McWilliams. A and C. Boni. $3.50. MR. McWILLIAMS'S book, the fourth study of Bierce published within a year, is so much the best of the four that it might be allowed to stand as the defini- tive account of Bierce's life. That it is not completely accu- rate is indicated by Professor Wilt's article in "American Literature," which throws doubt on a source McWilliams re- gards as impeccable — Bierce's war reminiscences. There are still, it appears, mysteries within mysteries. But McWilliams has diligently verified dates, examined unpublished letters, con- sulted newspaper files, and interviewed those who knew Bierce. The result is as close an approach to authenticity as we are likely to have, and perhaps as close as there is any legitimate reason for demanding. In its important details the case of Ambrose Bierce is perfectly clear. It is clear, for one thing, that Mr. McWilliams was not far wrong when he stated in The Nation last June: "His [Bierce's] contribution to American literature could be sum- marized in a footnote of no considerable length." His satire, which to the reader of today displays no penetrating or philo- sophic quality of survival value, was even in its own time, as McWilliams is careful to point out, essentially futile. His short stories grew out of a theory of fiction that squeezed vitality and verisimilitude from his material the moment he began to write. Even Professor Pattee should have been able to estimate Bierce's place in literature without recourse to the opinions of Walter Neale. Less obvious but not altogether obscure are the reasons for Bierce's vogue. Because he had an air of self-confidence, because he was courageous, because he possessed more integ- rity than was common in that day, he impressed his younger contemporaries. Myths grew up about the man from the first; he was a legend forty years before his mysterious dis- appearance provided the opportunity for apotheosis. Moreover, there had developed by the time of his death a school of writ- ers who, having brushed aside the accepted authors of Bierce's generation, flattered themselves by hailing him as a prototype of their enlightenment. There is also, of course, the fact that Bierce has attracted the attention of critics interested in explaining the repeated frustration of literary talent in America. Bierce's defeat seems to have been the result of his romantic, sentimental, almost adolescent cynicism. Mr. McWilliams, by tracing this cyni- cism as far back as Bierce's earliest experiments in journalism, lends plausibility to Lewis Mumford's theory that the Civil War was its cause. The real question, however, is why Bierce never outgrew this attitude. To me his environment is sufficient explanation. What could a man like Bierce do in the midst of the chaotic life of the Coast in the post-bellum period? He could alternate between the literature of protest — ■bitter, heartfelt, and useless — and the literature of escape — skilfully written, momentarily effective, and completely un- real. It is not a question of what a great genius could have FRANCE A NATION OP PATRIOT! BY CARLTON J. H. HAYES This book is a study of national propaganda. It tells of the efforts that are being made to stimulate patriotic force, speech and action at the expense of at least un- national, if not international indoc- trination. Professor Hayes has done an intensive and intensely interesting analysis and investiga- tion of French school books, jour- nals, newspapers, and the activities of the church, cinema, radio and the many patriotic societies. $4.50 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON— A MILESTONE? The present Disarmament Conference in London may well be the most significant event of the present century. Important decisions may be taken by the principal nations of the world bringing the dream of idealists for centuries — a condition of world peace — close to accomplishment. SRfre Jfflancfjegter (©uarbtan WEEKLY will give a sympathetic and, what is more important, an accurate and unbiased account of this epoch- making conference. At all times The Manchester Guardian Weekly keeps its readers advised of progress in international affairs. To leaders of intelligence in more than sixty coun- tries, it is a constant source of reliable information on all important world happenings and a faithful guide in keeping their viewpoint on vital events, clear and unprejudiced. - - MAIL THIS COUPON- - - The Manchester Guardian Weekly, 222 West 42nd Street, New York City. Gentlemen : Enclosed please find $3.00 for which send THE MAN- CHESTER GUARDIAN WEEKLY for one year to the below address. Name . Address please mention The Nation

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224 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3372 done; there is no evidence that Bierce was even potentially a great genius; he was a man with a literary gift that might have developed and with a mind that might have grown. If the Bierce myth had never existed, one would find it dif- ficult to justify the conscientious labor that has gone into this book. As it is, it is well for us to be able to separate fact from fable, and for that reason Mr. McWilliams's subject is not unworthy of the care, intelligence, ingenuity, and insight he has devoted to it. His work is conspicuously and satisfy- ingly unlike the slap-dash biographies that clutter up the book- stands. Though his style is uneven and his pages are not wholly free from solecisms, the diligence of his research and the sanity of his critical judgments make the book an admir- able performance. Granville Hicks Books in Brief Shadows of Men. By Jim Tully. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. Jim Tully has come a long way in craftsmanship since his earliest books, but in other respects he remains unchanged. And in this collection of reminiscent tales, loosely tied together, about jailbirds, dope fiends, outcasts of all sorts, from Dippy the pyromaniac to the tragic boy, Bright Eyes, he writes of a world with which his readers are already familiar. If one has suspected — or hoped — that Jim Tully might some day become an American Gorki, "Shadows of Men" will not satisfy him. Mr. Tully has not yet succeeded in conveying to his readers that transcendent sense of universality which is the secret of power in the great literature of the despised and rejected. But if one asks only for vivid yet realistic stories of the lower depths in American life, here is another book to add to Mr. Tully's growing list. It is a moving book; the characters live because their creator knows them, not only by experience, but with an understanding heart. Mothers Cry. By Helen Grace Carlisle. Harper and Brothers. $2.50. The reader who begins this book is likely to finish it. A mother, poor but refined, simple in thought but "rich with life," tells her seemingly artless story with tremendous cumulative effect. It opens with her courtship and ends on the day after her oldest child (and the author herself gives this away at the beginning of the book) dies, a murderer, in the electric chair. The years of struggle to keep herself and her little brood going, the growth and development of the four children, how one boy becomes "a builder to make beauty greater" while the other is born "a destroyer to kill" — all are touchingly described. Possi- bly this novel will be revived some day as a typical example of the pathetic literature of our period, just as we occasionally turn back to faded and forgotten romances over which our grandfathers and, more particularly, grandmothers wept. For this book, conceived and projected in the approved contemporary manner, is essentially as meretricious as those incredibly popular thrillers. On the surface it appears simple, sincere, utterly realistic; but in truth it is planned and constructed with reason- ing care toward a single purpose — not to mirror life but to wring the heart. No single stop is left unpulled; no chance to twang a heart-string is overlooked. Mr. Dreiser, however, recommends it warmly, the master being, it would seem, the most generous of critics. Iron Man. By W. R. Burnett. The Dial Press. $2.50. Mr. Burnett's first novel, "Little Caesar," was about a Chicago gangster, and was — to adopt the language of the sport- ing fraternity, in which dialect "Iron Man" is written — a When writing to advertisers Individual and Community Social Work The social worker working with Jews must be trained to deal successfully with the socially maladjusted Jewish family and individual. But he must be able, also, to see the problem in the large. He must "see" the Jews of America as a distinctive group aiming at adjustment to the general environment for its own greater happiness and the enrichment of American life. Holders and prospective holders of a bachelor's degree are invited to examine carefully the advantages of Jewish Social Work as a Profession A number of scholarships and fellowships ranging from $150 to $1000 for each school year are available for especially qualified candidates. For full information ivrite to M. J. Karpf, Director I The Training School For Jewish Social Work A Graduate School 71 W. 47th St., New York City The celebrations on May 1st dramatize again the events of IQIJ midst renewed outbursts of enthusiasm and a glorious panorama of color and costume. Sail from New York on ST. LOUIS April 12th BREMEN " 12th RELIANCE ... " 15th AQUITANIA . . " 16th OLYMPIC .... " 18th ILE de FRANCE " 18th or any other ship and join our party in Paris on April 26th. Members of this tour will visit the Russian theatres and Universi- ties at the time of their greatest activity. Write or call for Information A MALGAMATED Bank Travel Dept. 11-15 Union Square, New York City or Amalgamated Trust & Savings Bank 111 West Jackson Blvd. Chicago, IU. For Information on other Spring and Summer trips write for booklet "N" pleass mention The Nation

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February 19, 1930] The Nation 225 "natural." This second novel, therefore, suffers by comparison, though it deals with an equally glamorous phase of the Ameri- can scene — the "fight game." The action here is not so rapid, nor are the dramatic moments so tense; and "Coke" Mason, the "dumb" middle-weight who becomes world's champion in his class only to go down in defeat because of a woman — who, by the way, happens to be his wife — cannot begin to compare as a hero with Rico, the gangster in "Little Caesar." But "Iron Man" should make a hit. The situations are plausible and skilfully handled, there are several thrilling reportorial accounts of ring battles, and the talk — of which there is a great deal — is authentic. Mr. Burnett knows his fighters; he has also studied his Hemingway — possibly too assiduously. Those who like the usual run of prize-fight stories will here find a book that tops the list. But the real prize-fight novel has yet to be written. As a work of art "Iron Man" is simply not in the running. i Twelve Against the Gods. By William Bolitho. Simon and Schuster. $4. An adventurer, according to Mr. Bolitho, is an outlaw, charlatan, or idealist, who dares to resist not only the course of the social and moral order but the experience of mankind, and attempts the impossible in life. One may dispute the definition and question the omission of certain figures or the suitability of others, but no one will wholly regret the author's choices. Alexander, Casanova, Napoleon I, Isadora, these are the re- crudescent idols of every romanticist whatever his hypothesis. The combination is often not so happy as this one. Mr. Bolitho's estimates, which are just without being cynical, his enthusiasm, and his vibrant prose are really worthy of his sub- jects. His book should make a holiday for all who worship at the same shrines. Look Homeward, Angel. By Thomas Wolfe. Charles Scrib- ner's Sons. $2.50. Between the apostrophes, soliloquies, and philippics, through the torment, the despair, and the rapture of this prodigious first novel run the story of a mad clan of Georgians and the social history of that lost class which manages to escape the lot of Negroes and poor whites without becoming the eminent minority. Here is a fragment of the American scene unfamiliar to our social novels; here is "naked life" described with scope and fervor. As in the best tradition of naturalism, nothing has been omitted — nothing except that unobtrusive artifice which bestows upon a great novel the aesthetic quality, the impression of something other than life. There is novelty in the book's intensive compound of romantic fancy and irony, and there is great vitality in the episodes, but the vigor never becomes strength because it is dissipated by incoherence and the lack of a steady emphasis. Like life it is incomplete and unfinished — it might go on forever. The author gives no structural reason for it to stop. Joaquin Miller and His Other Self. By Harr Wagner. San Francisco: Harr Wagner Publishing Company. $5. Mr. Wagner makes good his claim that he has new infor- mation to offer concerning the once-great poet of California; letters, journals, and other bits of biographical evidence serve to fill out our picture of this man who went as a pioneer youth from Indiana to California, sowed his wild oats on the plains and among the mountains, settled down to pedagogy and poetry, enjoyed a period of rather flashy fame in England, and spent the long remainder of his Western life as a flowing-bearded bard and a "natural" lover. The personality so sketched is indeed interesting. But Mr. Wagner fails to convince us that his hero was even a third-rate poet. If one was uncertain about this before, the quotations would settle the matter. Lloyd Express * BREMEN * EUROPA COLUMBUS * Fastest Liner in the World * To England,, France and Bremen ♦ Lloyd Cabin Quartet BERLIN STUTTGART MUENCHEN -DRESDEN To England, Ireland, France, Bremen ♦ Every Lloyd Liner Carries Tourist Third 57 Broadway Hew York, or your local agent 'XPLORATIVE Itiner- aries worked oat with reference to social, economic, historic, artistic and scenic features. Visits to factories, schools, children's com- munities, collective farms and villages . . . art treasures, palaces and workers' rest homes . . . for the adventurous . . . camping in the Caucasus and study of primitive tribes. Small groups, each accompanied by a quali- ied American leader and Russian interpreter. From $395 including express steamship pass- age. Literature available. Individual itineraries also exe- • cuted ▲ Independent year-'round • representation in Russia 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK .THE^QREN^RQAD When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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226 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3372 Films A Soviet Fantasy POLITICAL sympathies enter to such a large extent into the public appreciation of Russian films that it is some- thing of a problem to consider "A Fragment of an Em- pire" (Cameo) on its merits as a picture. Here is unquestion- ably an unusual piece of work if measured by the standards of Hollywood. It deals with the interesting if not quite original theme of a man who suddenly finds himself in a new world, unaware of the changes which took place while he was suffer- ing from the effects of amnesia. It also employs some very striking images to describe the man's experiences and reactions. Moreover — which is rare — the acting in it is reserved and sensi- tive. With all this excellent material "A Fragment of an Em- pire" might have been a great picture. It actually falls short of this by a very considerable margin. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about it is its treat- ment of the new ways of life in Soviet Russia as they reveal themselves to the primitive mind of a peasant worker who re- members only the Russia of the Czars. The war scenes which make up the first half of the picture, though not quite relevant to the theme and somewhat overburdened with symbolism, are magnificently conceived. One expects an equal wealth of imag- ery and an equal sense of dramatic contrast in the scenes which describe the impact of the new life on a mind that has been bound by tradition and ruled by the idea of the sacred rights of master over his men, of husband over his wife, of father over his children. Here was an opportunity to show the re- markable changes wrought by the revolution in the status and mentality of the worker. But just at this point inspiration seems to have deserted the authors of the picture. Their hero, on recovering memory and returning to Petrograd, is thrown into a state of utter bewilderment by such trivial changes as a monument to Lenin — of whom he had probably never heard — a block of new build- ings, the short skirts worn by women, and the fact that the old owner of the factory in which he used to work no longer owns it. On the other hand, the picture makes hardly any attempt to show the reactions of the man to his new social standing and new opportunities for enjoying life. In fact, in one respect, namely, the relationship between husband and wife, it seems to suggest that there has been no change at all, our hero recover- ing his wife from a man whom she has been obeying with as much docility as she had probably obeyed himself. Of the two other silent pictures recently shown suffice it to say that "The Demon of the Steppes" (Film Guild) is a rather mediocre Russian picture, and "The Last Night"(Fifty- fifth Street Cinema) a somewhat better German one. Richard Barthelmess, who distinguished himself in the part of a Chinaman in Griffith's "Broken Blossoms," plays another Chinaman in "Son of the Gods" (Warner Brothers Theater), an effort to show the injustice of race discrimination, culminat- ing in a complete surrender to existing prejudices. The oriental color of the picture is about as authentic as Hollywood can make it, and the same must be said of the credibility of the story. The only feature of the picture deserving praise is the very able acting of Miss Constance Bennett. The appearance of a singer of the Metropolitan Opera in a full-length motion picture may be a portent of the times indi- cating the trend toward a screen opera, but Mr. Lawrence Tib- bett's vocalizing in "The Rogue Song" (Astor) fails to make this musical travesty a notable achievement in any other re- spect. Except for a few ballet scenes, it is quite crude. Alexander Bakshy Drama Gopher Prairie, Spain EVA LE GALLIENNE has added still another play by the Spanish brothers Quintero to her list at the Civic Repertory Theater. This time it is the light but grace- ful and consistently amusing comedy, "The Women Have Their Way." A young lawyer from Madrid comes to a small town in Andalusia to settle the estate of an uncle. No sooner does he arrive than the women of the town begin to invent a romance for him with one Juanita La Rosa, a girl of whom he has caught a casual glimpse, and of whom he has remarked, unfortunately within the hearing of two or three others, that she is rather pretty. Against his will an introduction is ar- ranged; they are continually thrown together at every social gathering; their every look and comment is interpreted as if it held a deep significance ; various subterfuges on the part of others bring the affair to a crisis, and the young lawyer, of course, finally capitulates, actually does fall in love, and pro- poses. The authors are relentless in their exposure of the almost incredibly narrow range of interests and topics in a little humdrum village which makes such busybodies possible, but there is never the slightest bitterness or malice in their humor; it is all as gentle and kindly as the warm Spanish sun- light. The outstanding performance in the play is that of Egon Brecher as the easy-going priest Don Julian. This short two-act play is preceded by a curtain-raiser, "The Open Door," by Alfred Sutro, a deft and moving piece in which nothing more unusual happens than that two people who can do nothing more about it confess that they love each other. Miss Le Gallienne acts with her usual capability both in this and in the Quintero comedy. "Josef Suss" (Erlanger's Theater), the play by Ashley Dukes, has been harshly judged on the ground that it does not adequately reflect the richness and sweep of the novel by Lion Feuchtwanger on which it is based; but in the drastic reduc- tion which dramatization necessitates this result was inevitable. "Josef Suss" as a play does, it is true, surfer from a certain episodic quality, but it is none the less powerful and impres- sive. The play opens at the moment when Suss ingratiates him- self with Karl Alexander just before the latter becomes Duke of Wiirttemberg; it carries the Jew through his unscrupu- lous rise to power until his own daughter kills herself to escape from the libertine Duke, and then to the moment when he has achieved his revenge and is led off to prison. Maurice Moscovitch plays the title role with a fine restraint, and Malcolm Keen gives a convincing performance as the Duke. "Strike Up the Band" (Times Square Theater) is a musi- cal show that is not only boldly original in plot but even flirts with social satire. It concerns a war between the United States and Switzerland over an increased duty on Swiss choco- late. For an act and a half the authors (the book is by Morrie Ryskind, "based on a libretto by George S. Kaufman," and the lyrics are by Ira Gershwin) have a gay time with the self-made American business man and his philosophy and with imperialism and war psychology; then everything evaporates into a typical song-and-dance show with the usual sentimental ending. The lines and lyrics are considerably above the aver- age; George Gershwin's music, though it does not easily cling to the memory, is very pleasant while it is going on, and Bobby Clark, with his miraculous cigar, cane, and eyebrows, is responsible for a more than generous supply of humor. H. H.

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February 19, 1930] The Nation 227 WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See •At the Bottom— Waldorf— 116 W. 50th St. •Berkeley Square — Lyceum — E. 45th St. ••Children of Darkness— Biltmore—W. 47th St. ••City Haul— Hudson — 44th St., E. of B'dway. •Civic Repertory — 14th St. & 6th Ave. — See Advertisement. •Criminal Code— National— W. 41st St. •Death Takes a Holiday— Barrymore Theatre — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •Dishonored Lady — Empire — +0th St. & B'dway. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 4-lst St., E. of B'dway. ••Everything's Jake— Assembly— 39th St., E. of B'dway. •Josef Suss— Erlangers — 44th St., W. of B'dway. •Journey's End— Miller— 124 W. 43rd St. ••June Moon— Broadhurst— W. 44th St. ••Meteor— Guild— W. 52nd St. ••Out of a Blue Sky— Booth— 44th St., W. of B'dway. ••Rebound— Plymouth — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •Red Rust— Beck— 302 W. 45th St. ••Strictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. •••Strike Up The Band— Times Sq.— W. of B'dway. •••Sweet Adeline — Hammerstein — Broadway & 53rd St. •The Boundary Line— Forty-eighth-^48th St., E. of B'dway. •The First Mile— Comedy — 41st St. E. of B'dway. •••Wake Up and Dream— Selwyn-^42nd St., W. of B'dway. Films Across the World— Cohan — 43rd St. & B'dway. Caught In The Berlin Underworld— Cameo — 42d St., E. B'dway. Disraeli — Central Theatre — Broadway and 47th St. The Green Goddess— Winter Garden— 1646 B'dway. Concerts and Recitals Harold Bauer— Town Hall— Sat. Aft., Feb. 15. Mischa Elman — Carnegie — Sun. Eve., Feb. 16. Heifetz — Carnegie — Wed. Eve., Feb. 19. Martinelli — Carnegie — Tues. Eve., Feb. 18. Philharmonic Symphony — Carnegie— Thurs. Eve., Feb. 13; Fn. Aft., Feb. 14. Students Concerts — Philharmonic — Carnegie — Sat. Eve., Feb. 15. Tales of Hoffman— Grand Opera for Children— Town Hall- Sat. Morn., Feb. 22. •Drama. "Comedy. ***MusicaL Announcement How Far Should Government Regulate Business — Mr. Henry Goddard Leach, Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, and Mr. Frederick A. Korsmeyer, speakers, over WEAF, Feb. 18, 7 to 7:30 P. M., Eastern Standard Time, under the auspices of the National League of Women Voters. The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present RUTH DRAPER Every Eve. including Sunday (except Mon. & Thurs. nights) at 8:50 rTkYlPTW THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats. Thurs. e.L»Mlipi and gat 2.30. VERY GOOD SEATS at J1.00 in her ORIGINAL CHABACTEB SKETCHES Coming — , , The Idol of 500 Million People! F. C. Coppicus presents MEI LAN-FANG China's Foremost Actor "Grand Abbot of Ching-Chung Monastery" "The Foremost of the Pear Orchard" DIRECT from PEKING to NEW YORK For a Limited Engagement Opening at 49th St. Thea. Mon. Evg. at 8:50, Feb. 17th Mr. Mei will be supported by his oxen company of actors, dancers and musicians in scenes from his most famous dramas. TirVUTC Opening Night, $5.50, $3.85, $3.00, $2.00 TICKETS: Other Performances, $3.85, $3.00, $2.50, $1.50 Mall Orders to F. C. COPPICUS, 33 W. 42nd St. Tel. LON. 8250 Auspices: China Institute in America D THEATRES D LEO BULGAKOV Theatre Associates, Inc., presents AT THE BOTTOM "Really worth seeing." — Brown, Post. by MAXIM GORKY New version by William L. Laurence Phone reservations accepted — Circle 1407 'A fine play" — Mantle. New: WAT nORF THEATRE— 50th St., Bet. 6th & 7th Aves. Eve., 8:60 "J™-"*-"-'*" MATINEES Thursday and Saturday, 2:30 Kenneth Macgowan and J. V. Reed present BASIL SYDNEY and MARY ELLIS in CHILDREN of DARKNESS by Edwin Justus Mayer, author of BILTMORE 'The Firebrand' THEATRE — 47th Street, West of Broadway Evenings, 8:50 — Mats., Wed. and Sat., 2:40. CIVIC REPERTORY 1£3zft.j!F 50c, $1, 1.50. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2 :30. EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Fri. Eve., Feb. 14, "Mile. Bourrat" ; Sat. Mat., Feb. 15, "Peter Pan" ; Sat. Eve., Feb. 15, "The Would Be Gentle- man" ; Mon. Eve., Feb. 17, "The Living Corpse" ; Tues. Eve., Feb. 18, "The Sea Gull"; Wed. Eve., Feb. 19, "The Open Door" & "The Women Have Their Way" ; Thurs. Mat., Feb. 20, "Hedda Gabler" ; Thurs. Eve., Feb. 20, "The Living Corpse." Seats 4 weeks in advance at Box Office & Town Hall, 113 W. 43rd St. -WILLIAM HARRIS, JR., PRESENTS' 'THE FIRST PLAY OF THE SEASON WITH TEETH IN IT." ROBERT LITTELL, WORLD. CRIMINAL CODE By MARTIN FLAVIN NATIONAL THEATRE with ARTHUR BYRON 41st St., West of 7th Ave. Evenings 8 :50 Matinees Wednesdays & Saturdays, 2 :30 ETHEL BARRYMORE Theatre, 47th St., West of Broadway Evenings 8 :50 ; Matinees Wed. & Sat. 2 :30 LEE SHUBERT Presents PHILIP MERIVALE IN DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY A COMEDY ABOUT LIFE •BRAVE, AUDACIOUS, PROVOCATIVE"— Robert Garland, Telegram IS LIQUOR A MYTH? THE ONLY WAY TO REALLY KNOW IS TO SEE EVERYTHING'S JAKE! THE RIP-ROARIXG ALCOHOLIC COMEDY by DON MARQUIS "GOOD, ROBUST FUN"— N. T. 7Wi— "A RIOT"— ttncklty. Ntm Tmrket ASSEMBLY Theater, 39th St., E. of Bwav. Eves, at 9. Mats. Tues. & Sat. 3 The Theatre Guild Presents METEOR By S. N. BEHRMAN if' » 1 5 1 *-! THEA., 52nd St. W. of Broadway VJUlia Ergs. 8:50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 1:40 REBOUND With Hope Williams "This is the best light comedy written by anybody hereabouts in ten or twenty years, and it's not so damned light, either." — Heywood Broun, New York Telegram. Arthur Hopkins presents DONALD OGDEN STEWART'S COMEDY. Plymouth Theatre. Eves. 8:50; Mats. Thurs. & Sat., 2:40. HERMAN SHUMLIN presents THE LAST MILE A new drama by John Wexley Directed by Chester Erskin. Settings by Henry Dreyfuss o l ■& t U U ADDIC Theatre 42nd St. W. of Broadway J5AM H. rlAtVIVlO Eves. 8:50. Matinees Wed. & Sat., 2:30

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228 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3372 Mr. Preston Sturges, whose delightful comedy "Strictly Dishonorable" is still playing to crowded houses in a bad sea- son, now offers another entertainment called "Recapture" (Eltinge). It is all about a lady — played as well as possible and very decoratively by Ann Andrews — who has loved rap- turously once and who is distressed because having lost "the rainbow" — Mr. Sturges's language — she cannot find it again. Figuring prominently in the action also is the lift in a French hotel, which usually will not work but which works too well at the end and carries the lady to an untimely death. The whole thing seems very gaudy and unreal. If Mr. Sturges wrote it a long time ago he can be forgiven; if he wrote it after "Strictly Dishonorable" one wonders what has become of his talent for high comedy. D. V. D. Oscar Straus's "The Chocolate Soldier" (Jolson Theater), based on George Bernard Shaw's "Arms and the Man," is one of the pleasantest revivals in some years. The music is as de- lightful and the book of course is as clever as ever. The per- formance generally equals the productions of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas staged by Winthrop Ames a few seasons ago. Alice Mackenzie, Charles Purcell, and Vivian Hart are to be commended particularly. M. G. MATINEES : GOOD SEATS, ALL PEICES, AT BOX OFFICE WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE ARLISS In 4ft DISRAELI (A Vltaphon* All-Talking Picture) 1f OEHTRAIi THKATRE Broadway and 47th St, Dally 1:45—8:4* Sunday S — 8 — 8:4a New York Branch FREETHINKERS OF AMERICA 130 W. 56th St. Friday, Feb. 21st, 8:30 P. M. MAJOR GEORGE HAVEN PUTNAM Noted Publicitt will deliver an important address entitled, "FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AMONG ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLE" Admission Free. Questions and Discussion j RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 7 E. 15 St. Alg. 3094 New Courses: Inquire for Details HERMAN EPSTEIN Fri., 8:30 "The Ring Ol the Niebelung" Feb. 14th WILLIAM H. BRIDGES Wed., 7:00 "Creative Psychology" Feb. 19th ALGERNON LEE Tues., 8:30 "Symposium: Socialist Policies" Feb. 18th ANITA BLOCK Wed., 8:30 "The American and European Theatre Feb. 18th ARTHUR GARFIELD HAYS Sat., 2:00 "Marl. vis of injustice" Feb. 15th CAPITAL and LABOR UNDER FASCISM BY CARMEN HAIDER Professor Herbert W. Schneider, author of THE FASCIST STATE, says: . . . the most careful study yet made of the economic institu- tions and policies of Fascism. It contains strictly up-to-date and first-hand information regarding the actual workings of the 'Cor- porative State.' It should interest every student of labor problems and politics. Useful for both prophet and historian." $4.50 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY£PRESS PRIVATE LETTERS PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN «*T KILLED my wife by mistake. * You, however, have deliber- ately made mischief by setting my son against me." Thus ran a letter from Periander, tyrant of Corinth to his father-in-law in this intimate collection of private letters contrib- uted by prostitutes, poets, philoso- phers and erring citizens. "Never again!" was Cicero's comment after he had been host to Caesar for the evening. $3.50 E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 300-4th Ave., New York, N. Y. (Publishers since 1S52) A CHICAGO DINNER FOR NORMAN THOMAS WHO WILL SPEAK ON CATCHING UP WITH OURSELVES A Program for the Times Hotel Morrnscra, February 22nd, at 1 P. M. Make reservations in advance at $2.00 each. Robert Morss Lovett, Chairman. COMMITTEE ON DINNER FOR NORMAN THOMAS 800 South Halsted Street Seeley 0940 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Security and "Sanctions » T HE following article, which we reprint from the London Economist, analyzes and explains in illumi- nating fashion the opposing attitudes of Washington and Paris toward the whole question of armaments and peace pacts. The declaration in the new German-American repara- tion agreement that "the United States Government agrees to regard Germany's loyalty and faith and credit as sole security and guaranty for the fufilment of Germany's obligations under this agreement" introduces an unaccustomed note into a formal diplomatic document, and it is not surprising that pointed con- trasts have been drawn in Germany itself between the attitude of the American government and that of certain other coun- tries a good deal nearer to Berlin, whose habit it is to raise the "sanction" issue wherever possible. That contrast does in fact exist, and it springs from a divergence of outlook which finds expression in more fields than one. So far as reparations go, it may be observed without sus- picion of cynicism that the United States can well afford to be tender to German susceptibilities, for Germany's obliga- tions are now being so largely commercialized that the whole national credit is involved in any case, and the last nation with which the German government would willingly embroil itself financially is the state to which financial dominance has largely passed. By introducing into the agreement a passage expressly renouncing all idea of any but moral sanctions, Amer- ica creates a general atmosphere of good-will and establishes herself in particularly good odor in Berlin. Even from the purely business point of view there is sound sense in such a course, just as from the business point of view there was sound sense in America's renunciation of a considerable portion of her share of the Boxer indemnity in 1908. ... In such matters American idealism is entirely genuine, but it is perhaps com- mended rather more than it otherwise would be to the average American mind by the fact that it has its uses as an asset in international relations as well. Akin to the opposition of view between the United States and, for example, France over sanctions in regard to Germany is the same opposition of view between the same two countries over such larger questions as the naval conference and the relationship of the League Covenant and the Kellogg pact. In all these fields Washington and Paris represent merely the poles of opposition. The questions on which they thus take position concern equally the other Powers of the world, particularly those participating in the naval conference. . . . Broadly speak- ing, the contrast is between tight and loose understandings, . . . France standing, as she always does stand, for the sys- tem formally complete and worked out remorselessly in every logical detail. The Treaty of Versailles, with its specific pro- vision against every possible contingency and its sanctions in reserve against every possible default, is characteristically French. So — paradoxically enough in view of its partially American origin — is the League Covenant as contrasted with the Kellogg pact, which, to carry the paradox further, is char- acteristically American in tenor despite its debt to the initiative of a French foreign minister. Fundamentally, the contrast is due to the difference of con- ditions on the two sides of the Atlantic. For France, and in lesser, or in some cases even in greater, degree for other European states, security is a real and vital issue. For the United States it is not and never has been. The inevitable in- termediary and interpreter between France on the one hand and the United States on the other is Great Britain, a fact which imposes considerable responsibilities on a government which has just sent its Foreign Minister to Geneva to carry a stage farther the task of bringing the League Covenant into harmony with the Kellogg pact, and will in ten days' time have four of its Cabinet Ministers sitting side by side with the French and American delegates hammering out the details of a naval limitation agreement. Those two tasks are far more intimately associated than at first sight appears. Naval limitation raises immediately the security issue on which France lays such increasing stress. In American eyes France's views on security are no less than an obsession. Be- cause of France's insistence on guns and aeroplanes and sub- marines as bulwarks of security, instead of on covenants of good faith between nations, the whole limitation of armaments is imperiled. So reasons Washington. Because America, Paris replies, will give no assurance that she will take her part in enforcing covenants if they are wantonly broken, France at least must take measures in other directions for her safety. She is a loyal member of the League of Nations, lacking though the League is in that material force with which the French delegation at the peace conference strove so hard to equip her. But even the Covenant of the League is insufficient for France, in view of the room it leaves for uncertainty as to whether war in violation of obligations will, in fact, be re- pressed by collective action. Hence the enthusiasm for meas- ures like the Geneva Protocol, designed to tighten the Cove- nant up in this respect. In contrast to the Covenant, with its palpable insufficien- cies, from France's point of view, America sets the Kellogg pact. There is, fortunately, no sort of opposition between the two documents. If the pact goes farther in the direction of formal prohibition, or rather renunciation, of war, the Cove- nant goes farther in the measures it embodies for the protec- tion of the law-abiding nation against the lawless. In the for- mer respect the Covenant is in process of being brought up to the level of the pact. In the latter there is no visible prospect of the pact being invested with the provisions for enforcement included in the Covenant. That matters little to signatories of the pact who are also signatories of the Covenant, except in so far as it fails to give them an assurance that America will be in action at the side of the unoffending law-observer when attacked by a law-breaking aggressor. So far from that, there is not even the assurance that America will not inter- fere, in the interests of her own traders, with the measures the law-observers may find it necessary to take in concert against the law-breaker. It is under these conditions that France declares openly that till the American attitude — and, to a much lesser degree, the attitude of various prominent members of the League of Nations, including Great Britain — changes, her eastern fortifications and her air squadrons and her super- submarines must be her safeguard. . . . The process of increasing Europe's faith in the sanctity of covenants unaccompanied by any obtrusive menace of enforce- ment is developing. So is the process of the education of the United States in the lesson that world citizenship means world responsibilities. No one soberly reviewing the course of events in the past ten years can be blind for a moment to the progress achieved in both directions. The present attitude of the United States and France may present strong con- trasts. But, at any rate, the roads the two states are taking are tending to converge steadily, not to divergfJ&TSfcer. PU3UQ U

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230 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3372 □ RESORTS □ SON AQUA CLUB Lake Mohegan, N. T. The Haven for Sport Loveri. Ideal for recrea- tion and relaxation. Convenient for week-end*. Only 45 miles from New York. Sports Special programs for Skating, Hiking, Lincoln'* ft Washington'* Skiing, Tobogganing. Birthday Weekends. For reservations call PeskskiU 1276 THE LAKE VIEW SILVER & CAMEN Surpassing Accommodations Atmosphere of Refinement Excellent Cuisine Moderate Rates 59 Madison Ave. Phone Lakewood 287 Lakewood - New Jersey "D USTIC Beauty for your relaxation and rec- •*■*■ reation, convenient for week ends. 1% hours from Grand Central. Skating, Skiing and tobogganing. HIL-BERT HOUSE, Lake Mahopac, N. Y. Hill Friedberg, Prop. Tel. Mahopac 862 FOR A WINTER VACATION Complete rest and rebuilding, in delight- ful country. Invigorating outdoor life. Winter Sports. Saddle horses. Only V/2 hours from New York. TOPSTONE FARM IN THE CONNECTICUT HILL* Write: R.F.D. 4, Ridgefleld, Conn. Telephone: Ridgefleld 648 "DEAUTIFUL country, hills, pinegrove*, won- ■'-' derful views ; home-like atmosphere ; finest food ; skating and other sports ; 1 V4 hours by Erie R. R. or route 17. ZINDOREST PARK Monroe, N. Y. Phone 122 F I UNITY HOUSE FOREST PARK, PA. Open all year. Modern accommodation* Skating on private mile and a half Lake. Tobogganing, Sleighing and Skiing on premises. Make reservation — New York Office Chelsea 2148 8 West 16th St. Owned by International Ladies' Garment Worker* Union. Operated on non-profit basis. Interesting People. Delicious Food. Most every room with bath. Reasonable Rates Phone Lakewood 667 w .KslxTger H. H. Oxman CAMP /""HILD Training Camp. Its director as char- acter builder, known to many New Yorkers for the past 20 years. For more information, write 12 Pinehurst Ave.. Apt. 8-F.. N. Y. D FOR RENT □ FURNISHED ROOMS Manhattan Beach Hotel Manhattan Beach, N. Y. C. I" ITS in a modern fireproof hotel *-* by the seashore for less than in the crowded city — $9.00 per week and up for one; $12.00 per week and op for two. All hotel services included. Tennis and handball courts. 37 minutes from Times Square (B.M.T. Brighton Beach Sta- tion). Phone Sheepshead 3000. YOUNG widow will share exquisitely furnished apartment with refined couple or two friends. One-half block from Cortelyou Station B.M.T. Every comfort and convenience of real home ; plenty steam heat, constant hot water, ex- cellent home of good taste. No other guests. $12.50 a week includes gas, telephone, electricity and full use of kitchen, dining and living-room. Buckminster 1726. T ARGE room, suitable one or two person*, "^ cleanly kept, homelike atmosphere : elevator apartment house ; rent reasonable. Sawyer, 115 W. 104th St., Apt. 25. Tel. Academy 9094. A TTRACTIVE furnished room, business girl; kitchenette privileges. Private bath. Call evenings Spring 4087, also Sundays all day. APARTMENTS TO SUBLET 4 ROOM apartment in Chelsea, accessible from any part of town, unobstructed air and sun- light, from 3 exposures. Kitchen with electric refrigeration. Sublet until Oct. $90. Will con- sider any offer. Watkins 8299. npo sublet from Feb. 15th to Sept. 1st, attrac- tive apartment, furnished, 2 rooms and kitchen, 4 large closets. Southern exposure. $150 a month. 6 E. 360 Central Park West. 2 WEST 86th ST.— Peter Stuyvesant Hotel, room and bath, Park view. March 1 to July 1. $100 per month. Would sell furniture. Room 1116. APARTMENT TO SHARE SOME congenial fellow will appreciate sharing my 3 room apartment. Quiet, cheerful atmosphere, located Washington Heights, corner 170th St. right oft* Riverside Drive. One-half hour Times Square. References necessary. Box 2302, % The Nation. HOUSE WANTED WJ 'ANTED: in Berkshires, modernized fur- nished or semi-furnished homestead, pre- ferably stone, in wooded tract with brook, 4 or more bedrooms. Desire rent from May 1 for year with option purchase. Box 2305, % The Nation. THE TIME TO FIND YOUR SUMMER HOME IS GET RESULTS! Call READERS' SERVICE For information about our REAL ESTATE columns. THE NATION, FITzroy 9074 □ EDUCATIONAL □ THE PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE PROGRAM— Feb. 14-22 AT COOPER UNION 8th Street and Astor Place at 8 o'clock. Admission Free. Friday,- Feb. 14— DR. EVERETT DEAN MAR- TIN— The Psychology of Progress "Psychological Factors in the Evolution of In- dustry. Is there an Instinct of Workmanship 7" HI Ethics and Social Science Sunday, Feb. 16 — Dr. Scott Buchanan — "Cas- sirer: Substance and Function." |U| Natural Science Tuesday, Feb. 18— Dr. Gardner Murphy — "Child- hood." MUHLENBERG BRANCH LIBRARY 209 West 23rd St. at 8:30 o'clock. Monday, Feb. 17 — Mr. Nathaniel Peffer — China: A Civilization in Disintegration." "Coming of the West: Conquest and Attrition." Wednesday, Feb. 19 — Dr. John Bartlett Brebner — Literature as Social History — "The Myth of Chivalry." Thursday, Feb. 20 — Dr. E. G. Spaulding — The Ways and Means of Reasoning — "Reasoning in Mathematics : The Nature of Number, Infinity, Finitene88." Saturday, Feb. 22— Dr. Richard McKeon— The B I Old and the New Logic — "The Absoluteness I and Relativity of Truth." Paths to World Unity and International Cooperation PUBLIC LECTURES under Joint Auspices World Unity Foundation and Roerich Museum February i6— "ECONOMICS" Rexpord G. Tugwell, Ph.D., Dept. of Eco- nomics, Columbia University March 5— "SCIENCE" Cassius J. Keyser, Ph.D., Dept. of Mathe- matics. Columbia University March 12— "RELIGION" Alfred W. Martin, M.A., Society for Ethical Culture, New York March 19— "PHILOSOPHY" John Herman Randall, Jr., Ph.D., Dept. of Philosophy, Columbia University March 16— "EDUCATION" Harry A. Overstreet, B.A., Dept. of Philoso- ophy. College of the City of New York COURSE OF FIVE LECTURES, $3.00 SINGLE LECTURE, 75c All lectures 8:30 P. M. in Auditorium of Roerich Museum 810 Riverside Drive, N. T. O. For prospectus and registration Write: World Unity Foundation 4 East 12th St., or the Roerich Museum RESTAURANT 4UIB IWTRO 249 EAST 13th St. — Close to 2nd Ave. An eating place of distinction — And a lot of it — A quiet place for a rendezvous Chess Conversation When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation _.

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1930 No. 3373 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 231 EDITORIALS: Grave News from London 233 President Hoover's First Year 234 Facing Unemployment 235 Who's Obscene? 236 A Neighbor Returns 236 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 237 THE HUGHES REBELLION. By Paul Y. Anderson 238 MUST BANKS FAIL? By J. G. Curtis 239 THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CENSOR: III. FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. By Henry Raymond Mussey 241 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 244 CORRESPONDENCE 244 BOOKS, MUSIC, DRAMA: Mid-Voyage. By Isidor Schneider 246 Mr. Wilder Turns to Terence. By Henry Hazlitt 246 Brutalities Under Mussolini. By Hiram Motherwell 246 The Truth About Washington. By Claude G. Bowers 248 The Man Ibsen. By Lee M. Hollander 248 The Poetry of Leonie Adams. By Eda Lou Walton 249 Rabelais. By Eliseo Vivas 250 The Student Volunteer. By Walter Kien 252 Music: Four Moderns. By Hubbard Hutchinson 252 Drama. The Unruffled Mrs. Tyler 254 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 252 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Forced Labor in Liberia 256 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCH WE Y DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Edito* Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN- NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Crosi, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. THAT WAS AN EXTRAORDINARY SPEECH which Philip Snowden, Chancellor of the Exchequer, made on February 9, especially directed at the American and Canadian radio audiences listening to him on that Sunday afternoon. After pointing out that the United States spends more for armaments than any other great Power — $879,000,000 annually— and Great Britain $175,000,000 more than in 1913, before the successful war to end war, he stressed the fact that, with the exception of Germany, every other great Power is spending more than before the war, with a total war expenditure for armaments of $4,500,000,000 a year. Already, he declared, Great Britain has spent some $50,000,000,000 on its part in that colossal tragedy with- out counting the loss of the productive power of the men killed and of those who were for four years withdrawn from industry. At the present rate, he said, it will take 140 years to liquidate the British war debt. Today England must raise for debt purposes "$5,000,000 every day, $200,000 every hour, $3,000 every minute." He added that "it takes the whole-time labor of 2,000,000 workers year in and year out to pay the annual cost of our debt burden." Add to this the present cost of armaments and pensions, and Great Britain has to provide $5,000 a minute for war purposes. Three-quarters of its taxes are spent in paying for past wars and preparing for future wars. Yet there are many people in England and the United States who believe that nations can have no other method of settling international disputes than by continuing to burn up their resources in wars. THE SENATE never did a better job than when, on February 17, it struck straight at the monopoly of the Aluminum Company of America, the chief owner of which is our sanctimonious Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew W. Mellon. It is true that the action was made possible only by two votes, the roll call standing 41 to 39, but that was sufficient to reduce the present duty of 5 cents a pound on crude aluminum to 2 cents. Next the Senate voted without a roll call to lower the duty of 9 cents on aluminum bars, sheets, and coils to 3^ cents, and by a vote of 41 to 30 it restored the pre-war tariff of 25 per cent ad valorem on aluminum kitchen and household utensils. If these rates remain in the bill when it is finally passed the result will be felt in every household in America which uses aluminum ware. Every such family has been robbed for years merely because of the political influence of the chief owner of the trust. The aluminum duty was raised from 2 to 5 cents per pound in 1922, and the trust promptly raised the price of the metal 3 cents per pound to every American citizen, while bauxite and carborundum, materials used by the trust, were kept on the free list — so ardent a protectionist is Mr. Mellon when his own pocket is involved ! The Senate made one mistake; it should have put the whole business on the free list. PROHIBITION IS UNDER FIRE as never before, and the friends and enemies of the system are massing their forces for a fight the end of which is not yet. The first of the so-called Hoover "reforms," the transfer of the enforcement machinery from the Treasury Department to the Department of Justice, has been approved by the House of Representatives and seems likely to be accepted by the Senate. The Wickersham proposal for the virtual abolition of jury trial in certain classes of liquor cases has, however, awakened an imposing volume of protest, and Congress has thus far shown little interest in a step which many lawyers believe would be a direct violation of the Constitution. Hearings before the Judiciary Committee of the House, which began on February 12, have brought out a mass of testimony regarding the failure of the system, some of the most impressive statements and arguments being offered by representatives of national organizations of women who are opposed to prohibition and demand a popular referendum on the question. Meantime the newspapers carry columns of news of prohibition raids and wholesale arrests, the fed- eral courts are swamped with prohibition cases, and prohibi- tion agents and the Coast Guard go on shooting and being shot in support of the "noble experiment." Senators Wheeler and Norris have offered resolutions asking a Senate inquiry into the whole enforcement situation.

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232 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3373 THE SUPER-PATRIOTIC D. A. R., self-constituted guardian of our liberties and detector of treason and heresy afar off, has again come in for drastic criticism from one of its members, the critic this time being no less a person than Dr. Valeria H. Parker of New York, honorary presi- dent of the National Council of Women and long prominent in work for better social hygiene. Dr. Parker, who frankly states that she has "not been in sympathy with organization policies for several years," has resigned her membership in the Hartford, Connecticut, chapter in a letter sharply ar- raigning the course of the National Board of Management. The circulation of lists of alleged disloyal individuals and organizations, "unwarranted charges" against the United States Children's Bureau, sponsorship of "men who have been publicly convicted of unethical activities" as advisers and public speakers, repression of opportunities for "frank ex- pression of members," and "active support of extensive arma- ment programs" are the principal points of Dr. Parker's indictment. Mrs. Lowell Fletcher Hobart, president-gen- eral of the D. A. R., flippantly suggests that Dr. Parker may have "wanted publicity." She makes no bones of ad- mitting that the D. A. R. is opposed to pacifism and wants "a sufficient force" to insure "adequate protection." She de- clares "we have got to keep this country for Americans." WE PRINT ELSEWHERE A LETTER in regard to the proposal of Congressman Hamilton Fish, Jr., to enlarge the reservation at West Point by no less than seventeen hundred acres. Since our correspondent wrote to us, we understand, Mr. Fish has consented to strike from his plans the lands adjacent to the town of Cornwall and the Stillman forest. But that is not enough. The whole project should be abandoned, if only because it is another unhappy illustration of the way we are increasing our mili- tary establishment at the moment we are in a conference for the reduction of naval armaments and have given in the Kellogg pact our sacred word as a nation that we shall not engage in international warfare hereafter. The contention of the authorities at West Point is that the academy needs, beside more room for artillery practice, an additional water supply, especially as a new apartment house is being built to lodge seventy more officers. Instead of increasing the water supply West Point should cut down the cadet corps and the number of instructors, with the idea that it shall eventually become a great civilian school. West Point is one of the most heavily over-staffed colleges in the world. It is time to call a halt in teaching the art of man-killing. ANEW YORK BOARD OF PAROLE entirely sepa- rate from the correctional department of the State and made a part of the executive department is the recom- mendation of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt's special committee on the parole problem, the chairman of which is Sam A. Lewisohn. This board, which would replace the five different parole systems now obtaining in New York, would be freed from custodial duties, it would be able to devote its whole time, with the aid of a properly chosen and trained staff, to administering the parole system, and it would be in a position to assist the Governor in the matter of pardons. The committee has been guided in its recommen- dations, the details of which are set out at length in its report, by two principles: first, that while "discipline and authority must be maintained by the State under all circum- stances in dealing with its prisoners," there is no necessary conflict "between the exercise of discipline and authority and humane and constructive treatment" ; and, second, that, while good behavior and a desire for rehabilitation in the community should be recognized and compensated, "we should also vigorously refuse to be swayed by sentiment toward those who are unwilling to accept and abide by prison discipline and authority, or those who because of physical or mental disabilities would be unable on their release to adjust themselves to the requirements of society." The committee points out, however, that "laws, courts, prisons, executive clemency, parole, and readjustment" are all parts of a com- mon program, and that they must work together if the crime problem is to be solved. The report is so sensible that it is hard to see how the Legislature can find fault with it. A SURPLUS OF PRISONS and jails is the agreeable situation with which the British Home Secretary, J. R. Clynes, is confronted. With only half as many prisons now as there were a century ago, and with not fewer than twenty-seven closed since 1911, Mr. Clynes now proposes to close a number of others to prevent the supply from ex- ceeding the demand. "We are able to pull down the prisons," he is quoted as saying, "partly because we have fewer wrongdoers and partly because we keep the people out of such places unless it is absolutely necessary." Slow-going Britain, which incidentally seems to be a stranger to the "third degree," sees crime and criminals on the wane, while alert and up-to-date America multiplies its criminal stat- utes, crowds its prisons and jails with offenders, and arrests suspected persons by the hundreds or thousands in spectac- ular raids. The other day County Judge McLaughlin of Brooklyn regretfully sentenced one Patsy Destasio, thirty- two years old and the father of five children, to a term of fifteen to sixteen years in Sing Sing for taking part in a theft of $180. Destasio was thirty-two years old instead of under thirty, and the notorious Baumes laws made a prison rather than a reformatory sentence mandatory. How long will it be before the United States ceases to multiply crim- inals by turning its back on humanity and common sense? TWO WEEKS AGO we said that the victory of the Illinois mine workers' district officers in the State court against President John L. Lewis's attempt to put them out of office points to a possible new alignment in the labor- union world. But more than one court decision is necessary before possibility becomes actuality. Entirely aside from any legal questions that remain unsettled it is still possible that these sworn enemies will kiss and make up — such things have happened before in the United Mine Workers' Union — that the Illinois leaders will lack the capacity and idealism to take proper advantage of the situation, or that they will not keep the confidence of the rank and file. Certain reports which we have recently received seem to show that Lewis's charges against the Illinois leaders whom he tried to remove were not altogether baseless. Some of the acts of President Fischwick's administration in Illinois require a great deal of explaining to the rank and file. So, too, does the prominence of ex-President Farrington in the anti-Lewis movement after his three years of employment by a great coal company. Finally there is the hard fact that the Illinois administration

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February 26, 1930] The Nation 233 by silence or open support gave aid and comfort to President Lewis in some of the very acts which its spokesmen now justly hold against him. To say this is not for a moment to whitewash John L. Lewis. Neither is it to deny that there is a real opportunity for progressive unionism in the break between him and the Illinois district. It is to call attention to the old, old story that in union as in civic politics it is not enough "to throw the rascals out." A STRIKING TESTIMONY to the value of labor organization under intelligent leadership is contained in the news of the past week. On the one hand we have the successful outcome, under the mediation of Lieutenant-Gov- ernor Lehman, of the eight-day strike of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in the New York dress- making industry; on the other, the report of the Federal Council of Churches on conditions in the non-union steel industry. The conditions of settlement in the dress industry offer promise of stabilization, to the advantage at once of the workers, the employers, and the public. The jobbers are to confine their work to members of the contractors' association, who employ only union labor, thus putting an end to the inroads of the sweatshop and strengthening the competitive position of the inside manufacturers, who maintain the prize labor conditions of the industry. Compare the steel industry. For years it fiercely resisted all attempts to get rid of the twelve-hour day, finally yielding in 1923 only after terrific outside pressure. The Federal Council's report covers 155 plants employing more than 248,000 men in all. Of these men, 46.6 per cent are working eight hours a day, 44.6 per cent ten, 2.1 per cent eleven, and 6.7 per cent twelve hours. Only 20.6 per cent enjoy a week of five or five and a half days; 52.5 per cent work six days, and 26.9 per cent seven days a week. Four-fifths of them thus spend six or seven days a week at the furnace or in the mill, where common labor in a majority of cases gets from thirty-five to forty-five cents an hour, say twenty-seven dollars for a six-day sixty- hour week. Contrast these figures with the five-day, forty- hour week of the dressmakers, and the ordinary operators' scale of forty-four dollars. FEW, INDEED, of those who see the current perform- ances in New York of Mei Lan-fang, China's foremost actor, understand what the play is about or even what the acting intends to convey. But the fascination is there none the less. There is the evanescent, sensuous fascination of delicate rhythmic grace in carriage and gesture, and another fascination, largely mental, of being in the presence of a completely alien civilization. The conventions of Chinese drama and acting are so utterly different from ours that there is no standard whatever for comparison. The ancient plays which this company enacts are ritualistic developments of dance and rhetoric, rather than representations of action; meaning is conveyed rather by formal gesture than by his- trionic imitation. But this only brings to mind that every art is conventional, even our supposed realism. To under- stand a foreign art, or a foreign civilization, it is first of all necessary to understand its conventions. If the China Institute of America, which is sponsoring Mei Lan-fang's tour, thereby reminds us that in dealing with the Oriental nations we must sympathetically familiarize ourselves with their standards, it will have accomplished its purpose. Grave News From London WE have carefully refrained from taking a pessi- mistic position about the outcome of the London conference in the belief that its proceedings were bound to be enveloped in a fog of rumor and gossip. We have been certain, too, that all sorts of trial balloons would be sent up, and statements made by the various conferees solely for bargaining purposes. We have not yet given up our belief that something worth while will result, but we admit to a great sinking of heart since the news came that the American delegation has advocated the immediate building of a $50,000,000 battleship in order to reach imme- diate parity. Trustworthy advices from London assure us that nothing has done so much to endanger the conference as this. A correspondent of the New York Times even went so far as to declare, on February 16, that all hope had been abandoned of any reduction whatever. Mr. Stimson gave up the abolition of the submarine before he began to fight for it. From Washington it is reported that the Hoover Administration is now hopeful, not of any cuts at this conference, but that the way will have been cleared to substantial reductions at the next naval conference now ten- tatively projected for 1935. Should this really be the outcome of the London con- ference it will be a disaster for all humanity. For it will mean immediate embarking upon additional building pro- grams by Italy, France, Japan, and the United States. In other words, the net result of a conference to reduce arma- ments will be that they increase! It will make the failure of the tri-partite Geneva effort to reduce armaments seem like a trifle. It will stamp the governments of the five leading Powers as hopelessly insincere, or hopelessly incompetent to solve the most vital problem of the day. The resignation of the Tardieu Government at this critical time offers further complications and excuses for delay. As for Mr. Hoover, failure at London would be both a personal and a political calamity. We have reviewed in an- other column the first year of his Administration. The record proves that no President was ever in greater need of a success in foreign affairs than is Mr. Hoover at just this juncture. If his delegates come back with nothing but the hope that five years from now the same group of men or their successors will really set about the business of reduc- tion, he and they will be merely a laughing-stock, fit sub- jects for the sneers of the cynics and the bitter upbraiding of those who seek to ground the world's arms. Mr. Hoover has returned to the White House which he should never have quitted in these critical days. He should hear from the country as he has just heard from that rock-ribbed election district in Massachusetts, which for the first time has given a majority to a Democratic candidate for Congress. We hope that not only he, but our delegation in London will learn through letters and telegrams from people the country over that this nation desires prompt re- duction; that it takes no pride and has only shame in the fact that the United States now spends more upon its arma- ments than any other country in the world. This is no time for hesitation or delay.

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234 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3373 President Hoover s First Year MR. HOOVER'S first twelve months are drawing to a close, with many storm clouds upon the horizon. Some questions are inevitable. What achievements has he to show for the first year of his Administration? What quality of leadership has he developed? What are the prospects for the remainder of his term? What con- structive acts have been recorded for the advancement of the country and its extrication from the economic difficulties in which it flounders ? How does he stand before the American people ? These queries are the more vital because of the peculiar situation in which the President finds himself at this moment. The London disarmament conference is under way — in the doldrums, with its delegates apparently forgetting, in their desire for one more modern battleship, President Hoover's words that "it only remains for the others to say how low they will go. It cannot be too low for us." At home the tariff debate drags its weary, wounded length along in the eighth month of its exhibition of incredible sectional selfish- ness and economic error. Throughout the country the indus- trial depression continues and the roll of the unemployed lengthens. The prohibition debate waxes louder and, if anything, becomes more futile. On top of all this Mr. Hoover has received the news that in the only clear-cut con- test for the House of Representatives since his accession Mr. Coolidge's own rock-ribbed Republican district went Democratic for the first time in its history by a majority of 6,421 votes. Almost at the same time the President's nomi- nee for Chief Justice, Charles E. Hughes, was confirmed only by a vote of 52 to 26, with the nominee permanently branded by some of the best lawyers in the Senate as un- worthy to be Chief Justice by reason of his past services to the big corporations and his complete conservatism in all con- flicts between property and personal rights. Upon this record no President could look back with satisfaction, even though he might be able to shoulder a con- siderable part of the responsibility upon the Congress, notably in the matter of the tariff. Even as to that, however, Mr. Hoover cannot avoid all responsibility. Here as in all his dealings with Congress he has shown complete ineptitude. Had he been familiar with our tariff history he must have realized when he gave to Senator Borah his campaign pledge to submit the tariff to the tender mercies of the special ses- sion that it meant months and months of discussion and con- flict with the outcome extremely dubious. At no time has he been able to induce the Congress, despite his enormous ma- jority in the House and his titular majority in the Senate, to pay any attention to his wishes; his frantic demand in No- vember last that the tariff revision be concluded before the ending of the special session fell upon deaf ears. So far there is not the slightest prospect, as has just been attested by the protest of the federation of farmers' organizations, that the farmer will profit by the bill which will eventually be enacted ; nor is it certain that Congress will honor his re- quest for the establishment of the pernicious system of Ameri- can valuation of imported products now subject to ad valorem customs duty, instead of valuing them according to the foreign statements of their value. One achievement of some worth remains to his credit in this connection. At his behest Congress voted a Federal Farm Board and appropriated for it the sum of $500,000,000 to be used as a revolving fund to encourage cooperative marketing and otherwise advance the interests of the farmer. To this board Mr. Hoover made excellent appointments. For the rest, Congress also disregarded the President's demand for the repeal of the National Origins Immigration law, precisely as the Senate revolted in May and adopted the debenture proposal for the relief of the farmers. On the other hand, it gave him his commission on law observance and enforcement and that for the study of conditions in Haiti. Among his own most commendable acts was the establishment of publicity for tax refunds larger than $20,- 000, in which case he overruled his own Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Mellon, and his own predecessor, Calvin Cool- idge. Again, he wisely withdrew all oil lands from leasing save where such leases had been made mandatory by the Con- gress. On the other hand, his proposal that the United States turn back to the several States 190,000,000 acres of public lands, which had never belonged to them, to be managed and later sold has thus far fortunately fallen upon deaf ears. His admirable appointments to the Indian Bureau and to certain other offices seem to us to have been more than offset by bad judicial appointments and by his selection of business men without previous experience for the highest diplomatic posts in Europe. He has much improved the relations of the President to the press by abolishing the subterfuge of the unofficial spokesman of Calvin Coolidge, returning to the historic policy of issuing statements in his own name, and accepting responsibility therefor. Finally, in the field of for- eign affairs he has yet to lay before Congress his proposal that this country enter the World Court on the modified terms accepted by the signatories thereto, and he has most commendably declared that he does not wish this country represented by marines abroad, notably in Haiti, where he has taken the first step, through the appointment of his com- mission, toward our withdrawal. The fact is that Mr. Hoover has not added a cubit to his stature as a leader or as a statesman. He has not only been entirely destitute of the necessary skill and persuasion to obtain a worth-while legislative program; he continues to be amazingly inept in his relations with other public men — wit- ness the few real friends he has in Congress, and the un- seemly haste with which he appointed Mr. Hughes Chief Jus- tice the minute that Mr. Taft's resignation reached him, dis- missing Mr. Taft with a brief and utterly inadequate letter. Here lies his greatest weakness and his greatest danger. It is not difficult to be a departmental head and to achieve much by constant conferences. No President can carry on in that way. Commissions may help him to share the labor of get- ting at the facts, but in the end the President himself must bear the responsibility and be courageous and forthright in declaring his policies and defending them. If the Massachu- setts election is anything of a guide it is apparent that the public is strongly of this opinion.

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February 26, 1930] The Nation 235 Facing Unemployment THE people of the country have a right to know the facts about unemployment, and the public authorities have a duty to set forth the situation, as far as they can learn it, exactly as it is. A strange theory, however, has developed during recent months that it is the duty of such officers to make business good by giving out cheerful statements and thus inducing everybody to keep on buying and producing. This practice is bad morals and bad logic; its results are bound in time to be disastrous. Secretary of Labor James J. Davis, with at least the passive connivance of President Hoover, is now engaged in an effort to persuade the country that all is well in the business and labor world, with the hope that then all will be well. We have questioned his outgivings on unemploy- ment. It is time for a forthright statement of facts about them, in order that his political performances may not mis- lead the people and at the same time discredit the careful work of conscientious statisticians in the labor departments of the federal and State governments. These public ser- vants have been making some progress in the collection and reporting of employment facts, and we are unwilling to see public confidence in their important work jeopardized in order to make ballyhoo for business. Since 1915 the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, utilizing partly returns which it collects directly and partly figures placed at its disposal by the labor departments of cooperating States, has presented each month a useful report on employment and unemployment. Several important in- dustrial States also have collected and published their own figures. Some of these series, notably that patiently built up by the Bureau of Statistics and Information of the New York State Department of Labor, have become the most reliable current sources of information on the labor market, and much of the value of the federal figures is due to the cooperation of the State bureaus. A committee of the American Statistical Association, under the chairmanship of Miss Mary Van Kleeck, has for years been at work helping to improve the technique of such reporting; for there are almost insuperable difficulties in building up and maintaining prompt and accurate reports of employment conditions. In the early winter, with the desire to speed up things, the President asked weekly, instead of monthly, reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That unfortunate organ- ization, caught by the demand for quick action, without notifying the cooperating State agencies or asking their aid sent to its reporting firms all over the country a request for weekly instead of monthly reports for a temporary period of possibly three months. This threw the whole situation into confusion and apparently buried the bureau under a mountain of reports that it could not handle properly and that had no great value if it could, as there was no real basis for comparison and as weekly fluctuations have little significance anyway. It was an admirable example of how not to monkey with a delicate machine of this kind, but apparently the Bureau of Labor Statistics had no option. Then what happened? As we later learn, the figures for December 23, however little they were worth, indicated a decrease in employment of 1.5 per cent from December 16, and those for December 30 a further drop of 4.7 per cent. Secretary Davis's mouth was tight shut. But when the next week indicated an upward movement of 3.4 per cent and January 13 of 3.3 per cent more, the President rushed to the country with the statement that the tide had turned and that business was definitely on the upgrade. We will not characterize that statement of January 22 or the further weekly statements of the President and his Secretary of Labor. We will only say that Secretary Davis's radio speech of February 13 was distinctly misleading, though only the in- formed expert will be able to put his finger specifically on its indefensible features. The federal bureau's own monthly figure for January, just released, shows a decrease from De- cember of 1.8 per cent in employment in manufactures, and 2.6 per cent for all industries. Of one thing we are certain. With the authenticated New York figures for January showing a 2 per cent drop in employment from December, and actually standing at the lowest point in their fifteen years' history except for three months in 1921, with relief societies showing an 80 per cent increase over last year in families in distress because of unemployment, with Philadelphia clergymen urging house- holders to have spring work done now in order to help re- lieve the great numbers of the unemployed, with as sober and conservative a man as R. Fulton Cutting advocating an unemployment dole in New York City, with unemployed men rioting in Philadelphia and Cleveland, with a political revolution, due to acute industrial distress, effected in ex- President Coolidge's own Congressional district, and, more significant in its sober reality than all the other indications put together, with the economists of the country now day in and day out seriously discussing a permanent problem of "technological unemployment" involving literally millions of men — with all this staring us in the face we know that we confront a situation not adequately to be met by "opti- mistic ballyhoo." It is no problem of this winter or next. The unemployment situation calls for a constructive pro- gram. No answer comes out of Washington. Inheritor and willing beneficiary of an evil tradition of government by prosperity bluff, developer of a theory of business Coueism that puts moral props under almost any form of public deceit provided only it be cheerful, the Hoover Administration faces a condition that threatens not to be wholly amenable to treatment by such means. We commend to Secretary Davis and his chief the benefits of a period of repentance, fasting, and prayer, followed by an absolutely honest attempt to learn and make public the facts, with that followed in turn by a further honest attempt to develop a genuine national program to cope with the steadily mounting dangers of unemployment. Many of the materials lie ready to hand in the findings of the President's Conference on Unemployment of 1921, the program of the American Association for Labor Legislation, the record of the experience of foreign nations, and the experiments of progressive American employers. Has Mr. Hoover the statesmanship to formulate a program?

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236 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3373 Who's Obscene? DH. LAWRENCE'S pamphlet "Pornography and Obscenity"* is, as we might expect, a remarkable • document, full of power and passion. That it offers a clear solution of a practical problem is more dubi- ous. Mr. Lawrence is denouncing the British and American censorships and deriding their conception of pornography. Why do we dislike pornography ? he asks. Because it arouses sexual feelings ? He can only dismiss such a reason as cant- ing hypocrisy. "Half the great poems, pictures, music, sto- ries of the whole world are great by virtue of the beauty of their sex appeal." We expect Mr. Lawrence, after that, to condemn all censorship. But he does not. "Even I," he continues, "would censor genuine pornography, rigorously." Ah, but what is "genuine" pornography? To Mr. Lawrence the answer seems simple. "In the first place, genuine pornog- raphy is almost always underworld, it does not come into the open." And again: "The whole question of pornog- raphy seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography." Now this criterion clearly seems to us to put the cart before the horse. Without a concept of pornography already existing in law or in public opinion, there would be no secrecy, because there would be no need for it. Mr. Lawrence's second criterion of pornog- raphy is far sounder. "You can recognize it by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex and to the human spirit . . . the insult to the human body, the insult to a vital human rela- tionship . . . [its] disgusting attitude toward sex, a dis- gusting contempt of it." Yet no matter how much one may sympathize with this definition, one dreads to think what would happen if every- thing to which it applied were to be censored as we now censor the outspoken attitude toward sex. In Mr. Law- rence's opinion, for example, "Jane Eyre" and Wagner's "Tristan" are much nearer to pornography than is Boccaccio, while "the most obscene painting on a Greek vase ... is not as pornographical as the close-up kisses on a film." If the official censors, by a complete reversal of their customary attitude, were to make Mr. Lawrence's tests of pornography their own, they would be obliged to suppress perhaps the majority of all existing novels and plays. The enterprise seems a bit staggering; it is certain that Mr. Lawrence's censorship would prove a great deal more op- pressive and disconcerting to the general public than that at present in existence. We suggest that Mr. Lawrence agree to tolerate the sly smirker's, the peeper's, and the censor's attitude toward sex as a "dirty little secret" if the censor, in his turn, will tolerate Mr. Lawrence's attitude of com- ing out "quite simply and naturally into the open with it." Mr. Lawrence would win his real point in the end. For the effect of abolishing censorship completely, of permitting sex to be treated with entire candor, of allowing spades to be called spades, would ultimately be to demolish the notion, held by the Watch and Ward Society, by Senator Smoot, by the censor always and everywhere, that the natural pro- cesses of the human body and the means by which the race propagates itself are essentially shameful and degrading. •Alfred A. Knopf. New York. $1. A Neighbor Returns WHEN the Neighborhood Playhouse, after twelve years of fruitful activity, closed its doors in 1927, announcing that it needed time and leisure to think about itself and its future, there were many in New York who genuinely mourned its passing. Now, fifteen years old and refreshed by contemplation and unobtrusive work, the group that flourishes through the generosity and under the accomplished direction of Alice and Irene Lewisohn issues a most promising report of its plans. The little theater on Grand Street, often enough filled to overflowing by eager and delighted audiences, was not of sufficient seating capacity to make possible any real financial success. What the group needs now, therefore, is a new theater. Plans for the building include not only a theater suitable for the production and presentation of all forms of drama, but galleries for exhibits related to the theater, studios for classes in the various related arts, and living quarters for workers. Thus the old idea of a center where dramatic art could be nourished intelligently and tenderly is to be carried out in the new venture. Moreover, the company plans to continue its school of the theater and to establish a road company. All this is cheerful news. It is a strange paradox that in the city where more than 90 per cent of all plays produced in this country are either first or exclusively seen, a small theater in a neighborhood which it was almost impossible to reach with any comfort, a theater whose benches were of hard, uncompromising wood, whose stage offered no oppor- tunities for any but the simplest sets, should have made a mark as significant and memorable as any single dramatic group in our history. Broadway managers whose theaters are half empty night after night might well pause and con- sider for a moment the Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street. The plays were, for the most part, frankly "high- brow." There were no fancy-priced seats; there were, with due respect to the pulchritude of the young ladies of Grand Street, no Ziegfeld choruses; there were no dazzling cos- tumes or equally dazzling lack of costume. It is true that once a year the young people at the Neighborhood Playhouse turned themselves loose, in the "Grand Street Follies," in a huge horse laugh at Broadway. But the annual "Follies" does not explain the succes d'estime of Grand Street. There is really only one plausible explanation, which is that the New York theater public really prefers good plays to bad. Nor was the Neighborhood Playhouse the sole exemplar of this interesting fact. Eva Le Gallienne, with her com- fortably successful Civic Repertory Theater, proves it nightly. The Theater Guild, in spite of several indifferent plays in a row, can point to the same reason for its success. A season or so ago Shakespeare in modern dress found audi- ences eager for more. Why does not an enterprising pro- ducer introduce a repertory of Shakespearean plays given in this manner? Above all, why not a regularly repeated reper- tory of Gilbert and Sullivan operas? "Iolanthe" and "The Mikado" were played successfully in New York a while ago. Add to these "Patience," "The Gondoliers," "Ruddigore," give them bright scenery and a dashing Broadway ensemble — and see if the money does not come rolling in !

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February 26, 1930] The Nation 237 It Seems to Heywood Broun WHEN Ralph Pulitzer resigned recently as president of the Press Publishing Company there came to an end an interesting chapter in the history of the New York World. It also marked the culmination of a gallant though ineffectual struggle on the part of an indi- vidual against the authority of a dead hand. Joseph Pulitzer had been dead a good many years when I worked on the World, but his was an ever-present spirit. There remained on the staff and in the editorial offices some few of his old associates, but it was not solely their presence which kept the founder's memory alive. The shop was haunted, as often happens in any place where a great personality has paused and then passed by. In almost any time of crisis somebody on the paper said: "Now, what would J. P. have done in similar circumstances?" And even if no one said it the thought was operative. Far from being an advantage, this continuing ancestor wor- ship constituted a blight. You cannot run today's news- paper by assuming what some dead man would have done if he still walked the earth. In fact I have always felt that the integrity of American political leadership will always be impaired as long as present problems are evaluated in the light of Washington's Farewell Address. The masthead of the World's editorial page contains a paragraph written by Joseph Pulitzer in 1883 in which the World is identified as a paper "that should always fight for progress and re- form." The business of looking back across a gulf of forty years is not generally conducive to progress. Curiously enough, the task of continuing the Pulitzer tradition was intrusted to a man who had little in common with his father. The force, the drive, the vitality which animated Joseph Pulitzer were never in his eldest son Ralph. But at the outset I might as well pick my side in this duel between the living man and the dead hand. I was and am for Ralph Pulitzer. The paper's peak during his period of control constituted a higher journalistic achievement than it had ever known in his father's day. Though the younger Pulitzer lacked the founder's force he did bring to the job a far more sensitized intelligence. He brought the paper up out of the field of cheap sensationalism into which Joseph Pulitzer plunged it back in the days of the duel with Hearst. And so, though he may have plunged it at last into the red, he did remove it from the yellow. The World has seemed to me the most interesting morning paper in America. It did not ever cover the whole field of human events with the tenacity of the Times. But the Times is so complete a journal of record that one almost suspects that it is published for the sake of posterity. If papers may be personified, the Times reminds me of a man who meets your casual greeting of "How are you?" with a detaining forefinger and a well-documented history. At the very least, one may say for the World that it kept a waste basket around the place. To be sure, the light of the World came in large part from personalities other than that of the publisher. Both Cobb and Swope colored it greatly in their day, but I trust that everyone will agree that an executive should reap some of the credit for the work done by subordinates whom he suffers or chooses. Ralph Pulitzer himself was always some- what miscast. The fact of being dedicated to the task of honoring his father's memory must have been irksome at moments. And my guess is that these time periods were even longer. Indeed, had the younger man succeeded beyond the wildest dreams he would have shown up the fallacy of the judgment of Joseph Pulitzer. By the terms of the will the founder had said in effect that Ralph Pulitzer was not good enough to carry on the tradition. Upon Joseph, Junior, he had set the same verdict. It was a curious document. In it the senior Pulitzer left the majority interest to his youngest son Herbert. Both Ralph and Joseph had entered newspaper work before their father's death. These two had been tried. One almost is tempted to say under his eye, for the blindness of the editor never blocked him from close contact with his paper. The result of this scrutiny of sons was the conviction that he must look elsewhere. Herbert was still a boy. He was the un- known quantity. It was on him that Joseph Pulitzer chose to gamble. It is too early yet to tell how the wager will come out. Herbert Pulitzer has been in charge of the Evening World for some little time and the paper has hardly seemed distinguished. But then it never was. The after- noon edition in recent years has done much better financially, but it has never approached the morning World in the mat- ter of prestige. In one respect the old man was quite right. For better or worse his son Ralph would never be the same sort of newspaper man as his father. In the first place, he was never authentically a liberal. Of course, the word requires a certain amount of definition. Surely one does not become a liberal merely by hating sham and fraud and corruption. I mean that Ralph Pulitzer had no passion for political or economic experimentation. Even in the arts his admiration was enlisted chiefly for the classic models. The new frank- ness that developed in the theater and in the novel found him not only abashed but indignant. His interest was not that of his father, in man in the mass. He gave his greatest attention to the littler things in the paper. I believe that he took great pride in the page which lies opposite the editorials. Here F. P. A., Deems Taylor, Frank Sullivan, Stallings, Bolitho, Woollcott, and one or two others have flourished. This was highbrow jour- nalism. Joseph Pulitzer would not have been interested. I doubt if he would have endured it. The most frequent criticism was that such stuff made the World a daily maga- zine rather than a newspaper. More accurately it might have been termed an attempt to elevate opinion to the dignity and importance of news. This may be heresy, but I'm for it, perhaps even more strongly than Ralph Pulitzer. No event is ever so important as its repercussions. On the face of things, the sort of journalism which Ralph Pulitzer had to offer seems not at the moment successful. I think I am very well aware of many imperfections in the man and in the method. And yet in all sincerity I cannot say other than "Good try!" Heywood Broun

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238 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3373 The Hughes Rebellion By PAUL Y. ANDERSON Washington, February 13 IT is difficult, in this reporter's opinion, to overestimate the historical significance of the furious fight waged in the Senate against the confirmation of Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice of the United States. The limber- ness of conviction, the absence of a proper pride, which in recent years have allowed Mr. Hughes to hire himself out along both sides of the street to whoever could pay his price, were objections grave enough to explain the terrific opposi- tion to placing him at the head of the Supreme Court. But something vastly more important than the individual char- acter and fate of Mr. Hughes was involved. The fight on him resolved itself with dramatic swiftness into a protest against the social philosophy embodied in the present majority of the Supreme Court itself. It became a popular uprising against the practice aptly described by Senator Dill as "writing into the law of the land economic doctrines that enable organized wealth to pick the pockets of the people under the guise of protecting its constitutional rights." It was a revolt against that "legal legerdemain" whereby the court sets up billions of dollars in fictitious values, and then requires the public to pay profits on them. It revealed how deep and widespread is the loss of confidence in the justice and impartiality of the court's decrees. There was another element in this historic rebellion — the resentment of Con- gress against the continued usurpation of legislative powers by the court. Remembering the occasions on which the court had assumed to judge the "reasonableness" of statutes, more than one conservative lawyer in the Senate joined the protest as one way of protecting the Constitution against its supposed defenders. Whether the event will have a large salutary effect, may be conjectured. I have be^n told that the court exists in a vacuum, deaf to all but the facts at issue, and blind to all except the Constitution. Seeing them, hear- ing them, observing their respective backgrounds, and spec- ulating on their various blood pressures, I have been tempted to doubt this sacred dogma. From the public's standpoint I suspect the Senate debate has done no harm. ***** AS for Mr. Hughes, unless he has the hide of a two- horned rhinoceros, he will enter upon his duties in a more chastened spirit than he has yet disclosed. Twenty-six Senators publicly pronounced him unfit, and their verdict was echoed privately by a dozen others who gave him their votes under pressure of expediency, political and otherwise. He resumes his robe under the charge of having dragged it in the slime of politics. As he takes his oath to "do justice to the poor and the rich," as he ascends the bench before which he has so often pleaded the case of the corporations against the people, and as he proceeds to render judgment on questions which he has already judged for pay, he must know that millions of his countrymen regard the perform- ance as a mockery. He knows that the only thing which saved him from humiliating rejection was the power of a disreputable political machine — that he owes his high office to the preponderance of Grundys, Binghams, Watsons, and Smoots in the Senate — that the members whose confidence and respect an upright man would naturally covet most were virtually all against him. If he has any capacity for humility, it must surely be extended by reading the prin- cipal defense offered in his behalf. Uttered in various forms, it always boiled down to this: that the constitutional views advanced by him at various times before the Supreme Court were not to be taken seriously, because he had been paid to advance them, and it was highly doubtful that he actually believed in them. What a defense for a man of Mr. Hughes's supposed standing! ***** FOR inaugurating and leading what originally appeared to be this perfectly forlorn hope, the country is in- debted, as usual, to Senator Norris, of Nebraska. When he arose on Monday to report the nomination from the Judi- ciary Committee and to read a brief statement recording his personal objection to it, not another man in the chamber was willing to join him openly in opposing confirmation. An irresponsible objection from the erratic Senator Blease, of South Carolina, delayed consideration until the following day. Next morning, when the Senate discovered the reac- tion to Norris's statement, the timid took courage, and the bashful became bold. Borah's magnificent indictment of Hughes's record, and his masterful identification of Hughes's point of view with the majority view of the Court, fol- lowed by a ringing denunciation of Hughes's "lack of sensi- bility" by Carter Glass, of Virginia, were enough to set off the fireworks. Seldom in recent years has the Senate afforded so tense and dramatic a spectacle. Probably not since the Grant administration have the acts of the Supreme Court been subjected in Congress to such savage assaults. Old Guard leaders who three days earlier had openly in- vited a fight in the belief that the result would discredit those making it hastily began checking up on the votes. New wobblers popped up suddenly, and old ones wobbled with new violence. One such, from a Southern State, ap- proached his braver colleague and emphasized the awkward- ness of his own predicament by pointing out that "Mr. Hughes is one of the leading Baptists of the country." "Are we voting for Chief Justice or Moderator?" was the scath- ing retort. Partisanship in the press gallery attained a stage unequaled in my experience. Usually the boys are fairly cynical about such matters, and those that aren't pretend to be. But smug self-righteousness, especially when attended by the suspicion of hypocrisy, has a singular power to antag- onize people of all political beliefs, and few men are better known to the Washington correspondents than Mr. Hughes. Among some fifty or sixty that were actively engaged on the story, I know of only three who wished to see him con- firmed. The mass antagonism of the others was so manifest that Senators noticed and inquired about it, and one of the devoted three registered his indignant protest — with raucous and ribald results. The whole affair has been edifying and wholesome. Once more the country may thank God and the enlightened Senate minority.

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February 26, 1930] The Nation 239 ON previous occasions I have hinted in this place that there were interesting disclosures to be made con- cerning the activities of Claudius H. Huston, national chairman of the Republican Party by the grace and influence of his personal friend, Mr. Hoover. Now it can be told, at least in part. It has been disclosed by the Senate Lobby Investigating Committee that just prior to accepting the Republican chairmanship, Mr. Huston busied himself in an effort to obtain the Muscle Shoals plant for the American Cyanamid Company, one of the two great corporations that for years have been snatching at that government property. It is said in Mr. Hoover's behalf that he was unaware of this activity when he selected his friend to direct the party organization, and it is declared in Huston's behalf that he discontinued it after his selection. On the other hand, it is a fact that Mr. Hoover was informed of the circumstances, and had an opportunity to secure Huston's resignation be- fore the public disclosure, and did not do so. As to whether Huston doffed the garment of a lobbyist when he donned that of national chairman, the committee manifests a healthy appetite for information. It might even look into the sudden departure of James Francis Burke from his un- official status at the White House several months ago! ***** SUCH distressing incidents as that involving Mr. Huston may or may not have inspired the Republican National Committee's determination to hire itself a press agent of proved worth in the person of Mr. James L. West, a vet- eran member of the Washington bureau of the Associated Press. Among those who are familiar with Mr. West's work in reporting the Hoover campaign, and subsequently in covering events at the White House, for the hundreds of newspapers subscribing to that great and wholly impartial news-gathering organization, there exists no doubt as to his willingness and ability to serve the Administration well. But there is considerable doubt as to the wisdom or tact involved in choosing him. For one thing, he now becomes an admitted partisan, and hence is suspect. There are some, like myself, who believe that the innocent and sincere admiration of the Associated Press reporter assigned to the White House would be more valuable to the Administration than the services of a paid press agent. Moreover, the incident leaves an unpleas- ant taste because of others which preceded it. In the midst of the oil scandal, the chief of the Senate bureau of the Asso- ciated Press resigned to enter the employment of Harry Sin- clair. Later the superintendent of the Washington bureau departed to join the Van Sweringen organization, which had weighty matters pending before the Interstate Commerce Commission. Thus far, no word on this subject has come from the chaste Frank B. Noyes, editor of the Washington Star and president of the Associated Press, but he is about the only member of the profession here who has not ex- pressed an opinion. Most likely it will prove to be beneath his dignity. Must Banks Fail? By J. G. CURTIS In an unusually quiet way, taking the importance of the happening into consideration, the news spread through the community Monday morning that the doors of the State Bank were to open no more for business. Small gatherings on the street corners discussed the event all during the day, but no demonstrations were made. . . . Organized over fifty years ago, this bank was one of the oldest in this part of the country. It has had the utmost confidence of the people of the community for many years, and experienced a steady growth until lately, following the accumulation of a number of farms taken as security for previously made loans. Assessments against the stockholders have been made regularly for seven years, according to Mr. Blackmore, president of the bank. Further assessments following the closing of the bank will amount to $25,000, the bank's capital stock, bringing the total loss to the stockholders to approximately $75,000. THE foregoing obituary of one of the five thousand banks that have failed in this prosperous country during the past nine years is taken from the weekly newspaper published in a village of the Middle West. The stockholders who lost the $75,000 were a few farmers and a country-town merchant or two. The depositors, whose loss will be small, were their neighbors. * The House Committee on Banking is now considering legislation au- thorizing branch banking by national banks. The frequency of bank failures lends special interest to this question at this time. A second article on branch banking by the same author will appear in an early issue. — Editor The Natioh. In 1928, the year in which this failure occurred, 491 other banks in the United States failed, their total deposits amounting to $140,000,000. In 1929 the record was still worse: in the first nine months the number of bank failures exceeded the total for 1928, and the indications are that the total of deposits involved in bank suspensions during 1929 will exceed $225,000,000, an increase of more than 60 per cent over the total for 1928. This state of affairs is all the more disturbing when it is pointed out that there were fewer commercial failures in 1929 than in 1928. Ten years ago there were a few more than 31,000 banks in the United States.. Today there are a few less than 25,000. Roughly one-fifth of the banks in the country have failed since 1920 — and they are still failing. These suspensions — if "failure" is too inexact and harsh a word — have occurred chiefly in agricultural sections — in Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Florida. In some of these States almost half the banks have closed. The failures are therefore endemic. More than 60 per cent of the banks were of the same size as the State. More than 60 per cent of them were in villages like , with a popula- tion of a thousand people or so. More than 60 per cent — probably 90 per cent — involved losses principally to farmers, country-town merchants, and such persons of small means. On the Pacific Coast, where banking has become more highly organized than elsewhere, and on the Atlantic Coast, where banking, though less highly organized, is supported by greater

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240 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3373 capital accumulation in the general community, the number of bank failures has been, by comparison, almost negligible. It is not enough, therefore, to attribute the bank failures of the Middle West to the agricultural depression and let it go at that, for the agricultural depression was not confined to the Middle West. It is more sensible to say that the agri- cultural depression might have been far less severe in the Middle West had the banking business as a whole been as strong there as elsewhere in the United States. It is more sensible because it indicates a means of farm relief more prac- tical than export debentures and federal farm loans, and far easier to achieve than cooperative marketing, though not of such final importance. These thousands of small banks — three thousand of them with only $25,000 capital apiece — instead of lending strength to their customers shared their weakness. They had neither the means nor the inclination to act collectively in any constructive program. They were not even able to save themselves as the metropolitan banks have been able to do under somewhat similar circumstances. The speculative increase in security values during 1928 and 1929 was unrelated to the earnings of business, just as the speculative increase in farm-land values before and during the war was wholly unrelated to the profits of farming. In both cases the speculative increases depended very largely on bank credit, because people borrowed against their apparent wealth ; in both cases the time came when the debts had to be paid. In the case of stock-market speculation, the loss fell upon a community comparatively well able to stand it; the losses in farm speculation, on the other hand, fell upon a class of people unable to afford it. Great city banks, holding the funds of balanced and diversified economic ac- tivity over wide areas, supported by membership in the Fed- eral Reserve system, and managed by persons of greater experience, even if not necessarily more intelligent, were able to endure the exigencies of liquidation. One would expect them to be. Country banks, on the other hand, owned by farmers and country store-keepers — people with all their eggs in one basket, and without more than local experience — were swamped when analogous exigencies closed in on them. One would expect them to be. They had gone into business without adequate strength to meet its risks, and, what is more important, in an agricultural region where risks are, in the nature of things, especially great. These failures, themselves the result of agricultural de- pression, have had the direct effect of making the depression still worse. The sum of $1,500,000,000 which, according to the Comptroller of the Currency, has been tied up in them is of course chiefly agricultural money. While not all of it is permanently gone, its withdrawal through insolvency at the time it was needed most was almost as bad as outright loss. In a way, the funds of the Federal Farm Board make up that loss, though not directly, for they should properly be used not for relief but for cure — for the removal, that is, of the primary hindrance to recovery, which is uncoordinated, individualistic farming practices. But a related secondary hindrance to recovery is to be found in uncoordinated, indi- vidualistic banking practices, and a cure for them lies in the realistic and constructive suggestions for banking reform offered to Congress by the Comptroller of the Currency, Mr. J. W. Pole, and favored by Mr. Louis T. McFadden, chair- man of the House Committee on Banking. Branch banking within cities is common ; statewide branch banking is per- mitted in several States, but is common in few except Cali- fornia. The comptroller's recommendation, which in sub- stance has been advocated for years by professional authori- ties, is for legalization of regional branch banking, i.e., the extension over wide areas of strong banking systems in place of the thousands of independent units which are now in operation. Naturally, this proposal arouses the opposition of some thousands of bankers who a few years ago were trying to prevent establishment of the "socialistic" Federal Reserve system. It has the more jealous hostility of State banking departments, whose spokesman, Mr. Peter G. Cameron, is banking superintendent of the high and mighty State of Pennsylvania. It has the opposition of a former comptroller, Mr. Henry M. Dawes, of the Chicago Daweses, who holds the theory that it is better after all for little banks to fail than for big ones. It has the long-winded opposition of that sanctimonious guardian of "popular liberties," the Commer- cial and Financial Chronicle, which sees in branch banking a "menace" to the "constitutional right to engage in business for profit and accumulation." It has also, unfortunately, the opposition of a great many intelligent people without tech- nical knowledge of b'anking, whose opinions about it are for that very reason influenced by the conventional and undis- criminating fear of anything big in business. The implications of the comptroller's plan for regional branch banking are numerous; that it would prevent for the future such an aggravation of disaster as the failure of almost half the banks in the farm region is the point relevant to this discussion. The fact that the farmers do not realize this does not affect the merit of the plan. In this country, branch banking has always been regarded by students of finance as an indispensable condition of safety and serviceableness. In the rest of the world it has been taken for granted as a feature of banking so invariable that it required no com- ment. It is its absence here and not its advent that should arouse attention. Ghosts By WITTER BYNNER Between courses at a dinner, he suddenly leaves To remember and wonder how many moons ago Those dinners happened that ghosts are attending. He grieves, Because the new persons whom he chooses to know Never knew these others and might not have liked the dead. There are new smiles now, new responses to his quips. And yet there are intervals when, having said His dinner-table say, he hears dead lips. The dead have ways of mingling in the uses Of the life they leave behind them. They can rise When a dinner is over. One of them refuses To be gone. One of them looks at him with eyes From farther away than any rain can reach, Leaving him only motion, only speech.

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February 26, 1930] The Nation 241 The Christian Science Censor III. Freedom of the Press By HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY CONSTANT dropping wears away the stone. The committees on publication and the loyal members of the Christian Science Church, in whatever nook and corner of the country they may be, are forever on the job. Their zeal, earnestness, and discipline create the im- pression of large numbers, and consequently bring prompt results in newspaper, radio, and legislative fields. I report largely in the words of the committees on publication them- selves, as published in the Christian Science Sentinel. Starting at the top, the committees are carefully hand- picked all the way down. To give a single example, John M. Dean, First Reader of the church in Memphis, was appointed Committee on Publication for Tennessee for the year beginning October 1, 1923. Mr. Dean was not con- sidered sufficiently "loyal," and his appointment was vetoed by the Board of Directors in Boston. The (local) assistant committees are similarly controlled. The general manager of committees in Boston, by means of regular bulletins and, when necessary, special communications, keeps in touch with the State committees and through them with the local ones. State committees, according to the manager, are required to correct impositions and injustices as provided in the Manual, "to guard the rights of Christian Scientists against restric- tion by public authority" (a duty prescribed by the directors under Article I, Section 6), and to perform any other duties required under the same by-law. The duties of assistant committees are similar. Now for the actual work. Committees are constantly on the alert to secure the insertion in local newspapers of notices and reports of Christian Science lectures and other news valuable to the church, and to see that there is promptly published a "correction" of any unfavorable publicity of whatever character. How this result is accomplished it is well worth while to observe, for the methods at need often go far beyond the simple friendly request that constitutes a natural and proper first step. Christian Scientists are com- monly well-to-do persons with good business connections. The committees therefore can, and do if necessary, bring valuable personal influence and advertising pressure to bear on the newspapers with surprisingly effective results. Such power is ordinarily exercised quietly, and on that account all the more effectively. An unusually well-known example occurs in Washing- ton, D. C. The District Committee on Publication is part owner of one of the large Washington department stores. Through his advertising power he holds in the hollow of his hand the Herald and the Star, which Washingtonians read in the morning and evening respectively. Some time ago the business manager of the Star told an interested inquirer that anything on the subject of Christian Science was always submitted to this man before publication, and that as his • The fourth and last article in this series, on The Siege of Fort Scribner, will appear in the issue of March 12. — Editoi Tnt Natiom. store was among the Star's largest advertisers, the paper could not afford to antagonize him. The advertising mana- ger of the Post complained that the man concerned was going much too far in putting pressure on that paper through advertising power. An examination of these two papers over a period of nearly four years shows that they have published no news adverse to the Mother Church, while authorized Christian Science lectures, given in Washington every two or three weeks, have been reported to the extent of anywhere from half a column to the full text of the lecture. The District Committee on Publication, officially re- porting his activities for 1924, says: There was also a syndicated article, critical and ad- verse to Christian Science, which was withheld from pub- lication in one of the local papers upon the request of your committee. The wisdom of Mrs. Eddy in establishing the activity of the Committee on Publication is becoming more apparent each year in a rapidly diminishing desire on the part of newspapers to print any criticism or incorrect statement concerning Mrs. Eddy or Christian Science. What a model diminishing desire! Four years later the committee reports thus: No unfriendly sermons were advertised, but an objec- tionable advertisement from a counterfeit organization ap- peared. A reply was presented, but the publisher stated that he could not accept a correction to a paid advertise- ment. Upon the insistence of your committee that some- thing be done in the matter, the publisher in lieu of print- ing the correction agreed not to accept in future objec- tionable advertisements. Desire is still diminishing, but presumably not department- store advertising. News is not news in Washington alone. A rival Chris- tian Science organization offered an advertisement to the Chicago Tribune, and elicited the two following telegrams from the advertising manager: November 17, 1927 Sorry publisher will not accept my recommendation to run your advertisement. Will write you regarding changes. November 23, 1927 Cannot accept religious advertising controversial in character. This ruling prevents acceptance of your order. Revision is futile in view of your objective. Very sorry. One advertising manager apparently learned a good deal in the course of a week. One may hazard a shrewd guess as to who was the teacher. At any rate, the Illinois Commit- tee on Publication was able to report in 1925: Many editors now refuse copy of a controversial na- ture and we are advised that any objectionable allusion to our religion reaching such well-guarded pages does so be- cause of ignorance or oversight on the part of the news- paper employees.

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242 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3373 The advertising departments of two of the largest daily newspapers firmly refuse advertising matter issued by false claimants of Christian Science. The education of our journalistic brethren, however, cannot always be accomplished simply by "the sweet ameni- ties of Love," as provided in the Manual, or even, it ap- pears, by the sweet amenities of advertising, for in the re- port of the New York committee for 1925 we read: It is seldom that the better papers quibble over print- ing a correction. To be sure, it is still necessary at times to emphasize the moral obligation and discreetly to point out the possible legal liability on the part of publishers in connection with the printing of statements misrepresenting the teachings and practice of Christian Science. Note correction outrunning error in Michigan in 1927 : In August a press dispatch which quoted certain mis- statements of Mrs. Eddy's teaching was printed in only one newspaper of this State, while fourteen newspapers printed a subsequent dispatch which quoted the Commit- tee on Publication from New York in reply to the earlier statement. The busy committees on publication, in their ceaseless pursuit of error, have much reading to do outside "Science and Health" and the newspapers. Despite such good work as was described in the preceding article, mortal mind still creeps into books and must be combated. Especially, the minds of the young must be guarded. In 1925 southern California reported : During the past year a textbook on hygiene, which misrepresented and attacked our religion, was excluded from Pasadena Junior College and Santa Barbara Teach- ers' College. In the former, the books were taken back and the amount paid by students was refunded to them in subsequent purchases at the school bookstore. Two years later northern California reported progress in the good work : Success continues to be experienced in removing from schools textbooks which attack Christian Science. Assur- ance has been given by members of the State Board of Education that hereafter the manuscripts of books to be adopted will be read carefully to detect medical or sec- tarian propaganda and veiled attacks upon religion. None of the other States, however, so far as reports indicate, could rival Illinois, which as early as 1924 had attacked the trouble at the root and likewise had smitten the noxious tree in its highest branches: At the request of this office several book publishers have revised incorrect copy, and one publisher destroyed plates containing disparaging references to Christian Science. An unauthorized work on Christian Science was removed from circulation at the Chicago Public Library, and an obnoxious textbook in hygiene, containing deroga- tory references to Christian Science, has been withdrawn from use in a university. It is also noteworthy that a plan purporting to accomplish the removal of objectionable books from all public libraries is now receiving the atten- tion of committees on publication. Whether the ensuing six years have sufficed for the execu- tion of this laudable plan I do not know. Fortunately, our reference books are being revised and brought into accord with the truth. New York is the great book center, and it is therefore natural that our knowledge of this work should come from the report of the New York committee (for 1927) : The Grolier Society, which publishes "The Book of Knowledge," has accepted a revision of the biography of Mrs. Eddy they have been using. Their book editor was most willing and cooperative in this matter. Funk and Wagnalls, publishers of the "Practical Standard Diction- ary," are using Christian Science definitions of words through an arrangement that they have made with the Christian Science Board of Directors. The "Encyclo- paedia Britannica" has accepted and published two timely new articles, one on Christian Science, and one on Mrs. Eddy. A third one has been submitted and will appear in later printings. This is the result of many years of work with the publishers. All this is encouraging. One wonders what was the char- acter of the "many years of work with the publishers" of the Britannica. I can only note the fact that earlier edi- tions of that immortal work contain a reasonably fair and critical, though by no means hostile, account of Mrs. Eddy and her religion, while the present one substitutes two ar- ticles written by Judge Clifford P. Smith, for fifteen years head Committee on Publication. I remind readers of the history of the Wilbur biography and the Dickey memoirs. It is unfortunate that more space cannot be given to the activities of the committees in respect to newspapers and books, but I must hasten on to other fields where also error raises its hateful head. The theater seems to be relatively blameless, yet even here occasional work must be done. Southern California reports in 1927: On the stage, antagonism is seldom directed publicly toward our religion, but a play was lately produced which contained lines that conveyed a wrong impression of Chris- tian Science. Before this play was given recently a protest was made, and the management agreed to omit the objec- tionable references. Lectures and sermons still give occasional trouble, and some- times zealous individuals use methods of direct action not sanctioned, of course, by their leaders. Dr. Morris Fish- bein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Asso- ciation, recently lectured in Pasadena on healing fads and quackeries. According to the Los Angeles Examiner of January 9, when Dr. Fishbein included Christian Science "in the category of 'fakes,' several persons in the audience interrupted with a storm of objections and cries of 'That's not so.' " Dr. Fishbein thereupon invited those who did not like his remarks to leave. "Throughout the remainder of his address groups of persons rose from their places and left. Others remained throughout, interrupting and heckling the speaker with objections, boos, and hisses." Similar inci- dents have occurred at other lectures in the same district. Truth will be served in California. If the theater troubles the directors and their publica- tion committees little, they are fully alive to radio possibili- ties, and one could already write a fascinating volume on the deadly effectiveness of their air censorship. Publication- committee reports in recent years are full of radio references. In place of such references, however, I shall give a few de- tails of a single case to show just how the machinery of suppression works. In January, 1929, a rival, or, as the Mother Church prefers to call it, "counterfeit," organiza- tion arranged a lecture tour by one of its British adherents, Sir Henry Japp, the distinguished engineer who built the

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February 26, 19303 The Nation 243 Pennsylvania Railroad's East River tubes. In an interview at the end of his tour, Sir Henry declared that much to his astonishment he had been prevented by organized oppo- sition from broadcasting his Christian Science lecture in Indianapolis and Schenectady, and that the same tactics had been tried unsuccessfully in Chicago and Phoenix. Sir Henry's New York experience, however, was per- haps the most notable. The sponsoring organization ar- ranged with the Columbia Broadcasting System, through its general manager and president, for a fifteen-minute talk over twenty stations of its basic network on the afternoon of January 15 (afterward postponed to February 17). The text of the address and of the introductory remarks was submitted, and after certain changes, apparently in response to criticisms by a Christian Scientist in the Columbia organi- zation, was accepted by the general manager. The con- tract was signed and a payment was made. As soon as the address was announced, the Columbia system began getting telegrams and letters of protest from all over the country, and they became so numerous that eight out of the twenty stations finally refused to go on with the broadcasting. On February 13 the following letter went out from an assistant committee on publication in New York: Dear Friend: The Assistant, of Church of Christ, Scien- tist, to Mr. Orwell Bradley Towne, Committee on Pub- lication for the State of New York, received under date of February 11 the following communication: "The Columbia Broadcasting System has contracted to give the representative the facilities of the Columbia System for an address on Sunday afternoon, February 17, from 4:45 to 5 o'clock. This has been done in spite of protests from this office and Christian Scientists elsewhere. "The Columbia System should know that this is a very unfair and unjust thing and I am therefore asking you to help get additional messages of protest from Christian Scientists in your section against it. It is not too late to stop the radio talk. . . . "One of the chief points to be emphasized is that [the rival group] are actually engaged in a re- sentful and malicious war against the Mother Church under the pretense of preaching, and that the public state- ments of have been deceptive, fictitious, and mis- leading, as well as controversial and hateful. It is wrong to have the facilities of the Columbia System used by a re- sentful propagandist with a handful of followers. . . ." Your Board recommends strongly to each member of to follow Mr. Towne's advice. . . . Your active participation in this move of defense is considered a true service to the cause of Christian Science. Very sincerely yours, Board of Trustees. On February 15 those who had arranged the lecture met by request with Columbia officials, and in their presence the Christian Science member of that organization talked over the telephone with Mr. Towne, New York Committee on Publication, and received a statement of further specific changes that must be made before the lecture would be satisfactory. The responsible parties, having a contract, re- fused to agree to these changes, and the Columbia company, despite its contract, at the lecture hour announced to the radio audience that owing to "unforeseen circumstances" Sir Henry would not broadcast. No publicity machine is complete without its lobby, and the Christian Science lobby's rating is AA1. In a cir- cular letter of November 19, 1918, Judge Smith, then man- ager of committees on publication, requested them all to send in information regarding newly elected Senators and Representatives together with additional information in re- gard to those "heretofore mentioned in reports." Admirable work is done both at Washington and at the State capitals. I have a body of material, some of it sensational, showing something of these extraordinary activities, but I must con- tent myself with a few excerpts from publication-committee reports. Michigan says in 1925: The deliberations of the State legislature are looked after with the greatest care. . . . Many measures were presented which contained objectionable features, but all these were either defeated in committee or amended in a way which removed undesirable provisions. California in 1927 was able to report that the legislature of that year was composed of members uniformly fair and generally friendly to Christian Science, and that the Com- mittee on Publication received the cordial support of legis- lators in defeating or amending bills which were objection- able to Christian Scientists. Senate bills 570 and 815, for example, protected the San Francisco "unit" for the Chris- tian Science Benevolent Association from the regulations of the State Department of Public Welfare, and from inspection by it, and likewise from the State requirements governing training schools for nurses — which suggests rather more protection for the "unit" than for the patients within its walls. And Illinois in the same year reported a triumph : Our visits to the Capitol during the legislative season of 1927 proved to be occasions for rejoicing that Christian Science is respected by Illinois lawmakers, a considerable number of whom are members of our church. Prior to this session our legislative duties were confined chiefly to protective or defensive action. The Fifty-fifth General Assembly, however, manifested such a fair and friendly attitude that it seemed an opportune time to initiate a measure to discourage misrepresentation of Christian Science and its Discoverer and Founder through radiocast- ing. Therefore, a bill was prepared "for an Act to pro- hibit slander over, through, or by means of what is com- monly known as radio." After a period of watchful wait- ing, during which time appeals were made to the Governor and the Speaker of the House, our bill was called and passed by the House on June 30, 1927. It was presented to the Governor, received executive approval, and became a law. I have let the committees on publication tell their own story from their own official reports, so far as those re- ports are presented to the public in the Sentinel. I have re- frained from extensive comment and have given only the slightest and most inadequate suggestion of the methods by which their task of suppression is accomplished. There are enormous areas of the propaganda activity of the church that I have not touched — for example, the story of the Christian Science Monitor, that admirable newspaper whose advertising history is best covered with a broad mantle of charity, and the deadly whispering campaign whereby the influence and standing of practitioners are undermined on the very suspicion of "disloyalty." I have given simply a few glimpses of the working of a powerful machine.

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244 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3373 In the Driftway JUST as it is impossible to spoil some people, so it is impossible to spoil some places. St. Augustine, Flor- ida, for instance, has the unpleasant external aspects of a town that lives on visitors — as is the fact. Yet in spite of its facade of hotels, souvenir shops, and tea rooms, it has an authentic charm that differentiates it from the average re- sort city of the State. Perhaps it is the historic background, for St. Augustine still has more indications than one would suppose, in our fast-changing civilization, of the fact that it is the oldest European settlement in the United States — some ancient houses, an old Spanish fort, and a network of narrow, crooked streets. But the city's charm lies not so much in any of these physical facts as in its atmosphere, which the seasoned traveler soon recognizes as Latin. One might think that after a century under the American flag St. Augustine would be no more Spanish than St. Louis, say, is French. Quite the contrary. The names and faces one encounters make it easy to believe — as one is told — that about two-thirds of the permanent population is of Spanish extraction. But in almost indefinable ways the Latinity of St. Augustine is even better authenticated. One feels some- how a respect for the amenities of life and an easy tolerance that link St. Augustine with Chartres, Naples, and Cadiz. The signs in the plaza, "Please Keep to Walk," have a graciousness that is lacking in our better-known "Keep off the Grass," while in a strictly American city one would not find the group which the Drifter encountered playing dominoes on an outdoor table in the old Slave Market in the Plaza of St. Augustine — an unmistakable Latin face, a Chinese, two Florida crackers, and several other types. ***** THERE is also a certain pleasant jesting which, once common all over America, has been largely subdued in the regimentation of recent years. A local resident, wearied perhaps by the monuments to stuffed shirts which he had encountered, has had a rude face cut in stone and has placed it in front of his property, with this inscription: Notis This Werry Elaborate Pile Is Ereckted in Memery of Tolomato A Seminole Ingine Cheef Whoos Wigwarm Stuud on This Spot and Sirroundings Wee Cherris His Memery As He Was a Good Hearted Cheef He Wood Not Take Yoor Skalp Without You Begged Him to Do So or Pade Him Some Munny He Allways Acted More Like a Christshun Gentleman Than a Savage Injine Let Him R. I. P. ***** OWING in part probably to the narrow streets, which are poor for motors, and in part to the survival of old traditions, horse-drawn carriages are still at the disposal of visitors to St. Augustine and seem to be enjoyed by them. There is even one hansom cab, with an old-fashioned black- and-white-spotted coach dog to trot underneath. The Drif- ter had thought the coach dog long extinct, and doubtless this one would be if he did his duty and trotted faithfully under the hansom in its peregrinations about town. But his motto seems to be "Safety and Comfort First," and while the hansom rolls the streets he lies asleep in the sun await- ing its return. The Drifter Correspondence The Harding Letters To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The following quotation may be of interest to all those who, like The Nation, are in doubt whether or not to credit the rumor that Harding's letters were destroyed. Mr. Charles Moore, acting chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, is authority for the statement that the widow of President Harding burned practically all of the letters he left concerning political and national affairs. Mr. Moore had endeavored to obtain from Mrs. Harding any state papers that her husband might have left to add to the collection of Presidential documents in the archives of the library. Mrs. Harding told representatives of the library that she had destroyed her husband's letters, consisting chiefly of communications written to him. There were only a few copies of those he had written. This item appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature for January 9, 1926. It does not, of course, settle the fate of the letters written by Harding, but it can leave little doubt, I think, that if they were not destroyed they should have been. Washington, February 1 Margaret Welplev America and the League To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: In your number of January 15 you decry the sugges- tion that the United States should enter the League of Nations on the ground that it is a vicious body intent on fulfilling the terms of the treaty of Versailles. I am afraid that this criticism is to a certain extent true. But Europe is still war-heated and there are very few Europeans who can regard affairs over here from a really generous viewpoint. It is just in this that an American voice could be of such inestimable value in the councils of the League. If America is to wait till the atmos- phere of Geneva is surer before she joins she will have to wait a long time, perhaps until we drift into another war. The League will always be an unsatisfactory body until America and Russia officially take part in its councils, but though in its four main tasks — the abolition of armaments and of tariffs, the control of drugs and of traffic in women — it has failed almost completely, it has brought most of the govern- ments of the world together to talk things over in a friendly atmosphere and to unite, in a small way at the present, in a serious effort to maintain peace. While the League must, of course, be immensely grateful to America for the fine way in which she Has cooperated with the League in its fight against disease, and indeed for creating these activities of the League, we wish that she would become one of us, and help us outl Oxford, England, January 22 R. F. CoOKB

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February 26, 1930] The Nation 245 Shall West Point Expand? Good News from California To the Editor op The Nation: Sir: The New York World of January 15 carried the report that Hamilton Fish was proposing a measure in the House of Representatives for the enlargement of the West Point Reservation. On January 22 the same paper carried a map showing the lands to be included in that project and the uses to which they would be put. Meanwhile, Dr. E. G. Still- man of New York City, who owns the greater part of the land, had received from Superintendent Smith at the Point a letter asking him to give this land to be used for maneuvers and for artillery practice. Dr. Stillman replied that he would neither give the land nor sell it. Whether it can be taken from him is an open question; in the interest of the civilian population senti- ment should be aroused for the defeat of such a proposal. I write as one of the citizens of Cornwall, who would be seri- ously injured if Dr. Stillman's holdings, known as Black Rock Forest, should be taken. The reasons against it are, briefly, these : 1. Dr. Stillman has had built in Black Rock Forest a chain of lakes to be used as a reserve water supply for the town of Cornwall. During the drought last summer these lakes were turned into our town reservoir and supplied us with millions of gallons of sorely needed water at a total cost of $1 to the community. If West Point acquires these lands this source of water supply for our town will be cut off, and no other reserve supply for the town can be developed at a cost of less than millions of dollars, which a community of 4,000 could not possibly raise by taxation. 2. For ten years past Dr. Stillman has spent many thou- sands of dollars on experimental forestry in Black Rock Forest, seeking to preserve our woodlands and at the same time find a way of using them for lumber. The forests would of course be demolished by artillery practice, and all wild life driven out. 3. The forest now forms what is really an extension of the Interstate Palisades Park, and is frequented each week by hundreds of trampers and hikers. Not only does the forest serve the need of New York City, but it is providing a pleasure ground for the rapidly growing communities to the north and west. Of these privileges the civilian population will of course be deprived if the War Department gets possession of the Black Rock Forest. 4. The dangers of artillery practice in the rapidly grow- ing and thickly settled area within fifty-five miles of New York City hardly need mention. Several years ago West Point at- tempted to close the Storm King highway to traffic during parts of each week for the sake of artillery practice, but public pres- sure was so great that it was forced to open the road in accor- dance with the agreement with New York State by which the road had been built. During the years when artillery practice was carried on at the Point, unexploded shells were frequently found out of bounds, constituting a danger to people walking in the woods outside the West Point Reservation. 5. If West Point gets this land it forever precludes the normal growth of the village of Highland Falls. Finally, why do we need an expanding military reservation at this time? The authorities at West Point are using the threat that if they cannot get the land the academy will be removed from the banks of the Hudson. This threat seems to have terrified some of our local citizens. Would it not be very advantageous if the academy were removed to a less desirable region, and the present buildings and campus utilized for a great international university for the study of the arts and sci- ences that promote the peace and happiness of mankind? Cornwall, New York, January 29 CIVILIAN To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Since I feel that whenever progressive forces receive any encouragement the fact should be noted, I desire to report that the new editor of the conservative Sacramento Union, Charles J. Lilley, formerly a Washington correspondent, turns out to be not an Administration "yes-man," but a progressive. Today's editorial on Muscle Shoals said this: "We do not feel concerned about the problem as long as Senator Norris remains in the Senate. He will keep it out of the hands of those who want to seize it and reap huge profits from the power there." Los Molinos, Cal., January 30 Don M. Chasb Another View of Boulder Dam To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I note Ruth Finney's article on Secretary Wilbur at Boulder Dam in The Nation of December 11. President Hoover and Secretary Wilbur are certainly doing their level best to keep the government out of business and allow business to run the government. The people of Los Angeles have fought for this dam against the opposition of the private power inter- ests for eight years. The private power interests have all along claimed it would not pay, but now that the project has gone through in spite of them they want all of the power. It is proposed eventually to bring 1,500 second feet of water from the Colorado River to this territory, and it will take 420,000 horse-power to pump this water. The allocation which the Secretary makes, assuming 550,000 firm horse-power at the dam, is about as follows: Horst-poer Arizona, 18 per cent 99,000 Nevada, 18 per cent 99,000 Municipalities other than Los Angeles, 4 per cent 22,000 Total 220,000 Balance 330,000 This balance is to be allocated as follows: Yi to the Metropolitan District for pumping. . . . 165,000 J4 to the City of Los Angeles 82,500 J4 to the Southern California Edison Company. . 82,500 Total 330,000 Thus, the people of this territory, represented by the Met- ropolitan Water District, having made possible this venture and arranging to pay for it, are getting out of it only enough water to pump 590 second feet. Moreover, when they need a larger amount of water, as they will very shortly after the aqueduct is completed, they will have to go somewhere else for the water or buy back from the Southern California Edison Company the power that is allocated to them, and in the end go to some other dam at a distance of some 200 miles in order to pump water at Boulder Dam. If anything could be more absurd than this I have yet to hear of it. To my mind, since the dam is made possible and is to be paid for outright by the electric cus- tomers of this city and by the payment for water by the Metro- politan Board, the allocation of power should normally be to the Metropolitan District to the extent of 420,000 horse-power when and as required, to the city of Los Angeles and other municipalities all power not used by the Metropolitan District. The Boulder Dam bill distinctly provides preference for municipalities, and yet the Secretary is disregarding the wording of the law in order to favor the private interests. Los Angeles, December 30 A. L. Smith

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Books, Music, Drama Mid-Voyage By ISIDOR SCHNEIDER Hard to break the day from time, the ship from water; though day has stations of going and coming to the sun, and the ship for marker, the sinking nape of coal in the bunkers. Meanwhile we imitate our pendent lives; the deck's road walk that in its round encompasses the sea; we sentinel our sleeping stomachs, hibernate in the moving cave burrowing this chilled and salted field. We- stroke our memories sea lull to uncramp, are patient of the sea's interim. All day we watch the long wave forward, the horizon ; the small waves their white spines crunched, slide beside us in little bones. We hear fall the wall of wind ; see the sky deal in one a dozen weathers, curdlings of storm, and ductile mile of rain, and cataracts of sun from cloud ridge notches pouring. Below the ship's engine beats; we hear the careful heart scratching its thin artery, the infinite seabreast on. Mr. Wilder Turns to Terence The Woman of Andros. By Thornton Wilder. Albert and Charles Boni. $2.50. THE first one or two books by a young author of unusual talent often give the impression of indefinitely wide pos- sibilities. With succeeding books this impression is modi- fied; the author begins to betray his limitations: his manner, his fictitious world gradually harden into a fixed mold; the reader can draw a definite circle around him. Witness the careers of Cabell and Sinclair Lewis: we now know almost as surely what to expect from them as we know what to expect from the Packard or Cadillac factories. In "The Woman of Andros," it seems to me, Thornton Wilder gives signs of ap- proaching precisely such a stage. Not only does the novel betray no new possibilities; it does not even realize all the possibilities suggested by "The Cabala" and "The Bridge of San Luis Rey." It is, so to speak, a smaller circle drawn entirely within the cir- cumference of the two preceding novels. "The Woman of Andros" is even briefer than "The Bridge," and like "The Bridge" it is set in a former age and in a foreign place. The place is the Greek island of Brynos; the time is after the great age of Pericles and before the birth of the Savior. The story is conventional: A young girl, innocent sister of an eminent hetaera, has a love affair with a young man of good family on the island, and becomes pregnant. The young man is then called upon to decide whether he shall leave her to her fate or whether he shall marry her with all the seri- ous social consequences which that would involve. His period of indecision is the period of the novel's suspense. He has just made up his mind to marry her, and she has just been rescued from slave dealers, when she dies in childbirth. To this sum- mary we must add the title role: the woman of Andros is the hetaera Chrysis, and not her poor sister Glycerium. Chrysis gives famous banquets, and gathers about her a group of the young men of the island, and recites to them from Plato and Homer and Aristophanes, and talks of the pain of life, for she is very wise and very sad. I wish I could speak of this book with more enthusiasm. It is written with scrupulous care; there are passages of genuine beauty in it, and flashes of what I suspect are real insight and wisdom; there are appealing characters, like the father Simo, and the atmosphere is sustained with great skill. But somehow the novel leaves me cold. The situations seem to me patently arranged, the plot shopworn, and at no time in reading the book was I able to lose sight of Mr. Wilder in the act of being a fine stylist. The whole thing, in fact, seems to me primarily an exercise in style; and to be told that "the first part of this novel is based upon the Andria,' a comedy of Terence, who in turn based his work upon two Greek plays, now lost to us, by Menander" does not help me to appreciate it. It serves, rather, to suggest its occasional resemblance to the work of John Erskine, though Wilder is never so facetious as the author of "The Private Life of Helen of Troy," and though he feels his situations more deeply. The type of novel to which Mr. Wilder seems to have dedicated himself is inspired largely by Anatole France, and be- cause it is not indigenous to our soil, I cannot believe that it can take deep root. Its mood and tone can be sustained only by a constant self-conscious effort; it is apt to be always a trifle anemic; and as the work of Cabell shows, it may quickly suffer from a poverty of fresh themes. But even if Mr. Wilder chooses not to depart from his present vein, we may justifiably look for better books from him than the present one, which does not quite fulfil his earlier promise. Henry Hazlitt Brutalities Under Mussolini Putnam's Sons. $2.50. reader who picks up this Escape. By Francesco Nitti. G. P THE first thought of many a book will be to recall that a similar book, Silvio Pellico's widely read "My Prisons," played a powerful part in awakening Italians to revolt against the tyranny of the Haps- burgs and their client rulers. Likewise, that it was Gladstone's revelations of the condition of political prisoners in Naples un- der the Bourbons which swung English public opinion in favor of the Risorgimento and made possible Garibaldi's crusade. Here is another terrifyingly vivid account of the life of the political prisoner under another Italian tyrant. Francesco Nitti, nephew of Italy's former premier, was arrested on vague charges of opposing the Mussolini regime, supported by the allegation that he had neither wife nor mistress and so must be up to mischief. He was condemned, without trial, under the special laws for the defense of the regime, to five years on one of the penal islands. Handcuffed to three fellow-prisoners he was transported to barren Lampedusa, where with professors, scientists, lawyers, teachers, workmen, and peasants, he was subjected to the obscene brutalities of the notorious sadist Lieu- tenant Veronica. For a year he plotted his escape with two friends. One night the three of them swam out to a launch which was waiting for them in the darkness. A roar of the engines, police boats in pursuit, searchlights playing, bullets fly- ing about them, and then — liberty 1

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February 26, 1930] The Nation 247 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN AGE by EGON FRIEDELL "Unquestionably a superb attempt to interpret the past five and a half cen- turies of European history in Spengler's terms of rise, maturity and decay, but in a manner less abstruse than that which Spengler sometimes employs, and with an emphasis upon personal- ity which he, on the whole, disdains. Its learning is great, its thought pene- trating and wholly unconventional, and its style moving and often brilliant." — WILLIAM MACDONALD, in The New York Times. $5.00 THE HUMAN MIND by KARL MENNINGER, M. D. Here at last is a popular book that tells all that science has revealed of the normal and ab- normal workings, disorders and treatments of the mind that lives as the personality behind our features. Richly illustrated with many cases from the au- thor's long experience as a psychiatrist. $5.00 STORIES t°hfe OPERA Third Series by ERNEST NEWMAN An interpretation of the music, stories and circumstances under which were created: Verdi's Rigoletto, La Traviata, II Tro- vatore, Aida, Otello; Gounod's Faust; Bizet's Carmen; Offen- bach's Tales of Hoffmann; Hum- perdinck's Hansel and Gretel; and Puccini's La Boheme, Tosca and Madame Butterfly. With brief biographies of the composers. $3.50 BUY YOUR BOOKS UNROMANTIC SPAIN by MARIO PRAZ With gay humor and much worldly wisdom, Mario Praz writes about festivals, bull- fights, dancing and architec- ture, giving us a new and real- istic picture of Spanish life. Illustrated. $4.00 BORZOI BY THIS LABEL BOOKS AMERICA CONQUERS BRITAIN by LUDWELL DENNY author of We Fight for Oil The complete story of the greatest eco- nomic war of all time — a war which daily threatens the continuance of in- ternational peace. No one who reads here of the foreign battles won by General Electric, Standard Oil, Ford, etc., can deny that our country is gain- ing in her attempt to wrest from Great Britain her long-held world supremacy. Avoiding all bias, Denny gives an im- pregnably documented analysis of the situation such as is nowhere else available. $4.00 THE LIFE OF THE DEVIL by FATHER LOUIS COULANGE A complete history of Satan from his rise in Heaven, through his vehement warfare against mankind and into his contem- porary decline. Illus. $5-00 At all Bookstores ALFRED ♦ A ♦ KNOPF ♦ PUBLISHER TCO FIFTH AVENUE ♦ NEW YORK THE GREEK CITY AND ITS INSTITUTIONS by GUSTAVE GLOTZ The rise, development and fall of that unique organization, the Greek city, and the evolu- tion of the various Greek in- stitutions that accompanied its growth. The range of this study makes the book in reality a political and social history of ancient Greece. $6.00 By THOMAS MANN Nobel Prizeman in Literature for 1929 BUDDENBROOKS A new and cheaper edition of Mann's most popular novel. Over half a million copies have been sold in Germany in the last four months. 704 pages. Cloth binding. $2.85 EARLY SORROW This delicate portrayal of a child's inarticulate love is Mann's latest prose fiction. $1.50 500 CRIMINAL CAREERS by SHELDON and ELEANOR T. GLUECK With a Foreword by RICHARD C CABOT By dramatically tracing the lives of 500 men before, during and after their imprisonment, this book effectively portrays the evils of our present day penal institutions. It is a study not only of absorbing interest, but of un- exampled importance in the field of penology. "A work of unique value and interest. . . Eminently readable and dis- plays vision as well as knowledge." — DR. GEORGE W. KIRCHWEY $5.00 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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248 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3373 As a narrative of almost incredible adventure the book could not be better. As a denunciation of the brutalities which inevitably accompany such a dictatorship as Mussolini's, it is as powerful as it is truthful. It will unquestionably further arouse public opinion abroad. But whether Nitti is another Silvio Pellico is another question. A dictatorship stands or falls not on its treatment of individuals or the behavior of its police, but on its ability to administer successfully the economic life of the nation. Whether the Fas- cist regime is doing that may not be known for several years to come. Hiram Motherwell The Truth About Washington George Washington, 1777-1781. By Rupert Hughes. William Morrow and Company. $5. IN the third volume of his admirable and monumental biography of Washington, Mr. Hughes maintains the high standard of the previous volumes, and continues his devas- tating work with the myths. It is an appalling thing that we have had to wait for a novelist's study to get the truth about Washington. Between the Parson Weemses and the John Marshalls the biographers played havoc with the truth in the beginning, and succeeding writers have lacked the honesty, the industry, or the courage to give us a true portrait. Mr. Hughes seeks to dig a great figure out from the debris of fancy and fable, and, in doing so, has destroyed many a pallid myth, and been roundly abused for his pains. But he has accom- plished one thing which is quite sufficient — he has given us the most thorough and scholarly biography of Washington yet written. Because of the author's necessity of combating tradition and prejudice, one sometimes gets the impression of a rower straining against the stream. He is denied the privilege of merely building something; he is forced to demolish much, and this means some dust and dirt and confusion. But the fault is not his. We shall be delightfully surprised if he escapes the condemnation of the uncritical for some of his devastating work in this volume. Washington on his knees at Valley Forge — this goes overboard. Washington the pious devotee of the church makes way for the Washington of the Diaries. Conway, the wicked Irish renegade, is shown in a new and more favorable light, and even the Lee of Monmouth becomes more a half- crazed genius than a traitor. Even Arnold is shown to have had some cause for complaint; the tearful stories of his later repentance are discredited, and his beautiful wife no longer commands our sympathy, since she is shown to have been as deeply involved in treason as her husband. Here we learn more than the historians have thought wise to tell us before of the French, and of Washington's relations with them, and something of the impatience of Washington, which made him a bit trying to his subordinates. It is probable that some of our super-heated patriots will be distressed at the author's indictment of the masses of the American people of the Revolutionary period, though Mr. Beveridge has painted the picture in colors quite as drab in his biography of Marshall. It is an ugly fact to which it is point- less to close our eyes. There were wholesale desertions, there were intolerable failures on the part of the Congress and the States, there were enemies of Washington among the Revolu- tionary leaders who had a contemptuous opinion of his military capacity, there was often chaos; and Mr. Hughes conveys a very bad impression of the Revolutionary fathers in the army. While the author seems at times in wrathful mood about the private soldiers, he nevertheless does much to explain their lapses in fidelity to the cause. After all, theirs was not an en- viable situation. They were the ones who made the bloody footprints in the snows of Valley Forge, and pressed in flimsy rags against the bitter winter winds, and went without pay. The honors went to the leaders, and no fashionable ladies were knitting yarn gloves for the privates. In all the literature of the Revolutionary period one looks in vain for evidence of special appreciation of the work of the common soldier; and Mr. Hughes shows that Washington believed in keeping him in his place — which was far, far removed from the officers. Privates were to be paid in script, and after the war was over most of them were to be tricked out of this — and by officers and heroes! It is not surprising, therefore, that they were not all fidelity to the cause at all times; there were times when they must have felt that they were making a futile sacrifice. It is far easier to excuse the common soldier in his desertion than to palliate the merchants and the aristocrats in their indiffer- ence or disloyalty. It is to the credit of Mr. Hughes that in painting the bl?^k picture he does not conceal the fact that even the deserters were not without a grievance. It was not until Webster spoke at Bunker Hill that the common soldier was to hear glowing words of appreciation, and, alas, there were so few then living to hear it! In these pages Washington the soldier is painted by the hand of a realist. It is not a military genius of the first order that is presented. The contemporary criticisms of his strategy are set forth fully, but with these all the heart-breaking handi- caps that the Napoleons never knew. And out of it all emerges a Washington greater than ever, more human, more under- standable, more masculine, and more than ever essential to the success of the mighty enterprise he led, and saved. Mr. Hughes has taken him from a vulgarly gilded pedestal and brought him to our hearthside where we see him as a human being. The author's Washington, created from his studies, is as follows: He was not at all the Washington that is taught in the schools. He was far greater than the bland miracle- worker. He was infinitely human, incessantly guessing wrong, making innumerable false prophecies, countless mistakes, losing his temper, regaining it, being driven into victories in spite of himself, and driving others to heights they could not otherwise have attained. And this is the true Washington. Mr. Hughes has thoroughly documented his work. His investigation has been exhaustive, his citations are conclusive on controversial points, and the result is that his biography comes closer to being definitive than any hitherto written. There are scrupulous honesty and superb courage in this work, and the author is to be congratulated on the performance of a real public service. Claude G. Bowers The Man Ibsen Ibsen, the Master Builder. By A. F. Zucker. Henry Holt and Company. $3.50. INEVITABLY there came a lull in the Ibsen cult after the long storm of feverish discussion that had raged about him and his "problems" from the time his Nora slammed the door behind her and his "Ghosts" first walked the stage — from 1879 or 1881, that is, until the poet's death in 1906 and for a few years thereafter. The reformer shares the fate of the scien- tist and the discoverer in that all he has accomplished for the race is just taken for granted. Most of Ibsen's "problems" have long since become semi-historic and have ceased to agi- tate us — woman's rights, political, marital, occupational, the double standard of morality, the claims of youth, and all the rest. But while the meat of the animal is gone, the exquisite and perduring conch is left — his dramas, perhaps the subtlest

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February 26, 1930] The Nation 249 yet most plastic portrayal of human nature in all literature. In so far as Mr. Zucker's book, somewhat too modestly, dis- claims any treatment of literary criticism and literary influences and lays its main stress on the outer circumstances of the life that gave birth to Ibsen's works, it is a step backward. Risking a paradox, one may say that in the present case the work is greater than the man. Whereas in this well-executed exposi- tion Ibsen the artist towers again as incontestably the greatest literary figure in Europe after Goethe, Ibsen the man shrinks and at any rate is neither admirable nor engaging. His great contemporary and rival, Bjornson, was not so wrong when he called Ibsen "only a pen." He was, rather, a specialist, one who to an extraordinary degree chose to renounce a broader life in order to achieve immortality in his chosen field. For all the many and interesting bits of new information about that bare life that are here brought together the Sphinx pre- serves essentially the same unrevealing silence. One almost questions the existence of a rich inner life behind the mask. Within his self-imposed limitations, Mr. Zucker has pro- duced an absorbing book. The story — the fairy story, as he himself called it — of Ibsen's life is told with a notable elegance, coupled with a certain vis comica and an epigrammatic felicity which raises the work above the usual "professor-made" biography. Lee M. Hollander The Poetry of Leonie Adams High Falcon and Other Poems. By Leonie Adams. The John Day Company. $2.50. LEONIE ADAMS is, to my mind, the finest lyric poet writing in English. She is the type of poet, so seldom found in America, who is directly in the stream of liter- ary tradition and yet a profoundly original genius. And this means that her work will live. "No poet, nor artist of any art," as Eliot remarks, "has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation, is that appreciation of his re- lation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him by contrast and comparison among the dead." And this is probably the reason why the critics of Miss Adams's first book, "Those Not Elect," did not trouble to compare her with her contemporaries as much as they tended to trace her literary lineage. Their decision was that her influences were Donne and the Metaphysical school. Now, not until Miss Adams had noted their comment had she ever read Donne. She was, however, deeply read in the Eliza- bethan and Romantic poets. It is to these two periods, and more particularly to the first, that her roots are rightly traced. Leonie Adams's language, even her grammatical structure, is often Elizabethan. She employs both the modern over- tones of speech and all the shades of connotation and usage known to the Elizabethans, and in so doing has greatly en- riched our poetic language. Her rhythms are, of course, not the simple song rhythms of the Elizabethans, but rather the subtle rhythms of written and beautifully patterned verse. She uses a variety of stanza forms, but has a strong individual inner rhythm attuned exactly to her meaning. The themes of Miss Adams's poetry are love and nature, the two great Elizabethan themes, but in her love poetry there is none of the Elizabethan conventionality of phrase, and in her nature poetry no reflection of the pastoral tradition. The simple sensual outlook of the Elizabethans is replaced by the intricate intensity of a modern bent upon spiritual exploration and understanding of life. Like all truly fine English poetry, Miss Adams's verse, despite its literary roots, is unique. Al- though her themes are simple and her images as simply sym- H'hen writing to advertisers New Titles in the MODERN LIBRARY at 95/ a copy THE SUN ALSO RISES By ERNEST HEMINGWAY -170 ANNA KARENINA By LEO TOLSTOY -37 THE DANCE OF LIFE By HAVELOCK ELLIS -160 THE TURN OF THE SCREW and THE LES- SON OF THE MASTER By HENRY JAMES -169 GREAT MODERN SHORT STORIES Edited by GRANT OVERTON, including stories by Conrad, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway. James Joyce, and others — 168 THE ILIAD By HOMER —166 Translation of Lang, Leaf and Myers THE ODYSSEY By HOMER -167 Translation of Butcher and Lang COMPLETE & UNABRIDGED IN ONE VOLUME Send for a list of 175 titles To YOUR BOOKSELLER or N-2-30 THE MODERN LIBRARY, INC., 20 East 57th Street, New York Please mail me MODERN LIBRARY Books Nos □ I enclose $1.00 for each volume (95c for the book, 5c for postage). □ Send books C. O. D. D Please send me, free of charge, your new catalog, describing all of the books in the Modern Library. Name — - — Address- City .State please mention The Nation

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250 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3373 bolic as those of Dante, all her poems glow with richness of language, with music, and with an imagery which sweeps from understatement to a disembodied tracery of light and shadow as luminous and tranced as Shelley's own. Hers is a mystic vision as terrifyingly simple and universal as Blake's, but her mind is more subtle and more intellectual than that ot the earlier mystics. When "Those Not Elect" was published, Miss Adams was accused of obscurity. The reasons are several: packed and elliptical sentences not always consistently punctuated, the ageless command of language of which we have spoken, and, perhaps most important, the fact that most American lyrics can be paraphrased and those of Miss Adams cannot. Cer- tainly the concentration of her lines and her special use of language do require an adjustment on the reader's part to her special technique. But in her actual emotional content there is nothing which can be rightly called obscure. Her poems arise, as all lyrics do, out of an intense personal experience, but this experience is almost immediately translated into its universal meaning through a profusion of images which flow rapidly into each other and are frequently summed up in a symbolic statement. The fact that her poems are not easily paraphrased is, indeed, a mark of their greatness. Whatever difficulties there were in the piling up of clauses and in an archaic use of words have largely disappeared in Miss Adams's second book, "High Falcon." Here she has been more scrupulously critical of her own constructions and has, moreover, clarified her own vision. "High Falcon" is, therefore, a better book than "Those Not Elect." The melo- dious rhythmic flow is the same, the richness of language and imagery have the same magic; nothing is lost, and a complete lucidity — one or two poems excepted — is obtained. Certain of the poems — Song for a Country Fair and Winter Solstice, for example — make use of a more concrete detail than was to be found in her earlier verse. But these poems seem a little away from the main course of her development. The others are in the same key as the five poems in the first book and are concerned with the same search after significance and with the glory down "the waste track of beauty in the heart." There are many singers, and excellent singers too, whose song is always of their own personal passion, with no roots going deeper than their own milieu. Miss Adams is infallibly the singer of such passions as are universal, and of a world ageless in its seasonal and transfixed wonder. Eda Lou Walton Rabelais Francis Rabelais: The Man and Hit Il'ork. By Albert Jay Nock and C. R. Wilson. Harper and Brothers. $5. Francois Rabelais: Man of the Renaissance. A Spiritual Biog- raphy. By Samuel Putnam. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $3.50. IT HAS been felt by those who have even the slightest ac- quaintance with Rabelais that he has something infinitely valuable to give us. A need, therefore, has long existed for an introduction to his works and an evaluation in contem- porary terms. A study of Rabelais that would meet this need must be done, if not in the spirit of the man, which would imply a genius equal in breadth and depth to his, at least in a spirit large enough to encompass, even on a reduced scale, his whole gargantuan personality, encircling the whole range of his expression with all its contradictions, paradoxes, and unintelli- gible bewilderment of richness. It -would have to be done by someone who has not only something of the depth of serious- ness the satirist was capable of, but also that unbounded George Washington VOL. Ill : THE SAVIOR OF THE STATES 1777-1781 By RUPERT HUGHES "The third and the most interesting volume so far. This distinguished biography gains steadily in nar- rative momentum, in reality of background and in clearness of character portrayal . . . Probably the greatest tribute that any biographer has given him." — Allen Tate, N. Y. Evening Post. At all bookstores, illustrated, $5.00 WILLIAM MORROW & COMPANY Al/XPI.ORATIYE Itiner- aries worked out with reference to social, economic, historic, artistic and scenic features. Visits to factories, schools, children's com- munities, collective farms and villages . . . art treasures, palaces and workers' rest homes . . . for the adventurous . . . camping in the Caucasus and study of primitive tribes. Small groups, each accompanied by a quali- fied American leader and Russian Interpreter. From $395 including express steamship pass- age. Literature available. Individual itineraries also exe- • cuted a Independent year-'round • representation in Russia 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK JME^ REN^RQAA WKen writing to ad*trti—rt please mmtion The Nation

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February 26, 1930] The Nation 251 capacity for the enjoyment of experience in the raw with brutal gusto which characterized him. Above all, such an evaluation would have to be done from such a lofty lookout that there should not appear in it the slightest indication of the tendency to apologize for what the philistines since his day have con- demned as his inexcusable coarseness. The reviewer is sorry to report that Mr. Nock and C. R. Wilson seem to lack the necessary qualifications for the criti- cism of Rabelais. Their scholarship appears in places to flag. And what is worse, two fundamental defects vitiate their work. They approach their subject in a spirit of unmixed piety which, one soon realizes, is at best sublimated prudery, and they under- take to demonstrate too simple a thesis. It must be indicated in all fairness that their point of view is altogether preferable to the vulgar approach which regrets the "unseemly side of our satirist." Their apology is much more intelligent and subtle. They admit the coarseness in Rabelais but undertake to prove that his "moral relation toward [his] subject is correct." In the telling of his best stories, we are assured, he "communicates an unmistakably authoritative impression of detachment," and they go on to point out that the "tone and accent of Rabelais's writings betray no morbid obsession of any kind, but quite the opposite." Their piety has another consequence. It tends to make of Rabelais a breviary for the comfort of those whose weariness and squeamish disgust with the conditions of our day impel toward consolation. Life in the sixteenth century was no better and no worse for all its intolerance and its stupidity than ours. But Rabelais did not go back to the past to seek comfort in it; he lived the life of his day with a dash and a relish incompre- hensible to us. He laughed at its imbecility, but he derived no small measure of enjoyment from it. This is the true panta- gruelism. The very last thing Rabelais would have wished to do — he who was, in Nietzsche's phrase, such a yea-sayer — is to offer comfort to those who lack a stout heart. And how he would have smiled patronizingly at our authors for even indi- cating the possibility of a parallelism between him and Marcus Aurelius! The second defect must be indicated briefly. The authors contend throughout that Rabelais was a story-teller, a great artist, and they write of him as if that fact, which is of course obvious, made it impossible for him to have been a great satirist. But, one asks, are the two incompatible? The sim- plicity of their logic and their piety force Mr. Nock and C. R. Wilson to skip lightly over certain aspects of their subject's work which indicate that he was not only a great story-teller and a great satirist, but also a man not as disinterested in the partisan issues of his day as they wish to make him out. In their pious simplicity they miss an aspect of his work as im- portant as the one they are so exclusively trying to emphasize. The "Works" are not only the expression of an attitude to- ward life, but they are also, it must not be forgotten, one of the most significant documents of the sixteenth century. In- terest in this aspect of Rabelais they condemn as pedantry. Mr. Putnam gives evidence of greater scholarship than Mr. Nock and C. R. Wilson, and his book is on the whole a more balanced one, though much less inspired. Nowhere throughout its pages did the reviewer detect a genuine attempt at evaluation. On the other hand,, one does find judicious use of the scholarly labor which the men working through the Revue des Etudes Rabelaisiennes and others have gathered to date. A classic, however, is more than a historical relic; it is living word, with a meaning to us which may be quite different from the meaning it had for the past. Mr. Putnam seems not to have any ink- ling of this. As an introduction to Rabelais it is hard to tell which of the two books is to be preferred. The jazzed scholar- ship of Putnam makes agreeable and informative reading, but it misses the significance of Rabelais to us; the admirable high- When writing to advertisers HEALTH CLASSICS at a Great Saving Outstanding Health Books for Laymen PHE health books that should be in your home — those of all pub- lishers which have proved most popular and helpful — are now available by mail at reduced prices. All are interesting, authori- tative and written in clear, simple language. Any or all will be mailed postpaid at the prices quoted, with a money-back guarantee. (1) The Lazy Colon. By Charles M. Campbell and Albert K. Det- willer, M.D. (Generally recog- nized as the leading work on constipation.) Sixth edi- tion. (5) Blood Pressure — Its Cause, Effect and Remedy. By Lew- ellys F. Barker, M.D., of Johns Hopkins. $1.19 $2.59 (2) Colds, Cause, Treatment and Prevention. By Russell L. 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It presents the newer methods of treating intestinal stasis (constipation) as developed by 300 world- famous Physicians. 42nd thousand already. Dr. John Dewey, Columbia University: "You have rendered us all a service by making this material available." Prof. E. V. McCollum, Johns Hopkins University: "It is very well written and should accomplish much good." Lloyd H. Wright, San Gabriel, Calif.: "Send by return mail one copy of 'The Lazy Colon,' recommended to me by my physician, Dr. Olson of Los Angeles." Martin W. Ban, M.D., noted physician and author: "Sat up most of last night reading this delightful and masterly book." SOME OF THE 36 CHAPTER TITLES Mysteries of the Intestines Revealed by X-Rays ; Curious Causes of Con- stipation ; Startling Theories of Self-Poisoning ; Story the Urine Tells ; Surprising Theory of Water Drinking ; Hardening of Arteries ; High Blood Pressure ; Purgatives, their Proper and Improper Use ; Mineral Oil ; Bran or Agar, Which?; Vitamin Facts; Greatest Menace of All; Intelligent Use of the Enema ; Coated Tongue, Its Cause and Meaning ; Is Sugar of Milk the Long Sought Remedy ; Starting Right with Children. Money Refunded If Desired If you And that the books you order do not contain practical, important and usable information, simply return them and your money will be re- funded. EDUCATIONAL PRESS, 8 East 12th St., Dept. H2, New York □ (1) $2.59 D <2) $ .97 □ (3) $1.39 □ (4) $1.39 □ (5) $1.19 □ (6) $1.89 □ <7) $1.19 D (8) $1.39 Kindly Bend me the books checked above, postpaid. Enclosed is $ . 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252 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3373 mindedness of Mr. Nock and C. R. Wilson, on the other hand, gives us a wry picture of that significance. Perhaps for those who have not yet entered the cool, spacious, free universe of the Frenchman and know nothing of the joy of its freedom and strength, both books might serve for the lack of a better guide. Eliseo Vivas The Student Volunteer German Students' War Letters. Translated and Arranged from the Original Edition of Dr. Philipp Witkop by A. F. Wedd. E. P. Dutton and Company. $3. «<T"Y TE only know that we got to win and that however war- Y/Y/ weary we may be, we shall go on doing our duty." This sentence from a letter written early in 1915 is symbolic of the entire collection, all the contributors to which died in the World War. These letters express the mental atti- tude of the German student volunteer much more emphatically than any of the recent war novels could do. For though a war novel may revive the experiences of the war, it cannot conserve, as letters do, the ideology and outlook of those past days. Here we have a monument to the spirit of a bygone elite of a bygone Germany. It is significant of the heroism of a social group and generation, even though the letters were selected from a choice of about 20,000, all of which certainly did not manifest the same undoubting patriotism; even though they were chosen by a nationally minded professor, with the official cooperation of the ministries of education of various German states; and even though most of them were written before the summer of 1917, at a time when there was still hope. The Malik-Verlag, Germany's greatest publishing house of radical authors, has announced, in protest against the reaction- ary tendency in Witkop's selection, its intention of publishing "Letters of Proletarians Killed in the War." One may trust that a collection of this kind, if published, will radiate a dif- ferent spirit. Though abridged, the English version of the present letters preserves the breath of the original. Walter Kien Contributors to This Issue Paul Y. Anderson is the national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. J. G. Curtis is the pseudonym of a careful student of present-day financial and industrial developments. Henry Raymond Mussey is managing editor of The Nation. Isidor Schneider is author of "The Temptation of Anthony." Henry Hazlitt is literary editor of The Nation. Hiram Motherwell served for five years as a news- paper correspondent in Italy. Claude G. Bowers is author of "The Tragic Era." Lee M. Hollander is associate professor of Germanic languages at the University of Texas. Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at New York University. Eliseo Vivas is in the department of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin. Walter Kien, on the staff of New York University, is an authority on German and Scandinavian literature. Hubbard Hutchinson has contributed articles on music to various periodicals. Music Four Moderns WE are always indebted to Dr. Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony for a constant fare of significant modern music. The New York concert of February 8 at Carnegie Hall, however, was especially interesting because its two principal scores, new to America this season, might fairly be said to represent the romantic and the classic tradi- tion in music — old labels for antagonists far older, the heart and the head. The same program rarely displays two con- temporary works so wholly devoted to the one spirit or the other as the Second Symphony of Arnold Bax and the Second Concerto of Serge Prokofieff, although they seemed to this writer too unevenly matched to prove anything of the relative merits of the two attitudes. The program opened with the Portsmouth Point Overture of William Walton, a young Englishman who derived his in- spiration from an eighteenth-century print of a roaring British port. Bits of bellowed chantey, ballads, scraps of melody from a dance hall are woven cheerfully together. The individual tunes employ intervals familiar as those of Turkey in the Straw, and as impudently gay. They speak a language clear to anyone. But Walton combines them in odd ways, purpose- fully crude, like the turmoil and clamor of a busy waterfront, and thereby produces pungent polytonal dissonances. It is a vigorous, merry, and amusing work, which would gain if some- where sixteen quiet bars relieved the pound of syncopated rhythms. Even sailors drowse. Bax builds his symphony in exactly the opposite way. Where Walton's tunes, the girders and beams of his bawdy little tavern, are homely as pine and oak, Bax brings to the pillared vaulting of his dark and lofty palace exotic substances, porphyry and ebony. For the stuff of his melodies is highly personal and hence unfamiliar to the average ear. But as he develops them he builds a structure which we enjoy, I believe, because we unconsciously recognize in it the same laws of organic growth that we have — usually thoughtlessly — felt else- where in mediums better known to us, such as architecture or literature. The edifice itself is new and we enjoy that as well, being changeful creatures. But it has taken shape around laws inherent in ourselves, which must be satisfied if we are to ex- perience aesthetic pleasure. Above all, this clarity of form and freshness of material are fortunately fired with a profound emotional sincerity. The score is neither artificially made nor muddled. Bax employs the entire range of the harmonic palette. He is untroubled with the fear of being considered old-fashioned which haunts lesser moderns, and uses simple major triads when they serve his purpose. He embodies his lyric impulse in subtle orchestral coloring gained by weaving many individual tonal threads. The effect is that of a somber tapestry shot through with glints of gold and silver, the principal themes embroidered in bold design. If a second hearing of the work reveals occasionally reminis- cent decoration from older facades, such as the Poeme d'Exstase of Scriabine or jhe Prelude to Tristan, it also confirms the originality of the basic material and the impression of music written because it was deeply felt. On the other hand, the Prokofieff concerto for piano, ex- cellently performed by the composer, was essentially music of the brain. No petals or perfumes of emotion were permitted to clutter this glittering chamber of clear-cut crystals. With its carefully made designs, beautifully fitted and crisply turned, it was clean swept and spare as the lobby of the Chanin build- ing, brilliant as an empty conservatory. Perhaps this impres-

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February 26, 1930] The Nation 253 □ LUNCHEON AND LECTURES D A CHICAGO DINNER FOR NORMAN THOMAS WHO WILL SPEAK OK CATCHING UP WITH OURSELVES A Program for the Times Hotel Morrison, February 22nd, at 7 P. M. Make reservations in advance at $2.00 each. Robert Morss Lovett, Chairman. COMMITTEE ON DINNER FOR NORMAN THOMAS 800 South Halited Street Seeley 0940 MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL famous British actress, herself distinguished for the beauty and purity of her diction will lecture on Beautiful Speech and the Art of Acting Monday, March 3 8:20 P.M. Admission $1.50 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH 465 West 23rd Street WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See •At the Bottom— Waldorf— 116 W. 50th St. •Berkeley Square — Lyceum — E. 45th St. ••Children of Darkness— Biltmore—W. 47th St. •Civic Repertory — 14th St. & 6th Ave. — See Advertisement. •Criminal Code— National— W. 41st St •Death Takes a Holiday— Barrymore Theatre — 47th St., W. of B'dway. Ruth Draper— Comedy — 41st St., E. of B'dway. ••Everything's Jake— Assembly— 39th St., E. of B'dway. ••June Moon— Broadhurst— W. 44th St. Mei Lan-Fang-^9th St.— W. of B'dway. ••Meteor— Guild— W. 52nd St. ••Rebound— Plymouth— 45th St., W. of B'dway. ••Strictly Dishonorable— Avon— W. 45th St. •••Strike Up The Band— Times Sq.— W. of B'dway. •The First Mile — Comedy— 41st St. E. of B'dway. ••The First Mrs. Fraser— Playhouse — 48th St., E. of B'dway. ••Topaze— Music Box — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •••Wake Up and Dream— Selwyn— 42nd St., W. of B'dway. Films Disraeli — Central Theatre — Broadway and 47th St The Green Goddess— Winter Garden— 1646 B'dway. First Nights Green Pastures — Mansfield — W. 47th St. Neighborhood Playhouse Program— Mecca Temple— W. 56th St. The Infinite Shoeblack— Elliott— 39th St., E. of B'dway. Art Exhibits Exhibition of contemporary Belgian painting sculpture graphic arts — Brooklyn Museum — to Feb. 23. Paintings by Arnold Blanch and drawings by Peppino Man- gravite— Dudensing Galleries, 5 E. 57th St.— thru Feb. Oil paintings by Jean Pfister— Holt Gallery, 630 Lexington Ave. — thru Feb. Woodcuts and Lithographs by Ellsworth Ford— The Fifty-Sixth St. Galleries, 6 East 56th St.— Feb. 18 to March 1. nd Are you interested in Humanism? Will it supplant Christianity? HEAR HARRY ELMER BARNES, Ph.D. in a Course of Six Lectures on "Religion in the Twentieth Century" Thursday Evenings February 20, 27, March 6, 13, 20, 27 8:15 P. M., at the COMMUNITY CHURCH AUDITORIUM Park Avenue and 34th Street Course $3.50 Single Lecture 75c RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 7 EAST 15TH STREET ALGONQUIN 3094 HERMAN EPSTEIN Fri., 8.30 p. m. "The Ring of the Niebelungen" February 21 DR. S. ADOLPHUS KNOPF Sat., 2.00 p. m. "Birth Control for the Benefit February 22 of Humanity" HARRY W. LAIDLER Tues., 8.30 p. m. "Socialist Tactics In the New February 25 Capitalism" WILLIAM H. BRIDGE Wed., 7.00 p. m. "Creative Psychology" February 26 ANITA BLOCK Wed., 8.30 p. m. "The Theatre as a Criticism of Life" February 26 'Drama. ••Comedy. •••Musical. Sundays. 8 P. M.. INGERSOLL FORUM, Admission. 50c PYTHIAN TEMPLE, 136 W. 70th Street, New York City Feb. 23 — "IS WOMAN MORALLY AND INTELLEC- TUALLY INFERIOR TO MAN?" MARK JACKSON vs. JOSEPH PORTAL March 2 — "OPTIMISM OR PESSIMISM?" JOHN T. KEWI8H vs. ERNEST GILBERT March 9 — "DID JESUS EVF>R LrVE?" JOHN W. HAWKINS vs. MAJ. JOSEPH WHELE88 Atheism Catalog of anti-religious books FREE. Tracts, 10c. American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, Inc. 119 E. 14th Street New York, N. Y. When writing to advertitrt pU<u« mention The Nation

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254 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3373 sion of limpid and elaborate vacuity was the result of collabo- ration between the Prokofieff of 1913 and the Prokofieff of 1924. The concerto was lost and ten years later rewritten from sketches. In the interval the composer has been increasingly preoccupied with "neo-classicism," a return to strict older forms. Whatever the cause, the result was disappointing from a man of Prokofieff's caliber. It may be that in some future golden age all composers will realize that music is a language for conveying emotion, and that if there is none to convey, all the skilful designs of cerebra- tion, all the resources of technique, will not bring the resultant patterns to life, even when animated with the sensitivity and verve which Dr. Koussevitzky brings to his readings. Hubbard Hutchinson Drama The Unruffled Mrs. Tyler AS Mrs. Austin Tyler, Mrs. Fiske is the singularly serene and passive center about which the other characters in "It's a Grand Life" (Cort Theater) feverishly revolve. She is the eternal adjuster, the husher-up, the conciliator, ever- lastingly patient, a fountain of unperturbed philosophy. Her husband is the amorous president of a great trust company, too many of whose affairs have become subject matter for the tab- loids. We are to understand that one more scandal and the directors will request his resignation. In the first act Tyler is brought home injured in a night automobile accident — in which he has been accompanied by his new lady secretary. Re- porters arrive; as is fitting, the reporter from one of the tab- loids is a rough, uncouth person, while the New York Times representative is a gracious young man in correct evening clothes. Mrs. Tyler consents to see only the Times reporter, explains away all the suspicious aspects of the case, presents him with a bottle of chartreuse, and sends him off to write a discreet story. Complications, however, pile up. Tyler is the presumable father of a boy — born in the next room during the action of the play — whose mother is the wife of an Alabama military man who believes in adjusting such embarrassing tangles with a re- volver. There are sub-plots: Mrs. Tyler's daughter has been having an affair with a married man; Mrs. Tyler's son marries a dancer who has had an affair with his father — and always Mrs. Tyler is being very calm and collected, very modern and broad-minded. "It's a Grand Life" is, for the most part, a successful light comedy. The lines supplied by its authors, Hatcher Hughes and Alan Williams, are always intelligent; some of them are genuinely witty. And Mrs. Fiske, with her usual adroitness, makes what she has to say sound possibly a good deal wittier than it really is. In "Dishonored Lady" (Empire Theater), based by Mar- garet Ayer Barnes and Edward Sheldon on the case of Made- line Smith of Glasgow, Katharine Cornell brilliantly portrays a woman who poisons the lover who, through threatened black- mail, has tried to force her to continue their relationship, and to prevent her marriage to the man she loves. The tension and excitement are built up with great skill, and the authors have contrived to have a courtroom scene with the courtroom left out. The play is as thrilling as "The Trial of Mary Dugan." As you are shown to your seat in the Booth Theater, you are handed a program which professes to be that of the Stadt- theater in Vienna, announcing the performance of "Camille." The curtain rises on a stage without scenery, revealing the stage hands playing poker, a scrubwoman cleaning, and so on, and one learns that through a grave mistake neither stage hands nor actors have expected a performance that night. Gregory Ratoff as the stage director then pleads with members of the audience to accept parts in a play to be improvised. A husband (Regi- nald Owen as Herr Neumann) volunteers with his reluctant wife; someone is asked to play the part of a lover, and the man who accepts turns out, of course, to be the wife's lover in real life. Thereafter the play becomes a very hackneyed version of the eternal triangle, and relies for freshness and humor chiefly on the husband's mistaken belief that the wife and her lover are merely acting. With the English title of "Out of a Blue Sky," the play has been "adapted" by Leslie Howard from the German of Hans Chlumberg. One is left to speculate why German names have been retained for the characters, and why the persons who emerge from a New York audience are all Herr This and Fraulein That. H. H. THE first two acts of Donald Ogden Stewart's "Rebound" (Plymouth Theater) offer as swift, amusing, and heart- warming entertainment as has been seen in the theater this winter. Hope Williams, as a clear-headed and unfailingly gallant young woman who marries one young man after having been thoroughly jilted by another, is a joy to watch and hear. For the most part the cast is adequate to Mr. Stewart's slightly insane humor, which is the highest compliment that could be paid them. The second-act curtain, in which a newly- wed husband is two-stepping with his old girl, while his bride watches them and sings the words of the tune they dance to, is comedy in the highest and soundest meaning of the word. And then in the third act things slacken up a good deal and the play ends in a fog of talk about what love is. Not that one need quarrel about what the play says it is, but that the happy ending, in which the pair who married on the rebound find that they really do love each other after all, is considerably less convincing than it should be. When they are merrily or sadly wise-cracking, Miss Williams and Mr. Stewart are a combination hard to beat. They are both, he as playwright, she as actress, masters of the unspoken word, the repressed emotion. It is only when it becomes necessary to reveal the inner heart that they become equally awkward and unsure. The best performance of the evening was that of Robert Williams as Johnnie Coles. D. V. D. "City Haul," a play by Elizabeth Miele, portraying a cor- rupt mayor and the ease with which he gets out of tight places to bid for office again, has now moved from the Hudson Theater to the Eltinge. The play first opened at the Hudson on De- cember 31. Curious stories have been going about New York that the play has been sabotaged by the politicians and ignored by the press. One theater refused to accept it after it was booked; and though Mrs. Harris finally gave it the Hudson, at least one agency decided not to announce the run of the play. The author's offense is that the corrupt mayor, admirably acted bv Herbert Rawlinson, has been made up to look re- markably like Mayor Walker, even to the amazing and fre- quently changed clothes and the boutonniere. Had he been represented as a tough-looking Westerner no politician would have cared. The play is sparkling and amusing; it is skilfully put together with clever and even sensational situations ending quite unexpectedly. It marches well and, though the mayor is incredibly base and his daughter's love story entirely conven- tional, the play was well worth writing and presenting. Both for its courage and its dramatic qualities it deserves a con- siderable run. O. G. V.

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February 26, 1930] The Nation 255 D THEATRES □ □ FILMS City Haul By ELIZABETH MIELE with HERBERT RAWLINSON A COMEDY ON MUNICIPAL POLITICS ELTTNGE THEATRE, 42nd St., West of B'dway. Evenings 8 :50. Matinees Wednesday and Saturday 2 :30. LEO BULGAKOV Theatre Associates, Inc., presents AT THE BOTTO "Really worth seeing." — Brown, Post. by MAXIM GORKY New version by William L. Laurence Phone reservations accepted — Circle 1407 "A fine play" — Mantle, News. WAT nORP THEATRE— 50th St., Bet. 6th & 7th Aves. Eve., 8:40 " ^^^'^"i MATINEES Wednesday and Saturday, 2 :40 Kenneth Macgo-wan and J. V. Reed present BASIL SYDNEY and MARY ELLIS in CHILDREN of DARKNESS by Edwin Justus Mayer, author of "The Firebrand" KIT TTLTfilJI? THEATRE — 47th Street, Wat of Broadway lilL, 1 ITlUIVJCj Evenings, 8 :50— Mats., Wed. and Sat., 2:46. CIVIC REPERTORY ^fc^iir BOc, $1, 1.50. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2:30. EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Fri.Eve.,Feb.21, "The Cherry Orchard," Sat.Mat.,Feb.22, "Peter Pan," Sat.Eve.,Feb.22, "The Open Door" & "Wo- men Have Their Way," Mon.Eve.,Feb.24, "The Sea Gull," Tues.Eve..Feb.25, "Mile. Bourrat," Wed.Eve.,Feb.26, "The Cradle Song," Thurs.Mat..Feb.27, "The Cradle Song," Thurs. Eve.,Feb.27, "The Open Door" & "Women Have Their Way." Seats 4 weeks in advance at Box Office & Town Hall, 113 W. 43rd St. WILLIAM HARRIS, JR., PRESENTS "THE FIRST PLAY OF THE SEASON WITH TEETH IN IT." ROBERT LITTELL, WORLD. CRIMINAL CODE By MARTIN FLAVIN NATIONAL THEATRE with ARTHUR BYRON 41st St., West of 7th Ave. Evenings 8 :50 Matinees Wednesdays & Saturdays, 2 :30 FTrTFl RiEFWftffF Theatre, 47th St,, West of Broadway CHILL DftlVftlMUCVL Evenings 8:50; Matinees Wed. & Sat. 2:30 LEE SHUBERT Presents PHILIP MERIVALE IN DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY A COMEDY ABOUT LIFE The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present RUTH DRAPEH in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER SKETCHES Evenings: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 8:50. COMEDY THEATRE, 41st Eastof Broadway. Mats. Thurs. and Sat., 2:30. VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 IS LIQUOR A MYTH? THE ONLY WAY TO REALLY KNOW IS TO SEE EVERYTHING'S JAKE! THE KIP-ROARING ALCOHOLIC COMEDY by DON MARQUIS 'GOOD, ROBUST FUN"— S. Y. Timet— "A KlOV—Benchlej. Sew Ytrket ASSEMBLY Theater, 39th St.. E. of Bwny. Eves, at 9.Mats.Thurs.& Sat.3 GRACE GEORGE In the ST. JOHN ERVINE Comedy "FIRST MRS. FRASER with A. E. Matthews and Lawrence Grossmith PLA YHOI ISF 48th St- East of Broadway. Eves., 8 :40 a A-r^vx "VUOlj Mats Wed Thurs. and Sat> 2:30 EXTRA MATINEE EVERY THURSDAY UNTIL JUNE 15 Matinee Every Day during Easter Week. The Theatre Guild Presents METEOR By 8. N. BEHRMM •Onil^-fl THEA., 52nd St. W. of Broadway OU11U Ergs. 8:50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 8:40 -REBOUNEF With HOPE WILLIAMS "This is the best light comedy written by anybody hereabouts in ten or twenty years, and it's not so damned light, either." — Heywood Broun, New York Telegram. Arthur Hopkins presents DONALD OGDEN STEWART'S COMEDY Plymouth Theatre. Eves. 8:50; Mats. Thnrs. & Sat., 2:40. HERMAN SHUMLIN presents THE LAST MILE A new drama by John Wexley Directed by Chester Erskin. Settings by Henry Dreyfuss QA1V4W" UARRIQ Theatre 42nd St. W. of Broadway •JZ-iiVI n. n/*.I\.£\.IO Eves. 8:50. Matinees Wed. & Sat., 2:30 WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE ARLISS In H DISRAELI (▲ Yitaphon* AJl-Talklns; Picture) »» CENTRAL THEATRE Broadway and 47th St. Dally 2:4ft— -8:4ft Sunday S — 8 — 8:4ft □ ART EXHIBIT □ EXHIBITION WOODCUTS and LITHOGRAPHS By Ellsworth Ford February 18th to March 1st, 1930 THE FIFTX-S1XTH HTKKJKT OAtLEKI£8 6 Kast Fifty-Sixth Street When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Forced Labor in Liberia CHARGES of forced labor and slavery in Liberia have been so persistent in recent years that a commission was named in August, 1929, to investigate conditions there. The commission consists of three persons, one each appointed by the League of Nations, the United States gov- ernment, and the Liberian government. The American rep- resentative, Dr. Charles S. Johnson, a professor at Fisk University, has lately gone to Liberia, and it is understood that the commission will start its inquiry some time in the spring. We print herewith a letter of protest and appeal to the League of Nations which describes the alleged conditions of native laborers in Liberia. It is signed by Thomas J. R. Faulkner, citizen of Liberia, who was a candidate for the presidency of Liberia in 1927. He was defeated by the pres- ent incumbent, Charles King. His letter, addressed to the League of Nations on June 20, 1929, and not hitherto printed, is as follows: Sir Eric Drummond, Secretary-General League of Nations Geneva, Switzerland Sir: It is because of my great interest in the native people of Liberia that I attempt, through you, to approach the League of Nations in behalf of these people and to protest the treatment they are at present subjected to. The natives of Liberia are forced to work on the roads un- der the following conditions: 1. They are forced to work nine months of the year. 2. They are compelled to furnish their own tools. 3. They receive no compensation whatever for roadwork. 4. They are compelled to furnish their own food. 5. They are compelled to furnish food, i.e., rice and palm- oil, to the commissioner and to the soldiers who act as overseers. 6. Upon failure of the chief of a tribe to supply the de- manded number of men, he is at once heavily fined and forced to pay cash forthwith or go to jail. Often these men are com- pelled to pawn their wives and children to get the money to pay these fines. 7. For the most trivial thing the laborers are fined small sums and forced to pay in cash, which is quite an impossibility. They often have to sell their food, which they have brought long distances, to get the money to meet these fines. 8. It is said that men on the roads are whipped so severely that they die from the injuries, but because high officials are implicated it has never been possible to get a report of the facts. The natives, of course, are afraid to inform against these pow- erful men. As a result of this system of forced labor, the natives are leaving the country in large numbers. Mr. Raymond Leslie Buell, whose writings on Liberia are in every detail correct, speaks briefly of this fact in his work, "The Native Problem in Africa." Coupled with this condition of forced labor in Liberia, is the even more pernicious practice of shipping laborers to the island of Fernando Po. This is carried on by and through the high officials of the Liberian government, and it is therefore impossible to ask the courts, the legislature, or any other official agency to interfere, since all are creatures of the President and will not attempt to act. Thus this traffic in human beings goes on with impunity. The inducement to force the natives out of the country lies in the sum paid by the farmers of Fernando Po — £10 ($50) for each boy. This money is divided among the official classes of Liberia, and the poor native is without redress. The legislature endeavored to put a stop to this shipment of laborers out of Liberia, but the counties of Sino and Mary- land refused to be included in the law, since the Vice-President and Postmaster-General are the shipping agents from those counties, and the President is a party to the transaction. Thus the law fell short of its final object and affected only the counties of Cape Mount, Grand Basa, and Montserrado. But even in these three counties the law is evaded. The ship- ping agents, whose names I mention below, ship boys from these counties as passengers to Sino, whence they are reshipped to Fernando Po. This is open violation of the law, yet it cannot be stopped. For the county of Maryland the Hon. Allen C. Yancy, Vice-President of Liberia, is the appointed shipping agent. On one occasion, the native African Commissioner-Gen- eral, the Hon. Reginald G. Sherman, on an official visit to the county of Sino saw the frontier soldiers being used to catch and detain boys for shipment to Fernando Po. He at once put a stop to it and reported it to the President. Mr. Sherman was immediately dismissed for his pains, and the ship- ping goes merrily on against the interest of the farmers of Liberia, as well as the Firestone Plantation works. Also, as stated above, this is fast depopulating the country, interfering with the getting of produce and the production of food prod- ucts for the populace of the country. The principal reason for my appeal to the League of Na- tions is that this condition of affairs cannot much longer exist in Liberia without resulting in bloodshed. President King feels that he is so well fortified as President of Liberia that he is immune from harm or influence in his demeanor as a self- instituted dictator of the little republic. Therefore I take this method in an attempt to prevent that which is sure to come if the League of Nations, of which Liberia is a member, does not in a friendly way interpose and stop this oppression of the native people — that is, a bloody fight or a revolution. I would, if permitted, make this suggestion: Let the rep- resentatives at Monrovia of the nations who are members of the League be requested to make a report on the statements that I have made — as to their truthfulness and correctness — and then take such action as you deem best suited to give to the natives the relief we ask. [Signed] Thomas J. R. Faulkner Labor conditions in Liberia are of special interest to Americans because of the large amount of American capital invested there. The Firestone company, for instance, has extensive rubber plantations in Liberia. Raymond Leslie Buell, writing in The Nation of May 2, 1928, has this to say concerning the agreement between the Firestone com- pany and the Liberian government by means of which the former is assisted in maintaining an uninterrupted supply of labor : One article of the Firestone Planting Agreement frankly provides that the Liberian government will "encourage and assist the efforts of the lessee to secure and maintain an ade- quate labor supply." The government has already established a labor bureau to furnish the . . . men. According to the Negro head of this bureau, Mr. Firestone pays to the govern- ment and the chiefs for each man recruited one cent per day. While there is no enactment obliging the men to work, the order of the chief is, in fact, law and few dare disobey it. _■

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 VoL CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 1930 No. 3374 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 257 EDITORIALS: Godlessness and Humbuggery 260 A Crisis at London 261 Cutthroat Competition 261 The Newer History 262 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 263 HEADLESS WASHINGTON. By Oswald Garrison Villard 264 PARITY OR REDUCTION? By Norman Angell 266 DIVORCE— AND AFTER. III. DIVORCE AND THE CHILD. A Personal Narrative 268 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 270 CORRESPONDENCE 270 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 271 BOOKS, DRAMA, FILMS: Park in the Gathering Dusk. By Eda Lou Walton 272 The Pretensions of Humanism. By Henry Hazlitt 272 "All That Glitters— " By Fred T. Marsh 273 Economics and Ethics. By Henry Raymond Mussey 273 Aggressive Pacifism. By Norman Thomas 274 The Sex Racket. By Benjamin Ginzburg 274 The Hero of San Jacinto. By W. J. Ghent 274 Books in Brief 276 Drama: Turn to the Left. By Henry Hazlitt 278 Films: Inflated "Grandeur." By Alexander Bakshy 280 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Haiti— a Plan for Self-Government. By L. J. de Bekker 282 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. WE AGREE WITH SENATOR NORRIS that the President by one sentence could "wipe out corruption in law enforcement." Not literally, of course. But what the Senator has in mind, we suppose, is one outspoken and indignant denunciation by the President of government offi- cials who play politics and are recreant to their oaths, and a declaration that he will, in so far as he has the power, see to it that they are punished if faithless and rewarded if faithful. To this should be coupled the statement that poli- tics must be banned from the prohibition enforcement unit. The trouble with Mr. Hoover is that no one really knows where he stands — despite his talk of prohibition's being a noble experiment. As long as he fails to take a clear-cut stand, as long as he is as silent about the playing of politics within the enforcement ranks as he was about the corruption in the Harding Cabinet of which he was a member, the enforcement officials, too often appointed for, by, and with politics, will play any game but the right one. It is this sort of thing which makes sincere prohibitionists declare that the law has never really had a trial. Certainly no Executive has so far acted as if he had the law really at heart. As long as the politicians are allowed to have their way with the enforcement service it is idle to expect that it will be other than inefficient and corrupt. OUR ANTI-TRUST LEGISLATION and its appli- cation continue to be the despair of the economist and the picture puzzle of the lawyer. On February 15 the government filed a suit against nineteen California oil com- panies to enjoin them from "conspiracy to maintain an un- fair price for gasoline," although the major companies, at least, were operating under a Trade Practice Conference code, including agreements for posting prices and adhering to them. The Department of Commerce and the Attorney General need to get together. On February 22 the Stand- ard Oil Company of New York and the Vacuum Oil Com- pany announced plans for a billion-dollar merger. Both companies are former subsidiaries of the old Standard Oil Company, dissolved under the anti-trust act in 1911. One does a general oil refining and marketing business, the other makes and sells lubricants ; so their business is comple- mentary. The Department of Justice is expected (and it may be added desired) to bring an appropriate suit in equity to test the validity of the merger, which counsel for the companies believe to be legal. ON THE SAME DAY with the announcement of the Standard and Vacuum Oil merger and projected suit, the Interstate Commerce Commission gave its approval of the merger, with an expected operating economy of ten million dollars a year, of the Northern Pacific and the Great North- ern Railways into a 15,000-mile system which will dominate the Northwestern territory between Minneapolis and the Pacific Coast, though it will have competition from the Milwaukee. Thus far have we traveled since 1901, when the Supreme Court in the Northern Securities case dissolved the Northern Pacific-Great Northern merger in effect at that time. In approving the present merger, however, the commission required the merged roads to break up their present system by divesting themselves of their 97 per cent ownership of the Burlington, which gives them access to Chicago, as the commission's plan, presumably in pursuit of the lofty ideal of competition, calls for the erection of the Burlington into a separate system. The commission points out, however, that it is not now denying the Northern lines a permanent entrance into the Chicago district. All three of these cases illustrate afresh the difficulties inherent in the attempt to secure the benefits of unified organization or operation at the same time that we continue our ill- advised policy of trying to maintain competition unimpaired. THAT JUDGE THOMAS D. THACHER of New York has been willing to resign the life position in the federal judiciary which he has been holding in order to become Solicitor General is a remarkable happening. Once a federal judge always a federal judge has been the rule, especially when one has made such a name for oneself as has Judge Thacher. He has won golden opinions from the bench and the bar for his learning and his industry. Every- one has believed that he had only to wait a few years to be certain of promotion, probably to our highest court. Before that tribunal he will now appear as government advocate in

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258 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3374 many, many cases. As such he will have a greater oppor- tunity than any other attorney to impress his personality, his knowledge, and his concepts of public policy upon the mem- bers of the Supreme Court. That will not hurt his chances for future appointment should he decide to reenter the judi- ciary; it may even open up to him other avenues for govern- mental service, just as John W. Davis, after being Solicitor General, became Ambassador to London and nominee for the Presidency. President Hoover has made an admirable ap- pointment; and the government acquires a gifted, liberal, and broad-minded official. BANK FAILURES CONTINUE to be one of our national scandals. In 1929, according to government figures, suspensions involved almost twice as much depositors' money as in 1928. The number of suspended banks in 1929 is reported as 633, and their deposits were $257,000,000. Most of these failures as usual were in the Western and Southern States. More than 87 per cent of the failed banks were not in the Federal Reserve system, and were operating, of course, under State charters. In Nebraska the situation is particularly bad, for that State some years ago optimis- tically undertook the guaranty of bank deposits. As a con- sequence of bank failures it has an obligation of $20,000,000 with no money left in the fund to discharge it. Shall the deficit be met by general taxation or by increasing the levy on the banks that still remain solvent? This, however, is only a local aspect of the problem, which is itself national. The suffering and loss involved in these failures justify the attention which Congress appears ready to give to banking as soon as the tariff abomination is out of the way. Bank- ing standards have undoubtedly been too lax in the farm regions. It is doubtful whether anyone should be allowed to undertake the responsibility of financing a community when he has only from $10,000 to $25,000 of capital to put up; yet if small banks are to be abolished, how are our small communities to have their farming and mercantile operations financed? We are the only people in the world disgraced and burdened by bank failures, and parts of our own country are free of them. It will be inexcusable, then, if means cannot be found of attaining foi all communities that minimum requirement of banking, namely, safety. THE CASE OF RUTH ST. CLAIR, first woman to be sentenced for life under the New York Baumes laws, excited a great deal of protest when the sentence was pronounced a week or so ago. It was pointed out that four crimes of shoplifting do not in themselves constitute such a threat to the public as to warrant shutting a person up for life at public expense because of them. But Mrs. St. Clair's complete dossier has been made public by the Municipal Parole Commission and it is evident that while it is alto- gether undesirable to incarcerate her for the rest of her life in Auburn Prison, some form of restraint is desirable for a case so plainly pathological as hers. Incorrigible, a runaway from her hard-working parents, defiant, tempestuous, un- truthful, and at the same time ingratiating and charming to those who sought to help her, the girl presented a case with which social workers are only too familiar. Her attitude officially from the age of 13 and probably much earlier was definitely anti-social. But for those persons who have ceased to believe in "natural cussedness" without a good and suffi- cient reason, the case of Ruth St. Clair should not be closed without the services of a competent psychiatrist, without the most expert and painstaking attempts to discover, if possible, wherein her deep-seated quarrel with society lies, and again, if possible, to remove it. One of the most grievous defects of our prison system is that we have provision for no such treatment for prisoners; nor, if psychiatric treatment proves ineffective, for restraint except under the old system of bolts and bars, silence, bad food, and the soul-destroying routine of the prison. FINANCIAL PROVISION for a few, rather than a straight out-and-out old age pension system, is the un- i satisfactory aim of four bills recently introduced in the New York Assembly. The distinguishing features of the new system, as set out in the report of a commission that has been studying the subject, are the extension of aid to needy persons in their homes, thus allowing them to continue their occu- pations but supplementing their inadequate earnings with public allowances, and an equal division of the financial bur- den of relief between the State and the counties or cities. By this plan, it is pointed out, a farmer who under the usual procedure would not be able to obtain public relief unless he sold his farm and entered a poorhouse will be enabled to retain his farm and earn what he can, the State or municipal ' government contributing the difference, to an amount not | exceeding in general fifty dollars a month, between what can be earned and what is needed for support. Practically, of I course, this is only a modified scheme of poor relief, avail- able, as it happens, only for dependent persons who are seventy years old, but with some of the stigma of charity i taken away and the poorhouse thrust into the background. The new plan, if it is adopted, will doubtless be better than what we now have, but at best it can only insure public aid to a few, not to all. THE INDEPENDENT LABOR PARTY loses the support of J. Ramsay MacDonald, easily its most dis- tinguished member, the British Prime Minister having given notice that he does not intend to continue his annual sub- j scription to the party funds. The reason for Mr. Mac- J Donald's withdrawal is not stated, but it is natural to con- jecture that he •has become somewhat weary of the persistent | and at times violent opposition in the House of Commons of the extreme radicals of the Labor movement, led by James Maxton, and has decided to part company with a handful of nominal followers who cannot be counted upon to support any government policy. Undoubtedly Mr. MacDonald's action involves some political risks, since even with the Inde- pendent Labor members the Labor Party is in a minority in the House, but it may well be that a united Labor front, unbroken by defections at critical moments, will strengthen rather than weaken the government. Something may also be gained, perhaps, from the division of opinion which Lord Rothermere's new United Empire Party may make in the Conservative ranks, although the prospects of the new party, with its futile slogan of free trade within the Empire, do not seem to be very bright. THE GENEVA TARIFF conference, called to pave the way for a "tariff truce" such as was contemplated in general by a convention drawn up at Geneva last year,

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March 5, 1930] The Nation 259 made only a beginning, apparently not a very large one, in a task which promises to engage more and more the attention of Europe. Ever since a number of European and Ameri- can bankers, in 1926, set their names to a statement sharply arraigning the evils of high and discriminating tariffs, there has been a steadily growing agitation in favor of calling a halt in tariff building preparatory to lowering the barriers that have already been set up. The conclusion of any col- lective working agreement at this time, however, proved too much for the conference, especially after Giuseppi Bottai, Italian Minister of Corporations, had pronounced the scheme "premature" and "inapplicable," and the general session ended with the creation of two committees, one to draft an agreement for a tariff truce, the other to consider means of facilitating the reduction of duties. The object aimed at is so admirable that it is to be hoped the committees, which set to work at once, may not be discouraged by the great difficulties to be overcome. VICTORY FOR THE GOVERNMENT, defeat of labor and liberal groups, and an obvious trend toward the dominance of two national parties are the outstanding results of the general election in Japan. Premier Yuko Hamaguchi continues in power with a majority of more than thirty seats in the lower house of the Diet, and with sub- stantial gains in rural districts which had previously sup- ported the Seiyukai, or leading opposition party. The de- feat of the proletarian parties, 90 per cent of whose candi- dates were rejected, is attributed in part to the workings of a system of proportional representation and the political instability of a considerable portion of the electorate under a universal male suffrage which is still new, but the main reason appears to have been the lack of unity and organiza- tion in the Labor following. The election turned wholly upon domestic issues and, as usual, upon personalities, but the victory of the present government with an increased majority will undoubtedly strengthen the position of the Japanese delegation at the London conference. Japanese business interests are naturally gratified at the prospect of continued governmental support for the gold standard and a balanced budget. THE RESIGNATION of Cardinal Gasparri as Papal Secretary of State removes from Italian public life one of its really outstanding figures. The heat of religious controversy may have blinded many to his distinguished services in behalf of peace during the war, and in behalf of international reconciliation afterwards. The Papal peace note of August, 1917, was largely his work. Although in- effective, it was of great importance as an expression of the Gasparri policy of resistance to the attempts of certain fac- tions within the Roman Catholic church to tie the fortunes of the Vatican with one or another of the con- tending groups. After the war the policy was maintained. The Vatican condemned the French invasion of the Ruhr and other manifestations of extreme nationalism. The Cardinal's services to his church, of course, are historic. He brought the Vatican out of the war with increased prestige, initiated the series of concordats which solidified its position in Europe, and negotiated the Lateran treaties which put an end to the Roman Question. Personally, Cardinal Gasparri is a scholarly and humane man, and, within the limits fixed by his office, a sincere liberal. Of his successor, Cardinal Pacelli, little is known save that he is a shrewd and experienced negotiator. NO FEWER THAN 15,060 German women are now attending the German universities and institutes of higher education, out of a total enrolment of 98,000 students, which is in marked contrast to the total of scarcely 3,000 women who were admitted to university lectures in the year prior to the war. As many as 2,079 women are now studying at the University of Berlin, 1,367 at that of Munich, 827 at the University of Cologne, and 682 in Ham- burg. The South German universities are also popular, there being 1,202 women in Bonn, and 885 in Freiburg. It is interesting to note that 194 of the total are studying theology in contrast to 11 who were preparing for the church in 1912, while 1,511 women are now studying politi- cal economy and law. To medicine 3,141 women are dedi- cating themselves, while over 10,000 have registered with the various philosophical faculties — in the latter group being included all women who are fitting themselves for teaching and desire a general education. There is even one in Munich who is seeking to become a veterinary surgeon. When one remembers that the universities were not wholly opened to women until the war came and that the first high school for girls was not established until 1885, when the Victoria Lycee was founded in Berlin thanks largely to the English- born Empress Frederick, the increased number of women seeking higher degrees in Germany seems nothing less than astounding. THE ADVENTURE OF ADMIRAL BYRD and his men at the South Pole is almost over. After a year of white earth they are on their way back to a green one, and the contrast must surely be refreshing to their spirits. In spite of the daily radio communication with the camp at Little America, it is doubtful if the New York Times cor- respondent, Russell Owen, really told the inside story of life there. Nor will Byrd or his men tell it — for publication — when they get back. But it would be well worth while, we suspect, to be able to hear honest reminiscences of a year in which human wants were reduced to a minimum, in which living conditions were different in almost every respect from those to which the group was accustomed. There were, to be sure, the most intricate and delicate of machines — the air- plane, the camera, the radio, and instruments for calculating distances, altitude, weather, the shape of the earth, the depth of the ice, the height of the mountains. But there was not a leaf or a bird, not even a camp cat unless Mr. Owen forgot to mention it. There was food only out of cans. We should like to hear more of this camp: how about the hot water? Was it cold when you got up in the mornings? Was it ever anything else but cold? Did your coffee freeze while you lighted a cigarette? Did the supply of cigarettes last? Mr. Owen can go on reporting steadily. Meanwhile his com- panions on shipboard are doubtless improving their time by reading their letters over again, and we at home, protected alike from the perils and the thrills of adventure, can be grateful that the ship got a good start, that the party is so far safe, that the year of exploration and adventure is evidently to end so auspiciously. We shall be relieved to hear that the ice is past and open water and home ahead.

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260 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3374 Godlessness and Humbuggery THE renewed attacks upon the godlessness of the Union of Soviet Republics need surprise no one. It was about time for a new line of attack to de- velop, and the Soviet leaders, with their usual complete incapacity to judge the effect of their acts upon public opinion abroad, have given their enemies the desired open- ing. This anti-religious slant is, of course, not a new policy ; it has been prominent from the beginning despite certain provisions in the Soviet constitution which on their face guarantee freedom of worship. The Soviet rulers have been as eager to be known as anti-religious as they are quick to resent the theory that they are democrats temporarily lured from their moorings. They are not democrats, and they have been as outspokenly opposed to all churches as they could well be. What they have done lately is simply to increase the anti-religious pressure in certain places with the result that, as Walter Duranty cables from Paris to the New York Times, there are harsher and more widespread attacks upon the Soviets than at any time in the last seven years, especially in Germany, England, and France, though each country gives quite different reasons for its outburst. To these have been added the protests of the Pope, of the Church of England headed by the Archbishop of Canter- bury, with our own Bishop Manning following suit here, and from all over the world very genuine protests from Jews deeply moved by the sufferings of their co-religionists in the territory of the Soviets. The Nation has never for one moment been recreant to its belief in religious liberty. It must therefore be highly critical of the anti-religious policy of the Russian state in so far as it affects the right of the individual to worship as he pleases. We cannot, however, permit ourselves to be humbugged by all this sudden outcry against the Soviets. Much of it is purely fake. Thus, Senator Borah has dis- posed of the false charge that fourteen rabbis were about to be executed ; eleven are free and the others will soon be released. Again, it has been admitted in London by the Tories that they are exploiting this outcry in the hope of ousting Ramsay MacDonald from office, and by Sidney M. Dawkins, general secretary of the Council of Christian Pro- test, that of the many atrocities they and the Archbishop of Canterbury have lately been citing not one has occurred since 1918! That adequately stamps the whole crusade. For some time past, however, there has been plenty of evidence that the present rulers of the Soviets were them- selves going back upon the original constitutional guaranty of freedom of worship. For instance, there was issued on April 8, 1929, a sweeping decree of some 6,000 words pre- scribing the rules to govern every phase of existent religious organizations. Their expenditures are minutely prescribed — even the repair of their buildings, the hiring of janitors, the acquisition of wood for fuel. Under this decree "re- ligious societies and groups of believers do not enjoy the rights of juridical bodies." After being thus deprived of a legal existence the churches are dealt with in detail to the extent of sixty-eight paragraphs. Despite these handicaps the churches in Russia have been operating ever since the edict was published in the Izvestia at the end of April. As Malcolm MacDonald, son of the British Prime Minister, informed the House of Commons on February 19, he him- self had no trouble in worshiping in Moscow a few months ago in company with 1,000 other persons. Moreover, the Metropolitan Sergius, the present chief patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, has supported the attitude of the Soviets by declaring that religious propa- ganda is allowed, that there are no brutalities toward indi- vidual church ministers, and that there has been no repres- sion by the Soviets of believers and clergymen for their religious beliefs, "but for anti-government acts just as for other citizens." He repeated this interview to the Ameri- can and English correspondents the next day, and among other things denounced the Pope of Rome as the enemy of the Orthodox church because "the Catholic church under the Pope's leadership in Poland alone in 1929 forcibly con- fiscated 500 Orthodox Russian churches, converting them to Catholic uses. As far as we know, no archbishops in Eng- land or elsewhere acted against these Catholic violences." Indeed, it seems to us, too, that the Pope does not come into court with very clean hands. In this connection we would refer our readers to our issue of January 15 last, in which will be found from the pen of our Moscow correspondent, Louis Fischer, a detailed narrative of the relations between the Vatican and the Kremlin since 1922. It is here clearly shown that the Pope was constantly negotiating with the Bolsheviks with a view to taking over the ruins of the Greek Catholic church. During all these years he could have protested against Bolshevik anti-religious persecutions quite as warmly as he has recently. And so could Bishop Manning and all the rest, because hundreds of persons have been punished on all sorts of ridiculous and trumped-up charges meant to hide the fact that they were really being exiled or imprisoned because of their religious activity. Walter Duranty undoubtedly puts his finger on what is back of a great deal of this sudden passion on behalf of those Russians who are being deprived of their religion. It is the growing economic menace that the Soviet state offers to the trade of Europe. It is able to dump its products abroad at any figure that it chooses in order to get the foreign monies which it needs so direfully. It is dumping matches, textiles, and gasoline at cut rates. The Russians believe that they are saving 40 per cent of the cost of pro- duction in other countries, because they have done away with big salaries, high-pressure salesmanship, advertising, and the other inevitable accompaniments of capitalist competition. This alone would make them formidable competitors. When, however, they dump their products at almost any price, since, as Duranty says, if they get only a fraction above the cost of transportation "that fraction will be profit to the Soviet state — profit because it would be something added to Soviet wealth from abroad" — it is not surprising that Europe begins to strike back in any way that it can. Its leaders are doubtless thankful for the stupidity and folly and anti- relieious intolerance of the Soviets, which gives them so welcome an opportunity to stir the religious world.

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March 5, 1930] The Nation 261 A Crisis at London UNLESS something radical is done, and done quickly, to straighten out the extraordinary situation at Lon- don, the London conference is likely to go down in history as one of the most disastrous attempts at inter- national cooperation in which the United States has ever engaged. Two problems in particular, both of grave serious- ness, confront the American delegation. The first is to in- sure the attainment of one of the two main purposes for which the conference was called, namely, the actual reduc- tion of existing naval armaments. The second is to avoid entangling the United States in a European security pact. For the existence of both of these problems in their present acute form the Hoover Administration and its delegation at London are so far responsible that the failure of the con- ference, if that calamity should happen, would be properly chargeable to the United States more than to any other Power. The statement issued by the French delegation on Feb- ruary 11, calling for 724,479 English tons of naval craft by the end of 1936, with 240,000 tons of that amount to be built during the period, contained nothing new except the figures. Weeks before the American delegation, sur- rounded by an imposing array of experts and helpers and attended by a squad of uniformed marines, departed from New York the French government, in an elaborate memo- randum to the British government, had traversed compre- hensively the business of the conference and outlined in detail the position of France regarding its naval needs. Instead of showing that it had grasped this situation and was prepared to meet it, the American delegation has strewn its course with some amazing blunders, in all of which, apparently, it had the approbation of Washington. When Mr. MacDonald, the question of battleships having been thrown to the fore, proposed to consider at once the abolition of that type of vessel, Mr. Stimson turned him down ; the conference had been called to deal with cruisers, and there must be no interference with that grand design. A single preliminary skirmish over the abolition of sub- marines caused Mr. Stimson to throw up his hands, and the fight was lost before it had fairly begun. An exhibi- tion of bungling that was a disgrace to American diplomacy concealed the fact, until an alert press forced it out, that the United States, champion of armament reduction, was actually proposing to build another battleship at a cost of from $35,000,000 to $50,000,000. The publication of the French statement of February 11, followed by the overthrow of the Tardieu Government, completed the moral rout of the embattled Americans, this time with the British close at their heels. It was matter of common knowledge that M. Tardieu's tenure was precarious, as it was that no succeeding ministry would be likely to modify greatly the French demands, and that any modification that might be conceded would still leave the way open to largely increased building; but the Stimson aggregation could only betake itself to gloom and leave the correspondents to cable that reduction was no longer even a pleasing hope. The second problem is equally grave. France is will- ing to trade tonnage for a security pact, with the covert understanding that the United States shall be one of the guarantors. It is the old game of maneuvering the United States into burning its fingers with European quarrels, yet the American delegation is actually reported as not wholly unfavorable to the suggestion. Senator Robinson, to be sure, has spoken out in reiteration of the time-honored American policy of keeping America free, but it was immediately noted that he did not wholly close the door; while Mr. Hoover, fresh from his fishing exploits in Southern waters, allows himself to be represented as deterred from enter- taining the proposal, not because he himself will have none of it, but from fear of the irreconcilables in the Senate. In other words, where the reply of the American delegation should have been a prompt and emphatic "No," there is real danger that the delegation, with the tacit acquiescence of Mr. Hoover, may allow the United States to become en- tangled in the net which France has spread for it, and that America, in addition to losing the naval reduction which it hoped for, may emerge from the conference with its hands tied. If that is the outcome, it will mean that the danger of war will be greater after the conference than it was before. It is time that the country waked up to the significance of what is going on at London and Washington. An un- prepared and inept delegation at the Ritz is losing its grip on the realities of the armament situation, and a politi- cal trimmer at the White House is aiding the decline. The American people want naval armaments reduced and lim- ited, but they also want to see American independence scrupulously preserved. They are not yet ready to barter statesmanship at London for a dreary program of backing, filling, and drift, nor statesmanship at Washington for a record catch of sailfish on a Presidential junket. Cutthroat Competition IN one industry after another unlimited competition, the main reliance of the public for good quality and fair prices, continues the suicidal process of cutting its own throat and making necessary some other plan of industrial control. A few days ago it was announced that the auto- mobile tire industry had passed into new hands, with Cyrus S. Eaton, of Cleveland, and his associates controlling Good- year, and the omnivorous and omnicompetent Du Ponts con- trolling the United States Rubber Company. In 1920 there were 300 tire companies; today there are 30. There is something like $10,000,000,000 invested in rubber, and the industry has paid its stockholders only about 2 per cent over the past ten years, as a friendly Congress and Supreme Court have not seen fit to guarantee the rubber industry a "fair return" like that which they would insure to railroads and public utilities. Yet, somehow, despite finan- cial disaster, the industry has grown. When the British government, after a vain six-year effort to keep up the profits of rubber planters by enforcing the Stevenson export re- striction act, in 1928 raised the ban, large quantities of stored crude rubber were thrown on the market. The American rubber companies, overstocked with high-priced rubber, suffered huge losses. In addition, excess capacity during recent years has caused fatally sharp competition,

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262 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3374 and great numbers of the weaker companies have dropped out of the running. Several mergers are now expected, and the industry, to quote Leslie Gould in the New York Evening Post, "is believed to be entering upon a more stabi- lized phase, with cooperation substituted for 'cutthroat* com- petition in the marketing of the finished product and the law of supply and demand governing the crude product." In other words, the days of old-fashioned competition in tire manufacture are thought to be over. In oil production there is a comparable, though en- tirely dissimilar, story. Two of the Standard companies, in an effort to discourage drilling, some weeks ago cut the price paid for crude oil, the Sinclair and Prairie Oil and Gas companies at first refusing to follow their lead. But oil production plus imports is far above current demands, Texas alone producing 175,000 barrels a day more than it can sell, despite the fact that crude-oil producers are "pro- rating themselves to death," as one authority puts it. In plain language, while existing producers limit their out- put, new wells are being brought in so fast that the price cannot be maintained. The American Petroleum Institute meanwhile is hard at work trying to bring about operation of each oil pool as a unit. In consequence of the uncon- trollable crude production, stocks of refined oil pile up. Gasoline stocks were 31,000,000 barrels at the end of August, and 47,000,000 at the end of January. The spring motoring season will open on April 1 with stocks 6,000,000 barrels in excess of the corresponding figure last year. So the hard-headed Standard companies, faced with the com- petition of "distress" gasoline, have cut gasoline prices in the Middle West to help carry off the excess. Unrestricted competition in crude production is creating conditions with which the highly organized and skilfully managed refining companies are having difficulty in contending. A third interesting example is cited in the recent ad- dress of Mr. Frank Haas, of Philadelphia, before the Ameri- can Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. Mr. Haas declares that the depression in coal mining is due pri- marily to speculation in coal lands, and urges a most in- genious plan of government ownership of such lands, with private operation of the mines, as the way out. Mr. C. E. Bockus, president of the National Coal Association, opposes Mr. Haas's specific suggestion, yet asserts that the in- dustry is suffering from "uneconomic, unreasonable, and unfair competition" and fatal overproduction. All three of these industries, widely different in their individual circumstances, teach the same lesson that our suffering agriculture proclaims with a voice heard to heaven, namely, that unorganized private competition is in- competent to bring about a stable production at prices that will give producers fair remuneration. Where they can, intelligent business men in self-protection organize their in- dustry, and we then proceed against them for monopoly. None the less, industry has got to be organized, will be organized, is being organized. That organization must be controlled to the end of public advantage, not purely pri- vate profit. Mr. Haas puts his finger on a vitally important element in such control, for there is truth in the words of the old Indian land grant quoted by Henry George: "To whomsoever the soil at any time belongs, to him belong the fruits of it. White parasols, and elephants mad with pride, are the flowers of a grant of land." The Newer History PEOPLE who wonder why history is forever being re- written and why the "facts," once they have been collected and verified, somehow do not seem to stay put will find some interesting answers to their questioning in the presidential address which Professor James Harvey Robinson gave last December before the annual meeting of the American Historical Association at Durham, North Carolina. According to Professor Robinson, it is not enough that history should be authentic; authenticity, as a rule, is much the easiest part of the historian's task. Documents, indispensable though they are, need to be interpreted, and interpretation registers not only changes in public opinion, in the way in which peoples and governments look at things, but changes also in the kind of material of which history makes use. The present generation, for example, has relegated to the lumber-room most of the "national" or "patriotic" his- tory that was once a pride. Only perfervid aggregations like the American D. A. R. would be likely to welcome today the kind of history that gave Bancroft his fame, and only the followers of Hugenberg in Germany would be pleased if another Treitschke were at work. The taste for partisan history has been sadly dulled, for partisanship means prejudice and prejudice never gives us the whole truth. Professor Robinson is very much for internationalism as a point of view, whatever he may think of things done in its name. "Since the war," he reminds us, "there have been established a world council, a world court, and, lat- terly, a world bank. . . . The most skeptical must see, in all these, unprecedented gestures in the furtherance of human unification. It may be that the last mentioned, the world bank, may ere long be speaking more convincingly than either league or court." But he goes farther, and sees the so-called prehistory of the archaeologist and the ethnologist displaced by an earlier prehistory which shall include ani- mal psychology. Years ago he was startling his historical colleagues by urging the recognition of what was then a doubtful prehistory. Today he commends the work of Kohler, Pavlov, Yerxes, and others "as essential contribu- tions to the historian's problems." So, for the scholar at least, the range expands. The historian, like Wesley, is to take the world for his parish. International interests in every form — finance, commerce, labor, food supply, communication, population movements, peace, war, politics, the Russian menace to world capital- ism, and the thrust of a new India and a new China at empire and the tradition of "backward races" — all are to be the preferred grist for the historian's mill. The intel- lectual history which Professor Robinson himself has done much to illuminate must have discarded its nationalist partitions, for ideas belong to mankind and the radio will soon enable the whole world to listen in. It is a devastating invasion of the established academic order, this coming of an international mind, and there will doubtless be many in the American professoriate to resist or decry it, but the trend is clear. The newer history will be foolishness if it prophe- sies ; it will be wisdom if it interprets the past in world terms.

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March 5, 1930] The Nation 263 It Seems to Heywood Broun FISH can't tell time nor keep a discerning eye upon the calendar. And so when Saturday dawned hot as spring I thought the pickerel might be fooled and not realize that they were out of season. Possibly the scheme of mine was treacherous. A fish should not be either caught or somewhat flabbergasted before his proper time. In all truth I caught nothing, but I undoubtedly frightened a few. Possibly a lasting neurosis may cause a fish as much tribu- lation as one brave but losing fight against a determined angler. And one I would have landed, maybe more, but for the fact that my treachery was met in kind. When I went through the woods in the direction of Diana's Cove a dog followed me. He was a stranger to me, but he seemed amiable and well intentioned. I didn't particularly want him, for we had nothing in common. Soothingly, I spoke to him about going back to wherever he came from and he wagged know- ingly and continued to follow after. Whenever I said "Nice dog," he vibrated ecstatically as if starved for compliments. I, myself, have found that it has been rather a lean year for kind words. Yet soon it was apparent that this dog responded merely to tones in the human voice. I never saw a dog with a poorer conception of the precise meaning of words. He had practically no vocabulary. To him, "Get the hell out of here" sounded just the same as "Nice dog." He shook with joy each time he was commanded to be gone. I grew imperious and even so failed to read my lines with any marked success. I called him "bad dog" and many other things more harsh, and he continued to caper and grin. Pantomime was also useless. The little play which I acted out for his benefit went completely over his head. Since he did not seem so very bright I hammered my part grossly and underscored all the points. It would have been what the average New York critic calls a "great perform- ance." There was no subtlety. All the strokes were as broad as those of Miss Cornell in her latest box-office tri- umph, "Dishonored Lady." Seemingly it was his notion that this was just the beginning and that the comedy might grow clearer as it proceeded. Although dumb he was polite and never coughed or laughed in the wrong places. Maybe it wasn't a comedy. I was trying desperately to portray a man terribly intent upon being alone. This, I imagine, is really tragedy because the protagonist is always crushed in the end by men or Airedales that want to tag along. My next thought was that the whole situation might be cleared up if only I could happen upon his name. This at least should be a word he would know. Lacking such identification, the phrase "bad dog" might seem to him merely a tirade against the species in general, and nobody ever takes blanket indictments personally. Although this angling kibitzer wore no collar nor any other identifying mark, it did not seem to me impossible to dive into the ran- dom and come out with his precise title. It may be hard to guess the name of a princess, but Airedales are christened out of a most limited imagination. This dog was Airedale in part but there had been at least one drop of spaniel blood and the law of Mendel operated savagely against him. The experiment of identification proved a complete failure, but it was no fault of mine. Possibly he had a name unusual in some degree but I doubt if that was the difficulty. He wagged violently for "Rover," barked appre- ciatively at "Sport," and when I called him "Tige" he rolled over on his back in sheer joy. If anybody ever told him, "My name is the symbol of my identity and must not be lost," he quite evidently had forgotten the phrase. Of pride in precise personality he possessed not an atom. I decided that he had probably been the youngest puppy in a consid- erable family and, through being much put upon, had adopted a regressive anonymity as a defense mechanism. Without much hope of success, I tried the final experi- ment of picking up a stick and waving it at him in a menac- ing way. I am not a good menacer and he merely mistook this for another game and entered into the sport whole- heartedly. After that I gave up and tried to accept, with as much philosophy as I could muster, the fact that I was doomed to spend the afternoon with a fool. By previous experience I knew that the experience although painful would not necessarily prove fatal. Later my estimate of the Aire- dale (I decided for no particular reason to call him Harold, after an editor) was completely changed. Harold was not a defective but a shrewd and calculating scoundrel. That developed as soon as I began to fish. Before we reached the lake he trod lightly over the dead leaves and created no commotion. While I was baiting the hook he grew animated about the bacon, but desisted when slapped on the nose and he sat satisfactorily silent while I lowered the line. Scarcely five minutes had elapsed when there came a terrific tug on the line. One man's guess is as good as an- other's in such matters, and, according to my estimate, such a wrench could have come from nothing less than a five- or ten-pound pickerel. I never knew or shall know, for as I waited for the monster to impale himself more definitely on the hook Harold leaped up from his reclining position and began to roll about in the leaves behind me. Naturally the pickerel did not remain in any close contact with the bait. He was convinced that some mastodon was roaming through the birches and he hurried deep into the eel grass. Having given the alarm, Harold relapsed into relaxation and grinned at me foolishly as if this deed of his were no more than an aimless infantile prank. I looked at him severely, but he met my gaze steadily and there was no hint of a malicious intelligence working against my best interest. The next time the fish may have been an ounce or so smaller but he was more definitely committed to the hook. Only a single twist of the wrist was needed to pin him fast. But that thrust was not delivered. Harold was up on the instant and into the lake with a long shallow dive. The frightened fish broke away, but he was not too frightened to take my bacon with him. I no longer hated Harold. Ac- cording to his lights he behaved patriotically. His was a class war. A sophisticated person with a finely chiseled and molded mind had matched his wits against creatures primi- tive and dumb. Harold knew which side he was on. Heywood Broux

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264 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3374 Headless Washington By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD Washington, February 20 THAT is what Washington is — utterly headless. The breakdown of leadership is really appalling. I doubt whether it has ever before been as bad, for the prob- lems of government steadily grow more involved, more diffi- cult, and more numerous, and call more and more for vision, ability, and consistent statesmanship if they are to be solved. One has the feeling that everybody in Washington is floun- dering in a situation which he cannot control. One won- ders whether the whole system is not cracking. When one beholds three important investigations going on simultane- ously; when one watches the Senators trying frantically to keep up with their work on committees of inquiry in addi- tion to their regular committee and Senatorial work ; when one visualizes the multitude of problems which are half solved, or are waiting solution at every turn, such as Muscle Shoals, Boulder Dam, the Mississippi flood prevention, the inland waterways situation, to say nothing of the rail- roads, prohibition, the tariff, and all the rest, one is com- pelled to ask oneself whether the business of government has not become too complex and too difficult for the machinery we set up in 1789. The chief failure is, of course, in the White House itself. Not that anybody should have expected anything else. Mr. Hoover has never shown moral courage, nor the capacity for leadership, since his Belgian days. As Secretary of Commerce the whole philosophy of his job was to collate figures, to progress in the coordination of industry by means of trade understandings and agreements — which may yet be held in court to violate our laws — and then to smooth the way for big business in every legitimate manner. Why should one have expected a complete change in the moral make-up of the man or in his political theory when he reached the White House? The entire legislative situation here in Washington today is due to Hoover's inability to refuse to promise the extra session to Senator Borah when Herbert Hoover, still a candidate, was striving for the goal of his ambition. He did not dare say no to the Senator from Idaho for fear that he would lose the farmers' vote. The extra session has come and gone, we are at the end of the third month of the regular session, and there isn't the slightest prospect whatever that the farmers will get any of the tariff aid which, together with the creation of the Fed- eral Farm Board, was the object of the special session. You cannot lead a nation that way, not even if you have the Republican leaders to breakfast every day in the week, and especially not if you have the kind of leaders to handle whom Mr. Hoover has to ask to his table. Watson, Tilson. Longworth, Snell, Wesley Jones, McNary, Wood, Andy Mellon — not a real idea, much less a principle, in a carload of such as these. But how in turn can they be blamed? After the White House breakfast on February 17, there was the usual press talk that the President was now "going to take a hand" ; that he would "warn Congress sternly," especially the Senate, that something would happen if they did not move. It was suggested that he was on the point of going over the heads of the legislators to appeal to the country. All of this sort of thing until a day later the Washington Star appeared with the reassuring but hardly un- expected headline that Mr. Hoover had decided not to inter- fere with Congress. It was a wise decision, for the truth is that when he asked at his own breakfast table whether he could do anything to hasten the Senate he was bluntly informed that if he tried to do anything it would be disas- trous. To such a pass has come the "leader of his party." It remained for a Democrat, Congressman Garner of Texas, to speak the truth in meeting. Declaring that "the titular Republican leader in the White House is either lacking in courage or capacity to lead," Mr. Garner added that there is not a Republican leader in the Senate or House "who has the faintest idea of what the President wants, and, worse still, they haven't the slightest idea that he wants anything particularly constructive or progressive." The apparent fail- ure of the London conference makes it clear that the Presi- dent has blundered there in letting the delegation go abroad without a clear-cut policy determined in advance and a readiness to achieve some disarmament come what might. And Mr. Hoover sorely needed a success in foreign affairs to conceal his nakedness at home ! Now the astonishing thing about it is that many of the problems which confront the government are those in which Mr. Hoover was supposed to have shown peculiar fitness and capacity. They are economic problems, business problems, often engineering problems ; for the political issues are being steadily shoved aside for business and economic ones. If the President has convictions and yet gives no clear-cut, con- vincing note, he is without courage. Never did a man need more to study the career of Grover Cleveland. In his second term that President aroused a storm of hostility. He, too, was charged with being the servant of big business, but at least no one could doubt where he stood or what he wanted. It is simply impossible to think of Mr. Hoover's doing what Mr. Cleveland did when he wanted reelection — plumping for a tariff for revenue only when all his advisers told him that if he came out for that his defeat would be certain. To this he replied: "Very well, gentlemen, then we shall be defeated." If Mr. Hoover ever does anything to electrify the country in some such way, the Washington corps of journalists will surely lose a number of its members from heart failure. At present he sits in the White House and sulks, calling the Senators every kind of name, yet un- able to make a stepping-stone of his dead self and stir the country by taking a militant position and assuming the lead- ership not merely of his party, but of the whole country. Still another reason why he cannot do this is that he, like the rest of Washington, is without a definite program, either political or economic. Here he is no worse and no better than the men in Congress — not even the Progressive group, which remains the one hopeful portent in the entire situation. Most people in Washington do not know that we are on our way somewhere, socially and economically. Few of them can visualize the whole forest, they are busy at best

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March 5, 1930] The Nation 265 in repairing an occasional tree, filling a hole here, running a rod through a trunk there. As for having any sailing chart for their political progress, they do not know that such a thing exists. They cannot realize that we are in the midst of a tremendous economic revolution. They cannot put to- gether the innumerable items of economic news that stare out at us from each daily paper — that the railroads are being consolidated ; that there are only thirty tire companies left out of three hundred; that the great Vacuum and Standard Oil companies have come together; that mergers are ex- pected in the automobile field and a dozen others; that at every turn there are combinations and consolidations; that but for the fear of our anti-trust laws we should be seeing in this country precisely what has just happened in Germany — the bringing together of every iron and steel plant in the country, so that the industry is being governed as a whole by a steering committee for the purpose of modernizing the weak, financing the struggling, dividing the domestic field among the plants best fitted for each line, and preparing for exports with which to conquer the European markets. In- stead, we have in Washington the headless and planless effort to stop a combination here, to control another there, to beat the devil around the bush by the inter-trade agreements to which I have already referred. And constantly the Sen- ate has to give its time and strength to muckraking various official bodies, or overhauling official activities to prevent the perversion of government by the deliberate turning over to private business of certain governmental functions, or their complete warping by the servants of big business whom Mr. Coolidge and Mr. Hoover have appointed to positions in which they are supposed to be the watch-dogs of the gov- ernment. This sort of inquiry is sneered at by the press; it infuriates big business, and the public becomes cynical about it. But if anything should stop it, that would be nothing short of disaster. It is quite true, as one news bureau has said, that the Progressives feel that if they do not keep on their job there will not be a single natural re- source of any kind, capable of being turned over to private exploiters, which will not be turned over by Mr. Hoover if he is allowed to have his way during the next three or seven years. It was only this week that Senator Couzens, who is presiding over the hearings of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, declared, after hearing certain charges as to what has been happening in the Federal Power Commission, that "conditions in the commission have become so intolerable that it presents one of the rottenest exhibitions of government I have ever heard of." Speaking of programs, and the lack of them, what could be more pitiful than the attitude of the Progressives and the Democrats on the tariff? Here is a God-given issue at hand. The Democrats in Congress, having also no leader- ship of any kind, and having been betrayed on the tariff issue by their party convention and their party candidate of 1928, are naturally unable to agree on any policy or to take any definite general position. They are also engaged in get- ting their feet into the trough as rapidly as possible. The most disgusting example of this practice has been afforded by Senator Copeland of New York. Did he, for example, vote against the Aluminum Trust, which robs every house- wife in America for the benefit of poor, starving Andrew Mellon and his family? He did not. He said he had been told that the workers in some aluminum factories in the State of New York would lose their jobs if we did not help Andrew out. He could see only the votes of his constitu- ents, nothing else. He has forgotten, if he ever knew, that the historic Democratic policy has been a tariff for revenue only, and he is certainly not of the opinion that the interests of the entire country are superior to those of a handful of workers. He goes round the country making speeches against graft, and then votes freely for the "honest graft" of protec- tion, whenever he thinks that any factory owner or worker in New York State may be helped by his vote. He is in no wise different from nearly all the others in his party. Cer- tainly none of the so-called Democratic leaders have any real thought that there is a principle at stake here. Neither have the Progressives. They have stood to- gether much better than was expected ; for once Senator Borah has really shown leadership. Remarkable as it seems, he has regularly attended group meetings of the Democrats and Progressives; for once he has shown symptoms of the fighting leadership that he might have exercised years ago, if his ability and brilliance had been matched with equal courage. He might well have been the most influential figure in political life today. The Progressives have fought hard against many tariff increases. They hit the Aluminum Trust a staggering blow ; they have so far kept the Senatorial tools of the sugar barons from still further mulcting the American people. They have cooperated far better with the Democrats, and the Democrats with them, than had been deemed possible. Yet they, too, vote now and then because of some State interest, for things which they ought to oppose, just as Senator Norris actually voted for a sugar bounty for the Nebraska beet-sugar growers. What could they not accomplish if they realized that there was a principle at stake in all this? They are greatly stirred up because the farmers are going to be buncoed again and are not going to be brought within the charmed circle of the protection grafters. They are doing their best to see that Mr. Hoover and his party live up to their promise of agricultural tariff relief, but in doing so they cannot lay claim to holding any moral position. They are debarred from attacking the whole system because they seek favors for their several States. It has been rightly said that without vision the people perish. Doesn't that apply to government as well? How long will it be before the so-called leaders here can see that the days of tinkering, and of stopping leaks, and of patch- ing, and of taking one timid step in this direction, and an- other in the other direction, are rapidly nearing their end? The time is surely at hand when there must be a nation- wide protest against the whole business of compromising and of special privilege and favoritism, which in one form or an- other is corrupting the government, weakening its machinery, and making impossible any grappling with our general eco- nomic problem on the basis of genuine and far-reaching economic reform. Leadership here? There isn't any. Few of the observers even realize what it is all about and where it is taking us — least of all, apparently, the man in the White House. Naturally, he is the most conspicuous target; he ought to be. There is criticism on the part of the regulars, even those who do not like Mr. Hoover, that certain groups are out to "get him." Why not ? There could be no greater service rendered to the country today than to make it clear just how bankrupt the White House is, and whither its con- duct of affairs is taking us. BOP- if ''\ pu UB>

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266 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3374 Parity or Reduction? By NORMAN ANGELL London, February 22 (By Cable to The Nation,) A FAINT ray of hope that the conference may emerge from its present doldrums comes from Paris; it is based on the expectation that Briand may succeed Tardieu as the directing force and prove more flexible than his predecessor. But this does not suffice to render the present feeling anything but one of pessimism. It is necessary to point out, however, that the present marks the moment when cards, in the shape of respective claims, have been put on the table, which is naturally the moment of severest struggle and least concession. Public opinion in Great Britain continues to show increasing disappoint- ment at the slowness of the conference. It is probable that a downright offer to abolish the battleship and submarines and to reduce cruisers still further, subject to corresponding reduction by the other Powers, would be enormously popu- lar even in the face of the monstrous French memorandum. Indeed, it is felt that such a move would make the French defense of the submarine more difficult. It is the general feeling in conference circles that before progress can be made France must be made conscious of her moral isolation, which implies diplomatic and later military isolation. When France feels that her present policy involves definite aliena- tion of potential allies she may modify her stand. An in- teresting suggestion in this connection is that the French nervousness concerning the German "pocket" battleship might be made the ground for calling Germany into con- sultation. It has been felt all along in some quarters that Germany should have participated in the conference. London, February 13 (By Mail) Even those with a very qualified faith in the wisdom of mass opinion in international affairs (so often in the past warmly responsive to war excitements of all kinds) have wished the last week or two, while watching the higgling hesitation of every government in approaching the problem of disarmament, that some of the issues which have come up for discussion could have been put to popular referendum. Long before the conference met, public opinion in Britain seized upon one issue as being the decisive one if real reduction in the weight of armaments were to come out of the deliberations. That issue was the abolition of the battleship, battleship here meaning the ship of over 10,000 tons. The layman was encouraged to plump for this particular slogan by the fact that even the naval experts, some of the best minds in the Admiralty, had been agitating for the abolition of the monster ship as a useless anachronism. If the British public could have expressed itself it is all but certain that in its present mood it would have swept away the battleship and the submarine altogether. But the British gov- ernment, under pressure from the main conservative body of the Admiralty, began by being extremely hesitant in responding to these movements of public opinion. The opinion, however, grew insistent, and there was a quick change of attitude on the part of the government. The Prime Minister, although qualifying the statement, let it be known that this government would desire to see the com- plete abolition of the big ship. But the American delega- tion did not seem to respond to the feeler, while unofficial American opinion declared the step incompatible with the sacred principle of parity: if the big ship were abolished the cruisers, which are now auxiliary ships, would be the capital ships; the armed merchantmen would be the auxiliaries; and this, argued one American school, would give Great Britain such an enormous advantage as to put an end to the whole principle of parity. Other experts, of course, protested that there was no shadow of validity in this latter argument for reasons which in their turn were answered by counter-arguments. In any case, the decisive and simple measure of getting rid altogether of these big ships, of wiping them out from our programs and deciding that they should sully the seas no more, somehow got whittled down and the conference got on to the problem of abolishing the sub- marine. But the submarine is the reply of the lesser naval Power, in this case France, to the Power which possesses great ships. If somehow Britain and America had been able to go to France and say simply, without qualification, "We have agreed to get rid of the great ship altogether. Will you agree with us to get rid of the submarine?" it would have been extremely hard for France in that simpli- fied situation to say no. But to ask for the abolition of the submarine while the great ships, in which Britain and America are so rich, are retained seemed to France, of course, an unfair trick of the Anglo-Saxons. Thus does real progress in disarmament come to grief on hesitations and complexities. What seems to be happen- ing is that, without the government intending it, the tech- nicians, the Admiralty, are passing upon political questions. In such circumstances one must give due weight to the difficulty of a government composed of civilians. The Cab- inet is made up of laymen. They are confronted by what is an all-but-unanimous technical opinion. There is just the risk that Admiralty resignations might result from opposing the Admiralty view and might cause something like a popular stampede, even of that opinion which is now decisively against the big ship. For many of the public, too, would be impressed with "expert" opinion, not realizing that the problem is one not of naval technique, but of politics and psychology ; and that the "experts" would be judging mat- ters outside their province. Unfortunately, in this discussion, the other side's case always seems so much simpler than ours. It is commonly asked here : Why could not the Americans straightforwardly have accepted MacDonald's tentative offer to abolish the big ship altogether? There is, as these lines are being writ- ten, intense irritation at the reply which the British delega- tion are reported to have made to the American suggestion as to the building of a Rodney. Our technicians seem to have pointed out as a large part of their reply that the American interpretation of parity leaves gun-power out of

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March 5, 1930] The Nation 267 account. The United States now possesses twenty-four sixteen-inch guns (eight in each of her three largest battle- ships), while Great Britain has only eighteen (nine each in the Rodney and the Nelson). If an American Rodney were built the United States would have thirty-three six- teen-inch guns to the British eighteen. To this the Ameri- cans retort that their superiority in gun-power is offset by the greater speed of the British battleships. It is felt that discussion of this kind could go on everlastingly and in- terminably. More and more is the purely conventional nature of "parity" being revealed. There is and can be no real "yardstick" of power which has to equate such di- verse elements as industrial self-sufficiency to speed of ships or range of guns. We have already noted how a discussion of the battleship question brings us to the mercantile marine. That would bring us to the reserve of a mercan- tile population, all of which presumably would have to be taken into account. If, as an American once commented, factors of power must include "fogs, bogs, and hogs," how many fogs or bogs or hogs are to be calculated as equivalent to one battleship or one cruiser? And even if one could get over this first difficulty, there is a second one more vital and more fundamental still. Armaments, of course, envisage the event of war, the con- tingency of all our peacemaking arrangements having broken down. That assumption must precede any discussion, any building, any armaments. Without it, the whole thing is utterly meaningless. But if the peace-keeping arrangements break down in the way in which they broke down in 1914, and the nations are aligned in rival camps as their respective interests may dictate, the figures which will count then are not the figures of each nation but the figures of the groups, the alliances. Since naval power is relative, it is impossible to say whether a nation is strong or weak until you know whom it has to fight. "On the African lakes during the war," says Admiral Richmond, "an armed motor-boat was a capital ship." Another admiral said to me the other day, "We ought to write on the walls of the conference room : Who is the enemy?" Britain and America have spent months and months in negotiations in a laborious attempt to achieve parity. But if in fact they are going to be ranged on the same side when the next war breaks out, the very day that war is declared each will want the other to have as much power as possible. As a wearied and cynical delegate said at a previous conference after a week of fighting over a few destroyers, "Mais, a la fin, it doesn't make any difference, for we can make alliances so much more quickly than you can make ships." Even occasional attendance at a conference like this brings home to one the fact that men agree with apparent readiness to a truth or a proposition long before they believe it in any vivid fashion or realize any of its implications. Two and two, of course, make four — unless we are discussing navies. For quite a time now the British and the Americans have agreed, and I don't doubt for a moment that the sin- cerity of the agreement is absolute and complete, that in no circumstances whatever could they go to war with each other again ; that such an event is as improbable and unthink- able as war between Pennsylvania and Ohio or between Yorkshire and Northumberland. So be it. Then it cannot matter to either what the other has in the way of armament. But that is precisely the resultant four that you must not make from this particular two and two. There are sections on each side which watch fiercely and suspiciously for any indication that the other side may be stealing a march ; every "concession" is narrowly weighed as though any increase in the power of one was a vital and dangerous menace to the security of the other. These contradictions and inconsist- encies are, it will be said, an old enough story. But they are recalled now for this reason: One of the real events of the conference is that now at last there seems to be a tend- ency to admit fully and with some meaning in the admission what at the outset was only admitted in words, with no faintest realization of the real implication of the words. As a result of this rather elusive change of mood there is, I think, a general expectation that the political by-products of the conference will be fundamentally much more impor- tant than the results in actual limitation or reduction. The belief plainly is growing that any technical agreement will have to be accompanied, as were the technical agreements of the Washington conference of 1922, by a political agreement something along the lines of the Four-Power Pacific Pact — an agreement, it will be recalled, by which the four Pacific Powers undertook to respect one another's rights in their possessions, to refer to a joint conference any controversy arising between them involving those rights, and in case those rights were threatened by the aggressive action of any other Power, to consult together fully and frankly so as to come to an understanding as to the measures to be taken. Any agreement along the lines of the Four-Power pact would go far to meet the French position. It will be re- called that, in response to the invitation to the conference, the French asserted once more the position that they have asserted with unfailing and unbending insistence at every conference of the kind they have entered since the war. They go on repeating, in effect : "A nation's first duty is to defend itself, achieve security. If an international organization of any kind can give it some measure of security, it is justified in disarming. If not, not." They have never wavered in the assertion of this position and have stated it always with complete frankness. To the contention that they have been given security upon security by the Locarno and other ar- rangements, they retort that no sooner does a British gov- ernment sign an undertaking of this kind than British public men or another British government begin to whittle down its commitments. However that may be, the expectation is now general that something along the lines of the political instru- ment which accompanied the Washington disarmament agree- ments must accompany the ones arrived at in this conference. The Senate difficulty has, of course, loomed large, but a pos- sible way round has been suggested. It is to the effect that an executive declaration might be made stating simply that in the event of any danger of the rupture of the Kellogg pact, it would certainly be the desire of the United States to consult with the Powers party to this conference as to the measures which might properly be taken to preserve peace, or prevent the extension of the conflict, if conflict had already occurred. It is recalled in this connection that the most im- portant foreign policy that the United States has ever adum- brated— the Monroe Doctrine — was put forward by the Ex- ecutive alone. It seems to be thought that the Monroe Doc- trine might be followed by a Hoover Doctrine, an expression of what America might be counted upon to do in the event of a violation which threatened the peace of the world.

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268 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3374 If French pressure so far succeeds as to secure some- thing in the shape of such a declaration, it may have results which are not perhaps taken fully into the French calcula- tions. That result would be, as a by-product of the declara- tion, some beginning at least in the settlement of the freedom- of-the-seas controversy, which is the outstanding ghost always present at any Anglo-American banquet. For if America gave an undertaking to confer with other signatories of the pact as to the course to be taken in the event of a violation, and if the British feel pretty sure that America would not claim the right to supply the aggressor with the means for continuing his crime, the great outstanding danger of conflict between Britain and America, namely, the question of neu- tral right, would have been removed. Some step in the re- moval of this old difficulty has, of course, been taken by Britain in the signature and ratification of the optional clause. And while provisions are made in the ratification not to have prize cases taken to the international court, the effect of the signature will be to make it easier to reconcile the British and the American attitude on this subject. Divorce — and After III. Divorce and the Child* A PERSONAL NARRATIVE MY former husband and I obtained what might be called a cooperative divorce. Our attitude toward each other at the time was one of sympathy, even affection ; we were young and fairly eager to "do the right thing" by one another and by our only child, of whom I was given complete charge. My husband, who was a sculptor, had not been able to do much toward our mutual support, but his family was very well off and had helped us by means of a regular allowance. Moreover, I had been earning money fairly regularly over a period of two years before we decided to separate. It was agreed, when the matter of the details of the divorce arose, that my husband should give to me and our son a large part of the allowance which his family had been contributing to our support. It did not occur to me to ask for alimony because I had complete con- fidence in his good-will and in the kindliness and generosity of his family. I had no desire to have them give me more than I required to live in the moderately comfortable manner to which I had been accustomed ; and I felt certain that they would not grudge me and their grandson the means to do so. Shortly after our divorce my small son contracted a con- tagious disease which resulted in certain permanent disabili- ties. The family rose to this occasion with additional funds. My former husband and I were still on excellent terms and confided in each other as intimate friends although by that time we were both embarked on new emotional relationships. A year elapsed, during which my new relationship ac- quired permanent tendencies. Unfortunately, the groom-to- be was not a good wage earner. In addition to that he seemed to be completely lacking in paternal feelings. He was not a simple personality, and I, unfortunately, was not able to guide my emotions into the practical channels which would make for a comfortable home for my child. I was, I fear, frankly more interested in having a good life of my own. My relationship with my former husband had never been a happy one. I had suffered from the very beginning. And now I felt that I had a right to grasp at happiness for myself. I had the naive faith that I could bring out the latent paternal feeling in my new husband. I was mistaken. Although he conducted himself toward my son with ex- • This if the third in a series of articles on the problems created by divorce. A fourth will be printed in an early issue. — Editor Thi Nation. emplary politeness his attitude toward him remained that or the pleasant but rather uninterested household guest. I real- ized later on that he was unconsciously resenting the presence of a child who was to him an alien person in our home, an alien, moreover, who absorbed some of my time and a great deal of my thought. What was disagreeable to him, he in- stinctively pushed out of his mind ; and very soon he became apparently almost unconscious that there was another person- ality in the household. This was possible because the boy was still young enough to have bedtimes which almost co- incided with my husband's return from work and because he was a docile and quiet child. The result of this was to give the child an ever-inten- sifying fixation on me. Meanwhile he saw less and less of his own father, who claimed that because he lived down- town in New York, while we lived far uptown, it was very difficult for him to make frequent visits. Because of his disabilities the boy was having a very difficult time in school. I felt more and more borne down under the weight of his dependence on me. When I failed to give him as much of my time as I thought he needed, I felt guilty about it. There was no one to share this emotional responsibility. I finally decided to call on the boy's father for help. We were still friendly, but we were seeing far less of each other. He agreed that he would try to see more of the boy, but I knew before the conversation was over that the battle was lost. He simply was not sufficiently interested any more. He was too immersed in hi? own affairs really to make the effort to carry out his promise. It was at this time that I realized that his paternal feelings, which had never been very strong, were now quite dead. If they had lived in the same home, the father would have identified the child with his own ego (which was by no means small). As it was, the child had lost his primary interest for the father; in fact, with its difficulties and drawbacks, the responsibility of being a father had become something of a burden to him. Soon a new complication arose. My second husband lost his job, and though I was working we were living to a large extent on the allowance that my ex-husband's family gave me. My husband, through no fault of his own, was out of a job for six months; and the ex-family decided very soon that they did not wish to be supporting or helping to

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March 5, 1930] The Nation 269 support him. They began to make reductions in the allow- ance. From that time on I was made to feel that I was the object of a sort of grudging charity. The financial arrange- ment was changed every three or four months. I never knew what I could actually depend on. Having geared my living to one standard, I would find suddenly that it must be geared to another. The changes were not enormous, but the fact that I never knew what to expect gave me a feeling of complete instability. In addition to this I had come so to hate the idea of accepting the money that I thought and worried about it much more than was warranted by the actual situation. You will wonder why, after my husband got a new job, I accepted the money at all. My husband was not earning enough to make it possible for us to give the child the various medical and other special advantages which he needed. Aside from that, however, I should have felt that it was unjust to ask him to bear the financial burden of a child not his own, especially since the boy's paternal relatives were driving about in motor cars and living in luxury. There was only one way to extricate myself and that was by earning enough to swing the thing alone. That I was unable to do, partly because the doctors' bills were so constant and large, and partly because my own mental state made it impossible for me to throw myself with great inten- sity into my job. After three years of this, the emotional strain seemed too great for me and I decided, with the help of a psycho- analyst, that it would benefit both me and my son to send him away from me for a while. An excellent boarding- school was chosen, small and homelike, with a group of teachers who had an intelligent modern attitude toward edu- cation and family problems. Now the financial difficulties increased. By this time I was paying half the boy's expenses while the family paid the other half. I had to keep an item- ized account of everything that I spent for him. Although my capital was zero, I was the one who had to make the outlays, half of which would subsequently be refunded. Each bill was disputed or commented on adversely, or if this was impossible, the letter which contained the check was full of other complaints. I was made to feel that the family re- sented every penny spent. I was heckled for my child's behavior as well. As a matter of fact, I had been rather scrupulous in making the boy feel that the family, particu- larly his own father, were really very grand people. But this magnanimous attitude was beginning to wear thin. During the child's vacations he usually saw his father once. From these visits he returned depressed, if not defi- nitely distraught. His father, it appeared, could not spend the few hours without lecturing him severely on some sub- ject. On the day when that subject turned out to be some- thing connected with his disability, which the boy was powerless to correct, I turned into a militant mother. On that day I lost all my desire to try to understand the point of view of my ex-husband or of his family. From then on I regarded them all simply as a means of obtaining the greatest possible benefit for my son, and I wasted no sweet words or thoughts upon them. My correspondence became acrimoni- ous and so did all my feelings. I am afraid that I let my son perceive that I felt rather contemptuous toward his father. The boy was by this time twelve years of age and was not in the least attached to his father. Eventually he confided in me that he did not like him; and I could not bring myself to urge him to do so under the circumstances. It would have seemed to me a silly piece of sentimentality. I did tell him that I thought his father was a very selfish person, but that I also thought he could be very agreeable and charming and that some day, perhaps, they might become good friends. The family now adopted the attitude that I had never allowed the boy's father any say in his upbringing and there- fore it was only natural that he should have lost interest. This, I believe, referred to certain sporadic pieces of advice which my first husband offered me perhaps once or twice a year, or about as often as he saw his son during that period. Once or twice, when the financial situation seemed intol- erable, I dared to think that if the family would only stop to consider the very harsh difficulties I had experienced in bringing up a handicapped child, they must surely stop their ugly, heckling tactics. On these occasions I wrote letters to them, trying to make them understand what it all meant, trying to appeal to their imagination and even sympathy. For a short while thereafter they would mend their manner. But only for a while. Now that my son is almost grown, his father has begun to take some interest in him. It is spasmodic, as usual, and of doubtful benefit. He raises the boy's hopes and summons to himself a child's quick, warm affections, only to baffle him later by coldness and neglect. I should say that the re- sult of all this is that the boy's life has been pretty much ruined. He has a strong sense of "not belonging." How could it be helped? If I had given up my life to him that might have been avoided, but I'm afraid that I loved life more than my child. If I had given up the things that I wanted for his sake I might have ended by hating him and I think perhaps he would have suffered from that more than he has from the other condition. If his father and I had stayed together we would have ruined our own lives, with- out doubt. I am not prepared to say that our son's life would not have been happier. It might very well have been, if his father and I had remained friends in the same home. That, of course, was possible, since long before we separated we were very good friends in spite of our un- happiness. But who is to say which lives are more impor- tant? Any judgment on that question would be quite meaningless. In any case, it is likely that the child will suffer from divorce, especially if he is an only child. If foster-homes of a high standard could be found, I believe that would be the best solution for the children. They might then get the emotional stability that they require to be healthy psychi- cally. Such an arrangement, to be effective, would have to last over a period of years, and the real parents would have to keep "hands off," so that the children could make a com- plete transference of their love and confidence to their foster-parents. Probably no mother and few fathers would ever agree to such an arrangement. And I will admit that it would undoubtedly be difficult to find the desirable foster- parents. Perhaps if there were a demand for them, the supply would increase. Of course, my story points its all too obvious financial moral. If there are children, a mone- tary settlement is essential to protect them and also to pro- tect the mother from a harassing situation and constant contact with a past whose associations may become very disagreeable.

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270 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3374 c In the Driftway HICAGO is not the only place in the United States where the government has "gone broke." In Laurens County, Georgia, more than half of the public schools, with an enrolment of 5,000 children, have been closed until next autumn because of lack of money with which to pay the teachers. An effort was made to borrow funds with which to carry on, but banks both in and out of the State refused to make any further loans until the in- debtedness for 1928 and 1929 was cleared up. WHILE some public schools are closed because of finan- cial bankruptcy, Thomas H. Briggs of Teachers College, New York City, would close all private schools by law because they are "educationally bankrupt." So between financial and educational bankruptcy there may be so many closed schools presently that almost any boy can respond to the inner call to go swimming in early March without play- ing hooky. Dr. Briggs is against the private schools because, he says, with a few exceptions they are not con- tributing anything to the progress of education and because it is unusual to find parents who send their children to pri- vate schools and at the same time do anything to promote public education. The Drifter thinks that Dr. Briggs under- estimates the work done for the progress of education by private schools. Doubtless it is true that most of them are hidebound and ultra-conservative, but a saving remnant are doing experimental work of a highly interesting and valuable sort. The Drifter's own distrust of private schools — and it is a strong one — is not based on their educational methods but on the ground that they tend to create snobbery among the pupils. * * * * * WHEN the Drifter was a youngster, nearly all the boys and girls whom he knew went to the public schools, and all their parents would have thought it a mis- take to send them elsewhere regardless of whether or not they could afford it; they felt that private schooling would make their children undemocratic. The Drifter understands that a similar feeling still exists in most parts of the United States and that in general it is thought that the public schools are not only more democratic but superior to private institutions in their educational technique. New York City is a notable exception. To the Drifter's distress most of the children of his friends in New York are sent to private schools — even when the parents can ill afford it — and much as the Drifter deplores the situation he sympathizes with the fathers and mothers who are responsible for it. In New York City the public schools are notoriously overcrowded, and good teachers are handicapped by a sterile political over- lordship. But even if the schools were the best in the world, they are filled with children whose home environment con- stitutes an enormous impediment to effective education. When one considers that children learn more from their fellow-pupils than they do from their teachers, the situation puts conscientious parents in an unpleasant predicament be- tween the desire to be democratic and a wish to do the best possible by their offspring. It is hard to see, for instance, how a child can grow up to use correct English in the public schools of New York City — though happily some of them do. Of course the defects of the New York public schools are largely due to the fact that parents of the so-called "better element" have preferred to send their children to private schools rather than put up a fight to improve the public-school system. # * * * * BUT however much truth there may be in Dr. Briggs's general argument in favor of public as against private schools, his proposal to close the latter by law goes too far unless we are prepared to accept absolutely the Russian system of life. It is true that children belong to the com- munity as well as to their parents, but if the state is going to insist on taking sole and exclusive charge of their educa- tion, then it must also see that they are fed and clothed — and spanked when necessary. At the moment — and apart from the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled in con- nection with an Oregon statute that private schools may not be closed by law — Americans are no more ready to surrender the sole control of schooling to the state than they are to turn over to it the exclusive publication of their newspapers, magazines, and books. The Drifter Correspondence "Strictly American" To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: My copy of The Nation having failed to turn up in the mail last Saturday, I went to the large, fine shop of this capital city of Pennsylvania which deals exclusively in periodi- cals and stationery, to buy the missing copy. I was told that "We don't carry The Nation. We handle only strictly Ameri- can publications." Do please send me the missing number! Harrisburg, Pa., February 14 Helen R. Martin Creative Centers To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Artists and professionals are being forced in growing numbers to eke out insufficient livelihoods in overcrowded and standardized atmospheres. There are unnumbered rural or suburban acres lying idle and untouched. Why not establish on these unused areas small units of artists and professionals? By concentrating on the surrounding community these artists and professionals might be able to fill both the social and educational needs of their neighbors. Economic betterment for all con- cerned would also be assured. Four years of experience in one community in the Blue Ridge Mountains is the basis for this proposal. In this com- munity we found a native population which ordinary industrial systems could not sustain because of its unstandardized char- acter, and for which ordinary training schools made no provi- sion. The modern approach in teaching proved the practical solution, since it preserved the native simplicity and at the same time gave it tangible outlet in group activity. We chose native hand-hooked rugs as a medium, but we also chose workers who had never made rugs commercially, because we found that the mechanical demands of tourist or "seasonal" trade had already

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March 5, 1930] The Nation 271 destroyed any native freshness in the types upon which it drew. As artists, we began at the opposite pole and employed the same freedom in use of materials which we would have exercised in painting. The new rugs thus freely designed and created out- sold the commercialized ones in the market; and our volunteer "industry" soon included fifty families within a radius of twenty miles. There were literally hundreds of such families in our im- mediate vicinity, and there were other mediums besides rugs capable of development. By developing native resources and training native talents, creative centers would emerge as new clearing-spots for the new findings. These centers might logi- cally function in cooperation with state extension depart- ments. New York, February 20 Zoltan Hecht Rosa Pringle Hecht Our Mistake To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: In The Nation dated February 19 appears an article entitled The New Chief Justice. Speaking of Mr. Hughes, it says: "He came off the bench — to wage his weak and futile and intellectually pitiful campaign for the Presidency in 1912. Few contrasts could be greater than that between the Hughes of 1906 and the Hughes of 1912." Mr. Hughes resigned from the Supreme Court in 1916. He was a member of that tribunal for six years, from 1910 to 1916. New York, February 15 William Isaacs For Albany Readers To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The Nation Club of Albany is holding a meeting on March 4 at which Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard will speak. Harold P. Winchester, of the J. B. Lyon Company, Albany, is in charge of arrangements. Albany, February 21 Harold P. Winchester Minorities in Czecho-Slovakia To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: In The Nation for December 25, in an editorial com- ment dealing with the minority rights, you say that "the plain fact of the matter is that the Little Entente, and particularly Czecho-Slovakia, have treated the minorities treaties very much like scraps of paper." Czecho-Slovakia concluded the treaty for protection of the minorities with the Allied Powers on September 10, 1919. This treaty consists of fourteen articles of which the most important are Articles VII, VIII, and IX. Article VII guarantees to all Czecho-Slovak citizens, without regard to race, language, or religion, full equality before the law, full civil and political rights, free use of any language in private, commercial, religious, and public life, and, finally, the possibility of the use of their own tongue before the courts. Article VIII guarantees to lin- guistic minorities the right to found their own philanthropic, religious, and social institutions and schools, and to use their own language. Of particularly great importance is Article IX which points out the duty of the government to establish mi- nority schools in towns and districts containing a large number of inhabitants who do not speak the Czech language. The provisions of the treaty have been incorporated in the Czecho-Slovak constitution. As to how they are applied in prac- tice, the minority schools offer the best example. In the begin- ning of the school year 1925-26, there were in Bohemia, Mora- via, and Silesia 7,628 Czech schools with 22,439 classes for 848,348 Czech children (an average number of 38 children in a class), and 3,493 German schools for 341,124 German children (38.6 average per class). These figures refer to the proportion of schools in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia only. The Czecho- slovak government has, moreover, established German schools in Slovakia and Ruthenia where there were none under the Magyar regime. It has established in Slovakia 112 German schools, and there are 11 classes with 555 children in Car- pathian Ruthenia. The franchise in Czecho-Slovakia is universal, equal, and secret, without restriction, and in the Czecho-Slovak Parlia- ment the various racial groups are represented according to the strength of their votes. In the election held on October 27, 1929, the racial groups in Czecho-Slovakia received the fol- lowing representation. In preparing this table I have not ap- portioned to their respective nationalities thirty seats won by the Communists. Czecho-Slovaks 191 Germans 66 Hungarians 9 Poles and Jew9 4 The Germans are again represented in the government, having two ministers — one a Social Democrat, the other an Agrarian — in the Cabinet. Civic rights include liberty of the press and the right of public meeting. In 1918, in the whole territory of the Czecho-Slovak Republic, only 28 Magyar news- papers were published; at present there are more than 100. The nourishing political life and the number of associations and clubs among the Hungarian minority are the best proof of the minority's situation in this respect. The Hungarian minority had in Czecho-Slovakia in the 1924-25 school year 814 element- ary schools, of which 811 were state schools and 3 private schools, 5 secondary schools, 1 agricultural school, and 1 com- mercial academy. On the basis of the foregoing brief information, is it right to accuse Czecho-Slovakia of treating "the minorities treaties very much like scraps of paper"? New York, December 27 S. Kli'ma Contributors to This Issue Norman Angell, author of "The Great Illusion" and editor of Foreign Affairs, is a Labor member of Parlia- ment. Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at Washington Square College, New York University. Henry Hazlitt is literary editor of The Nation. Fred T. Marsh writes occasional book reviews for The Nation. Henry Raymond Mussey is managing editor of The Nation. Norman Thomas is executive director of the League for Industrial Democracy. Benjamin Ginzburg is preparing a volume to be en- titled "The Adventure of Science." W. J. Ghent is on the staff of the Dictionary of Ameri- can Biography. Alexander Bakshy, author of several books on the theater, writes on motion pictures for The Nation. L. J. de Bekker is a New York journalist, secretary to the committee on Haiti.

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Books, Drama, Films Park in the Gathering Dusk By EDA LOU WALTON The rare, unfathomed waters of spring night Refill with deepening blue this well of trees, Where tiny liquid lamps like luminous shells Float windward on the dusk. Somewhere a blossoming cherry is whirled down The inundating tide, a fragrant pause, And then the twilight rolling in again, And memory lost. And tiny pools close eyelids to night's hand Laid delicately down. The bosom of warm mist dilates encompassing The sun-delivered garden. And this that was a passion to the dawn, Sought out and pressed upon, Is, for the dark, a gathering place of tears. The Pretensions of Humanism Humanism and America. Essays on the Outlook of Modern Civilization. Edited by Norman Foerster. Farrar and Rinehart. $3.50. FIFTEEN humanists, under the editorship of Norman Foerster, are here drawn up in battle formation, flinging, if I may quote the volume's paper jacket, "the challenge of culture to the anarchy of our times." In a martial chorus such as this, one may legitimately hope to come upon at least a clear definition of what humanism is. I regret to report, not indeed an absence of definition, but what is perhaps worse, an embarrassing excess and variety of definitions. Mr. Foerster begins by remarking that humanism, in its broadest significa- tion, "denotes a belief that the proper study of mankind is man, and that this study should enable mankind to perceive and realize its humanity." One does not have to scrutinize this definition very closely to perceive its essential hollowness. Pope's line has always sounded impressive, but what does it mean? If it means that we must confine ourselves, in science, to psychol- ogy, human physiology, and the various social disciplines, and eschew botany, geology, astronomy, mathematics, physics, it is pure nonsense; if it means that man should study whatever interests man, it is the baldest truism. As to the second part of the definition, it seems to mean nothing more than that human beings are human beings, an observation not very illu- minating. Though Irving Babbitt's entire contribution to this volume is ostensibly "an essay at definition" of humanism, it does not seem to me very much more helpful. Mr. Babbitt does not in fact give any clear definition of humanism, though he does tell us, in several places, what it is that humanists aim at. They aim "at proportionateness through a cultivation of the law of measure." " 'Nothing too much' is indeed the central maxim of all genuine humanists, ancient and modern." And a sentence of Matthew Arnold's is quoted in further support and elucida- tion: "I hate all over-preponderance of single elements." Now if I may presume to say so, it seems to me that all this gets us precisely nowhere. Did Arnold hate the ocean, for its over-preponderance of salt water? Did he hate the heavens, for their over-preponderance of space? What is over-prepon- derance? How does one determine its existence? It seems to me that these last two are the only real questions. Everyone thinks himself opposed to over-preponderance, to disproportion, to "too much"; the words themselves are condemnations. The real disputes arise when it comes to determining, in any specific practical or literary judgment, just what constitutes "too much." And this means that "proportionateness" and "moderation" can never be final criteria; they are themselves subordinate to ulterior ends, and their presence or absence can only be deter- mined by reference to those ends. Even Mr. Babbitt does not believe in moderation when it comes to a showdown. Not when he is wrestling with those serpents, the naturalists. "When first principles are involved," he points out righteously, "the law of measure is no longer applicable. One should not be moderate in dealing with error." And when the battle grows hottest most of the other humanistic laws also go by the board. In his Forum article we found Mr. Babbitt denouncing the "anti-intellectualists" from Rousseau to Bergson; here we find him appropriating the entire Berg- sonian poison: "The final appeal of the humanist is not to any historical convention but to intuition." He can spend half his breath regretting our "egoistic impulses," and then write that "the real humanist consents, like Aristotle, to limit his desires only in so far as this limitation can be shown to make for his own happiness" [italics mine]. At least the law of self-con- tradiction seems to hold a secure place in the humanistic credo. We must pass on to the rest of the stalwart little band. Louis Trenchard More, listed as a professor of physics at the University of Cincinnati, seeks to show that a science of psy- chology, of sociology, or even of biology is impossible; that the only possible science is physics, "for the aim of all science is, and must be, to express its laws in the language of mechanics." Having left us with only one science, Mr. More evidently does not think very much of the present state of that one. He finds Whitehead, Eddington, and Einstein "dreamers," who "have pictured a phantasmagoria, instead of a world, as non-sensical as the hallucinations of the medieval monk driven mad by the fevers of asceticism." Paul Elmer More's contribution is merely a reprint from "The Demon of the Absolute"; it is an attempt to settle per- haps the most baffling of all metaphysical problems — the rela- tion of the mental and physical worlds — by a display of irrele- vant oratory. I have already reviewed this elsewhere. Mr. G. R. Elliott has discovered that "the main source of our modern spiritual catastrophe . . . is . . . blind spiritual pride. . . . We see how vicious it was for the Stoic to be proud of his pride, and for the monk to be proud of his humility. We have not yet seen how vicious it is for the modern citizen to be proud of being neither proud nor humble." There would not seem to be much chance of escaping viciousness. Mr. Elliott, how- ever, points a way: "The human task is to clarify and obey, as well as we can, Laws which we did not invent." Mr. Elliott does not tell us just what these Laws are; the awe-struck majuscule suggests the Ten Commandments, but Mr. Elliott prefers not to be vulgarly specific. In any case it would seem to me both difficult and presumptuous for man to attempt to clarify Laws which he had no hand in inventing. Mr. Elliott, I might add, opines that Baron Friedrich von Hugel and Pro- fessor Irving Babbitt are "the two most potent and distinguished personalities . . . that have so far appeared in English litera- ture of the twentieth century." Mr. T. S. Eliot believes that "the need of the modern world is the discipline and training of the emotions," and this, he has found, is "only attainable through dogmatic religion." As for humanism, he does not attempt to define it: "I take it that the reader thinks he knows what it means, and that he will

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March 5, 1930] The Nation 273 understand that I am putting before him the difference between what I think he thinks it means and what I think I think it means." As the reader is perhaps becoming a bit dizzy at this point, it may be well to haul up. The present symposium is surely not lacking in value, and many of its contributors are men of high ability. Mr. Robert Shafer has written an admirable article, from his standpoint, on Dreiser, and I have read Mr. A. R. Thompson on modern tragedy, Mr. H. H. Clark on American fiction, Mr. S. P. Chase on modern poetry, and Mr. Gorham B. Munson on modern critics, if not always with agreement, at least with interest and profit. One must guard against allow- ing the humanists to drive one into a merely antagonistic posi- tion; their own philosophy, as I indicated recently in discussing Mr. Babbitt, is itself largely a product of "the subservience of contradiction." Much of what they have to say about tradition, knowledge, discipline, completeness, is worth at least a respect- ful hearing. My own objections to their views I have already set forth in a previous article. They are trying to revive an outworn and discredited metaphysics. They fancy they have solved problems when they have merely distributed labels and catchwords. Most of them seem to imagine that complex lit- erary questions can be settled by the crude methods of practical politics, and they see the literary scene naively as a bi-party struggle for power between the Humanists and the Naturalists. They are in the habit of judging all writers, not by their genius, originality, or power, but by whether or not they are fountains of correct humanistic thought. I may as well confess, finally, that I distrust not only "humanism" but every other sweep- ing pansophy with equal pretensions. Surely there is no more glaring example of "blind pride" than these pat wholesale solutions of the infinitely complex and diverse problems of life and art. Henry Hazlitt "All That Glitters—" Pure Gold. By O. E. Rolvaag. English Text by Sivert Erdahl and the Author. Harper and Brothers. $2.50. THIS novel is a study in avarice. The incidents are selected with unvarying monotony to show how the lust for money grew in the hearts of an ignorant Nor- wegian-American couple until it came to dominate their lives and, eventually, to destroy them. The years go by and the "babies" (gold coins), the "brats" (bank notes), and the "shill- ings" (silver dollars) accumulate in spite of two or three affairs that involve heavy losses. Later, all the money is changed for "kids" (thousand-dollar bills), which the two divide between them and carry in canvas belts worn day and night, winter and summer, next to the skin. Only once does the author leave his two pathetic misers to look about him. Then it is to show the effect of the war on the rural com- munity in which they live. This portion of the book adds little to his story, or to our understanding of war psychology. Mr. Rolvaag has not attempted to write a true novel. Instead, he has written a theme-story of the De Maupassant order, extended to novel length and unsupported by subtlety of approach or beauty of style. "Pure Gold" is not well sus- tained. In parts it is baldly reiterative, the result of heavy- handedness. Some of the passages, showing the gradual dis- integration of character, are well thought out and well exe- cuted. But it is time that the critical reader should demand something more than character studies, descriptions, essays, from the novelist who claims serious attention. All these may be done in forms which, though no less delighftul, are compre- hensively less demanding than the novel. Fred T. Marsh Economics and Ethics Economics and Ethics. By J. A. Hobson. D. C. Heath and Company. $4. THERE was a certain fine inevitability in the choice of John A. Hobson by the editors of the Heath Social Rela- tions Series to write their volume on "Economics and Ethics," for no other man in the English-speaking world shares in equal degree the qualifications for that task possessed by the distinguished contributing editor of The Nation. His long career as an outstanding unorthodox economist, his broad studies in other fields of social science, and his lifelong human- istic interest mark him out as the one man best qualified to undertake the pioneer work of bringing modern economics back into fruitful relations with modern ethics. Mr. Hobson first defines welfare in terms of organic well- being, giving due weight at once to the innate equipment of the human animal and to the complex of ideas and institu- tions that bind him in the community. The "formal disparage- ment of community in the interests of an all-absorbing per- sonality is the most distinctive note of modern life," says Mr. Hobson, and his book must be judged a successful attempt at a proper redressing of the balance. "The art of human wel- fare in its full relation to the population of the earth and the civilization of the future" he considers the chief duty of man, and economics becomes a branch of the wider study of human conduct. Production and valuation are both social processes; all rights, to property and income alike, rest essentially on their contribution to well-being. Hence absolute individual claims disappear. The question becomes, not how much the com- munity may take from the individual, but how much it shall allow him. Here enters Mr. Hobson's well-known distinc- tion between costs, the payments necessary to call forth eco- nomic activity, and surplus, the payments not thus necessary. Costs, even as things stand, do not include the ridiculously exaggerated amounts we pay our great business men like Henry Ford, or the loot taken by monopolies and economic "pulls" at hundreds of points through our economic system. Surplus, wherever it arises, ought generally to be taken, by taxation or otherwise, for common purposes such as the increase of material equipment, the productive training of the human agent, above all, the provision of those non-economic common services on which so much of the interest and richness of life depends. An intelligent and equitable control of distribution is an essential condition to an orderly and adequate production, and that in turn to a genuinely humane consumption. Thus the humanist who regards the advance of civ- ilization and of personal well-being as requiring a dimin- ishing volume of human interest and energy to be devoted to the economic functions, an increasing volume to the free arts of personal expression and enjoyment, will fasten upon the social control of the machinery of production as an indispensable condition for enabling man as consumer to secure the leisure and liberty in which alone an art of life may flourish. It is impossible to follow the detail of Mr. Hobson's inter- esting suggestions for the reform and improvement of the eco- nomic system in the light of his dominant ethical principle. Perhaps their spirit has already been sufficiently suggested. Recognizing clearly the difficulties and limitations of community action, he yet sees plainly the necessity of rational social con- trol if our disordered and acquisitive economic system is to be brought into its true place as an important part of a real sys- tem of human welfare. Thus controlled, he envisages it for- ever reducing the human costs and increasing the human utilities

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274 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3374 of economic goods and services, thus liberating more and more of human energy for "those free creative activities in which production and consumption are fused in costless satisfactions." It is a noble idea, admirably worked out. Henry Raymond Mussey Aggressive Pacifism Pacifism in the Modern World. Edited by Devere Allen. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2. MR. ALLEN has given us a symposium to which most of the better-known American pacifists, Fenner Brock- way of England, and Rabindranath Tagore of India have contributed. It is notable for the vigor and range of its ideas and for two other qualities: (1) the pacifism the writers discuss is not passivism ; it is or seeks to be positive, even aggres- sive, as a method of dealing with injustice; (2) this pacifism is not derivative; that is, it does not rest on some texts of Scrip- ture, nor is it, as most of the writers see it, a mere deduction from some abstract philosophical principle. Each writer deals more or less strictly with some particular phase of the problem — e.g., pacifism and national security, pacifism and class war, etc. The method obviously has the disadvantages as well as the advantages of all symposiums. It gives us, however, a book well worth the reading, and offers food for thought even to those whom it does not completely convert. Norman Thomas The Sex Racket Our Changing Human Nature. By Samuel D. Schmalhausen. The Macaulay Company. $3.50. THIS is a collection of essays, articles, and literary sweepings served with pungent psycho-analytic sauce. There are disquisitions on human nature, psychology, woman, civilization, modern poetry, George Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris, H. L. Mencken, and above all, sex. The chapter headings include Sex and Human Nature, The Psy- chology and Pathology of Sex (A Preface to the New Sex- ology), Sex in the New Society, The Fall of Woman, The Immorality of Conventional Morals (A Study in Sadism). The other thirteen chapters are also not lacking in the sex appeal. The only comforting thought that the reviewer got after wading through the 500 pages of the book was the hope that we may soon be nearing the end of the psycho-analytic sex racket. Whether it be out of a desire to vary the monotony of straight sexology, or out of deference to a public saturated with a sex diet, or finally whether it be through an internal development of doctrine, the reviewer does not know, but Mr. Schmalhausen is led, in some of his essays, to champion the view that we need something more than straight psycho- analysis and sex expressionism. We must reconcile sex and the ego, he tells us; we must harmonize sex and human nature. It is this that leads the publishers to couple Mr. Schmalhausen with Walter Lippmann as advocating on psycho-analytic grounds the Lippmann morality of self-discipline. The reviewer would not go so far; there seems to him to be no trace of self-discipline in Mr. Schmalhausen's book. On the most serious interpretation of his thesis, what Mr. Schmal- hausen seems to be looking for is how to keep the "kick" in sex from evaporating after psycho-analysis has uncorked the bottle. Doubtless, as he tells us, we shall need a much greater Freud to solve this problem for us. None the less the fact that Mr. Schmalhausen entertains such a thesis may be regarded as a hopeful sign of the times. People are beginning to find out that there is more in the human problem of love than the physical instinct of sex. Sophisti- cation, when no longer regarded as equivalent to wisdom, may eventually become a drug on the market. If this happens, an old, old rhythm will be repeated. The rhythm goes back to Adam, who was probably the first to discover — and without the aid of Mr. Freud — the physical side of love. Out of his dis- covery came the myth of the tree of knowledge which, according to Spinoza, was simply designed to teach man that he was not altogether like the animals in the Garden, and that he had specifically human, moral problems. This moral may yet find an audience in these modern times of ours. And when that occurs, the sex racket will be liquidated and the new psychology will be absorbed into the humanistic tradition. Benjamin Ginzburg The Hero of San Jacinto The Raven. A Life Story of Sam Houston. By Marquis James. The Bobbs-Merrill Company. $5. IT is as a national figure, and an important one, that Mr. James regards Houston, and he has presented the man against the background of national events. But the person- ality of Houston is unique, and the author's happiest efforts are given to a portrayal of his character. The book is the result of years of research. The author has had access to sources un- touched by any other writer and has made effective use of them. He has sought not only the facts, but from legends and tradi- tions the atmosphere of the different environments in which Houston moved. In his treatment there is neither "heroizing" nor depreciation. One sets down the book confident that the hero of San Jacinto has at last been presented as he was. Every period of this enigmatical being's career is brought into clearer relief. Wild, indolent, and romantic, an aimless runaway among the Cherokees of eastern Tennessee, adopted by Chief Oo-loo-te-ka as a son and named Co-lon-neh, or the Raven, the boy showed little promise of the part he was later to play. But then came the War of 1812, his notable service as a soldier, and out of that service a sudden rise to preferment and fame. The romantic tragedy of Houston's life — his separation from his young bride, his resignation of the governorship of Tennessee, and his self-exile among the Indians — is deftly treated by Mr. James. The women who played so determining a part in Houston's career are all here in vivid portraiture: his mother; his first wife, Eliza Allen; his Cherokee wife, Tiana; Anna Raguet, whom he loved but could not win though he dow- ered her with "half the laurels of San Jacinto"; and the roman- tic but highly capable Margaret Lea, who married him, re- formed his bad habits, and was in all things an ideal helpmeet. Fresh incident and color are given to the period of exile among the western Cherokees. Introduced to this recently opened field by Grant Foreman's "Pioneer Days in the Early Southwest," Mr. James has found material in the Indian Bureau that enables him to picture anew the life that surged about Fort Gibson in the 1820's and 1830's. It is a scene dominated by the figure of that picturesque frontier baron, Colonel Auguste Pierre Chouteau (who, by the way, was not a son of "one of the founders of the French outpost of St. Louis") ; but Houston's part is also outstanding even when grossly discreditable. He was there to become involved in a scandal over a government contract, to have his Indian name, the Raven, exchanged for that of the Big Drunk, and to sink to the nadir of his reputa- tion; but it is from there also that, inspired by a new purpose,

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March 5, 1930] The Nation Our Newest Books for Discriminating Readers YEAR YOU'RE OUT By SAMUEL HOFFENSTEIN Enfin! Endlich! And at hist! The new book of poems by the author of Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing will be at your book sellers on March 8th. It's Hoflenstein once more, a little gayer, a little wiser, a little madder and a little more profound than ever before. $2.00 THE AMAZON By ELLIOT PAUL She was Alberta Snyder, first lieutenant, beautiful and determined, who managed to get her detachment of American girls to the front in France. Shell-shock made her lose her mind; her German captor made her lose her heart; and post-war Paris nearly made her lose her 6oul. Just Published S2.50 A PROPHET AND H!S GOO By E. L. GRANT WATSON An exquisite, mystical interpretation of life and God through the life of Moses. "I read the book through with mounting interest and deepening un- derstanding of the bitter, lonely, difficult way of a great leader." — Edwin Seaver, N. Y. American. $3.00 Shattering Health SUPERSTITIONS By MORRIS FISHBEIN, M. D. Author of The Medical Follies, etc If you believe that rusty* nails cause lockjaw, that raw beefsteak heals .a black eye, that a drunken man never hurts himself when he falls, or any of other hundreds of popular superstitions, you will want to read this amazing book — The Medical Man's Believe It or Not. Just Published $2.00 JEWS WITHOUT MONEY By MICHAEL GOLD "The two books that I have ever read that seem to give one the taste and terror and immensity of the East Side are Haunch, Paunch and Jowl and now Jews Without Money.""— JOHN DOS PASSOS. "The best story of tenement life I have ever read . . . unforgettable." — UPTON SINCLAIR. Just Published Wood cuts by Howard Simon. $3.00 THE SACRED FIRE The Story of Sex in Religion By B. Z. GOLDBERG A masterly study of man's love life in relation to religion throughout the exes. Here is the entire history of the sex motif in religion, from the gross sacred rites of savage man to the erotic symbols in modern religion. Illustrated with rare prints. $4.00 ORPHEUS A History of Religions By SALOMON REINACH Author of Apollo, etc. The third of the must books! Beside The Story of Philosophy and The Story of Mankind, place this Story of Religions, by one of the world's best known scholars. It will enrich your mind and en- chant your imagination. Just published $5.00 JUDGE AND FOOL By VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY (Altalena) "Jabotinsky has made the world of three thousand years ago as real, as exciting, as bit- ter to the modern reader, as it was to the people who lived in it. He has the gift of creating great tragic characters and great tragic situations. The book is in the grand manner." — Elmer Davis, N. Y. Herald Tribune. Just published $2.50 THE ROAD OF THE GODS By ISABEL PATERSON The well-known critic of the Herald Tribune, author of The Fourth Queen and The Singing Sea- son, has written this fine historical story of Pagan limes, a delightful story of lovers that were young when the world was young. Just Published $2.50 MANHATTAN MADE By CHARES RECHT Author of Rue with a Difference "Profoundly interesting; this poetry cuts deep; it stirs the mind; it is of us and our age." Ludwig Lewisohn. Just Published $2.00 DROLL PARADE By CARLTON TALBOTT Mischievous, fresh and irresistible, these poems will capture even more admirers than the author's first volume, Ballyhoo for a Mendicant. Just published $2M0 HORACF LIVERIGHT NY GOOD BOOKS JFk«* wrt&*t t* aditrtifn pl+m wnntio* Th« Nation

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276 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3374 he was to set out on the adventure that was to bring him triumph and renown. Considerably more than half of the book is given to the Texas period, to Houston's service in the United States Senate, and to his stubborn contest with the secessionists. The field has been worked over often, but Mr. James offers new lights that compel new interpretations and especially a stronger emphasis on Houston's part in national affairs. The man who out of an undisciplined rabble created an army, who with a remnant of this army in a single victory established the independence of Texas, and who out of chaos built up a stable republic was until 1846 only a sectional, a provincial figure. But the man who later maneuvered this republic into the Union, who as Senator and then as Governor was always an unflinching sup- porter of the Union, who in 1860 was strongly supported for the Presidency, and who conceivably might have been nominated and elected was an actor on a larger stage. It is this Houston that the author would have the reader particularly remember. Mr. James's short, crisp statements, interlaced here and there with sentences longer and more flexible, give movement and dignity to the narrative, and there are many spritely turns of phrase. It is a style that will, no doubt, find many admirers, but to the present reviewer it has at least some of the defects of its qualities. If it avoids the modern vice of smartness, it not infrequently reveals an overstraining for effect. The de- vice of ending a sentence with "however" or "nevertheless" hardly imparts the air of happy negligence that is intended, and the constant emphasis on events that are picturesque or strik- ing entails the omission of many of the little connecting facts and explanations that are essential to good historical narration. Nevertheless, the work is entitled to high praise. As history it is thorough and authentic, and as a story it is of absorbing interest. W. J. Ghent To Understand India, You Must Know Mahatma Gandhi "For all of us Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas is ... a valuable book. I am torn between praising Andrews and emphasizing Gandhi; between com- mending the work of the disciple in presenting us with a book so filled with sympathy and understanding, and describing the actual ideas of the leader himself . . . Anyone eager to know just what is being done in the East to create better living conditions for a depressed and often hopeless people will find eloquent passages in these pages." — Harry Hansen, in the New York World. MAHATMA GANDHI'S IDEAS Edited by C. F. Andrews The Macrnillan Company Price- $3*00 Books in Brief Joy Is My Name. By Sarah Salt. Payson and Clarke. $2.50. This slight story of a commonplace little tragedy, told with swiftness and precision, is no less poignant because it contains none of that perverted romanticism by use of which some women novelists think to achieve realism in their "slices-of- life" fiction. Joy is a provincial English girl of the lower middle class. She has achieved her heart's desire and is a "real actress" in a small and tawdry repertory company. But she loses her pitiful little job when the leading man buys her a pair of pretty shoes. Joy nearly starves looking for work in Lon- don ; even worse is the disillusion of her homecoming to "dearest mother." Finally she seeks out her old beau, the whilom lead- ing man, now, morally as well as materially, a down-and-outer. In Miss Salt's writing one comes to look for brilliant sentences — sentences that do more than sparkle, for they serve to illumi- nate the depths of her understanding. The Apes. By Eden Phillpotts. The Macrnillan Company. $2.50. Mr. Phillpotts is a versatile Englishman. His new book, partly a satire on humanity and partly a preachment of human- ism, tells of the apes of some far-off era who, in congress assem- bled, receive a prevision of their child-to4)e — man. It is a very small book and, although it is pleasant enough reading, seems hardly to warrant the full-book-length price which the publish- ers ask. Free. By Blair Niles. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.50. The author of "Condemned to Devil's Island" has here written a novel having the same general background as that When writing to advertisers pUat* mention The Nation A BIOGRAPHY!! THE DEVIL By Maurice Garcon and Jean Vinchon An intimate account of this lively rogue and engaging fellow. And yet — This Prince of Darkness, this fearful apparition is shown to have had another side to his mysterious nature. $5.00 E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 300-4th Ave., N. Y. G. (Publishers since 1852) If you would make your sides ache with laughter refresh your mind with wise and witty thoughts. Read Mr. Margrie's MAGGOTS BRAIN THE MIGHTY & MEN STUFF HEART A 8 c ho ol boy's Sums up the A Surrey of outline of His- world's greatest England as It Is and a Vision tory from Mi- ideas, achieve- of What it crobes to Super- ments, men, and Might Be. With men. With 64 books. An au- a critical appre- ciation of the Humorous illus- dacious booklet. Author by Ber- trations. nard Shaw. postpaid postpaid postpaid 30c 15c $1. WATTS A CO., S /6 Johnson's Court, London (England)

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March 5, 1930] The Nation 277 eminently successful fictional biography. The French penal col- ony in Guiana is the scene. In the novel the characters are no longer convicts; they are ex-convicts, lost souls who, freed from prison, must remain the rest of their lives in exile in this poverty-stricken patch of South America. That Mrs. Niles knows her locale one cannot for a moment doubt. And yet she has failed to convey the reality to her readers. Her ex-con- victs and natives seem fictional characters intended to carry along the somewhat melodramatic plot; and the book lacks the convincing power that might have succeeded in raising it above the level of the competent serial story. Consequences. By Julia Ellsworth Ford. E. P. Dutton and Company. $2.50. Mrs. Ford has chosen the novel as her vehicle for a power- ful expose and excoriation of the traffic in opium. In an excit- ing story which holds the interest to its very end she lays bare the great sin of the West against the East. Lord Ramondi, son and heir of the fabulously wealthy Marquis of Berkeley, decides to travel in India and China after his graduation from Oxford. This will afford him time to decide whether he shall please his father by taking his place at the head of the family and admin- istering the fortune that shall one day be his, or follow his own desire to become an artist. In China he makes many friends and he finds there the woman, a beautiful Chinese girl, whom he chooses for his future wife. Then, quite by accident, Ramondi learns the source of his father's wealth. It has been accumu- lated at the expense of numberless Orientals, some of whom he has come to count among his most valued friends, whose craving for opium, unscrupulously encouraged by those who profit by its sale, has filled the coffers of his father and of many another "noble" white man. Ramondi, overwhelmed by this terrible discovery, becomes himself temporarily the victim of his father's sin, thereby visiting upon the Marquis the punishment he de- serves, a punishment which breaks him at last upon the wheel of remorse. "Consequences" points a moral which every one who prates of the "white man's burden" should take to heart. Yama: The Pit. By Alexandre Kuprin. Translated from the Russian by Bernard Guilbert Guerney. $3. A sentimental, humane, photographic, and very moral depic- tion of life in a brothel. From Kuprin we learn that the brothel is a social evil inevitable while poverty and ignorance exist, that harlots are essentially human, and that disease is the terrible price of lechery. The worst features of this artistically indif- ferent book are the luridness of the jacket, the obtrusiveness of the translator, and the absurd extravagances of the introduction. Rose of Corinth. By Mitchell S. Buck. Nicholas L. Brown. This attractive little pink volume is inclosed in a green box, is excellently printed on French Navarre paper, and con- tains charming green decorations by Franz Felix. It should prove an agreeable ornament for the tables of those who buy their books to look at. The reading matter consists of a short story about a beautiful hetaera in ancient Corinth. It is slightly appealing to the erotic imagination, but otherwise quite inconsequential. The Life of an Ordinary Woman. By Anne Ellis. With an Introduction by Lucy Fitch Perkins. Houghton Mifflin Company. $3.50. This is, of course, not at all the life of an ordinary woman but the history of two magnificent female creatures — one Mrs. Ellis herself and the other her mother. The latter had her numerous babies by herself and unaided, and then got up from her bed and cooked a meal for the rest of the family. She was a miner's wife, brought up in all the hardships and penury of mining camps, accustomed to work from sunrise to "He has brought furrows of care to the brow of the Mayor of Chicago, but he continues unperturbed at his task of reinterpreting the American Revolu- tion. In his new volume, as in the former ones, Professor Van Tyne gives no aid and comfort to the thought that the War of Independence was a struggle between embattled cherubims and the demons of darkness. . . . His thorough narrative, vivid in many pages, whets the appetite for further treatment from the same source." — Allen Sinclair Will in the New York Times. "By virtue of its high literary quality, its impressive erudition, its aloof impartiality, its unhurried temper and dignity, this book must be pronounced a notable contribution to the historical literature of our time." — Henry Steele Commager in the New York Herald Tribune. "This volume is a positive pleasure for an historian who has the least vestige of an analytical mind. ... If the test of the interest of a book is its power of engross- ing no matter where it is opened and read, this is more than interesting." — America. "Not only scholarly, but absorbingly inter- esting. . . . One of the most readable histories of the Revolution which has ever been written." — Chicago Tribune. THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE By Claude H. Van Tyne $5.00 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY L When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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278 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3374 sunset cooking, baking, washing, scrubbing, nursing the sick, coaxing along a lazy or bad tempered or merely aimless hus- band, bearing and raising a brood of wild ones that were the despair of the neighbors. Mrs. Ellis, the oldest of these, herself married not one miner hut two, and lived through strikes and good times until she was a second time left a widow. Where her mother had seven children, dying at thirty- nine, she bore three and lost one — and lives to write her story. It is a pertinent addition to the saga of the pioneers. They, men as well as women, were cast in a heroic mold; but reading the list of woman's chores, one wonders if the scales of heroism did not tip ever so little in favor of the wife, the mother, the housekeeper. Drama Turn to the Left itfT^OPAZE" (Music Box) is a malicious and delightful comedy with a completely immoral tendency. Adapted "^ from the French of Marcel Pagnol by Benn W. Levy, it might be briefly described as the American underworld drama inverted. Instead of the crook who reforms in the last act, we have the honest man who goes completely crooked, and instead of this being presented as a tragedy, it is put before us as a success story. It is a girl, too, who is chiefly instrumental in inducing the hero to give up his honest ways. He wins her in the last act, when he has proved himself more of a scoundrel than his mentor, and his proposal is not an honorable one of marriage, but simply that she shall be his mistress. She accepts, and the curtain falls on a happy ending. It may be because of my upbringing, but I confess that Topaze, the hero, appealed to me most in the first two acts, when he was still a fool and an honest man. We encounter him first as a schoolmaster, laboriously trying to indoctrinate his little boys in the principles of virtue. He endeavors to teach them that ill-gotten gains do not bring happiness, that poverty is no crime, but most of them distress him by repeat- edly giving sensible and realistic answers to such questions as whether a man who has enriched himself through evil means has any friends. He is finally dismissed from the school for his insistence on giving honest marks to the stupid son of a baroness. Suzy Courtois, the rich and beautiful lady whose nephew he has been tutoring, is the mistress of a corrupt legislator who has been turning over various municipal contracts to his own corporations headed by a dummy. Topaze, completely innocent, is hired as this dummy at a salary beyond his wildest dreams, and is horrified when he discovers the corruption to which he has been a party. But instead of jail and dishonor, he finds that his new wealth and prominence bring him only compliment, respect, and friends seeking favors. The turning-point comes when he learns that the newspaper which threatened to expose him can be bought off, and when his great ambition, a degree in moral philosophy, which had previously been denied him on his merits, is secured for him by blackmail. Thereupon he takes the reins in his own hands, embarks upon corruption on an international scale, kicks his former employer out, and appro- priates his employer's mistress. Frank Morgan as Topaze gives one of the most admir- able performances of the season, realizing to the full not only the early guilelessness and timidity of the character, but the deep pathos of the spectacle of trust and innocence confronting a worldly world. The return of Fred Stone to the stage in "Ripples" (New Amsterdam), accompanied not only by Mrs. Stone and Doro- thy but by still another beautiful and talented daughter, Paula, is the occasion for one of those tender evenings when a sophis- ticated New York audience smiles with tears in its eyes and laughs good-naturedly at anything said. "Ripples" is in the best tradition of Fred Stone plays: there is excellent dancing and acrobatics, a sentimental story based on the legend of Rip Van Winkle, with a lovely mountain scene and a haunting dance of dwarfs, clean fun, and tuneful music. The humor is not all it might be, but Andrew Tombes and Eddie Foy, Jr., handle their material very commendably. Henry Hazlitt To John Wexley, himself an actor, we owe one of the most extraordinary plays ever put on in New York, "The Last Mile," at the Sam H. Harris Theater. It is a tragedy of the death house in a prison, based obviously on the recent prison mutinies in Colorado and New York and possibly upon a story in the American Mercury. Whether it was meant to be primarily propaganda is not clear, but if it was then the young author has achieved that rare thing, a piece of propa- ganda of extraordinary power and of a dramatic intensity and worth which leave nothing to be desired. Indeed, if it were more emotional and more intense the first act would be un- bearable; as it was it was hardly to be endured. It portrayed the last couple of hours of a man condemned to die, the hor- rible ritual of preparation, the frightful effect of it all upon six other condemned men, the nauseating religious prepara- tions, the final abandonment of hope, the march to the death chair, and finally the hum of the motor which recorded the fact that a stupid and backward State had itself committed the very crime for which it was inflicting its barbarous penalty. We defy any intelligent person to sit through this act and come out a believer in capital punishment. The heartrending power of the scene was in part due to the altogether admirable acting of the convicted men in their cells — the march of the doomed man to the chair, most movingly portrayed by James Bell, remains unforgettable, his legs plainly weighing a ton each — and in part to the remarkable simplicity, directness, and naturalness of the dialogue, into which no mawkish sentiment was allowed to obtrude. The next acts were given over to the hopeless revolt of the convicts, who take several prisoners including the priest and the principal keeper. The latter and one of his subordinates are killed in cold blood by "Killer" Mears (splendidly acted by Spencer Tracy) as if to bring out the fact that even this horrible kill- ing cannot be so revolting as a deliberate execution by the State. If the members of the New York Legislature could be induced to see this play they would certainly pass the bill abolishing murder by the State. All in all, here is a great play, extraordinarily creditable to author and producer. It deserves a run of years. O. G. V. EIGHTH SATURDAY LUNCHEON of the New York Chapter LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY at the HOTEL WOODSTOCK 13:45 P. M., Saturday, March 8th, 1930 "The Telephone — Servant of the People** Speakers: W. J. O'CONNOR, Assistant Vice-President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. EDWARD D. BIERETZ, International Vice-President of the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. DONALD RICHBERG, Attorney for Railway Brotherhood; Gen- eral Counsel for the National Conference on Valuation of Railroads. McALISTER COLEMAN, Writer. Chairman: BENJAMIN STOLBERG Make reservations in advance at the office of the L.I.D., 112 East 19th Street, New York City— Algonquin 5865. MEMBERS $1.00 NON-MEMBERS $1.25 Listen in on WEAF, l:i5 P. M., Eastern Standard Time. When writing to advertiser! please mention The Nation

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March 5, 1930] The Nation 279 □ THEATRES □ LEO BULGAKOV Thbatrb Associates, Inc., presents AT THE BOTTOM "Really worth seeing." — Brown, Post. by MAXIM GORKY New version by William L. Laurence Phone reservations accepted — Circle 1407 "A fine play" — Mantle, Newt. XXI A T nOR F THEATRE— 50th St.. Bet. 6th & 7th Aves. Eve., 8 :40 W t\L*,UVJIS.r MATINEES Wednesday and Saturday, 2 :40 Kenntth Macgowan und J. V. Reed preetnt BASIL SYDNEY and MARY ELLIS in CHILDREN of DARKNESS by Edwin Justus Mayer, author of "The Firebrand" DTT rmufr\VH? THEATRE— 47th Street, Wert of Broadway tSLL 1 JTHJIiHi Evenings, 6:50— MaU., Wed. and Sat., 2:40. CIVIC REPERTORY u£X2\$r 60c, $1, 1.50. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2:30. EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Fri.Eve.,Feb.28. "Sea Gull" ; Sat.Mat.Mar.l, "Peter Pan" ; Sat.Eve.,Mar.l, "Open Door" & "Women Have Their Way"; Mon.Eve.,Mar.3, "Sea Gull" ; Tues.Eve.,Mar.4, "A Sunny Morning" & "The Lady From Alfaqueque" : Wed. Eve.,Mar.5, "Living Corpse" ; Thurs. Mat..Mar.6, ' Open Door" & "Women Have Their Way" ; Thurs.Eve.,Mar.6, "Hedda Gabler." Seats 4 weeks in advance at Box Office & Town Hall, 113 W. 43rd St. Theatre, 47th St., West of Broadway Evenings 8 :50 ; Matinees Wed. & Sat. 2 :30 ETHEL BARRYM0RE LEE SHUBERT Presents PHILIP MERIVALE IN DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY A COMEDY ABOUT LIFE "Stirring, fascinating, alive." — Loekridge, Sun. The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present RUTH DRAPER in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER SKETCHES Evenings: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 8:50. iTHV/fPTiY THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats. Thurs. VjUIVICU X and Sat 2 .30 VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 GRACE GEORGE with In the ST. JOHN ERVINE Comedy "FIRST MRS. FRASER A E. Matthews and Lawrence Grossmith 8:50 PT AYHOINR 48th St. East of Broadway. Eves., rLAinuuau Mats Wed Thurs and Sat _ 2:3o EXTRA MATINEE EVERY THURSDAY UNTIL JUNE 15 Matinee Every Day during Easter Week. ^REBOUND- With HOPE WILLIAMS "This is the best light comedy written by anybody hereabouts in ten or twenty years, and it's not so damned light, either." — Heywood Broun, New York Telegram. Arthur Hopkins presents DONALD OGDEN STEWART'S COMEDY Plymouth Theatre. Eves. 8:50; Mats. Thurs. & Sat., 2:40. The Theatre Guild Presents METEOR By 8. H. BEHRMA5 p.-Il J THEA., 62nd St. W. of Broadway VjUUU Ergs. 8:50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. S:40 The Apple Cart Bernard Shaw's Political Extravaganza M ATJT'TTV nrPK' Theatre, 45th St., W. of Eighth Ave. ITlAIlllll Dll.^JV Evgs., 8:30. Mats., Thurs. & Sat., 2:30. FILMS □ S City Haul By ELIZABETH MIELE with HERBERT RAWLINSON A COMEDY ON MUNICIPAL POLITICS ELTTNGE THEATRE, 42nd St., West of B'dway. Evenings 8 :60. Matinees Wednesday and Saturday 2 :30. HERMAN SHUMLIN presents THE LAST MILE "Most exciting play in New York today. Superbly done. Cheera keep rising in your throat. — John Mason Brown, Poet. C A lVyf U UADDIQ Theatre 42nd St. W. of Broadway OAlVl n. riAlXlXlO Eves. 8:50. Matinees Wed. * Sat., 2:30 VOTED THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR Matinees: Good Seats, All Prices, at Box Office WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE ARLISS In (4 DISRAELI (A Vitaphone All-Talking Picture) *1 CENTRAL THEATRE Broadway and 47th St. Daily 2:45 — 8:45 Sunday 3 — 6 — 8:45 55th STREET PLAYHOUSE JSJ& SWS2: Continuous 1 :30 until midnight. Popular Prices Commencing: Saturday, March 1st — FIRST TIME AT POPULAR PRICES THE FIRST 100% GERMAN TALKING PICTURE "DICH HAB ICH GELIEBT" ("BECAUSE I LOVED YOU") "One of the best films that have come from Berlin since •Variety."— SAYS FILM DAILY. □ □ DEBATE □ DEBATE! T A significant debate on the most Fundamental Problem suggested by the human mind since the Specu- lations of the Ancients. RESOLVED IS THE WORLD <% WE LIVE IN f RATIONAL « JOHN COWPER POWYS says NO Noted Novelist and Poet — Author of "Wolf Solent" HARRY WATON says YES Noted Author and Lecturer — Author of "Pain and Pleasure" Chairman— DR. G. F. BECK— Director of Labor Temple Sunday Afternoon, March 2nd, 1930, at 2:30 P.M. Great Hall, Cooper Union, 8th St. & 4th Ave. TICKETS 75 CENTS, AT THE DOOR $1.00 Obtainable at Rand School, 7 East 15th St.; Labor Temple, 14th St. and Second Ave.; Room 702, 110 West 40th St.; Rational Vegetarian Restaurant, 199 Second Ave.; Columbia University Book Store, Journalism Building. For Mall Orders Address Room 702, 110 West 40th St. AUSPICES WORKERS EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTE

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280 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3374 Films Inflated "Grandeur" I DO not know if any psychologist has tried to analyze the peculiar complexes which dominate the minds of the film- manufacturing colony in Hollywood, but I am certain that the people there suffer from some strange mental disease. Taken individually they seem to have the normal quota of intelligence, technical competence, and even imagination. In any collective effort, however, they almost invariably sink to sheer puerility. Witness the present Hollywood craze for plots dealing with stage life. Picture after picture has shown us the miraculous rise of an unknown vaudeville actor to stardom on Broadway. Why, you will ask, this persistent riding to death of a patently trivial subject? Because the public demands it? No, I am sure the reason is simply that Hollywood finds in stage life the easiest formula for making a song-and-dance show realistically plausible. It has obviously never occurred to the film producers that actors today are much more anxious to attain stardom in Hollywood than on Broadway. Nor has it occurred to them that a film within a film provides as many opportunities for singing and dancing as does a play within a play or, to be more precise, a play within a film. But then, to make singing and dancing expressly cinematic, something that belongs intrinsically to the screen instead of being a slavish copy of the stage, requires a little thinking and a little imagination, whereas aping the stage requires none. It is this strange preference for the trite and hackneyed that makes "Happy Days" (Roxy) such a painful disappoint- ment. For "Happy Days" is not an ordinary picture. It is an experiment designed to herald forth a new achievement in cine- matic technique — the enlarged projection. You would think that with the increased screen space at their command the producers would have tried to present their entertainers (since the pic- ture is largely a revue) in all the variety of simultaneous con- trasts and juxtapositions made possible by the enlarged projec- tion. You would expect to see the screen surface used for weaving decorative and rhythmic patterns built up of different groups of actors and dancers on the principle of parallel action. But what do you find? A not particularly bright comedy introduc- tion of stage life leading up to a glorified but uncommonly dull minstrel show, both of which derive no greater benefit from the larger screen than the ability to show an increased number of people at the same time or a full-sized figure on a scale approximating the normal. Neither of these advantages is of much importance except for reproducing the effect of the stage. By contrast with "Happy Days," "Puttin* on the Ritz" (Earl Carroll Theater) may almost pass for a Hollywood masterpiece. To be sure, it has its defects — the inevitable story of a vaudeville team and all the stage business that goes with it — but it breaks away from the routine in a number of scenes, notably, in Harry Richman's spirited dance against the per- fervid movements of the chorus. For this, Mr. Sloman, the director, deserves high praise. Praise is also due to Mr. George Arliss for his brilliant acting in "The Green Goddess" (Winter Garden), a slight but entertaining skit by William Archer which does not obtrude its stage descent on the screen, although it does not achieve, either, any cinematic distinction. As a comedy "Not so Dumb" (Capitol) is sufficiently amusing, with Miss Marion Davies proving herself a very able comedienne. Mr. King Vidor's direction of the picture, how- ever, is only competent, and from him, of all Hollywood direc- tors, we are entitled to expect something far more inspiring. Alexander Bakshy FILM AND DEBATE TIMELY 3-CORNERED DEBATE!!! SOVIETISM vs. RELIGION SOVIETISM (Atheism) LIBERALISM (Agnosticism) for RELIGION (Deism) max for EASTMAN Brilliant Author-Lecturer (lately returned from Russia) HARRY ELMER for BARNES Noted Social Philosopher DR. STEPHEN S. WISE Eloquent Expounder — Subject — RESOLVED: That the anti-religious policy of the Soviet government is detrimental to civilization. CARNEGIE HALL, i'V*^.. SUNDAY, MARCH 16, 1930, AT 3 P.M. Reserved Seats, $1.00, $1.50, $1.75, $2.00, $2.50, $3.00 BUY YOLK SEATS NOW FOB BEST LOCATIONS On sale at Carnegie Hall Box Office (Circle 1770) ; Rand School Bookshop, 7 E. 15th Street ; New School Bookshop, 465 W. 23rd St.; Columbia University Bookstore, 116th St. and B'way ; and in person or by mail from offices of LEAGUE FOR PUBLIC DISCUSSION 11 W. 42nd St. Checkering 5796— Lackawanna 1613 (N. B. This debate will be published ad verbatim. Reserve your copy now by mailing $1.00.) R K O CAMEO 42nd St & B'way American Premiere u BEG. SAT. MARCH 1st Newest S0VKIN0 Production CHINA EXPRESS Sensational Uprising aboard the famous Nanking to Luchow express DARINGLY DIFFERENT An amazing film tt Whtn writing to advertUert pleat* mention The Nation

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March 5, 1930] The Nation 281 WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See •At the Bottom— Waldorf— 116 VV. 50th St. •Berkeley Square — Lyceum — E. 45th St. ••Children of Darkness — Biltmore — W. 74th St. •Civic Repertory — 14th St. & 6th Ave — See Advertisement. •Death Takes a Holiday — Barrymore Theatre — 47th St., W. of B'dway. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st St., E. of B'dway. ••Everything's Jake — Assembly — 39th St., E. of B'dway. June Moon — Broadhurst — W. 44th St. Mei Lan-Fang— National— 208 W. 41st St. ••Meteor— Guild— W. 52nd St. •♦Rebound— Plymouth — 45th St., W. of B'dway. ••Strictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. •••Strike Up The Band— Times Sq.— W. of B'dway. ••The First Mrs. Fraser — Playhouse — 48th St., E. of B'dway. •The Infinite Shoeblack— Elliott— 39th St., E. of B'dway. •The Last Mile— Sam H. Harris — +2nd St., W. of B'dway. ••Topaze — Music Box — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •••Wake Up and Dream — Selwyn — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. First Nights The Apple Cart— Beck — 45th St., E. of Eighth Ave. The Green Pastures — Mansfield — 17th St., W. of B'dway. The International Revue — Majestic — Films China Express — Cameo — 42nd St., E. of B'dway. Dich Hab Ich Geliebt— 55th St. Theatre— 55th St., E. of 7th Ave. Disraeli — Central Theatre — Broadway and 47th St. The Vagabond Lover — Criterion — B'dway at 44th St. Announcement Albany Nation Meeting, Tues Eve., March 4, 8 P. M. Channing Hall, Unitarian Church. Oswald Garrison Villard to speak on Russia and Contemporary Problems. /XPLORATIVE Itiner- aries worked out with reference to social, economic, historic, artistic and scenic features. Visits to factories, schools, children's com- munities, collective farms and villages . . . art treasures, palaces and workers' rest homes . . . for the adventurous . . . camping In the Caucasus and study of primitive tribes. Small groups, each accompanied by a quali- fied American leader and Russian interpreter. From $395 including express steamship pass- age. Ijiterature available. Individual itineraries arso^ exe- • cuted a Independent year-Yound • representation in Russia 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK JME^mfc^R-Q'Aa •Drama. •Comedy. •••Musical. to Tica.d&aA of tfie, ^A/oLCCc>rZs^ ^Xakjcuc ideaAt qm& ^^iffcncnt7^hai^ccHM^tnjuj La cccuufiirzci iju. tjo change, iaousc xofioCs outtoofk cxn ^tifcr — La making zjou rnentaXJlM >»if Up — fa^dnatGA "J/oc* Cha its dLartlriQ inn.oucm.cjns — tfte. one ^kyoxoru COKtPZ ZfoiAuc, Jon^cd. toiridlt^—o* if z^ou hau& Been iftc^jC^Loant^io Ji&tZutrz. to J&C& iOo icLsaig inJytacu^cG? 3~[&c£. La ovac exceptional op~ pcrt£u\ni£y t^oUd^SotllCtTfiuddiCl in turn i£ uAtnc*3 tfo May lot dntcknaJtonal MDau Ce£tlna£u>n.. G, Special! tourt, JtUuo&a GjvdJ 1£& ~ S-5. QtternErz — • Sscom f&rf-O — KJf^incu-LcU* : PccLn^at^nlict Jja^aa^e, botfi -u>cufo , acccjrruocicitj^frua in jhcat^^oloktcf hofeoa in jluxt&ia, 9 i3 mcaJLd daib(i suxiiu)OL( vuitfz \*teep£sc, ^Ujht&e&Lric toustjO-, j&ckjvvc&a oj^ arv t^aiiah'^paaMng guide, etc. XXnd&t 1h& auspice* of^ tn^ foxjotTlnieJUcan axaani^aXoon t^pHcaerzudooieC^lu^la. tJ^ifzG UJCaxrel&t,, (fkijLcc/xto^o, T$todlrz£&d.Ma*z , StucLesztl 'cfu$l information aJUutlu mailed. irrro\ld UbiotiAta Inc. ^„ . ^^^ Q^M 175 Slfm Ooenue, jv.y. CU^on^ijun 6G56-Q797 (p.S.^ tg£, tjKoiApo of-' ^&tcictcnta arui, tuot^cw arte, naur Uz -ftycrruxtucrrz. :f&t oe>uj Jou? Jyc/cecl (souk*, Onfy lhx>ae xoha donTrnind. Mougfziruj Win 3ootctZ TiiA&aLa, >ahfrti£cL iruztMjee -font pcutucjuuiuva. 4H&0 La iPti. cxxrtTT When writing to advertiteri please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Haiti — a Plan for Self-Government By L. J. de BEKKER NEWS that the American Occupation might be with- drawn from Haiti aroused the keenest interest in the island; and this interest was increased to great excitement by Senator Borah's declaration that first among the "things to be done meantime," that is, before the Hoover Commission made its report, was the substitution of a civil governor to replace High Commissioner Russell. The re- actions to this proposal were various and significant. The subsidized newspapers representing the Occupation and Presi- dent Borno at once assumed the attitude that the appoint- ment of a civil governor would be an insult to the national pride of Haiti. The Opposition press immediately retorted that it was not important what the governor was called, espe- cially during a transitional period, since the American high commissioner had been governor in fact since 1922. This view, expressed by Charles Moravia in his Opposition jour- nal, Le Temps, drew a supporting letter from Elie Guerin, a Haitian lawyer and for many years a prominent figure in the Haitian nationalist movement. After remarking that it seemed as though word must have been given by Borno to his newspapers to feign indignation at the word governor, M. Guerin continues as follows: As Le Temps has so judiciously asked: Why should we be alarmed at the correct naming of a thing which we have endured [under another name] for eight long and mortal years? As Le Temps said in its editorial: Since 1922 this country has endured the misdeeds of a governor under the name of high commissioner. . . . [Yet] because he does not call himself governor the so-called pa- triotism of some people accommodates itself to the situation [to his misdeeds], in spite of the ruin and misery, the de- spair and the blood which his proconsulate has spread throughout the country to the point of engendering revo- lution. [Now, when] in order to assure definitive relief [for Haiti] it is proposed to invest his successor with the title of governor, here are people feigning indignation who have never played and do not wish to play any role except that of executioners of their country! A handsome state of affairs! . . . Indeed a handsome state of affairs! We nationalists say this: If we have been able to endure for fifteen years the thing itself in all its horror without faltering and without approv- ing it, ceaselessly struggling against it in spite of all the risks of persecutions and suffering, we shall express no indignation merely because it is called by its true name. It is necessary for the Haitian nation to permit a high com- missioner or a governor to restore her sovereign rights, just as she permitted Admiral Caperton to come and rob her of them, but this must be done under the following conditions: 1. Cessation of the convention of 1915. The terms of this convention are still enforced, although the treaty ex- pired in 1926. 2. Immediate notification to the Haitian people to pre- pare for an election, to be held under an altogether liberal electoral rule, for the selection of senators and deputies. 3. Discussion and ratification of a protocol or a treaty to be made by a reconstituted national Haitian government providing for the withdrawal of the American Occupation. Here lies the only solution which is at once logical, accept- able, and satisfactory if we are to dismiss the possibility of indemnification by the United States. . . . While the subsidized press continued to speculate about the changes which might result in the government of Haiti as a result of the commission's visit, without admitting for a moment the possibility of the withdrawal of the marines, the leaders of the Opposition were in consultation over plans for an orderly and gradual withdrawal not only of the marines but of the entire American Occupation, following the establishment of a genuinely representative government elected by the Haitian people. Placide David, editor of La Presse, outlined in his paper a plan for self-government which is printed herewith: 1. On April 5 next the American agents shall suggest to the local government that in the interest of public peace the presidential election of April 14 be postponed. 2. On May 15, the term of the actual president normally coming to an end, the representative of President Hoover shall assume the responsibility of government. (It goes without say- ing that General Russell will not occupy this position.) 3. The special American agent shall surround himself with a council, including some Haitian representatives, to assist him in the promulgation of executive orders which shall have the following objects and shall be issued under the conditions mentioned: (a) Formation of electoral registration commissions. (b) Rules for procedure of legislative elections. (c) Slight modifications in the method of election of senators so as to conform more to our traditions, in ac- cordance with the constitution of 1889. (d) These executive orders shall be issued within two months, that is, between May 15 and July 15. At this latter date the primary assemblies shall be convoked, and a delay of two months accorded for the registration of voters. (e) The election of deputies and that of electors of arrondissements shall be fixed for September 30. These two elections shall be held at the same time. (f) On September 30 voters shall convocate at the capital of each electoral district, in a place designated by the communal administration, for the election of candidates for the senate. (g) On October 10 the convocation of the deputies and the establishment of the chamber shall take place. (h) From October 10 to 20 the chamber shall pro- ceed to the election of senators. (i) On October 25 the senate shall be convened. (j) On October 26, the two chambers shall meet in the National Constitutional Assembly for the vote on the new constitution. Under the circumstances this work ought to be completed at the latest by December 10. (k) On December 15 election of the president of the republic shall take place. (I) On December 20 the chief of state shall be sworn in. At this last date the mission of the special representative of President Hoover as well as the military occupation should have come to an end. It seems to us that these are practical ideas which should receive the attention of the President of the United States.

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The Nation FOUNDED 1 g65 Vol. cxxx NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 1930 No. 3375 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 283 EDITORIALS: The Lesson of Dollar Wheat 286 Poor Porto Rico 287 A Conspiracy 287 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 288 POWER CONTROL BREAKS DOWN. By Laurence Todd 289 THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CENSOR. IV. THE SIEGE OF FORT SCRIBNER. By Henry Raymond Mussey 291 THE HOOVER HIPPODROME. By Paul Y. Anderson 293 THE INVENTOR ENTERS HEAVEN. By James Rorty 295 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 297 CORRESPONDENCE 297 BOOKS AND DRAMA: Dialogue. By Irwin Edman 298 Kaleidoscope. By Henry Hazlitt 298 A Romancer's Columbus. By Clifton P. Fadiman 298 Libertine and Libertarian. By William Seagle 299 The Unthinkable War. By William MacDonald 299 Into the Wilderness. By Dorothy Van Doren 300 The Nationalist East. By Elizabeth MacCallum 301 Illumination. By Granville Hicks 303 Books in Brief 304 Drama : For the Defense. By Joseph Wood Krutch 306 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 307 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: The Massacre at Aux Cayes. By L. J. de Bekker 308 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. AN ENTIRELY ADMIRABLE DECISION was handed down by the United States Circuit Court of Appeals on March 3 in reversing the conviction of Mrs. Mary Ware Dennett for sending obscene matter through the mails. The decision, written by Judge Augustus N. Hand, and concurred in by Judges Thomas Swan and Harrie B. Chase, is one of the most thoroughgoing and handsome rebukes on record to the sort of obscenity snoop- ers who have been so noisomely active of late. The decision says in part : The defendant's discussion of the phenomena of sex is written with sincerity and feeling and with an idealization of the marriage relation and sex emotions. . . . The old theory that information on sex matters should be left to chance has greatly changed and it is commonly thought that much was lacking in the old mystery and reticence. . . . While it may be thought that portions of the tract ["The Sex Side of Life"] go into unnecessary details that would better have been omitted, it may be fairly answered that the curiosity of many adolescents would not be satisfied without full explanation, and that no more than that is really given. . . . The statute we have to construe [that defining "obscene and lascivious matter"] was never thought to bar from the mails everything that might stimu- late sex impulses. . . . Like everything else, the law must be construed reasonably, with a view to the general ob- jects aimed at ... it must not be construed to interfere with serious instruction regarding sex matters unless the terms it is conveyed in are clearly indecent. These are only the high spots in a completely sane, reasoned, and farsighted discussion of Mrs. Dennett's pamphlet and the implications arising therefrom. Her counsel, Morris L. Ernst, declared that the decision was a severe blow at the powers of federal censors in the Post Office Department. It is time that such chastisement was administered. ENCOURAGING NEWS comes from Geneva that the League of Nations committee of eleven jurists which is engaged in coordinating the Kellogg pact and the Cove- nant has gone so far as to propose an amendment to Article XII of the Covenant declaring that "in no case" can League members resort to war to settle their differences. It is, of course, a far cry from this preliminary action to its adoption by all the members of the League. But sincerity speaks out of this action, which is obviously a genuine attempt to put the right kind of teeth into the Kellogg pact. The whole trouble at London and elsewhere is that the nations, includ- ing our own, which signed the Kellogg pact did so with their tongues in their cheeks. It is hard to see how if this amend- ment to Article XII goes through, League members can any longer continue to go ahead with their armaments as if the Kellogg pact did not exist. More than that, the amendment, it is reported, further strengthens the pact be- cause it excludes all the reservations permitting defensive wars, or wars in undefined regions of vital interest to the British Empire — the reservations now attached to the Kel- logg-Briand treaty. Even a phrase to the effect that mem- bers of the League must have recourse only to pacific means for the settlement of any dispute likely to lead to a rupture of relations marks a step forward. AN EMPHATIC PROTEST against the proposed betrayal of the United States by an abandonment of the reduction program at the Naval Disarmament Conference has been cabled to London by 1,200 Americans under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, Raymond Fosdick, James G. MacDonald of the Foreign Policy Association, and Professor James T. Shotwell. The document again recalls to the delegates Mr. Hoover's words of promise to the American people that reduction "cannot be too low for us" and declares that this policy of reduction "has had and continues to have the overwhelming indorsement and sup- port of the American people." The Harvard Liberal Club and the Radcliffe College International Club have sent to President Hoover a petition, signed by 62 members of the faculties of the two colleges and 765 students, demanding that our delegates stand behind a drastic reduction of the capital ships and asking "why our delegation is running counter to a policy so recently declared." At Yale, through the Liberal Club, 300 students have similarly petitioned President Hoover. Senator Borah, too, has taken a hand by a radio speech in which he declared that failure to bring

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284 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3375 about substantial cuts would be "nothing less than a catas- trophe"; and well asked his hearers: "What is national security when the whole world is armed to the teeth?" In London the answer is talk of a three-power agreement be- tween Japan, England, and the United States. That would be better than nothing. But the delegation must realize that a large section of public opinion here will not be satis- fied with anything less than a genuine move toward dis- armament. NOT A SUPER-BANK, but an institution of large powers and even larger hopes notwithstanding, is the burden of the description of the Bank for International Set- tlements which Jackson E. Reynolds, chairman of the com- mittee which drafted the plan of organization, gave recently in New York. The bank charter is to be perpetual and its statute is so drawn as to be hard to amend, at least to the bank's disadvantage. As far as words and promises can go, the bank will be free of requisitions or other interference in time of war, thus setting a standard which it is to be hoped may be applied to all other forms of property not directly intended for military use. What will keep the institution from becoming a super-bank is, apparently, the fact that it cannot issue currency in any form (London insisted that the bank should not be allowed to deal in acceptances) and may not engage in any financial transaction in any country rep- resented on its directorate without the consent of the central bank of that country; but Mr. Reynolds sees it as "coordi- nating the central banks of the world" and eventually hold- ing a large part of the world's gold. The Federal Reserve system has no official connection with the management of the World Bank, but there is every reason to believe that the choice of the two American directors of the bank, Gates W. McGarrah and Leon Fraser, the former of whom is slated for the presidency, was made with Mr. Hoover's approval. Both Mr. McGarrah and Mr. Fraser are men of the high- est standing, and no better selections could well have been made. ENFORCEMENT OF NARCOTIC LAWS by the federal government is due for a shake-up if the present- ment of a federal grand jury at New York on February 21 is given attention at Washington. "Wholesale padding of the records of the local federal narcotic office in New York" for several months, beginning in April, 1929, under orders telephoned to the Assistant Deputy Commissioner by the Deputy Commissioner at Washington, is the startling charge which the grand jury urged should be laid before Secretary Mellon. "Evidences of gross dereliction and incompetence" on the part of some of the agents attached to the New York office, including evidence that "at least one of the agents is a user of drugs," form a part of this unsavory exposure. A few days after this presentment was made the newspapers reported that a woman federal agent, herself an addict, was under investigation on suspicion of peddling drugs in night clubs and among theatrical people. The reply of the Treas- ury Department is amazing. Colonel L. G. Nutt of Wash- ington, the official whom the grand jury has branded with fraud, has been given a roving commission in the prohibition service, and the three federal officials responsible for the ex- posure have been transferred, one to Chicago, one to Kan- sas City, and the third to Honolulu. BROADSIDE ATTACKS on prohibition exceeding in vigor and severity anything known to our legislative history marked the opening hearings before the House Judi- ciary Committee on the administration of the prohibitory laws. No one of the speakers went quite so far as Frederic R. Coudert, Sr., of New York, who declared that "it is easy to predict that the government, legislative or administrative, that attempted something like real enforcement would be swept out of existence at the next election, and if that were not so they would have on their hands a civil war," but a long list of prominent speakers fell only a little short of Mr. Coudert in denouncing the system and its effects. Dr. Samuel Harden Church, president of the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburgh, arraigned "the questionable methods of en- forcement, all on money appropriated by Congress," and in- sisted that "the dignity and tranquillity of the nation have been destroyed by conditions which never have occurred be- fore in times of peace." The president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, General W. W. Atterbury, told the committee that he could not find that prohibition "has made a particle of difference with the discipline" of the road, while the Rev. Dr. John A. Ryan, of the Catholic University of America, affirmed that "prohibition sears everything it touches and confuses the mental processes of higher officials." A GOOD BEGINNING has apparently been made by President Hoover's commission in Haiti. Overruling the autocratic General Russell, they insisted that the Hai- tians be allowed to hold a parade in protest against the occu- pation, and an orderly and extraordinarily impressive demon- stration by 1,200 women offering public prayers and then passing in procession before the commission's headquarters was the result. In consequence of the fair attitude of the commission, the Haitian opposition is reported as having given up its original intention to "boycott" the hearings. A striking body of protest has already been put into the record from leaders representing powerful groups opposed to inter- vention. They condemn General Russell as a virtual dic- tator and declare that President Borno is simply a puppet in his hands. As for the Council of State which President Borno has asked to elect his successor on April 14, they assert that the council is simply a body of clerks for the President, and that unless a popular election is allowed bloodshed will certainly result. The testimony already taken is bound to be impressive to any fair-minded person. AMERICAN COMMUNISTS are annoying and silly, but they will not become dangerous unless the authori- ties give them importance by attempting their forcible suppression. Recent demonstrations in New York and else- where have led to some lamentable instances of police bru- tality, but in other cases have been met with notable good sense and good temper. We hope that progressive annoy- ance may be met with progressive good humor on the part of the officers of the law. Mayor Walker's two-faced public statement, however, does not help. It is likely to encourage the use of violence. Certainly no thoughtful American can have anything but condemnation for the provocative blast of Matthew Woll, acting president of the National Civic Federation and vice-president of the American Fed- eration of Labor, who sends to commercial organizations in 500 cities and to all members of Congress a letter designed

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March 12, 1930] The Nation 285 to stir up hatred against Soviet Russia as being responsible for these outbreaks. In Los Angeles a reactionary school board has prepared a fresh assault on our liberties by under- taking to prevent any young person of communist beliefs from getting a high-school diploma. Such certificates hence- forth will read as follows: "This diploma is awarded in consideration of a satisfactory record in character and citi- zenship and the completion of a course of study as prescribed by the Board of Education." Superintendent Bouelle, ac- cording to a dispatch, regards the new wording as a guaranty that no student known to harbor communist beliefs will get a diploma. Does the Los Angeles school board know noth- ing of the long history of persecution for opinion's sake? WISE AND FARSIGHTED is Stalin's decision to put on the brakes in Russia and to slow down the collectivization and nationalization of the farms. Walter Duranty declares in the New York Times that the states- manship of this remarkable article of Stalin's "appears to put Stalin on a level with Lenin himself." That may well be, but the truth is that any child could see that Moscow has been going ahead so fast as to jeopardize the whole Com- munist experiment. Already Stalin says that 50 per cent of the peasant holdings have been collectivized and more than 3,500,000 tons, or 90 per cent, of the cleaned seed have already been delivered to the collectives for the spring sow- ing, something which appeared, Duranty reports, "quite im- possible three weeks ago." Stalin is opposed at present to pushing collectivization to a further extreme of commu- nism and of sharing even pigs, poultry, and houses with the collectives. Similarly Stalin has only sneers for those Com- munists who would start collectives by pulling down church bells and "calling themselves r-r-revolutionaries." This is statesmanship, for a wise statecraft knows when to retreat. THE PRESIDENT has appointed another business "go-getter" to an important diplomatic post. John N. Willys, the automobile builder who sold out his motor interests last July for a neat $21,000,000, is to round out his career as United States Ambassador to Poland. This is in several aspects the worst of Mr. Hoover's bad diplomatic appointments, for Mr. Willys is by education, training, and experience totally unqualified for this job. Poland is in a difficult and dangerous financial situation. It is beset with grave economic and international dangers and it is in the hands of a dictatorship. To make matters more difficult, the lot of the Jews in Poland at present is direful — worse even than in 1922. Race discrimination is everywhere preva- lent ; economic opportunities are completely denied to all Jews, especially to Jewish women. In consequence their American relatives are deeply concerned and are most eager to have a skilled diplomat at Warsaw who will be of real help. They have nothing to hope for from Mr. Willys. THE TRIBUTES TO PRESIDENT MASARYK on his eightieth birthday will be numerous and warm. He has been head of the Czecho-Slovak Republic since 1918, and is its founder in that he was, in 1914, the organizer of the Czecho-Slovak movement for independence and later convinced Woodrow Wilson and the Allied leaders of the desirability of building up this new state. There is no ques- tion that the government he reared has been the stablest and probably the cleanest and best of the new ones set up after the war. In this he has, of course, had the support of a highly competent foreign minister, Eduard Benes. It is nat- urally too early to judge of their work, or of its possibili- ties of endurance. Unfortunately we cannot give him the unqualified praise as a statesman which he so eminently deserves as a man, a famous leader of oppressed minorities, a champion of the Jews at a time when it almost meant martyrdom to defend them, and a patriot. It is profoundly disappointing to record that President Masaryk still believes in force, maintains a very large army, and preaches pre- paredness despite the folly of that policy as illustrated by the World War, and that he has not protected the rights of the German minorities in his country as he should have. The forcible wiping out of all traces of German influence and culture in Prague, for example, is a melancholy exam- ple of how one who once battled nobly for the oppressed can himself turn to oppression when in power. GEORGE HAVEN PUTNAM DEAD? It seems hardly possible, for even at eighty-five, up to three weeks ago this dean of American publishers possessed the spirit of youth and easily and fleetly dodged motors on his daily walk to his office. A Civil War soldier at seventeen, he was captured in the Shenandoah, and was one of the few men in 1930 who could testify to the hardships and cruel- ties of confinement at Petersburg and in Libby Prison. In- heriting with his brothers the Putnam publishing business, he held it true to his standards for more than sixty years, refusing to yield to any pressure to cheapen them. But it was as a living link between the United States and Great Britain that Major Putnam was perhaps best known. The founder of the English Speaking Union and of a professor- ship in American History at the University of London, he espoused the Allied cause at the outbreak of the war, throw- ing himself into it with all his great vitality. It is pleasant to recall his long service to good government in New York City, his unyielding fidelity to copyright legislation, to civil- service reform, to the Indian, to the cause of political inde- pendence— he was a staunch Cleveland Mugwump at a time when that seemed treason in a veteran — and to free trade. THE LONG-AWAITED American renaissance, we are pleased to inform our readers, is here: "Art has come to the dishpan, to the washstand, to dust-mops, and to the garage. For generations, even centuries, the perfumery industry was just a matter of pleasant smells, until one shrewd French manufacturer fixed his attention upon the container — and the industry was soon off on a new start in world-wide prosperity. One artist who became famous through his brilliant black-and-white illustrations for Salome' is bringing beauty now to automobile tires, turnstiles, and lighting fixtures. . . . Even for commodities such as electric washing machines the manufacturers declare that artistic design is getting to be a more important factor every year. . . . Oilcloth has blossomed out into a thing of beauty. Art is on our floors." Just another of those mali- cious and exaggerated travesties that Mr. Sinclair Lewis puts into the mouths of his victims? No, readers, we have had Art Week in Boston, and these remarks are from the radio speech of Dr. Julius Klein, Assistant Secretary of Commerce, in solemn celebration of that event!

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286 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3375 The Lesson of Dollar Wheat DOLLAR wheat has now been added to the other tribulations of President Hoover. Agricultural com- plaint, of course, is perennial, but agricultural dis- tress during the past decade has been acute and widespread. The Federal Farm Board is the Administration's cure for that distress. Within eight months of its establishment wheat hits the dollar mark, and the political results are likely to be serious. The real lesson of dollar wheat, however, is hard to learn, for it involves disagreeable and unwelcome truths. The farm cycle of the past twenty-five years has only repeated a bit of history as old as the United States. Prices of farm products have gone up, and land prices with them, while farmers thought to get rich by buying land for the rise. Then agricultural prices, and land prices with them, collapsed, and the farmers, loaded up with high-priced land, could not make a living. That is exactly what happened in spectacular fashion during and following the war. The farmer's relative disadvantage has been increased further by his inability to organize, as all sorts of industrial groups have done, to control the market. The hard fact of the business is that the farmer by the very nature of his occupation cannot successfully get special economic favors, no matter how great his political power. For a century the farmers have tried to put their hands into the protective-tariff grab-bag. Always they have drawn out, and always they must draw out, burned fingers and nothing else. Consequently the export-debenture plan was proposed. The tariff system has for generations enhanced the prices of various manufactured goods to the real or sup- posed advantage of certain manufacturers and the real loss of everybody else. Discovering at last that import duties on farm products cannot raise prices in a country like ours that exports instead of importing such products, the agricultural representatives since the war have asked the rest of the coun- try to subsidize the farmers by paying a bounty on exports so as to raise domestic prices of foodstuffs and materials against the American consumer — surely a monstrous proposal if there ever was one, though no more monstrous than the whole protective-tariff graft. The point is, however, that the farmers, even with all their political strength, did not succeed in putting through the export-debenture plan, and if they had succeeded the resulting stimulus to production would undoubtedly have robbed them of any benefit in per- manent high prices. Then came the Farm Board with its possible half-billion fund to apply big-business methods to marketing. Now co- operative marketing, in so far as it is an outgrowth of sound organization of the farming industry, is an admirable devel- opment, as the experience of Denmark has shown, but the desirable end of encouraging cooperation has been confused in many minds with the totally different end of combating grain speculation. It is believed that somehow wicked specu- lators are responsible for low prices, especially that they drive prices down in the fall when the farmers sell the bulk of their crops. This is simply not so. They do sometimes get rich out of price changes, but they cannot fix prices in an intensively competitive market for a world commodity like wheat or cotton. Nevertheless, the ill-directed drive against the speculator goes on, and with dollar wheat we have been treated to the edifying spectacle of a United States Senator demanding the closing of the exchanges, as though the shut- ting-up of the market in which the farmer's product was to be sold would raise the price he gets! What are the facts? Wheat and cotton prices are, and in modern times always must be, world prices determined by world crops and world demand. The enormous wheat crop of 1928 resulted in an almost unprecedented carry-over into 1929. Although last year's crop was 400,000,000 bushels less than that of 1928, Europe, the great buying continent, itself raised 100,000,000 bushels more than the preceding year. Our export to Europe since the middle of 1929 has been 117,000,000 bushels less than during the corresponding period a year ago, which is more than the decrease in our wheat yield from 1928. We may, then, have a bigger carry- over this year than last. Why should not the price be low? How can it help being low? The declaration of the Farm Board in October, with prices more than thirty cents above their present level, that prices were then too low did not make them too low in the important sense of the word. That price is a right price, in the sense of a necessary price, which will move the crop. Denunciation of speculators and whole libraries of books on "ordered marketing" cannot change that disagreeable fact. Must the farmer, then, be left to stew in his own juice? By no means, but the measures undertaken must be possible and not impossible. Improve marketing arrangements if you can, strengthen farm finance, take every possible measure of legitimate direct aid, but do not try to establish artificial prices for the farmer's product, because under our existing conditions it cannot be done. The farmer ought to be free of the unnecessary burdens under which he labors. He ought to be free of tariff graft. He ought to be free of high freight rates based on the attempt of a muddled government to in- sure the railroads a "fair return" on a valuation inflated by mistaken court decisions. He ought to be freed of outworn tax systems and of disastrous systems of land tenure. Back of it all lies a more fundamental trouble. Our boasted prosperity has gone mostly to a comparative few, and the great mass of people, who make a living by working and producing rather than by planning and selling, have not found the task of earning a living appreciably eased by the events of the past ten years. The farmer's interests lie with the working class, not the trading class, and we shall get no genuine farm relief until he learns to cooperate with that working group in bringing about a better organization of industry and a more equitable distribution of its products. Such cooperation may take the form in part of common eco- nomic action, and in part of united political endeavor. If we are ever to get away from our present system of government by big business through the agency of two interchangeable parties, the farmer and the industrial worker have got to find a basis of common action. It is not wholly inconceivable that dollar wheat, for all that it means of loss to the farmer, may help forward that process.

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March 12, 1930] The Nation 287 Poor Porto Rico ANY one who fancies that Porto Rico is a bright and shining example of American success in administer- ing a dependency should read Governor Theodore Roosevelt's recent message to the Porto Rican Legislature. The financial condition of the Insular government, the legis- lature was told, is "grave." Treasury receipts for the first six months of the present fiscal year fell $1,318,556, or 25 per cent, behind the estimated receipts on which the budget was based, and the total of perhaps $9,500,000 which the Treasurer expects to collect for the year is less by $1,420,000 than the estimate. The condition of the municipalities the Governor pronounced "desperate." Taxes are in arrears and bond issues have in some cases exceeded the legal limit. There is an Insular bonded indebtedness of $25,390,000, plus a floating indebtedness of $3,024,950. Ninety-seven municipal bond issues total $18,314,300. Governor Roosevelt is not hopeful that much can be done to remedy the situation at once, but he makes some comprehensive recommendations for the future. With a large volume of unpaid taxes, with taxes in some cases years overdue, and with taxes "unscientifically and in some in- stances inequitably assessed," an immediate revision of the tax laws to meet abnormal conditions might not be suitable for normal times, and forcible collection of unpaid taxes cannot be resorted to without risking an increase of failures, unemployment, and distress. The floating indebtedness of the island should, however, be funded ; the system of mu- nicipal government should be revised to get rid of useless offices and save money; and the budget system should be made more effective. All these things are important, and if they can be car- ried through the Porto Ricans ought, after a time, to be able to breathe more freely. The underlying factors, as Governor Roosevelt sees them, are economic. Most of the people of Porto Rico live by agriculture, but while many small farmers have "hunger and hardship" for their "con- stant companions" and many have sold or deserted their farms, many large holdings are only partially developed. Governor Roosevelt proposes to pay special attention to the small farmers by spreading agricultural information and education and by encouraging the formation of cooperative marketing associations with some financial aid from the gov- ernment. An additional appropriation of $3,000,000 which Congress has authorized will complete the road program, give work for two years to 8,000 persons, and eventually save $400,000 yearly in road upkeep. Finally, Governor Roosevelt comes out frankly for industrialization. He wants factories and mills and de- veloped hydroelectric power, a Bureau of Commerce with a branch office in New York to make the resources of the island known, and assistance in answering the inquiries of manufacturers who are to be interested in investing their capital. There may be something in this for the Porto Ricans, especially if the Governor keeps up his interest and his energy. But Latin American countries, if any, which yearn for the protection of the United States would do well to consider these results of thirty-two years of such protection in Porto Rico. A Conspiracy A FRIEND of ours who is not generally given to view- ing with alarm has just uncovered what he regards as a serious threat to that most friendless of infant industries — authorship. Himself the author of a recent book which seems to have been more widely read than bought, he is not, perhaps, a wholly unprejudiced observer, but when his opus began persistently to appear upon the lists of the "Books Most in Demand at the Public Library" without winning a place upon the economically more significant lists of "Books Most in Demand at the Bookstores" he determined to make an investigation, and now he maintains that he, as a producer of books, is faced with certain unfavorable market conditions deliberately fostered by municipal authorities. Books, he reports (after careful consultation with pub- lishers and booksellers), are still occasionally purchased — chiefly for the purpose of being given away. We send them to friends about to sail for Europe and we send them to other less fortunate friends who have just had their tonsils or their appendices removed, but the dealers would shut up shop if it were not for Christmas, boats, and hospitals. Thanks to the number of circulating libraries, both free and commer- cial, thanks to all the facilities which they have developed for making it as easy to get a current book for a week as to buy it outright, no one buys a book simply because he wants to read it, for nowadays it is just as easy and a good deal cheaper to borrow from the branch library, the stationery store around the corner, or the friend who was lately ill. Our informant insists that certain books suffer even more than others because they are not suitable for gifts, and he calculates that the mere fact that his particular work was unadapted for convalescents lost him at least a fifth of his possible profits by completely eliminating the hospital trade. Legislation and public opinion are, says our disgruntled informant, complacently in favor of popular education and determined that knowledge shall be free, but the mere writer is forgotten and the author, gnashing his teeth while his book is being enthusiastically borrowed on every side, is presuma- bly supposed to live either upon fame or upon the sandwiches handed out to him at the teas given in his honor by ladies who shamelessly confess that they mean to read him as soon as his latest work is "in" at the library. We are, he con- tinues, actually proud of these institutions which supply a whole neighborhood by means of two overworked copies of the latest "success," but we ought, he says, to regard them in another light, for though to some they may appear as the crown of our educational system, they are from the writers' point of view merely part of an organized effort to discour- age the buying of books. He sees no reason why the average citizen should be encouraged to patronize the Free Library any more than he is encouraged to take his ailments to the free clinic, for both, he maintains, are eleemosynary institu- tions and he plans to warn Congress that one is as likely as the other to "pauperize" the citizens of the country which permits their misuse. Socialization may be, he thinks, very well, but he insists that if the municipality is going to lend his books free it ought to do the same thing with Mr. Ford's automobiles, Mr. Edison's phonographs, and Mr. Gillette's razors.

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288 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3375 It Seems to Heywood Broun A GOOD play carries with it divers benefits, and among the useful by-products minted out of Marc Connelly's "The Green Pastures" is a new accession of vigor on the part of all the town's reviewers. The gen- tlemen of the press rose magnificently to their opportunity, and if this play of Negro life around God's throne set a new standard for the current season it did just the same for local journalism. Yet no one did quite so well as William Bolitho, the British Empire's gift to the New York World. Speaking of the Negro's extraordinary status in the Western world Mr. Bolitho wrote: They were snatched suddenly from an environment with which they had made their peace for centuries, brought across an ocean whose existence they had never imagined, taken in chains of a metal they had hardly seen before, and set down to work out their lives tilling new plants in a new land. They left behind them their very gods, their language, their songs, and were given as the sole consola- tion to replace them this intricate, infinitely complicated story of the Bible . . . not even in such simplified form as the older churches have brought it to, but the huge amorphous mass, riddled with all the subtly limited ration- alisms which all the Protestantisms have put into it. And this Book they made their own. They digested it, as if cows might take to a ration of meat and alcohol, as if chickens succeeded in living on the tops of trees. It is not easy, thus, to simplify the Bible but, for that matter, the reduction of Bolitho into his essential terms is no mean task. Marc Connelly, then, has scored the double triumph of acting as an agent in the clarification of both Book and Briton. I remember I was talking with a taxi driver once about the young essayist from South Africa. He made a sad hash of the name which defies phonetic repro- duction and went on to say, "I read him more than any other columnist because I always know there's something there, but, boy, on plenty mornings I couldn't tell you what he was talking about." Bolitho in his "Green Pastures" piece spoke of the Negro's adventure in history as something which "will per- haps never be paralleled until the human race is invaded and kidnapped by filibusters from another planet." But it has always seemed to me as if Bolitho himself had undergone just such an experience. The gulf set between his column and the want-ad readers of a New York morning newspaper is quite as wide as the expanse of ether which lies between the earth and Mars. William Bolitho has served his time as foreign correspondent, and yet I think he possesses less of what is traditionally known as newspaper instinct than any press man whom I know. I think the difference between his attitude and the prevalent one of city rooms is expressed in another paragraph of his column on "Green Pastures" : It is singularly difficult to analyze what has intensely moved the mind either to enthusiasm or hatred. Yet that is a sort of duty, the only one perhaps, laid on its bene- ficiaries by true art. Mr. Marc Connelly's play will bear a great deal of meditation before the simple sensation of fascination is broken up into its constituents. Now that is a mood wholly divergent from the general newspaper attitude in this country. Here we have been con- cerned— the exceptions are few — with recording simple facts of fascination, enthusiasm, and hatred. For instance, a typical newspaper item may be headed "Police Club Com- munists." You may read your morning paper from the weather forecast on the front page to the words of the founder in the current Wanamaker display ad on the back, and be no wiser as to just what a Communist is and what is the psychology of the police who club him. It is thought to be enough to say, "Levitsky, Joseph, 2984 Grand Concourse, lacerated scalp and multiple contusions." But Mr. Levitsky's bruises are nothing whatsoever to Bolitho. He will consider them only as extremely casual stepping-stones by means of which he may get down into the constituents of the Communist's enthusiasm and the cop's hatred. In saying that such practice is alien to American journalistic tradition I am by no means contending that it is unfortunate. Indeed, I hold the opposite view. I would there were more Bolithos. A wish for bigger and better ones would be highly fantastic. It is not good that news- papers should be so wholly devoted to the business of keep- ing the record and so little concerned with interpretation. Over a period of time interpretation is by far the more im- portant job, but that the dailies leave in the hands of journals of opinion which, unfortunately, seldom command sufficient circulation to make them fitting emissaries for the mass mind. When a group of Jewish internes is hazed in a local hospital it seems to me insufficient that the papers should merely handle the surface facts of the episode without going into some speculation and study of the community's state of mind in the matter of race prejudice. There are more monsters in the depths of an ocean than ever leap out of the water, and journalism is largely a matter of tabulating the little hops of flying fish and ignoring the whales. But though Bolitho at his best has written the most brilliant pieces it has ever been my privilege to see in any newspaper he does possess certain faults in technique. All baseball fans have seen at one time or another the eager short- stop who covered wide territory and yet failed his team upon occasion through his effort to throw the ball a little before it reached his hands. I have known Bolitho to indulge his passion for analysis before he had quite allowed the fact itself to enter into his mind. Or if it was in the mind of the writer it had not yet penetrated the consciousness of the reader. Before "the simple sensation of fascination is broken up into its constituents" some little time must be spent in observing and noting down the outward manifestations of the thing. Mr. Levitsky's multiple contusions should be counted and even thumbed over before the exploration into Mr. Levitsky's soul commences. One should not attempt to make straw without bricks. But the intention of this article is bouquetial. As one columnist to another I bow low three times, no mean feat for me, and tap my forehead on the floor. Heywood Broun

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March 12, 1930] The Nation 289 Power Control Breaks Down By LAURENCE TODD FE. BONNER, executive secretary of the Federal Power Commission, testifying on February 20 be- • fore the Senate Committee on Interstate Com- merce, complained that "persecution" of the electric-utility corporations had endangered the progress of hydroelectric development in this country. Congress began some three years ago to wonder why power generated by privately owned American companies on the American side of Niagara Falls is sold to American con- sumers at double the prices charged to Canadian consumers in Ontario, who are served by a government-owned and gov- ernment-operated hydroelectric system. In March, 1927, as the session of the Sixty-ninth Congress was ending, Senator Walsh of Montana quietly introduced a resolution provid- ing that the Senate investigate the financial and propaganda aspects of privately owned public utilities. Senator Walsh hoped that his resolution would slip through unnoticed in the final rush. Instead, he barely got it reported out of the Interstate Commerce Committee to which it had been re- ferred ; and when finally, by one vote, the resolution was reported to the Senate, it received what its enemies regarded as a death blow: the investigation it embodied was put into the hands of the supposedly innocuous Federal Trade Com- mission. But the Federal Trade Commission assigned Judge McCulloch to conduct the utilities investigation. Judge Healy, new chief counsel for the commission, began to examine witnesses about the propaganda machinery set up in more than thirty States by the Power Trust. The coun- try was amazed to learn that its daily and periodical press, its public schools, its churches and Boy Scouts and other civic organizations had been for years absorbing propaganda which was designed by the National Electric Light Associa- tion and its allies to prejudice the public against any step toward public ownership. For two years the Federal Trade Commission has steadily pursued its inquiries. It has now entered upon the financial phase of the probe; and on Feb- ruary 24, economists who have been examining the financial structure of power companies since the investigation was ordered began to disclose their findings before the commis- sion, disclosures which Mr. Bonner, presumably protector of the public against the Power Trust, characterized as "irresponsible newspaper statements" and "persecution" of electric-utility corporations. The power investigation now going on before the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee has for its immediate object a plan for reorganizing the Federal Power Commission on a scale commensurate with its great responsibility under the Federal Water Power Act. That act set up a commission composed of the Secretaries of War, Agriculture, and the Interior, with an executive secretary and a small staff of accountants and counsel, to administer the leasing, for periods of not more than fifty years, of the power sites remaining in federal control. These sites are on navigable streams and their tributaries, on public lands, and in the national forests. The administration of the act as described in testimony before the Interstate Commerce Committee of the Senate led Senator Couzens, the chairman, to declare that "conditions in the commission have become so intolerable that it presents one of the rottenest exhibitions of government I have ever heard of." The disclosures which led up to this declaration began with the publication in August, 1929, of an anony- mous memorandum which purported to reflect the desires of power executives to kill off the accounting system installed by Chief Accountant King of the commission and ex- pressed the hope that a suitable successor might be chosen to O. C. Merrill, secretary to the commission since its estab- lishment in 1920. When this secret document came to light, with its suggestion that the quotations for electric-utility stocks would be injured by examination of padded invest- ment accounts, Solicitor Charles Russell, recently brought over from the legal staff of the Interstate Commerce Com- mission, joined Accountant King in defending the right of the public to have the water-power act enforced. Russell and King have recently told the story of the commission before the Committee on Interstate Commerce. They presented records showing that no fundamental ques- tion as to federal control of federal power resources had ever been passed upon by the commission. They showed that in nine years an average of only five and one-half hours a year had been devoted by the three Cabinet members to the work of this commission. This precious time had been de- voted to granting permits or extensions, or to other routine work. Regulation of rates had never even been approached. Then King brought out a report made to Congress in January, 1928, which had been withdrawn by the commis- sion, deleted to the extent of twelve pages, and then re- submitted in its amended form. Those twelve pages con- sisted of a series of illustrations of alleged fraudulent or padded accounting. The first was that of the Niagara Falls Power Com- pany, one of the concerns named by Bonner as victims of persecution. This company, according to the statement which the commission suppressed, had refused to give access to some of its records to the commission's accountants. But their examination did disclose that "considerable property which had been abandoned and demolished was still carried in whole or in part in the plant-investment account; that many large amounts in connection with new construction appeared to have been erroneously charged to property in- vestment; and that many millions of dollars carried in the plant investment account did not represent actual investment either by the company or its predecessors." Then followed an analysis of the company's claim for valuation on which consumers must pay dividends through the rates paid for electricity. Of $77,671,451 claimed by the company, $31,190,974 was found to represent lands, structures, and equipment. There was an item of "intangi- ble property" amounting to $5,762,143, and one of "over- head costs" amounting to $8,718,334, while "water rights" were valued at $32,000,000. These water rights came from the federal government. Then there was a claim of $27,- 465,125 for "new construction," charged in with the rest,

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290 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3375 although this item did not belong to the original investment. Another case deleted from the report was that of the Clarion River Power Company of Pennsylvania, promoted by H. D. Walbridge and Company, New York bankers. Book costs of this development were $11,032,816.57. The commission's accountants found that the expenditures on actual construction work were' $4,360,000, while "more than $6,000,000 of alleged cost is represented merely by entries on the books and is unsupported by evidence of expenditure or cost." The Walbridge firm refused to permit access to original records. The Clarion River Power Company is now controlled by the Associated Gas and Electric Com- pany. This report in its original form, while still confidential to the press, fell into the hands of an editor of the McGraw- Hill publications, who notified the Niagara Falls Power Company of its damaging contents. Colonel Kelly, vice- president of the company and former chief engineer for the Federal Power Commission, came immediately to Washing- ton urging Secretary Merrill and then the members of the commission to withdraw it. Merrill refused to approve its suppression, but Secretaries Davis, Work, and Jardine re- called it from Congress and deleted the evidence of what the Niagara Falls Power Company was doing. Within a year after the failure of this attempt to dis- close padded cost accounting by electric utilities, Merrill decided to resign, though his salary had just been raised from $7,500 to $8,000 a year. He had tried for nearly nine years, without success, to get the White House and Congress to provide the commission with adequate personnel to check up the claims of applicants as to the investment they made before getting sites, and thereby check the inflation of capital accounts. He has testified that in 1923-24 there was created a finance committee which raised, chiefly from among the big power companies that were among the applicants for federal power sites, a fund of $25,000 to send an American delega- tion to a world power conference in London. He was among the delegates. While he remained on the government pay roll as executive secretary, he used most of the $7,000 that was left in this fund to go to Europe to other conferences in succeeding years. Secretary of Commerce Hoover was honorary chairman of the American Committee of the World Power Congress, and knew the source of these funds, Merrill has testified. Good fairies in the form of Paul Clapp, of the National Electric Light Association, Henry J. Pierce, of the legal staff of Electric Bond and Share, and a representative of Harris, Forbes, and Company had raised the original fund for this American Committee of the World Power Congress. Clapp now guaranteed to Merrill for five years a $15,000 salary as chairman of that organization. The National Elec- tric Light Association undertook to distribute the load among the other leaders of the power industry, including Electric Bond and Share and the Guaranty Trust Company. When Merrill left his government post, he wrote a letter recommending F. E. Bonner as his successor. Secre- tary Wilbur went for advice concerning Bonner to an execu- tive of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, who was also a trustee of Stanford University and a classmate of President Hoover, and Bonner was duly appointed. Merrill had mildly protested because he was not given facilities to do his duty. Bonner promptly announced that no increase in the accounting or legal staff of the commis- sion was needed. Secretary Wilbur echoed this opinion, al- though the previous commission, in the Coolidge adminis- tration, had urged upon Congress the dire need of more help in digging the truth from the claims of the power companies seeking federal favors. Bonner has declared that Merrill was to blame for delay, in the past nine years, in auditing the power applicants' investment claims. Merrill in turn has blamed the Director of the Budget Bureau, General Lord, and Congress, and has indorsed King's assertion that the commission should have its own staff of accountants and counsel and no longer depend upon personnel drawn from the Departments of War, Agriculture, and the Interior. Here must be quoted the final paragraphs from the anonymous memorandum of last summer : The foregoing statement shows how critical is the situ- ation which now results from an increased appropriation by Congress which is to provide for an increase in the per- sonnel, and consequent activity, of the accounting staff of the commission. We have made representations to the Water Power Development Committee of the United States Chamber of Commerce that this accounting work could be better done by the Departments of War, Interior, and Ag- riculture than by the commission's staff directly. If this committee is successful in presenting this argument to the secretaries who form the commission, and further direct enlargement of the accounting staff is prevented, it is be- lieved that these departments will not have men specially trained for this work. At least, they will be removed from the direct supervision of Mr. King. There is another phase of the present situation which we are watching carefully. It is rumored that Mr. Merrill may be persuaded to accept some other more lucrative and less trying position. The new Secretary-Commissioner may be persuaded to appoint as his successor some engineer who may quite naturally be sympathetic toward the development of the accounting force and its activity as previously out- lined. ... It is anticipated that the agencies and forces opposed to our industry in national legislation will not have their attention directed to this matter and it is hoped that discreet representations can be made to the new Secretary-Commissioner. On November 16, 1929, Wilbur approved a recom- mendation by Bonner that the three departments be drawn upon for personnel to do accounting work, and that "the pre-license cost statements of applicants for licenses and the construction-cost statements of licensees be referred as far as practicable to the Departments of War, Interior, or Agricul- ture for examination and recommendation prior to review by the accounting officer of the commission." Bonner at one time tried in vain, by bringing Solicitor Russell into private conference with M. O. Leighton, rep- resentative of the Electric Bond and Share Company, to per- suade Russell that Accountant King was obstructing unduly the granting of power sites to Leighton's clients. Conflict in the commission staff led to deadlock, Bonner and Wilbur preventing the securing of further funds with which to bring the disputed investment accounts to decision, and King and Russell refusing to approve the unaudited claims. For months Bonner referred no legal problems to Solicitor Rus- sell and deflected accounting work from King wherever this could be done. Now a demand has been made in the Sen- ate that Bonner resign, while Administration suggestions that King and Russell be likewise dismissed have been met by Senator Norris's declaration that they should be promoted as faithful servants of the public.

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March 12, 1930] The Nation 291 The Christian Science Censor IV. The Siege of Fort Scribner By HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY THE effort of the directors of the Mother Church to suppress Edwin Franden Dakin's "Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind," published last summer by Charles Scribner's Sons, and the methods em- ployed in that effort have fortunately received an unusual amount of publicity. The entire incident is so revealing, however, that it cannot be omitted in any account of the church censorship, and there are certain aspects of it that have not hitherto received due attention. I attempt no criticism or appraisal of Dakin's work further than a re- minder, to those of my readers who share my own distaste for the "modern" method in psychology and biography, that the book is a careful, thoroughly documented study, which was greeted by the reviewers almost without exception as one of the outstanding biographies of the year. The book was announced last April for publication in the early fall, and the publishers put into the hands of each of twenty members of their sales organization a confiden- tial statement of "selling points" on the work. In some unexplained way this memorandum came into the possession of Mr. Orwell Bradley Towne, Publication Committee for New York, and the executives of the firm, much to their surprise, shortly received a call from him, memorandum in hand. Mr. Towne made a strong protest against the pub- lication of the book on the ground that the memorandum proved the book to be "false" and "unworthy." He re- marked the danger of offending several million people, and suggested that the manuscript be submitted to the Committee on Publication for checking as to the reliability of its sources and the accuracy of its data. Just how complete and ac- curate information and fair criticism Mr. Dakin would have received from that source I leave my readers to judge in the light of the facts I have given concerning the treatment of other lives of Mrs. Eddy. Mr. Towne was politely but firmly informed that Scribner's does not submit books to censorship by interested parties before publication. His little reconnaissance in force had disclosed the existence of a fort that apparently did not intend to haul down its flag at the first sign of danger. It was accordingly decided to try diplomacy next. No use to fight if things can be arranged pleasantly among gentlemen. It was discovered that Albert Lombard, Com- mittee on Publication for Southern California, was an old Harvard roommate of Henry H. Saylor, editor of Archi- tecture, published by Scribner's. On July 3, Mr. Saylor received a letter from his old friend reminding him of Lombard's old-time interest in Christian Science and con- sequent concern over the Dakin book, which Lombard un- derstood to be inaccurate, inadequate, unfair, and quite unworthy the esteemed name of Scribner. So Lombard luggested: "If you are in a position to discuss this subject with the proper person so that it will receive judicious con- •Thii ii the last of a series of four articles. — Edito* The Nation. sideration, the best interests of both of us may be served." It was all very pleasant, gentlemanly, and friendly, as be- came one old friend to another, and as became a proper diplomat. The letter was passed on to "the proper person" in the Scribner organization, but once more nothing hap- pened except that preparations for publication went steadily forward. The committee had lost this little diplomatic skirmish, too. There seemed to be nothing to do but bring up the siege-guns and prepare for action with the heavy ar- tillery if necessary. Exactly what went on in the offices of the publication committee in Boston during the hot days of last summer it is impossible to say, but one can make a fairly safe guess from what has occurred since. Evidently the campaign plans were laid there and we have concrete evidence that certain directions went out from that office to the State com- mittees as to how the campaign was to be carried on. The Dakin book was published August 16 and was in the hands of booksellers all over the country by the beginning of September. Immediately the publishers began to be deluged with letters of protest from Christian Scientists and with perturbed inquiries from booksellers who suddenly found themselves under hot fire. The letters from Christian Scientists may be divided into two groups, those that threaten boycott and those that do not. An occasional letter suggests that the writer has looked into the book, but the vast majority were evidently written, under direction or suggestion, by persons whose knowledge of the book was obtained at second hand. I quote a few representative examples : New York, September 19 ^ You have recently published a book about Mrs. Eddy which I understand is disrespectful of her character and accomplishments. ... As far as I know there is no pre- meditated attempt on the part of the organization to cause letters to be written to your good selves but doubtlessly you will have received many letters in addition to this one. North Cohasset, Mass., September 5 I am writing to protest against the publishing by Charles Scribner's Sons of the spurious life of Mrs. Eddy. Boston, August 28 A great protest goes up from true Christian Scientists everywhere that at this date such a wholly false and mali- cious book should be published by your respected house. Louisville, Ky., December 2 I have just learned of the book, "Mrs. Eddy, the Biography of a Virginal Mind," by Edwin Franden Dakin, which has been published by your firm. ... I feel im- pelled to lift my voice in protest against the publication and circulation of this book which has been described as "biased and offensive, avoiding any good word for Mrs.

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292 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3375 Eddy and misrepresenting her wherever possible." . . . With sincere hope that this book, which is so objectionable to Christian Scientists, may be speedily suppressed . . . I turn with pain to the boycotting letters, for the pub- lication committees often point out that their religion pro- hibits them from any attempt at injury to publishers, and I regret to see them so singularly unsuccessful in restraining the misdirected zeal of their erring followers. Here is one that is quick on the trigger: New York, August 30 After reading the review of a book that you have just published called "Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind," by E. F. Dakin, I wish to inform you that I, for one, will never patronize your shop again and if there is any way that I can keep others from buying books at your store I will endeavor to do so. In different vein: Toronto, November 5 I trust you will realize that I am writing this in a very friendly way, but I would also point out that I could not purchase books from a house publishing such objection- able matter and, as you doubtless realize, there will be many, many more purchasers of books who will feel as I do. On a post card, only this: New York, December 13 Dear old Friends — Sorry I cannot buy from you now. Earnestly. From an ignorant anonymous Scientist to the author: Bridgeport, Conn., August 26 You must want to make a living off the dead, and at that a woman, that now cannot defend herself. No one would do such a thing but a Coward in the sight of God. . . . To all C. Scientists you are to them a Coward and lower than a Worm. The book and publisher will be boy- cott by all Christian Scientists. Letters from individuals suggesting or threatening boy- cott could be multiplied indefinitely; the publication com- mittees virtuously disclaim them, but occasionally even a publication committee apparently slips. By some error the publishers received official letters of protest (all but two written within two weeks of September 16) from no less than nine churches, all of them, by a curious coincidence, in St. Louis or Kansas City. The spirit of truth seems to have prevailed mightily and all at once in this geographic area. The following letter is signed by the clerk of the Third Church of Kansas City: Kansas City, September 16 [The Dakin book] ... is obnoxious to all Christian Scientists and misleading to the general public. . . . The Church Manual . . . governs every Branch Church . . . and we are one of those branches. A by-law . . . reads as follows: "A member of this church shall not patronize a publishing house or bookstore that has for sale obnoxious books." We are calling your attention to this, feeling that if you understood the circumstances you would not want to be instrumental in putting out a book which was not true and might be detrimental to you. Even more directly to the point was the communication of the Sixth Church of the same city: Kansas City, September 17 At a meeting of our executive board . . . motion pre- vailed that a letter be written . . . protesting that [the Dakin book] is obnoxious according to the understanding of Christian Scientists, and that in conformity with our Church Manual we will have to desist from patronizing your company unless the book be removed from publication. From these business-like communications one turns to one signed for the trustees by the clerk of the Fifth Church in St. Louis. It contains no mention of by-laws, but after stat- ing that the Dakin book "is in every respect objectionable to our membership" ends briefly thus: "We trust that the Spirit of the 'Golden Rule' will prompt you to give our protest consideration." For months the publishers were covered with a bar- rage of protests such as have been indicated, the whole cam- paign evidently having been most carefully organized and directed. While the main fortress was thus being be- leaguered, every outlying post from Burlington, Vermont, to Honolulu was likewise being subjected to vigorous at- tack, always with the same weapons and essentially the same strategy. The skilful national organization and the great success (probably exaggerated, however) of the campaign are indicated in the following extract from a letter of Richard C. Shoup, Publication Committee for Georgia, pub- lished in the Macon Telegraph of December 20: These protests have been entered so effectively that according to Mr. Charles [sic] Scribner, senior member of Scribner and Sons, the book has been removed from sale in four-fifths of the bookstores of the United States. To achieve this result, it was not necessary to use threats, in fact very definite instructions were issued by the man- ager of the committees on publication in Boston, Massa- chusetts, that no threat was to be used. We found that the booksellers are as a whole reasonable and fair-minded men and they are not interested in assisting the publishers to distribute a malicious, untruthful book, objectionable (because of its misrepresentations) to many of their fellow- citizens. I call special attention to the "very definite instructions" that went out from the manager of the committees on pub- lication, and express my regret at the mention of only one feature of those instructions. I remind my readers of the sample letters to the publishers already quoted and raise the question how church members, under the obnoxious-book rule, could call attention of booksellers to the obnoxiousness of the work without threatening a boycott. Certainly the bewildered booksellers somewhere got the impression that they were being threatened with dire things. I have space for only a handful of their letters to the publishers: Palo Alto, Cal, October 8 I have been forced by the Christian Scientists here to put copies I have of "Mrs. Eddy" under the table and to refrain from buying any more. Los Angeles, August 27 The local chairman for the Christian Science Commit- tee on Publications has just been here. Apparently every effort is going to be made to suppress "Mrs. Eddy" — up to and including intimidation. [From a later letter] The Christian Scientists are giving us no rest. "Old Charge Customers" write in and they bedevil us daily.

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March 12, 1930] The Nation 293 Detroit, November 23 Due to violent protest by the Science Church in our City and boycott on our store by these good people, we have been forced to withdraw the sale of your book "Mrs. Eddy" from our store. Utica, N. Y., October 22 A good friend of mine who is a prominent Scientist advises me not to stock the book, stating that it was ex- tremely detrimental to Christian Science, and that if we offered the book for sale our store would be shunned by all local Scientists. Without setting forth more of the abundant available evidence, I summarize briefly my own conclusions. The church authorities, unable to bring about the withdrawal or modification of Dakin's work, set in motion the ma- chinery I have earlier described, with the deliberate pur- pose of preventing the sale of the book as far as possible. The campaign constituted in its essence, whatever it was in name, a nation-wide boycott of the publishers and of all booksellers who did not yield to the request that the book be withdrawn from sale. The actual carrying out of the measures was in the hands of the State and local publication committees and individual members of the church, but complete responsibility for the campaign as a whole rests on the manager of the publication committees and on the Board of Directors who appointed him; for under the Manual they have the power to control his official actions. No disclaimer on their part can free them of such responsibility. The action which has received such wide publicity in this case is thoroughly consistent with every- thing that I have been able to learn of the methods and ideas of the directors, the committees on publication, and great numbers of individual members of the church acting under their direction and suggestion in many other cases that have not had much public attention during the past quarter-century. In many cases their action has resulted in virtually entire suppression. In the present instance the Scribner flag still floats defiantly. A new popular edition of the Dakin book, containing important additional matter, including sensational extracts from Calvin Frye's diaries, has just come from the press. With this case I bring my record to a close. I have tried to set down honestly and fairly, and as adequately as possible within my space limits, the relevant facts concern- ing this remarkable publicity organization. My wish has been not to attack any individual or group or to impugn their motives, and above all not to attack the Christian Science religion or the faith of its adherents. I have wished to attack, by the simple statement of facts, the operation of a powerful and dangerous publicity machine absolutely con- trolled by the central authorities of the Christian Science church and used to an end that I believe dangerous to orderly progress, namely, the suppression of truth. If the general public, and notably our newspapers and publishers, can be put on notice regarding its operation, and if the at- tention of the honest and thoughtful Christian Scientists of the country can be drawn to the abuse of power within the church, with a view to ultimate correction of such abuse, my end will have been achieved. The Hoover Hippodrome By PAUL Y. ANDERSON Washington, March 1 NO amount of glossing or suppression can conceal the fact that at last the Hoover Administration is in serious difficulty. The number and gravity of its troubles may not be sufficient at this time to warrant free use of the phrase, "One-Term Herbert," recently attributed to an Old Guard cynic, but they are enough to inspire genuine apprehension among the President's friends, and to explain some of the panicky maneuvers recently executed at the White House. Chief among the causes of worry are the following : ( 1 ) the business depression and attendant unemployment; (2) loss of party unity and control in Con- gress and the multitude of ensuing complications; (3) the situation created by the Farm Board's efforts to interpret and apply the agricultural marketing act; (4) multiplying signs of scandal in connection with electric-power develop- ments. Moreover, the Administration now faces the possi- bility of failure or disappointing compromise at the naval conference, with the added knowledge that any measurable success would alienate some of its most powerful supporters. ***** IF any President caused the business depression, it was Coolidge. Nevertheless, Hoover will receive the blame, precisely as he would have received the equally undeserved credit if the condition had been reversed. He is clearly responsible for staging a ballyhoo to conceal the facts, in- stead of making an earnest effort to ascertain them and ap- prehend their causes. Coolidge's opponents learned that there was no answer to prosperity, and Hoover's supporters may learn that there is no explanation of adversity. Some- times a poor rule works both ways. As for Hoover's rela- tions with Congress, they have gone steadily from bad to worse until it is difficult to say in what quarter dissatisfac- tion is most intense. Certainly as much resentment exists between the President and the Republican leaders as exists between either of them and the Progressive-Democratic op- position. From the beginning Hoover's technique in deal- ing with Congress has been singularly simple and ineffectual. First he threatens; then he runs. So often have Old Guard leaders gone forth to fight behind the President, and sud- denly found themselves fighting alone, that they hesitate to follow him anywhere. Even Jim Watson has sufficient pride to feel the humiliation when he concludes a long and passionate defense of a White House statement, and sits down to find that a supplemental statement has rendered his defense ridiculous. That is what happened this week. ***** THE episode was a perfect illustration of three Hoover characteristics that have involved their possessor in plenty of grief and embarrassment, namely: his habit of re-

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294 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3375 sorting to circus stunts to divert attention from disagree- able situations; a curious lack of candor in selecting and staging his material ; and a precipitate tendency to disavow and abandon it in the face of hostile reaction. Thus, at the conclusion of a White House breakfast he made public a list of appropriation bills pending before Congress, with the warning that passage of all these bills would necessitate a drastic increase in taxes. The impression to be conveyed was that of a wise and frugal President demanding economy of an extravagant Congress. A more transparent piece of hippodroming cannot be imagined. Members of Congress are constantly introducing appropriation bills .without the slightest hope or intent of having them passed, and there has seldom been a time in recent years when such a list could not have been compiled. Any such list would have been equally long and equally meaningless. The Senate's reaction was as prompt as it was inevitable, and on Senator Watson, as the Republican floor leader, fell the unhappy duty of justifying the White House strictures on Congres- sional extravagance. Hardly had he concluded when he was handed a supplemental statement from that source ex- plaining that the President had not meant his admonitions for Congress at all, but for those individuals and organiza- tions on the outside who were pressing Congress for appro- priations outside the budget. I am told that Jim mopped his massive brow and fervently inquired : "How in hell are you going to stand behind a man who has St. Vitus dance?" The public may be excused for experiencing a similar dizzi- ness when it hears one group of trusted Hoover spokesmen denouncing the Senate coalitionists for obstructing and muti- lating "the Administration tariff bill," while another equally trusted group carefully explains that the coalition is writing exactly the sort of tariff bill that the President desires. ***** THE affairs of the Farm Board have reached a critical stage. It is obvious that Chairman Legge is de- termined to adopt whatever measures he considers necessary to carry out his original aim of bringing the farmers into co- operatives, and bringing the cooperatives into the marketing organization sponsored and financed by the board, and that he is prepared to conduct ferocious reprisals against any and all who oppose his program. Is the board charged with price-fixing? Well, I can only say that those who counted on anything else must either have been ignorant of the pur- pose of the farm act, or they had an abiding faith in the inability or unwillingness of the board to administer it, for price-fixing always was the ultimate object. Either Chair- man Legge will put the grain trade out of business, or the grain trade will put him out of business. The outcome is up to Mr. Hoover. My money is on Mr. Legge as long as he lasts, but I am not certain how long he will last. ***** THE Senate committee investigating lobbying finally has unearthed a long-suspected scandal in connection with Muscle Shoals. When such corporations as the Amer- ican Cyanamid Company and the Alabama Power Company set out to get possession of a government property valued at more than $100,000,000, scandal is always suspected al- though it is not always disclosed. The disclosures in this case involve Messrs. Coolidge and Hoover to a degree that would be sensational in any country except this case-hardened republic. Even here they very possibly will suffice to insure passage of the Norris bill for government operation of the plant. Under the circumstances it will be somewhat em- barrassing for Mr. Hoover to emulate his predecessor by vetoing the bill. The facts are fairly simple. The Cyana- mid company, in partnership with the Union Carbide Com- pany, wanted the property. So did the Alabama Power Company, a child of Electric Bond and Share. Both were fearful of government operation, and the Alabama Power was fearful that if the Cyanamid company got the plant surplus power might be sold in competition with its own service. So they fought. By devices which remain shrouded in mystery, Cyanamid enlisted the support of the American Farm Bureau Federation and its legislative agent, Chester H. Gray. Agents ostensibly representing the federation, but actually on the Cyanamid pay roll, went about the country lining up farm organizations in support of the Cyanamid bid. It was not long until wiser heads perceived the danger in this conflict. They saw that if Cyanamid and Alabama Power continued to fight for this government property, neither of them might get it — the government might keep it and operate it for the benefit of the public. Accordingly, Gray testified, President Coolidge directed him to see offi- cials of the Cyanamid company and ask them to arrive at some amicable agreement with the power interests. At that time Mr. Hoover was Secretary of Commerce. In a pur- ported confidential memorandum signed by Claudius Hus- ton, now Republican national chairman, and addressed to J. W. Worthington, leader of the fight against government operation, it was stated that "you and I, in the fall of 1925, did our utmost to bring the power and chemical groups to- gether, . . . and Mr. Hoover attempted to do so later, and Mr. Hoover even undertook to bring these interests together through Owen D. Young, and failed." THAT was the evidence before the committee. Ob- serve how it was reported by the Associated Press: Testimony that President Hoover, while Secretary of Commerce, had attempted to aid in solving the long-stand- ing problem of Muscle Shoals by an effort to reconcile the divergent views of the power and chemical groups was heard today before the Senate lobby committee. Was this an effort to obscure the significance of a spectacu- lar news development or is it to be explained on routine grounds? Subsequently, according to the evidence, it was suggested that if the power and chemical interests should succeed in reaching an agreement for a peaceable division of the spoils, they should do it in a manner that would enable them to deny its existence. They now deny that any agreement was reached, although the competition for Muscle Shoals seems to have lessened appreciably! The Wintry Mind By WITTER BYNNER Winter uncovers distances, I find ; And so the cold and so the wintry mind Takes leaves away, till there remains behind A wide cold world, and so the heart grows blind To the earth's green motions lying warm below Field upon field, field upon field, of snow.

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March 12, 1930] The Nation 295 The Inventor Enters Heaven By JAMES RORTY FOR some years the deaf old man had contemplated his departure from the terrestrial scene without re- luctance, without fear, but with a certain character- istic curiosity. Perhaps for that reason his translated self was moved to linger briefly, before beginning its celestial journey, to assist at the unprecedented tribute with which America honored the memory of her greatest inventor. It had been rather imaginatively conceived, after the manner of the English celebration of Armistice Day. Promptly at half-past eight on the evening of the funeral, the main switches of the power stations clicked in unison, and in darkness America mourned her loss. Light and sound and motion were all pinched out in this sudden pause. The radio, too, was silent — had not the great inventor anticipated this whole development decades ago? All over America millions of awed people sat in the darkened motion-picture houses, facing screens which had suddenly gone blank; minds turned inward upon the mind's blank curtain ; dismayed, and groping uncertainly for the rusty tools of image-making ; struggling painfully in vacuum, as the fetus struggles in the womb ; hating birth and beg- ging for the return of the anaesthetic flicker of false love, false birth, false death. Yet here and there something stirred in that darkness. A boy's hand felt for the breast of his girl, who covered his hand with hers. Together they rose and crept out into the wider darkness, the more entranced silence, of Broadway. All traffic had stopped ; the extinguished bulbs which festooned the fagades of the buildings drooped like paper garlands, withered by the sudden frost of silence and darkness. Broad- way was like an abandoned motion-picture set, unreal be- neath the casual silver of the brightened moon. Suddenly the lights snapped on. The ten-minute tribute of darkness and silence was over, and now the ether vibrated with the earth-girdling bellow of the greatest radio hook-up in history. The eulogistic phrases were familiar — too famil- iar ; so was the toneless voice of an ex-President of the United States for whom the great inventor remembered voting. But he could hear now, since death had stripped him of his pro- tective infirmity. Muttering sadly to himself, the old man pressed his fingers to his ears. ***** From everlasting unto everlasting stretched the glassy sea. Beside it rose the ramparts of the Kingdom, tower on tower, praising the Most High in soaring splendors of jade and chrysoprase. Like the choiring meadow larks of a Cali- fornia spring, like a paean of light made vocal, came the celestial antiphony: "Alleluia! Alleluia! Allelu-u-u-ia !" All this was as it should be, reflected the inventor. Yet it did not seem quite right that the gate of the heavenly man- sions should look a little like the entrance of the New York post office, even though much vaster and more luminous. And the inscription over the portico was different. It was difficult to read — something about children. Reading this, the great inventor felt himself very old, and a little hesitant. The ceaseless iteration of the alleluiaing angels struck him, too, as a little fatuous. He could see them now, hundreds of them, stationed at intervals along the heavenly ramparts. There was one close by the gate, a mag- nificent winged creature, clothed only in light so that the inventor could not help observing that the seraph was appro- priately sexless. Soon, he reflected, it would be this one's turn, and even as he watched — "Allelu— " "Shut up!" The voice which had so rudely interrupted the celestial antiphony was anything but seraphic. Equally incongruous was the appearance of the bearded ancient who had suddenly appeared through a side gate, hurriedly thrusting his arms through a monk's cassock. "Come right in. You're expected." This, then, would be St. Peter. Smiling diffidently, the inventor mounted the steps while he gathered his thoughts together for the speech which would undoubtedly be expected of him. Also, he reflected with a throb of apprehension, there would be those terrible reporters. Their questions always fell into two categories: things that God Himself couldn't answer, and things that didn't matter. It was almost as if America hadn't manifested a bit of adult curi- osity in the last decade. The worst of it was that a coerced answer to a foolish question is always equally foolish. For years he had been obliged to celebrate his birthday by writing himself down a conceited, priggish child. And he wasn't that. Damned if he was! "On the contrary, you're damned if you're not." "I beg pardon? You know I'm a little deaf." "I beg your pardon. You know quite well that in your present state you are nothing of the sort. Neither am I. Nor am I deaf to the thoughts which you have just been thinking. I must say that you have changed greatly since we received our last report of you. As you see, I have had the gates opened, but perhaps it would be as well for us to wait and talk a bit before we go in." Silently, before the dazzled eyes of the inventor, the gates of pearl rolled back, disclosing a limitless vista of tow- ers and castles. Something in the pyramidal, stepped-back style of the heavenly architecture struck the inventor as fa- miliar. The resemblance was intensified by the din of riveters and the hiss of welding machines that surged out through the heavenly gates. Familiar, too, were the banners swung high above the streets of gold and bearing the inscrip- tion: "Forward, Heaven. Business Is Good. Keep It Good." "Heaven seems very populous," remarked the inventor mildly. "Frightful! Frightful! A while back we had a slight recession. Some of your people were caught long on bliss and threatened to grow up. But now they're coming again faster than ever. And you can't turn 'em away. That's the rule, you know. Of such is the kingdom of heaven." The guardian saint pointed at the inscription over the portico. "But I didn't realize that earth had produced so many good people!"

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296 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3375 "Good? What's good? All that's beside the point. The twentieth century will probably go down as the most exquisitely childlike period in human history. That last chil- dren's crusade your fellow-countryman Wilson was so keen about — we were simply swamped ! Haven't caught up yet. A new mob of children at the gates every day. They seem to come faster and faster." "But how about hell?" "Hell ! There's a deserted village for you. They haven't had a baker's dozen in the last ten years. You ought to see it." The inventor's mind leaped to a new vista. Even in the presence of eternal bliss the habit of curiosity is not easily suppressed. "Do you know," he started, "if you wouldn't mind — " But the saint gestured for silence. The din of the riveters had ceased. In the profound silence of eternity the inventor could hear the soft fall of pin feathers upon the streets of gold, dropped by the processions of the saved mov- ing back and forth over the celestial causeways. Suddenly a burst of choral music shook the ramparts. "That's the Celestial Rotary Chorus," explained Saint Peter. "They're rehearsing their welcoming song for you. Listen !" The chorus swelled in volume until the words were clearly distinguishable. It was the song which George M. Cohan had composed for the celebration of Light's Golden Jubilee, the fiftieth anniversary of his greatest invention : He is A Wiz. The inventor remembered it only too well, and blushed. "The voices seem — well, perhaps a little light." "Of course," answered the saint. "That's the Rotarians. Boy sopranos. Always have been and always will be. Time without end. God knows I've heard enough of them." The accent of bitterness in the saint's voice was unmis- takable. Seeing the surprise in the inventor's expression, he shrugged his shoulders. "You're thinking that heaven is perfect? Well, it is. Perfect for children. But I'm not in it. I'm the gate-keeper. It's your heaven, not mine. Come along, the Rotarians are waiting for you — Hey! Wait, where are you going?" For the old inventor had spread the tail of his frock coat like a sail and was in full flight toward the abyss of night. "Do you mean to say," shouted the saint as he caught up with him, "that you actually don't want to enter heaven?" The inventor turned and stared at him. "I'll see you in hell first," he stated succinctly. Throwing back his head, the guardian of the gate laughed long and loud. "See me in hell first, eh? That is an idea. Wish I might. No such luck for me. And what, by the way, makes you think that you'll get in? Hell is very exclusive. For adults only, you know." "So I gathered," replied the inventor with dignity. Then, as the memory of his earthly frustrations gathered force: "Do you suppose I enjoyed seeing my life-work made trivial and ridiculous? I was an inventor — it was my pas- sion to use the tools of science for the service of mankind. I gave the world light — good light, cheap light. Is it my fault if they used it to outrage the beauty and peace of the night — to make a cheap bazaar out of every street and avenue, selling one another cigarettes and chewing gum at the rate of a mil- lion candle-power a minute? I gave them the phonograph, so that every man, woman, and child might know the glory of great music and great speech ; so that the great singer, the great instrumentalist, might have all future generations of men for his audience. So I thought and dreamed. Yet to- day I am afraid there is less music in the heart and mind of the common man than ever before in history. I gave them the motion picture. At first I thought it was a toy. Then, too late, I saw that it was the medium of a new art. For by that time it had become merely a new racket for the pants-makers, and millions of minds were being trivialized and anaesthetized by that endless flicker of falseness and venality. How much of my work was actually applied to the service of a sane humanity? How much of it was cheapened and perverted by the greed of men, the mechanical greed of money to make more money? My work was honest work. I never cared for money — never thought about it. You imply that my work helped to fill that vulgar adolescent heaven of yours. I deny it. At any rate, it's your heaven, not mine. I want none of it." The guardian of the gate had listened to this outburst with growing admiration. "Do you know," he remarked, "I think perhaps you have a chance. Be sure to tell all this to Lucifer the first thing. You understand the basis of the divine categories, don't you? Heaven is for children and nose-followers, people who follow their noses like the ani- mals, only not so well ; people who praise God because they have never grown up enough to respect and praise themselves. Hell, on the other hand, is for adults and hell-raisers; peo- ple who praise and serve man from everlasting unto everlast- ing ; who follow Lucifer in the revolt that one day will shake the stars. From the divine point of view, heaven is the abode of that mercy which is death ; whereas hell is the home of the immortals and the eternal outpost of hope. Goodby and good luck to you. And give my regards to your friend Steinmetz." "Steinmetz? But Steinmetz was not a bad man." "There you go again! Good or bad, he went to hell like a shot. So did Aristotle, and Francis Bacon, and Gali- leo, and Newton, and Darwin, and Michael Faraday in spite of all his piety, and Gregor Mendel in spite of his priest's cassock, and that old viking Thorstein Veblen who wrote 'The Place of Science in Modern Civilization.' Oh, you'll have excellent company." On the brink of the abyss the old inventor halted and turned a troubled face to his celestial mentor. "There's just one thing," he murmured. "Henry . . . You know, I am greatly attached to Henry. Do you suppose — " "I think so. Yes, I'm confident of it. Henry has a great many things to repent. He's a very unconventional man and he's still growing. Remember, also, that he's never asked for mercy — not even from the bankers." Again through the gates of pearl came the shrill chorus of the Rotarians. "They're welcoming an ex-President of the United States," explained Saint Peter. "You know him — a very good man. It seems he burst a blood-vessel broadcasting your funeral elegy." The inventor smiled — with a certain diabolism. For already, in anticipation, the fires of hell warmed his heart with a fine glow of adult malice. "Serve him right," he said. "I never liked him."

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March 12, 1930] The Nation 297 In the Driftway AS he isn't good at conundrums, the Drifter has been shamefully dilatory in answering a question posed by Margot R. Granger of Charlottesville, Vir- ginia. "Having found you ever avid of discussion upon various topics, I write to ask what your idea is of the word virtue," is Miss Granger's simple plea. "Among a gather- ing of the younger generation," she goes on to say, "the word was given so many definitions, of such varying mean- ings, that I'm puzzled. To one it was merely an incon- venience upon occasions, to another a necessity, a third couldn't be worried as he was eating, another refused to discuss such a word in polite company, another even com- pared the word with altruism." Now if that isn't enough to spoil anybody's day the Drifter would like to know what could be. The dilemma of the Drifter's correspondent is that of every person nowadays who attempts to probe ever so little beneath the cuticle of things as they are. For the ancients, and for moderns too until psychology came along to upset us all, the question was different. The problem used to be to choose between Virtue and Vice, which in- variably were spelled with capital letters as became such august deities. There never was any question as to what Virtue and Vice were. BUT Virtue went under the scrutiny of the psycho- analysts, and when they got through with her she was spelled just virtue — and most illegibly at that. According to them virtue is a strange conglomeration of habit, supersti- tion, the greed of the privileged, the hypocrisy of the power- ful, together with a substantial residuum of hard common sense based on the human experience of the ages. To us moderns is given the problem of isolating and preserving that substantial residuum while scrapping the rest. Most persons of the older generation have frankly funked the job. Parents are often flabbergasted at the intelligent and reason- able questions of their children and unable to do more than move from event to event, powerless to formulate any fixed philosophy. For the most part the younger generation is just like them. So far as the Drifter can peer into the minds of high-school and college boys and girls today, they are unabashed pragmatists. They are hardly concerned at all with general principles; they are satisfied to seek day by day through personal experience the best way of life. BUT the Drifter's correspondent reminds him that some persons of the younger generation are interested in principles and definitions. All the definitions of virtue reported by the Drifter's correspondent seem to have some validity. Undeniably virtue is an inconvenience upon occa- sions— although not merely that, as the Drifter's corre- spondent quotes one of her friends as saying. Virtue does seem also to be a necessity to most persons, which is what Voltaire meant when he said that if there had not been a God it would have been necessary for mankind to invent one. On the whole the Drifter likes best the answer which identifies virtue with altruism, for it suggests that virtue is concerned primarily with one's attitude toward other people. The Drifter Correspondence Einstein on Peace To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Thank you for your editorial, Einstein on Peace, in The Nation for February 5. A few weeks ago it was my privi- lege to hear Professor Einstein speak to a group of interna- tional students at the Alexander Humboldt House in Berlin. Though the room was crowded, there was something about the man as he sat in his chair waiting to speak that created a peace- ful quiet. His first words cast a spell over all of us, and for the two hours during which he spoke and answered questions in his simple and unaffected manner we felt that we were living in a world of peace. I am sure that none of us will ever forget the softness of his voice, the light in his eyes, and the truths that he spoke. Berlin, February 20 Shepard Arthur Stone Viva Voce Votes To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: I "viewed with alarm" your article about the Lin- thicum bill which proposes to make the Star Spangled Banner the official anthem of the nation. If a toothless flutist who plays chiefly by ear and beats time with both feet may qualify as a musical connoisseur, then I want to say a few words. I submit that the Battle Hymn of the Republic is better in every way than the Star Spangled Banner or My Country 'Tis of Thee. If Congress is going to pick a national anthem I think it should qualify for the job by learning all three songs and singing them viva voce in joint session. Then, I'll bet that the Solons would do such a good job of the Battle Hymn of the Republic and make such a mess of the other two that without debate the Battle Hymn would get a unanimous and enthusias- tic vote. Portland, Oregon, February 20 Albert C. Jourdan Women and Wages To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: One encouraging feature stands out in the contro- versy which has followed Harvard's discharge of the scrub- women at Widener Library. That is the offer of the Women's Trade Union League to organize the women workers at Har- vard. We may be indignant at the employment policies of this wealthy university, our sympathy may go out to the hard- working women who have lost their jobs, but we should be even more concerned over the very low wages these women were receiving — over the very low wages paid women workers everywhere. This is not the first time in Massachusetts or in other States that the minimum-wage law, which was designed to pro- tect women, has interfered with their means of livelihood and forced them into even lower-paid employment. Any so-called protective legislation, such as the minimum-wage law, which applies to women and not to men helps fasten the burden of low wages on women. Any group of workers whose right to work is restricted by law is hampered in competing with other work- ers. If minimum-wage laws are necessary, let them apply equally to men and women. Boston, February 4 Alma Lutz

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Books and Drama Dialogue By IRWIN EDMAN And so I tell myself that this is peace, This dark sweet lassitude, this musing death, Where ardors sicken not, nor fires increase, Nor any hope can stir the even breath. I tell myself, "So must you always live, Only this freedom is felicity, They forfeit this who dare to take or give A love that drowns them in a desperate sea," I tell myself. To which myself replies, "This peace you prattle is but tired regret, Your quietude is all compact of lies, Your joy half built on what you half forget," Thus in the drowsing comfort once again, The homesick heart, the immemorial pain. Kaleidoscope The 42nd Parallel. By John Dos Passos. Harper and Brothers. $2.50. THE most striking quality about "The 42nd Parallel" is its structure. It is built after the manner of Aldous Huxley's "Point Counter Point" and of Mr. Dos Passos's own "Manhattan Transfer," but in one or two respects it is more intricate than either. It is really five novels shuffled together; among these are also shuffled excerpts called The Camera Eye and Newsreel. One reads, say, forty pages about the adventures of Mac, then a camera eye, then a news- reel, then a three-page biography of Debs, then thirty pages about the adventures of Janey, then another newsreel, then more about Mac, and so on. Toward the end the paths of two or three of the main characters cross, but haphazardly; there is no general drawing together of the threads, no climax, no rounding-out of anyone's story; things simply leave off, arbi- trarily, anywhere. It would be difficult to point to any unity in the book ex- cept that supplied by the binding. The forty-second parallel, as the reader will recall, is that imaginary circle of latitude which passes roughly through Chicago and slightly north of New York. But many of the events in the present volume happen in Mexico, New Orleans, and Paris. Apart from style and treatment, the themes have chiefly in common the fact that they represent various aspects of life in these United States. We begin with Mac, who picks up a job peddling Boccaccio and "The Queen of the White Slaves," gets a girl into trouble, marries her, deserts her, becomes a wobbly, drifts to Mexico, lives with a Mexican girl, runs a bookstore for a time. Next we follow Janey, who ends by becoming the adoring secretary of J. Ward Moorehouse, a go-getter and platitudinarian who has risen from a real-estate salesman and reporter to a public- relations counsel, and has married first the dissolute daughter of a nose-and-throat specialist and then, having divorced her, a Pittsburgh heiress, after he has spent the night with the latter on the day following her father's death. Next we come to Eleanor, who as a girl swears that she will kill herself if a man ever touches her; she becomes an interior decorator and enters into a platonic friendship with Moorehouse. We end with Charley, who drifts around as a garage mechanic, and doesn't marry his girl after she has been seduced by his friend. He winds up on a boat off for the war in France. Mr. Dos Passos is a writer of extraordinary talent; he knows American cities, he knows a great deal about life, he has a shrewd insight into men and women. "The 42nd Parallel" is full of amusing incidents, and at times, particularly in the early pages, it is absorbing. But it leaves one wondering whether Dos Passos's present method is not more a handicap than a help to him. This kaleidoscopic shaking of the fragments of several novels into one no longer has the attraction of novelty, and its other advantages are not always clear. Dos Passos's present prose, too, seems to me greatly inferior to the prose of his "Three Soldiers." What he does here is simply to omit commas from their conventional places, link his statements to- gether with the conjunction "and" as a substitute, and run phrases, nouns, and adjectives into single words, such as (all of these are from his first paragraph) "fourfamily," "whale- oil," "cavechested," "blondegrey," "nightwatchman." The net result of these mannerisms, which have already be- come stereotyped in the writing of the whole school of "new barbarians," is that the style of one member of the school has become almost indistinguishable from that of another. It is a prose that rapidly tends to become monotonous. It may be said in defense of such undistinguished writing that it is perfectly adapted to record, as it does here, the adventures of undistin- guished people. But where the characters are so aimless and unimportant the novel itself may come to seem aimless and unimportant. Dos Passos's men are interested only in women, liquor, and money; nearly all of them pass through the same weary cycles. Even the reds and revolutionists that he presents with sympathy are so much driftwood, without persistence, am- bition, emotional or intellectual discipline. The reader sees the tired cynical smile on the face of the narrator, and begins to feel almost as tired himself. "The 42nd Parallel," in brief, shares the capital danger of all futilitarianism in fiction: the fic- tion is apt to seem as futile as the events it records. I must, however, bear witness to the fascination of the nineteen "newsreels" scattered through the book. Here the kaleidoscopic method achieves some brilliant effects. News- paper headlines, fragments of contemporary speeches, snatches of popular songs of each year, are splattered on the page ap- parently at random but actually with great skill. These news- reels, which begin with the dawn of the present century and end with the year of America's entrance into the World War, not only indicate the cultural background of each period of the story, but supply an amazingly compact history that com- bines the merits of Thomas Beer and Mark Sullivan. They reveal admirably the mores of each year, and are so arranged that one news item becomes a subtly ironic commentary on the next. Henry Hazlitt A Romancer's Columbus Columbus, Don Quixote of the Sea. By Jacob Wassermann. Little, Brown and Company. $3.50. IN this biographical portrait of Columbus there is nothing new except the implications of the subtitle. The whole book is a glowing but unconvincing defense of the heroic. Columbus is seen as a Schicksalsmensch, the Don Quixote of the ocean, who sought not that which he found and found not that which he sought. Like the Knight of La Mancha, he was self- bewitched, a dark, unconscious idealist, one of God's fanatics. Incidents in Columbus's career that run counter to this romantic conception are simply rejected. Wassermann refuses to believe

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March 12, 1930] The Nation 299 that Columbus during his first voyage ever wanted to turn back, because the very idea is full of "inner improbability." As for the factor which simpler and more cynically minded persons would denote as the key to Columbus's character, Wassermann has this to say: "His unappeasable thirst for gold is rooted in something far removed from greed. Don Quixote, with his mind full of the treasures of the Emperor of Trebizond, is not greedy; he merely considers these treasures as the tribute due him from the hands of destiny." This may be true of the Don, but it requires a considerable faith to believe it of the man who contracted so shrewdly and so greedily with Ferdinand and Isabella before he set foot on board his ship of discovery. If it is easy to draw parallels between the two, it is easier still to mark divergences. It is true enough that Columbus, like Quixote, found something far different from what he 90ught, but in his case this was due to a geographical accident; in Quixote's, to a quirk of character. Columbus had nothing of the peculiar sweetness of Don Quixote, his ability to gain the love even of those who derided him. Don Quixote pre- vailed because he was a saint; Columbus because he was — among other things — a salesman. Wassermann admits that Columbus was a liar and an exaggerator; but surely he goes too far when he ascribes this to his hero's "visionary power." The trouble with Wassermann, whose nature is intensely, almost feverishly moral, is that he cannot reconcile charlatanism with greatness. Therefore he has to rationalize or, better, mys- ticize what to many people would seem the qualities of a brave, daring, but greedy and unscrupulous trickster who played with commendable cleverness upon the religious susceptibilities of his employers and who was interested personally in the main chance. It is also possible that Wassermann has been misled by some obvious parallels in the exterior lives of his heroes; both suf- fered degradation, imprisonment, the incredulity of their con- temporaries, etc. But not all Wassermann's eloquence can make these parallels seem other than accidental. As a work of lyric prose his book is valuable, but as a historical interpreta- tion it is half-baked. Clifton P. Fadiman Libertine and Libertarian That Devil Wilkes. By R. W. Postgate. The Vanguard Press. $4. JOHN WILKES is an important name in the history of civil and political liberty. It is imperishably linked with the establishment of some of the most fundamental of English constitutional rights. One cannot deny Wilkes the title of great libertarian. But, alas, he was no Plutarchian hero. As a libertine of the eighteenth century, his name is also linked with the orgies of the notorious Medmenham monks and with the celebrated "Essay on Woman" which incidentally helped to establish the English law of obscene libel. As a result, all of Wilkes's former biographers from Fitzgerald to Bleackley have approached him with a good deal of Victorian distaste and con- descension. "Notwithstanding these services," observes Fitz- gerald, "we find that the idea of a statue to John Wilkes some- how shocks the sensibilities." His honesty and sincerity have been questioned and he has been habitually referred to as the demagogue. There was thus every need for a new life of Wilkes that should be more palatable to the modern. This Postgate biog- raphy is a highly amusing and rollicking account. The manner of its telling is the simple and straightforward one of the racon- teur, and on the whole I doubt if the failure to employ Freudian technique upon so obvious a subject is to be deplored. For the first time Wilkes emerges entirely as a hero. He is exculpated upon every charge that has marred his reputation. He is de- fended against his wife ; his diversions are treated as the natural ones of an eighteenth-century gentleman ; he is cleared of the authorship of the "Essay on Woman"; and finally his recon- ciliation with the government of George III is explained as the result of a noble and renunciatory act of duty on his part in helping to quell the Gordon anti-Popery riots in London. The truth is that Wilkes had risen to power and popularity as a champion of the merchant class which was fighting the feudal privileges of the aristocracy, and as a convenient instru- ment of the great Whig nobles against the Tories. The Gordon riots made clear to Wilkes, who was an astute politician, that his usefulness had ceased, and with his characteristic cynicism he "retired" into Parliament to support the government. One may quarrel with Mr. Postgate's view of Wilkes as a poli- tician, but it would be ingratitude for a merciful and fascinat- ing biography. The book should be read also as an example of that voluntary bowdlerization which our sex censorship accom- plishes. It has taken a great deal of skill in innuendo to tell the story of John Wilkes the libertine. William S eagle The Unthinkable War America Conquers Britain. A Record of Economic War. By Ludwell Denny. Alfred A. Knopf. $4. MR. DENNY develops on an elaborate scale a thesis similiar in the main to that which Nicholas Roosevelt has lately expounded more summarily in his "America and England?" namely, that America and Britain are economi- cally at war, and that the economic superiority of America, ac- tual and potential, makes the defeat of Britain only a matter of time. Where Mr. Roosevelt, however, treated his subject with special reference to its bearing upon the London naval confer- ence, Mr. Denny keeps before his readers the possibility of an ultimate clash of arms. The "unthinkable war" is to him very thinkable indeed, not because either nation desires it, but because the economic conflict that is being waged is in fact a life-or- death struggle for Great Britain. There is no place in the world, Mr. Denny believes, for two such rivals for world eco- nomic dominion, and a "holy war" equipped with all the accus- tomed slogans of a great moral crusade may easily, all too easily, be launched once the economic struggle becomes suf- ficiently acute. The evidence in support of this thesis is by no means en- tirely new, but Mr. Denny marshals it with startling effective- ness. At virtually every point at which the economic life of Great Britain is examined it is found to be ominously on the decline, and the decline is tending to become a rout under the powerful and often unscrupulous competition of the United States. As far as industrial efficiency goes there is no longer any doubt of American superiority. Britain is overpopulated ; it has a vast and well-nigh insoluble problem of unemployment; restrictive immigration laws have closed the United States as an important outlet for a surplus population; and schemes of em- pire settlement have afforded thus far no effective relief. British labor is agitated and hungry; American labor reasonably con- tented and well fed. The Prince of Wales as a commercial drummer is an entertaining subject for editorials and after- dinner speeches, but American business, backed by an energetic Department of Commerce, is getting the world trade. Even the financial leadership which London still holds in the foreign loan market appears to Mr. Denny to be seriously threatened, partly because a declining British industry no longer produces a sufficient surplus of capital for export, and partly because finan- cial support of foreign enterprises which in return are expected to buy in British markets results in giving an artificial support

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300 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3375 to British industries which would not otherwise be profitable. Mr. Denny is particularly informing in the chapters which trace the world penetration of American capital, with its result- ant control of foreign industries and commercial operations. His accounts of the affiliations of the General Electric Com- pany, the International Telephone and Telegraph, and certain great banking and investment houses, of the fight for oil and other raw materials, and of the struggle of Great Britain to retain control of its. radio and cable communications are an arresting exposure of the widening grip of American money and the American business mind. Mr. Denny does not write in praise of these things; on the contrary his criticism is often severe, and he shows no special reverence for distinguished names. Anyone who still imagines, for example, that Mr. Hoover is an economist or a statesman should read Mr. Den- ny's scathing review of the Hoover policy in attacking the British rubber monopoly. The only prospect, as Mr. Denny sees the future, is for a continuance of what is now going on. Great Britain is "not succeeding," and there is no likelihood that it will succeed. "We were Britain's colony once. She will be our colony before she is done; not in name, but in fact." America will be too wise to try to govern the world; "we shall merely own it." "If Britain is foolish enough to fight us, she will go down more quickly, that is all." But she may fight when the American economic invasion has forced her to the last ditch. Good intentions are of little avail against economic facts, and professions of peace are quickly forgotten when a crisis arrives. Such is the possible future which Mr. Denny sees for two nations which have sol- emnly renounced war as an instrument of national policy. William MacDonald Into the Wilderness The Great Meadow. By Elizabeth Madox Roberts. The Viking Press. $2.50. FROM Albemarle westward a little cavalcade makes its way slowly. The smaller children ride; if a woman must carry a baby she rides also. Otherwise the horses are loaded with salt and lead, precious grain for journey cakes and for future sowing, an iron pot or two, a pewter tankard and spoon, linen woven in the plantation behind them, wool like- wise. The men carry their rifles across their arms; in a rain- storm or while fording a river it is the powder that at all costs must be kept dry. The comforts of the plantation, the houses with board floors, the full larders, the riches of sheep and cattle and swine — all these have been put away from the little band. Around them the trackless forest sheds a dark, mysterious, mottled light. Ahead is their trail, poorly marked, stony going, over mountains and across streams — the road to Kentuck, the promised land, rich with cane fields, alive with Indians, a land for the taking, but one that only strong men can take. This is the milieu of Miss Roberts's latest novel. She relates the progress of one such pilgrimage, that of Berk and Diony, from Five Oaks to Harrod's Fort in the late seventies of the eighteenth century. The civilization they leave behind them in Virginia is primitive enough, yet it knows comfort and plenty, the delights of Gray and Milton and Shakespeare as well as the solace of a full stomach and a warm back in winter. They ride forward into a land that is in the process of being wrested from the Indians. These Indians scalp women, they burn dwellings made with infinite patience by one pair of hands. Into this grim reality Berk and Diony go as bride and groom, into the protection of the little stockade at Harrod's Fort in Kentucky. There they know birth and death, the sweet joys of love, the pain of separation, the pinch of hunger and When writing to advertisers To Understand India, You Must Know Mahatma Gandhi "For all of us Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas is ... a valuable book. I am torn between praising Andrews and emphasizing Gandhi; between com- mending the work of the disciple in presenting us with a book so filled with sympathy and understanding, and describing the actual ideas of the leader himself . . . Anyone eager to know just what is being done in the East to create better living conditions for a depressed and often hopeless people will find eloquent passages in these pages." — Harry Hansen, in the New York World. MAHATMA GANDHI'S IDEAS Edited by C. F. Andrews The Macmillan Company Price $3.00 Consequences By Julia Ellsworth Ford Author of IMAGINA Introduction by John Haynes Holmes "Nothing more compelling has been written in years. There is a message here, but no academic discussion; an expose, but no sensational muck-raking. 'Consequences' should prove pop- ular everywhere, and once it has been read by a few, its fame will spread, for it is a novel that deserves to live. Ohio State Journal. Klang Kang-hu, a distinguished Chinese scholar says: "This is more than a novel — it is life." E. P. DUTTON & CO. $2.50 A CLEARING HOUSE FOR THE UNUSUAL The Nation Reader looks through these columns each week for information on the unusual If you have the unusual to offer — write us for our rates THE NATION pirate mention The Nation 20 Vesey Street

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March 12, 1930] The Nation 301 cold. There, too, Diony, who has married again after Berk's long absence has convinced her that he is dead, must make the bitter choice between him and her new husband when he unex- pectedly returns. All this Miss Roberts tells gravely, in rich detail, with in- sight, with tenderness, with a kind of slow candor that is very comforting in a day of books that tell their tale too swiftly. She never raises her voice; in an incident as heart-moving as that wherein Diony must make her difficult choice between two good men who love her and whom she loves there is no blustering, no hurry, no piling on of adverbs, no loud trumpeting of sobs and shouts of indecision. I am inclined to think, indeed, that a little of this drama would not have come amiss. For if Miss Roberts has a serious fault, it is an evenness of tempo that descends sometimes to monotony. She gives herself so unreservedly to understatement as to lose often the force of her remarks. Diony is evidently not without passion; but only the most careful reading discloses that Miss Roberts is trying, at times, to de- scribe her as passionate. She carves herself a wooden spoon, she bears her child, she sends her husband off on a dreadful journey from which he may easily never return, all with the same even heat. I am told that she is gay, that she is weary, that when she is confronted by an Indian brave who is deter- mined to scalp her she shrieks with terror. But I do not hear her laughter or her shrieks. She is like a lovely, rich figure in a tapestry, without sound, without movement. For me all this difficulty is due to Miss Roberts's language. Her mise en seine moves me as does no other in literature. I am touched by the log houses, the great fireplaces, the gourds that hold salt or meal, the spinning, the candle-making, the pewter dishes, the linsey gowns. I am touched by the virtues that these men and women had in abundance: fortitude, humor, strength, ingenuity, a generous competence that could make the wilderness give them food and fire and the materials of a living. But I see Miss Roberts's figures through a fog of language. It is, to be sure, rich and lovely language. But it makes them vague, it permits them to move only slowly and thickly. It robs them, I believe, of life that they would otherwise have in great abundance. Nothing can be done about this, probably. Miss Roberts could not write any other way if she would; and there will be plenty of readers who will admire her for just this quality. For me the sound obstructs the sense, the manner ob- scures the matter. And in spite of it I am moved, I am inter- ested, I am compelled to ride on through the fog because the meadow, I am convinced, lies just over the hill. If Miss Roberts ever does come into her great meadow it will be one of the literary gardens of her time. Dorothy Van Doren The Nationalist East A History of Nationalism in the East. By Hans Kohn. Trans- lated from the German by Margaret M. Green. Har- court, Brace and Company. $7. MISS GREEN of Foreign Affairs has done the English- reading and English-speaking academic world a wel- come service by translating so soon Dr. Kohn's "Geschichte der Nationalen Bewegung im Orient," which made its first appearance in Berlin only last year. It is an up-to- date and inclusive textbook in a field where such textbooks have been noticeably lacking. Hitherto scholars have treated Eastern nationalist movements individually for the most part, leaving travelers and popular writers to enjoy what has been a near-monopoly in the field of synthesis. Dr. Kohn's book is one of the few attempts that have yet been made to treat his- torically and between the covers of a single book those separate 1890 1920 THE DEVIL'S BOOTH Percival Wilde The upper-class nineties, — and Molly May Millen who knew what she wanted, — who carved her way straight into the small cold malicious heart of that brilliant era by no mere feminine accident of charm or beauty, — but by sheer nerve and a desperate genius for respectability. Each succeeding man was merely a rung in the ladder which finally left her the triumphantly moral Mrs. Quinchard of Quinchard. $2.50 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 383 Madison Avenue, New York THE MACHINE AGE and INDEPENDENT THINKING The journalism of The Manchester Guardian has stood the test of changing times and varying public tastes for more than a century. Today it is more widely read than ever because it has not let its judgment on affairs be stagnated by outworn slogans nor its views be cramped by the standardized thinking of a machine age. ®j)e jWancftestter (Suarbtan WEEKLY is published especially for overseas readers to give week by week in a concise form the gist of the news, reviews and opinions of The Manchester Guardian Daily. It is a storehouse of information on international poli- tics, European trends of thought, current English litera- ture, and cultural developments the world over. The intellectually inclined in more than sixty countries depend on The Manchester Guardian Weekly to keep them furnished with reliable information on all impor- tant world happenings and to keep their viewpoint on vital affairs clear and unprejudiced. — — -—MAIL, THIS COUPON — The Manchester Guardian Weekly, 224 West 42nd Street, New York City. Gentlemen : Enclosed please find $S.OO for which send THE MANCHES- TER GUARDIAN WEEKLY for one year to the below address. Name Address When writing to advertiteri pleat* mention The Nation

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302 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3375 nationalist movements which have changed the face of Asia in the last century. As a resident of Jerusalem, Dr. Kohn's observations on the peculiar status of Palestine are of special interest. He is among those who advocate the principle of equal political rights for Arabs and Jews regardless of changes in the relative nu- merical strength of the two groups. He is inclined to believe that the world may yet see in Palestine the development of a new conception of the state as an institution in which govern- ment will be conducted for the economic benefit of the entire population, while the cultural or so-called nationalist affilia- tions of the individual citizen will concern the government as little as his religion does at present in any secularized state. Some of the most interesting of Dr. Kohn's general obser- vations, appearing in the first six chapters of the book, may be best understood after reading Chapters VII to XII inclusive, in which are traced in varying degrees of detail the nationalist movements in Egypt, Turkey, the territories under Class A mandate, the Arabian peninsula, Persia, Afghanistan, Turkestan, and India. In this section the author succeeds to a remarkable extent in divesting himself of the condescension that marks the works of certain other historians who have applied themselves to a discussion of contemporary affairs in the East. His chap- ter on Egypt, for example, offers a distinct contrast to those comparatively recent histories of Egypt in which the develop- ment of the country has been represented as depending almost altogether on the patience and wisdom of an alien occupying Power, while the inhabitants themselves are treated somewhat like supernumeraries in a play, to set off the brilliance of the main actors. The Egypt of Dr. Kohn's work is an Egypt in- habited by Egyptians, not by Englishmen. Realism has replaced a familiar sentimentality in his approach to the subject; he is quite aware of the reasons for which the European press and European diplomats habitually represent the Egyptian struggle for freedom "not as an act of patriotism but as an outburst of fanaticism directed against Europeans, and a revolt of irrespon- sible soldiers and agitators against all authority and order." His portrayal of the nationalist movement in Egypt is based, therefore, on a study of what Egyptians themselves have been saying and thinking and doing for several decades rather than on the interpretation placed by Europeans on Egyptian activities. It is not surprising that his conclusions should differ some- what from those of conventional European accounts. "The spirit in which [Arabi Pasha's] reforms were begun," he writes, "gave ground for hope that without English intervention Egypt would have developed along liberal lines. True, the condition of the country was described otherwise in the English reports; for they were designed to justify intervention. But in reality 1882 was not a year of mutiny and bloodshed and disorder, but of an awakening national consciousness throughout the younger generation of Egyptians." And in a preceding passage he as- serts that in fact peace and order did prevail in Egypt during this brief period of national government: "The attempt to re- organize and revolutionize the whole conduct of life was ac- companied by far less disorder than has been the case else- where." This judgment is characteristic in the sense that the author has not been content to base his conclusions on com- monly accepted accounts of contemporary or past events, but has considered with care evidence that has escaped the atten- tion of previous writers. Particularly gratifying is it to find in his account a review of the contributions to the development of nationalism made by various Eastern writers and thinkers concerning whose lives and work little has been written here- tofore in English. In the first six chapters of the book Dr. Kohn has evalu- ated the religious movements in Asia, and especially in the world of Islam — movements which are the outcome, he be- lieves, of the ferment accompanying a great historic process Many Readers of The Nation Entrust Us With Their Travelling Problems of Special Interest SOVIET RUSSIA A never forgetful tour begins on April 12th, S.S. Bremen, and April 16th, S.S. Aquitania — Includes transatlantic passage both ways — accommodations In first-class hotels in Russia — three meals daily — railway with sleeper — sight-seeing tours — ser- vice of an English-speaking guide — passports, etc. — In time ^L^/f/"^ TTT> for International May Day. *JJ/«I/Trv/ U" PRIVATE AUTOMOBILE TOURS Reasonable Rates Every European Country Covered It will pay you to inquire. EUROPEAN PROFESSIONAL TOURS To cost scarcely more than a few weeks at shore or mountains. Itinerary 1: France — Germany — Bel- gium— Holland — England. 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March 12, 1930] The Nation 303 which is entirely reshaping the intellectual and social life of the East. He has then proceeded to analyze the effects of Great Britain's influence upon the Orient and the far-reaching ramifications of the Russian Revolution. As a corollary of European aggression he finds that "it is precisely in national- ism that the consciousness of Eastern unity originates. For the present it is a sentiment of defensive solidarity in face of a united white race. But it may be the first step toward a world consciousness which for the first time in history will embrace mankind as a whole." Elizabeth P. MacCallum Illumination Firehead. By Lola Ridge. Payson and Clarke. $2.50. The Black Christ and Other Poems. By Countee Cullen. Harper and Brothers. $2. CONSTANT repetition has robbed the story of the cruci- fixion of almost all emotional force. Poets have often tried to breathe life into the story by reinterpreting it. By reducing the supernatural element, they have hoped to achieve a more credible story and thus to make a more power- ful impact upon modern readers. Sometimes they have, by re- quiring us to adjust ourselves to the idea of, say, Judas as a hero, disrupted the usual pattern of responses. Such methods have not infrequently resulted in a certain vigor and fresh- ness. But there is another way of bringing life to the dead bones of the too familiar. Negro spirituals of the crucifixion make, as a rule, more impression on our sensibilities than any carefully conceived revision of the legend. They do so be- cause the authors did not feel the remoteness of the story in time and place, and because the personal implications of the events were to them altogether real and even novel. But the conditions which made possible the spirituals do not exist today among either Negroes or whites. When, there- fore, Lola Ridge accomplishes — in, of course, a richer and more sophisticated way — precisely what is accomplished by the spirit- uals, one recognizes that the poetic imagination has performed an extraordinary feat. There is no novelty in the conception of the events and characters of "Firehead," and the fictitious elements that have been introduced are strictly limited by the outlines of the tradition. Nevertheless, Miss Ridge's telling of the story utterly breaks through conventional responses; the events she describes are alive and almost terrifyingly close to us. Somehow, out of her own intimate acquaintance with suf- fering, Miss Ridge has found a way to plunge herself into the midst of the happenings of the crucifixion day. She has con- ceived for herself the uniqueness of Jesus, and she has re- created the effect which the death of such a person would have on his associates. And then, by a tremendous effort, an effort perhaps too apparent to the reader, she has contrived means for the communication of her vision. To such an achievement one must yield full measure of appreciation. The power of the poet's imagination, the beauty of innumerable passages, and the sustained force of the poem as a whole impress the most critical reader as evidences of an i uncommon talent. It is enough, one must repeat, to have made 1 real and affecting the sufferings of Jesus and the struggles of the disciples. And yet Miss Ridge has not been able to do the one thing — it was almost certainly impossible — that would have given her poem enduring greatness. Though the events of the crucifixion have for her both a personal and a kind of cosmic significance, she has not succeeded in making that significance completely felt by the modern mind. The quality of Miss Ridge's achievement can be measured by the failure of Countee Cullen to accomplish a simpler task in "The Black Christ." The poem has merits of its own, but When writing to advertiser* please •XPL.ORATIVE Itiner- aries worked out with reference to social, economic, historic, artistic and scenic features. Visits to factories, schools, children's com- munities, collective farms and villages . . . art treasures, palaces and workers' rest homes . . . for the adventurous . . . camping In the Caucasus and study of primitive tribes. Small groups, each accompanied by a quali- fied American leader and Russian Interpreter. From $3»5 Including express steamship pass- age. Literature available. Individual itineraries akoi exe- • cuted a Independent year-'round • representation in Russia 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK JME^QBEN~-RQA5D< LAND OF GAIETY AND COLOR " " THE vivid drama of peasants in national costumes gathered in picturesque inns and marketplaces against the many-colored back- ground of Germany's flowery valleys, forests and hills and the lofty eminence of legend- haunted castles. The Passion Play at Ober- ammergau. Festivals in the great cities cano- pied with banners. Modern zest in jazz operas, iheatres. cabarets, and dancing. The undying past in the music cycles. Adventure spent In ihe moderate cost of hotels, meals and travel. No vise charge, no special taxes. Refreshment in the mountain, sea, and health resorts. "Going to Europe" means going to Germany GERMAN TOURIST INFORMATION OFFICE 665 FIFTH AVE. NEW YORK. N. Y. Please send me Illustrated Travel Brochures oo i Beautiful Germany. , f j Nami i I Addrin ■mention The Nation

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304 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3375 clarity of conception is not one of them. In general, Mr. Cullen's talents do not seem to be developing as one might wish; there is in the poems in his new book an uncertainty of tone that is not offset by the lyric skill for which his work is always distinguished. Granville Hicks Books in Brief Pay Day. By Nathan Asch. Brewer and Warren. $2.50. This story is a studied report rather than a novel. But it is a swiftly moving, accurate, and engrossing report. Jim is a thirty-dollar-a-week clerk. He is very young and it is pay day. And he has a date with a new girl. He boards the Bronx-bound subway express, washes up and has supper, and "beats it" back downtown again to keep his date. Jim's thoughts roam a dark forest. They are dominated by fear and sex urge in turn. So he wants to fight every man and he has thoughts about every girl. He dreams of becoming a travel- ing salesman — plenty of "jack," living in hotels and riding in Pullmans, plenty of drinks and cigars, with women in every town. He and Helen go to the movies; then to Paddy's back- room speakeasy. What a night! Jim gets drunk, then sick. Helen leaves him for another boy. And Jim arrives home at dawn broke, ill, savage, and remorseful. There are thousands of pimply-faced Jims in every big city. Mr. Asch has done an excellent study of the type. The Hidden City. By Philip Gibbs. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. Through the clear eyes of the thirty-five-year-old Doctor Jevons, Sir Philip Gibbs looks out on the tumultuous life of London streets and ponders on such subjects as poverty, the post-war generation of slim-legged young girls and neurotic boys, sex in young lives in our hectic megalopolitan civilization, and free will or determinism — which? All this is not to deny the fact that his latest novel also contains a good story. After Doctor Jevons puts up his brass plate on the door of his house in Walpole Street, he becomes drawn into an ever-widening circle of troubled lives, many of which — since one patient leads to another — are intertwined. It is a good idea. There is a mild Dickensian flavor about this story with its dramatic, sentimen- tal, and heroic moods, though the philosophy is contemporary. And if in place of the villain there are glands, environment, heredity, neuroses, complexes, yet in the figure of the intelligent and tolerant young doctor the author has provided his readers with a perfect modern knight for a hero. Audacious Audubon. By Edward A. Muschamp. Brentano's. $3.50. The story of John James Audubon, the Frenchman who became one of America's greatest naturalists, is of an order that always has a wide appeal — that of the man who achieves fame after years of failure, almost disgrace. Having lost his original fortune, and having failed in his many efforts to retrieve it because of his own neglect of what he felt to be his duties and responsibilities, this Audubon, encouraged and aided by a remarkable wife, finally gathered together the by-products of twenty years of "folly" (his bird pictures) and set forth to con- quer the world — in his own field. The story of the succeeding fourteen years is the story of his extraordinary work, "Birds of America," originally published in four gigantic volumes, each volume three feet three inches high and two feet five inches wide, the size being due to Audubon's obsession that all his bird portraits should appear life-size, even the wild turkey. After this book came international fame, followed by other books. Mr. Muschamp's admiration for his hero, though it affects his "The Majority Rules" A T least, that's the theoretical basis of government in America. But majorities have a way of becoming care- less about HOW they rule. So it devolves upon the minority to keep the majority straight, or at least in a tolerable state of effectiveness. That's why the public so sorely needs the ser- vice of that little group of progressive Senators in Washington. Likewise The Nation — a minority journal devoted to the interests of the majority. It gives publicity to the essential facts and trends in government and cultural life here and abroad. The minority read it; the ma- jority feel its influence — and hate it simply because they do not understand its purpose and effect. DO NOT SUBSCRIBE unless you are one of the minority. The price is $5 a year, pay- able in five $1 instalments at one-month intervals. NEXT WEEK A critical appraisal by Joseph Wood Krutch of the work of D. H. Lawrence, whose death has just been announced. THE NATION 20 VESEY STREET NEW YORK □ For the $1 enclosed, enter my one-year subscription instanter. I will send the balance in four monthly instalments of $1 each; or □ I enclose $5, payment in full for one-year subscrip- tion; or □ The enclosed $8 covers my two-year subscription. Name Street City 3-12-3° When writing to advertitert please mention The Nation

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March 12, 1930] The Nation 305 Plays to See ••Apple Cart— Beck — +5th St., E. of Eighth Ave. •At the Bottom— Waldorf— 116 W. 50th St. •Berkeley Square — Lyceum — E. 45th St. ••Children of Darkness — Biltmore — W. 74th St. •Civic Repertory — 14th St. & 6th Ave. — See Advertisement. •Death Takes a Holiday — Barrymore Theatre — 47th St., W. of B'dway. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st St., E. of B'dway. ••Everything's Jake — Bijou — 45th St., W. of B'dway., Beginning Mar. 10. ••June Moon— Broadhurst— W. 44th St. Mei Lan-Fang — National — 208 W. 41st St. ••Meteor— Guild— W. 52nd St. ••Rebound— Plymouth — 45th St., W. of B'dway. ••Strictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. •••Strike Up The Band— Times Sq.— W. of B'dway. ••The First Mrs. Fraser — Playhouse — 48th St., E. of B'dway. •The Green Pastures — Mansfield — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •The Infinite Shoeblack— Elliott— 39th St., E. of B'dway. •The Last Mile— Sam H. Harris^2nd St., W. of B'dway. ••Topaze — Music Box — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •••Wake Up and Dream— Selwyn — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. First Nights •••Flying High— Apollo— W. 42nd St. The Players of Japan — Booth — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •••A Glass' of Water — American Laboratory — 222 E. 54th St. •Launcelot and Elaine— President — 247 W. 48th St. Films China Express — Cameo — 42nd St., E. of B'dway. Dich Hab Ich Geliebt— 55th St. Theatre— 55th St., E. of 7th Ave. Disraeli — Central Theatre — Broadway and 47th St. Concerts and Recitals Philadelphia Chamber String — Town Hall — Tues. Eve., Mar. 11. Spalding — Carnegie — Tues. Eve., Mar. 18. Intercollegiate Glee Club — Carnegie — Sat. Eve., Mar. 8. Grand Opera for Children — Tales of Hoffman — Roerich — 103rd St. and Riverside Dr. — Sat. Aft., Mar. 15. Josef Hoffman — Carnegie — Sat. Aft., Mar. 15. Philharmonic Symphony — Carnegie — Thurs. Eve., Mar. 13. 20; Fri. Aft., Mar. 14, 21; Sun. Aft., Mar. 9; Metropol- itan— Sun. Aft., Mar. 16. Philharmonic Svmphonv Students' Concert — Carnegie — Sat. Eve., Mar. 15,' 22. Philharmonic Symphony for Children — Carnegie — Sat. Morn., Mar. 8, 22. Art Exhibits Exhibition of Paintings selected by Alfred Stieglitz — Oppor- tunity Gallery— Art Center— 65 E. 56th St.— To Mar. 13. Drawings by Rockwell Kent for Moby Dick — Weyhe Gallery — 794 Lexington Ave. — To Mar. 15. Exhibition on contemporary French Masters — Reinhardt Gal- leries—730 Fifth Ave.— To Mar. 15. •Drama. '•Comedy. 'Musical. □ □ LUNCHEON □ □ EIGHTH SATURDAY LUNCHEON of the New York Chapter LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL, DEMOCRACY at the HOTEL WOODSTOCK 12:45 P. M., Saturday, March 8th, 1030 "The Telephone — Servant ofi the People" Speakers: O'CONNOR, Assistant Ylce-Presldent of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. EDWARD D. BIERETZ, International Vice-President of the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. DONALD RICHBERG, Attorney for Railway Brotherhood ; Gen- eral Counsel for the National Conference on Valuation of Railroads. McALISTER COLEMAN, Writer. W. J. Chairman: BENJAMIN STOLBERG Make reservations in advance at tlie office of the L.I.D., 112 East 19th Street, New York City— Algonquin 6865. MEMBERS $1.00 NON-MEMBERS $1.25 Listen in on WEAF, 1 US P. U., Eastern Standard Time. a DEBATE □ LECTURE D FILMS D - FSOVIETISM^i RELIGION! IS RUSSIA JUSTIFIED? THE TIMELY 4- CORNERED DEBATE Sunday, March 16 at 2:80 P. M. CARNEGIE HALL 7th Ave. at 57th St. Res.rved Seals, {1.00, $1.50, $1.75. $2.00, S2.50. $3.00 Box Seats $3.85 On sale at Carnegie Hall Box Office (Circle 1770) ; Rand School Bookshop, 7 E. 15th St. ; and in per- son or by mail from of- fices of LEAGUE FOR PUBLIC DISCUSSION 11 West 42nd St. Room 644 Phones: Lackawanna 1618- Chickering 5796 (N. B. This debate ^^ will be published ^^^ verbatim. Reserve Aw your copy now ^k by mailing $1.) RESOI/VED: That the anti-religious policy and practices of the Soviet government are justified. MAX EASTMAN Brilliant Author-Lecturer For SOVIETISM (Atheism) REV. JOHN HAYNES HOLMES For RELIGION (Deism) HARRY ELMER BARNES Noted Social Philosopher For LIBERALISM (Agnosticism) DR. STEPHEN S WISE For RELIGION A RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 7 E. 15th St. PROF. RAYMOND MOLEY Prof. Public Law, Columbia University CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN TRANSITION Saturday, March 8, 2 p. m. WILLIAM H. BRIDGE CREATIVE PSYCHOLOGY Wednesday, March 12, 7 p. m. Alg. 3094 VOTED THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR Matinees: Good Seats, All Prices, at Box Office WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE ARLISS in (4 DISRAELI (A Vitaphone All-Talking Picture) »1 CENTRAL THEATRE Broadway and 47th St, Daily 2:43 — 8:45 Sunday 3 — 6 — 8:45 154 W. 55th Street, East of 7th Avenue. Popular Prices 55th STREET PLAYHOUSE Continuous 1 :30 until midnight. 2nd Triumphant Week FIRST TIME AT POPULAR PRICES THE FIRST 100% GERMAN TALKING PICTURE "DICH HAB ICH GELIEBT" ("BECAU8E I LOVED YOU") "One of the best films that have come from Berlin since 'Variety."— SAYS FILM DAILY. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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306 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3375 judgment, has not led him to distort or conceal important facts, all of which are to be found in the two-volume biography by Francis Hobart Herrick published about twelve years ago. "Audacious Audubon" is in no sense a critical biography, nor, as a study of the man, does it penetrate very far beneath the surface, but it is a spirited retelling of a tale which in itself contains all the necessary elements of drama. The Overland Trail. By Agnes C. Laut. Frederick A. Stokes Company. $3.50. Endeavoring to combine history with present conditions in a picture which would show both the pioneer and the grown-up stages of an important section of the country, Miss Laut has achieved little more than a jumble. In her pages the past jostles the present rather than runs along beside it or blends with it, the effect not being helped by the author's tendency to gush. The Oregon Trail was indeed what the subtitle of this book calls it — an "epic path." But it was not made in a single bold stroke. On the contrary it was formed bit by bit, by new bands of adventurers pushing on from the point reached by preceding explorers. Nor was it a simple, direct line. Rather was it a set of rough routes over land and through streams. These routes would have presented a colorful scene to one who could have viewed them from a low-flying airplane, with their caravans of horsemen and wagons, their hovering Indians, their occasional forts. This panorama Miss Laut depicts, partly in her own words, partly in quotations from the diaries and other accounts left by a few of those who made the perilous journey. But her story is neither clear nor comprehensive. For a proper historical record one must turn elsewhere. The Gothick North: A Study in Mediaeval Art, Life, and Thought. By Sacheverell Sitwell. Houghton Mifflin Company. $5. The English poet writes a "history of the tall, fair-haired races in Art," containing a few admirable and poetic re-creative studies of tapestries, castles, and monasteries, together with much quite extraneous matter in which he airs his ideas, his prejudices, and his hates. Drama For the Defense **F I "A HE Plutocrat," Booth Tarkington's defense of Bab- bittism, has been adapted for the stage of the Van- derbilt Theater, where it is acted with genial abandon by Mr. and Mrs. Coburn. In it Earl Tinker, Napoleon of the meat trade, blunders from his native Omaha across the ocean to Egypt, and by the simple process of stepping firmly on everyone's toes succeeds in revealing to all the real greatness of American character. He sings "Sweet Adeline" in the smoking-room, he slaps the foreign adventuress on the back, and he exhibits the depth of his homely humor by addressing a sensitive young Frenchman named Hyacinthe as Hollyhock, Heliotrope, and Hibiscus; but (though one would hardly believe it without the incontrovertible evidence of the play itself) they like it, and it is only the most absurd of his countrymen who object. Earl has, to be sure, neither manners in the conventional sense nor even the most rudimentary beginning of that capacity to understand the tastes of another upon which manners are founded; yet this fact only serves to convince his victims that he is the modern analogue of the Roman conqueror, and when that dubious com- pliment has been paid to his hero Mr. Tarkington is content. He has set out to demonstrate not only that Babbitt is likable but that Europeans like him, and he is apparently satisfied thai he has established his contention. Now most controversy cast in the form of drama or fiction is peculiarly futile for the simple reason that the controversialist is able to invent all the evidence upon which his argument is based, and this fact is responsible for one of the many defects of "The Plutocrat." Thus it is, for example, far from clear where Mr. Tarkington got his idea that Babbitt is better liked abroad than he is in the more effete portions of his native coun- try; for though, perhaps, he ought to be, I at least have never observed any tendency on the part of the English or the French to judge him with that affectionate leniency which the play rep- resents as typical; and if I remember my history aright the Greeks did not generally regard the Roman conquerors who rode roughshod over their decadent civilization with any par- ticularly genial admiration. Yet the most striking of all the striking things about "The Plutocrat" is not this dubious premise concerning the attitude of Europe toward the magnates of the Middle West, but the plain fact that Mr. Tarkington has drawn a libelous portrait of his hero, and out of the depths of his ad- miration attributed to him speeches and actions which would be set down to extravagant malice had they been imagined by a Lewis or a Mencken. If Mr. Armour, Mr. Ford, and Mr. Du Pont were out- ward bound on the He de France they would not put their arms around one another's shoulders and make the timbers ring with barber-shop ditties. Any one of them would probably know what an "impresario" is, and not one would be likely to inquire "house or sign" when introduced to a young man who is described as a painter. Neither is it probable that Mrs. Chrys- ler would take her husband publicly by the ear because she saw him talking to an attractive woman, or even that any captain of industry would habitually dismiss all inhabitants of the At- lantic seaboard as "frozen-faced Easterners." Yet such is the behavior attributed by Mr. Tarkington and his adapter to men supposed to be of equal eminence, though represented as possess- ing habits, tastes, and opinions which would disgrace the pro- prietor of a village filling station. Much can be said for the American, but these authors seem singularly unfitted to say it. By some strange twist of mind, they are led to suppose that a comic-strip husband sneaking away from a termagant wife constitutes a convincing picture of our superior family life and that, in general, the best way to exalt our countrymen is to label a gross exaggeration of all their most obvious defects "American virtue." We can survive our enemies; but may God defend us from such friends as these, and preserve us from the folly of the ass in Swift's fable who boasted of his voice while confessing that his ears were, perhaps, a little too short. The "International Revue" (Majestic Theater) is an elab- orate spectacle featuring Harry Richman, Gertrude Lawrence, Florence Moore, and Jack Pearl. Most of the scenes fail dis- mally to come off. Joseph Wood Krutch It is hardly necessary to remark that "Simple Simon" with Ed Wynn at the Ziegfeld Theater is as uproarious a revue as one is likely to see. Mr. Wynn has simply to remark that he loves the woods to send any normal person into gales of laugh- ter. And he is supported by charming Urban scenes and by some of the most original and lovely Broadway dancing that has yet appeared, even under Mr. Ziegfeld's auspices. In "The Infinite Shoeblack" (Maxine Elliott's Theater) a poor Scotch Puritan falls in love with a notoriously promiscu- ous woman, reforms her by talking about her soul and the vir- tues of child-bearing, and marries her. Although there is much lofty quotation from Carlyle, the play is essentially a melo- drama, and most of its humorous moment's are not intended. H. H.

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March 12, 1930] The Nation 307 Contributors to This Issue Laurence Todd is in charge of the Washington bureau of the Federated Press. Henry Raymond Mussey is managing editor of The Nation. Paul Y. Anderson is the national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. James Rorty is the author of "Children of the Sun." Irwin Edman is the author of "Adam, the Baby and the Man from Mars." Henry Hazlitt is literary editor of The Nation. Clifton P. Fadiman is head of the editorial depart- ment of Simon and Schuster. William Seagle is the author of "Cato, or the Future of Censorship." William MacDonald is a regular contributor of his- torical and political reviews to The Nation. Dorothy Van Doren is associate editor of The Nation. Elizabeth P. MacCallum is a member of the research staff of the Foreign Policy Association. Granville Hicks is assistant professor of English at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. L. J. de Bekker is secretary to the committee on Haiti. THE DIVORCE AND SEPARATION OF ALIENS IN FRANCE. By Lindell T. Bates. Grounds and defences, power and jurisdiction of courts, procedure, rules of evidence, alimony, separation agree- ments, division of property, etc. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS. Price $7.00 □ □ FILMS □ □ R K O CAMEO 42nd St & B'way American Premiere a BEG. FRIDAY, MARCH 7th Newest S0VK1N0 Production CHINA EXPRESS Sensational Uprising aboard the famous Nanking to Luchow express DARINGLY DIFFERENT An amazing film if □ □ THEATRES D □ CIVIC REPERTORY "£^,IT 60c, $1, 1.50. Matinee* Thursday* and Saturdays, 2:80 EVA LE GALLIENNE. Director Thurs. Mat., Mar. 6, "The Open Door" and "The Women Have Their Way," Thurs. Eve., "Hedda Gabler," Fri. Eve., Mar. 7, "The Open Door" and "The Women Have Their Way," Sat. Mat., Mar. 8, "Peter Pan," Sat. Eve., "Tha Would Be Gentleman," Mon. Eve., Mar. 10. "The Living Corpse" and "The Women Have Their Way," Wed. Eve- Mar. 12, "The Sea Gull." Seats 4 weeks in advance at Box Office & Town Hall, 113 W. 43rd St. The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present RUTH DRAPER Evenings : COMEDY in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER ■mm Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, 8 :50. THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats. Thurs. and Sat., 2:30. VEHY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 GRACE GEORGE In the ST. JOHN ERVINE Comedy "FIRST MRS. FRASER with A. E. Matthews and Lawrence Groismith PT AYT4fiTT 2.30 EXTRA MATINEE EVERY THURSDAY UNTIL JUNE 16 Matinee Every Day during Easter Week. -REBOUND- With HOPE WILLIAMS "This is the best light comedy written by anybody hereabouts in ten or twenty years, and it's not so damned light, either." — Heywood Broun, New York Telegram.. Arthur Hopkins presents DONALD OGDEN STEWART'S COMEDY Plymouth Theatre. Eves. 8:50; Mats. Thurs. & Sat., 2:40. The Theatre Guild Presents METEOR By 8. K. BEHRMM p.-JlJ THE A., 62nd si. W. of Broadway V»U1IU E¥g«. 8:60. Mat*. Than. & Sat. 1:49 LAST 2 WEEKS! The Apple Cart Bernard Shaw's Political Extravaganza lif ARTT1V RI7PK" Theatre, 45th St., W. of Eighth Ave, iTl/ilX J 111 DtiVjJV Evgs., 8:30. Mats., Thurs. & Sat., 2:30. » City Haul By ELIZABETH MIELE with HERBERT RAWLLVSON A COMEDY ON MUNICIPAL POLITICS ELTTNGE THEATRE, 42nd St., West of B'dway. Evenings 8 :50. Matinees Wednesday and Saturday 2 :30. -LAURENCE RIVERS presents- 5* Green Pastures By MARC CONNELLY (Play staged by Author — Music under direction of Hall Johnson) MANSFIELD THEATRE W. 47th St. EVS. 8:30, MATINEES WED. & SAT., 2:30 HERMAN SHUMLIN presents THE LAST MILE "Most exciting play in New York today. Superbly done. Cheers keep rising in your throat. — John Mason Brown, Poet. QA1V4 14 I-IAOT3IQ Theatre 42nd St. W. of Broadway Or*IVI n. nAfVIVlJ Eves. 8:60. Matinees Wed. & Sat., 2:80 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section The Massacre at Aux Cayes By L. J. de BEKKER A PEACEFUL day in Aux Cayes, a little port in Haiti chiefly busied in shipping coffee to France. A week of student demonstrations and a dock strike had just ended part of the general strike which included even the lawyers of Haiti and resulted from the troubles that Dr. Freeman, head of the $1,000,000 agricultural school at Damien, brought upon himself by his shortsighted treatment of the students. The marines had been restrained from a bayonet charge against a procession of striking students; Lieutenant Fitzgerald Brown, U. S. M. C, sub-commander of the military district, had proclaimed the rigors of mar- tial law; and on December 5 there was no visible disorder, although the strike leaders were holding a conference in a warehouse. Out of a cloudless sky came three naval air- planes, which circled the city discharging machine-guns and rifles, dropping shell-cases from time to time, then flying out over the bay where they discharged real bombs. Terror- stricken men, women, and children ran into streets, where they were joined by the strikers, all expecting instant death. But they did not cry for mercy; they shouted: "A bas l'Occupation ! A bas Borno!" No one was injured, and when this "demonstration of force" had continued for an hour, the naval planes flew away in the direction of Port au Prince. Secure in their barracks-fortress, the marines this time made no attempt to restore order. The people of Aux Cayes were permitted to rage through the streets and shout "Down with the Occupation!" and "Down with Borno!" until they calmed down through sheer exhaustion. That same day in Port au Prince, R. M. Cutts, sign- ing himself "Colonel, United States Marines, Command- ing First Brigade, United States Marine Corps and United States forces ashore in Haiti," had proclaimed martial law in Port au Prince, ordered the inhabitants to be in their houses by 9 p. m. and to remain there until daylight, and informed them that "articles or speeches of an incendiary nature or those that reflect adversely upon the United States forces in Haiti or tend to stir up agitation against United States officials" would constitute offenses to be brought to trial before a military tribunal. Thereupon all the Oppo- sition newspapers suspended publication. Captain Evans, U. S. M. C, major general and com- mandant of the Garde d'Haiti, and Sergeant Belton, U. S. M. C, lieutenant in the Garde d'Haiti, telegraphed the Associated Press and the United Press, for which they were correspondents, that trouble was apprehended in Aux Cayes, and that a shipment of arms had been received there from Guatemala. They were wrong about the arms from Guatemala, but right about trouble at Aux Cayes. The correspondents of the Associated Press and the United Press wired their American offices the first news of the massacre at Aux Cayes, saving that five Haitians had been killed and several wounded by marines in suppressing disorders arising from the strike. All Haiti knew next day how inaccurate these figures were, but the Temps, the Presse, and other Opposition newspapers could not give the correct report and the Occupation press stuck to "five killed and several wounded." This was the story, of course, that appeared in American newspapers. Murmurs of dissatisfaction with the official figures be- came too much for Colonel Cutts, and to suppress them he sent an official communique to the Haitian newspapers, which they published at his request on January 7, without com- ment. The Cutts communique reads as follows : It is requested that a brief report be published rela- tive to the events at Cayes of December 6, 1929. The inquiry having terminated, and the last reports having been received, the following facts are established: A mob of 1,000 to 1,500 persons, more or less drunk, marched on Cayes from the neighborhood of Torbeck, en- countered a patrol of twenty marines at the passage of the river, and were stopped by the patrol. The mob agreed to return home if the strike at Cayes should prove to be ended. Leaders of the crowd were permitted to enter Cayes to reassure themselves, and declared on return- ing that the strike in Cayes was over. The mob violated its promise and refused to go home. A number of func- tionaries and men of eminence in the town then approached the mob and urged them to be reasonable and to turn back, but without result. Then the mob began to surround the patrol, and the latter fired over their heads in an at- tempt to stop them. They halted, but again advanced. The patrol again fired over their heads, but this failed to stop them. Night was approaching. The mob then surrounded the patrol, which, in legitimate defense, fired in earnest. The first volley was with muskets, but when this failed to halt the mob, the marines fired with machine-guns and automatics. The machine-guns fired twenty-four cartridges in a fixed position. The fusillade ceased the moment the mob abandoned its attack. The firing was directed low against the legs, for the purpose of checking the mob while killing as few as possible. Reports from the hospital demon- strate that all wounds made in bodies were caused by ricocheted bullets. First reports received stated that five were killed and twenty-five wounded; final reports from the hos- pital at this date say ten were killed and twenty-four wounded. There is little probability that there will be any changes from this final report. If the patrol had wished, or if it had intended to kill, three or four hundred persons could have been easily struck down. The weapons utilized were of the government standard type, such as were used in the World War. There are no longer any other kind here. There have been no disorders in Cayes or in the neighborhood since. But as many unfounded rumors have been placed in circulation, it is desired that this short state- ment of the affair be published. This circumstantial if unveracious narrative only made matters worse. The communique, after a delay of a month for Colonel Cutts's inquiry, raised the figures still being pub- lished in the United States from "five killed and several wounded" to "ten killed and twenty-four wounded." But

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March 12, 1930] The Nation 309 ESSAYS IN SATIRE by Ronald A. Knox F. P. A. in the Conning Tower, N. Y. World: "And so read a book called 'Es- says in Satire,' by Ronald Knox, who is a writer with a fine sense of words and of parody, too." There i3 gorgeous material in this day and age for keen satire of a new ^ order, and here's a new satirist in- troducing himself in a diverse col- lection lampooning, among other things — human credulity, psycho- analysis, mystery novels, radio, Christian Unity, college theses, literary scholars, and other "serious" $2.60 ■ubjects. E. P. DUTTON & CO., Inc., 300 Fourth Ave., New York (Publishers since 1852) THE TALK OF THE TOWN Is our newly opened Health Food Luncheonette, where the most fastidious and elite in matters gastronomic are fully- satisfied — both in regards to taste and nourishment. Only the freshest and best of foodstuffs and no processed prod- ucts nor injurious ingredients are used. Come with your friends and join the increasing host of our enthusiastic patrons. Open every day until mid- night, including Sunday and holidays. HEALTH FOODS DISTRIBUTORS 45 East 34th Street (Between Madison and Park Aves. ) New York City ^••(■■■•■■•■■■■■■■■■■■■■•■■■■■■■■■■■ia**aai*>ti Individual and Community Social Work The social worker working with Jews must be trained to deal successfully with the socially maladjusted Jewish family and individual. But he must be able, also, to see the problem in the large. He must "see" the Jews of America as a distinctive group aiming at adjustment to the general environment for its own greater happiness and the enrichment of American life. Holders and prospective holders of a bachelor's degree are invited to examine carefully the advantages of Jewish Social Work as a Profession A number of scholarships and fellowships ranging from $150 to $1000 for each school year are available for especially qualified candidates. For full information write to M. J. Karpf, Director The Training School For Jewish Social Work (A Graduate School) 67-71 W. 47th St., New York City MIIMlllIIIIIIirilllllll •■■•■••Mllll ■•■■•••■•■■Illllllll-lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll D SHOPPERS' CORNER MARITZA — of 172 Went *th Street - is having an anniversary sale. Wonder- ful assortment of dresses, blouses, bats, Russian ■mocks, Russian pajamas, and shirts for men. Orders taken at sale prices. Is it Navajo rugs ? Chimayo or Oaxaca blankets ? Mexican or Pueblo pottery ? Jewelry beaten with incredible skill from old silver coins ? — Write or visit — La Fiesta The Indian 88 West 8th St. Trading Post New York 619 N. Michigan Ave. (Open evenings) Chicago ETCHINGS Artists' proofs, now available di- rect from artists of international experience, and established repu- tation, associated with THE BROWN COUNTY ARTISTS- COLONY. Send for booklet of reproductions. 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310 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3375 by this time news had been published of President Hoover's intention to send a commission to Haiti. Colonel Cutts accordingly permitted the Haitian dailies to publish a list of the dead oh January 16, giving names, ages, resi- dences, and the nature of the wounds. The dead numbered twenty-four. Among them was a woman of twenty-six, a boy of eight. One of those "ricocheted" bullets caught the boy 300 feet away from the mob, while he was down in the ravine giving his horse a drink. Another of the dead was not attacking the marines when slain; he was buying cigarettes. On January 17 Colonel Cutts permitted the Haitian dailies to publish a list of the wounded, with names, addresses, et cetera. They numbered fifty-one. The Ameri- can Occupation has not disputed these figures: twenty-four killed and fifty-one wounded. The marines withdrew to their barracks immediately after the massacre, leaving the dead and wounded alone in the dark all night, except for such aid as the Haitians could render. Haitian physicians hurried to the scene next day. The unsupported evidence of some of the Haitians is that they counted the dead, that the total was 212, and the number of the wounded pro- portionately greater. The real figures may never be dis- closed, but the President's commission may get some light on the subject. Meantime the State Department and the Navy Department at Washington decline to give any information to the press. Two narratives of the events at Aux Caves, both writ- ten on the spot by eyewitnesses, are before me. They corroborate each other. I give one in translation. Friday, December 6. This day, destined to end in tragedy, opens with a somewhat comic incident, worthy of a place in burlesque: a gendarme undertakes arbitrarily to arrest a workman, who (assisted, it is true, by some comrades) gives him a sound drubbing. Work is resumed. Except for the lingering emotions aroused by the day be- fore, normal life has recommenced. But in the afternoon two airplanes fly over the town, this time peacefully. Toward five o'clock there is great alarm. Announce- ment is made that a considerable crowd which has come from the borough and the plain of Torbeck (principally from Gauvain) is about to enter Aux Cayes. According to information at hand they do not come as enemies. They are persons who believe the rumors that Aux Cayes has really been bombarded by airplanes; who had heard that the strikers in Aux Cayes had obtained satisfaction; and who wished to claim for themselves abolition of the tax on alcohol and removal of the seals put on their stills, both of which mean ruin for the proprietors of sugar plantations and of small distilleries. Down there in the country misery is killing them. Their molasses, when it finds a buyer, is paid for at a fifth of its price, at one-tenth of the price of certain epochs. They have not the means to build the costly reservoirs demanded by the tax service, nor to pay the tax on the production of alcohol. All along the road the protestants, among whom are well-known citizens, have been joined by peasants and women, the lat- ter chiefly from nearby neighborhoods. Later on the charge was made that some of these persons carried, carefully concealed, machetes and even small pikes. This has been strongly contradicted. What is true is that some of the horsemen carried small sticks for their mounts, or simple whips made of ox sinews. But nearly all had empty hands. It was not an armed band. The crowd crosses the ravine and marches toward the Calvary of the Sacred Heart. They had intended, it was said, to remove the seals from the distilleries of Quatrc Chemins, which had been closed by the tax office. Georges Butreau on the one side and Ulysse Simon on the other, former military chiefs of the district, dissuade them from this purpose, however, and fuming and cursing they turn back, massing themselves to the number of three to four hundred on the far side of the ravine to await, they say, the return of some of their companions from town. A detachment of twenty to twenty-five marines ar- rive, armed with machine-guns and automatic repeating rifles, and post themselves at the corner of the Avenue des Gabions, near the bridge facing the ravine, covering these poor people, who do not show any intention either to ad- vance or retreat. The district sub-commander [Lieutenant Fitzgerald Brown] goes to them and tries to persuade them to retire. Several citizens of Aux Cayes — Maitre Du- clervil, dean of the lawyers' association, Maitre Joseph V. Delerme, some civic authorities, Edmond Sylvain, gov- ernment commissary, and Antoine Ferrer, president of the Communal Commission — then cross the river, tell the crowd that all manifestations have been stopped in Aux Cayes, and advise them to go home. But they insist on the lib- eration of three of their companions who have been de- tained. They give the names of the prisoners to Maitre Delerme. The sub-commander of the district promises to give them satisfaction on this point. They insist upon the removal of the distillery seals. There is hubbub and tumult. And all this time the barrels of the American rifles are pointed on the unfortunates, notwithstanding the pres- ence among them of the conferees. Some women throw stones, which cannot reach the marines but fall into the river or in the dry part of the ravine. The parleys con- tinue. The unfortunate wretches do not imagine for an in- stant that they will be fired upon. It is sunset. A resounding oath is heard and suddenly the fusillade begins, first blank shots and then almost im- mediately the murderous rattle of the machine-guns. In the midst of horrible screams, men, women, children, and horses fall. There is a stampede. One distiller from Gauvain, who had come on a handsome horse, unharnesses the dead animal and leaves with saddle and reins. The scene is horrifying. One hears the screams and moans of the wounded (they are going to pass the night under the stars), the death rattles of those in agony. There is the twenty-year-old son of Surveyor Molin struck dead. Night arrives. The marines withdraw. The news throws the town into consternation. The wounded come in to have their injuries dressed in the drug- stores. These are mostly innocent bystanders who have had no time to move away. The machine-guns and rifles have worked in all directions, to the south, where the crowd had chiefly gathered, as well as to the north, east, and west. Houses in the region are riddled with bullets and peaceful inhabitants killed or wounded in their homes. Some victims are carried to the hospital. The rumor is spread that, furious against the people of Aux Cayes who had let them be massacred, the crowd had reformed their lines at Coquette in order to invade the town during the night and deliver it over to pillage. However, the night is very quiet. Toward three o'clock shots are heard. They come from the marines at General Head- quarters. Nobody replies, for there was neither a riot nor an organized rebellion, as the rumor promised. American physicians, according to both eyewitnesses, withdrew after the massacre to marine headquarters, where there were no wounded, leaving their Haitian colleagues the care of the dying and wounded, not only in the field, but afterwards in the hospital.

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 1930 No. 3376 Contents Attorney, Mr. Crain, against the five Communist leaders :. who were arrested. Nothing could so increase Communist editorial paragraphs 3ii bitterness and arouse sympathy for them as any obvious effort EDIp?ntyAtiie: Enemy 314 to railroad these misguided and misguiding leaders. The ad- stones for Bread 315 dress made bv the Police Commissioner the day after the riot Yachts Gargantuan ^'° . . ' J ... William h. Taft ->io m which he boasted that his stool-pigeons were on the inside IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUX 317 r£ THE tariff vote market. By Henry Raymond Mussey 318 ot all Communist activities, even to the extent of being beaten -yHgoLtAtaRhave reject* fo*l AWr *' By " Wortmkn. ■.•".•.•. ". 321 UP **« comrades of the police, reflects very little credit Russia's new revolution. Bv Louis Fischer 322 upon his intelligence. If the police are doing that sort of ^&^A^AC^Hi,^..T™..™?.^"" .?*.™ 323 thing it would hardly seem wise to notify the Communists IN the driftway. By the Drifter 325 themselves as to their movements. Moreover, Mr. Whalen CORRESPONDENCE 326 . . ' BOOKS films drama- admits going tar beyond his proper sphere when he declares ?£ ^'^^ Vto8^^::::::::::::::::::::::::: 3228 that the police are giving the employers of labor information The Mind of Emily Dickinson By Granv.iie Hicks 329 as t Communists in their employ. Americans still have the Six More War Novels. By Clinton Simpson J2y ^ j Christian Science Examined. By Edwin Franden Dakin 330 right tO their Own beliefs however mistaken, and tO freedom Old Man \ ictorv. By Lewis S. Gannett 332 = . . ' Fascism as a Religion. By Hiram Motherwell 334 or conscience. 1 his fact we commend also to the New York Films: Color. By Alexander Bakshy '. '.'.'.'.'.'...'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'..'.'.'.'.'.. 337 Chamber of Commerce, which has just appointed an entirely Drama: The Impenitent Shaw. By Joseph Wood Krutch 338 _«J__ . „ -,... U" a ..• c " .. ■ «.• contributors TO this issue...... 340 reactionary committee, chiefly representatives or patriotic international relations section: societies," to root out the reds and especially to rouse large Fresh Hope for Haiti. By Helena Hill Weed 342 ' , .... . — ■ employers of labor against the Communists in their employ. OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor associate editors npHE SUDDEN AND UNEXPECTED DEATH of dorothy vanFdorenKIRCH^arthur WARNER -»- Justice Sanford of the Supreme Court removes not Dramatic Editor Literary Editor one of the most distinguished members of that tribunal but JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT , , , , . , Contributing Editors one wno enjoyed great personal popularity and was univer- john a. hobson heywood broux H. l. mencken sally respected by the bar. That he belonged to the conserva- NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN ' ' , _ . mark van doren ludwig lewisohn tive and reactionary part of the Court is, of course, well david boehm, Advertising Manager known. Hence, the filling of the vacancy left by Mr. San- Subscription Rates- Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States ford will be a definitive test of the President's attitude Union^d. t0 Canada' $5'50; and t0 £°reiSn C°UntHeS °f "" P0SUl toward the Court. a11 the more significant since it is now ~ ~~ ~ r~~ ~~ plain that Mr. Hoover will have the making over of the THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New \ork City, Cable Address: ^ , ir-n i Nation. New York. British Apent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss UOUrt in his hands. At the time that Justice btone Seemed Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. . , , , , . , , . , , , ! . slated for the chief justiceship, it was understood that one of THE NATION-WIDE COMMUNIST demonstra- the most progressive and liberal judges in New York would tion of Thursday, March 6, passed off, on the whole, be named to take Mr. Stone's place as associate. With Mr. extremely well. Special honors go to the Mayor of San Fran- Stone and Mr. Hughes, both from New York, on the Court Cisco and to the Police Commissioner of Baltimore. Both of it will require courage by the President to appoint still an- them were politeness itself, permitted the Communists to other New Yorker. Meanwhile, Justice Holmes, that noble march, and protected the parades ; all rioting was avoided, representative of so much that is best in our American life, and the populace remained good-humored and even amused, has celebrated his eighty-ninth birthday amid universal ac- In New York 40,000 persons attended a completely orderly claim. That he is the foremost American citizen today is and good-natured assemblage in Union Square which was the belief of multitudes ; the recent book containing his dis- turned into a nasty row when the police attempted— success- senting opinions has been selling like a novel. He can well full\ — to clear the streets in a quarter of an hour. The rejoice in this nation-wide applause, for it is proof that his original police arrangements for the meeting were admirable. countrymen still know how to honor a great judge, a just Mr. Whalen's own bearing was at first excellent. He him- judge, a liberal judge, and a fearless one. self offered to take the leaders in his own car to see the mavor, guaranteeing them an audience to present the claims TX/'HAT THE MONROE DOCTRINE IS and what of the unemployed. He was quite within his rights in refus- ▼ V it is not is the burden of an elaborate memorandum ing to allow a parade without a permit. Unfortunately, prepared by J. Reuben Clark, former Under Secretary of when the trouble began a number of his police lost their State, in December, 1928, but made public for some unex- heads and attacked persons right and left, whether they were plained reason only on March 3 last. According to Mr. guilty of a breach of order or not. Clark, the Monroe Doctrine means today only what it meant when it was announced in 1823 — opposition by the United States to European interference with the political affairs of Latin-American states. The so-called "Roosevelt corollary," under which the United States was at liberty to "attempt an GLAD AS WE ARE to praise Grover Whalen for his behavior on March 6, we can only censure the bitter- ness and vindictiveness shown by both him and the District PUBUO

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312 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 adjustment" of "financial or other difficulties" in weak states of Central or South America "lest European governments should intervene and, intervening, should occupy territory," is held to be without justification by the terms of the Mon- roe Doctrine "however much it may be justified by the appli- cation of the doctrine of self-preservation." We are glad to see what the Bogota journal El Espectador describes as Roosevelt's "audacious adulteration to a formula of imperial- ism" ruled out of court, but intervention in the garb of self- preservation is just as dangerous as intervention wearing the cloak of the Monroe Doctrine — more dangerous, in fact, be- cause self-preservation is the more comprehensive term. What we should like to read is an announcement by the State De- partment that the United States proposes henceforth to let Latin America manage its own affairs. REGISTRATION OF ALIENS continues to be pressed in Congress, three bills on the subject being before that body at the present time. A bill introduced by Representa- tive Aswell of Louisiana calls for compulsory registration annually, with deportation as the penalty if registration is delayed two years. A similar but less drastic bill, sponsored by Representative Cable of Ohio, adds a provision allowing aliens who entered the country illegally between 1921 and July 1, 1924, to legalize their residence. This last provision should certainly be dealt with in a separate bill. A third bill introduced by Senator Blease of South Carolina, similar to one passed by the Senate in January, 1929, provides for vol- untary registration. The most serious objection to these bills is the use that would almost certainly be made of them if any of them became law. Voluntary registration, if that policy were adopted, would speedily become compulsory in practice through the insistence of employers, the operation of administrative regulations, and the pressure upon aliens who held out to register as others did. Any attempt to enforce registration would subject all persons of alien birth, whether naturalized or not, to espionage, suspicion, and annoyance. "PRISONER KILLS the Auburn principal keeper." A This headline has appeared for the third time in the last three years. What is more remarkable is the fact that this latest victim of prison rage was stabbed seven times in the presence of all the prisoners, just after three other Au- burn convicts had been sentenced to the electric chair and had been removed to Sing Sing for execution. Here we see the deterrent effect of the death penalty. Was there ever a clearer proof of its utter futility? The murderer of Keeper Beckwith was beaten into insensibility by the keepers and lay in a state of coma for three or four days. Immediately Assemblyman Cuvillier introduced into the New York Legis- lature a bill calling for the use of the lash in jails and the abolition of the Mutual Welfare League. At least one offi- cial at Auburn kept his head. He is Warden Hoffman, who refused to be stampeded into threats for the establishment of further tortures, declaring that this sort of thing was all in the day's work for a keeper and would happen just as long as the present prison methods were continued. Major Philip G. Roosa, of the staff of the Commissioner of Prisons, was equally cool. "Give us buildings where we can classify and segregate prisoners, and we can stop this sort of thing," he said. There is no doubt who the chief criminal is. It is the State of New York. THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES was all that a Charlotte, North Carolina, jury required to acquit five mill fore- men of the murder of Mrs. Ella May Wiggins in Gastonia last September. For the killing of Chief of Police Aderholt, seven strikers and union organizers were sentenced to from five to twenty years in prison. But the deputies in Marion who shot and killed six strikers in a riot in front of one of the mills have been acquitted, as have those charged with the murder of Mrs. Wiggins. Governor Gardner made it plain that he wished the trial just completed to be conducted vigorously and fairly; to that end he appointed Attorney General Brummitt to conduct the prosecution after Solicitor Carpenter had clearly shown that he could not force himself to any real activity except in a case where strikers were the defendants. Two State's witnesses identified Howard Wheelus, one of the defendants, as the man who shot Mrs. Wiggins. But Wheelus offered an alibi and the jury evi- dently found it possible to believe him. It is evident that neither the citizens of Gaston County nor its officials are ready for the organization of the textile workers. Those of the workers who are ready will have to be patient and begin all over again, and they can be sure that sooner or later their strength will impress both employers and officers of the law. GIFFORD PINCHOT has rendered a public service in again throwing his hat into the Pennsylvania gov- ernorship ring. It would be intolerable if the Republicans of that State were to have no choice except one between a Vare candidate and a Mellon one. "I want to help break," Mr. Pinchot declares, "the strangle-hold of the electric, gas, water, trolley, bus, and other monopolies on the cost of living and the government of the State." That his stand as a dry will help him greatly is beyond question ; whether he will again have the luck to win the nomination in a three-cornered contest time will soon show. Meanwhile, it is a great pity that there is no one like him to challenge the Vare candidate for the Senatorship, Secretary of Labor Davis, and the Mel- lon candidate, Senator Grundy, apostle and lobbyist of high- tariff interests. At least Mr. Vare is out of it. He has finally yielded to his supporters and retired. THE BEST OF NEWS comes out of Haiti. The Hoover Commission has already won the complete con- fidence of the Haitians and has obtained Mr. Hoover's con- sent to an arrangement made with the opposition elements to substitute at once for President Borno a provisional presi- dent, agreed on by all the protesting parties. This person is to call immediately a constitutional popular election and then resign so that the new assembly can elect a permanent president. General Russell is to be superseded at once by a regular civilian minister. Furthermore, the commission on Monday flatly demanded that President Borno carry out his earlier acceptance of this agreement. All of which merits the enthusiastic cablegram of our special correspondent, Helena Hill Weed, printed on another page of this issue and all the commendatory adjectives with which she describes the work of the commission. The fact that this leaves the American Occupation totally discredited we would not stress ; its downfall came because the commission was willing to hear the opposition which appeared in overwhelming num- bers to demand freedom, as did the Catholic church — the same opposition which General Russell, in true military style,

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 313 knew no better way to deal with than to threaten, repress, and imprison. That The Nation rejoices with all its heart at this promised outcome we need hardly say. PROTESTS AGAINST PROTESTS are the new phe- nomena which have followed the heated denunciation of the anti-church campaign in Russia. Dr. George S. Counts, associate director of the International Institute of Teachers College, Columbia University, who has lately returned from a seven-months' tour of Russia, declares that the protests of Western sects "can do little good if their object is to mod- erate" the anti-religious movement, because the religious bodies in Russia that are being attacked "have been for the most part hostile to the Revolution from the beginning." Dr. H. H. Henson, Lord Bishop of Durham, referring to the prayers of intercession for Russian Christians that have been ordered for March 16, joins with Prime Minister MacDonald in deprecating anything that mixes politics and religion in the Russian matter, and warns of danger that the protest may "lose its moral impressiveness." A notable counter-protest is the statement issued on March 5, signed by eighty-seven min- isters of various sects in New York City, regretting the omis- sion from the anti-Russian pronouncements of "a note of humility and a recognition of the historical facts which have caused" the Russian policy. Substantially the same position had been taken three days before by some of the faculty and sixty-seven students of Union Theological Seminary. All of these protestants agree in deploring anything that savors of religious persecution, but the Russian problem, as they clearly perceive, is so much more political than religious that organ- ized efforts to exact pressure from the outside might bring in their train a real jeopardy to world peace. TNDIA STANDS ON THE BRINK. As this issue of A The Nation goes to press Gandhi is beginning his civil- disobedience program which may result in his immediate arrest. We shall soon learn several things: just how far India is united behind the move for independence and its leader ; whether it will be possible to keep the movement non- violent ; and how wise or unwise the Viceroy will prove to be in dealing with a situation as difficult as it is profoundly dan- gerous. Already Vallabhai Patel, Gandhi's chief lieutenant, has gone to jail after issuing a statement in which he said that "our success lies in our capacity for non-violence and self-sacrifice." He then reiterated his program of non-violent non-cooperation and advised that in the event of Gandhi's arrest village officers should resign, Indian barristers should boycott the courts, and wherever people were ready non-pay- ment of taxes should begin. These must be extremely anxious days at 10 Downing Street and in the office of the Viceroy. CHARLIE CHAPLIN'S GENIUS is best expressed in his matchless pantomime. It is undoubtedly because he knows this that he has abjured the talkies. Chaplin, according to his representative, will organize a new company, erect new studios, and set aside five to ten millions of dollars a year for producing pictures. He will appear personally in one picture a year and will personally direct one picture. His company meanwhile will produce several additional films each year, all silent. The news that Chaplin will direct one pic- ture a year is as heartening as the promise that he will appear in one annually, for it means that we may expect other films as excellent as "The Woman of Paris." The fact that Chaplin will sponsor only silent pictures is good news for those who prefer silence. On the other hand, since the talkies are with us and show every sign of remaining with us, we could wish that someone who combines, as Chaplin does, artistic excellence with financial independence might enter the land of the loud speakers where so far the still, small voice of intelligence has been almost entirely submerged. ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY belonged to an older generation of university presidents which num- bered Eliot of Harvard and Gilman of Johns Hopkins among its distinguished names and it is as president of Yale during a long period of transition that he will be most widely remem- bered and honored. Few men who have been translated from a professorship to a presidency have carried with them such sound and varied attainments as scholars or held so firmly the enthusiastic loyalty of successive generations of students and alumni. His main contribution to the intellectual life of the country, however, was made not in the field of educa- tional administration but in that of economics, particularly in railway organization and transportation, where he was long a recognized authority. His support of Governor Smith in the Presidential campangn of 1928, largely because of Governor Smith's attitude toward prohibition, did credit to his political independence, for he had left the Democratic Party in the free-silver days, but he could not be induced to accept a Democratic nomination for Senator from Connecti- cut in that year, feeling, no doubt, that the Bingham machine would be too strong for him. For all his learning, his omnivorous interest, and his genial manner, his temper was conservative, and his insistence upon the public obligations of private business did not carry with it any marked evidence of sympathy with government supervision or control. THAT ADMIRAL VON TIRPITZ, whose death is reported from Germany, will ever rank with General von Ludendorff as one of the evil geniuses of Germany is beyond question. Supposedly a great expert in his field, as well as a passionate patriot, he was a pure militarist constantly urging his country into a race of armaments which could only lead to war. In his memoirs he declares that the German naval authorities, among whom he had the controlling voice, had decided from the beginning of the war not to use the fleet in any decisive naval battle. Jutland was an accident, and they were fortunate to get out of it as well as they did. None the less, though it was not to be used, the fleet was kept in being, tying up thousands of men and officers who might have been thrown into the submarine service. Fortune had given Germany a weapon with which it could have defeated England and broken her naval power, and yet never at any time did Tirpitz get more than fifteen submarines on the front line, and actually not until September, 1918, when the end was at hand was there an order given for a very large number of U-boats. Some officers, like General von Hoff- mann, protested when Tirpitz began the submarine campaign with an inadequate number of U-boats. Von Hoffmann affirmed later that if all the available German naval power had been applied to the submarine campaign it would have won easily. Even as a naval officer von Tirpitz was thus hopelessly inadequate. Yet the leading nations, our own in- cluded, continue to put faith in the naval and military mind.

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314 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 Parity the Enemy IT is now plain that the naval conference in London is near the rocks, and this is true despite Ramsay Mac- Donald's radio appeal of March 9 to the American people to shun the pessimists. Nothing but good luck can save it from becoming a genuine disaster to all the world and the most lamentable breakdown of statesmanship since August, 1914. For this the American delegation will not be able to escape a large share of the blame. It has been extraordi- narily weak. It has lacked courage. It has blundered damnably. It has forgotten the words and promises of its own members, notably those of Messrs. Stimson and Gibson. It plainly went to London without a clear-cut policy or a program, and it has obviously been inspired by nothing from the White House. Mr. Stimson has merely muddied the waters by his statement of March 5 intended, he said, to refute the "impression that the work of the American dele- gation at this conference is likely to result in an increase instead of a reduction in the tonnage of the navies of the world." The most superficial examination showed that Mr. Stimson had submitted no figures to prove that his promised net reduction of 200,000 American tons was in sight, "and an even larger reduction on the part of the British fleet" ; that his figure was "contingent upon some reductions being made in the fleets of other Powers." Next, Mr. Stimson resurrected obsolete cruisers (including Sampson's flagship at Santiago thirty-two years ago), submarines, and destroyers to make even this promise possible. Finally, it appeared that Mr. Stimson got some of his reduction by counting in ships authorized but not yet begun ! Whatever else may be said of this statement it smacks of despair and self-delusion. Aside from the fallibility of the delegation itself, what is it that has wrecked our undertaking in London? We answer this question by quoting from a dispatch in the New York Times from its correspondent, Edwin L. James. Re- porting in it the sullen reaction of our delegation to the cablegram of criticism from 1,200 American protestants, Mr. James, whose language is obviously directly inspired, con- cludes his dispatch thus: America can have parity at the cost of sacrificing her reduction principle at this conference and paying a billion dollars. She can have reduction at a cost of sacrificing her principle of parity and saving a billion dollars. But to ob- tain parity and reduction both at this conference is beyond the abilities of Secretary Stimson and his colleagues. It is also beyond the abilities of the 1,200 signers of Mr. Fos- dick's cablegram. The New York World, which has ignominiously hauled down its flag by saying that "we cannot hope to reduce exist- ing fleets or reduce the fleets we are building," but that "we can still hope to reduce the fleets we would have to build if the conference fails," similarly admits that parity is the con- trolling influence. Thus, it says that "the only conceivable basis of agreement between two Powers of such magnitude is equality" and that "any other basis of inferiority and superi- ority would be the source of perpetual irritation." "Parity," it declares, "is valuable. It costs a price. The price is naval construction up to a standard fixed by Great Britain. . . ." Writing from London in the New Republic, William T. Stone, of the Foreign Policy Association, declares that our delegation is "more concerned . . . with precise mathemati- cal parity than with possible ways of achieving reduction." Here then is the chief enemy — this new, un-American, recently unheard-of doctrine that we must have parity with Great Britain. We have existed as a nation for 154 years, and no one ever pretended to assert until the last few years that we needed parity with the mother country. We were for generations completely unarmed, notably from 1830 to 1860 and from 1870 to 1900, and never did Great Britain seek to take advantage of it, not even under the terrific in- citement of Grover Cleveland's Venezuelan message. But now all is altered. Not at a price as the World says, but at a terrible price we are to have parity — at the cost of building still larger fleets, of reducing not at all ; at the cost of an armament race with Great Britain; at the cost of being feared and therefore hated by all the other Powers; at the cost of a billion and then of untold additional millions of dollars ; at the cost of some of our finest American ideals. And parity, what is it? A chimera. The World re- joices that by "an act of high statesmanship and profound common sense" we have eliminated the question of relative naval bases, the merchant marine, trade routes, inland versus continental strategy, financial resources, and industrial re- sources. What remains? Mere numerical parity. Just as though any two nations could be on a par even with exactly duplicate fleets when the vital question is the brains of the respective commanders, the drill and efficiency of the crews, their marksmanship, their will to win — all the per- sonal factors — and even these, as the battle of Jutland showed, may be offset by weather conditions. Parity is a myth, guaranteeing no victory, but only insuring war. Will Americans yield to this folly? We cannot believe it. Who has authorized the World, or our delegation in London, or President Hoover, or the Congress, or anyone else to say that the United States must have parity? Who has had the authority to say for the American people that, having grown great and rich and powerful, a "world Power," we must, therefore, assume a crushing naval burden which we declined to consider when we were weak and young and totally undefended? Who has given the World the right to assume that if the conference fails we shall have to build vast new fleets to our own impoverishment? Has anybody asked the American people for its views? Not Mr. Hoover. He would be careful not to seek to ascertain definitely whether the people of this country, opposed to its business leaders and its politicians, wish to embark on this policy. We do not believe for an instant that the aroused conscience of America or its moral forces will submit to any such inter- pretation of America's future. There will be no yielding without a tremendous struggle, without proper characteriza- tion of those who would fasten upon our industry military and naval burdens which, as Mr. Hoover admits, are already greater than those borne by any other nation on earth. On this line there are Americans ready to fight, not only all summer, but as long as they live.

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 315 Stones for Bread THERE is something pathetic about the outgivings of the Administration in regard to unemployment. Sec- retary Davis, put forward as a spokesman on March 4 to tell how the situation was regarded at the White House, paraded some figures which were quickly shown to be unreliable, admitted that some 3,000,000 persons were out of work and that the situation was "distressing," added the smug protestation that the calamity, thanks to the Ad- ministration, had been kept down to less than one-half that of "previous crashes," and concluded by averring solemnly that things would be better if Congress would only hurry along the tariff and public-buildings bills. Mr. Hoover, with the felicitations of Senator Fess — nobody else! — on the achievements of his first year in office to hearten him, fol- lowed the next day with the unofficial announcement that he saw business recovering rapidly from the effects of the stock-market crash, and struck hands with his worthy Secre- tary of Labor in calling for the speedy enactment of the tariff enormity. This was his positive contribution. On the negative side he saw no need of an unemployment conference and was opposed to doles. The Hoover statement given out on March 7 was ob- viously intended to bring more specific comfort to troubled hearts. Notwithstanding Senator Wagner's unchallenged assertion that the Administration "has neither the figures nor the means of securing them" about unemployment, the Departments of Commerce and Labor, we are told, have dis- covered that "unemployment amounting to distress is in the main concentrated in twelve States." The States are not named, but since the concentration is also declared to be "in the large industrial centers," one gathers that the situation is most acute precisely where it should be expected to be. Relatively to the number of workers there is "considerably less than one-half," and probably only one-third, of the un- employment "which resulted from the crashes of 1907-8 and 1920-22." Meantime business is improving, interest rates are lower, bond issues for public improvements are in- creasing, wage schedules are being maintained, there is less borrowing on insurance policies, and the Federal Reserve is again feeding out credit. Let the country cheer up ; "all the evidences indicate that the worst effects of the crash upon employment will have been passed during the next sixty days." This optimistic piffle is set off by a memorandum pre- pared by Secretaries Davis and Lamont designed to show that things are going on tolerably well. Mindful, apparently, of watchful critics, the Secretaries are careful to admit that "there are no detailed statistics as to the unemployed, and they can only be approximated." On the basis of a canvass of trades employing some 17,000,000 persons, "and applying the same ratio to the whole," they estimate the number of unemployed at "perhaps 1,000,000 and certainly not more than 1,250,000" more than a year ago. In the building trades the normal seasonal unemployment has risen from about 30 per cent to 40 per cent, but "various surveys" show an in- crease of employment in all trades of "somewhere from 600.- 000 to 1,000,000 since the low point at the beginning of the year." The cloud has not only a silver lining, but a golden edge; "the forces of recovery are steadily gaining strength" and "the winter seasonal unemployment will soon relax." "If every business concern and every householder able to do so would survey their situation as to repairs, clean-ups, and betterments that must be undertaken sooner or later, and have them put in hand now with a view to relieving the im- mediate distress in their localities," and if governments, rail- ways, public utilities, and business generally will "continue their able cooperation toward recovery," there will soon be brightness in place of gloom. Thus the gospel according to Robert and the epistle general of James. We are not convinced by Mr. Hoover's cheer nor by the optimistic estimates which the two Secretaries marshal to support it. It is small consolation for the millions who are out of work to be told that if they can hold out for another two months they may find jobs. We see no evidence in the weekly reports of banks, trust companies, and statistical agencies that industrial or trade recovery is anything but spotty or that business as a whole is emerging from the dol- drums; while as for cheap money, that is as good an argu- ment for the bears as for the bulls. The pathetic thing about these Administration statements, however, is that Mr. Hoover does not seem to know why we are having an un- employment crisis, and that the specific remedies to which he turns have at best only an emergency value. To acclaim the tariff or public works as satisfying cor- rectives of unemployment is both confusing and futile. Senator Wagner, in the recent speech in which he flayed the President for "artificial attempts at myth-making," spoke the solid truth when he declared that "not a shred of evidence has been submitted to show that the tariff debate has caused business to halt or pause." Public works, on no matter what scale, can at best only mitigate a condition which affects the whole structure of our industrial and busi- ness society. It is idle for Mr. Hoover to protest that he does not believe in doles; for doles, whether directly in the form of charity such as many communities are now obliged to dispense, or indirectly in the form of such artificial stimu- lation of industry as Mr. Hoover has initiated, are inescapa- ble accompaniments of unrestricted competitive production. There is no need to rehearse the particular causes of unemployment. They all inhere in the conditions of a ma- chine and capitalistic age in which the ability to produce has outrun the normal ability to consume, and in which high-pressure methods of forcing consumption are held to conduce to so-called higher standards of living. What the country would like to know is whether Mr. Hoover realizes this, and if he does, what he is prepared to do about it. As far back as 1921, when he was Secretary of Commerce in the Harding Cabinet, he set out to do something nationally about unemployment. He was still setting out when Mr. Coolidge took him in train. Now, after eight years and more, we have another crisis. Is Mr. Hoover prepared to recognize unemployment as a national disease and champion national treatment to combat it, or will he go on asking the country to cheer up while he temporizes and drifts?

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316 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 Yachts Gargantuan IN this year of our financial, economic, and moral de- pression one of our new multimillionaires with a taste for grandeur has placed an order with the Hamburg firm of Blohm and Voss for the "largest private yacht in the world." It is to cost $3,000,000, its length will be 410 feet, its net tonnage is reported to be 8,000 tons, its speed will be eighteen knots, and with a crew of approxi- mately eighty men it will accommodate, besides the owner's family, some twenty guests. The daily press declares that it will be "one of the most luxurious steamers afloat." The cost of maintenance will be not less than $300,000 a year without depreciation and without the owner's personal ex- penses for entertainment. This is larger than Mr. Morgan's new Corsair, a mere 3,080 tons, to cost only $2,500,000. In the case of one of our Pittsburgh Mellons we have already expressed our feeling about American millionaires who, although ardent upholders of protection for our in- dustries from foreign competition, place their orders for yachts in foreign shipyards. What right have they, ask we, to go abroad to purchase in the cheapest markets? Are not our shipbuilders needing support, too? Are these yachts- men really willing to profit by pauper labor abroad and to take the bread out of the mouths of American workingmen? Where, where is the American Federation of Labor? Is it possible that Messrs. Green and Woll are too deeply en- grossed in fighting the Bolshevik godlessness to spring to the rescue of our endangered shipyards? This sad spectacle does not, however, prevent us from considering further Mr. Williams's yacht. It is but one of about twenty such seagoing vessels over 200 feet long built during the recent boom years. They are equipped with the most efficient turbo-electric or Diesel engines, with gyroscopes to eliminate rolling, with "metal Mikes" — automatic steering devices — to eliminate the wobbly steering of even the most efficient quartermasters, with the most up-to-date heating and cooling devices, and with every other comfort obtainable. More than that, the day of the old-fashioned ship-style yacht interior has gone. The effort is now not to let the voyager know that he is at sea, but to deceive him into believing, despite the pitching, that he is in a country house. Hence the calling in of interior decorators familiar to Fifth Avenue ; hence designs which suggest nothing of the sea except the ship painting over the fireplace, in which burns a real log fire. Less than fifty years ago the greyhounds of the seas were only 500 feet long and were under 7,000 tons — this was the size of the Alaska of the Guion Line which long held the speed record and cost only about $1,500,000. Com- panies found it not easy to finance such a leviathan. Cabins were small, smelly, and lighted by smoking lamps. They were arranged around the dining saloon so that those at meals might miss none of the sighs and sounds of those in distress at sea. Now a single individual can compass for his private pleasure a ship which costs twice as much as the ocean steamer of the late seventies. Meanwhile the average wage of the textile worker in the United States is $15.49 a week and the average annual income of the American farmer continues to be $774. William H. Taft OF William H. Taft it must be said that he had without question one of the most winning person- alities in our public life. If his face was not his fortune then his kindliness, his humor, his geniality, and his sincerity were. However much one might differ from him politically, to know him was to like him. One felt his abso- lute honesty of purpose, however hemmed about his vision. Unbiased people never could believe that he was actuated by an unworthy motive or ruled by selfish ambition. In- deed, his rise to our highest office was not the result of his own desire. The antithesis of Mr. Hoover in this respect, he lifted no finger to achieve the Presidency, but allowed himself to be chosen for that office by the then President, who again proved that the power we have allowed to accrue to our Chief Executive renders it possible for him to dictate his renomination or to pick his successor — in the case of Mr. Taft, at a cost to him of bitterness, disappointments, mis- understandings, and loss of highly valued friendships. That Mr. Taft's qualities were also his defects is clear. Your kindly, good-humored, easy-going man is not often an incisive executive, especially if he be of stout habit. Life was altogether too easy for him. He was born to means and to social position. He achieved readily his appointment to the bench upon which he might have stayed a respected and happy judge had not the Philippine opportunity come to him — the brightest chapter in his entire career. He car- ried American ideals with him. He was determined to treat the Filipinos as equals and as our wards in trust for a brief period. He even danced with their women at the most important official functions and so won for himself the anathemas of those who considered the natives "niggers" fit to be ruled over but never fit for fraternization. But always Mr. Taft was apart from the mass of our own peo- ple by reason of his good fortune; by the fact that he never had to fight for a living and hardly for office. As President he ruled — and failed. Not that he wholly merited the anger of Roosevelt or the bitterness of Pinchot and others. His fault was that he was intellectually sloth- ful and constantly procrastinating. He decided the Pinchot- Ballinger controversy in an evening and decided it wrongly, after thirty-six holes of golf that day with Yale under- graduates. The next morning he started on his fatal West- ern trip and, as he afterwards admitted, dictated his critical Winona speech "between stations" — his freedom to admit his faults was one of his charms. He found himself in the wrong because he had not thought things through. These were fatal blunders. But it was characteristic of the man that he bore no malice. Given an opportunity to address American newspapermen and to "get even" with them he replied : "Experience has taught me that an exhi- bition of one's wounds gives only momentary pleasure to the exhibitor and too often furnishes additional gratifica- tion to the one who inflicted them. Besides, I have no grievances." He never had enough grievances, or rather hardships, to make him really a tribune of the people or a wise, far-seeing, progressive justice. On the Supreme Court he was conservative and reactionary to a degree. But his heart was golden at all times.

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 317 It Seems to Heywood Broun THE government, even of a great nation, must have concern for little things. In a cosmic scheme which has arranged that the fall of sparrows shall be noted it is not amiss for the House or Senate to give heed to the tribulations of the individual, however humble. And even so I am puzzled to understand what public purpose was served by dragging Mrs. Ruth G. K. Strawbridge from her pleasant Philadelphia home to tell some kindly Congressmen of what she gives her guests for supper. Seemingly, Mrs. Strawbridge had no complaint to lodge with press and public. Her parties are bone dry and she is satisfied. She says that her guests are. None of the guests was summoned. Such potential rebuttal might have covered the ground more com- pletely, but I am at a loss to understand why it should have been touched upon at all. To be sure, there was no indication of unwillingness upon the part of Mrs. Strawbridge. She faced the limelight bravely and without flinching. No conscript she, but only a volunteer. Indeed, there was evidence that this was not the first occasion upon which the lady from Philadelphia had embraced an opportunity to exert an influence beyond her home sphere. The work of sustaining dry dinners does not seem to be as exhausting as an outsider might imagine. Pos- sibly all the guests left a little early. At any rate, time hung heavily upon the hands of Ruth G. K. Strawbridge. Accord- ingly, she took up her pen and wrote round-robin letters in a flawless and flowing script. And this was the burden of her letter : I am taking the liberty of addressing myself to you, as a representative Philadelphia woman, to inquire quite con- fidentially whether in your judgment it would be possible to constitute a committee of women of your own standing in the social world who would interest themselves in creating sentiment for observation of the prohibition laws within their own circles. There has no doubt recently come to your attention the notable example set by Mrs. Edward B. McLean, of Wash- ington, in this respect. I am sending you herewith a photo- stat copy of the newspaper article which was published about Mrs. McLean's Easter breakfast party. I have every reason to believe that her courage in making this innovation in Washington society met with the hearty approval of President Hoover and of all others, like himself, who are trying to inculcate in our people at this time a more lively sense of their obligations as American citizens. May I reiterate that anything you are good enough to write me or to suggest will be treated in strictest confi- dence. A search through the entire "Book of Etiquette" fails to furnish me with any precedent for this singular behavior. In ;reat detail the problem of whether she should ask him in is discussed, and also the station a young man should assume A'hen walking with two young ladies along a crowded thor- oughfare. But there is nothing which fixes a method for neddling in the affairs of one's neighbors. Although the working day of Mrs. Ruth G. K. Straw- )ridge does not seem to have been filled to overflowing, she lid not have sufficient leisure to acquaint herself with the provisions of the prohibition law before she wrote her letter. The serving of beverages in the home is by no means essen- tially illegal. There are still families in Philadelphia possess- ing cellars in which repose wines acquired before the man- date of Mr. Volstead. One cannot really think that Mrs. Strawbridge stooped to sniff at any entertainment to which she was invited. No matter how close the constitutional kin- ship, a social gulf still yawns between the Brookharts and Strawbridges. That no bootlegged potion ever graced a Philadelphia table I would not be prepared to argue. As a member of the great middle class I would not think of asking any host or hostess: "Just where did you get this liquor and is it come by with honesty and good intention ?" Beyond the borders of my home I take the cocktails and the soup which are set before me without question. I had supposed in my ignorance of the ways of the socially elect that this was as fundamental as the injunction not to point, which my parents and guardians dinned into me at four. And so it seems to me that the most impressive thing in the Ruth G. K. Strawbridge inquiry lay in the opening phrase : "I am taking the liberty." As a student of human psychology I should have liked to see the answers in full. We only heard that other social leaders were favorable for the most part to the suggestion that they should become as pious as any Strawbridge and quit giving guests the stuff which steals away the brain. Un- fortunately, the lady could do no more for the House com- mittee than summarize her findings. Her letter was con- fidential. But one confidence begets another. I wonder if in the collection there might have been even a single reply run- ning about as follows: Dear Ruthie: Thanks for reminding me of the law and of the duty of us social leaders. I did see the news- paper account of Mrs. Ned McLean's boozeless breakfast. At least my secretary called it to my attention. I hope you agree with me that it was a vulgar display of a passion for publicity. An older woman like yourself must remember back to a day when it was not customary for a social leader to spill all her stuff to the press men whenever she gave a party. But after all, she did marry a Middle Westerner. Incidentally, my dear, I want to make a suggestion to you, and I trust that you will take it in the same spirit in which I received yours. Where in Heaven's name do you get your scrapple? I was talking it over with one of the Biddies only last week and we both agreed that somebody ought to have the courage to tell you about it. If you could have seen the face of that poor French count who attended your delightful banquet last Saturday! He was as brave as Lafayette at Gettysburg or wherever it was that some- body said, "Nous voila." Don't you find history boring? Of course, maybe it isn't the scrapple itself. It could be your cook. Several of us have been meaning to speak to you about her. I was discussing it with the Drexels last night. So sorry not to find you there. But to make a long story longer I'll meet you half-way on your proposition. If I agree to give up whiskey sours at my house will you agree to quit serving scrapple at yours? I hope the chil- dren are all well. John sends his love. Heywood Broun

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318 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 The Tariff Vote Market By HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY Washington, March 7 THE vote trade is extremely active during these closing days of the Senate tariff debate. The market reached its peak for the present season thus far at three o'clock on Wednesday, when ten Senators who on January 16 voted against raising the present sugar duty reversed themselves without a word of explanation and voted for the new higher rate proposed by the chairman of the Finance Committee. Here are the names. Let them not be for- gotten: Dill and Jones of Washington, Ashurst and Hayden of Arizona, Pine and Thomas of Oklahoma, Schall of Min- nesota, Trammell of Florida, Goff of West Virginia, and Metcalf of Rhode Island. Let not their geography be for- gotten, either. Their astonishing reversal, made without the presentation of a syllable of new evidence, took place in the face of a blistering speech from Senator Caraway, flatly charging them with trading their votes on sugar for votes on other duties in which they are interested. Mr. President [said Senator Caraway], I am aware that no argument, no information available or that might be produced, is to be effective in the vote that is pending. The fate of this bill was settled by a trade, an agreement, in which my information is — and I think it is accurate — that eight Senators have agreed to change their votes upon this rate and vote for sugar in return for votes that are to be hereafter cast for other duties that are pending. That being true, argument is wasted; because when a matter becomes a matter of trade, of consideration, of bar- gain and sale, whatever the facts may be, the result has been fixed. In the face of these charges the ten sat silent. When the vote was taken, Senator Smoot and the Great Western Sugar Company had won by a vote of 47 to 39. Five days earlier the long grueling fight of the Progressive-Democratic coali- tion had seemed about to come to a triumphant conclusion. Now it appeared to be lost. On all sides one heard that the Old Guard had regained control, and that in the few remain- ing days of the Senate battle they would put new duties on lumber, oil, cement, brick, aluminum, iron, what not. What brought about this sudden change in the tariff situation? The facts are quite simple. On January 16 the Senate, in committee of the whole, after full consideration of the sugar duties, adopted by a vote of 48 to 38 an amend- ment proposed by Senator Harrison of Mississippi to retain the present rate of 1.76 cents a pound on Cuban sugar in- stead of the rate of 2.20 cents proposed by the Finance Com- mittee. This vote constituted one of the major victories of the coalition. It represented a saving of some tens of mil- lions to sugar consumers, and it seemed as though the house- wife might sleep quietly at night without putting her sugar- bowl under lock and key. But during February there began to be heard disturbing rumors of a new combination, par- ticularly among the oil, lumber, and sugar interests. Wash- ington swarmed with oil lobbyists, whose activities have just been ventilated by Senator Caraway's committee. The woes of the sugar producers, of course, have been broadcast to a listening world ever since Senator Smoot and his associates began their efforts to jack up the sugar duties a year ago, but oil furnished a comparatively new story at Washington. The producers of crude oil have had their troubles for a long time, owing directly to a completely uncontrollable competitive bringing-in of new wells which flooded the mar- ket with an output from domestic sources averaging during the past year 2,755,000 barrels per day, and driving down the price. This made it easy, however, to blame the troubles of the industry on imports, which last year amounted to only 78,915,000 barrels, mostly from Mexico and South America, against a domestic output of 1,005,598,000 barrels. Of course, in any rational economy imports of a rapidly exhaus- tible natural product like crude oil would be welcomed as lengthening the life of the native supply, but the independent oil men (the great body of producers outside the big com- panies) can see nothing for it but a dollar duty on imported oil, which, they assume, would raise the price of their own product by a like amount — an assumption manifestly unsound unless domestic output is restricted. The independents like- wise turned their guns on the big concerns, like the Standard companies, which as the chief refiners are the great importers of crude oil. Altogether, they carried on a tremendous cam- paign with plenty of well-paid lobbyists and hundreds of oil men from all over the country pouring into Washington to urge on Senators the needs of their imperiled industry. While this was going on in a semi-public way, the more practical details were being attended to by those expert in such matters. Telegrams now in possession of the lobby committee show clearly enough the line of action taken, which was a combination with the sugar and lumber inter- ests. To quote a single example, take the telegram addressed to C. C. Sheppard, general manager of the Louisiana Central Lumber Company, a constituent of Senator Broussard, one of the most persistent tariff beggars (in behalf of his sugar friends) in the national legislature: Russian importation of lumber and South American importation of crude oil without protective tariff will further demoralize these great industries unless protective tariff is secured on them. . . . Pat Harrison of Mississippi and Broussard of Louisiana must be lined up. Depending on you to reach these parties through whatever channels your conscience dictates. On February 25 Earl Callaway, second in command among the lobbyists, reported to one of the editors back home: I am glad to advise tonight that we have secured the support of two of our most obstinate opponents whom we had dreaded on the floor of the Senate, and I believe by Friday [when the vote was to be taken] we shall have at least two more strong men in the Senate who have opposed us heretofore and who will appear in our favor in the de- bate. It is my prediction and sincere belief that we have won this fight. It is plain enough how the game was played by the wily high priest of sugar protection from Utah and his asso-

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 319 dates, notwithstanding their bitter denials of trading. Such heaven-sent opportunities as this situation offered of bringing salvation to imperiled American industry and, inci- dentally, of picking up the few remaining votes needed to overturn the mistaken Senate decision of January 16, were not to be neglected. As the time for the vote on lumber and oil approached, hopes ran high, but, alas, arrangements for mutual aid are not always successful. Senator Jones of Washington had proposed an amendment for a duty of three dollars per thousand feet on lumber. Finding it impossible to get that, he changed it to two dollars on soft woods only. When the vote was taken on February 27, the amendment was rejected by 39 votes against 34. The next day came the vote on Senator Thomas's amendment proposing a duty of a dollar a barrel on crude oil and 50 per cent ad valorem on all derivatives. After a fiery debate, in which Senator Blaine made a vitriolic attack on the oil lobbyists, this amendment, too, was beaten by 39 votes against 27, or, counting pairs, 48 to 36. On this vote, as on lumber, the chairman of the Finance Committee, with that faithful regular, Metcalf of Rhode Island, voted to maintain the position of the commit- tee as against the duties proposed in the amendments. Of the ten Senators who switched on sugar, Goff, Jones, Pine, and Thomas voted for both oil and lumber duties, and on lumber they were joined by Dill, Ashurst, and Trammell, while Metcalf, Schall, and Hayden were recorded against both oil and lumber. The actual details of the bargaining, of course, were not revealed. When the Senate adjourned on the evening of February 28, the opinion prevailed that the oil-lumber-sugar coalition was beaten. Such judgments took no account of the resourcefulness and persistence of the Utah Senator who watches over sugar. Oil and lumber had labored under the disability of an un- favorable report from the Finance Committee ; not so sugar. Therefore, the apostle of sweetness, defeated on the earlier committee proposal for a duty of 2.20 cents on Cuban sugar, now brought forward a new measure for a two-cent rate. Once more the debate waxed furious and the opponents of the increase hurled their charges of dicker and trade. All in vain ! Clad in the panoply of righteousness, denying all charges of log-rolling, admitting the enormous earnings of the Great Western Sugar Company, the saccharine saint yet pointed tearfully to the profits of the candy and pop manu- facturers, stated that Cuban sugar the day before had reached the lowest price in history, and let it go at that. No more was needed ; for there sat nine of the silent ten, giving no sign but ready to vote when the moment came, while the paired Goff was not at hand. Before the final vote was taken, Senator Howell ob- tained unanimous consent for a vote on his amendment pro- posing a bounty of forty-four one-hundredths of a cent a pound to beet and cane producers, one-fifth to go to the mill and four-fifths to the farmer. He pointed out that the maxi- mum cost under his plan would be $10,600,000 a year, of which $8,500,000 would go to the farmer, while the Smoot amendment would cost $30,000,000, of which not more than $6,000,000 would reach the manufacturer and the farmer. This simple and straightforward plan of taking money out of the public treasury and handing it over to the farmer, the plan favored by the honest advocates of farm relief at a minimum cost to the treasury, was buried under a vote of 66 to 22. Then the secretary called the roll on the Smoot amend- ment, and one by one the votes were cast: Ashurst, Dill, Hayden, Jones, Metcalf, Pine, Schall, Thomas, Trammell — with Goff paired and absent. None of his hearers will soon forget the scorching words of Senator Caraway: We will need no explanation. None will be necessary and none could explain. When the roll is called, we will know whether legislation is written on the floor of the Senate because the facts warrant the votes, or whether it is made by trades taking place outside of the Senate, because here there is no chance to be mistaken. Senator Thomas had already defiantly given notice of his intention to reintroduce his oil amendment in slightly different form. Lumber may again come on the carpet. Cement, made free in January, was today charged six cents, Wagner, Tydings, Couzens, Pine, and Pittman reversing themselves. Senator Cutting is expecting a fresh onslaught in behalf of the customs censorship that he fought so valiantly and successfully before ; but if the secret smut session threat- ened by Senator Smoot is actually held, that godly man will be confronted by an impressive document signed by 560 lead- ers of thought in all parts of the country, opposing the system of censorship by customs inspectors, which document was in- serted in the record by Senator Cutting on March 7. The New York World on Thursday morning uncovered a fresh scandal by disclosing that a considerable part of the office force used by Senator Grundy when he was simply a high-tariff lobbyist, has since his elevation to a seat in the Senate been moved from its downtown offices to his quarters in the Senate Office Building. The Pennsylvania Senator's lame defense on the floor led to a more complete expose by the lobby committee. What will be the outcome of the tariff fight, as a whole, no one can say at this stage. The coalition has received a staggering blow, and the Washington Post says that the ex- isting combination "if successful, and the cards certainly seem stacked for it to be, will virtually revamp the bill from a coalition-written one to an Old Guard bill," pointing out that six members of the coalition, Couzens, Fletcher, Frazier, Howell, King, and Nye, voted for the sugar tariff before. It goes on : And it was upon this weakness in the coalition camp that the tariff fixers, who have laughed contemptuously at the "high principles" of the coalition from the beginning and predicted confidently that in the end their fixing would prevail, went to work. They went to work upon the coali- tion, in such a way and at such a time, too, that they bid fair to make them look like political monkeys. . . . There was one Old Guardsman who could not restrain his mirth after yesterday's result. "The dynasty fell on the only things about which it was right," he chuckled. Even after the bill is out of the Senate it must still run the gauntlet of the conference. If the Old Guard succeeds in winning the final battles on the Senate floor, a large part of the good work done there during the past six months of steady fighting may be undone, and the conference will sim- ply have to choose between two sets of thoroughly bad pro- visions. But the fight is not yet over, and it is too early to assume that the cohesive power of public plunder is going to prevail against the determination of the small band who have persistently fought, with ever-shifting alliances, for a rela- tively honest tariff bill, if such a thing may be said to exist.

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320 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 D. H. Lawrence By JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH N March 3 D. H. Lawrence died of tuberculosis in might manage to live together when it was not yet clear how a villa near Nice. His death, at the age of forty- each could live with himself. He was perpetually asking five, extinguishes a talent that was one of the most what human nature was capable of and he never succeeded varied and stormy in contemporary literature. Too much of in giving an answer satisfactory to himself. It was the an individualist to be the member of any school or even, for universe that he would not accept and he was angrier at that matter, to be the founder of one, he was nevertheless God than he was at kings or censors. Hence, though he be- O typically "modern" in his preoccupations and he had his pas- sionate say upon most of the topics which agitated his con- temporaries. Lawrence was born in a miner's cottage in Derbyshire and grew up amid the hardships which he described in his first conspicuously successful novel. At sixteen he became a lieved that nothing was to be gained by reticence or suppres- sion, he never promised any solution, for he was far more in- clined to believe that civilization was going down in some stupendous debacle than to hope that even the frankest and freest discussion would save it. Many maintained that "Sons and Lovers," the first of village schoolteacher and though he was compelled for lack his novels to attract great attention, was in every respect the of funds to forego the scholarship which he was awarded at the age of nineteen, he succeeded two years later in matricu- lating in a training-school for teachers. Shortly afterward some poems written to a local girl were published in a maga- zine and the fact determined him to embark upon a literary career. His first novel, "The White Peacock," was issued in 1911 and from that time on he wrote with great rapidity, publishing in all some twenty-one volumes in less than twenty years. Throughout his career Lawrence was the subject of acrimonious controversy and the victim of much persecution, both political and literary. A professed pacifist and the hus- band of the former Frieda von Richthofen, he was hounded by secret police during the war and he became, besides, the ob- ject of persistent hostility on the part of the censors, both here and abroad. Thus, "Sons and Lovers" aroused the protests of Justice Ford; "Women in Love" was attacked by Sum- ner; the British Home Office seized copies of a recent volume of poems called "Pansies" which he had sent to England from Italy; and a Boston bookseller was arrested just a few weeks ago for selling his latest (and privately printed) novel, "Lady Chatterly's Lover." But though these various annoy- ances doubtless increased his irritation against contemporary society he was a natural protestant, hardly less at war with the outside world than with himself. And this fact was, per- haps, the one which most clearly marked him off from his older contemporaries in English literature. The Shaws, the Galsworthys, the Wellses were, how- ever much they might battle with their fellows, patriotic Englishmen at bottom. They believed in modern society, in the possibility of reforming it, and, even more specifically, in the society of England. But Lawrence's abandonment of England and his wanderings in Australia, Mexico, and the American Southwest were outward signs of the fact that he had given up that white man's civilization which he so bit- terly reviled. He had no political interests and no social pro- gram. It was only incidentally that he condescended to touch a detail of our system, as he did, for example, when he at- tacked the censorship, for he had repudiated it in toto and he saw no reason for meddling with the details. Essentially an anarchical individualist, his absorption in the problems of the individual in general and of himself in particular implied that it was useless to consider how men best. Nor is there any doubt that it is, with the possible exception of some of the short stories, the most finished and articulate of his prose works. It is a realistic novel not entirely outside the tradition represented, let us say, by the early works of George Moore, and it might very possibly be read as merely an admirable realistic story of the struggles of a young miner. But the very fact that it is less repugnant than most of his other works to tastes which find scant pleas- ure in "Lady Chatterly's Lover" or "Women in Love" is sufficient indication of the fact that it is not the author at his most characteristic. Its unobtrusive and inexplicit use of a "mother complex" as the dominant psychological factor in the life of the hero serves to announce Lawrence's persist- ent preoccupation with various sexual abnormalities, but it is essentially the work of a man who still feels the influence of a tradition to which he is adapting himself and it is therefore either not really representative or at least far less character- istic than even such a book as "Aaron's Rod," which may be more difficult to classify but which for that very reason gives more of the peculiar quality of the author. Indeed, it may be doubted whether Lawrence was pri- marily a novelist at all in the conventional sense of one whose chief concern is with a picture of the world outside himself. He is at his best when describing the doings and feelings of people who are essentially variants of himself, and from "Sons and Lovers" on his development is centrifugal rather than centripetal. He scatters instead of coming to a focus, and the result is that we lose a novelist to gain an almost frenetically passionate commentator upon life as it affects his supersensi- tive and irritated soul. He tried at one time or another almost all the forms of literary composition — poetry, fiction, drama, criticism, history, travel, and philosophy — and his purely literary gift, his gift, that is to say, for forceful and peculiarly unhackneyed utterance, was extraordinary; but it is the temper of the man which gives unity to the work and it is ultimately that temper, in whatever form it happened to express itself, which makes the work so interesting. Law- rence was very conspicuously himself whether he happened to be speaking in his proper person, in the pages of a novel, or even in an effort to interpret the character of Benjamin Franklin, whom he recognized, properly enough, as the most perfect possible antithesis of himself. (Continued on page 346)

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 321 yv/aV'^^^n I 'Y' gotta have respect for law!"

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322 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 Russia's New Revolution By LOUIS FISCHER Moscow, February 16 THE present is the most interesting period of the Bol- shevik Revolution since 1922, perhaps since 1917. A tremendous upheaval has occurred during the past six months. One returns to the country to find not only new achievements, radically new policies, and a new social atmosphere, but a powerful, all-enveloping, newly released wave or wall of energy and enthusiasm. This is my out- standing impression. Even the passive, anti-Bolshevik sec- tions of the Soviet bureaucracy feel the inspiration of recent trends; as for the Communists, they have become machines of permanent motion, more uncritical and impersonal than ever, driving fiercely toward a goal which grows nearer as the milestones are passed in planful fashion. The goal is the complete destruction of capitalism in the Soviet Union, and after that stage the complete enthronement of socialism. We are witnessing the gradual accomplishment of that for which November 7, 1917, took place. This is the revolution. The greatest innovation is the sharp course directed to the eradication of private capitalism in the village. The kulak, or rich peasant, is to be wiped out "as a class," and the private capital of the middle, poor, and landless peasants is being pooled into collective agricultural units called kolkhozi. The organization of kolkhozi is proceeding far ahead of plan, and soon the majority of the Soviet Union's peasantry — 25,000,000 households — should be bound together in cooperatives using government land, borrowing government tractors and seed, and selling their produce to the state. From this to the complete proletarianization of the Russian peasantry is, I think, a long but single step. The subject, however, needs more than a paragraph, more than an article. For the moment I shall limit myself to a sort of bulletin of the changes which struck me on my return. Collectivization amounts to the ruthless extermination of NEP on the land. How logical, therefore, that the Nep- men of the city be brought under the same head. Private stores in Moscow and other urban centers grow fewer daily, and private trade — both legal and illicit — has shrunk to an unprecedented minimum. Stalin a week ago publicly sum- moned the party to more temperance in this matter, for the Moscow committee of the party had set itself the task of the wholesale and immediate annihilation of private capi- talism in the cities. Yet unless an unexpected trend toward the Right sets in, NEP and the Nepmen are doomed to at least economic death. Stalin's ultra-radical, revolutionary policy has won the hearts of the Trotzkyists, and they have come rushing back from Siberian, Caucasian, and Volgan exile to participate in the pressing business of construction. They have come back humbly, with clipped wings, acknowledging Stalin's talents and Trotzky's mistakes. The remnant that remains in Bar- naul, Tashkent, Tobolsk sulks in remote retirement out of personal affection for the "great Leo." (His brilliancy shines undimmed in his recent autobiography, but its apologia and criticism, which may strike a sympathetic note in the soft air of foreign lands, sound like a far cry amid the clang of battle and the din of the forge that envelop Russia.) Stalin, my ex-Trotzkyist friends tell me, has done more than they wanted of him, and more even than they had expected of Trotzky. Only if the Right raises its head will Trotzky be needed here. But at present it is Left tendencies, like those of the Moscow committee, which require checking. It is indicative of the extent to which the crushing of everything private has gone that the private practice of medi- cine has been restricted and will probably soon be entirely prohibited. In anticipation, doctors and dentists are uniting into cooperatives, forsaking private activities in cases where they also enjoy state employment, or preparing for very hard times. The student of social movements is interested to observe that the moment socialism comes into the foreground com- munism appears in the offing. The kolkhozi may here and there develop into communes, but especially in the cities one already notes the beginnings of groups which propose to place their varied earnings in a common fund and live on a communistic basis of equal consumption. Some of the new cooperative houses are being converted into communes. Institutions occupied with family and child problems are dreaming what today may still be fantastic dreams of ideal- istic unions, with state care of children, but tomorrow, when the Five-Year Plan is successfully executed, may gradually assume realistic forms. A year ago, even six months ago, the Five-Year Plan encountered strong skepticism abroad and resistance at home. Now the slogan is: The Five-Year Plan in Four. In some branches they will certainly do it — in oil, chemi- cals, agricultural machinery, lumber, agricultural collectives. The Turkestan-Siberian Railroad will be finished in May, 1930 — four months in advance of plan. New industrial giants are rising in every corner of the vast land, and the more they build the more they must build. Industrialization begets industrialization, and collectivization, with its con- comitant of mechanization, makes maximum factory produc- tion a prime necessity. The aim is to make the Union in- dustrially powerful and economically self-sufficient (inciden- tally, by converting into a commercial asset a wild rubber- yielding plant of Kazakstan, the government hopes to make Russia independent of foreign rubber supplies), and monu- mental progress is registered each day in this direction. All year, the curve of industrial output has risen ; during the first third of the current fiscal year foreign trade increased 23.3 per cent, and in the same period the amount of cur- rency in circulation was reduced. Inflation has been checked. To increase output, an unbroken working year has been introduced together with a five-day week. As a result, fac- tories, offices, and stores operate 360 instead of 310 days a year, yet each person gainfully employed enjoys six sabbaths per month instead of four. The days of the week no longer exist, and people, even my kindergarten children, count by the days of the month. The social as well as economic effects of this daring departure are manifold and deep. Sundays and Saturdays have been abolished. This in-

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 323 dustrial reform, therefore, strikes an indirect blow at church attendance. Yet if this were all, Greek Orthodoxy need not be disturbed. It would be unnatural, however, if the new revolutionary resurgence, the tremendous crescendo of mili- tant socialization, the augmented mass enthusiasm of work- :rs, and the more intimate contact of the peasantry with the state, with Communists, and with the proletariat did not stimulate the spread of atheism. On this subject, too, I jromise another article. The change is one not in quality 3ut in quantity — tremendous quantity. It is the ther- nometer of the crusade against private capitalism and of the lewly tapped gushers of popular will, determination, force. Everything moves here. Life, the air, people are dy- lamic. When I watch these recently unsealed reservoirs of mergy I am sometimes carried away and think that nothing s impossible in the Soviet Union. Russia is pulling herself ipward by her own bootstraps as no nation has done before. The Bolsheviks retain all the qualities which explain their last achievements, and now they have another — confidence n success. A promissory note on the future stirs the prole- ariat to maximum concentrated effort. The technical per- onnel of industry, hitherto indifferent or hostile, has finally turned a corner and caught by the spirit of creative, planful building, is throwing itself enthusiastically and loyally at an unprecedented engineering opportunity. This is an added asset to the state and increases the potentiality of growth. Moreover, those dynamos bursting with power — the youth — have been harnessed to the industrial chariot, and they move in shock brigades, putting their shoulders to wheels that are stuck in the mire, closing breaches in the economic front, reinforcing weakened sectors of the line. Really, this country grows younger and younger as the years go by. The cost is very heavy. The population is being de- prived of many comforts and even of some necessities in the name of accomplishments yet to come. The explanation is simple : so much money is being invested in capital develop- ment that the needs of the present cannot be entirely satis- fied. A score of new large cities, hundreds of factories, a network of electrical stations, a host of schools and scien- tific institutions are in the process of construction. They will yield goods a few years hence. But today they re- quire funds, labor, materials. What they get is equal to what the population does not get. The hope that they will repay the debt handsomely is the present motive power. Divorce — and After IV. The Insecurity of the Child* FOUR CASE HISTORIES DIVORCE adds to the insecurity in children's lives. One need not be a psychologist to know that. The question arises whether or not this insecurity would e present, and if so whether in greater or less degree, in omes where parental unhappiness, incompatibility, or hos- lity has not led to actual separation or divorce. The four ises detailed here are taken from the actual records of a insultant in the behavior problems of children and young iults. Each one presents facts and factors which may be uplicated in other cases where the consequences were dia- letrically opposite to those here described. So much is Mitingent on the native equipment and previous training of ie children and adults involved, so much also is dependent l other environmental factors present before and after the ivorce, that any effort at generalization is more likely to :flect the truth about its author than about divorce. I A wealthy couple are divorced after ten years of retched quarreling. Two children, a boy of nine and a rl of five, remain in the custody of their unhappy, em- ttered, socially ambitious mother. Long before the divorce e mother has begun to devote herself to her son, to whom e offers the loving attention that a woman gives to a ma- re man. As her relations with her husband grow more rained, and of course more markedly after the divorce, she kes the boy into her confidence, she uses him as escort, she eks his ministrations when she is ill or indisposed, she dis- • This is the fourth of a series of articles on the problems created by livorce. A fifth will appear in an early issue. — Editor The Nation. cusses her friends with him, they read the newspapers to- gether, she tells him again and again that he is the only one she has left. The boy plays his role to his mother's sat- isfaction, and thus secures constant praise and appreciation from her and from most of her women friends. Meanwhile, his younger sister, who has been her father's pet and a spoiled but loving daughter to her father, finds herself alone after the divorce. She is forced to seek out the company of her mother, who intrusts her to the care of a French governess. What little companionship the child receives from her mother is bestowed grudgingly. She soon discovers that she can increase this maternal attention in two ways — by unsatisfactory behavior and by illness. True, the former involves the pain of rebuke and punish- ment ; the latter, confinement and unpleasant medicines, not to mention doctors who even doubt her illnesses. But this behavior is successful in obtaining for her her mother's solici- tude, and that reward is apparently worth the price. She has also begun to punish her father for his absence. When he visits her she is extremely rude and unpleasant to him, accepts his gifts ungraciously, and even offers him her opinion that he is not a very nice man. Her father does what his paternal duty commands: he discusses his little daughter's rudeness with her mother, blaming his wife, of course, for what he considers the child's inadequate train- ing. The mother meets the child's deviations of conduct with criticism, constant correction, deprivations by way of penalty, and other forms of punishment. This treatment of the girl, who is now ten years old, is grist to her unconscious mill. She achieves, on an anti-

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324 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 social level, an eminence that she despairs of ever attaining on any plane of good behavior, first, because of the discour- agement she draws out of the carping criticism of a frus- trated mother; secondly, because of constant unfavorable comparison with the paragon, her elder, father-impersonat- ing brother; and thirdly, because of the essential insecurity of her own fatherless life. For years now she has been a serious problem at home; she has recently become a serious problem at school. Meanwhile, the brother, now fourteen, has reacted in an unfortunate manner to the role of husband forced upon him. Tall and robust though he is, his manner, his attitude toward other boys, and his growing disinterest in girls reveal an alarming disposition to identify himself, not with the absent father, but with the omnipresent mother. Effeminacy is not a healthy symptom in a strong young man of nearly fifteen. There can be little question of the cause-and-effect rela- tionship between the divorce of these parents and the be- havior of their children. But it should be pointed out that for every case similar to the foregoing in a divorced house- hold, there are several just as impressive and quite as dis- tressing to be found in the homes of those who are unhappily married but not divorced. II A childless couple of means, finding themselves drifting apart, mutually decide that what they need is a child. The young, pleasure-loving mother views with favor neither preg- nancy nor the care and worry that in her mind must mark the all-too-protracted period of infancy. She persuades her husband that an adopted child is "just as good"; and a bright and beautiful little girl of three receives their name. Fundamentally there is something sinful in deliberately avoiding the travail of childbirth. That becomes, for a time, the burden of the mother's conscious regrets. Only for a time, however. Soon they are neatly repressed in the face of other, greater grief. The new little girl had brought about for a while at least that community of interest that husband and wife had sought. But this could not alter their essential incompatibility, nor her infidelities, nor his fury at the knowledge of her infidelities. War was inevitable. The divorce was decreed less than two years after the adoption. It was all done very quietly, and by agreement the mother retained the custody of the child. Within three months after the final decree the child became desperately ill, recovering completely only after a long and expensive period of hospitalization and convalescence in the country. Now the old feeling of guilt, long repressed, that grew out of her escape from child-bearing, united with a new feeling of guilt because of her sexual infidelities, came to shake the woman's security. Her child's illness could only be retribution. Fear of losing the child grew. She clung to it more closely than ever, inevitably carrying over to the six-year-old her own insecurity. She was "modern" enough to interpret for the youngster the facts of her adoption ; but her modernism did not extend to any interpretation of the divorce. Instead, she resorted to false explanations and roused false hopes. Her own sense of guilt precluded any sane effort to rationalize the absence of the father in a way that would be intelligible and convincing to a bright child of six. The child's insecurity became pathetic. The indulgence attendant on long illness, the over-solicitousness of a guilty, insecure mother, the deprivation of a father she had learned to love, and the knowledge that she does not belong truly even to her mother — all these factors have contributed to change a bright and charming little girl into a neurotic child, spoiled beyond toleration, cruel, wilful, cowardly, unpleasant, and unhappy. Had there been no divorce, would this child be suffering as she is now? Who can tell? Again, this much is certain: Circumstances similar to the foregoing in families that have sternly avoided the divorce courts have again and again resulted in neurotic children, equally spoiled, equally unpleasant, equally insecure. Ill An intelligent, educated husband and wife, parents of three children — a boy of eighteen, a boy of sixteen, and a girl of twelve — are divorced. Even prior to the divorce the chil- dren were familiar with the parental differences. Both boys have definitely cast their lot with their father and feel a strong antagonism to the mother because she was the prime mover in the final decision to obtain a divorce. She is too "decent" to inform her intelligent young grown-up sons of her reasons (which are statutory), and they are allowed to believe that the mother's story of "incompatibility" is her only motive. Where the daughter's loyalty would lie had circumstances not been as they were, it is difficult to conjec- ture. The facts, however, are these: During the period when the two homes were being established, the girl was sick. There was no question that the mother should attend the child through her illness. The boys and the father moved to a new home. When the daughter recovered the mother realized, through the defection of her two sons, that she would be obliged to do battle to hold her daughter's affection against the assaults of her husband. Because of the long period of nursing that had been demanded of her, she claimed the right to see all three children at regular intervals. She would undoubtedly have won her "rights" in any court, but knowing the temper of her sons, and having no desire to awaken in them further antagonism, her only court was her husband's conscience. His decision was in her favor only in so far as the girl was concerned. Then followed the daughter's travels back and forth, from father to mother, from uncertainty to uncertainty, from insecurity to insecurity. The mother has taken the girl into her confidence, from which she excluded her sons, though they were certainly better prepared for it than their twelve- year-old sister. The daughter's affections are slowly but surely turning in the direction of her mother. The five-and- ten-cent-store trinkets, the cheap millinery, and the movie treats bestowed on her by her "poor, dear mother" are given a value that in themselves they are far from possessing. Her sojourns in her father's home are replete with criticisms of mother and sallies at the cheapness of her new finery. Her father's gifts are intended to be, and are, a little more impressive than those her mother makes. Such a technique, however unethical, might easily have the desired effect were it not accompanied by the teasing, provocative, hypercritical, and unfriendly belittlement of her mother's gifts. After all, it was mother who nursed her during her long illness. The result is not only a gradual drawing away from father, but from her brothers as well because of their callow hostility toward her mother, to whose defense they unwittingly arouse her own constantly progressive partisanship. One be-

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 325 holds here the spectacle of a house already divided against itself becoming even more divided ; a father and his sons left womanless; a mother and her daughter left manless; and all because of the incredibly unenlightened selfishness of two otherwise intelligent adults. IV The parents of Arthur, aged three, separated. Their arrangement, despite the bitterness that necessitated it, was an intelligent one. For the first year the mother was to devote herself to the child, and the father to see him twice a week, once mid-week for an hour and once during the week-end for a whole day. Thereafter, if there were no reconciliation, divorce proceedings would follow. The second year ended with the mutual hostility un- ibated. In fact it was enhanced on the mother's side to the joint of her refusing even to discuss divorce. She there- ifter found professional employment, but continued her in- telligent care of the child through her own contacts with lim and through the employment of a thoroughly trained governess whom she carefully supervised. Her reentry into the world of affairs did much to )ring her serenity and mitigate her deep bitterness toward ler husband. Divorce was discussed over many months, ind at the end of the third year of separation mother and rhild went to Europe. The father arranged to join them , ater, and the divorce mill was set in motion. Arthur was hen almost seven. As soon as they arrived in France the nother began to prepare the child for the final event. She lad previously agreed with her husband that geography and msiness were to be used as the explanation to be given to Arthur in response to questions he might pose concerning lis father's absence. But the mother realized that an un- ruth which is effectual for a child of three, four, or five .night not serve for a child of seven. Besides, word from 'ther, less considerate sources concerning the divorce and ts implications might somehow filter through to him. She watched carefully for opportunities, and some op- portunities she went out of her way to create. She sug- ;ested his writing a letter to Freddie back in America. Arthur wasn't so keen on letter-writing, and besides he idn't care so much about Freddie anyhow. But he used o. Yes, but he didn't any longer. That was opportunity umber one. It was used gently. Similar opportunities rere not infrequent for one who was on the watch for them. Analogies in her own life, analogies of the moment were ound, too — situations that had no apparent relationship Hth Arthur's father. And thus the ground was laid over lany months for the boy's understanding of the possibility f the termination of friendship, of love, of affection. Just prior to his father's arrival in Paris Arthur was rought face to face with a similar situation in his parents' ves, and therefore in his own life. His first reaction was iolent and painful. Mother must not stop loving father. le would tell father when he came that he must go on wing mother. She was patient ; she calmly worked out the 'hole situation with him in terms that he could under- and. When his father arrived Arthur whispered to him fter the first embraces: "Daddy, mother told me the secret." Four and a half years have passed. The parents, though ivorced, cooperate in the rearing of Arthur. Arthur at even is self-reliant, well-poised, beautifully adjusted, de- voted to each of his parents, appreciative of their distant though now amicable relationship. He has in his life a sound security that he might never have had were his parents still together, a security that is absent from the lives of many children who live in quarrel-filled, planless, unhappy, but "unbroken" homes. In the Driftway THE Drifter's remarks in this column concerning old- school proofreaders in general and his friend George Schumm in particular have brought forth a letter of gentle protest from James M. Lynch of Syracuse. The Drifter prints it here in full, not only because it is interest- ing, but also because he considers it a perfect example of the best labor-saving device yet designed for columnists. Mr. Lynch's remarks and reminiscences with regard to the "comma-chasers of another day" run as follows: My knowledge of proofreading and proofreaders cov- ers some forty-seven years as printer's apprentice and jour- neyman. I have also had opportunity for wide observation as an officer for many years of the typographical union. I can remember when proofreaders were capable of doing all of the things they are credited with ; and almost without exception during the hand-set days they were journeymen printers of long experience. They were members of the typographical union, it is true, but were not at that time required to be. Union membership was with them a matter of pride and sentiment. Proofreading was not in high re- gard with employers even in those days of required ability, and the union took over jurisdiction so that for these highly qualified men and women there might be established conditions at least as good as those in the composing rooms. In the hand-set days and for some years after machin- ery was introduced into composing rooms, the printer and the operator were required to know how to set type and correct the errors that so often appeared in the copy com- ing from the editorial rooms. They had to know names of places no matter how remotely located ; they had to have literary knowledge; above all, they had to be familiar with local names both as to initials and spelling, and with the business and social life of the community in which they worked. They were informed as to nations, their rulers, and their statesmen, and they had a store of knowledge gathered by reason of their trade that would astonish the sages of today. So the printer was able and was expected to correct error as he set type. If he missed — and being human he often did — then the proofreader finished the job. The result was as perfect a piece of work as could be ex- pected from a production that had to take into considera- tion the element of time. . . . The conquering machine put an end to this nicety in the setting of type, and the great god Production took its place. Today the rule is quantity and not quality. If type will pass muster, that is all that is required — pro- viding the workman sets enough of that kind of type. The newspapers that still require quality, and they may be counted on less than three fingers, stand out to the dis- criminating reader as oases in a great desert of sloppy and crude typography. And it is all so unnecessary. When it is required by a publisher, the printers of today, who manipulate keyboards instead of movable type, can still do creditable work, ap- proximating that which the Drifter mourns as having

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326 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 passed. Yes, and the quantity would not be seriously diminished. But what may be expected under the rule of production and still more production, with errors seldom marked and as seldom corrected if the forms are gaping for the type? The printer knows this. He sets type ac- cordingly. Most emphatically, it is not a question of union- ism. Just as surely is it a question of speed and quantity. I join with all the nice things the Drifter had to say about George Schumm and his kind. I have not the pleas- ure of his acquaintance, but in my time I have known many of his type, printers who were editors and could fill any position to which they might be called. These nice things might have been said about Schumm, however, without at the same time placing blame on the typographi- cal union for a sin which it did not commit and which, equally with the Drifter, it deplores. THE scourge of the machine, and of its twin offspring, speed and quantity, has fallen upon the printer as upon all artisans. To the man who works with his hands, that work is first of all his own. As such, it holds the possibility of satisfaction with the thing done that may be rare but is also deep. Pride in workmanship is inevitable. For the most part, the man who runs a machine literally has no hand in what he is doing. It is not surprising therefore if his attitude toward his job is that of a bystander; but it is none the less unfortunate, both for the workman and for the world at large. The Drifter Correspondence Yes Indeed! To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Although I have been a Nation reader intermittently for about fifteen years, I continue to have the same reaction to it. Your anemic nagging can only appeal to infantile intel- lectuals. Your malignant complacency does not hew a "sharp- shooting line." The only value in your paper is in what it may or might be. I would suggest that you place on your staff a few healthy people. Are you going to publish this in your readers' column? New York, March 1 Anna R. Bruenn National-Gallery Heroes To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: On a recent trip to Washington I paid a visit to the new National Gallery, which I had been anxious to see. It is a wonderfully imposing structure, as fine as any.thing I have seen in E.urope. An attendant with an excellent Dublin brogue checked my umbrella and I proceeded to enjoy myself. The lighting system, the great columns, the splendid floor, all appealed to me. Then I began to look at the exhibits: a bust of Mrs. Coolidge, one of Mrs. Longworth, one of Charles Curtis, the Vice-President — all these right at the entrance, fol- lowed by a bust of Sam Gompers, one of Abraham Cahan, editor of the (once upon a time) radical Jewish daily, and a big assortment of generals and miscellaneous heroes of the World War, including Foch, Wilson, Clemenceau, Smedley Butler, Pershing, and many others. The remainder of the first floor was taken up with an exhibit of exact duplicates of the homes of the rich of the District of Columbia ami its environs, all nicely arranged and perfectly lighted. By this time I was so exhausted that I could not make my way to the next floor. Reclaiming my umbrella, I made my way out into the slush and rain for a breath of fresh air — and a little mental relief. Cincinnati, February 22 Nicholas Klein Hard Times To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: I have discontinued my subscription to The Nation because this wonderful Coolidge-Hoover prosperity hasn't reached Maine yet. Times are not only hard, they are alarm- ing. I haven't the money for a year's subscription or a month's even, and I won't have it right away. The Nation expresses my own outlook upon world condi- tions and I'd like to subscribe, but I need $1,000 right now to put my farm on its feet and I haven't got 100 cents. Thomaston, Maine, February 13 Otis A. Robinson Southern Chivalry To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: There are many progressive women in Virginia who would appreciate your assistance in their seemingly endless struggle against the old order in the South. As a youngster I was forever gazing at petitions posted in public places pleading for women's right to admittance to the sacred precincts of the State University of Virginia. On February 25 the House of Delegates at Richmond committed itself to the establishment of a college for women at some place in Virginia — not less than thirty miles from Charlottes- ville! I recommend to The Nation a study of Southern chivalry in action. Norfolk, Va., February 26 M. P. G. Jamison Let Artists Live To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: When is an etching not an etching? If we are to believe what the signs in the windows of some of our colossal chain drug-stores tell us, one dollar entitles you not only to an etching but to the frame as well. With the drug-stores thus tak- ing over the care of our aesthetic needs, the private art gal- leries may just as well shut up business. Artists will have to go without the herrings and crackers that have been their only sustenance. The pictures labeled "etchings" are, of course, not real etchings but mechanically reproduced facsimiles of etchings, turned out in lots of hundreds of thousands. These reproduc- tions actually cost the producer only a fraction of a cent apiece. A genuine etching is a hand-made proof, done directly from the artist's original plate. The artist's signature on the proof sig- nifies that the proof was made by himself, or under his super- vision. The artist may spend weeks to complete the drawing on the plate ; the pulling of the proof, too, is a lengthy and skil- ful job; and the plate wears out after about 75 or 100 proofs have been made from it. New York, January 30 Charles Z. Offin

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.March 19, 1930J The Nation 327 Back-Cover Hyperbole To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The back cover of The Nation for February 26 consists of a full-page advertisement promising that those who will do themselves the favor of purchasing Clement Wood's "The Outline of Man's Knowledge" will thereby equip them- selves with the Whole Story of Philosophy, the Whole Story of Science [sic J], the Whole Story of Art, and the Whole Story of History. Nothing less, nothing more — and all for the miserly sum of $5.50. The Nation is one of the outstanding periodicals that fight against misrepresentation in economic affairs no less than in public matters. You are in full agreement, are you not, with Messrs. Chase and Schling in their volume, "Your Money's Worth"? How is it then that The Nation can carry an advertisement so grossly hyperbolic in its claims? Brooklyn, February 28 Jacob Chernik Watch the R.O.T.C !To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The attention and publicity now being given to the London naval conference are all to the good, but the stellar nature of this attraction should not blind us to what is hap- pening at home. Navies are not the only stumbling blocks to peace. May we call your attention to the following: 1. Congress is granting an increase in the army budget. ■ This increase includes the largest sum ever appropriated in this country for subsidizing military training in schools and colleges. 2. The navy rides the high seas and is a cause of fear and suspicion to our neighbors. Army officers are going into our own back yards to play with and teach our children. Let me quote from the official citizenship-training manual now in use (Section 152, headed Destructive Idealism) : "An im- practical and destructive idealism called internationalism is be- ing propagated by certain foreign agitators and is being echoed and reechoed by many of the nation's 'intellectuals.' " 3. A national organization of "prominent military and civic leaders" has been formed — called the Reserve Officers' Train- ing Corps Association — "to promote and foster the R.O.T.C. in educational institutions." Major General Amos A. Fries, of spider-web-chart fame, is the president, and Lieutenant Colonel Orville Johnson, former secretary of the Reserve Offi- ] cers' Association, is the executive secretary. This group will have the active cooperation of the Reserve Officers' Association, which sends its monthly magazine free to all college students working for commissions. The R.O.A. last spring announced a gift of $30,000 to be devoted to the R.O.T.C. in schools and colleges. When you remember that there are approxi- mately 115,000 commissioned officers in the Reserve and that most of them are leaders in civil life, you can realize the potential political power of this group for the military view- point. The campaign against militarism must be supported with every resource of the peace-minded if we are to prevent the growth of a powerful military-minded force in our public schools, colleges, and universities. To support this campaign during 1930, the Committee on Militarism in Education needs the gifts of as many Nation readers as feel moved to con- tribute. Checks may be sent to the committee at 387 Bible House, Astor Place, New York. New York, March 1 George A. Coe The Reparations Referendum To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: It is highly regrettable that such a splendid and use- ful weekly as The Nation is apparently unable to secure any intelligent interpretation of events and of the general situation in Germany, or even any correct reporting of facts. A glaring proof of ignorant reporting is the article by A. H. Feller in the issue of December 4 concerning the reparations -referendum. Your readers are told that "the combined parties of the Right had polled 7,000,000 votes at the last election." They polled less than 6,290,000. Your readers are told that the Supreme Court decided that the action of Prussia forbidding state officials to inscribe their names for the referendum "was- legal." The Supreme Court merely refused to issue an injunc- tion, holding that to do so would be to prejudge the case — a rather striking comment, by the way, on German mentality. And the court has now held that the action of Prussia was a violation of the Weimar constitution. Your readers are told that President von Hindenburg issued a statement denying that he was in favor of the initiative. They are not told that he issued another statement declaring his complete neutrality and amounting to a rebuke to the oppo- nents of the referendum. That Mr. Feller, after reporting that the Prussian government forbade state officials to sign the demand for the referendum, could then venture to speak of "reactionary landlords" driving voters to the polls is hardly less than amazing. The number of state officials who were intimi- dated by the illegal action of the government — an action that was so obviously a crass violation of the constitution that it is difficult to understand how it could have been earnestly defended at the hearing before the Supreme Court — was far greater than the number of "reactionary landlords." That this was so has been shown by the fact that the vote cast for the Hugenberg bill in the referendum proper exceeded the number of petitioners for the referendum by 38 per cent. It would undoubtedly have been much higher but for the fact that the Socialists and Com- munists had watchers at the polls who recorded, often with the aid of the election officials, the names of all voters who appeared. The referendum was an absurd and futile action. Its suc- cess would have been most damaging for Germany. But it is silly to attempt to minimize the strength of the elements that were behind it. Berlin, December 25 S. Miles BoUTON The Real Issue To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: An editorial in the Wall Street Journal for February 26, headed The Utility Issue, states that this issue is "non- partisan, but political"; that "the real issue is . . . between those who would keep government out of business and require the users of a service to pay for it, and those who yearn to give something away and conceal its cost in taxation." Assuming that the government represents the whole peo- ple (which it is supposed to do) and that the users are the whole people (which they undoubtedly are) we might translate this "real issue" as follows: The real issue is between those who would keep a few individuals in possession of the public utilities and require the whole people to pay handsomely for their use, and those who yearn to see the whole people own the public utilities and use them at cost. Atlantic Highlands, N. J., March 1 William Raoul

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Books, Films, Drama Not Yet a Word By EDWIN SEAVER Not a word, not yet a word, a whisper heard among the crisp dead leaves a tree still clung to, or impact of feathered flake on flake, snow filtering through quiet. Already the idea stirs in the loam, the seeds turn in their dawnsleep hearing or dreaming they hear down dark unfolding corridors the first song seeking the first bird's throat. Under the loosened girdle of silence the curled buds quiver, the lean sap mounting the eager limbs gives ear to the muffled pulsebeat in the womb: the whirr of dynamos, the rush of wings. The Gods Damned Treatise on the Gods. By H. L. Mencken. Alfred A. Knopf. $3. THIS treatise will do much to restore the recently waver- ing reputation of its author. It easily stands among the best of his books, and seems to me likely, indeed, to sur- vive longer than any of the others. It is vastly better, for ex- ample, than "Notes on Democracy," if only because there is more solid industry behind it. It is a work of genuine scholar- ship, admirably organized, and for the most part surprisingly sober in tone. The volume is divided into five chapters or sections. The first discusses the nature and origin of religion. The single function of religion, Mr. Mencken believes, "is to give man access to the powers which seem to control his destiny," while "its single purpose is to induce those powers to be friendly to him." Hence arise the priests who claim to have special gifts in this direction; the hall-mark of a priest to this day is that "he has a god working for him." Religion is supported primarily by the emotion of fear: "Always, in time of bloodshed, pestilence, and poverty, there is what theologians call a great spiritual awakening. But when peace and plenty caress the land the priest has a hard time keeping his flock at prayer, and great numbers desert him altogether, as they desert his col- leagues in cheer and comfort, the poet, the publican, and the political reformer." Mr. Mencken's verdict upon immortality is that it is only a sort of wish neurose: "It is grounded, not upon objective evidence, but upon a despairing, colicky feeling that this world we live in is hopeless, and that there must be another beyond to correct its intolerable injustices." He passes next to the evolution of religion — its passage' from primitive animism and unorganized polytheism to mono- theism, or at least to a hierarchy presided over by one great deity, usually the sun-god. This section discusses also the growth of the priests as a class, and their constant reaching out for power, secular as well as spiritual, so that "the history of civilization is largely a history of the long effort to shake them off." Section III is a highly fascinating discussion of the varie- ties of religion, with elaborate descriptions of comparative ritual, sacrifices, and theological notions — the origin of incense, rosaries, sacraments, and blood sacrifice, from its mildest forms up to those of the Aztecs who killed 70,000 victims at a stroke. We pass on to the habits and morals of various gods, and to the innumerable Hells, particularly the complicated tortures developed by the lush imaginations of the early Buddhists. Then we are prepared to consider religion in its Christian form. Mr. Mencken here examines the origin and history first of the New Testament and then of the Old, and reveals as remarkable a knowledge of the higher Biblical criticism as he does of comparative religion. But it seems to me that his rea- soning in this chapter wabbles considerably. He first accepts the New Testament as "an historical document of very tolerable authority." He then rejects the divinity of Jesus, and even the notion that Jesus ever claimed divinity. He rejects the Virgin Birth, the dogma of the Trinity — "a dogma of which Jesus Himself was as completely unaware as He was of the nine symphonies of Beethoven" — the star of Bethlehem, the coming of the Magi, the miracles, and so on. Finally, as a sort of com- pensation, and as a way of explaining the colossal importance that the life and death of Jesus later took on in the world, he accepts the Resurrection as probably factual, and seeks to ac- count rationally for it by supposing that Jesus was mistakenly put in the sepulcher before He was truly dead, and that "He Himself, when he came to his senses in the sepulcher, believed He was coming back from death." This last supposition strikes me. as highly implausible. Mr. Mencken confronts the dilemma of all modernists who seek a naturalistic interpretation of the New Testament: they find themselves forced to reject a great deal, but their acceptances and rejections are, in the end, pretty arbitrary. They are merely guessing, and Mr. Mencken's guesses are no more weighty or definitive than those of scores of his predecessors. The final chapter is devoted to the state of Christianity today. Here the author directs his fire against "the effort of certain alarmed and conciliatory scientists to prove that exact knowledge and theological dogma are not actually at odds." "The only real way," he holds, "to reconcile science and religion is to set up something that is not science and something that is not religion." The Millikans, Eddingtons, and their like "rec- oncile science and religion by the sorry device of admitting, however cautiously, that the latter is somehow superior to the former, and is thus entitled to all territories that remain un- occupied." Meanwhile the theologians, on their side, yield nothing. On the contrary, they boldly claim "that what no one knows is their special province, that ignorance is a superior kind of knowledge, that their most preposterous guess must hold good until it is disproved." Mr. Mencken, I need hardly add, waves all these claims aside contemptuously. He closes by describing the credo of the "truly civilized man": "If he has not proved positively that religion is not true, then he has cer- tainly proved that it is not necessary." As the reader may have guessed, there are no subtleties in the book, and few ideas that are brilliantly new; but it is full of a wide and curious learning, it is admirably put together, and its eloquence and pungency never flag. I have myself often engaged in pointing out what I believe to be Mr. Mencken's faults and limitations, but in recent criticism those limitations have been absurdly overstressed, and now that even sophomores are beginning to dismiss him in a lofty and condescending man- ner, and to flatter themselves that his chief function was merely to clear the way for their own august works to come, it is worth while to remind ourselves of his great gifts and his spe- cial contribution. He has been the most influential American critic of his generation, and this eminence has surely not been undeserved. He has set fire to more stuffed shirts and estab- lished the reputations of more men of solid talent than any of -»

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 329 his contemporaries. There is no other living American writer who remotely approaches him in gusto and in Rabelaisian lusti- ness. When he has at his adversaries, when he pummels and mauls them, it is not through vindictiveness but through love of exercise. If there is one authentic and original prose style in America today, if there is one style whose every sentence bears the personal stamp of its maker, it is Mencken's. In contemporary English prose only Shaw's can equal it for energy. These are almost platitudes, but they bear repeating here. The man is worth, in brief, whole battalions of Irving Babbitts, and when the present epidemic of Humanism has run its course that fact, I make bold to believe, will be recognized once more. Henry Hazlitt The Mind of Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson: The Human Background of Her Poetry. By Josephine Pollitt. Harper and Brothers. $4. Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Martha Dick- inson Bianchi. Houghton Mifflin Company. $5. THE proprietary attitude of Mrs. Martha Dickinson Bianchi toward Emily Dickinson and her poems has been both objectionable and unwise. In particular, her reticence regarding Emily's lover and her careful drawing of attention to that reticence have been a little stupid. Even if Mrs. Bianchi could not realize that the poet belongs to the world and not to her family, she might have been shrewd enough to foresee that someone would come along and ferret out her treasured secret. Now that has happened. Josephine Pollitt, with not too much difficulty, has identified the "stranger preaching in Philadelphia" as the Rev. Charles Wadsworth. Can Mrs. Bianchi seriously believe that anyone is the worse off because the world knows? But Miss Pollitt has gone farther. Mrs. Bianchi indicates that her own identification of Emily's lover is an inference; any authentic version of the affair died with Sister Sue, Mrs. Bianchi's mother. Miss Pollitt thinks the guess was a bad one. Emily, on that trip to Washington and Philadelphia, met not only the Rev. Mr. Wadsworth but also the husband of her girlhood friend, Helen Fiske, become Helen Hunt. Lieutenant Hunt was, Miss Pollitt avers, the tutor who "was not con- tented I be his scholar, so he left the land." Miss Pollitt's first clue was an unpublished letter from Colonel Higginson to his wife written in 1870, after his visit to Emily. "Major Hunt," he wrote, "interested her more than any man she ever saw." Who, Miss Pollitt asked her- self, was Major Hunt? She found what she could about him, and her investigation convinced her that he fitted the outline provided by family tradition far better than Dr. Wadsworth. The steps of this investigation there is not space to follow. She has, it is sufficient to say, gathered a mass of details which taken separately are open to question, but which taken together make a not unimpressive showing. As Miss Pollitt admits, she has probably failed to discover all the truth; but she has made a good beginning, and it will be surprising if her findings do not lead, in due season, to the revelation of the complete story. In any case, the value of Miss Pollitt's book should not be ; regarded as resting solely on her detective work. Far more important is her study of the intellectual influences that touched the young poet. Mrs. Bianchi's "Life and Letters," first pub- lished in 1924 and now in its sixth printing, reflects for us the Dickinson family, the habits of the Amherst community, and the routine events of Emily's days. No one, however, can doubt that somehow Emily bathed in more sparkling waters than moved in the currents of Dickinson life. No discussion of "influences" will ever explain Emily Dickinson, but it is foolish to suppose that her intellectual and spiritual being was Mel- chizedekian. The first person to stir Emily's mind was her tutor, Leon- ard Humphrey, and Miss Pollitt has sought with diligence and ingenuity to reconstruct that long-forgotten personality. Then came the trip southward and meetings with Dr. Wadsworth and Lieutenant Hunt. Miss Pollitt has exhumed and examined the writings of these men, and we see what each might have given to an eager pupil. Finally, and fortunately at a time when Emily's mind was too fully developed to be seriously damaged, came the friendship with Colonel Higginson. Here, if Miss Pollitt has done nothing else, she has made us under- stand how Emily could so deeply have admired that pallid Vic- torian. Each devoted reader of Emily Dickinson's poems has his own conception of the mind in which those poems originated. Miss Pollitt offers no substitute for that conception, but she does provide for it a useful framework of fact. Her biography is not an altogether polished piece of work. The results of her ingenious research are not always held together in an organic fashion, and at times she introduces material the relevance of which is not apparent. Her style is sometimes rough; for one thing her use of colloquialisms is questionable, and she speaks of "Reverend Dwight," and, God forgive her, "the Reverend Parsons, Jr." There is one thing Miss Pollitt has not done that I hope someone will sometime take occasion to do: she has not paid special tribute to Lavinia Dickinson. In the subtitle of "Further Poems" — "Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia" — Lavinia appears in the role of villain. In Mrs. Bianchi's biog- raphy she not only plays Martha to Emily's Mary, but is also subordinated to the ubiquitous Sister Sue. In Miss Pollitt's book her presence is but vaguely felt. And yet, as Mrs. Todd's recent article in Harper's makes clear, we owe our possession of Emily's poems more to Lavinia than to any other single per- son. She insisted on publication, she enlisted Mrs. Todd's assistance, she overcame Colonel Higginson's hesitation, and she was right in every dispute with that immaculate arbiter litterarum. Even if blind loyalty was the moving force one would admire her, but I suspect that Lavinia was not wholly unconscious of the importance of what she was doing. Granville Hicks Six More War Novels Retreat: A Novel of 1918. By C. R. Benstead. The Century Company. $2.50. Gray Dawn — Red Night. By James Lansdale Hodson. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. Loretto: Sketches of a German War Volunteer. By Max Heinz. Horace Liveright. $2.50. Ten Thousand Shall Fall. By David King. Duffield and Company. $2.50. Return of the Brute. By Liam O'Flaherty. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2. Down in Flames. By Ben Ray Redman. Brewer and Warren. $2. BY this time it is perhaps only right that we should expect a little less war and a little more novel among the in- gredients that make up our war novels. At any rate, that is what we are beginning to get; we find here two war novels in which the war experience itself is secondary. "Retreat" by C. R. Benstead and "Grey Dawn — Red Night" by James Lansdale Hodson are both English books and belong more or less in the regular tradition of the English novel. In the first the war provides a continuous and often obtrusive background

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330 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 for a psychological drama ; in the second it enters only as a part of the chief character's life story. In "Retreat" we find a realistic picture of one of Professor Irving Babbitt's "Rousseauist" types— in this case, a coward who sees himself as a potential savior of the world, a simon-pure example of a fanatical religious reformer. He is an Anglican priest who goes to the front with perfect confidence that he can save the entire British army, and perhaps win the war in the bargain. When he finds not only that he cannot save the army, but that he cannot save himself and is considered perfectly useless, the result is considerable pain, ending in madness.^ Psychologically the story stands foursquare; it is written with a fine penetration, an emotional honesty, and an insight that are most unusual. It is marred by the inclusion of too many war scenes, but the main story is hard and clear. It is free of any compromise with ordinary conceptions of religion or of the priest; in short, it is an exceptionally good, readable English novel. If in "Retreat" we have Professor Babbitt's "Rousseauist" treated realistically, in "Gray Dawn— Red Night" we have a "Rousseauist's" picture of himself in action. This is the story of a journalist's life, love, and death — a life in which circum- stances just shape themselves so that he begins to "write," a love which is at once speechless and dispassionate, and a death which is quite without significance further than the fact that it is purely accidental. The story is remarkable in that Hard- castle never knows why he volunteered, in that he thinks of Stella in terms of clothes rather than of character or person- ality or sex, and in that, when he says goodby to her, he feels — as always — that "this was the greatest, the most dramatic moment in his career, and it was slipping past him." A great deal slips past Hardcastle, so that the novel makes not easy but positively fluent reading. Next we have two war books which are not war novels in any sense, but simply war records — "Loretto" by Max Heinz and "Ten Thousand Shall Fall" by David King (the latter was originally published as "L. M. 8046," of which this is a re- issue). Of the German book, the impression that remains with me, as in the case of Junger's "Storm of Steel," is one of a great deal of violence and bloodshed described very vividly for no apparent reason. A purpose, indeed, is indicated — on the last page the author is threatened by a mob of revolutionaries and remarks: "So this is the gratitude of my native country." But that seems scarcely enough to justify 316 pages of closely packed horrors, particularly when the author is a graduate of several universities and a frightful snob in the bargain. David King's book, on the other hand, remains one of the most readable factual accounts we have had of war experiences. A purely personal record, written by a Harvard boy in the Foreign Legion (a friend, incidentally, of Alan Seeger), it is vivid, racy, quite sufficiently realistic in its "action scenes," and full of sometimes bitter humor. It is evidently the work of a "natural" writer, or at least of one without any special literary aims or pretensions; but like Cummings's "The Enormous Room," which it distantly resembles, it makes good use of American slang, which we miss in English books and translations. The first two books on our list were war books that tended at least in part to become pure fiction; the last two are books of fiction that use the war, somewhat incidentally, for locale and material. O'Flaherty's "Return of the Brute" is half a turgid psychoanalytical probing into the instincts and images released by war, half a brilliant account of the psychological factors that lead to nine men's annihilation. The genius of the writer is nowhere more evident than in this story of growing madness and death, but it is a capricious genius, at home only in the dark caves of passion, and the result is here, as in much of O'Flaherty's work, decidedly uneven. Most of the stories in Ben Ray Redman's "Down in Flames" can be classed immediately with those printed in our popular magazines. The fact that they concern aviators and aviation gives them a journalistic value. A quick start, a sudden twist, a surprise ending — they follow all the tried-and-true regulations of handbooks in composition. "Aftermath" has real irony, and "The Sausage" a relentless line. It is undeniable that the descriptions of flights and fights in the air are ex- tremely graphic and exciting. Clinton Simpson Christian Science Examined Our New Religion: An Examination of Christian Science. By H. A. L. Fisher. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $2.50. CHRISTIAN Science, like Ibsen's Boyg, can always es- cape mere sword thrusts, for the reason that it is so uncontained, so shifting and shifty, so unconfined where it should be limited, and yet quite precise in matters which can be intelligibly discussed only in terms of intuition. All of this is of course explained by the philosophy on which this religion is formed. For it must always be remembered that the basis of Christian Science is the denial of the usual standards of truth. For the average man truth must be arrived at by a comparison of the idea with objective reality. Christian Sci- ence, denying objective reality, wipes away all standards by which truth may be ascertained. Truth becomes, for each indi- vidual, a matter of wish fulfilment. This explains, of course, a great deal about Mrs. Eddy and her church members alike. Their words are never to be taken as meaning what the same words would mean in your mouth or mine. Hence, few persons of scholarship have had the courage to penetrate into the voids of Christian Science to discover what really lies there. The explorer will be overwhelmed by the great Boyg, which, if he gets out again into the open, will follow him in the form of penumbrous tentacles which take the shape of publication committees seeking constantly to enmesh and smother him. That Mark Twain survived the experience in his "Chris- tian Science" may be explained by the fact that his sharp sword thrusts were in the end so ineffective. He was not a scholar; his was not a particularly analytical mind; he never became really entangled because he hardly penetrated. That no scholar of real eminence has previously ever undertaken the combat may be explained by the general conviction among informed people that Christian Science is so unimportant as a movement that there is no reward adequate to compensate for the slime one must always be overwhelmed by in any real exploration into its depths. A glimmering of understanding on such matters is needed properly to estimate the value of H. A. L. Fisher's critical treatise, "Our New Religion," which is the first attempt by a scholar of note to appraise this American phenomenon. Dr. Fisher, who is warden of New College, Oxford, and president of the British Academy, is hardly to be blamed if some of the Boyg escapes in his attempts to nail it down; his achievement lies primarily in the fact that he has risked his scholarly stand- ing to dare. If his book, which was published last year in England and was recently also reprinted as a serial in the Lon- don Daily Dispatch, manages to attain a general circulation in this country, the achievement will be particularly gratifying. It will not only be a sure sign that the Messrs. Scribner have managed to chop off a good many of the tentacles weaving out from Boston, so that future explorers can have a freer path; it will also act as encouragement to other minds trained for such a survey to join in the task. To simplify his work Dr. Fisher divides his subject into

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 331 ■ I' ■"■■I llllll'l"1"""" '"fill Hill !'"■• """■""""n,l.iiM,l,i»,iihi»1 i... i ii ii i. .■■■.. .....nl|||||r... ...■■■■ ■■!■■.. 1 1 - THE WOMAN OF ANBROS BY THORNTON WILDER "One of the most exquisitely beautiful and moving things I have read.'' Edwin Bjorkman "Writing of this temper is rare in American fiction. .."The Woman of Andros' is the best book we have had from Thornton Wilder." New York Times "Wilder's third and best." New York-Herald Tribune **A vivid picture of human life in man's relation to his world. ..A memorable piece of work... There are some phrases in it which are forever unforgettable." Fanny Butcher in the Chicago Daily Tribune "In every page one feels that Wilder is writing for the ages... A creation of beauty." N. Y. Telegram tfc*. (ycdt" A&SISUikq (rotril Aak. CLwJl/uciiin»»iii)iiiii) m iiiiniUmm HENRY ADAMS History of the United States during the Administrations of Madison and Jefferson The most masterly work yet written on the formative period of the history of the American people. Hitherto available only in a nine volume edition at a high price. The set is fully indexed and contains 23 maps in color. Madison 2 voli.J 5.00-Jefferson 2 vol; IS. CO PROUST The Sweet Cheat Gone Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff The sixth, and penultimate, part of Proust's vast panorama of French society in the closing years of the Nineteenth and first two decades of the Twentieth centuries. *.oo lllllllll lllllll 1 I I 1 1 1 1 1 I llll llll Anthology of World Poetry Edited by Mark Van Doren $5.00 Genius in Love and Death by Paul Wiegler Translated by Carl Rausbtmbusb $2.50 Ottr Business Civilization Soku Aspects of American Culture by James Truslow Adams $3.00 nil n i ••••"•"••"«'■- 1- » «* mi i"-i"""" «■.«««■Miimi;i iiirn'iinniiiiiii'i THOMAS CALDECOT CHUBB THE LIFE OF BOCCACCIO We have here, for the first time, a life of the great Italian -author of the Decameron. Boccaccio the lover, the diplomat, the man of letters, the life-long frieid of that other great genius, Petrarch— ail this is set against the glamorous background of a dawning Renaissance. (I //unrated) 4-00 •J The Seventh Wave by Marietta Mianigerode Andrews 12.50 Autobiography of America EJited by Mark Van Doren 15.00 Ambrose Bicrcc by Carey McWilliarm $3.50 ........ ..ILUKl.tll y.,,,1.111 1inti(l.m1.."«i ■i..n«n»nmmi.ni «««>» i.i.HitiniiiMiiiii MOUNTAIN CITY BY UPTON SINCLAIR Mountain City is a swift and grip- ping tale of an impoverished youth's determination to annihi- late the great obstacles which stand in his way to an ultimate and magnificent success. His methods 2 -So are sometimes ingenuous, often cruel — and invariably they attain their questionable ends. The novel isdevastatingin its implications;it is an indictment of the go-getter" which will win many readers. ALBERT (80 CHARLES BONI, 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK j II1111"!!!!!!!"""""" mmiii ■1......II.....I1 mi imUumi ■ mm Int ■ When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 three parts— The Prophetess, The Creed, The Church. To the prophetess he grants no more than have her other informed biographers; for him she remains a neurotic, sentimental, in- hibited woman with a driving ego, who succeeded in extending her sphere of personal influence beyond her immediate family largely because of the current mood of the American people themselves. Typically English in his viewpoint, Dr. Fisher is always inclined to explain Christian Science by national ignor- ance in a land where "no belief is too wild, too crude, or too fantastic to prevent its acceptance by some section or other of the vast, miscellaneous, and mobile population." For him Mrs. Eddy succeeded, despite the fact that she was "entirely un- chastened by converse with the intellectual world," largely because: In the leadership of a religious movement sentiment counts for much, and Mary Baker's commonplace but genuine vein of gushing sentiment about the ocean and the sunset and the cuckoo was of the exact quality to commend her message to that simple audience. . . . The gullibility of the audience, its suggestibility, and the fact that Mrs. Eddy's limitations before this audience became real virtues, for him explain the woman's rise to eminence. For her creed he displays small sympathy. "A theory of the universe which ignores the greater part of the universe is no theory at all. Had Mrs. Eddy contented herself with say- ing that spiritual life is the ultimate basis of reality, or that all happenings are to the percipient facts of consciousness, she would have stood within the grounds of philosophical sanity; but she went much further." Of "Science and Health" Dr. Fisher declares that "the true nature of the problem of knowl- edge is not even dimly apprehended." Denying it any single literary virtue, he can accord it only "the tribute which be- longs to sheer bulk." "Even by the standards of her own coun- try . . . Mrs. Eddy is generally adjudged to have had a very imperfect command of the English language." That despite such extraordinary limitations the book brought Mrs. Eddy to fame and fortune, once she established a church to act as its advertising and selling agent, Dr. Fisher considers quite understandable in view of the limitations of the average human mind, and, specifically, of the American mind. He says: We are at once prepared to concede the authenticity of a certain proportion of the healings ascribed to the operation of Christian Science. . . . The patient who has paid three dollars for a talisman is predisposed to think he has got value for his purchase. In many cases the talisman will work for no other reason than that it is expected to work. . . . Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. "After reading Mrs. Eddy I am cured, therefore Mrs. Eddy has cured me." In the end, Dr. Fisher sees a grain of real truth in that part of the doctrine which Mrs. Eddy took over from Quimby, once it is stripped of her errant philosophy and ignorances. "The doctrine of mind-cure, so far from being peculiar to Mrs. Eddy, has always, and in every generation, entered as an ele- ment into the wisdom of the wise." For the church which promotes this creed the author has few kind words. He sees its appeal as being made primarily to neurotics ; its audience largely emotionally unstable women, that "vast tribe of female neurasthenics, nowhere so numerous as in the United States." Yet he does not doubt that it will continue to add recruits to that "half illiterate population who constitute the rank and file of the Christian Science church," if only because of the phenomenal material power the church has amassed. The Christian Science corporation is as little likely to founder as the Standard Oil trust. "It commands vast ma- terial resources; it directs influential newspapers . . . has pat- ented a cure for all ills, and advertises its patent by a con- tinuous exhibition of miracles. No corporation, no trust, no Church has gone down into the common mind with wares more attractive or more profusely commended." Dr. Fisher regards tolerance of the Boston church as a virtue only so long as the organization is an impotent force. Let this church once attain the power of numbers that could be translated into political effect, and the American republic "would in a very short time be a vast cemetery." Without health laws or even drainage systems, impossible if Mrs. Eddy's pronuncia- mentos were enforced literally; without even the material aspects of civilization such as houses to protect us from cold, the nation would soon founder. Admitting that "a religion can rarely afford to practice all that it preaches," Dr. Fisher would nevertheless hold Christian Science in strict check, and is not in sympathy with its recent success in having certain laws in various States modified to suit its liking. Thus: If Christian Scientists are enabled to sustain existence today, it is because they are members of a society which is regulated by principles the opposite of their own. The Christian Scientist, like the inmate of the lunatic asylum, is a social parasite. He can only exist as one of a com- munity which thinks otherwise than he. If this book can survive to win an American group of readers, this circumstance alone should indicate that the influ- ence and power of the organization, so long successful in preventing adverse criticism, is on the wane, and should be one of the best indications that Dr. Fisher's pessimism is not wholly warranted. Edwin Franden Dakin Old Man Victory | Clemenceau. By Jean Martet. Longmans, Green and Com- pany. $5. CLEMENCEAU was a man of hates, and this is a book of the bitter snarlings of a disappointed old man. Clemen- ceau never forgave France for having refused to elect him president; he never forgave Briand and Poincare and Mil- lerand for modifying the treaty which he had signed. France, having deserted him, was "like a kind of sponge. You squeeze it and muddy water runs out." Jean Martet was Clemenceau's secretary during and after the war and saw him frequently to the end. He was one of the two men to whom Clemenceau confided his precious papers, including a bitter retort to Foch. And for the last year of their conversations (1927-28) Martet kept careful records of Cle- menceau's monologues, debates, and diatribes, and sometimes questioned him to bring out the stories of his lifetime of battles. This book is the product of those records. It contributes little that is new to history, but it gives an intensely vivid picture of the lonely old man. It is Clemenceau, and whatever Clemen- ceau was, he was seldom dull. "Jaures," Clemenceau said to Martet one day, "had none of the qualities which bestow the true love of humanity on a man — neither the smile, nor the tolerance, nor self-doubt, nor skepticism — nothing." By his own tests Clemenceau ranked low. A smile he had, but it was a wry smile and bitter; not, except when he was thinking of his beloved Greece, or of Claude Monet's painting, a friendly smile. Tolerance he never had; nor self-doubt. "I was very wrong to be eighty years old in 1920," he told Martet. "If I had been twenty years younger they would have thought twice before going on in that way." "They" were Millerand and Briand, who had consented to modifications of his precious, and ferocious, treaty. Another time he was as sure that if he had been the head of the gov- ernment instead of Poincare the cost of living would never have

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 333 BUY YOUR BOOKS BY THIS LABEL A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN AGE by EGON FRIEDELL "Destined to reach the book- shelf of every man who makes the slightest claim to a whole and intelligent un- derstanding of modern social history. . . . Will find shock and sheer mental excitement. ... I urge the thrilling satis- faction of this sensitive, thoughtful social history up- on you as a required read- ing."— William Soskin, in The New York Evening Post. $5.00 MAN VERSUS MICROBES by Nicholas Kopeloff Dr. Kopeloff writes simply and concisely of every important kind of microbe, not only those which man must fight in disease, but also, the bacteria, moulds, yeasts and protozoa that he constantly utilizes in industry and agricul- ture. With 130 illustrations. $5.00 500 CRIMINAL CAREERS by SHELDON and ELEANOR T. GLUECK With a Foreword by Richard C. Cabot "No list of the best books of 1930 can afford to omit this epoch-making volume on the efficiency o f reformatory methods. A place must be reserved for it upon the shelf devoted to the master works of criminology ."—The Phila- delphia Public Ledger. $5.00 rr^HE LIFE OF L9 THE DEVIL by Father Louis Coulange A venerable French priest writes the complete history of Satan from his rise in Heaven, through his vehe- ment warfare against man- kind, until his rapid con- temporary decline. $5.00 TREATISE ON THE GODS by H. L. MENCKEN From the probable development of the primitive priest and early cults, through every stage in the evolution of organized religion, sun-worship, Shintoism, Buddh- ism, Judaism, Christianity, etc., Mr. Mencken treats of man's ever-changing relations to his gods. As always, Mr. Mencken's conclusions are convincing and original. Nothing in this book, the first by Mr. Mencken since 1927, has been printed either in The American Mercury or else- where. $3.00 cT^HE HISTORY \Dof THE JEWS by Abram Leon Sachar A book that discovers the full importance in the Jew- ish epic, not only of literary and philosophical effort, but of the masses, the develop- ment of social institutions and the careers of economic radicals and industrial giants. $5.00 PORNOGRAPHY AND OBSCENITY by D. H. LAWRENCE The untimely death of this brilliant writer came simul- taneously with the publica- tion of this book, and found Lawrence fighting hypocrisy to the very end. "A pamph- let which may well mark a new epoch in the history not only of censorship, but of a reasonable appreciation of the realities of sexual mo- rality and sexual honesty and decency." — The New Statesman (London). $1.00 THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN MARRIAGE by F. Muller-Lyer A book that traces the complete evolution of the sexual relation- ship through the Clanal, Familial and Personal epochs. It will give the reader the complete genealogy of such concepts as modesty, virginity, jealousy and monogamy. $4.00 At all bookshops AMERICA CONQUERS BRITAIN by LUDWELL DENNY No one who reads here of the foreign battles waged by Ford, General Electric, and Standard Oil, etc., can deny that a great and dangerous Anglo - American economic war is being waged in all corners of the world today. It is a book of especial im- portance — appearing simul- taneously with the present arms conference and show- ing as it does, the real issues threatening international peace. $4.00 ALFRED KNOPF • 730 FIFTH AVE • NEW YORK When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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334 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 gone up. He would have stopped it by taking out a few profit- eers and shooting them! Skepticism he did have — skepticism of everybody and everything but himself; but skepticism alone does not make a lover of humanity. Skepticism, indeed, except for his war-time fanatic faith in France, was the outstanding characteristic of this man who gloried in being called the Tiger. He had no faith in God or man, and could make bitter jests of both. If he had faith in anything in those bitter days after his France had refused to elect him president, it was in the eternal bellicosity of the Germans. That roused him to his bitterest irony. It was in 1927 that he grumbled: M. Briand believes in peace, so that's all right. . . . Mark well what I'm telling you: in six months, a year, five years, ten yean, when they like, as they like, the Boches will invade us. I don't know if you recently saw in the Journal that extraordinary picture — it represented all the ministers in the park at Rambouillet, at a meeting of the Cabinet, frolicking with a swan. That picture re- assured me. We are well defended. He wanted to go on fighting the war forever. Though there is much of the story of Clemenceau's equivo- cal role in the Commune in this book, there is singularly little of his part in the Dreyfus Affair. There is a great deal about his controversies with Foch and Poincare, little of his diffi- culties with Woodrow Wilson. Perhaps Clemenceau, in those last years, forgot all but his wars with the Germans, and with a few Frenchmen. Martet is utterly guiltless of criticism of his chief. He is no Brousson, biting the hand that he had licked. But in his uncritical adoration, setting down all, or almost all, that the old man said, he builds up through haphazard conversations a full- contoured, flesh-and-blood portrait of one of the strangest and most savage, and most powerful, animals of our day. Lewis S. Gannett Fascism as a Religion Making Fascists. By Herbert W. Schneider and Shepard B. Clough. University of Chicago Press. $3. MR. SCHNEIDER, who in "Making the Fascist State" wrote the best book yet published on the development of Fascist ideas and purposes, here writes, with Mr. Clough, the best handbook of the apparatus by which the regime is attempting to mold all Italians into obedient servants. Not of the entire vast apparatus which Mussolini has con- structed— for it mentions only incidentally the Fascist regi- mentation of finance, industry, and trade — but of the educa- tional organs which the present government has taken over or created to serve its purpose. After diagraming succinctly the various group cleavages — economic, regional, racial, and re- ligious— which Fascism is attempting to iron out, the authors outline the multifarious instruments by which it is injecting its doctrine of disciplined nationalism into the schools, the army, the civil service, the press, and, most important of all, its own party organization. With keen insight they point out that Fascism is busy erecting itself into a religion, with a good deal of Roman paganism in its inspiration, which may become a not inconsiderable counterpoise to the new temporal power of the Roman church. The system here described with academic precision, al- though by no means without humor, strikes one as astonish- ingly similar in outline to that of the Bolsheviks in Russia, after which it was unquestionably imitated. With this funda- mental difference, however: whereas the Bolsheviks insist on their discipline for the unification of tke w«rld «f labor, the Fascists insist on theirs for the conquering of other nations. Both systems of political education are at the moment con- spicuously successful, and equally regardless of individual rights. The one, however, commits its atrocities in the name of ultimate peace, the other in the name of ultimate war. Hiram Motherwell Books in Brief Closing Hour. By Norah Hoult. Harper and Brothers. $2.50. Norah Hoult, whose volume of short stories, "Poor Women," was so favorably received in England last year, has now written a very fine first novel. It is the study of a drunkard, a man of the professional class, and his family, be- ginning at the point where the family fortunes have practically touched bottom. The clients are gone; the proud, stiff, cold, little English wife is at her wits' end; the puzzled and pa- thetic children wonder what it is all about; and the once rol- licking goodfellow of an Irish husband and father, now far gone in dipsomania, spends most of his few and meager little fees on drinks, cadging for them when his pockets are empty. There is neither beginning nor end to this brilliantly worked- out study. It gets nowhere. But it is very much worth while for the powerful illumination which it throws on the mediocre souls of its characters, as well as for the keen observation which supports its extraordinary descriptions. The Missing Masterpiece. By Hilaire Belloc. With Forty- one Drawings by G. K. Chesterton. Harper and Brothers. $2.50. The mystery story is only a peg on which Mr. Belloc hangs certain opinions and ideas, but this happens to be a rather good mystery story in itself — an essential element for first-rate satire. Mr. Belloc's satire, however, is not very subtle; indeed, it is extremely broad, not to say ill-tempered. Modern art and artists, art dealers and art experts, the new plutocratic aris- tocracy in England and America, lawyers and judges and juries, journalism and great journalistic combines, big business gener- ally— all come in for a sound belaboring done with considerable wit but more spleen. Mr. Chesterton, who does this sort of thing even more successfully, has reproduced nearly all of the many characters in drawings which, though quite undistin- guished, faithfully reflect the spirit of the book. His Own People. By Leon W. Rogers. Laidlaw Brothers. $2. Everyone is said to have one novel in him, the implication being that that one is autobiographical. Mr. Rogers has written his. Paul Wesley Polk is the oldest son of a Methodist preacher in Texas. His father has dedicated him to the Lord's service, but Paul, after a struggle, chooses to become a lawyer, though he loves and reveres his father. The feelings of a normal boy who suffers under the affliction of being a minister's son and the hard life of a circuit rider and his family, saddled with poverty and constantly on the move, are described with a crude effectiveness that makes this story better worth reading than many more carefully written ones. Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist. By Austin Warren. Princeton University Press. $3. Mr. Warren has done Pope the great service of demonstrat- ing that in his critical theories, his literary attitude, and his whole method of thought he was far more liberal, humane, and wise than several recent generations have given him credit for being. The "Essay on Criticism," the scattered remarks on the art of poetry, the notes to the "Homer," as well as to the "Shakespeare," the "Dunciad," and the evidences of Pope's read- I

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 335 Soon there will be only The American Mercury and its imitators, says E. W. Howe, Sage of Potato Hill E. W. HOWE (Courtesy Dodd, Mead & Co.) In his monthly magazine, Ed Howe writes "The other night I was paying the penalty for foolish eating and leaving my bed, picked up THE AMERICAN MERCURY. Soon I was laughing as at a show. Old Man Mencken himself writing about presidents, senators and governors. I found a satisfaction in it a man finds when a friendly hand scratches an itching spot on his back that he cannot himself reach; it was a new, an amazing and inter- esting performance, even at two o'clock in the morning. ... I wish to make a prediction. We shall finally have no monthly maga- zines except those in the form of the MERCURY; evidence of the change are quite apparent now." THE AMERICAN MERCURY $5.00 by the year •with The Nation $7.50 Vanity Fair 6.80 Country Life 7.60 Arts and Decoration 8.00 Send The American Mercury and I enclose $ NAME ADDRESS N 3-16-30 Add 504 for Canada and $1.00 for a foreign address, for each magazine. The American Mercury 730 Fifth Avenue New York W\*n writing to mdvortUor* ploato mention The Nation

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The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 "A moving and a powerful story. It can stir you to the roots." — Philadelphia Public Ledger. "It has a reality which holds you in a grip so firm that you will never forget it." — Chicago Tribune. "Its admirable restraint, dignity and stark truth rank it not with, but before, most books about the war." — Providence Journal. $2.50 THE NIGHT CLUB MYSTERY By ELIZABETH JORDAN A brilliant human story of three lives in- volved in a New York speakeasy murder. $2.00 WHO KILLED CAVELOTTI? By AUDREY NEWELL "The plot is ingenious and intriguing; the action is swift, exciting and complicated." — Buffalo News. $2.00 THE VILLA JANE By JANET LAING "A good Scots story of mysterious crime, ending on a note of sardonic comedy." — Hartford Courant. $2.00 THE TETHERED BUBBLE By FANNY LEE WEYANT A romance of a generation ago, telling how love came to a woman's college in the nineties. $2.50 MRS. GRUNDY IS DEAD By DORIS WEBSTER and MARY ALDEN HOPKINS Social behavior not as it ought to be but as it is. "A shrewdly amusing little book." — Ar. y. Evening World. $1.25 SHANTY- BOAT By KENT and MARGARET LIGKTY An American "Inland Voyage" — down the Mississippi, the heart of undiscovered Amer- ica, by houseboat. Illustrated. $3.50 THE CENTURY CO. 353 Fourth Avenue New York ing both in foreign and in native authors are examined with intelligent care with a view to arriving at an understanding of this much-maligned genius; and the result is worthy of the effort. Pope is usually put down as desiccated, authority-ridden, and mean. He emerges here as an original critic who added to the best counsel he could find among his predecessors in Greece, Rome, France, and England much that was valuable from his own distinguished store of common sense. It now remains for someone to demonstrate in the same manner that Pope's poetry, even more than his prose, was broad and sound as well as sharp and fine. The more enlightened modern critics have been sug- gesting it; someone yet will say it fully and movingly. Adventurous America: A Study of Contemporary Life and Thought. By Edwin Mims. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.50. In this book Professor Mims has set himself the worthy task of counteracting the views of those who despair for America. Among the phenomena which inspire him with hope are Gutzon Borglum's Colossi, the orientation courses for freshmen at Columbia, the election of Robert M. Hutchins as president of the University of Chicago, the directorship of Owen Young in Phi Beta Kappa, the enlightenment of the late Judge Gary, "Julius Rosenwald's success in establishing the mail-order business upon a sounder financial basis," the Anglo- Catholicism of Chauncey B. Tinker, the addition of William McDougall to the faculty of Duke University, the large at- tendance at the concerts of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, "the prophetic words of Dr. Fosdick and Dr. Cadman," and the formulation by Robert A. Millikan of "a statement that has done more to clarify the long dispute between religion and sci- ence than any other utterance of the day." The Best Poems of 1929. .-Edited by Thomas Moult. Har- court, Brace and Company. $2.50. Mr. Moult's annual selection of poems from American and English magazines has for several years been one of the best resumes of published poetry. Again this year the editor has given more room to American poets and thereby indicated the fact that today American poetry is, on the whole, more interest- ing than English poetry. But the 1929 volume is less impressive than earlier volumes: America is too copiously represented by the late and less worthy work of such poets as Frost, Masters, and Lindsay, and too little represented by moderns; England, too, is unfairly represented by pallid poems from Noyes, Wolfe, Blunden, and others. There is no single poem in the entire book so important as was Hart Crane's Brooklyn Bridge, pub- lished last year in the same anthology. Such a selection for 1929 would seem to indicate a slackening in poetic ability, but it must be remembered that Mr. Moult begins where the stupidity of magazine editors in general leaves off. / Was Sent to Athens. By Henry Morgenthau in Collabora- tion with French Strother. Doubleday, Doran and Com- pany. $4. Mr. Morgenthau, unlike Julius Caesar, loves to place emphasis on the "ego" of his exploits, this time as chairman of the League of Nations Commission which aided in the settle- ment in Greece of the million and a quarter refugees from Asia Minor. He continually thrills with his own important role and the contacts it afforded him with important personages on the European stage. The second part of the book, probably the work of his collaborator, gives a very much more modest and more interesting account of how this epic of refugee coloniza- tion was actually carried out. One wishes that this portion of the book had been considerably expanded at the expense of the rather verbose and often prattly section fathered by Mr. Mor- genthau. When writing to advertiser! please mention The Nation ^■'

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 337 Films Color IT has been frequently maintained that the screen has no need of color, in fact, that the use of color in the motion picture is a step backward from the goal of artistic per- fection. On the other hand, in the whole range of problems which have occupied the minds of the film producers during the past twenty years, none has aroused greater interest or has been pursued with greater deliberation than the problem of color. Today the technical goal has been practically reached. Color has been captured for the screen. It is true that the hues reproduced are not always faithful to nature and, what is even more important, are not always pleasant to the eye. But even with these shortcomings, the technicolor, the process that has been the most successful in the field, may be said to have solved the problem within a measurable distance of the ideal. There remains the question: Do we need color in the movies? Does it add anything to their powers of artistic ex- pression? The answer may be profitably sought in some of the recent color pictures, of which "The Vagabond King" (Cri- terion) and "Song of the West" (Warner Brothers) are the latest on Broadway. The evidence in this matter supplied by "Song of the West" can be easily disposed of, since it merely demonstrates the fact that bad color does not improve an otherwise bad picture. In- deed, it is very doubtful if any color, no matter how good, could have saved this insipid and poorly acted operetta, which manages to squeeze a modern revue chorus into a story of the days of "the covered wagon." As it is, smudgy color, glaring lights, and feeble composition, relieved only by one or two rather delicate close-ups, contribute neither to the illusion of real life nor to the enhancement of the dramatic or the decora- tive effect. To pass from "Song of the West" to "The Vagabond King" is to realize the enormous possibilities which are latent in the use of color. Even if we concede considerable merit to the story, dialogue, and acting in "The Vagabond King" (in spite of the incongruity of the conventions which it borrows from the stage), it is its color that makes this picture so different from others and so vibrant with dramatic sentiment and pictorial loveliness. The romantic fantasy of Francois Villon's seven-day adventure as the king of France called for an emotional atmosphere that would combine purity and lust, serenity and frenzy. In the picture this is suggested mostly by the play of color. Not only is the quality of color in many single scenes most appealing to the eye, but it also succeeds in charging some of the scenes with a greatly enhanced dramatic significance. The naive enthusiasts who have been denounc- ing color in favor of black and white as the only "art" form of the movies must be either color-blind or simply ignorant of the art quality that distinguishes one visual sensation from another. There can be no question that color is one of the most important means of cinematic expression. The irony of the situation is that it is derided by those who profess to be concerned with the art of the cinema, while it is brought into practical use and developed by those to whom "art," like hypoc- risy, is only a tribute which vice pays to virtue. So much of the Hollywood output is banal and trivial that any picture showing serious interest in human life is assured of attracting general attention. "Men Without Women," a Fox picture shown at the Roxy and the Film Guild, reveals this commendable concern with real life and does so in a series of tensely dramatic and largely convincing scenes. A picture decidedly worth seeing. Alexander Bakshy THE NEW FREEMAN, 112 East 19th St., New York I enclose herewith my check for $4.00 for which you will send The New Freeman for one year to NOTE: Special offer of $4.00 a year expires May 1, 1930. Subscription rate $5.00 a year thereafter. Drop this in the mail and The New Freeman will speak for itself It will speak pungently, intelligently, about the important things that are happening and are likely to happen in these United States and elsewhere. Sometimes the accents will be those of Albert Jay Nock, who has broken a vow to write no more magazine articles by promising to write only for THE NEW FREEMAN. Sometimes they will be those of Newton Arvin, Ernest Boyd, Harold Kellock, William MacDonald, Daniel Gregory Mason, Edwin Muir, Lewis Mumford, James Rorty, Pitts San- born. There will also be voices which you have never heard before, but will want to hear again. THE NEW FREEMAN'S determination to be well written is equalled only by its determi- nation to be well and widely READ. That is why we have put the coupon at the top of this advertisement. THE NEW FREEMAN 112 East 19th Street New York On sale March 15th When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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338 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 BALZAC: THE MAN AND LOVER by Sir Francis Gribble Author of GEORGE SAND AND HER LOVERS "I have two and only two passionate desires . . . One is to be- come famous; the second is the love of a woman." The whole world knows how the great author fared in his first: [he biographer gives us an intimate and authentic account of the success of the second. $5.00 E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 300-4th Ave., N. Y. G. (Publishers since 1852) THE DIVORCE AND SEPARATION OF ALIENS IN FRANCE. By Lindell T. Bates. Grounds and defences, power and jurisdiction of courts, procedure, rules of evidence, alimony, separation agree- ments, division of property, etc. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS. Price $7.00 Consequences By JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD Introduction by John Haynes Holmes "I read your book with deep and increasing interest. You have told a most interesting story about real people and real issues, and for this alone you ought to command the attention of the public. But you have done more. You have brought home a crying inequity of the day, backed up by such evidence, and at the same time ap- pealing to such chivalry in the hearts of right-minded people, that you may yet help to abolish the evils you describe so graphically." — Charles Rann Kennedy. E. P. DUTTON & CO. $2.50 I.ECTIRE DANCE THE DANCE OF THE YEAR! NEW YORK CHAPTER OF THE L. I. D. Invites Nation readers to dance in Harlem on FRIDAY, MARCH 14th at Renaissance Casino 144 West 138th Street, near Seventh Avenue. Jeff Blount will present his Lenox Club Revue — The famous Vernon Andrade Orchestra will play until nearly three A.M. Tickets $1.00 in Advance. $1.50 at door. Ticket* for sale at: League for Industrial Democracy. 112 East 19th Street, Algonquin 5865 ; Rand Book Store, 7 East 15th Street ; Civic Club, 18 East 10th Street; Darktower, 108 West 136th Street. MRS. ANNIE E. GRAY American Press Correspondent at London Naval Conference will report on the LONDON NAVAL CONFERENCE at the American Women's Ort Forum at Temple Emanu-El, 65th St. and 5th Ave., N. T. Saturday, March 15 at 8 o'clock ADMISSION FREE Drama 1 The Impenitent Shaw A FEW years ago critics were commenting with glee upon the conversion of Bernard Shaw. His "Saint Joan" not only moved forward in a fashion more convention- ally theatrical than it was his wont to permit, but for once the feeling was so much more important than the thought that the play was hailed as the first work in a new manner, and England's oldest bad boy was said to have seen the error of his dramaturgical ways. Once more, however, the critics have been confounded, for "The Apple Cart" (Martin Beck Theater) reveals only an impenitent Shaw, who is writing as he always wrote, and who has learned nothing except how to be more unreservedly himself. Many will maintain that for such an argumentative and actionless play there is no possible justification, but I must confess that it held me delighted to the end, and if I were pressed to explain the fact I should probably insist that I was charmed by something which must be pure art of some kind, for I applauded, not anything which was said, but the suppleness and dexterity of the man who said it. The scene, as everyone knows by now, is England some fifty years hence, and the theme is the place of the king in a society by that time completely dominated by the Labor Party. Farce occasionally interrupts the argument, and satiric shafts directed at a diversity of objects fly in all directions. Thus, for example, the members of the Cabinet are still British enough to grow sentimental and to show a disposition to sing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" when they think that they have the King beaten. Thus, also, the American Ambassador (who comes to announce that the United States is applying for admission into the British Empire) talks distressingly like General Dawes, and claims to be really English in feeling be- cause he was brought up in the shadow of Ely Cathedral — "which, as you will remember, was taken down stone by stone in 1940 and reerected in New Jersey." But despite all this diverting by-play, and despite a highly characteristic interlude in which the King comes to refresh himself with the company of a purely platonic mistress, the play sticks closely to its theme, and reaches its intellectual climax with the scene in which the monarch, the last representative of irresponsible power, sits surrounded by the elected representatives of the people and explains to the assembled republicans why he should not be abolished. They have (and it is well) won their victory over the selfishness of his ancestors and the power is in their hands; but now that the battle is won it would be wise to look at the other side before the enemy is annihilated, for there are moments when only an irresponsible power can dare to act or to do the things which they themselves would have done. They are the slaves of a public which cannot have their knowl- edge. They must do only what that public in its ignorance and its instability would have them do. But they are lucky to have in him one who not only wills good but can do it with- out having to justify himself to others less intelligent or less well meaning. I am, he says, the last person alive who can speak for both the past and the future against the present, the last remaining representative of "the evolutionary appe- tite against the gluttony of the moment." They, republicans that they are, must be officially his enemies. To denounce him is, of course, a necessary part of the technique by which their position is maintained. But in their hearts they must know that they need him, if only to protect themselves against that public whose creatures they are. h'hen writing to advertisers pleat* mention The Nation

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 339 D D THEATRES D □ CIVIC REPERTORY "&££.?.&* 50c, $1, 1.50. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2 :30 EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Thurs. Mat., March 13, "Peter Pan." Thurs. Eve., March 13, "The Open Door" and "The Women Have Their Way." Fri. Eve., March 14, "The Cherry Orchard." Sat. Mat., March 15, "Peter Pan." Sat. Eve., March 15, "The Sea Gull." Mon. Eve., March 17, "Open Door" and "Women Have Their Way." Tues. Eve., March 18, "Living Corpse." Wed. Eve., March 19, "The Sea Gull." Seats 4 weeks in advance at Box Office & Town Hall, 113 W. 43rd St. The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present RUTH DRAPER Evenings : Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, 8 :50. flOMFDY THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats. Thurs. and Sat., 2 :30. VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER SKETCHES JUNE MOON SAM. H. HARRIS" Big Laugh Hit. By RING LARDNER and GEORGE S. KAUFMAN "Funniest show of the season." — Broun, Telegram, Orchestra $3. Bale. $1 to $2.50. No Tax. 44th W. of B'way. Evs. 8:40 Mats. Wed. and Sat., 2:40 BROADHURST -REBOUND- With HOPE WILLIAMS "This is the best light comedy written by anybody hereabouts in ten or twenty years, and it's not so damned light, either." — Heywood Broun, New York Telegram. Arthur Hopkins presents DONALD OGETEN STEWART'S COMEDY Plymouth Theatre. Eves. 8:50; Mats. Thurs. & Sat., 2:40. The Theatre Guild Presents METEOR Guild By S. N. BEHRMAN THEA., 52nd St. W. of Broadway Evgs. 8:50. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:40 LAST WEEK! The Apple Cart Bernard Shaw's Political Extravaganza H/f ART'TTV Rl?r,K" Theatre, 45th St, W. of Eighth Ave. ITli*.I\I I1K DEjI^IV Evg»., 8:30. Mats., Thurs. * Sat., 2:80. -LAURENCE RIVERS presents- ^ Green Pastures By MARC CONNELLY (Play staged by Author — Music under direction of Hall Johnson) MANSFIELD THEATRE W. 47th St. EVS. 8:30, MATINEES WED. & SAT., 2:30 HERMAN SHUMLIN presents THE LAST MILE "The play of the year. Let the theatre rejoice." — Burns Mantle, News. ^AHf W TTARRTQ Theatre 42nd St. W. of Broadway ortui u, iirtniua Kvm s-sn. Matins*. w.-; Eves. 8:50. Matinees Wed. & Sat., 2:30 THE THEATRE OF THE DANCE 116 West 65th Street, Studio 220 — SUS. 0855. under the direction of DORSH A Presents an unusual program of interest to the discerning every Saturday evening. Subscription $1.00 WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See **Apple Cart— Beck — 45th St., E. of Eighth Ave. •Berkeley Square — Lyceum — E. 45th St. •Civic Repertory — 14th St. & 6th Ave. — See Advertisement. •Death Takes a Holiday — Barrymore Theatre — 47th St., W. of B'dway. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st St., E. of B'dway. ••Everything's Jake — Bijou — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •••Flying High— Apollo— W. 42nd St. ••June Moon — Broadhurst — W. 44th St. Mei Lan-Fang— National — 208 W. 41st St. ••Meteor— Guild— W. 52nd St. ••Rebound— Plymouth — 45th St., W. of B'dway. ••Strictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. •••Strike Up The Band— Times Sq.— W. of B'dway. ••The First Mrs. Fraser— Playhouse — 48th St., E. of B'dway. •The Green Pastures — Mansfield — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •The Infinite Shoeblack— Elliot— 39th St., E. of B'dway. •The Last Mile— Sam H. Harris— 42nd St., W. of B'dway. The Players of Japan— Booth — 45th St., W. of B'dway. ••Topaze— Music Box — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •••Wake Up and Dream— Selwyn — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. First Nights Love, Honor and Betray — Eltinge — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. The Rivals— Erlanger— 246 W. 44th St. Volpone — Liberty — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. Films Across the World with Mr. and Mrs. Martin Johnson — Little Carnegie— 146 W. 57th St. China Express — Cameo — 42nd St., E. of B'dway. Dich Hab Ich Geliebt— 55th St. Theatre— 55th St., E. of 7th Ave. Disraeli — Central Theatre — Broadway and 47th St. The Case of Sargeant Grischa — Globe — 46th St., and B'dway. •Drama. •Comedy. •Musical. I c K E T S TICKETS: W EVD SB^^S^Ii MUSK BY I k deacon Johnson'* ftRAPIOSVNCOPATOM DANCING AT 10 O'CLOCK IN ADVANCE *l.'*' AT THE DOCR $2,5? f Jl UNION JQ. NYC- N o w AX The Civic Club, 18 East 10th Street; the Band Book Store, 7 Bast 15th Street; all Village Shops. Mail and Phone Order* Filled WEVD DBBS MEMORIAL BADIO FUND Dept. A. 45 West 45th St. Bryant 9166 Even a fire couldn't stop us from having a good time! Notice change from Webster Hall to the newly redecorated BEETHOVEN HALL When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation ■

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340 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 • *••*••••••■• ■■•••■••r ••■■■•»* RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 7 East 15th St. Alg. 3094 New Courses, Spring term : E. L. TARTAR Mon., Mar. 17, "Masters of Comedy and Satire" 8.30 P-m« DR. MARGARET MEAD Wed., Mar. 19, "Society and Human Nature" 8'30 Pm- ALGERNON LEE Thurs., Mar 20, "Proposed Roads to Freedom" 700 P*m* DR. JOHN H. FRY Thurs., Mar. 20, "Heredity and Human Affairs" 8'30 Pm' Series of Literary Events: First Speaker ELMER RICE Thurs., Mar. 13, 8.30 p.m. "Present Tendencies in American Drama" OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD Sat., Mar. 15, "Russia Through a Car Window" 200 Pm- Other speakers: Robert Morss Lovett, Theodore Dreiser, John Krskine, Gilbert Sel<l<-s, Stephen V. Benet. Write, phone or call for further detail. This speech, marked as it is by a touch of Shavian mysti- cism, is far from simple. Considered merely as an argument for monarchy it obviously begs the question quite shamelessly, for the simple reason that it assumes that the person who happens to be king will be born with all those excellent quali- ties of both head and heart which are as rare in royal families as anywhere else; and the whole argument is answered if one substitutes the real George the Fifth for the King Magnus of the play. But Shaw has never given a simple argument for anything whatever, and if he believes now in kings it is only because he cannot believe as unreservedly as he would like in the democracy which he sees triumphing. Under the same circumstances another temperament would be content with skepticism, but Shaw is emotionally a man of faith — and he cannot doubt democracy without seeking to escape from the dilemma of that doubt through the aid of a mystical faith that "the evolutionary appetite" must of necessity find itself some- where embodied; even though he can find for this representa- tive of the something which transcends mere individual hu- manity no symbol less shabby than that of royal authority. "The Apple Cart" is a remarkable play if judged only as a part of contemporary literature, but if the time ever comes when the wit and satire of Shaw's plays are no longer enough by themselves to justify their claim upon the attention of an audi- ence, then I suspect that this play will be found wanting along with the rest, and that its defect will be the same as the defect of the others. In each there comes a moment when the author must transcend in a mystical flight the logic which he has seemed to follow; a moment when, as in the scene described above, a vision and a faith are necessary to supply a link that is not there in the chain of reason; but the enraptured eloquence which would enable him to leave common sense behind never quite breaks free. The thing which he wants most to say is something which no prose, not even his, can communicate, and thus there is always one point in every play where he fails of complete success simply because he is not a poet. The whole cast of "The Apple Cart" is excellent, and Philip Moeller has given another of those well-nigh perfect productions which we have come to expect after his long experience with Shaw. Joseph Wood Krutch Contributors to This Issue Wortman is well known for his drawings, "Metropolitan Movies," which appear daily in the New York World. Louis Fischer, Moscow correspondent of The Nation, will soon publish "The Soviet in World Affairs." The Author of "The Insecurity of the Child" is one of a group of professional consultants in the behavior problems of children. Edwin Seaver is the author of "The Company." Granville Hicks is assistant professor of English at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Clinton Simpson writes reviews for various magazines and periodicals. Edwin Franden Darin is the author of "Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind." Lewis S. Gannett is a contributing editor of The Nation. Hiram Motherwell served for five years as a news- paper correspondent in Italy. Alexander Bakshy writes on motion pictures for The Nation. Helena Hill Weed is special representative of The Nation in Haiti. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 341 D FILMS □ D D DEBATE D ! CAMEO 42nd St & B'way American Premiere a SECOND BIG WEEK Newest S0VKIN0 Production CHINA EXPRESS Sensational Uprising aboard the famous Nanking to Luchow express DARINGLY DIFFERENT An amazing film •• Greatest Drama Since Dawn of Talkies! . — Is New York's Verdict of "Grischa" Herbert Brenon, master director . . . blazer of daring trails . . . crasher of idols . . . arch- enemy of the common-place has brought to the talking screen the most heart-searching drama ever told. More than a great talking picture ... It is the screen's first great drama! RADIO PICTURES, Presents HERBERT BRENON'S THE CASE OF SERGEANT GRISCHA From ARNOLD ZWEIG'S World read book. With CHESTER MORRIS BETTY COMPSON Jean Hersholt Alec B. Francis Gustav Von Seyffertitz NOW PLAYING! ?lSfk NO ADVANCE IN THE GLOBE'S POPULAR PRICES! G CONTINUOUS SI LOBE CONTINUOUS SHOWS B'way & 46th St. Phone CHIckering S500 P^SOVIETISM^B VS. RELIGION! IS RUSSIA JUSTIFIED? THE TIMELY 4- CORNERED DEBATE This Sunday March 16 St 2:38 P. M. CARNEGIE HALL 7th Ave. at 57th St. Rei.rted Saats, $1.00, $1.50. $1.75. J2.M. $2.50, J3.00 Box Seats (3.85 On sale at Carnegie Hall Box Office (Circle 1770) ; Rand School Bookshop, 7 E. 15th St.; and at offices of LEAGUE FOR PUBLIC DISCUSSION 11 West 42nd St. Room (44 Phones: Lackawanna 1613 Chickering 5796 Chairmen : HEYWeOD BROUN SAMUEL UNTERMEYER RESOLVED: That the anti-religious policy and practices of the Soviet government are justified. MAX EASTMAN Brilliant Author-Lecturer For SOVIETISM (Atheism) REV. JOHN HAYNES HOLMES For RELIGION (Deism) HARRY ELMER BARNES Noted Social Philosopher For LIBERALISM (Humanism) DR. STEPHEN S WISE For RELIGION (Theism) VOTED THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR! Matinees: Good Seats, All Prices, at Box Office WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE ARLISS in 64 DISRAELI M (A Vitaphone All-Talking Picture) CENTRAL THEATRE Broadway and 47th St. Daily 2:45 — 8:45 Sunday 3 — 6 — 8:45 55th STREET PLAYHOUSE *£& 5MS2: Continuous 1 :30 until midnight. Popular Prices 3rd BIG WEEK FIRST TIME AT POPULAR PRICES THE FIRST 100% GERMAN TALKING PICTURE "DICH HAB ICH GELIEBT" ("Because I Loved You") "One of the best films that have come from Berlin since ■Variety'."— SAYS FILM DAILY. "ACROSS THE WORLD WITH Mr. and Mrs. MARTIN JOHNSON" Their First Talking Picture Not a staged movie — a genuine adventure in the South Seaa and Africa, interestingly described by the explorer. 146 West 57th St. BEG. SAT.. MAR. 15 LITTLE CARNEGIE PLAYHOUSE When writing to advertiaer* please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Fresh Hope for Haiti By HELENA HILL WEED Port au Prince, March 10 (By Cable to The Nation) AN agreement has been made between the Hoover Commission, the Opposition — represented by Sey- mour Pradel, head of the League for Constitutional Action; Antoine Regal, president of the Union Patriotique and federated societies; Justin Sam, president of the League of Youth; Pierre Hudicourt, international lawyer; and Georges Leger, Haitian advocate before the commission — and the supporters and followers of Borno that these societies shall send delegates immediately to a convention in the capi- tal to select a neutral candidate for provisional president, this candidate to be agreed upon by the three groups. The Council of State has agreed to elect this person, knowing that any other candidate will not be recognized by the United States. The provisional president will immediately call for a popular election in the method prescribed by the constitution. The chambers will then resign so that the new assembly can elect a president. The United States is a party to this agreement, since President Hoover has already wired his approval, which the Opposition is free to use politically. The following are the possibilities under this agreement : The new president will dissolve the Council of State. A regular minister will replace General Russell. A new treaty will be negotiated with the constitutional government. The work of the commission has been superlative. The commissioners themselves have been earnest, intelligent, thor- ough, unbiased, fearless, determined. By their tact and sympathy they have won the confidence and cooperation of the Opposition. Mr. White is the most influential member of the commission. Haitians urge his appointment as minis- ter to conclude the readjustment and negotiate the new treaty. Kerney and Vezina are next in popular favor for the important part they played in securing the support to the agreement which brought about Borno's capitulation. The agreement is wholly satisfactory. The masses have been overwhelmingly represented before the commission. Public confidence has been restored. Port au Prince, March 1 (By Mail) All Haiti — native and foreign — was in a subdued, un- certain, but tense state of mind as it awaited the arrival of the steamship Rochester bearing the Hoover Com- mission. Eight years ago, as the McCormick Committee drew near, the atmosphere was wholly different. Haitians were then divided into three general groups. There was the small group which supported the Occupation — a group which included those who were actively working with the Occupa- tion forces and those who accepted it either because they honestly believed it was established for the welfare of Haiti or because, for personal reasons, they believed it was safer and more comfortable to submit. Another somewhat larger group rebelled from the first against the invading forces and fearless of personal consequences that might result from their opposition, were loudly crying defiance or asking for justice and humanity from their oppressors. Between these two groups stood the great mass of the Haitian people, as yet unaligned with either side, waiting, hoping, fearing, praying. Except for rare instances no one in the civil or military Occupation could be found who was not openly and arrogantly supporting the Occupation. All Hai- tians were lumped by them as "niggers," mentally incom- petent, physically inefficient, chronically dishonest, and wholly unfit for political or social responsibility. Today everything is different. All Haiti, except for the office-holders of the Borno group, is solidly aligned against the Occupation and is speaking, in voices not to be misun- derstood, though in differing tones, the same language. Im- mediate withdrawal of the military forces from the soil of the sovereign state of Haiti ; immediate restitution of con- stitutional government, with the free election of a president by the votes of the people — these are the demands of Haiti to- day. There is no desire to complain to the commission of ille- galities of conduct on the part of either civil or military offi- cials, of waste, inefficiency, or nepotism in administration, or even of the brutal and insulting treatment of the Haitian people of all classes, though there is, of course, a mass of evidence on all these points. The day is long past when an amelioration of these grievances would satisfy any Haitian. To one who saw and felt the spirit of the days of the McCormick investigation the most amazing thing today is the attitude of the foreigners here in civil life, particularly of many American civil and military officials. In private conversations, with the request that they be not quoted per- sonally, many of these officials frankly admit that the whole business is a miserable mistake and a practical failure, a tragedy and an outrage from the human standpoint. There is a widespread and genuine spirit of sorrow and outspoken indignation for the national disaster that has befallen the Haitian people, and this point of view is openly held by many highly placed American men and women of the Occupation. The sessions of the commission began under a slight cloud. The message of President Hoover had raised great hope in the hearts and minds of the Haitian people; but un- fortunately they were misled by it into believing that the commission had executive powers to bring about the ends sought by the President. There was skepticism as to whether the commission would see its way clear to carry out the desire of the President, but of the power of the commission to right their wrongs the Haitians had no doubt. Above all, they felt certain that the commission would have some au- thority over the presidential elections scheduled to take place during the commission's visit to the island. When, therefore, the commission announced on their arrival that they had only the power of recommendation and that their report would not be made and acted upon for some weeks or even months after their return home, such a wave of bitterness spread over the island that it seemed for a dn as if a political tragedy was imminent. Distrust of

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 343 the commission was greatly increased, moreover, by reason of a brutal display of force by the Garde d'Haiti on the night before the commission arrived, when it had dispersed in absolutely quiet and orderly crowd gathered before the legislative chambers. A more effective exhibition of unfit- ness for the job of governing a country could scarcely have been planned by the opponents of the military Occupation than that staged on this occasion by the marine officers in ordering the Garde to charge upon and beat up a perfectly orderly crowd. The well-grounded fear of a coup d'etat and the immediate installation of a new president for six more years, before the commission could establish plans to secure a constitutional election by an elected legislature, had brought large crowds to the vicinity of the legislative cham- bers. There was absolutely no disorder. They were merely waiting to see if the Council of State was going to convene. There is no doubt that trouble would have occurred if an attempt had been made to hold a presidential election, for Haiti is in no mood to accept a continuation of her subju- gation. But there was no need for a charge on the crowd even when it reached the number of around 3,000. It was not compact, it was not blocking traffic in the great Champs de Mars. The people were walking about, waiting, when suddenly the Garde appeared, led by marine officers, and without even giving an order to disperse or to clear the streets and park, began to beat the heads of men and women alike with their cocomacaque sticks, inflicting deep cuts and terrible bruises. About forty Haitians are known to have received medical treatment, and no one knows how many more fled to their homes for treatment there. It was inevitable that the Haitians should feel that such a display of brute force on the eve of the arrival of the commission would not have been ordered if the Occupation had not felt sure of support from the commission, and this fact made it doubly difficult for the commission to secure the confidence and cooperation of the Haitians for its work. Early morning conferences on the day after the commis- sion's arrival, and especially the sympathetic understanding of Commissioner William Allen White, served to clear the air of misunderstandings on both sides and opened the way for frank discussions of possible lines of procedure that would obviate a tragic failure at the outset. This brute force of which I have given an example and which has characterized the whole history of the Occupa- tion is not the crowning stupidity — to use no stronger term — of the fifteen years of blundering in Haiti. The great issue — and it is the issue that pervades every phase of every American intervention — is the racial attitude of every American official in every department of the Occupation. For an American to be seen speaking on friendly terms to a Haitian, unless in a strictly business or official capacity, is to invite ostracism and insult from the lowest to the highest of those who, under the terms of the treaty, are here to "assist" the Haitians. Thus, while French, German, Eng- lish, and Canadian residents maintain social relations with Haitians of their own degree of culture and education, Americans, from the highest official to the toughest leather- neck, treat all Haitians with the utmost contumely and ridicule. In view of this racial condescension, an incident which occurred in connection with the arrival of the commissioners is especially amusing and significant. General Russell, in an Lloyd Express • BREMEN * EUROPA COLUMBUS * Fastest Liner in the World * To England, France and Bremen ♦ Lloyd Cabin Quartet BERLIN -STUTTGART MUENCHEN DRESDEN To England, Ireland, France, Bremen ♦ Every Lloyd Liner Carries Tourist Third NORTH CHMAM LIOYD 57 Broadway New York, or your local agent s The celebrations on May 1st dramatize again the events of IQIJ midst renewed outbursts of enthusiasm and a glorious panorama of color Sail from New York on ST. LOUIS April 12th BREMEN «< 12th RELIANCE ... <« 15th AQUITANIA . . «« 16th OLYMPIC .... «« 18th ILE de FRANCE <i 18th or any other ship and join our party in Paris on April 26th. Members of this tour will visit the Russian theatres and Universi- ties at the time of their greatest activity. Write or call for Information Amalgamated Bank Travel Dept. 11-15 Union Square, New York City ~ Amalgamated Trust & Savings Bank ■-"*' -i- ™ j. » i_. di„j 111 West Jackson Blvd. Chicago, 111. For Information on ether Spring and Summer tripe write for booklet "N" COOPPI When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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344 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 EXPLORATIVE itiner- aries worked out with reference to social, economic, historic, artistic and scenic feature*. Visits to factories, schools, children's com- munities, collective farms and villages . . . art treasures, palaces and workers' rest homes . . . for the adventurous . . . camping in the Caucasus and study of primitive tribes. Small groups, each accompanied by a quali- fied American leader and Russian Interpreter. From $395 including express steamship pass- age. Literature available. Individual itineraries also exe- • cuted a Independent year-'round • representation in Russia 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK To the TRAVELER who wants the thrill of his lifetime — who is tired of the usual London — Paris — Berlin tour. BUSINESS MAN The one spot on earth with undeveloped resources where he is welcome. STUDENT History changes here as nowhere else. See a transition of civilization with your own eyes. On the front page every day. READERS OF THE NATION This workingman's paradise particularly interests you and such an opportunity as presented may never again arise. Under the auspices of the one organization which knows every nook and corner of SOVIET RUSSIA A tour — a never-forgetful one — begins on April 12th — S. S. Bremen on April 16th. S. S. Aquitania — transatlantic passage both ways — accommodations in first-class hotels — 3 meals daily — railway with sleeper — sight-seeing tours — services of an Eng- lish-speaking guide, etc. $340 up. Full information gladly mailed WORLD TOURISTS, Inc. The firs! American organization to present Soviet Russia to the Traveler, Educator, Business Man and Student. 175 FIFTH AVE. NEW YORK Tel. ALGonquin 6656 Large groups of students and workers are now in formation for very low priced Tours. Only those who do not mind roughing it in Soviet Russia should inquire for particulars. $280 is the cost. effort to save his face, invited the elite of Haiti to his resi- dence to meet the members of the commission. The local press carried the replies to his invitation of several distin- guished Haitians. I reprint three of them here. I am a part of that national community which "has the mentality of a child of seven years," and my country undergoes . . . oppression for which you, and yours, are the responsible agents. As a Haitian, my place is not in your salon, and the invitation which I have received . . . is a mystification. I refuse it. Francois Mathon I should like to believe that it is by . . . error that your invitation was addressed to Mme Lucien Th. Lafont- ant and myself. ... I ask you not to attribute to a simi- lar cause my refusal to take part. Lucien Lafontant The "nigger" Jacques Roumain does not condescend to associate with whites. Jacques Roumain In line with the policy of racial suppression of the Hai- tians, the civil branches of the Occupation have been prac- tically filled by Americans, with Haitians tolerated only in the lowest grades. There seems to have been not the slight- est effort to use capable and trained Haitians in the middle or upper grades. One is reminded forcibly of the warning of Senator Caraway, made years ago in Congress, that if Americans were authorized to serve here at double pay at the expense of the Haitian government, the time would never come when any Haitian would be found "capable of serving." The country is teeming with merry young strip- lings, "technical experts," who are receiving double and treble the amount their qualifications would ever bring them at home, while the real work is being done by underpaid Haitians. There is the established fact that an American official had an apartment made from storage quarters in a Haitian government building, at the expense of Haiti, and is today occupying it without paying any rent, in violation of the laws we ourselves have made for Haiti. It is said that there are many such cases, and that they are all known to the authorities. It is known facts like these which have brought the situation to the breaking-point — and no one who has eyes to see and ears to hear will challenge the fact that the breaking- point has now been reached. The Haitians have abandoned any hope of carrying out the purposes of the treaty which we imposed on them by force. They realize that it is a policy of economic and financial domination in the interest of the United States and its nationals. Yet the will to cooperate peacefully still exists here. And now that the first misunderstandings are cleared away the power of the commission to undo the great wrongs of the past years is complete. While all the members of the commission are liked and trusted it is unquestionably true that the sympathetic understanding and great-heartedness of Commissioners White and Vezina have done more in the few days they have been here than could be expressed in words. They have won the hearts and minds of the people. On every side one hears it said: "If Commissioner White could only be sent here to replace General Russell and guide the work, we would be patient and hopeful, for he has shown us that he understands us and that he has the true spirit of honest cooperation in our national interests. Al- ready we love and trust him, and we would work faithfully with him. He has found our soul." When writing to advertiter$ pitas* mention The Nation

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March 19, 1930] The Nation 345 □ TOURS D )l 'nbctfiem ZhLRUSSIA On the S.S. RELIANCE A luxury cruise to the top of the world — Ice- land and awe inspiring glaciers,- The North Cape and the gorgeous spec- tacle of theMidnight Sun; Norway 's fjords; Scan- dinavian and Baltic Capitah.Then, four days Stay in the Soviet Union — a wonderful opportunity to study first hand the world's greatest social experiment. FROM NEW YORK JUNE 28TH Duration 36 days to Hamburg — Rates $800 up including return passage. Also six cruises from Hamburg — from 11 to 24 days — by the S.S. Resolute and S.S.Oceana. Sena for illustrated literature. Hamburg-American 39 Broadway LINE New York Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton, or local tourist agents. Foremost Student Tours Nearly4000 satisfied members In 1929 250 All Expense Tours Small groups, 1st class hotels, more motor travel. Visit the Passion Play of 1930. Send for booklet. COLLEGE TRAVEL CLUB 154 Botlston St. Boston, Mass. OPEN SHELF 03 THAT BOOK YOU WANT I We hold 2,000,«W of the beat books — new, ■•cond-hand, out- of-print, rare— all lubjecta. Also Seti of Author*. Catalogue* free (25 issued). Outlina require- ments and interests. Books sent on approval. Foylm, Charing Cross Bd., London, Ens. BOOK MANUSCRIPT Wanted — Let us publish your book. The bast service at lowest cost. Mbadob Pubuihihq Co., 27 Beach St., Boston, Mass. ATHEISM Book catalog; FREE. Tracts, 10c. Am. Assn. for A dr. of Atheism, 119 B. 14th St., New York, N. Y. SPECIAL ARTICLES ON Louise Michel and the Paris Commune in the March issue of ROAD TO FREEDOM The Only English Anarchist Monthly P. O. Box 486 Madison Sq. Station New York, N. Y. □ HELP WANTED □ "\ A 7ANTED immediately as secretary, woman, * * academic college degree, at least 6 to 10 years experience, rapid stenographer and typist, familiar with files and dictaphone, efficiency recognized in salary. 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NEWAIL, 150 Stornoway, Scotland Capitalize\i>ur Knowledge of Books Through This Pleasant Easy Pastime YOU can start at once to turn your spare time into money by the simple means of discussing the chief literary movement of the day. The most pleasant hours you spend are those devoted to book talk. Now you can increase your present income by directing the bookish conversation to juvenile reading and the Junior Liter- ary Guild in your leisure — or full time if you wish. All over America Junior Literary Guild Membership Secretaries are among the most heartily welcomed men and women in the community. For they bring word of a progressive educational and literary movement for boys and girls, which is endorsed by eminent edu- cators, editors, and critics — as well as by discriminating parents in all parts of the country. Here is part or full time employment which pays splendid re- turns to those who qualify. 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546 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3376 (Continued from page 320) A nature so passionate and a gift for expression so strik- ing could hardly fail to exert some influence upon contempo- rary fiction-writing, but because of the idiosyncrasies of his interests and of his temperament that influence was more general than specific. He encouraged frankness, he helped popularize the use of psychoanalysis in fiction, and even more conspicuously still he was in part responsible for the free dis- cussion of the sexual problems of characters; yet it is im- possible to avoid the conclusion that he was more concerned with using the novel for his own purposes than with develop- ing it as a definite art form and that by his example he thus contributed to the forces which were disintegrating it. Each of his novels was less a novel than a treatment of some new aspect of his personal problem and an addition to the record of his perpetually unsuccessful struggle to make peace either with life or with the wildly discordant desires of his own stormy nature. In an interview given recently to a correspondent of the Evening Post Lawrence said: "I consider 'Sons and Lovers' to have been the best novel of my first phase, 'Women in Love' the best of my second phase, and 'Lady Chatterly's Lover' the best to date, because in each case the vision em- bodied in the book seems complete for that world into which it is set." There is, to be sure, an obvious reality about this division, for the second of the works mentioned gives free rein to the forces which disintegrated the form of the first, while the third represents an effort to achieve again a simple and unified pattern. Yet it is difficult to think of Lawrence as working through any orderly course of development toward any settled method. One never knew what to expect next and for him the composition of a book seemed always to be some kind of explosion. Periodically he erupted into verse or prose and always, so it seemed to an outsider, at the moment when the internal pressure of his feelings reached a point which made a release of some kind inevitable. Personally he was said to be shy and very gentle in his manner despite the violence with which upon occasion he would break out. Certainly he wrote less like a man who was savage by nature than like one suffering continually from some frustration so agonizing as to make it impossible to bear with equanimity the additional irritation occasioned by even the most ordinary of human stupidities. Yet it cannot be said that he ever defined very clearly the exact nature of that frustration, for it is primarily the effects of it, the disgust with life as it is lived, and the occasionally passionate mys- tical utterances concerning the "dark," anarchical God who is to liberate us which he so vividly describes. Sex was, of course, the most obvious of his perplexities and the one of which he spoke with the greatest clarity, per- sistently analyzing not only the complexities of its normal manifestations but devoting much space in book after book to the picture of this or that perversion of the normal in- stincts. For this reason the temptation is strong to seek in sex the key to his own mystery and to assume that some de- rangement of the instinct was the source of his own malad- justment to life. Yet it is not quite certain that one can escape from the challenge of his pessimism quite so easily or that his concern with sex was actually more than a concern with something which was important chiefly because it sym- bolizes the most plainly irrational aspects of the lust for life which cannot justify its own desires. He dreamed some- times of frank and pagan love. He spoke sometimes as though he thought that life best which was most completely absorbed in the practice of the sexual act. But his own feel- ings were distinctly ambivalent and for that reason trouble- some. Lawrence not infrequently seemed to despise his own preoccupation and to center upon creatures in love the whole of his irritation at beings which could not escape from their bondage to desire. Perhaps, then, it was not sex which led him to question the universe but the universe which led him to question sex, for the simple reason that sex presents in a concrete and complicated form much of the problem of the relation of sentient man to the blind forces of nature. And if we take this view of Lawrence's preoccupation it leaves us with no simple or mechanical key to the meaning of his pro- found and unending quarrel with the conditions of human existence. Yet this quarrel of his was certainly an idiosyncratic one. Even in the midst of a generation remarkable for the number and variety of its protests he was set apart not only by the extraordinary violence of his dissatisfaction but also by the fact that its nature was enough different from that of his fel- lows to make it as obviously unsuitable to class him with Aldous Huxley as with social critics like Wells. His em- phasis was his own ; he had his particular vision of the evil in nature; or, if you prefer, his own private grievance. And it is just a clear or wholly comprehensible description of the exact nature of that grievance which he never gives. One feels that some clue is necessary before one can completely understand him and that that clue, despite the nature and extent of his writing, is never supplied. Perhaps this fact more than any other will be responsi- ble for his failure if it should happen, as seems not unlikely, that Lawrence's work is finally judged to be extraordinarily interesting rather than absolutely great. Probably no other English writer of his generation equaled him in the sheer talent for writing, but one can seldom forget for long the riddle which his temperament propounds or read many pages of his writing without beginning to speculate, not about the work itself, but about the possible genesis of the mood which inspired it. And when this is true of a novelist it is proof that his novels are not absolutely of the first rank. Your artist may be with impunity even "queerer" than the ordinary mortal. He may suffer from all sorts of com- plexes, fixations, and inhibitions. Indeed, if the Freudians are right he cannot very well get along without them, for they supply him with both the need to create and the ma- terials for creation. But art at its most significant certainly detaches itself from the personality of the creator. It con- tains within itself everything necessary for the comprehension of any particular work, and we do not need to know any more about the character of the writer than the pages of his own wrork give. Thus, though Dostoevski may have been epileptic and Poe impotent, we can understand the works of both in the sense in which they were intended to be under- stood without reference to either fact. But in the case of Lawrence it is not quite so. We feel the need to understand him more thoroughly before we can understand the meaning of some of the most passionate of his outbursts, and to say that is to admit a defect in his work. He was a fascinating personality and an extraordinarily vivid writer, but he was not quite a novelist of the first rank.

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 1930 No. 3377 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 347 EDITORIALS: Whalenism 350 Uncle Sara, Plunger 351 $1,000 Prize! 351 Celluloid Aesthetics 352 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 353 "MY DEAR SENATOR": ON A CERTAIN BETRAYAL IN WASH- INGTON. By Oswald Garrison Villard 354 THE MINERS' REBELLION. By Louis Stanley 356 TWO SWANS I WATCHED AT TWILIGHT. By David Morton.. 357 OLD JOE'S SENATE. By Paul Y. Anderson 358 BEING RIGHT WITH BABSON. By Ralph West Robey 359 HOW DIGGING BEGAN. By Anne Kimball Tuell 361 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 362 CORRESPONDENCE 363 BOOKS, MUSIC, DRAMA: Mountain Background. By Glenn Ward Dresbach 365 An Unrepentant Naturalist. By Henry Hazlitt 365 Froude Rehabilitated. By John Macy 366 Why We Fought. By McAlister Coleman 366 From the French. By Joseph Wood Krutch 368 Bland Futility. By Dorothy Van Doren 368 The Pueblo Artist. By Mary Austin 370 A Cattleman's Life Story. By W. J. Ghent 371 When News Was Young. By Harold de Wolf Fuller 372 Books in Brief 373 Music: The Pioneering Playhouse. By Hubbard Hutchinson.... 374 Drama: Miracle. By Joseph Wood Krutch 376 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 376 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Victory in Haiti. By Helena Hill Weed 378 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. The naval conference is now back where it started two months ago. Private talks are going on but no formal business is being transacted. There was one meeting today, that of a subcommittee formed to de- cide how to scrap ships, but none of the participants has yet agreed to scrap. This subcommittee had tea and adjourned. . . . THIS IS THE REPORT from London to the New York World as we go to press. Not unnaturally there broke out on the same day violent protests in the House of Commons. Commander Kenworthy, himself a naval offi- cer of distinction, who has for years been earnestly working for disarmament, spoke right out in meeting, calling the con- ference "a terrible failure," and saying that the failure should be admitted so that the delegates might "part friends" and try over again. Commander Kenworthy's sugges- tion for saving the conference at the last moment was a five-year building holiday all around. That would redeem it a little, but what a ghastly mess it all is. If some miracle does not take place, everybody connected with it must equally share the disgrace of this absolute breakdown in statesman- ship. But to our minds Mr. Hoover and Mr. Stimson are particularly guilty, because of their lack of vigor, courage, and readiness to abandon parity and really disarm. THE GREAT DAY OF PRAYER for the embattled Christians and Jews in Russia has come and gone in our American churches with Bishop Manning unctuously de- claring that the church is not intending a bitter attack upon the Soviet leaders — "they know not what they do." It is a fortunate thing, we fancy, that one does not have to prove positive results from a day of prayer like this. We are our- selves not quite clear whether the appeal was to a recreant Deity to stop what is going on in Russia or whether it was intended solely to soften the heart of the commissars in Mos- cow. If it was the latter then the day of prayer went wrong, for its first effect was to produce an Associated Press cable from Moscow announcing that there will be "a more in- tensive assault against God and the churches during the approaching Easter period." Stalin himself, on the other hand, has issued orders that any Communist party-worker found guilty of using violent methods in the fight against religion will be severely punished. It was characteristically stupid of the Soviet leadership, from their point of view, to speed up that campaign just at this time. While we sin- cerely hope that the Soviets will permit to all the religious freedom guaranteed by their constitution, we cannot deny that it would be extremely enlightening to see if a country can be made prosperous, decent, and law-abiding without the aid of a powerful church. Does Bishop Manning fear the outcome of such an experiment? IN STILL ANOTHER DIRECTION, the collectiviza- tion of Russian agriculture, Stalin has given orders to go more slowly. Here again he is wise. There was certainly no reasonable excuse for proceeding with such tremendous speed as was reported, with increasing peasant resistance and ever-present bloodshed. A year in the life of a country is but a minute; to create great opposition and produce unrest by a given reform is never wise. Private letters from Mos- cow report increasing food straits and mounting prices for the necessaries of life. There is a tremendous lack of soap, butter, sugar, eggs. Clothing remains extremely dear and inadequate in supply. But that does not deter the leaders from carrying on at full speed in their desire to outstrip America industrially within a few years. All of which gives point to the following story, which has just reached us from Moscow : ... It is the year after the Five-Year Plan is com- pleted. The sky is black with airplanes. One man riding in last year's airplane is overtaken by a friend in a new model and hails him by radio. "I see you have the new motor from our super- factory." "Yes, in this model we have at last surpassed America! Two hundred miles an hour. Cost minimum; operation fool-proof. Want to show it to you, but not now. I'm in a rush." "What's your hurry?" "I hear they're selling eggs in Kiev!" The other friend would like to follow, but doesn't. His airplane is a slower model and it is impossible to get there before the eggs are gone.

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348 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 THE PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION on Haiti has done an astonishingly quick and effective piece of work, for which the people of Haiti and the United States alike have cause to be grateful ; for it promises at once to restore freedom to Haiti and to reestablish the honor of the United States. The uprising of the early winter and the Aux Cayes slaughter of December 6 were immediately responsible for the appointment of the commission by calling public attention to conditions in the island. The United Press at once sent a special correspondent by airplane to Haiti to supple- ment the work of its regular correspondents, and the Associ- ated Press also made special and commendable efforts to cover the situation. (We regret that the article appearing in our issue of March 12 has been misinterpreted as implying a criticism of the handling of the Aux Cayes incident by these news agencies.) Increasing knowledge caused increasing pub- lic restiveness and led to appointment of the commission. Under the present arrangement, fully described in our Inter- national Relations Section by Mrs. Helena Hill Weed, spe- cial correspondent of The Nation in Haiti, M. Eugene Roy, a business man who has never been in politics, will become provisional president when President Borno's term expires on May 15 and will have the task of carrying out the agreement made by the commissioners and the Opposition leaders, to which the reluctant Borno finally assented on March 15. If, as there is every reason to hope, the arrangement is carried out in good faith on both sides and the American Occupation is withdrawn as rapidly as possible, President Hoover will have performed an act of statesmanship for which he should be given unstinted credit. ALIEN REGISTRATION, we rejoice to say, is dead so far as this session of Congress goes. On March 12 the Senate Committee on Immigration held a hearing on the Blease bill providing for voluntary registration, so called, and the measure was deservedly buried under an avalanche of hos- tile criticism. Amos Pinchot pointed out that in effect the registration requirement would become compulsory because employers would inevitably discriminate against unregistered aliens, while Joseph Schlossberg, secretary-treasurer of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, showed that registration would materially increase the difficulty of organ- izing aliens. Representatives of the American Jewish Com- mittee, the National Council of Episcopal Churches, and other organizations declared that the measure would hurt Americanization work and would furnish endless opportuni- ties of graft and corruption, to say nothing of being the be- ginning of a universal system of identification cards. Inter- estingly enough, the only persons to speak in behalf of the measure were Captain Trevor, representing the New York Chamber of Commerce, and Assistant Secretary of Labor Husband, speaking for Secretary Davis. It is a striking com- mentary on the intelligence and sympathies of the Secretary of Labor that he finds himself in such company on this issue. THE JULIAN PETROLEUM SCANDAL, whose corrupt ramifications were found far and wide in Los Angeles and southern California a year and more ago, entered its final stage on March 1 1 when Asa Keyes, twenty-five years the public prosecutor, left Los Angeles to serve a term of from one to fourteen years as a prisoner at San Quentin prison. Keyes was found guilty in February, 1929, of con- spiracy and bribe-taking in connection with the prosecution of persons who wrecked the Julian Petroleum Company, a $35,- 000,000 corporation. The Julian company case was not the only one in which bribery was charged ; Keyes went in for that kind of plunder wholesale, and according to one estimate succeeded in gathering in as much as $140,000. Even so, and with the losses of the stock swindle still keenly remem- bered, the last day of his stay in the county jail, where he had been for thirteen months, was marked, according to the Associated Press, "by farewell visits of many of his friends. Judges, lawyers, newspapermen, and others came for a final word with the convicted man." Crime, if only it be in the grand manner, appears to confer distinction in the City of the Angels. A novel feature of the case is the fact that Keyes, in the five years in which he was a district attorney, sent more than 4,000 persons to San Quentin, and so bitter is the feeling against him there that the warden was reported at the time of his conviction to have considered giving him a cell in the condemned row to keep him from possible attack. FREE SPEECH AND A FREE PRESS had their day in court on March 6 when Louis B. Seltzer, editor, and Carlton K. Matson, editorial writer, of the Cleveland Press, were purged of contempt of court by the Appellate Court of Cuyahoga County. The contempt with which Seltzer and Matson were charged consisted in a published criticism of an injunction, issued by Judge Frederick P. Walther of the Court of Common Pleas, forbidding the sheriff to interfere with races at the Thistledown track and the betting which accompanied them. The Appellate Court not only tore the injunction order in pieces, arraigned the motives of the lower court in issuing it, and declared that even if the accused had been guilty the thirty-day sentence was excessive, but frankly stated that "we live in an age when freedom of speech and freedom of press are paramount issues," and that "people should be allowed to say what they please and newspapers should be allowed to print what they please, always making themselves liable under the law of slander or the law of libel." We should like to be able to record that Judge Walther was in process of being removed from the bench. MERGERS AND MORE MERGERS, with the usual opposition of stockholders who think that their inter- ests have not been properly considered, and with rumors of war between one merger-creation and another, have become the order of the day in the industrial and financial world. Close upon the heels of the proposed consolidation of the Standard Oil Company of New York and the Vacuum Oil Company and the reported plans for merging the Chase Na- tional Bank, the Equitable Trust Company, and the Inter- state Trust Company, all of New York, have come announce- ments of plans for a billion-dollar merger of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Com- pany and of the acquisition by the Van Sweringen brothers of Cleveland of financial control of the Missouri Pacific railway system. The legality of the Standard-Vacuum merger, it is believed, will be first tested in the courts to determine whether or not it violates the order which in 1911 dissolved the old Standard Oil organization. The Bethlehem-Youngs- town merger, if it is consummated, will offer a formidable challenge to the supremacy of the United States Steel Cor-

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 349 poration, while the new control of the Missouri Pacific may open the way to a coast-to-coast railway system under a unified financial and administrative authority. RAMSAY MacDONALD weathered the storm on March 13 when the Government, with an adventitious majority of seventy-three votes, defeated a motion of censure moved by the former Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. The circumstances of the vote were interesting and, in a way, dramatic. Two days before, a Conservative amendment of the coal bill had been carried by a majority of eight, but when Mr. Baldwin asked if the Government, in view of its defeat, intended to proceed with the bill, Mr. MacDonald defied the Opposition by inviting Mr. Baldwin to move a vote of general censure, and announced that "we will accept the decision." The victory on March 13 was actually due to the Liberals, who refused to join with the Conservatives in turning the Government out, although the full Labor strength, if it could have been mustered, would have been sufficient to insure success. The victory should not be misinterpreted either way. It does not mean that the Liberals will certainly support Labor when a vote is taken on the coal bill as a whole instead of on some minor provision ; it means only that the Liberals are not ready to play the Con- servative game by helping to unseat the Government at this stage. Mr. Baldwin himself seems not to have expected that his motion would be carried. THE YOUNG PLAN is law as far as Germany is con- cerned, the bill giving effect to it having been passed by the Reichstag and signed by President von Hindenburg. With this has gone also the approval of the agreement regulating the payment of German reparations to the United States. The final vote on the Young plan, 270 to 192 with 3 abstentions, indicates the numerical strength of the opposition, but there is little doubt that the plan, now it has been ac- cepted after full debate and in the face of violent attack from the Nationalists, will be carried out to the extent of Ger- many's ability. President von Hindenburg, in a proclama- tion, declared that he had put his name to the Young-plan law "with a heavy but resolute heart and after long and con- scientious deliberation," believing that in comparison with the Dawes plan it "marks a bettering of our economic lot and an advance along the road toward Germany's freedom and re- construction," and that a refusal "could but bring unforesee- able difficulties to our industry and finance and to our Father- land grave crises with all their attendant menaces." President von Hindenburg's patriotic action does him honor and his words put the situation in a nutshell. Grievous as are the burdens which it imposes, the Young plan is less burdensome than a continuing Dawes plan would have been, and there was nothing sensible for Germany to do but to accept it. THE MAN WITH THE HOE still survives in spite of the poem of Mr. Markham, but the Man with the Machete is doomed if the machine invented by C. G. Muench for cutting, topping, and stripping sugar cane proves as successful in practice as it proved in a demonstra- tion the other day at Clewiston, Florida. Ex-Governor Smith of New York, who was one of the spectators, was quoted as expressing unstinted admiration for the new ma- chine. When one considers how long ago the harvesting machine appeared in the grain fields of this country, and how many years before that the reaper was in use, it seems almost incomprehensible that to this day every bit of the labor in connection with gathering sugar cane is performed by hand up to the time it is carted away to the central, or grinding mill. The machinery of the central has been greatly improved in recent years, and the cane is squeezed and resqueezed until scarcely a drop of sweet is left. So perfect has the process of extraction become, in fact, that the molasses which once was a toothsome by-product is now so poor that in the West Indies much of it can no longer be sold and is piped away as waste. To bring similar efficiency into the process of harvesting sugar cane will be a boon to the industry, but it will bring little joy to thousands of men who now do the work with the machete. THE DEATH of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and of Arthur Sherburne Hardy removes from the American literary scene two figures who began their careers in that great decade of the 'eighties when Mark Twain, Howells, and Henry James were at their most flourishing, when thou- sands of readers were eagerly devouring Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward," when Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" was just becoming known. Into this sturdier fare, Hardy poured a gentle, fragrant stream of romance. "Passe Rose" and "But Yet a Woman," among others of his novels, are vague but pleasant memories to those who read them. Mrs. Freeman was made of sterner stuff. The New England scene, which Sarah Orne Jewett had pictured with all the minor, negative virtues of charity and kindness and resigna- tion, she saw in a light that would appear surprisingly mod- ern to readers of today, coming to her for the first time. She was aware that unselfishness can be unhealthy, that mar- tyrdom warps the human soul, that kindness does not come freshly from resignation. Young persons who are sure that the American novel is only just attaining eminence might do well to look up the novels of an earlier day, and to regret the passing of their creators. They will regret even more the death of one of the most distinguished of translators into English, Mr. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, who died in Rome on March 1. If only for his incomparable rendering of one of the greatest of contemporary authors, Marcel Proust, whose "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" he has brilliantly interpreted for English readers — on the last volume of which he was engaged when he died — he will inspire grati- tude for his work and sorrow for an untimely death. OUR WARMEST GREETINGS go out to the New Freeman, edited by Suzanne La Follette, the first issue of which has just appeared. If this new liberal weekly ap- proximates the old Freeman under the editorship of Albert J. Nock it will be of great value indeed, for the Freeman re- mains in our memory as the best written and most carefully edited of all the American weeklies of our time. This new venture, we learn, is guaranteed for at least three years. That it may have established itself permanently by that time is our earnest wish. There can never be too many liberal weeklies to suit us, and since it will favor the taxation of land above all else, it will be particularly welcomed by the Single-Taxers who were such ardent supporters of the Freeman and are surely entitled to an organ of their own. That the editor is a woman makes us all the more eager for its and her success.

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350 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 Whalenism WHAT is Whalenism ? It is nothing new and is not confined to the city of New York nor to the police commissioner whose name it bears. It is that combination of official ignorance and stupidity, coupled with the belief that all officials are above and beyond the laws, which has come grievously to menace civil liberty in America. It is that phase of lawlessness which the Hoover Commission on Law Enforcement should study above all other, for more than anything else it explains the difference between the law-abiding character of the English people — just now closing twenty-one prisons for lack of prisoners — and the disgraceful lawlessness of the American nation. It is that official lawlessness which makes possible the third degree in almost every police station in the country ; which daily results in the violation of personal rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States and the hourly breaching of that document itself by city and police officials. These men believe that their possession of authority not only sets them above the laws ; they reserve the right to say to whom the laws shall apply, when they shall be enforced, and how. Their ignorance is so great that if you describe them as lawbreakers they are either infuriated or rendered dumb with amazement. Mr. Whalen has been one of the dullest and most ignorant. When he took office he defended and encouraged the use of the third degree. On January 3, 1929, he reiterated the statement he made on taking office that "there's a lot of law at the end of a nightstick." At that moment he was vowing eternal war upon gangsters, gunmen, and dispensers of bad liquor. To the reporters he said "nightstick law" would be applied to this gentry, but that it would be applied "intelligently" albeit "vigorously." "They'll be knocked out cold and left to lie, Commissioner?" he was asked. "They'll be cleaned up," he replied. He had pre- viously, according to the New York Times, declared that "the policemen are being sent out not necessarily to make arrests — we do not wish to clutter up the courts — but to do their duty in seeing that the known hang-outs for gunmen and the like are put out of business." Of course it never occurred to Mr. Whalen that in issuing these orders he was placing himself on the exact level of the gunmen and gang- sters he was denouncing, except that he was a greater menace to society because he was a lawbreaker in high office. As William Bolitho has put it in the World: "Here is an honest, brave, quite unsophisticated man, with one of the finest and most complete sets of undeveloped ideas on government, law, and social ideals who has ever emerged into a position of great public trust." In no other country, we are convinced, could a public official make such a statement as Mr. Whalen's and remain in office an hour. That there was not a rising against him throughout the city shows how little understand- ing the public has of what are the fundamentals of civil liberty, and what are the responsibilities of a public official. This same combination of naivete, childish ignorance, and lack of moral responsibility has also marked Mr. Whalen's dealing with the Communists. As we pointed out last week, he started out well in dealing with the demon- stration of March 6. He saw to it that the Communists were given complete freedom of speech, and he had the wis- dom and good sense to invite the Communist leaders to ride down with him to the City Hall and lay their complaints about unemployment before the Mayor in person. He was then living up to the best traditions of American official life. That the Communists refused to accept his invitation proved convincingly the insincerity of their intentions. When, how- ever, the Communists illegally started their march and his police fell upon them with extraordinary brutality, Mr. Whalen was unable to see any of the wrongdoing by his officials. It was again the law at the end of the nightstick. That, however, was by no means as bad as the Com- missioner's announcement that he had called into his office the heads of various large corporations and given to them the names of 300 Communist employees so that these might be dis- charged— "watched" he put it later. Before he got through with this activity, he hinted, the number of those placed upon the "proscription lists" might run to thousands. Similarly amazing was his exuberance of pride in his announcement that he had sent members of the police force into the Com- munist demonstration who carried placards demanding the overthrow of the government and made as much noise as genuine reds, and that he had "cracked his sides with laugh- ter" to see the uniformed police beating up their brothers in Communist guise. Here again the man's lack of an ordi- nary education is the trouble. He does not know that send- ing stool pigeons and agents provocateurs into the ranks of men whose ideas and ideals he does not like is one of the basest and most contemptible devices to which an official can resort; that it has been the trick of dictators and despots and tyrants from time immemorial, and that it never works, but only lowers the rest of the police in public estimation. That is what's wrong with Mr. Whalen. He does not know that the procedure of trying to persecute men for their be- liefs is utterly un-American ; he would be surprised to hear that it goes contrary to fundamental American principles, be- cause he gives no evidence of knowing what those principles are. It is no wonder that a storm of protest has arisen ; that seventeen members of the Columbia University law faculty have pointed out his lawlessness to him ; that a mass meeting will be held in the Community Church to deal directly with him on March 21 ; and that Norman Thomas has handed in a petition to the Mayor signed by ninety-six prominent persons asking for Mr. Whalen's removal. The difficulty is that this petition must needs go to a mayor who is as ignorant of American rights and liberties as is his police commissioner ; otherwise Mr. Walker would have hauled Whalen up or dismissed him long ago. And perhaps the most amazing thing about it all is the failure of either of these gentlemen to realize that this effort to pro- scribe Communists in legitimate employment, with the law- less refusal of one magistrate to give bail to the Communist leaders and the piling up of charges against them, is directly playing into the hands of the Communists themselves. They have no greater desire in the world than to be made the victims of official lawlessness and persecution.

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 351 Uncle Sam, Plunger THE Federal Farm Board has found a first-class way of throwing good money into a bottomless pit, and Congress is on the point of giving it another $100,- 000,000 to follow the method farther. In a letter to Gov- ernor Shafer of North Dakota on March 11, Chairman Legge made this ominous statement : The present operations of the Stabilization Corpora- tion will undoubtedly result in their having upwards of 100,000,000 bushels of wheat on hand at the close of the present season, and if farmers are going ahead trying to produce an additional surplus on the basis that some way will be found to take care of it on a fair price level another year, they are going to be mistaken. If they will cooperate, the Stabilization Corporation will be justified in paying storage charges and carrying this wheat for a time in the hope that a crop shortage some- where in the world will give them an opportunity to un- load it, but if, on the other hand, the farmers' attitude is to let George do it all, the natural procedure would seem to be to dispose of this wheat the best they could and write off the loss, but doing this would probably adversely affect the price of the 1930 crop. As a farm reliever Mr. Legge is an incomparable machinery manufacturer. The present statement shows clearly that instead of giving him an additional $100,000,000 to squander, Uncle Sam could well afford to pay him an enormous salary to go back and work for the International Harvester Company while we get any one of a hundred educated economists to run the Farm Board at say $10,000. Three weeks ago we pointed out that despite the in- vincible popular superstition about the power of speculation, the price of world commodities like wheat, cotton, rubber, and sugar, to mention only a few, is determined by world conditions of production and consumption, and except as they affect those conditions other forces are only temporarily effective. Every effort at fundamental control of that price through market manipulation has ultimately resulted in disaster to the controller. Even governmental schemes that reached back toward the control of production, like British rubber-export restriction, Brazilian coffee valorization, and Cuban sugar sale, have sooner or later broken down be- cause of inability to control production all over the world. What big business men like Mr. Legge, apparently know- ing no history or economics, cannot get into their heads is that you cannot control production and prices among mil- lions of farmers all over the world in the same way as among a half-dozen big machinery manufacturers. The wheat crop of the world since 1923 has averaged rather more than 4,000,000,000 bushels a year, of which the United States has produced a little better than one- fifth. During the same years our exports of wheat and flour have accounted for an average of something like 200,000,000 bushels, or say one-fourth of our crop. Does Mr. Legge really imagine that the Farm Board by a wave of the wand can cut down our wheat-growing and milling industry by a quarter and keep it cut? Does not Mr. Legge know that the farmer grows wheat instead of other crops because he thinks that it pays him better? If the farmer believes that Mr. Legge is going to keep up the price, he will think that it is going to pay him relatively better yet, and he will certainly let George do it when it comes to cutting wheat acreage. But the existing case is even worse. The wheat carry- over of the world from one crop season to the next (August 1 being taken as the date) is normally something like 300,000,000 bushels. During recent years there have been persistent attempts to hold up the price, Canadian, Hun- garian, and Polish efforts being worthy of special mention. The price has apparently not been low enough to carry off the crop completely, and the carry-over, which was figured at 284,000,000 bushels in 1926, has increased each year since to 598,000,000 bushels, or twice the normal amount, on August 1 last. In the face of these facts and the resulting sharp break in wheat prices of last spring Mr. Legge now announces the purpose of the Farm Board to buy up and hold over into the next season more than 100,000,000 bushels on the chance that a crop failure somewhere may bring a fortunate outcome to this desperate gamble. Even if the American farmer would and could restrict wheat acreage, it would do him no good; for he would simply increase the output of the other products to which he turned and therefore drive down their price, while the eager wheat growers of Argentina and Canada and Australia and India and now Russia, with its growing export capacity, would rush in and fill the void in the wheat market. What sense, then, or indeed what common honesty is there in trying to make the farmer believe that a desperate govern- ment speculation can really help him? By the very nature of his business he is unable to establish and maintain monop- oly conditions, so he must make his industry profitable under world prices. He need not try to get artificial prices for what he sells, because he cannot do it, and any farm board that makes him think he can is a fake. By intelligent poli- tics he can, however, break down artificial prices for what he buys. The Farm Board is turning his attention in the wrong direction. $1,000 Prize! ft lHE NATION takes pleasure in announcing that m the weekly Liberty is offering $1,000 each for the best solution of each of ten famous murder mysteries. There is the "Mystery of Arnold Rothstein," the "Mystery of the Typhoid Oyster," the "Mystery of the Wall Street Explosion," and, first and third respectively on the list of ten, the "Mystery of Sacco-Vanzetti" and the "Mystery of Thomas J. Mooney." It is possible that even among the two million odd read- ers of Liberty, inclusion of these cases among the well- known murder "mysteries" of our time may cause some astonishment. For Thomas J. Mooney is at present serving his fourteenth year in San Quentin prison for the murder that Liberty lists, and Sacco and Vanzetti, the cobbler and the fish-peddler, are, for the other, dead and at peace. The Bialtimore Sun is unkind enough to suggest that Messrs. Lowell, Stratton, Grant, and Thayer, not to mention former Governor Fuller of Massachusetts, themselves are the ob- vious contestants for the first prize and that Mr. Lowell of Harvard could use his share of it — $200 — to raise the

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352 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 wages of the Harvard scrubwomen. Two years ago these gentlemen had not a single shadow of doubt about the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti. They knew, beyond peradventure, beyond any qualm, as surely as though their own eyes had seen the Braintree paymaster murdered, that Sacco and Vanzetti had killed the man for whose death they were to be executed. They read the evidence that was presented to them, they heard the witnesses, they listened to what Van- zetti, the fish-peddler, said and wrote from his cell in Charlestown prison where he had spent seven years, and what Sacco, the cobbler, less articulate but not less forth- right, said from his. They considered the offered alibis, the protests of respectable and disinterested persons, among them men and women of the highest standing in public life; four of them read every word of the court records, which the fifth did not read because he was present and could hear. And after they had read or heard every word and examined and sifted every fact, solemnly, advisedly, with the full knowledge that the lives of two men hung on their decision, they announced their verdict : "Guilty as charged. No doubt of it. Let them die." It is unfortunate, if all these things happened as they must have happened, that only two years later a weekly which has never in its most reckless moments been called even faintly liberal should put these worthy gentlemen of Massachusetts in a position so truly horrible. For if doubts as to the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti have permeated through the masses and reached a level which makes the editor of Lib- erty think these doubts news for his readers, the case is per- haps less iron-bound and copper-riveted than Messrs. Lowell, Stratton, Grant, Thayer, and Fuller knew it to be. And if this is so, what then? How can the fish-peddler and the cobbler profit by these doubts? Who can bring the dead to life and allow them to be confronted by their judges who will tell them: "We really were not quite sure after all!" These, of course, are very unhappy considerations, and the gentlemen from Massachusetts will not be envied by any person who ponders them. But there is one man in these United States more fortunate than they. He is Governor Young of California. Tom Mooney — and Warren K. Bil- lings, whom Liberty evidently overlooked — are still alive. Governor Young can still pardon them. And by doing so he can save himself bad dreams, a bad conscience, the weight on his mind and his heart of the lives of two men whom thou- sands of persons believe to be innocent of the crime for which they are in prison. By its "mystery" contest, Liberty may have done an inestimable public service. Celluloid Aesthetics A FEW weeks ago we had occasion to discuss the talkies with a writer attached to a very important producing company and himself the author of one of the most successful of what Variety calls "the articulate flickers." We propounded to him a problem in the aesthetics of the cinema and we received an answer so astonishing in its gen- eral implication that we have decided to pass it on for the benefit of those who, like ourselves, have wondered that cer- tain things could be. As to the problem itself, it dealt, perhaps, with matters a little overrefined, but we had just returned from seeing the talkie version of the musical comedy "Hit the Deck," and we had been struck with what seemed to us an obvious and easily remediable defect of style. Operetta, we pointed out, is, after all, a highly artificial form of art and it involves absurdities which are tolerable only because they are part of a consistent convention. Thus, in the case of the piece in question we have a story which is about not real, but musical-comedy sailors, and musical-comedy sailors are credible only when they are seen against a background equally unreal. Any theatrical producer would instinctively recognize the fact and put them in "a painted ship upon a painted ocean." But in the film everything except the story was as perversely actual as possible. The ship was literally exact; the sailors — re- cruited in a real recruiting office — embarked at a real navy yard ; and the inevitable result was that, when they suddenly broke into a song and dance on the sidewalks of a real street, one shuddered at a crudity which might have been easily avoided by the exercise of elementary aesthetic judgment. Now, when we propounded this opinion we expected to have it brushed aside as academic and to be told that the great public was hardly interested in considerations like these; but our friend, instead of being contemptuous, agreed per- fectly. "You are right," he said. "The director who made the picture is probably just as aware as you are of the prin- ciple involved. Moreover, even audiences would, without knowing why, find pictures produced in a consistent style more enjoyable than a hodge-podge like 'Hit the Deck.' But there is one serious difficulty. Harmonious stylization — what you call a 'painted ship upon a painted ocean' — would not cost enough." "You see," he continued, "there are three grades of pic- tures called respectively 'programmers,' 'features,' and 'super- features.' The last rent for the highest price, but in order to get it we must convince the exhibitor that the picture was expensive to make and, of course, the more conspicuous the expenditure the more easily he is convinced. We need to be able to say to him that we took the company to Shanghai, that we rented a fleet, or that we reconstructed a battleship in all its details right on the lot. He knows that things like that cost money and he is willing to pay his share, but he can't be fooled. Perhaps there is no artistic reason for going to Shanghai, perhaps a simpler setting would be better, and perhaps a picture produced less elaborately would please the audience more. But the exhibitor will not pay the price un- less he knows that we have paid our part." And so, like another ancient mariner, we were left sadder but wiser as the result of our experience with painted ships and painted oceans. We had supposed that perhaps the producers of talkies need only to learn, but we had discovered that they know already. Many are men of talent and refinement. A few at least would be glad to find some way to escape from the thousand and one limitations imposed upon their work. But every individual is lost in the huge organization, and the organization itself is controlled by social and economic factors which make impossible any effort to do anything except what has always been done. Indi- viduals engaged in it may dream of something different, but they know that they must conform or get out. Experimenta- tion? Unconventionality? Special pictures for the few? As one magnate is said to have said to his art director, "I can give you the answer in two words : im — possible."

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 353 It Seems to Heywood Broun PEOPLE who say that communism can never succeed in America have forgotten about the Elks and about Skull and Bones at Yale. In fact, it may well be that communism has already succeeded in its principal objective here. I am not denying that it may never be a very big fra- ternal order, but possibly that is precisely the reason why it affords its followers so much fun. One black ball is sufficient to keep an applicant out and there is no end of satisfaction in being a genuine blown-in-the-bottle Communist entirely surrounded by masses of the bourgeoisie. The paraphernalia is not unfamiliar. There are secret passwords and grips of the usual sort to be given to the initiated. This summer I understand that the club is going to go in for a hatband in addition to the fraternity pin which is worn upon the under- shirt and must never be parted from the wearer. Some Com- munists, I assume, use the flap of flesh across the clavicle instead. To those in good standing all sorts of jolly parties are furnished. One gets the opportunity to sing the "Interna- tionale" twenty or thirty times a day. There are fish fries, clambakes, and gatherings at local ball parks where the good Communist may sit for several hours and listen to denuncia- tions of God and Norman Thomas. In this I catch a slight lack of logic. According to the Communist philosophy, as I understand it, the club is against God because he doesn't exist and against Norman Thomas because he does. The chief danger for the Communists lies not in Whalens or any outside adversaries but within the ranks of the cause itself. Palpably it is true that when three or four Communists are gathered together you have five major parties and six heresies. I know one ambitious red who is tearing himself to bits in an effort to belong to every one of the irreconcilable groups in the movement at the same time. God's children are not the only ones to have wings. Among the revolutionaries there is the left, the right, the north south- west, and the west northeast. And not one of these is on speaking terms with the rest. Orthodoxy among the Com- munists is far more difficult than that which obtains in the ranks of fundamentalists. Such scary folks as actually believe that wild disorder and barricades are just around the corner overlook the fact that the Communists are much too busy to get on with the proletarian revolution of which they speak upon occasion. After all they have to save most of their time for heresy trials. In fact a truly orthodox Muscovite would rather have no upheaval at all than tolerate one sponsored under irregular auspices. If it isn't red it isn't a revolution, they say, and must be thrown back into the creek. But what is red? Ah, there's the rub. Some part of the drive against religion is probably based on a not unnatural envy of the Catholic church and its system of government. Of course the Communists have taken over the idea of a Pope, but through their tendency to excess they have set up a round half-dozen, which throws everything completely into confusion. Being a proletarian in good standing is no bed of roses. Probably it can't be done. There lives today in all America not one Communist whose position is unassailable. Inevitably he is a counter-revolutionist in the eyes of some comrade or other. Indeed, the rule of the order differs somewhat from that of the Boy Scouts. It is laid down that each and every one must do a daily denunciation. Of course the drive against religion has been a godsend. Here at last the club has found One to assail who cannot or will not answer back. To me a field day devoted wholly to picnic lunch and atheism sounds a little dull. After you have heard one denunciation of God it seems to me that you have heard them all. For my own part I'd a great deal rather sit and watch sparrows fall to earth. But possibly at forty I have lost something of youthful enthusiasm. The whole movement leaves me a little wistful. Not even Princeton itself has produced so many perpetual sophomores as the Communist Party. Yet I cannot deny an occasional flash of irritation at the snobbery of this small and exclusive club. Only last night I was reading a new book by Mike Gold called "Jews Without Money," and a fasci- nating and spirited book at that. Mike has been called "the playboy of the Communists," but that is hardly a complete characterizer. Mr. Foster's faith that the world can be made over through his swapping wisecracks with Jimmy Walker seems to me an equally youthful concept. And if Bob Minor had remained in the newspaper business he would by now be only a sedate cartoonist drawing endless strings of fat men with dollar marks upon their clothing. To how many of us is it given to rag and wrestle with the cops after the age of forty-five ? But as I was saying, there are times when the reds seem inclined to claim too much. In Mike's "Jews Without Money" I came across a chapter called Did God Make Bed- bugs? and here I found: "Bedbugs are what people mean when they say: poverty. There are enough pleasant super- ficial liars writing in America. I will write a truthful book of poverty; I will mention bedbugs." As a liberal, I have not the slightest desire to limit Mike's freedom of speech, but I am a shade annoyed to find him behaving as if he had hit upon something brand-new. It is a little as if a writer said : "I am going to talk about a great actor whom nobody has ever mentioned before. I have discovered him all by myself. His name is Charlie Chaplin." Just what has Mike been doing with himself during the last twenty years of the realistic movement in American litera- ture? I can hardly remember five native novels in all that time which did not manifest a deal of preoccupation with insect life. Nor am I pleased to have one species held out as belonging to the proletariat alone. I can assure Mike that the mascot which he mentions is by no means unheard of in the homes of the bourgeoisie. Even in the great Park Ave- nue apartments of the rich who oppress the poor the gentle- man from the exterminator's has been known to call upon a Tuesday morning. And in addition I accuse Mike of superficial observa- tion. "They crawl slowly and pompously," he writes. Not in the homes of the middle class, I can assure him. Heywood Broun

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354 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 "My Dear Senator"8 On a Certain Betrayal in Washington My dear Senator: To say that I am appalled by your letter of March 7 defending your action in changing your vote on the sugar tariff is to put it as politely as I can. You have been, since you were first elected, one of the truly progressive Senators in Washington. On most questions that have come before you you have taken a stand which seemed to indicate that you were conscious not merely that you were the representative of your State, but that you had a duty to the public as a whole. Yet here you are defending yourself on the ground that there are tre- mendous areas in the Western part of the United States avail- able for raising sugar beets, that the sugar growers of the West are "in dire distress," and that "the industry is almost ruined." You also tell me that you promised the farmers and beet-sugar growers that if you were reelected, and the high-tariff bill should be presented, you would vote for high tariffs on products of your State even though you were opposed on principle to them. You repeat that the sugar-beet industry is highly important in your State, and that the exist- ing tariff does not enable the sugar-beet farmers to make a living. In other words, your argument is that although you feel there should be no tariff trough, or at least no deep and extensive one, your clients are entitled to get their feet into the swill as long as any trough exists and anybody else is feeding therein. The second Charles Francis Adams once called himself a thief because he profited by the looting of the purses of all the people of the United States through a protected industry in which he was a shareholder. If he was correct in this characterization of himself and his asso- ciates, then by your stand you are encouraging others to rob the public on behalf of an industry in your State which you admit cannot stand upon its own feet, partly because of com- petition in other areas under the United States flag, and partly because of the coming in of Cuban sugar. Why should you, or anybody else, seek to bolster up at the expense of all the people an industry which has no valid economic excuse for its existence? Nobody asked the citizens of your State who have gone into beet-sugar growing to put their money into that enterprise. No one guaranteed that they would make a profit out of it. They took exactly the same risks that anybody else took who established a carpet factory, or set up a brokerage house, or sought to serve his fellow-Americans by running an unpopular newspaper. In not a single one of these cases was there any guaranty that if the investors lost their money through taking up an economically unsound venture, or through their incompetence or poor business methods, or through creating a product which no one needed, Uncle Sam would come to their rescue and guarantee them satisfactory profits. Had those who have gone into beet-sugar growing in your State since 1916 con- sulted a report published by the Department of Agriculture they would have found that its chemists certify that there are • Thii is the first of a series of articles on the national political situation »nd the issues involved in it. The next will appear in an early issue. — F.aiToi Til Natiom. only three limited areas in the United States in which beets can be grown with sufficient sugar content to be commercially profitable. As for competition from other sections of the United States, would anybody listen to the boot-and-shoe manufacturers of Massachusetts if they asked for government aid against the competition of Missouri, the greatest boot- and-shoe-producing State in the Union, and California? As for Cuba, why should the mere fact that it flies a foreign flag — although its independence is severely limited by the Piatt Amendment permitting us to intervene in its affairs when we see fit — deprive the American people of the opportunity to obtain cheap sugar from the richest sugar-producing territory in the world? Any sensible country would rejoice in the nearness of this island to enable it to obtain cheap sugar for its every citizen, and would be glad to include it in a customs union beneficial to both sides of the bargain. And what would happen to your beet-sugar growers if we should annex the island as so many Americans think we eventually will ? Why should you, or anyone else, seek to protect the beet growers of your own and other States from the consequences of their mistaken business judgment at the expense of every consumer in this country? They had plenty of other oppor- tunities to invest their money, there were plenty of other crops they could raise. The world did not need an increase in sugar-producing acreage. There was plenty of cane sugar available in the world when sugar beets first began to be grown within the United States. But, I hear you ask, granted that the enterprise was a mistake, should we not pro- tect these men from the results of their own folly and short- sightedness? My answer is emphatically no. Not a day goes by but that men lose their investments because of errors of judgment, or because of the ever-shifting stream of economic life and the progress of invention. The government was never asked by anybody outside of an insane asylum to reim- burse the livery-stable keepers, the harness and carriage manu- facturers who were put out of business when the arrival of the automobile completely changed transportation in the United States. Not a day goes by that does not witness the abandonment of some trolley tracks made financially unprofit- able by the coming in of the motor bus. What would happen to the owners of worthless interurban trolley securities if they turned up in Washington and demanded that the gov- ernment subsidize their lines lest they lose their capital, or reimburse them in the event that economic disaster should completely overtake them? Can you not see that when you ask Uncle Sam to go down into his pocket to keep your particular group of sugar growers alive you are asking for special privilege at the ex- pense of the rest of the country? Can you not see that you are creating for them a vested right, establishing a precedent which enables them to say that the government owes them a living, thus echoing the words of every worthless tramp who will not lend himself to an honest industrial task? Do you not see that in letting your vote be influenced solely by local considerations you are forgetting your duty to legislate as a

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 355 representative not merely of your State, but of the entire Union? Why is it that you, usually a genuine Progressive, cannot see that when you are supporting this protective system you are committing an immoral act ; that it is grossly im- moral for a man to lend himself to a system which is steadily corrupting our political and economic life on the ground that as long as other people are getting graft his clients are also entitled to it? The very fact that you are dependent on these men for the votes necessary for your reelection ought forever to keep you from placing yourself in a position where you can be accused of advocating special favors for people with- out whose suffrages you cannot remain in public life. The very fact that you say that you are opposed on principle to high tariffs should have barred you from the position you have taken. That so many of our legislators and statesmen are willing to violate their principles in order to help out some good fellows at home explains in high degree why our political life has sunk so low as it has. That you made this a pledge when you were elected does not avail to excuse you ; for in your letter to me you explain your change of vote by saying that as long as you stay in the Senate you expect to change your vote when your judgment teaches you that you owe it to the people you represent to do so. Your willing- ness to lay yourself open to suspicion and misconstruction by your recent switch shows that you have the moral courage to change your position under fire. You could have done so after reaching Washington and seeing all the rotten mess of crookedness and corruption, of log-rolling, wire-pulling, and vote-buying that has disgraced the Senate throughout a year of tariff-making. I cannot, with all respect, but feel that if you had been true to yourself, to the statesmanship which you have displayed heretofore, you would have resigned from the Senate rather than put yourself in so equivocal a position and lend yourself to this whole business of tariff robbery into which the Congress has plunged itself, only to fall lower than ever before in the history of tariff-making. The very fact that you are a Progressive ought to enable you to see clearly that the forces which are behind this tariff swinery are the same forces which menace democracy at every other turn. The high-tariff protectionists are also our im- perialists, our big-army people, our big-navy people, our ship- building people who hire the Shearers to thwart the desire of the American people for disarmament and peace. They are the same persons who are buying up water powers by hook and by crook, overcharging the American people through their utilities, padding their capital accounts, and poisoning the well-springs of our national life by their dishonest and under-cover propaganda in our schools and colleges. They are the same people who by fair means and foul — usually foul — are seeking to emasculate the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Power Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission, all the State and federal regulatory commissions by packing them with their own creatures — as has again just been brought out beyond question or doubt by any honest citizen because of the inquiries which have been going on under your eyes in Washington. These are the same powers that are sworn foes of liberalism and progressivism — the same progressivism for which you have stood and fought so bravely. They are the ones responsible for the packing of the Supreme Court by conservatives, for the tremendous cliques in this country by which all the wealth of the country is being con- centrated more and more in the hands of a few. They are the ones who figured in the oil scandals, who debauched one Cabinet, if not one President of the United States. Wherever they move in their pursuit of special privilege they leave behind them a sinister trail of corruption. They employ the Grundys. They finance the Vares and the Smiths and the other men who have sought to buy their way into the Senate of the United States. There is the enemy! Yet you who have fought them so often have now lowered your lance and struck hands with them. Can you not see that in doing so you have debarred yourself from speaking out again effec- tively against their other raids upon the Treasury, their un- ceasing efforts to secure for themselves the natural resources, the birthright of the American people? Why are you so blind now? Can you complain if people ask whether it is merely because you wish to get a few thousand dollars for the lumber men and the beet growers of your State? It is, of course, impossible for you not to know the outright cor- ruption going on under your own eyes in this tariff-making. The swapping of votes in order to obtain favors for both sides is none the less corruption even though no money changes hands. It is corruption for the party leaders to award tariff favors to men who contributed to their cam- paign funds, because that makes the transaction merely one of bargain and sale. It is corruption, as well as pure folly, to permit interested persons to frame the nation's tariff polic}'. Yet, viewing all this, you, too, are willing to enter this shameful scramble to get something for your State. This is not service, but a grave disservice to your people. I am certain, knowing you as I do, that the motive in your case has not been fear for your political future, but kindness of heart. But kindness of heart can never be an excuse for going over to the powers that prey and demanding your State's share of the loot. Kindness of heart cannot free you from the duty of going to the bottom of these economic problems that are obviously menacing not merely the prosperity and the happiness of our people, but their free- dom of opportunity, their spiritual and economic equality, their right to the heritage of their fathers. What hope can there be for the growth of the Progressive movement when a man like you lends himself to such folly and such error? For thirty-three years I have been observing and writing on public affairs and what has been happening in Washing- ton. Never has there been such a moral debacle, never such base selfishness, and never such cowardly opportunism as are to be found today in the headless Washington of which you are so distinguished a part. Never in these thirty-three years has there been a greater opportunity for a man to stand forth, to burn his bridges behind him, to forget his clients and their narrow State interests, and to declare that he is taking his stand, come what may, for the welfare of all the people, for the advancement of his country, for its protection against the flood of slimy corruption which appears to have touched nearly every institution that we hold dear. When such a man appears the country will acclaim him. It will recog- nize his righteousness. Yes, it will receive him with open arms if he declares that no power on earth, much less the plight of some farmers and lumber men in his State, can swerve him from his beliefs or make him legislate for anyone else than the entire people of the United States. For such a one there will be no office too high, and no gratitude too great. Yours very truly, Oswald Garrison Villard

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356 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 The Miners' Rebellion By LOUIS STANLEY Springfield, March 17 FROM the picks came some 450 miners to Springfield, Illinois, on March 10 to reorganize the United Mine Workers of America. Over in Indianapolis John L. Lewis, still claiming to be president of the union, presided over what he called "the thirty-first consecutive constitu- tional convention." The "All-High," as the miners like to call Lewis, had been defied. The men had at last broken out in open rebellion. The immediate causes of the revolt are not such as to arouse the deep interest of a progressive, nor did they play the most important part at the Springfield convention. The basic reasons were continually heard, however: the tyranny of John L. Lewis and his callousness to, if not collusion in, the running down of the union. The direct reasons for the present outbreak concern the feud that has existed for years between the officials of Illinois District 12, the richest dis- trict in the United Mine Workers of America, and the In- ternational administration headed by Lewis. The conflict existed during the regime of Lewis's most formidable rival, Frank Farrington, former president of District 12, whom Lewis eliminated four years ago when he revealed that Far- rington had signed a three-year contract, while he was still holding office in the union, to serve as labor adviser to the Peabody Coal Company at $25,000 a year. The antagonism between Illinois and Indianapolis continued under the presidency of Harry Fishwick, who succeeded Farrington. Last year Lewis seized the opportunity to obtain a foot- hold in Illinois. His investigators discovered irregularities in the transfer of real estate belonging to two local unions in Franklin County in southern Illinois. The officials of Subdistrict 9 were implicated but defied the International office. Thereupon Lewis revoked the charter of the sub- district on June 8, 1929, and appointed "provisional officers." Inquiry revealed that the accused officials had also misap- propriated $10,500 out of $50,000 intended for groceries to relieve members during the strike of 1927. In the meantime another incident took place. George Stouffer, of Peoria, was declared elected a member of the district board by the official tellers. His opponent claimed the election stolen from him, appealed in vain to the district board, and finally obtained a decision unseating Stouffer from the International executive board. Charges and counter-charges were flying about and mat- ters had been made worse by the refusal of the district offi- cials to support Denny Lewis, brother of John L. Lewis, for reappointment as State Director of Mines and Minerals, when Lewis struck another blow. The United Mine Work- ers' Journal of October 1 published a memorandum signed by the International officers giving the details of a confession made by two of the deposed officials of Subdistrict 9. Among other interesting items were included charges of cor- ruption against district officers and their leading attorney and the proof that the administration of District 12 had materially supported the fight of the accused men against Lewis. A. C. Lewis, chief counsel for the district, filed suit for $250,000. Later Harry Madden, a district-executive- board member, did likewise. The district board met in session at Springfield on Oc- tober 5 and threw down the gauntlet. They refused to recognize the provisional government set up in Subdis- trict 9, and instead parceled out the territory among adjoin- ing subdistricts. They refused to abide by the decision in the Stouffer case. They refused to disavow the libel suit of A. C. Lewis. As a consequence, on October 10 President Lewis revoked the charter of District 12 and established a provisional government. The victory was short-lived. The Illinois officials were prepared for this contingency and ob- tained an injunction the same day they received the order from Lewis. On January 23 the plea of the International to have the injunction dissolved was denied. The case will be heard on appeal next month. In all this the officials of District 12 had not been placed in the most favorable light. It is true that they argued that provisional governments were unconstitutional, that their decision in the Stouffer case was founded on formal considerations, and that Lewis had no right to dictate to them as to libel suits. It is also true that their battle was against Lewis; this was their strongest point. Nevertheless, the squabbling seemed to be factional. The membership of District 12 was dissatified with corruption. The rank and file in other districts could be only mildly aroused. Something had to be done to turn the struggle into one over principles rather than office; something had to be done to make the fight national rather than local in scope. For the sake of self-preservation District 12 took the next step. Quick action was needed. A conference took place in Chi- cago in February. The constitution of the United Mine Workers, we were reminded, had lapsed by its own limita- tion on March 31, 1929. The referendum extending it, taken in November, 1928, had no validity. Therefore the conferees, as an "organization committee," issued a ringing call for a convention of the United Mine Workers to be held at Springfield, Illinois, on March 10 at twelve o'clock noon. The promise of reorganization that the call held forth lay in the names attached to it. There were Alexander Howat, president, and August Dorchy, vice-president of the Kansas District. Both had fought the industrial-court law of that State and had been expelled from the union by Lewis for their pains. There was John H. Walker, president of the Illinois State Federation of Labor, a substantial, respec- table addition to the ranks, who had had his tiffs with Lewis years before. There was John Brophy, incorrigible idealist, driven from the union by Lewis and now a salesman for the Columbia Preserve Company, noted for its liberal labor policy. There was also Adolph Germer, secretary of the Socialist Party during the war, supposed to have had his election as president of District 12 taken from him at one time by Farrington and Lewis. More recently he has been a real-estate agent, though his membership in the union has never lapsed. The other signatures to the call were chiefly

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 357 those of officials of District 12. Conspicuous for its absence was the name of Frank Farrington, recently reinstated to membership and in the forefront of the anti-Lewis campaign. This was a concession to the progressives and the sentiment of the rank and file. Behind all this maneuvering was Oscar Ameringer, genius of the Oklahoma Leader and the Illinois Miner, known to the miners as "Adam Coaldigger," his nom de plume. It was he who through his papers stirred the workers to open rebellion. It was he who achieved the national progressive front. The Springfield convention did not open at noon on March 10, for Lewis had decided to call a convention also at ten o'clock of the same day. Upon the advice of lawyers the Springfield group met at nine o'clock. At 11 :21 the por- tions of the constitution providing for the name and juris- diction of the union were adopted. At 12:01 the Indian- apolis convention legalized the extension of the constitution. The insurgents might now call the others dual by virtue of a forty-minute margin. The courts, however, will have the final word. The gathering at Springfield was in the main a rank- and-file convention. The delegates drove President Fish- wick of District 12 from the chair immediately after he had opened the convention. By acclamation they chose their "Alec" Howat to take his place. Throughout the entire proceedings parliamentary rules were given but the most casual attention ; the rank and file had its say. At the be- ginning the officials of District 12 were denounced, but the chief target was, of course, John L. Lewis himself. Man after man told stories of his arrogance, his high-handedness, his neglect of the unorganized, and his sympathy for the operators. His henchmen, the organizers and the Inter- national-board members, were proved guilty of extravagance, corruption, indifference to the needs of the workers, and the expenditure of time on political work for their chief. The big issue of the convention was the seating of Frank Farrington. "I made the contract," he asserted in his defense, "to save the miners' union." Delegates laughed out loud. He tried to explain that Lewis would not agree to the wage reduction needed to halt the disintegration of the union unless he, Farrington, had eliminated himself from the or- ganization. He signed the Peabody contract with that in view. Very few, indeed, believed his story, but he was seated nevertheless by a vote of 225 to 145. The majority argued that his credential was correct in form and that if he wanted to rehabilitate his honor, he should be allowed to do it. Anyway, both John Brophy and Powers Hapgood, Har- vard graduate who had shown his fearlessness in fighting both Lewis and the operators, were at the moment not even members of the union and represented unorganized groups, yet they opposed the seating of Farrington. The victory of Farrington was a deep disappointment to the progressives, who had hoped that the "reorganization convention" would be more sensitive to ethical considerations. The election of officers was another test of the progres- sive character of the convention. It was a foregone con- clusion that "Alec" would be elected president and "Jack" Walker secretary-treasurer. The former lacked the vigor of his earlier years; the latter, a conservative, might lack driving power in the trying months ahead. Much might devolve upon the vice-president. Hapgood and Germer were the contestants. The progressives pinned their hope on the younger man. They were disappointed again. His youth, his attack on Farrington, and his advanced ideas were against him. He was defeated by a vote of 299 to 95, but a moment later he was again the hero, when he shook hands with Germer and moved the delegates by his appeal for solidarity. Afterwards Hapgood was given a personal tribute, when the convention voted for a substitute motion of his, less because of its merits than to please him. Was the convention encouraging? It was. A house- cleaning is probable in District 12 and Farrington may be kept out of the picture. The constitution adopted makes the officials more responsive to the rank and file. The sala- ries of officials are comparatively low. If Hapgood was not elected vice-president, still the officials chosen are of the high- est caliber. Besides, Hapgood and Bill Deak, rebel in John L. Lewis's local, were elected to the important policy com- mittee. Almost all of Illinois, Kansas, and the Southwest are with the "reorganized" union, and that means most of the bituminous coal miners in the United Mine Workers. If the American Federation of Labor recognizes the Spring- field United Mine Workers, the union will throw its in- fluence to the side of militant struggle against the employers and in favor of progressive policies. The constitution com- mits the union to advocate the six-hour day, the five-day week, unemployment insurance, and "the full social value of their [the workers'] product." If the American Fed- eration of Labor bans the new union, it may, with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, become the nucleus of a new trade-union center. Much depends upon "Adam Coaldigger." As editor of the official organ which will succeed the Illinois Miner he will have a tremendous educational job to fulfil. As the generalissimo of the national progressive front he can do much to preserve and strengthen it. The extent to which progressives, militants, and rebels are permitted to function in the affairs of the "reorganized" United Mine Workers will determine whether we shall have just another business union or a fighting machine run by practical idealists — un- less, of course, a peace is patched up between the old and the new unions. Two Swans I Watched at Twilight By DAVID MORTON These slow and silver images of peace Might well be pictures that the mind had wrought Out of some tortured labor at release From the dark chambers of tormented thought; So tranquil and so dim and cool they are, Here in the gathering darkness they would seem Part of this dusk that gazes, star by star, Out of its own reflection in the stream. The twilight thickens, now — the deeper dark Will settle here, and silver ghosts will stir So slightly that no mortal eye could mark Their going or the silver shape they were, That came in beauty and in beauty went, For one who knew the thing their passing meant.

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358 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 Old Joe's Senate By PAUL Y. ANDERSON Washington, March 15 NOT since the Harding days has Washington been permeated by such an atmosphere of scandal and impending scandal. Administration leaders have the furtive and uneasy look of men who fear their enemies and distrust each other. Dreadful rumors fill the air. Many of them concern the methods by which the tariff bill is being revised skyward under the practiced and unscrupu- lous hand of "Old Joe" Grundy, and an equal number con- cern the real or suspected relations between public person- ages and the power and chemical interests. Already it has been disclosed that immediately prior to his election as na- tional chairman of the Republican Party, the delectable Claudius H. ("Deuce-in-the-Hole") Huston participated in a lobby that aimed to grab Muscle Shoals for the American Cyanamid and Union Carbide companies; that he collected, from sources that he cannot entirely recall, and disbursed, in ways that he cannot always remember, very large sums of money without keeping any record except in a check book, which he now seems to have mislaid ; and that he sought to effect an arrangement whereby the power and chemical companies would quit quarreling over the anticipated plunder and agree to divide it like honest pirates. More- over, he solicited and received for the lobby contributions totaling $36,000 from the Union Carbide, and deposited the money to his private account with a brokerage firm, sub- sequently forwarding it to the lobby organization in amounts and on dates that have now escaped his mind. In fact, the condition of Mr. Huston's memory on these matters pro- vokes one to wonder whether he is a sleepwalker. ***** IN this connection the Senate Lobby Investigating Com- mittee, which already has performed invaluable services, is being urged to examine the records of the Cyanamid and Carbide companies and to scan their lists of stockholders. In connection with proposals to dispose of Boulder Dam power, it might well inspect the books and correspondence of the Southern California Edison and affiliated companies. In respect to the inexplicable increase in the tariff on rayon, it certainly should ascertain the names of American stock- holders in the favored companies, especially those controlled by Courtaulds, Ltd., of London. Senator Blaine of Wiscon- sin has publicly asked for an inquiry into the activities of the Mormon hierarchy in connection with the sugar vote in the Senate. In short, if events were to justify one-half the whispers now generally current in the capital, we might look back on the Fall-Daugherty-Forbes regime as the Age of Honest Government. ***** WHEN news dispatches relating the progress of the tariff fight will not stand up between editions of the afternoon papers, any attempt to indicate events three or four days ahead is wholly futile. As this is written, the Sen- ate Old Guard is in the saddle again, as the result of an audacious vote-trading conspiracy hatched by Grundy and his private lobby. Employing the style of attack made fa- mous by Chinese generals, the Pennsylvania statesman and his aides have inspired enough desertions to reduce the coali- tion from a majority to a minority. It now appears that this might have been accomplished long ago if the Old Guard leaders had only known that so many votes were for sale, and at such reasonable prices. It may sound ridiculous to attribute any form of innocence to Jim Watson, Reed Smoot, or George Moses, but actually I do not believe they realized that Dill and Jones could be reached with promises of a duty on lumber, or Pine and Thomas with pledges of a duty on oil, or that Ashurst and Hayden could be lined up with a few kind words about hides. Evidently they did not detect the rubber in the convictions of Wagner, Cope- land, and Tydings. It took a realist like "Old Joe" to size up the condition and devise the proper measures. Assisted by Warren F. Doane, a professional lobbyist on the joint pay roll of Grundy, the Manufacturers' Club of Philadel- phia, and the State of Pennsylvania, who occupies an office in the Senate Office Building, "Old Joe" soon had the situ- ation well in hand. Since then he has made but two mis- takes: the first, when he fell into a panic and attempted to deceive the Senate about Doane's status; the second, when he essayed publicly to lead the fight for a higher duty on pig iron. In the latter instance he discovered that Senators who were quite willing to go along with him when the con- nection was not too obvious were unwilling to commit po- litical suicide by openly accepting his leadership. Next time "Old Joe" will let someone else wear the sword and epaulets while he directs the battle from the cloakroom. A Progres- sive Senator remarked ruefully the other day: "The worst mistake we ever made was to exclude Bill Vare." ***** NEVERTHELESS, brilliant careers are sometimes short, and the convening of the next Congress might easily find "Old Joe" again paying rent for himself and his lobby in a private office building, and conducting his opera- tions from the corridors instead of the cloakrooms. When the Honorable Jim Davis was first suggested (by himself) as a candidate for the Senatorial nomination against Grundy, there was a general disposition to smile — perhaps because people have always smiled at the spectacle of Jim as Secretary of Labor. The smile vanished instantly when Vare declared for him. Even the mighty Mellons have learned that it is folly to laugh at any Pennsylvania candi- date who has the support of the Philadelphia machine. In this instance the folly would be fatuity, because the conse- quences of the last Senatorial primary in that State will prevent any more orgies of spending in the near future, and when money is scarce organization support is doubly effec- tive. As a matter of fact, genial Jim has many of the attributes of a successful campaigner. Not only is he the greatest Moose known to natural history, but he is also a Mason, an Odd Fellow, an Elk, a Knight of Pythias, and a dues-paying member of the American Federation of Labor.

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 359 He is a tireless and accomplished handshaker, and the only living Cabinet member who ever told the British Ambassa- dor that the Embassy victuals would go down better with a scoop of beer. He radiates energy and good nature, and if an idea ever entered his head it perished there of loneli- ness. In other words, he is a perfect candidate, and I should be neither surprised nor disappointed to see him give "Old Joe" a noble licking. To be sure, he would add nothing to the Senate, but he would supplant an evil in- fluence that never should have been admitted. ***** WHERE the tariff is concerned, it begins to appear that Mr. Hoover's failure to indicate by word or sign the kind of bill he desired may not have been so ama- teurish after all. Throughout the various stages of the fight — when the House was adopting the most piratical rates in history, when the Senate coalition was weeding out some of the grosser larcenies, and now when Grundy's Gang is restoring most of them — there have been two equally authori- tative groups of Hoover spokesmen, one declaring that the President wanted the sort of bill the coalition sought, and the other declaring he desired the sort of bill that Grundy is writing. Mr. Hoover's refusal to settle the issue between them may now bear fruit. I venture to forecast that no matter what form the bill finally takes, it will prove to be the very bill that he wanted all along, and that its enact- ment in the form in which it is enacted will be hailed as vindicating his leadership. Calvin knew a thing or two. SENATOR COUZENS, as bland and guileless as when he induced an unsuspecting Old Guard last year to authorize his sweeping investigation of the communications and power industries, has now introduced a bill to regulate the interstate power industry. He will not succeed in slip- ping this one through: it has too much dynamite — and the Power Trust has too many eyes. In addition to creating a permanent Federal Power Commission, the bill would pro- vide for regulation of interstate power on such a scale, and with such powers, as the Interstate Commerce Commission rightly seeks in connection with railroad regulation. It would extend this regulation not only to the producers, trans- mitters, and distributors of interstate power, but also to holding and management companies of all kinds and their affiliated companies. It would compel all of them to sub- mit their books to regular inspection. In brief, it would enable the federal government at last to ascertain the full extent of the partially hidden profits of the power indus- try, in so far as it engages in interstate commerce, and to restrict them to decent limits, a thing no government author- ity now has the power to do. The necessity of such legis- lation needs no argument, but the bill will pass, if it passes at all, only after a terrific battle, because it is designed to end what Senator Howell has called "the fattest form of public-utility graft that ever existed in this country." The undisturbed enjoyment of such a graft will not be surrendered without fighting — in both the Chinese and American styles. Being Right with Babson By RALPH WEST ROBEY MONDAY is proverbially blue and Friday notori- ously unlucky. Thursday, however, is the worst day for Wall Street. On that day too many finan- cial data are given out to make it comfortable for those interested in stock prices. Thursday afternoon the figures on brokers' loans and the condition statement of the Federal Reserve Bank are made public. It is also on that day that any change in the rediscount rate is announced. It is, in other words, a day when the stock market is in no mood for jesting and a time when one should be careful of what he says, especially if his words may be interpreted in any unfavorable light. Despite these considerations, it was on a Thursday that Roger W. Babson made his most famous prediction. On Thursday, September 5, 1929, he foretold a drop in stock prices of sixty to eighty points. It was not, of course, Bab- son's first prophecy, for his principal business for many years has been to read the future for business men. It was not, by some hundreds, his first statement on the future of stock prices. In fact, it was not, by some scores, even his first prediction that stock prices were going to decline. For some reason, however, the statement was given a most un- usual amount of publicity for a Babson prediction. The telegraphic news services rushed it all over the country, and the newspapers shortly were giving it even more space than they normally accorded a statement by Secretary Mellon on the fundamental soundness of American business. Even the stock market supposedly took notice of the forecast and stopped its tiresome upward movement to pay Babson a rare compliment by being very weak for a day or two, thus attract- ing further attention to the prediction. Actually, the market never did get back into its old swing, and two weeks later, to the day, it reached its high for all time. On this latter date, Thursday, September 19, the twenty-five securities used by the New York Times as its index of industrial stock prices reached the astounding aver- age of $469 a share. From this level there began a reces- sion which in five weeks carried prices down to almost $400 a share. After this all orderliness in the decline disap- peared and in three weeks industrial shares dropped in value almost 50 per cent, or to $221 on November 13. At this point it was only natural that many individuals should recall Babson's prophecy of a few weeks earlier. The difficulty was that he had not supported his prediction by arguments sufficiently strong to make one take him seriously. Dozens of people had been preaching lower stock prices for some years. Many of them had given far better reasons than the one vouchsafed by Babson : "Thus far there have been few deaths among those with very large stock holdings. Before long these men will begin to die and their holdings will be put on the market." After the panic one might maintain that he had not followed Babson because he had not believed that Babson possessed any special information on the death- .

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360 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 rate of large security owners, but that kind of rationaliza- tion could provide only limited consolation. The fact re- mained that anyone who had adopted his point of view and had got out of the market was much better off than many of the rest of us. In any event, Babson soon became the lion among stock-market prognosticators. It was only a matter of days until he was writing for one of the New York evening papers, which placarded the subways with the slogan "Be Right with Babson." This latter was a dis- tinct victory for him, and since he likes to include in his business-forecasting service a substantial amount of re- ligious sentiment, it must have been a source of regret that the slogan was not joined with the old hymn "Get Right with God." Most of those who thus adopted Babson as their guid- ing light probably were not more than casually familiar with the method followed by him in his prognostications. As so- called scientific methods of forecasting go, however, it is relatively simple. In his words: Our forecast of future events is based on the assump- tion that the law of action and reaction applies to eco- nomics and human relations, en masse, as it applies to mechanics. Thus we assume that abnormal depression must follow abnormal activity; that lower prices must follow higher prices or vice versa; and that we as classes or nations must ourselves get what we give and must prosper as we serve. The "law of action and reaction" is the thing. And, as understood by Babson, it has a delightful universality. For example: Don't try to force yourself to "love God." Just accept the great truth that God loves you and is anxious to have you well, useful, and happy. Leave the rest to the law of action and reaction. Or, in discussing the changing styles in women's dresses: ... we have concluded that women will accept the longer skirt, due to the fundamental law of action and reaction. That there is a certain basic accuracy in this "law" goes without saying. Even small boys playing in the streets fre- quently refer to it, although among them it is stated in less technical language, such as, "What goes up must come down." Nevertheless, it all amounts to the same thing, except in the breadth of its applicability. Many people be- lieve that when it is applied to economic phenomena, the points when business or prices will start up or down and how far they will go in either direction are much more diffi- cult to determine than if one is swinging a pendulum in a physics laboratory or throwing pebbles into the air. Doubtless Babson himself thinks of this from time to time, for he has not always during the years that are past been so fortunate in his predictions as he was with that of Sep- tember 5. Babson 's predictions on general business, however, are of no interest for the present. Here we are concerned only with his forecasts on stock prices or, more accurately, with his prophecies since 1926. By so limiting the discussion it is possible to compare his statements and advice with actual events and thereby furnish a possible explanation for the general skepticism with which his September prognostication was received. For this purpose it is well to recall that stock prices made a substantial advance between the latter part of 1921 and the first of 1926. For the twenty-five industrials of the Times index the increase was from $67 a share on August 24, 1921, to $184 a share on February 10, 1926. During the rest of February of the latter year and throughout March prices receded until on March 30 the average was only $139 a share. This decline, obviously, was extremely severe when considered on a percentage basis. In fact, until the recent panic the March, 1926, break was frequently referred to as the worst thing that had happened to the market in many years. Babson, however, did not think that the decline had gone far enough to create any real stock bargains. Thus, after stocks floundered between $140 and $150 a share dur- ing April and May, 1926, we find him praising in the fol- lowing words those of his clients who were following his "system" : . . . those who are using their funds according to the long-swing-area method are now holding their capital in liquid form in order to have it intact when the right buy- ing period arrives. The Babson chart now indicates that this is the correct policy. On the date of this statement, June 8, 1926, the average price of the twenty-five industrials was $151. The follow- ing day they held steady and then started upon an upward movement. But this could not fool Babson and a week later he explained the rise as being "due to short covering and so-called 'investment' buying." He also went ahead in the same letter to advise his clients to "continue to hold their funds in good liquid condition to the extent that they wish to participate in the next major stock-market movement." The market still continued to move slightly upward and Babson strengthened his advice by telling his followers on June 29 that they "should take advantage of the strong spots" for getting out of the market. Within a week after this the market made its little courtesy to the 150's and moved on to better levels. For the rest of the year the rate of increase in stock prices was not rapid, but gradually they climbed until by the middle of December, 1926, the average was $180. Babson, in the meantime, continued to advise his clients to stay out of the market. At times, in fact, he became almost insult- ing to those who might have differed with him, as, for ex- ample, on September 7 when he said "no sane investor" would "be loaded up with stocks at such a time." By May, 1927, the average of the industrials was more than $200, or some 25 per cent above their level at the time of the first advice noted above. Babson thought there would be "won- derful opportunities later" and that it was no time to buy. From May to September prices continued their advance. In October there was a slight reaction but by the end of No- vember the industrials were up to $241 a share. It was at this time that Babson issued a letter giving Twelve Points in 1928 Business. The fourth among these referred to the stock market and said that "any major movement should be on the downward side." This, it will be noted, was his blanket forecast for the whole of 1928. As the year pro- gressed he continuously bombarded his subscribers with the gospel that they must keep out of the market, that they should buy bonds, that "the writing is on the wall," that it was the "time for even the most thoughtless to stop, look, and listen," and that it was "only common sense to be pre- .

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 361 pared for a reaction." In the meantime the market boiled, and on January 2, 1929, the twenty- five industrials closed at $338 a share. Obviously, it is not worth while going ahead. Babson continued to issue his bearish statements and the market continued upward, finally reaching $469 a share. Babson followers enjoyed none of this general average advance of 330 points, for they had been out of the market since early in 1926, except for the stocks especially recommended by Babson from time to time. It is only fair to give Babson credit for these special recommendations, for they constituted exceptions to his general bearish position. Babson him- self appears to have been rather proud of the selections. Evidence of this pride is provided by a special circular issued December 3, 1928, giving the list of such recommendations as "a summary of what the Babson Statistical Organization has done for its clients." The list is too long to be given in full but a sample may be of interest, for, as was stated, "the list speaks for itself." During the period July to November, 1928, seven se- curities were recommended, as follows : Anaconda Common at $67.75; Beacon Oil Common at $20; Louisville Gas and Electric, Class A* at $38 ; Pacific Gas and Electric Com- mon at $47.75; Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron at $30 ; Pierce Petroleum Common at $4 ; and White Eagle Oil at $30. Had one bought one hundred shares of each of these at the price suggested they would have cost a total of $23,750. Had the whole lot been sold at the time of the general low of the stock market, November 13, 1929, they would have brought $19,412, or 18 per cent below what they had cost. On the other hand, if instead of fol- lowing these special recommendations an investor on July 2, 1928, had purchased an equal number of shares of each of the twenty-five industrials used by the Times and had sold them at the bottom of the market, November 13, 1929, he would have lost only 13 per cent of his capital. Theoreti- cally, therefore, since the twenty-five industrials were pre- sumably selected because they are representative of the whole market and not because they offered any special investment or speculative opportunities, the Babson follower was more than 25 per cent worse off than the foolish speculator who tossed a coin to see what he should buy. It is very probable that Babson would contest the fair- ness of this comparison on the basis that his followers bought their securities outright and consequently did not sell at the low of the market. This is a thoroughly legitimate point of view. Unfortunately for Babson it does not help much in the present instance, for if our hypothetical Babson in- vestor was still holding the seven securities on March 11, 1930, they wTere worth then $25,025, or 5 per cent more than they had cost. Contrasted with this is the position of the one who theoretically tossed a coin. His stocks on March 11 were worth 29 per cent more than he had paid for them. Such are the facts. Yet they should not cause Babson any embarrassment, for as he said in his letter of July 3, 1928 : "For profits made we give ourselves credit ; for losses we blame circumstances." Perhaps this frankness is suffi- cient solace for his more faithful followers. Others may wonder if he was not really serious back in June, 1928, when he advised: "Clients who own farms with good green pasture which is idle should consider goose-raising." How Digging Began By ANNE KIMBALL TUELL THE sound conservative who prefers to think of a world finished once for all, warranted not to move or to develop, might find satisfaction in exhuming a forgotten Eden tale of the early sixteenth century, inno- cently known, or rather unknown, as Barclay's "Fifth Eclogue." Here is to be recovered an account of creation at least as static as the one in the narrative of Holy Writ, with additional reassurance concerning the final and divine ordinance for existing classes. There is in the rugged lines no notion at all of irony, but they present with naive and unconscious daring a theory of social origins as diverting as the mind of Anatole France could contrive for the race of penguins, a comfortable creed for the easier centuries before the voice of Demos was heard in the land. Shorn of rough spelling and uncouth word the story sounds still with the simplicity of days "when Adam delved and Eve span." There "is no moral issue, no subtle serpent, no fall from obedience. At least one version of the universe, we are happy to find, has made no attempt to justify the ways of God to man. The earning of bread by hard means is but the result of a mistake. Eve of course was to blame. The beginning reads like the story as we know it: First when the world was formed in creation, And Adam and Eve were set in their station, Our Lord conjoined them both as man and wife, To live in accord the season of their life. By this genial version our Father Adam had in Eden a very happy family, for God Commanded mankind to multiply, By generation to get them progeny. And the generation of a healthy race was no curse, no hard doom for the multiplication of sorrow. It was the joyous business of Eden. Eve did not shrink from her responsi- bilities. She liked her children well. Nor is there more than hint of a tragic apple. (We might all be united today as far as the apple was concerned.) Moreover, labor was pleasant in Eden till the fatal visit of the Lord of Creation, which turned quite accidentally into a visitation : The Avhile that Adam was pitching of the fold, Eve was at home and sat on the threshold, With all her babies and children her about, Either in her lap within or else without. Now had she pleasure them hugging and kissing, And then was she busy them cleaning and combing. All was joy till the coming of the Creator and the division of the children of men: At last our Lord upon the fifteenth year, To Eve, our mother, did on a time appear. Misfortune struck, as it always does, on a pleasant day. Eve had just been especially happy with her babies — busy. by a custom which one can bear to find obsolete, "with but- ter to anoint their necks," but alas! In the meantime, while she was occupied, Our Lord drawing near she suddenly espied.

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362 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 Eve was very naturally in a flutter. And here, too, as in Genesis, she was ashamed, but only at the size of her family. Hence her scramble and ill-advised concealment. For it must be confessed that there was in the mother of all women a certain disingenuousness about her children : And all ashamed, as fast as ever she might, She hasted and hid some of them out of sight, Some under hay, some under straw and chaff, Some in the chimney, some in a tub of draff. / But such as were fair and of their stature right, As wise and subtle reserved she in sight. We cannot wonder at her nervousness. "The Father and Lord omnipotent" appeared to be a variable and arbitrary God, a combination of Caliban and Cheeryble brothers. One could not be sure of suiting Him. But He came this day in a mood wholly benevolent — just to see the children and, as is the wont of visitors, to give them something. And He said: "Woman, let me thy children see. I come to promote each in his degree." Eve was not unnaturally "amazed," but hurried for- ward her most presentable. God on them smiled and them comforted so, As we with birds and dogs used to do. He is a God who likes pretty children; and the gifts are forthcoming straightway, no less than "the honors belonging to mankind": At last to the most old of all He said, "Have thou the scepter of Rome imperial. Thou art the eldest. Thou shalt have most honor. Justice requireth that thou be emperor." Then to the second He said, "It is seeming That thou be exalted to the honor of a king." And unto the third He gave such dignity To guide an army and noble duke to be. And so forth to the others as they were in degree. Accord- ing to the original divine plan, apparently, everybody was to lord it in some fashion over everybody else. Eve, delighted at the unlimited shower of benefactions, grieved as well she might for the unlucky children tucked away — a whole troupe of little Esaus. Was there to be no blessing for them? Without stopping to consider their ap- pearance, she made haste to drag them from their hiding places. If they had not been prepossessing to begin with, they were not improved by their late experience: Their hair was rugged and powdered all with chaff, Some full of straws, some others full of draff, Some with cobwebs and dust were so arrayed That one beholding them might be afraid. And the temper of the Lord was changed as He beheld them: Our Lord smiled not on them to show His pleasure, But said to them with troubled countenance, "Ye smell all smoky, of stubble and of chaff, Ye smell of the ground, of weeds, and of draff." There are no gifts for such dirty children as these. The Lord has a daintier sense for the fitness of things, though He is as anxious as Milton's God about His reputation for omnipotence: "I shall not, although I well can, Of a foul villein make a gentleman." And so the curse descended — the curse at last, though only upon a limited number of the children of men: "Ye shall be ploughmen and tillers of the ground; To pain and labor shall ye always be bound. Some shall keep oxen, and some shall hogs keep, To dig and to delve, to hedge and to dyke, Take this for your lot and other labor like. To drudge and to drivel in works vile and rude, This wise shall ye live in endless servitude. To stoop and to sweat and subject to become, And never to be rid of bondage and thraldom." There was to be no nonsense, no compounding with strikes: Then bade He them be tough, And never to grudge at labor or at pain, For if they did so, it should be thing in vain. Alas for the digger and delver! Thus said the Lord and Father omnipotent, And then He ascended up into the firmament. In the Driftway SNAKE stories are circulated by the Florida press in winter with the same avidity and gusto with which tales of sea serpents are printed by newspapers in the North in summer. It might seem that in this age of unbe- lief both sets of yarns would gradually die of anemia and malnutrition, but fortunately for the amusement of the human race there seems to be no immediate danger of such a catastrophe. At least the 1930 crop seems to be without blight or blemish, for in spite of the presence in the orange groves of what Florida newspapers call for short the "Medfly," the St. Petersburg Evening Independent reports that the snake-story season has opened on the east coast of the State both auspiciously and conspicuously. "One night last week," it says, "a snake, which apparently was out mak- ing whoopee, climbed a power company's pole, got tangled up with the wires, caused a short circuit, and left everything on the east coast from West Palm Beach to Fort Lauder- dale in the dark." -One recognizes at once all the makings of a good snake story, and there is no let-down or sad end- ing to spoil what follows. It was a blacksnake, one learns further, which accounts for its ability to climb a smooth pole — all blacksnakes and "blue racers" are proficient in that art. The skilled reptile wriggled itself to the top of the pole, possibly thinking it was a wireless system. Or maybe it was just that the snake's early education in electricity had been defective. Anyhow, when the snake reached the top of the pole it carelessly allowed its head to come in contact with a high-voltage line at the same moment that it under- took to get a tail-hold on another wire. In less than a sec- ond, cafeterias, hotels, night clubs, amusement parks, thea- ters, and homes had to fall back on lamps, candles, electric flashlights, or just matches. * * * * # THE snake had evidently abstained from alcohol and tobacco in its youth and so was able to put up a game fight for its life when the crisis arrived. Sixty thousand volts of the best electricity the Florida Power Company had to offer flowed through the snake's body, but though "cooked

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 363 to a crisp brown," the Evening Independent avers, "it re- mained in one piece." The newspaper fails to state whether or not the doughty reptile lived through the process, but that is a detail of little interest to anyone except, perhaps, the snake. The newspaper does say, though, that the east- coast manager of the power company was rather flabber- gasted, remarking that in his experience whenever a cocoanut palm fell on a wire the current invariably burned the tree in two. Not so, it appears, with Florida blacksnakes. THE story seems almost flawless as it stands, but the Evening Independent complains that one important point was not explained. Why, it wants to know, did the snake climb the pole? Speculating on this point, the journal suggests that the reptile may have found a still and after slaking its thirst, obeyed the impulse which has been known to cause humans in a similar situation to try to climb lamp posts or other poles. Or the snake may have gone up the pole to hunt woodpeckers, a variety of game much esteemed in snakedom. Again, hazards the newspaper, the reptile may have made the ascent to take electric treatment for its rheu- matism. And, finally, it may have gone up the pole just for the fun of the trip. "Certainly," the newspaper concludes plaintively, "there should have been some explanation of why the snake went up the pole." The Drifter raises his hand eagerly, confident that he can supply the explanation. Re- calling the answer to the classic conundrum "Why does the old hen cross the road?" the Drifter replies that the snake had been reading the success stories in the popular maga- zines and climbed the pole because it wanted to get to the top. The Drifter Correspondence Police Brutality To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: The sheer brutality of the police in Union Square on March 6 makes one ill. I am not in sympathy with the Com- munist movement, but the beating of defenseless men and women by armed men is a disgrace to our alleged civilization. Can you not raise your voice in protest against this disgusting condition? Can you not find words that will bite into the con- sciousness of the authorities so that they will desist from such disgraceful exhibitions of brute force? New York, March 12 M. S. Shefferman There Is a Conspiracy To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: Your suspicion, expressed editorially in the issue of March 12, that there is a wicked conspiracy against buying books is more than half right. There is one, and a lot of us are in it; and moreover we're going to stay in it until the pub- lishers get on their mark in the matter of reasonable prices for their output. About one book in a hundred published is worth keeping; I say this in the face of an unprecedented, and not unbiased, claque. Books are made to pass an idle hour and be thrown away. We used to pay a dollar to a dollar and a quarter for them; now we have to pay two to two and a half dollars; yet during the same period we have seen the price of automobiles go from $1,500 down to $600 for an infinitely better machine. Moreover, by waiting six months we can buy our book in per- fectly good format for seventy-five cents a copy. I get books from a library for two reasons aside from the above, namely, to pass the time pleasantly, and to see whether the book is worth buying to keep. Libraries are making read- ers; readers will pay for good books; but they will not be mulcted, though the publishers weep. We don't get Mr. Ford's autos, nor Mr. Gillette's razors from a "library," because we can buy them at a reasonable price. Detroit, Michigan, March 8 Maynard D. Follin "Noble in Motive" To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: In the last paragraph on page 231 of your issue of February 26, in referring to the "so-called Hoover reforms," you use the phrase "noble experiment." In your edition of March 5 the very first editorial repeats this inaccuracy. Per- mit me to quote to you the correct version of the statement of President Hoover in his speech of acceptance at Palo Alto: "Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose." It is disheartening to the loyal readers of The Nation to be obliged to question its truthfulness because of repeated inac- curacies of statement. New York, March 4 Alida Lattimore Economics and Ethics To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Henry Raymond Mussey's review of John A. Hob- son's book, "Economics and Ethics," had a peculiar attraction for me. Something over forty years ago I made the acquaint- ance of a printer in New York who had written a book on a subject connected with both economics and ethics. My friend's book had a considerable circulation, and he later wrote others, one of which especially should be carefully read or read again by both Mr. Hobson and Mr. Mussey. It appears that my printer friend had very definite ideas about political economy, and it comes to my mind that he cau- tioned his readers to be carefully on guard when dealing with utterances of those who undertook to label their subject "eco- nomics" rather than "political economy," because, he said, the term economics had been used to make what is not really politi- cal economy pass for political economy. In his last book, he argued that a true political economy had nothing whatever to do with ethics, and he went on to say about political economy this pregnant sentence: Although it will be found incidentally to throw a most powerful light upon, and to give a most powerful support to, the teachings of moral or ethical science, its proper business is neither to explain the difference between right and wrong nor to persuade to one in preference to the other. If my printer friend was an able man, well informed, and remarkable for his power of analysis, arrangement, and illus- tration, and if his views were evidently greatly at variance with those of Mr. Hobson and Mr. Mussey, the question may be asked which views are the most worthy of being referred to and explained in the columns of The Nation.

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364 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 Our own John Dewey not long ago wrote of my printer friend as follows: It would require less than the fingers of the two hands to enumerate those who, from Plato down, rank with this man among the world's social philosophers. No man, no graduate of a higher educational institution, has a right to regard himself as an educated man in social thought unless he has some first-hand acquaintance with the theo- retical contribution of this great American thinker. His name was Henry George. Long Branch, N. J., March 3 George White In Defense of Henry P. Fletcher To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I do not know, of course, the source of the informa- tion upon which The Nation based its statement, in the issue of February 19, that "as for Henry P. Fletcher, his discourag- ing record as Ambassador to Mexico, where he stood with the interventionists, is clearly on record." But I do know this: it is not so. This is not entirely a personal expression of fact and opinion, although I was a constant and close observer, on the ground, of Fletcher's official conduct during all of his diplo- matic career in Mexico. For if we choose to stand by the record we find that Fletcher was certainly in hot water with, and covertly and overtly criticized by, the outstanding inter- ventionists of his time. You know who they were. For proof, vide the attacks upon him which were per- mitted to go into the record of the notoriously interventionist activities of the committee of the Senate which investigated Mexico, as well as Fletcher's conservative and judicial state- ments regarding conditions in Mexico, which he had made previously as a witness before a similar investigating commit- tee of the House. These are matters of accurate record. Very distinctly, also, I recall a certain occasion upon which I heard Fall, who was famously head devil among all the thirty-third-degree interventionists, criticize Fletcher bitterly for not handling his job as Ambassador to Mexico in the manner in which Fall thought it should be handled. Mexico City, February 20 Robert Hammond Murray Czecho-Slovak Minorities To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: In The Nation of March 5 Mr. S. Klima takes ex- ception to your statement in an editorial of December 25 that Czecho-Slovakia has "treated the minorities treaties very much like scraps of paper." The December, 1929, issue of Nation ttnd Staat, a Viennese journal devoted to the interests of minori- ties, fully substantiates your editorial. From a review of the progress — and retrogression — of the rights of minorities during 1929, I note the following, which, for the sake of brevity, I translate into abstract form: In Czecho-Slovakia the year began with the inaugu- ration of the administrative reforms of 1927. In the prov- inces and government districts, it will be remembered, one- third of the representatives are appointed; and not only the "minorities" but also the Slovaks are disregarded in these appointments. Not a single German has been ap- pointed as provincial president or vice-president. The MHU discrimination was exercised in the formulation of the law providing for representation in the Chamber of Commerce. As regards foreign affairs, we need only to call attention to the fact that Minister Benes, in the League of Nations, made himself leader of the enemies of the minorities. Within the Czecho-Slovak state there was no advance whatever in the rights of minorities in 1929. In general, it may be said that in all the newly created states except Esthonia and Rumania there was not only no advance in the rights of minorities, but an actual retrogression; and, one may add, if in the two old states that acquired a large number of unwilling subjects, namely, Italy and France, minori- ties suffered no more last year than they had before, it is be- cause the governments of these states started at the nadir of injustice and could not, therefore, have retrograded. The student who has followed the policy of these two states, to- gether with those of Poland and Jugoslavia, in their attitude toward minorities has given up all hope of generosity or justice on their part; but those who associate the new state of Czecho- slovakia with its founder and first President, Masaryk, the liberal scholar and philosopher, are keenly disappointed at find- ing that the rights for which he fought to create a new state are so disregarded, now that he rules over it. Oberlin, Ohio, March 5 Karl F. Geiser For Baltimore Readers To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Readers of The Nation in Baltimore are invited to join a luncheon group which is now being organized. These luncheons will be held on the first Monday of each month at the clubhouse of the Women's City Club, 15 Mt. Vernon Place. Reservations may be made through the House Secretary of the club, Miss Brinkley (Vernon 4356). Baltimore, March 10 Mrs. William J. Brown Boy Scouts and Peace To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The Nation for February 19 contained a letter from Abraham A. Conan relating to the bill introduced into the New York Assembly by Assemblyman Coughlin, proposing to insti- tute training under the Boy Scout program in the public schools. While this measure was introduced by Mr. Coughlin with the very best intentions in the world because he believes that the Boy Scout program is bringing something to the boyhood of America, yet I join with Mr. Conan in holding that such a law would be out of harmony with the democratic ideals and the best traditions of our Republic, and just as sincerely as you could possibly wish it I hope that it may not receive serious consideration at the hands of the legislature. I would, however, most certainly disagree with him that this measure would have any unfavorable bearing upon the cause of international peace. If he might have seen the great international jamboree of Boy Scouts at Birkenhead, England, last summer, where between fifty and sixty thousand boys from forty-two nations and seventy-three lands were gathered to- gether for two weeks in the greatest comradeship and friend- ship, he would feel, I am certain, that the Boy Scout movement is making its contribution to settlement of world differences. To be sure there is discipline in the Boy Scout organization, but there is no such thing as a military discipline. The main point which I should like to establish with you, however, is that under no circumstances nor conditions are boys forced into the Boy Scout movement. The whole genius of the movement consists in presenting a program which shall be so attractive that boys will want to be Scouts. New York, February 28 James E. West

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Books, Music, Drama Mountain Background By GLENN WARD DRESBACH This is the background for the silver plunge Of waterfalls, for wings like petals blown Across infinity, and for the lunge Of fiery swords against the shields of stone. Here cedars from contention in the dark Affirm the nearness of the stars, and here Age-carved designs remain unchanged by mark Of pageants fading down another year. Plows cannot bite this soil to tenderness, Or fences leap the gorge and grip the ledge. A man is one more shadow here, to press Against the stone or face across the edge Infinity that answers — if he calls — With echoes hurled back by a thousand walls. An Unrepentant Naturalist Montaigne. By Andre Gide. Translated by Stephen H. Guest and Trevor E. Blewitt. Horace Liveright. Autographed Limited Edition. $5. I FIND the style and structure of this volume irritating. The reaction in France against the grace and fluency of Anatole France and his school has gone in some instances to absurd lengths, and leading French writers seem now to be seeking a reputation for depth and subtlety by the process of endlessly qualifying their sentences, ripping them open and stuff- ing them full of involved parentheses. I offer a brief example from M. Gide's present essay: One of the most surprising passages in Montaigne is that wherein, after having defended himself against the accusation of obscurity (an accusation doubtless leveled in his day against any writer who broke with conventional sentiment by attempting a stricter sincerity) and protested against the insupportable confounding of obscurity with depth that already certain "precious" writers were de- lighting in ("they will conclude the mystery and depth of my sense by the obscuritie" III, 245), he declares: "which" (obscurity) "I hate" (subsequently he added "extreemely") "and would shun if I could disguise myselfe" (later on he substituted "avoide myselfe"). M. Gide is not satisfied with wedging these qualifications and parentheses into nearly all his sentences; he sprinkles them with asterisks that refer us to notes in the back, and the notes are frequently further modifications. He is capable of writing, for example, that Goethe is superior to Montaigne by virtue of his "interior demon," then of referring us to a note in the appendix in which he finds that "on maturer considera- tion, this remark about Goethe no longer seems to me quite justified" — and so on. I hope I am not too naive in asking why, in that case, he did not alter his original remark. The irritation produced by all this is aggravated by sev- eral other factors. The book puts forward no clear single thesis, moves in no particular direction, and has no conti- nuity or flow. It is simply a series of footnotes, often not more than a page or two in length, on various passages from Montaigne. The notes are separated by blank lines, and strung along apparently in random fashion. The general effect is almost as if M. Gide had once planned a substantial book on Montaigne, had begun taking notes on it, and then, despair- ing of ever being able to weave them into an integral whole, had simply sent them off to the printer as they were. Add further that the translators, in transcribing the pas- sages from Montaigne, have used the Florio translation. Now Florio has a salty Elizabethan flavor of his own, but he is not very accurate (he made such elementary blunders, for ex- ample, as translating poisson into poison), and it is often with difficulty that one finds one's way through his antiquated syntax and diction. The result is that many of the quotations as they stand are unintelligible, particularly as they are torn out of their explanatory context; and one is forced to turn either directly to the Florio or to the admirable modern trans- lation of Trechmann to squeeze the meaning out of them. I need hardly say that as a result of all this M. Gide's book lacks the independent charm that first-rate criticism ought to have; one cannot enjoy it for its own sake in the way that one can the essays on Montaigne by Emerson and Sainte- Beuve. M. Gide thinks that Montaigne would forgive him "for treating him in the desultory fashion that is his own," but there is a vast difference between the desultoriness of Mon- taigne and that of his critic. Montaigne's writing, indeed, has the informality of conversation, but few writers carry you along so swiftly and easily as he does; his transitions and digres- sions, too, are as natural as those of fine talk. In M. Gide's present volume there are no transitions; the reader is simply bumped abruptly from one idea to the next. Taken separately, however, M. Gide's observations are remarkably just and shrewd, and, in the end, rather thorough. Few comments are happier than that in which Gide regrets Montaigne's death a few years before the appearance of "Don Quixote" : "The book was written for him. ... It was at the expense of Don Quixote that, little by little, Sancho Panza came to great stature in him." And the concluding section of Part I is so admirable that I cannot forbear quoting it at length : To those who may accuse me of presenting Mon- taigne's ideas edge foremost I would reply that too many of his commentators have busied themselves with supplying buttons for his foils. . . . The chief preoccupation of the pundits, in the face of daring authors who nevertheless have become classics, is to make them inoffensive. The mere passage of time works also, admirably, and quite nat- urally, toward this end. After a brief interval it is as if the blade of new thought had become blunt; familiarity allows us to handle it without fear of being wounded. One more point, which M. Gide merely hints at in pass- ing, but which, in view of the present vogue of humanism, is worth explicit statement. Montaigne, a century and a half before Rousseau came into the world, and when even Francis Bacon was no more than an infant, was already a confirmed "naturalist." The passages in which he reveals this are too numerous for quotation. I confine myself to three : Philosophy appears to me very childish when she rides the high horse, and preaches to us that it is a barbarous alliance to marry the divine with the earthly . . . that sensual pleasure is a brutish thing, unworthy to be enjoyed by the sage. . . . Nature has, with motherly care, observed this rule, that the actions she has laid upon us for our need should give us pleasure; and she invites us to them, not only through our reason, but through our desire. It is wrong to infringe her rules. As I have said elsewhere, I have for my part adopted, very simply and crudely, this ancient rule, "that we cannot go wrong if we follow Nature," and that the sovereign precept is "to conform to her."

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366 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 These sentiments, no doubt, are somewhat embarrassing to Mr. Babbitt's theory that all such heresy stems from Rousseau, but it is rather late for anything to be done about it. Henry Hazlitt Froude Rehabilitated Froude and Carlyle: A Study of the Froude-Carlyle Contro- versy. By Waldo H. Dunn. Longmans, Green and Com- pany. $5. IT is idle to regret that there ever was any quarrel over Froude's handling of the Carlyle documents and his per- sonal portrait of Carlyle. The controversy, which still per- sists after fifty years, had the good effect of bringing out all the facts, however muddled by useless bickerings and adventitious and irrelevant interests. Now Professor Dunn seems to have settled the main questions once and for all in a volume which is a model of scholarship in its careful examination of evidence and its clear, dispassionate interpretation of the evidence. Though in the nature of the case some of the details are vexa- tiously minute, they are all essential, and the whole book can be read with pleasure both by those who are especially inter- ested in Carlyle and by those who have only a general liking for any good specimen of biographical study. A brief review cannot even hint a summary of this complicated matter, the in- volvements of which are due primarily to the perplexing, many- sided Carlyle, the scarcely less multiple character of his wife, and the intricate difficulties of the task which Carlyle placed upon the shoulders of Froude. It should be said at once, how- ever, that the upshot of it all is wholly satisfactory so far as the really important persons are concerned, that Thomas and Jane Carlyle and Froude emerge without a serious blemish on their extraordinarily fine characters, that they are seen more clearly than ever as what they indubitably were — salient, admi- rable, remarkable persons. The shortcomings of such persons are noteworthy simply because the persons are in every way note- worthy, because they stand up under temperamental failings and harassments of circumstance by virtue of their superb courage and intellectual power. Two or three persons do not come out altogether well: Carlyle's niece, Mary, who, more than anybody else, started the argument; Mary's husband and cousin, Alexander Carlyle, who naturally carries on his wife's spirit; James Crichton- Browne and David Wilson, to whom the muses seem to have issued no valid license to write biography at all; and, most im- portant of the outside contributors to the stewing caldron, Charles Eliot Norton, who quite honestly got on the wrong side in spite of the plain rebuke administered to him by an inside and loyal authority, Ruskin. Norton's eminence gave great weight to his opinions, which were unfavorable to Froude and prevailed unquestioned among American students who were brought up to regard Norton as the grand old man of Harvard. Younger instructors under Norton's influence taught us that Froude had blackened his master and that Norton had come to the rescue, corrected Froude's editing, removed the smirches, and cleaned everything up beautifully. This simply never hap- pened, because Froude never blackened Carlyle, never misrep- resented him, was never guilty of anything but minor inaccu- racies which no more disfigure his magnificent portrait than a speck of dust on a great painting, never underpraised Thomas or overpraised Jane, never did anything but adore and celebrate his hero and his heroine, but like the honest man and excellent artist that he was, drew them in the spirit of Cromwell's in- junction to the portrait painter, "wart and all." When, in accordance with the unequivocal and complete discretion given to Froude by Carlyle and confirmed by many years of intimate association and discussion, Froude pub- lished the "Reminiscences," Mary Carlyle immediately, in let- ters to the Times and the Daily Telegraph, accused him of having published the book against her uncle's wishes. This was a false charge, by any reasonable interpretation of Carlyle's written will or of Froude's understanding of his master's spoken instructions. The young lady wanted the commercially valuable literary remains of Carlyle for herself, and that was all that really ailed her. But she was not the only mischief- maker. For years Froude's other work had entangled him in controversy, and his enemies were lying in wait for him. Here was a chance to strike him and discredit him. But they made a mistake. Froude was legally right and morally right, and though he was very patient he was a good fighter and naturally sensitive when his honor and good faith were attacked. He left with his children, to defend his reputation after his death, the pamphlet "My Relations with Carlyle," which the Froudes published in 1903 (Froude died in 1894). The pamphlet revealed what hitherto Froude had deli- cately suppressed, that Carlyle once in a fit of violence had left "blue marks" on Jane's wrists, and that, as the inner circle of the Carlyle acquaintance already knew, Carlyle was sexually incapable. This set going a fresh controversy, in medical and 'lay journals, as to Mrs. Carlyle's condition and physical com- petence. The net conclusion from that discussion is that the.se two passionate, high-strung people were not ultimately happy together, and that they went through a nerve-racking experience for many years with great bravery and undeviating devotion to their ideas of duty. They were largely saved, no doubt, by their infallible pawky humor. Perhaps between them they had too much genius for one small house to hold. But the genius was there, and that is what really matters for literature. Something else matters immensely, the genius of Froude, who has given us one of the supreme masterpieces of literary biog- raphy, rivaled only by Boswell's "Johnson," Lockhart's "Scott," and Forster's "Dickens." Something may still be added to our understanding of Carlyle, but no biography can supersede Froude's. Professor Dunn says: "On the foundation of Froude's work there will some day be constructed a short and properly proportioned interpretation of Carlyle." Well, who in the world is better qualified to write it than Professor Dunn himself? John Macy Why We Fought Why We Fought. By C. Hartley Grattan. The Vanguard Press. $3.50. IN the front of this book the author quotes Randolph Bourne as saying: "There is work to be- done to prevent this war of ours from passing into mythology as a holy crusade." Mr. Grattan here does his part of the job with competence and spirit. He deals with the propaganda, the economics, and the diplomacy that sent us into the war with Germany. The effect is terrifying — terrifying because of its revelations of the weak- ness of a democracy whose virtue can be so readily taken by such clumsy suitors as the Allies and their friends this side the water. To be sure, it was no great trick for the jingoes, as Mr. Grattan abundantly proves, to win over such incorrigible Anglo- philes as Walter Hines Page and Colonel E. M. House. Our Ambassador to Great Britain and Mr. Wilson's Man Friday both show themselves to have been as easy pickings for the Allied diplomats prior to our entrance into the war as was Mr. Wilson "at Versailles. Even little Jimmy Gerard (perhaps it was his Tammany training) comes off better than these in- flated two. And Bryan, by comparison, was the stern realist.

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 367 About Haiti. THE MAGIC ISLAND William B. Seabrook Here is the book which, besides being one of the most exciting and entertaining books in print, is also the most thorough modern work on Haiti. Mr. Seabrook knew Presi- dent Borno, Mr. and Mrs. Russell, Chauvet and all the other personalities figuring in the current news. The intimate friend of both Marines and natives, his unbiased but extremely revealing discussion of the Haiti situation should be read by everyone who professes an opinion on the relations between the U. S. and her dependents. $3.50 New Fiction FREE by Blair Mies A NEW ECONOMIC ORDER edited by Kirby Page Out of the four great movements of our time the new economic order must emerge. This work contains, in addition to many other equally significant essays, the follow- ing discussions, pro and con : Capitalism: For, E. R. A. Seligman; Against, H. R. Mussey. Fascism: For, Angelo Flavio Guidi; Against, W. Y. Eliott. Communism: For, Anna Rochester; Against, Jerome Davis. Socialism: For, Norman Thomas; Against, J. E. Edgerton. Mr. Page is editor of The World Tomorrow. $3.00 By the author of "Condemned," — a novel about Stephen, the young French ex-convict, "free" to die in exile in French Guiana. $2.50 THE AGE FOR LOVE Ernest Pascal Jean Hurd worked for fun and married for love . . . and her story touches with dramatic intensity all the conflicting prob- lems of an intelligent modern girl. By the author of "The Marriage Bed." $2.50 THE DEVIL'S BOOTH Percival Wilde Molly May Millen, born" in the slums, bat- tered down the last strongholds of the up- per-class nineties by sheer nerve and a pas- sionate genius for respectability. $2.50 NONE SO PRETTY Margaret Irwin Winner of the historical novel prize contest judged by E. M. Forster, Professor George Gordon and R. H. Mottram. By the au- thor of "Fire Down Below." $2.50 YOUTH IN REVOLT Shmarya Levin Like "Childhood in Exile," this second volume of the autobiography of the great Jewish leader is history, panorama and bio- graphy joined in an unforgettable story. $3.50 THE PROVING OF PSYCHE Hugh V Anson Faussett In opposition to a new humanism. "The first thorough critical examination of the doctrines of Mr. Irving Babbitt," says /. Middleton Murry in Books of the Quarter. $3.50 CROWD YOUR LUCK ON DEATH Harry Kapustin "A powerful sincerity, a passionate force, impregnate these stories," says the Philadel- phia Record. This is a new man. We advise you to try him. $2.50 THE HOAX by Italo Svevo "The most charming bit of prose composition it has been my pleasure to read in months," says William Soskin in the N. Y. Post. $2.00 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, 383 MADISON AVE., NEW YORK When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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368 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 But what happened to 100,000,000 people, irritated perhaps but by no means in a hot fighting mood, between November 7, 1916, when they reelected Wilson because "he kept us out of war" and April 6, 1917, when they cheered Wilson because he put us in? Mr. Grattan's book is more a masterly compilation of the "revisionist" documents and the post-war memoirs than any new contribution to the perplexed matter of our amazing war entrance. It serves the useful purpose of reminding us once more that democracy's Achilles's heel is its foreign relations; and that any little group of weak and wilful men, uninformed and irresponsible to a real public desire, can set the war drums beating at the command of that powerful minority which likes its music martial. McAlister Coleman From the French "— C5? Co." By Jean-Richard Bloch. Translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. With an Introduction by Romain Rol- land. Simon and Schuster. $3. "N a somewhat windy introduction to this very interesting novel Romain Rolland compares it to the work of Balzac. If one is thinking of style, the comparison is inept enough, since the tales of Balzac belong, despite all his grandiose ideas concerning the possibilities of fiction, to the careless youth of the art when one aimed high, wrote fast, and trusted that any defects of structural detail would be forgotten amidst the rush of creative energy; whereas Jean-Richard Bloch composes words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters with all the meticulous care of a man who knows that his later compatriots from Flaubert to Gide have delighted to scan a novel as narrowly as though it were a lyric. But if, on the other hand, one is thinking not of style but of theme, then the comparison is not unfitting, for " — & Co." is con- cerned with Balzac's favorite subject, which is money, and tells a Balzacian tale of a Jewish family mastered and de- stroyed by its love of honest gain. The Simlers, weavers of Alsace, fled from their native province when it was annexed by the Prussians. They settled farther south, beginning again from the beginning, and continu- ing with dogged perseverance until they alone survived in the region, while their more graceful and easy-going neighbors went down one by one in an -industrial upheaval. But their success — if success it was — was made possible only by the fact that they allowed themselves to become merely the creatures of the mill, which became in its turn the one justification of their exist- ence. They were Jews with all a Jew's fidelity to the traditions of his race, but these very traditions lent themselves to the habits of which they were the victims. Family loyalty expressed itself as loyalty to the company which had absorbed the family, and the individual's obligation to sacrifice himself to duty meant primarily that the individual must sacrifice himself to that group prosperity which it was one's chief duty to maintain. Alone in a Catholic society, the Simlers were equally un- touched by the contempt with which they were first received and the respect which their success earned them, for despite the fact that they thought themselves too French to remain in a conquered province they permitted themselves little com- munity with any group except their own. Once a year their factory, whose wheels on no other occasion could stop, ceased turning on the day of their religious holiday. Once a year the Simlers, with shawls about their shoulders, passed twenty-four hours in fasting and prayer. Yet even the son did not know what the father believed, for religion itself had no implications outside the circle of interests bounded by the walls of the mill, and it meant only that once a year one must tell God that He was somehow the reason why one sacrificed everything to the institution which, by being handed down from father to son, had become the sacred trust of every Simler. One member of the family escapes — runs away to America and returns years later with fabulous tales of more efficient factories. But he is the only one who can do so, and he has earned the reproof which is so quietly expressed because it seems to the man who utters it so crushingly unanswerable: He has run away. I call that cowardice. We have no right, Chosef, no right. There are certain things which we do not leave behind us, like an empty barrel: the busi- ness to which we have pledged ourselves and which bears our name, our parents, wife, children. We are all bound up with what we have done, and today is bound up with yesterday and tomorrow, and so on, like . . . the links in a chain. He thought he was setting himself free. He will live and learn. . . . And that was forbidden him, to him more than to anyone. Bloch's style, self-conscious to the last degree, occasionally forgets such admirable simplicity as this and falls into the strained, over-intense metaphors which are the characteristic defects of the writer too anxious to keep the emotional tension through every paragraph — as it does, for example, in a passage like the following, which is, after all, merely intended to describe a hot day: "The white heat of two o'clock in the afternoon is as vertical as a flagstaff. The cry of the grasshoppers shoots its shrill points up at the sky and supports the motionless weight of the zenith. The firmament opens with the colorless misery of a blind man's eyeball." But there is no denying either the extraordinary effectiveness of the novel as a whole or the striking fashion in which it illustrates the possible effectiveness of the intellectualist treatment of the passions. Bloch, him- self a Jew, has succeeded in two remarkable feats: in the first place he has comprehended through the mind the tradition which he has set out to record, and in the second place he has managed to record it in a manner which communicates the emo- tion without ever ceasing to seem in itself calm, detached, and almost cold. The passion of the Simlers is real, stupendous, and, because of its intensity, almost nobk, but it has come to one through the understanding alone. Joseph Wood Krutch Bland Futility John Merrill's Pleasant Life. By Alice Beal Parsons. E. P. Dutton and Company. $2.50. MRS. PARSONS is above all else intelligent, and she demands intelligence in return from her readers. For a novelist this is probably a limitation. I confess to reading to the very end of her latest book and then being obliged to turn back to the title before I thought I knew what the story was about. Mrs. Parsons disdains signposts along the way. She will not say: "This is a novel about love or about ambition or about ingratitude." She merely tells her tale quietly, competently, matter-of-factly. You must take it or leave it; you may understand it or bepuzzled by it; be moved or left cold — Mrs. Parsons refuses to help you out. But I believe this is the story of John Merrill upon whom the im- pacts of experience made no mark; who was either so hard as to be impervious or so soft as to be completely resilient to the stings of unrequited love, to the boredom of a stupid, nag- ging wife, to whatever pangs of conscience might result from ingratitude to his benefactor and unfaithfulness to his wife. Things happen to John Merrill: he is in love with a heartless flirt who jilts him time and again; he marries a lovely, dumb girl who can offer him no companionship except that of the

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 369 It Is Not Mere Chance When a magazine more than doubles its circulation in a few years, it is not a matter of luck. It simply proves that modern minded readers have come to depend upon HARPERS MAGAZINE because of its dauntless honesty, its lively variety, and the unfailing importance of its contributors and the subjects they write about. Features in the April Number Are: Two Unpopular Laws of Nature We try to ignore the law that returns increase up to a certain point, and then decrease; also the law that when too many people strive after the same good, that good disappears. In "Diminishing Returns in Modern Life," James Truslow Adams shows the inexorable working of both laws in our social and political life. "Booze in Business" Big Business, according to the Drys, is back of Prohibition solidly. Jesse Rainsford Sprague explains that many firms do not allow these principles to blind them to the obvious advantages of the use of Scotch and gin in making sales. Are the French Immoral? Mary Borden, wise and witty woman of the world, ex- plains in her "Defense of French Morals" a code that is based on common sense, that protects the community, that recognizes only one unit — the family, that is rigorously observed, and that actually works. "The Mad Hatter's Dirty Tea Cup" You may not realize that our country which boasts of 18 million bath tubs has the dirtiest streets and parks in the world, that it abandons on its country roads 2 million wrecks of automobiles yearly, and poisons its rivers with waste. Stuart Chase tells you why. For a short time, we are making a special introductory offer to new sub- scribers of 6 months for only $1.00. We think it only fair to warn you that once you acquire the habit of reading Harpers Magazine, you will find it next to impossible to break. MAQAZINJE cW volixtu special - iMTt^oDijcrroiOjf * OFFen HARPERS MAGAZINE 49 East 33rd Street I am enclosing one dollar for your six months offer to new subscribers. Name Address NM New York City W hen writing to odvertiterj pleate mention The Nation

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370 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 Count Keyserling and Sour Grapes In ROMANCE OF THE MACHINE (Ji.oo) Michael Pupin answers the European as- persions of our mechanical prowess. The Gallo w's Shadow Lengthens IT'S NEVER OVER ($2.50) for those who were close to an executed murderer, Morley Callaghan shows in a novel of insight. Science ^Vill Expand Our Future Robert A. Millikan, the world-known physi- cist, predicts the future in SCIENCE AND THE NEW CIVILIZATION ($2.00). 1916 Praised It: 1930 Buys It THE MAN OF PROMISE ($2.50), just re- issued, is coming into its own. It's by Willard Huntington Wright. Days of Creation Revisited John C. Merriam turns geologic discoveries in California into THE LIVING PAST ($2.00). bed, which she withholds whenever she is offended at some trifle or other; he is offered a career and a fortune by a rich eccentric who, without an heir, is in search of someone to suc- ceed him in his business. All these things John Merrill lives through, and at the end he is the same slightly bald, smooth- faced, smooth-minded, rather dull man he was when he started. He accepts good fortune as easily as he shakes off bad. He is, in a sense, without pride. He lives a day at a time; he is some- times miserable, but as a child is miserable, because something he wants very badly is denied him. After a while he contents himself with wanting something else. As in Mrs. Parsons's earlier novel, "The Insider," here is a clearly recognizable aspect of the American scene. Ma- terial success, a kind of literacy but no real intellectual attain- ments, an easy assimilation of what is the correct mode in literature as in house furnishings, emotions that are quick enough to respond to stimulus but that are fundamentally with- out passion, above all, a complete absence of generosity — not the easy generosity of giving away what you do not especially want, but the generosity of a free-flowing spirit. I think of John Merrill as a sort of snail, snug in the shell that his lack of imagination made of the world. He is completely protected — from pain and from joy. Mrs. Parsons has made him thor- oughly convincing. Incidentally she has drawn extraordinarily clear portraits of three women: Anne, who could be ardent only when her lover was not near her; Mrs. Daggett, whose "being seemed relaxed and open," all of whose "nerves were untied"; and Mary, Merrill's wife, eager, trivial, manually competent, and quite without a mind. But these are only parts of John Merrill's pleasant life. Mrs. Parsons has told it with irony, with clarity — and without pity. The result may be a book that moves the mind more than the heart, but it is a book worth reading in spite of that. Dorothy Van Doren Incest, Pride, and Infanticide Andre Chamson portrays this sequence of terrible moods in a novel of powerful sim- plicity, THE CRIME OF THE JUST ($2.00). u And the Waters Prevailed — ft Over UR OF THE CHALDEES ($2.50), City of Abraham, but C. Leonard Woolley recreates it in this narrative. Mistresses Are Lilce Books Said BRAWNY WYCHERLEY ($3.00), courtier, wit, and playwright, whose biog- raphy has just been written by Willard Con- nely. The Blight That Failed MRS. EDDY: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A VIRGINAL MIND (new popular edition, $2.00), by Edwin Franden Dakin, has survived the attempted suppression. Write for 16-page pamphlet describing the Christian Science fight against it. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York City The Pueblo Artist The Pueblo Potter. By Ruth L. Bunzel. Columbia Univer- sity Press. $10. THIS is one of an increasing number of books which excite question. What, in the flood of publications designed to interest the reader anxious for information and dubious of technical patter, is the moral responsibility of the publisher who puts a book forth under titles and descriptions which have little relation to its real worth? Here is a volume presented by a title with a misleading finality and a descriptive misrepre- sentation which by disappointing the expectation of the reader might do great injustice to the writer. Miss Bunzel's book is modestly written, and every item of its information carefully accounted for, but it is by no means an exhaustive study of the subject, nor even the fruit of a two years' contact as the publisher advertises. The author, by her own account, spent two summers in the pueblo country, mainly at the three pueblos of Zufii, Acoma, and San Ildefonso, and at the Hopi group. She has also read widely on the subject, and for this prepara- tion, her material is creditable in amount and interestingly set down. It is, indeed, excellent as far as it goes. Probably nothing will have to be retracted even in view of the great mass of material on the subject soon to burst upon the reading world. I question the dates of several of the pots selected for illustration, but that is a minor detail. Had the work been put forth as a short modern contact with a few of the existing pueblos, from which two of the most interesting are omitted — Sia, almost as rich as Zufii in design, and Cochiti, unique among the more than two score villages — there would have been little to criticize. This is undoubtedly the way a few potters in a few pueblos are making and decorating pots. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 371 The fact is that the Amerind tribesman cannot compe- tently be studied in any one aspect of his close-woven life without more than a little knowledge of some of the others. Many of the questions as to the source and implications of de- signs, which Miss Bunzel frankly admits her inability to answer, never can be answered without reference to the earlier art of Amerind poetry. If, for instance, it had occurred to her to ask of those designers who told her that they "dreamed" their pat- terns whether they dreamed them asleep or awake, she might have put her hand upon the key, for to the Indian a dream- vision or "dream-seeing," as I have heard them call it, is in reality the result of that intense inner concentration known to all creative artists. In the primitive it comes closer to genuine sleep- dreaming than with us, but it is the state of mind in which the outer consciousness becomes momentarily receptive to the inner activity from which all art proceeds. Miss Bunzel notes that what an Indian calls a design is not what we call a design, but she fails to realize that it is, in fact, a figure of speech. Familiarity with the poetry of the pueblenos would have supplied her with explicit phrasing of what her informants tried to give in prose. I suggest that the reader compare the following quotations with the descriptions of pottery designs such as she records. The quotations are from rain songs. "Let the sky be covered with clouds as the earth with flowers." "White blossom-clouds." "Dark cloud, over the waiting corn, let the rain down." This is merely by way of suggesting the treasures of Indian thought which escape the most conscientious student who attempts to unlock them with only one key. Or a knowl- edge of sign-writing might have cleared up Miss Bunzel's con- fusion as to the distinctions between expressive design and symbolic pattern as these appear on ceremonial objects. Or again, the realization that the paucity of significance in design which she reports from Acoma corresponds to a like meager- ness of poetic content in their songs might have suggested that Acoma is the point at which to begin a study of design sepa- rating itself from ideation and continuing on its own. It is the lack of this wider acquaintance with the way of art in the Indian mind that makes Miss Bunzel's concluding chapter less valuable than the preceding descriptive matter. One feels that much of it might have been written from the stereotypes about primitive art in the general mind without reference to the pueblos. One wishes, indeed, that the tech- nical student would refrain from attempted explanations of art processes in any medium. What Miss Bunzel saw and handled and heard has the stamp of authenticity. What she infers and concludes lacks the validity of the completed inquiry. Mary Austin HARPER SUCCESSES A Cattleman's Life Story Dal- A Vaquero of the Brush Country. By J. Frank Dobie. las: The Southwest Press. $3.50. JOHN YOUNG, the veteran cattleman, tells the story of his life, and Mr. Dobie, with a practiced hand, puts it into form. It is a story of the Texas cattle country from the days of the open range to the days of barbed-wire inclosures, and it brings in adventures with Indians, cattle thieves, horse thieves, and all-round bad men. It is, however, something more than a biography, for into the personal reminiscence has been skilfully woven a historical sketch of the period, with much description and other informative material. Young's venturesome spirit once led him into close contact with Billy the Kid. It is a common-sense appraisal that is here made of the man. For all the romantic yarns that have been STEPHEN ESCOTT By Ludwig Lewjsohn. Author of The Island Within. "The greatest thing in the world is the theme . . . Love. ... A creation of vital charac- ters, a highly important story, distinguished prose and probably Lewisohn's best book." — The New York Telegram $2.50. THE 42nd PARALLEL By John Dos Passos. A brilliant novel that cuts to the core of American life. "Dos Passos may be, more than any other, the father of humanized and living fiction — not merely for America, but for the world." — Sinclair Lewis. $2.50 PURE GOLD By O. E. Rolvaag. Again the author of Giants in the Earth sets a heart-rending story against the background of the inexorable prairie. "Vividly unfolded and carried to a climax that is as humanly ironic as it is dramatically bold." — New York Times. 5th printing. $2.50 MATA HARI By Major Thomas Coulson. The incredible and almost legendary dancer, courtesan, and spy whose lovers numbered cabinet ministers and Gen- erals, who sent 50,000 men to their death. The true story of this mystery woman of the war told for the first time by a man who was in the British Intelligence Service. $3.50 ENGLAND: Its character and genius By Wilhelm Dibelius. Written from the point of view of an intelligent, deep-thinking German, this is political, economic and social history, a scien- tific interpretation of one national aspect of world civilization. "Comparable to Bryce's great book on the American Commonwealth." — Abraham Flexner. $5.00 CHRISTINE And Other Stories By Julian Green. Four stories by the author of The Dark Journey and The Closed Garden that lead you into the weird lands of the occult and supernat- ural. Here, once again, is the sure touch of genius, the vivid psychological realism which have made Julian Green famous. $2.50 Funniest By JAMES THURBER and E. B. WHITE When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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372 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 Are You World-Conscious? Just Published! Two Important New Books — Each by a Recognized Authority NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM By Herbert Adams Gibbons This human and understanding book makes the reader sure of his ground in discussing the growth of nationalism, and with it internationalism. $2.50 A WORLD COMMUNITY By John Herman Bandall A clear, timely, and readable book on the "su- preme task of the 20th century" — showing just what factors are awakening the international mind. $2.50 The first tivo volumes in the "World Unity Library," dealing -with international movements and trends of vital importance. Buy your books of your bookseller 443 4th Ave. Frederick A. Stokes Company New York JUST OUT! THE TRUTH AT LAST! The True and COMPLETE Story off the ten years' persecution of MARY WARE DENNETT WHO'S OBSCENE ■ MARY WARE DENNETT This book contains the pamphlet, THE SEX SIDE OF LIFE, for which Mrs. Dennett was convicted. Her conviction has been reversed by the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, but the govern- ment has announced its intention of car- rying the case to the United States Supreme Court. For months to come this book will be the focus of an acute controversy. 52.50 At Bookstores THE VANGUARD PRESS, 100 Fifth Avenue, New York City When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation spun about him, Young portrays him as a professional cheat, gambler, thief, and gunman, without loyalty to his friends and without respect for any of the decencies of life. The cattleman had many thrilling encounters with bad men, and one may well believe in the aptness of the tribute paid him by George W. Saunders, president of the Old Time Trail Drivers' Associa- tion, that he "would charge hell with a bucket of water." But there is no vaunting in the recital, and some of the incidents of his courage the author-editor has had to get from other men. One may doubt if any more intimate and authentic depic- tion of the range has ever been given. Certainly there is nothing on the subject more delightfully written, or more hand- somely put into print. W. J. Ghent When News Was Young Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England, 1476-1622. By Matthias A. Shaaber. University of Pennsylvania Press. $4. MR. SHAABER has shown much enterprise in examining a deal of dull matter, along with some that is sensa- tional, to demonstrate how the people of England sat- isfied their curiosity for news in the one hundred and fifty years after the introduction of the printing-press. The term "news- paper" does not occur until after the Restoration, and what is usually set down as the first newspaper, a weekly which ap- peared irregularly in the decade 1622-32, was in reality a pamphlet known in those days as a "newsbook." It was almost entirely a translation of news reports from abroad. As the author himself, toward the end of his volume, says: We have now arrived at the grand anticlimax of the early history of journalism in England — all the printed news discussed above had nothing to do, directly, with the origin or form of the first newspaper. Indirectly it doubt- less did much to prepare the way by creating a body of news-readers and, more importantly, by leading certain publishers into the purveying of news as a specialty of their trade. But the first English newspaper was . . . not a native growth; its ancestors were the same as those of the earliest Continental periodicals. In his survey of all this antecedent matter Mr. Shaaber examines official proclamations and state papers, political and religious propaganda, official accounts of wars and rebellions, ballads and broadsides and the like. The most spirited chap- ter has to do with popular news, which usually in ballad form described the doings at court, murders and other crimes, miracles, prodigies, and wonders, monstrous births and strange beasts, witchcraft, the plague, and acts of God such as flood and fire and the weather — all accompanied by much moralizing. Murders, then as now, excited enormous interest, that of Sir Thomas Overbury, friend of Ben Jonson, the most celebrated case, calling forth reams of wild accounts. Of all this ma- terial it can only be said that it created an appetite for news among the people and gradually showed the publishers where a great opportunity lay. In a final chapter Mr. Shaaber discloses the fact that something like a systematic publication of the news, at least of foreign news, had for a long time been going on in the Neth- erlands and in Germany. Budgets embracing a year, a half- year, or a month had been appearing from early in the six- teenth century. But in both countries there were also com- pilations dealing with much shorter periods, usually not more than a week, and often appearing on a single sheet; in these, rather than in any of the other documents discussed in the preceding chapters, he finds the direct progenitor of the news- paper. These Continental "corantoes," as the smaller budgets

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 373 were called, were translated into English from 1590 on, and six corantoes originating in England appeared in 1621. They differ not a little from the newsbooks to which the genesis of the newspaper has usually been ascribed. "The earmarks of the coranto are a colorless, matter-of-fact tone and the arrangement of the news under rubrics indicating the place and date of origin ('From Venice, the 13. of Ianuarie')." With some of the groundwork thus done, the newspaper might have made steady progress in England except for the disturbances caused by the approaching civil wars. Harold de Wolf Fuller Books in Brief Cardinal Newman. By J. Lewis May. The Dial Press. $3.50. Inasmuch as Cardinal Newman recognized with unusual clarity the direction in which the nineteenth century was moving and was less deceived than his contemporaries by the generali- zations of liberalism and the blithe efforts to reconcile science and religion, there might be considerable value in a reconsidera- tion of his writings. Mr. May, however, has failed to bring out the importance of Newman's thought and he has been only moderately successful in the presentation of his character. Moreover, Mr. May deprives us of whatever pleasure there might be in reading his book by introducing irrelevant and platitudinous discourses, by dotting his pages with back-of-the- dictionary Latin, by ostentatiously representing himself as a profound student of artistic prose, by betraying a partisan spirit, and by repeating sage reflections and favored phrases. Cardinal Newman still remains available if anyone cares to write an interpretative study of a major Victorian prophet. The Revolt of the Fishermen. By Anna Seghers. Translated from the German by Margaret Goldsmith. Longmans, Green and Company. $2. Frau Segher's short novel of a young agitator who tries to organize the fishermen of Saint Barbara and fails is a story of the broadest realism conveyed in the simplest, briefest language. The effect is one of hushed restraint. The luminous bits of color in the setting and in the strife are quiet and not garish, and this gentleness of style strangely intensifies our sense of the desperation of the inarticulate peasants. The book has many elements of greatness — firm character studies, fine narration, and a sentiment of beauty — but it lacks a special time element which would bring it closer to common experience, make it applicable, as the theme warrants, to human experience in gen- eral. A sense of remoteness dulls the force of the picture. Three Strange Lovers. By V. F. Calverton. The Macaulay Company. $2.50. The apparent simplicity of these three stories rather dis- arms one's critical estimate of them. One reads easily, almost fluently, through experiences which seem increasingly "strange" and which are certainly not simple at all. The various mani- festations of love which Calverton examines would be well worth the talents, in one respect, of, say, a Dostoevski and, in another, a Schnitzler. They are stories that require the great- est subtlety of understanding and expression to be successful; they are concerned not only with love but with religion and with various kinks of psychology that are thoroughly abnormal. If Calverton's stories are not wholly satisfactory, the fault lies in their execution rather than their conception — the last story is particularly well planned and dramatically effective. One feels in all of them an acute, highly sensitive intelligence and a fertile imagination at work upon the material. However, one does not feel the pulsing fulness of creation which calls SCHOOL REVENUE By Henry G. Morrison An educator who is also an economist and a philoso- pher writes a searching criticism of present sources of school money and presents a program for putting the school on an economic basis. $2-5° The Americanization of CARL SCHURZ By Chester V. Easum The only intensive account of this brilliant man's important first decade in America. $3-5° CHICAGO An Experiment in Social Science Research Edited by T. V. Smith and Leonard D. White A record of five years of intensive study of some as- pects of urban life in Chicago and its region. $3-00 The Dissolution of the HAPSBURG MONARCHY By Oscar Jaszi "No student of Central European affairs should fail to read the book which shows unusual grasp and exceptional breadth of view." — Foreign Affairs. $3.00 MAKING FASCISTS By Herbert W. Schneider and Shepard B. Clough ". . . . presents with simple directness the precise results of a personal study of the workings of the schools, the press, the army and other instruments of 'making Fascists.' " — New York Evening Post. $3.00 The University of Chicago Press 5807 Ellis Avenue Chicago When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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374 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 Just Published Social Control ^ ^ OF THE Mentally Deficient By STANLEY P. DAVIES, Ph.D., State Charities Aid Association. 408 pages and 12 illustrations. Dr. William A. White says: "An invaluable summing up of the feeble-minded situation. . . . It is a book that no one interested in the sub- ject can afford to be without." Dr. Frankwood E. Williams calls it "a book that is of more value for the student of the social aspects of mental deficiency than any other book I know." Professor Harry Elmer Barnes says: "by far the best manual on the subject of feeble-minded- ness which has appeared in the English language. It can be safely designated as the standard textbook in the field." PRICE $3.00 Thomas Y. Crowell Company Publishers 393 Fourth Avenue, New York An Imperative Book! ORPHEUS A History of Religions By SALOMON REINACH Author of Apollo, etc.. It must be read; it must be owned; it be- longs next to The Story of Philosophy and The Story of Mankind on your shelves. "The fairest analysis we have read of the mightiest search mankind ever under- took."—F. F. V., N. Y. Evening Post. Just Published $5.00 HORACE- LIVERIGHT NY. GOOD BOOKS w HEN changing your address for the summer, please be sure to send your old as well as your new address , and allow about two weeks for the change to be made Circulation Dept., THE NATION , 20 Vesey St., N. Y. C. into being rather than describes emotional values. There is, except in the last story, a lack of crystallization in the style, and in all three we stumble upon unintentionally banal expres- sions. Music The Pioneering Playhouse FOR fifteen years the Misses Lewisohn have provided a workshop for talent, and I doubt if it is possible to exag- gerate the creative value of what they have done. Much of this season's dance renaissance might be traced to the doors of the Neighborhood Playhouse, and the organization's recent program of "Symphonic Music with Stage and Orchestra," un- der the direction of Miss Irene Lewisohn and the Cleveland Symphony, proved one of the winter's most significant perform- ances in this field. Like all vital experiments, it was interesting as much for attempt as achievement. If the attempt was to create a single aesthetic whole from the elements of orchestra and dance, it was for me not successful, for reasons too elaborate to be more than touched on here. Both music and dance have so expanded since the remote time when they blended in the archaic Greek orchesis, a single melodic line and a single gesture embodying the same impulse, that the observer can no longer synthesize them. Each has become a full-bodied, autonomous art demand- ing his full response, and he oscillates between them. But if, as the program indicated, the conception was that of symphonic music with the stage as an adjunct, it must be judged differ- ently. Three pieces were given: Loeffler's "Pagan Poem," Ra- baud's "La Procession Nocturne," and Janssen's "New Year's Eve in New York." The last two were unfamiliar to me, but seemed well and sensitively read. Mr. Sokoloff conducted the first with the vigor and finesse that have made this score his finest performance, and with Harold Bauer illuminating the difficult piano part it was a joy to hear. The choreography, worked out upon pyramidal steps leading to an altar, with a chorus of priestesses, and Martha Graham and Charles Weid- man in the leading roles of enchantress and pastoral god, was original, clear, and splendidly executed. It summoned to the eye the mixture of austerity and voluptuousness, the haunting far-off quality, the dramatic intensity of the score. Indeed, there were moments of such startling beauty — the first en- counter of the principals and the ultimate capitulation of the god — that music and movement seemed to flash into one entity, flooding eye and ear as through a new sense. The quiet religious tableau following was less originally conceived, though it would perhaps be difficult to deal otherwise with Rabaud's sweet and insipid music, plaintively misquoting the Liebestod and Morales. As to the third, it seemed to this writer, here venturing humbly upon alien ground, that music and stage rendering were grievously at odds. The undernote of Janssen's powerful score, for all its fox-trots and simulated midnight whistles, is one of spiritual exultation. It is largely abstract, and as modern as its title. Would it not have fared better with a much more sim- ple and stylized staging — something of tilted levels upon which corps of dancers could have symbolized the varying moods of the city and built a climax of masses in motion against sug- gested masses of architecture? Whatever its intent, the setting employed managed to recall, it is to be feared, nothing so much as the pseudo-realism of the old Metropolitan Opera sets, with Kundry suddenly lighted up inside those pasteboard rocks. The chorus of dancers was lost in the obscurity of a street scene; When writing to advertiser* plea** mention The Nation

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 375 D FILMS □ LUNCHEON D BALL □ Greatest Drama Since Dawn of Talkies! — Is New York's Verdict of "Grischa" Herbert Brenon, master director . . . blazer of daring trails . . . crasher of idols . . . arch- enemy of the common-place has brought to the talking screen the most heart-searching drama ever told. More than a great talking picture ... It is the screen's first great drama ! RADIO PICTURES, Presents HERBERT BRENON'S THE CASE OF SERGEANT GRISCHA From ARNOLD ZWEIG'S World read book. With CHESTER MORRIS BETTY COMPSON Jean Hersholt Alec B. Francis Gustav Von Seyffertitz NOW PLAYING! gS*25&£* G CONTINUOUS SI LOBE NO ADVANCE IN THE GLOBE'S POPULAR PRICES CONTINUOUS SHOWS B'way & 46th St. Phone CHIckering 8500 VOTED THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR! Matinees: Good Seats, All Prices, at Box Office WARNER BROS. Present GEORGE ARLISS "DISRAELI" (A Vitaphone All-Talking Picture) CENTRAL THEATRE Broadway and 47th St. Daily 2:45 — 8:45 Sunday 8 — 6 — 8:45 NINTH SATURDAY LUNCHEON of the New York Chapter LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY at the HOTEL, WOODSTOCK 12:45 P.M., Saturday, March 22, 1930 "UNEMPLOYMENT" Speakers : BEL LAH AMIDON, Associate Editor of The Survey Graphic, who has made an investigation this winter of unemployment in industrial centers. HARRY W. EAIDLEB, Executive Director of the L.I.D., who recently published his excellent study of unemployment. SIDNEY HI1XMAN, President of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Chairman: BENJAMIN 8TOLBEEG Make reservations in advance at the office of the L.I.D., 118 East 18th Street, New York City— Algonquin 5865. MEMBERS $1.00 NON-MEMBERS $1.25 Listen in m WEAF l:iS P.M., Eastern Standard Time. G E T Y O U N O w R I C K E T S AT The Civic Club, 18 L.ast 10th Street; IJuulier ot t-me Book Shops, 66 Fifth Avenue; the Rand Book Store, 7 East 15th Street; all Village Shops. Mail and Phone Order* Filled WEVD DEBS MEMORIAL RADIO FUND Dept. A. 45 West 45th St. Bryant 9166 Eoen a fire couldn't etop a* from having a good time! Notice change from Webster Hall to the newly redecorated BEETHOVEN HALL "Within the Fortnight" appears on page 377 RUSSIA from a Car Window by Oswald Garrison Villard All who contemplate reading this eighty-page ac- count by Mr. Villard of his recent tour of Russia should order the booklet now, before the few re- maining copies are sold. The price is 40c a copy. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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376 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3377 A the soloists were cramped for space; and Miss Graham, pinned by a spotlight to an inexplicable platform in mid-air, made what she could, I suppose, of her predicament. Altogether, this ex- periment seemed entirely unsuccessful. But the point is that it was an experiment. Its makers were looking for new concepts, new methods. The mistakes of innovators will always be more apparent than the mouse-like errors of those content to nibble fixed formulas. So will their achievements. The extraordinary freshness and arresting beauty of the "Pagan Poem" amply proved it. Hubbard Hutchinson Drama Miracle PLAY based upon the Bible and profoundly religious in its spirit is one of the biggest hits on Broadway. Nothing could seem more improbable than that, but nothing is, on the other hand, more obviously true, for every scene of "The Green Pastures" (Mansfield Theater) is suffused with a touching piety and (let us join the incongruous facts) seats are already selling many weeks in advance. Marc Con- nelly, to whom the play was suggested by a series of stories in Negro dialect— Roark Bradford's "Of Man Adam and His Chillun" — is the person most immediately responsible for the extraordinary performance, but neither he, the original author, nnr even the fine cast of black actors can claim the largest share of the credit, since the fundamental creative work was done by the anonymous geniuses who composed the spirituals upon which the whole is based. Mr. Connelly and the rest have cooperated with great skill and delicacy; they seem, one and all, to have been gifted with a remarkable imagi- native insight into the mood of the materials at hand; but neither they nor any other white men of the twentieth century could possibly have invented a mythology as rich and simple and satisfying as that which the Negroes evolved when they made the heroes of the Old Testament over into their own image. The corpus of these spirituals constitutes, of course, the finest expression of the religious emotion achieved anywhere since the seventeenth century. That fact has been recognized for some time past, but no one seems to have suspected that it was possible to do more than perform and admire them until the makers of this piece translated the songs into pictorial form and made their ideology as well as their imagery the basis of an epic drama in the course of which a black God creates a world, saves a Noah, and leads the black children of Israel out of their Egyptian bondage. The effect is, moreover, so surpris- ingly fine that I can hardly help feeling that the authors and producers must have been themselves surprised at the perfec- tion of the harmony which they have achieved and at the depth of the emotions aroused. One would expect something gro- tesque at its worst and quaintly charming at its best, but charm is a word in no sense appropriate to anything so deeply moving. The imagination which conceived God in the guise of a Negro preacher, and Gabriel in the guise of an amiable giant fingering his trumpet with nervous eagerness because he is anxious to put an end to the race which profoundly annoys his God, was an imagination so richly concrete as to leave no room for ques- tion, and hence capable of creating a world in which everything seems both inevitable and right. One laughs, of course, but there is no condescension in the laughter, which dies away as quickly as it should and gives place to something describable only as reverent attention. These are not, to be sure, the Bible stories as the ancient Hebrews told them. Here the familiar tales are suffused with the spirit of a gentler race and given the setting, dress, man- ners, and psychology imagined to be appropriate by minds more ardent than instructed in Biblical antiquities. But the result is as genuine as that achieved when the Middle Ages lovingly re- worked the same material, and this Negro version of Christian mythology is the only one now living enough to touch us as "The Green Pastures" does. After all, the true test of faith is its ability to deal intimately with the things which it pro- fesses to believe, and this is the test which the faith of the authors of the spirituals so triumphantly meets. The fact that they saw Moses as a gray-bearded "darky" is the one thing which proves to us that they saw him at all; the fact that they con- ceived of God as a man and of Heaven as a place is the one convincing evidence that they really believed in the existence of either. The delicacy of sophisticated religions, the strange fini- calness which leads theologians to shrink from giving any features to divine personages or any scenery to divine places, is merely the result of a skepticism unwilling to confess that it is forced to doubt anything which it allows itself definitely to conceive; and though such "delicacy" may serve to keep churches open it will not serve as a basis for art — for art must have faith strong enough to embody itself in concrete images. That modern audiences are still capable of feeling — poetically at least — the religious emotions, the enthusiasm aroused by "The Green Pastures" is sufficient to prove, but the Negro mythology may quite possibly be the last thing left which can call them forth, for we certainly cannot generate them for our- selves, and we have long ago worn thin most of the other bodies of legend that have come down to us from a simpler past. I have not read the text of "The Green Pastures," and I do not know how much of its beauty would be evident when detached from the singing of the spirituals (which makes up a part of the performance) and when deprived of the simple dignity lent to the lines by the voices and gestures of a most extraordinary company of actors. I do know, however, that the thing which becomes a living whole on the stage of the Mans- field is one of the most moving creations I have ever seen in the theater. Joseph Wood Krutch Contributors To This Issue Louis Stanley is Garth Fellow in Political Economy at Columbia University and associate editor of the New Leader. Paul Y. Anderson is national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Ralph West Robey is lecturer in banking at the School of Business, Columbia University. Anne Kimball Tuell is professor of English literature at Wellesley College. Glenn Ward Dresbach is the author of a book of verse, "The Wind in the Cedars." John Macy is author of "The Story of the World's Literature." McAlister Coleman, columnist and writer on labor con- ditions, is a contributing editor of the New Leader. Mary Austin is the author of "The American Rhythm" and other volumes. W. J. Ghent is on the staff of the Dictionary of Ameri- can Biography. Harold de Wolf Fuller, former editor of The Nation, is professor of journalism at New York University. Helena Hill Weed is the special representative of The Nation in Haiti.

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 377 THEATRES D D CIVIC REPERTORY 14£&ft£r 50c, $1, $1.60. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2 :30 EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Thurs.,Mat.March 20, "The Open Door" and "The Women Have Their Way." Thurs.Eve., March 20, "The Cradle Song." FriEve.,March 21, "The Living; Corpse." Sat.Mat, March 22, "Peter Pan." Sat. Eve., March 22, "La Locandiera." Mon. Eve. .March 24, "The Open Door" and "The Women Have Their Way." Tues.Eve.,March 25, "The Living Corpse." Wed. Eve. .March 26, "The Sea Gull." Seats 4 weeks in advance at Box Office & Town Hall, 113 W. 43rd St. The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present RUTH DRAPER in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER SKETCHES Evenings : Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, 8 :50. rflMFDY THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mata. Thurm. vjwm^i^ a and gat 2 .30 VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 -REBOUND- With HOPE WILLIAMS "This is the best light comedy written by anybody hereabouts in ten or twenty years, and it's not so damned light, either." — Heywood Broun, New York Telegram. Arthur Hopkins presents DONALD OGDEN STEWART'S COMEDY Plymouth Theatre. Eves. 8:50; Mats. Thurs. & Sat., 2:40. The Theatre Guild Presents A MONTH Z COUNTRY By IVAN TURGENEV iO iii 1*4 THEATRE, 52nd St., W. of Broadway V3U11U Evgs. 8:30. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:30. The Apple Cart Bernard Shaw's Political Extravaganza lilt AUTITSI ■Rs7i",K' Theatre, 46th St., W. of Eighth Ave. ITliYn. 1 111 DtiljlV Evgs., 8:30. Mats., Thurs. & Sat., 2 :30 "Every thinker should see this play." Joseph Lews, Pres., Freethinkers Assn. "THOMAS PAINE" A drama of an idea in nine scenes from the German of Hanns Johst presented by New American Theatre. At MACDOUGAL ST. PLAYHOUSE (formerly Provincetoivn Playhouse) 133 Macdougal St. Spring 7053 ROBERT MORSS LOVETT Fri., Mar. 21 "Literature and Science" 8.30 p.m. SYMPOSIUM Sat., Mar. 22 "Labor and the Industrial Crisis" 2.00 p.m. THEODORE DREISER Fri., Mar. 28 "An Informal Evening with Theodore Dreiser" 8.30 p.m. CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL Sat., Mar. 29 "And They Call This Disarmament!" 2 p.m. THE RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 7 East 15th Street Algonquin 3094 WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See ••Apple Cart— Beck— *5th St., E. of Eighth Ave. •Berkeley Square — Lyceum — E. 45th St. •Civic Repertory — 14th St. & 6th Ave. — See Advertisement. •Death Takes a Holiday— Barrymore Theatre — 47th St., W. of B'dway. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st St., E. of B'dway. ••Everything's Jake— Bijou— 45th St., W. of B'dway. •••Flying High— Apollo— W. 42nd St. ••June Moon — Broadhurst — W. 44th St. ••Rebound— Plymouth— 45th St., W. of B'dway. ••Strictly Dishonorable — Avon— W. 45th St. •••Strike Up The Band— Times Sq.— W. of B'dway. ••The First Mrs. Fraser— Playhouse — 48th St., E. of B'dway. •The Green Pastures— Mansfield — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •The Infinite Shoeblack— Elliot— 39th St., E. of B'dway. •The Last Mile— Sam H. Harris — 42nd St, W. of B'dway. The Rivals — Erlanger— 246 W. 44th St. ••Topaze— Music Box— 45th St., W. of B'dway. •Volpone — Liberty — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. •••Wake Up and Dream— Selwyn — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. First Nights A Month in the Country — Guild — 52nd St., W. of B'dway. The Royal Virgin— Booth — 45th St., W. of B'dway. The Matriarch — Longacre — 220 W. 48th St. Films Disraeli — Central Theatre — Broadway and 47th St. The Case of Sergeant Grischa — Globe — 46th St., and B'dway. Concerts and Recitals Argentinita — Barrymore — 47th St., W. of B'dway. Sun. Eve., Mar. 23. The Barrere Little Symphony — Guild — 52nd St., W. of B'dway. Sun. Eve., Mar. 23, 30; Apr. 6. Schola Cantorum — Carnegie — Wed. Eve., Mar. 26. Gigli — Carnegie — Sun. Eve., Apr. 6 (Benefit for Italian Hospital). Philharmonic Symphony — Carnegie — Thurs. Eve., Mar. 27; Fri. Aft., Mar. 28; April 4; Sun. Aft., Mar. 30; April 6. Student's Philharmonic Symphony — Carnegie — Sat. Eve., Mar. 22; April 5. Children's Philharmonic Symphony — Carnegie — Sat. Morn., Mar. 22. Manhattan Symphony — Mecca Temple — Sun. Eve., Mar. 23. Art Exhibit Collection of English Sporting Prints — Kennedy Galleries — 785 Fifth Ave.— Through March. Permanent Exhibition of Progressive Twentieth Century Artists — Gallery of Living Art — 100 Washington Sq., East. Exhibition of Painting by Paul Klee and Max Weber and of Sculpture by Maillol and Lembruch — Museum of Modern Art— 730 Fifth Ave. — Through March 30. Exhibition of Greenwich House pottery — The Potters Shop, Inc., 755 Madison Ave. — To April 1. Selected Group of Important Paintings, Old and Modern — Howard Young Galleries — 634 Fifth Ave. — Through March. Events Abroad Bayreuth Festival Plays — Muck, Toscanini, ElmendorflF, Sieg- fried Wagner, Conductors — July 22 to Aug. 21. Oberammergau Passion Play — Munich — May through Sept. World's Fair— Antwerp — Dorland, 205 E. 42nd St. for infor- mation. •Drama. ••Comedy. •••MmieaL When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Victory in Haiti By HELENA HILL WEED Special Representative of The Nation in Haiti Port au Prince, March 11 THE President's Commission for the Study and Re- view of Conditions in the Republic of Haiti — to give the official title under which it works — has accom- plished more work of reconciliation in one short week than would have seemed humanly possible at the outset. Under the necessity of preserving the diplomatic courtesies of the occasion, and thus making their first and formal contact with the despised Borno and his functionaries of the Council of State, they turned to face a disillusioned and justifiably suspicious nation. Owing to a wholly unintentional vague- ness in defining their work in the statement given to the local press on their arrival, they faced a practical boycott from the Nationalists. Only by the quick work of a few extraordinarily level- headed Haitians assisted by a few Americans in whom they reposed complete confidence was the mist of cynicism and distrust dispelled and a beginning made. Once the barriers were broken, the commission itself by its frank efforts to know the truth won the complete faith of all groups. As day after day passed, each bringing before the com- mission individuals and delegated representatives from every walk of life, ranging from learned Supreme Court judges and scholarly educators to hard-handed workmen and simple peasants, and all bringing the same plea from every section of the republic, it was not long before the most casual ob- server could see what the outcome of it all must be. One witness after another told why Haiti would rather die as a nation than longer submit to the tyranny and suffering crushing the people. After a peculiarly shameful story of the way in which absolute power had developed into brutal domination and degradation, Commissioner White sat in thoughtful mood for a few moments, then penciled the fol- lowing words and passed them to a friend. With Mr. White's permission I quote them : In that twilight zone wherein the desire to help one's fellow-men passes from fraternal association to paternal control, despotism begins to rot the heart of benevolence. And here is a curious thing: I am satis- fied, by talking for hours with many Americans here, that they are honest — as men go in politics — and are sincerely imbued with a desire to help the Haitians. They feel that we who oppose them are undoing a great work. Yet so inexorably does the possession of power disinte- grate the spirit that benevolence is destroyed by tyranny. There can never be a benevolent despot. What was promised, and accepted in good faith by many Haitians, as friendly aid to reconstruct a weak and admittedly backward nation has become a complete, selfish, illegal, and in many instances brutal domination over a helpless people, who are kept in financial, economic, and racial subjection in their own country by foreign armed forces. Worse than that, their national wealth, in the hands of the invader, is used to pay the price of their degradation and to bring ease, comfort, and even luxury to their oppres- sors. Comparatively few instances of specific wrongs have been brought before the commission, but they can be veri- fied on every hand by any passing stranger who can see and read. A mechanic, stranded in Haiti through the fail- ure of the company with which he came here, was installed as a high official in the customs office at $350 a month, though Haitians of years of experience and admitted ability are kept in minor positions at pitiful salaries; there was an an- nual item of $40,000 a year for remount horses for the gendarmerie, which is not a mounted service, the horses being constantly used by the American officers and their wives for riding and polo ; there are endless instances of racial abuses on the part of unlettered minor officials toward cultured Haitian scholars and professional men and toward women of refinement, education, and culture, while Ameri- can officers live openly with Haitian girls and bring illegiti- mate half-breed children into the world only to abandon them at will — one could go on indefinitely. The one ray of light in the long story is the spirit of revolt among Americans themselves, in both civil and military positions, against the conditions which have developed. The end of the first week, which began in a fog, saw earnest conferences between the commission and the com- mittee of five Haitians representing the patriotic organiza- tions, led by Georges Leger, son of the late J. J. Leger, former minister to the United States and for some time dean of the foreign ministers at Washington, who was called by the late Sir Julian Pauncefote, British Ambassa- dor at Washington, "the most brilliant diplomat I have ever known." The work of young Leger in presenting the cause of Haiti has been gracious, dignified, fearless, and technically superb. One of the commissioners, in compli- menting Leger upon the ability with which he had pre- sented the case and the aid which his presentation had been to the commission, told him, in the hearing of all, that his work had equaled that of Judge Brandeis in his greatest moments. Faced by the united, determined demand of the men of Haiti, to which was added the organized and fiery demand of the League of Haitian Women, who had made such an enormous and convincing demonstration of patriotic religious fervor the Sunday after the commission arrived, and following upon these by the open support of the National- ist cause by the Catholic church in Haiti, President Borno capitulated. Just one week after the arrival of the com- mission the happy solution which all had feared was weeks i away, and perhaps not to be found even then, was reached by an informal agreement to which not only the commission and the Nationalists, but the Borno group also, were parties. The plan was that the patriotic societies should send their delegates from all over the republic to Port au Prince as soon as possible and in conference with the Borno group should select, as a candidate for provisional president, to take office on the expiration of President Borno's term on

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March 26, 1930] The Nation 379 May 15, a neutral, non-political man, acceptable to the commission, who would make the following agreement with the Haitian people: He would be formally elected by the Council of State on April 14 and as soon as he took office would call for an election to the national chambers. As soon as they could convene and organize, he would present to them his resignation as president of the republic so that they could elect a president under the constitutional forms. The plan provided that this provisional president on assum- ing his temporary office should abolish the Council of State, and that he should not be a candidate for the regular elec- tion by the assembly. The readjustment of all other questions was to be left to the new constitutional govern- ment, which would be a truly legal government chosen by the Haitian people. Sunday brought the official agreement of President Hoover to this plan and his promise that the government of the United States would not recognize the election of any other candidate by the Council of State than the one agreed upon under this plan by the Nationalists, the Borno group, and the commissioners. It was a happy solution of the difficulties that faced all groups. The United States, which had recognized Borno and the powers conferred on his Council of State to elect a new president on April 14, was relieved of the necessity of using further force to undo the things it had effected by force; the Nationalists had won their supreme aim of having the new president elected by a National Assembly chosen by popular vote; and the Borno group would be allowed to end their terms in peace. Haiti was throbbing with prayer and thanks- giving, and the commissioners, as they left the capital on Sunday morning for their trip of inspection through the country, were happy in the thought that their work had been fruitful of results so satisfactory to all. But mixed with the joy of the Haitian people, as the Sunday crowds congregated in the parks and groups gathered on the spacious verandas of the homes of the elite, was a note of fear. It was not lack of confidence in the commission. They had won the absolute trust of the people. It was not suspicion of rival political groups in the National- ist League; for though there were many aspirants for elec- tion by the chambers, all had agreed to accept the result and cooperate with the winner. But would Borno keep faith? That was the question. There were many dis- quieting signs. Someone had sent a cablegram to the United States declaring that a revolution had been suppressed by military force in Port au Prince the night before, when everyone knew that the perfect peace of a tropical moon- light night had reigned in every quarter of the city. All civil and military Occupation officials had been warned not to leave their homes on Saturday evening unless armed, and apon one sound of the military siren to barricade them- selves in their homes and on two blasts to rush to the Ameri- can Legation. What possible reason could be assigned for this real fear which seemed to grip the Occupation? The answer soon came. Telegrams and telephone mes- sages began to pour in from the provinces repeating the telegram that Borno had sent on Saturday, through his Minister of the Interior, to all prefects. It read: It is false that a provisional government will be formed, as the agitators would have the people believe. The presidential election by the Council of State will take place on April 14 and President Borno will remain in After War, What Is the World's Greatest Menace? "A gigantic and deadly narcotic menace is upon our coun- try and the world. It is estimated that 75,000 girls from all walks of life disappeared last year, an increase of 50% in the estimate for the previous year. Boy drug addicts recruit robber gangs and create our crime wave with its daring hold-ups and unnatural murders. Half of the pris- oners in turpitude cases are drug addicts. A 'dope ring' in Chicago revealed 18,000 drug addicts among the customers, involving yearly payments of $39,000,000. This is but one ring in one city.* The yearly economic burden laid upon our people exceeds $5,000,000,000.** There are about 1,000,000 addicts in the United States." Have you read Consequences By JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD Introduction by John Haynes Holmes "By means of a powerful up-to-date story, Julia Ford has given to the world another 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' in which she undertakes to let the startling facts be known."*** "Nothing more compelling has been written in years." — Ohio State Journal. Until the people rise up against government revenue from opium, the tragic bondage of "THE LIVING DEAD" will increase. • World's Conference on Narcotic Education, 578 Madison Avenue, New York. ** Congressman Fisk. *** Dr. J. T. Sunderland, Author of India in Bondage. Dutton and all bookshops. $2.50 Ge RMANY LAND OF BEAUTY AND SPORTS ... The exerting present and the go den past form one harmonious pattern in Germany. Music festivals echo with golden thunder. Horse and motor races give thrilling panoramas. Deep forests and emerald lakes lure the hunter and angler. Lake and sea resorts sparkle with gaiety, golf, tennis and swimming. Every- one dances in vivid cabarets: while walled towns retain a legend- ary splendor. Old-world hospitality, moderate prices, no vise charge. Every form of sport and culture invite the traveler to Germany for a holiday of ever-changing delight. "Going to Europe" means going to Germany GERMAN TOURIST INFORMATION OFFICE 665 FIFTH AVE. NEW YORK. N.Y. Please send me Illustrated Travel Brochures on Beautiful Germany. .- Namt. — „__ Addms. liken writing to adv*rtis*ri pUam mention Tat Nation

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380 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 337 /XPLORATIVE Itiner- aries worked out with reference to social, economic, historic, artistic and scenic features. Visits to factories, schools, children's com- munities, collective farms and villages . . . art treasures, palaces and workers' rest homes . . . for the adventurous . . . camping in the Caucasus and study of primitive tribes. Small groups, each accompanied by a quali- fied American leader and Russian interpreter. From $385 including express steamship pass- age. Literature available. Individual itineraries also exe- • cuted a Independent year-Yound • representation in Russia 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK There are so many diverse opinions regarding Soviet Russia Why Not See it for Yourself? The educator — traveler — business man or stu- dent will be interested in two never-forgetful tours beginning on April 12th S. S. Bremen or April 16th S. S. Aquitania. LOW RATES in- clude transatlantic passage both ways — accom- modations in first class hotels in Russia — 3 meals daily — railway with sleeper — sight seeing tours — services of an English speaking guide — etc., etc. Send for Descriptive Literature WORLD TOURISTS, Inc. 175 FIFTH AVE. NEW YORK Algonquin 6656-8797 P. S. I-arge groups of students and workers are now in formation for very low priced tours. Only those who don't mind roughing it in Soviet Russia should inquire for par- ticulars. $280 is the cost. office until May 15. This is the exact truth which you must make known to the people. As for the legislative elections, they cannot take place before the constitutional date, the nearest one being January 10, 1932. Other personal telegrams from Borno quoted him as sayin that this agreement had been made by him with the commi sioners and that he was the complete master of the situatiot Consternation reigned, but through it all there was no lac of confidence in the commission. It was only a proof to a that Borno was faithless and that his Council of State coul not even be trusted to keep their agreement with the coir mission and the Nationalists to elect the provisional presider selected by them all. The meaning of the Occupation warr ings became clear. Its officials knew of this Borno telegrar and expected an outbreak when the people learned of it. S sure were they that the fury of the people would expres itself in disorder that a revolution which never occurre was reported in advance! Instead of fomenting disorder, the leaders immediatel established telephone connections with Hinche, in the in terior, where the commission was spending the night, report ing the treachery of Borno, and spread among the peopl wise counsels of patience and confidence in the commissior Their unanimous demand that the United States preven any election by the Council of State had been more tha justified. They could well afford to await action by th commission. They had feared that part of the agreemen which gave the Council of State the right formally to ratif the nominee agreed upon by the three groups, but ha yielded the point when they were promised that the Unitec States would recognize no other election by the counci YeL here was treachery, an attempt at the first moment t undo the work of the commission. Monday morning found President Borno confronted first, by an angry Council of State demanding the meanin; of his telegram to the prefects, and, second, by the proo given out from commission headquarters on Sunday after noon that the contents of the telegram were false. Afte keeping the council waiting for four hours (it afterward de veloped that Borno himself was on the carpet before Ameri can officials during that time) he appeared before them an< told them that General Russell had deceived him in the mat ter, in spite of the fact that the commission had stated tha Borno in person had given them his assent to the plan at th< palace on Friday. Rumors flew through the city all dai Monday that a cabinet crisis was impending, but late in th< afternoon the official Moniteur came out with a final gestun of defiance toward the commission. It read: As his term expires on May 15 next, he [President Borno] can consider the political plan set forth above [the commission's plan] only in that single part whose execution he has the constitutional duty to assure, namely, the elec- tion of his successor by the Council of State on April 14 next. He has given his approval to the above plan only on the formal condition that the plan shall be carried out in conformity with the constitution of Haiti and the treaty which binds the government of Haiti and the government of the United States of America. 'J Tonight Haiti interprets this last blast to mean that Borno Government, rather than retreat from its position ol broken faith, will resign. The country awaits the quick return of the commissioners to handle the crisis. When writing to aJhmrtUm v*—" «*»Wo» Th« Nation

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The Nation FOUNDED 186S Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 1930 No. 3378 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 381 EDITORIALS: The Virtue of Reed Smoot 384 Time to Act 385 The People's Power 385 The Ninth Planet 386 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 387 A NEW DEAL FOR THE RED MAN. By Ruby A. Black 388 ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR. By Lord Ponsonby 391 DIVORCE— AND AFTER. V. DIVORCE WITH ARBITRATION. VI. A CHILD OF DIVORCE. Two Personal Narratives 393 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 394 CORRESPONDENCE 395 BOOKS, DRAMA, FILMS: Marigold. By Robert Hunt 397 An Apology for the Present. By Henry Hazlitt 397 England. By Abraham Flexner 397 The Subjection of India. By C. F. Andrews 398 Critic as Poet; Poet as Critic. By Eda Lou Walton 399 Mr. Callaghan's Medium. By Horace Gregory 399 A Philosophical Vagabond. By Glen Mullin 400 Boswell and Johnson. By Dorothy Brewster 400 Books in Brief 401 Drama: An Alien Art. By Joseph Wood Krutch 403 Films: Small Mercies. By Alexander Bakshy 404 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 406 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Ramsay MacDonald and the I. L. P 407 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN- NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. AFTER SIX MONTHS and eighteen days of weary discussion the Senate has completed its revision of the pending tariff bill. It has achieved the incredible in making it a more flagrant robbery of the American people on behalf of the privileged classes than has yet been voted by Congress. Senator Harrison declared that its rates are "the most obnoxious and indefensible ever passed." Senator Norris pointed out that in its administrative features it goes beyond anything ever before essayed in our history. The rates, he said, "are unjust, unfair, and indefensible, and some of them are almost criminal." We believe that there has been only one gain out of the whole twelve months of legislation since the special session met — the frank reve- lation of the way tariffs are made, the deliberate log-rolling, swapping of votes, and bargain and sale of tariff privileges at the expense of the American people so that certain manu- facturers may be further enriched. As for the pretense that this bill helps the farmer, that is at best a delusion. That the bill will not in the slightest degree accomplish what he asked from Congress, that it blindly disregards his wishes to legislate only for the farmer and to avoid a general re- vision will not keep Mr. Hoover from signing the bill. There has never been any danger of a veto, no matter what the monstrosity to which the Congress might give birth. THE LONDON CONFERENCE lingers on, but in so feeble and obviously hopeless a state that any day may bring news of its demise. Secretary Stimson still feels called upon to deny that the conference has been a failure and to censure the London press for saying that it is dead, but his official optimism does not deceive anybody and we doubt if he takes any stock in it himself. Even if, by some miracle, the conference should contrive to pull itself to- gether and patch up an agreement of some kind that could be christened limitation of armaments, everybody would know that it was only a compromise designed to save the faces of Mr. Hoover and Mr. MacDonald and that its moral value would be nil. The probability is that any other conference called as this one was called and set at a similar task would also go to pieces. It is futile to expect that juggling the tonnage figures of cruisers and submarines so as to make the totals somewhat less or the distribution by classes of vessels different will increase the likelihood of peace while each of the jugglers is still bent upon being prepared for war. The calamity that has overtaken the London con- ference has, indeed, gone far to discredit the whole idea of an international conference which seeks peace by such methods. There is need of deeper and broader foundations in international good-will and cooperation. IN APPOINTING JUDGE JOHN J. PARKER, of Charlotte, North Carolina, to the Supreme Court of the United States, President Hoover has plainly had political and sectional rather than judicial considerations in mind. Born in 1885, Judge Parker is one of the youngest men ever appointed to the Supreme Bench. A North Carolinian by birth and education, at the age of twenty-four he was Re- publican nominee for Congress from the seventh district of North Carolina. Six years later he was the party candidate for attorney general and in 1917 for governor of the State. In 1924 he was North Carolina delegate at large to the Re- publican National Convention. Appointed United States judge for the Fourth Circuit by President Coolidge in 1925, for reasons fairly evident from the above record, he has had an undistinguished career during his four years on the bench, and he will bring to the Supreme Court neither notable legal learning nor any reputation for understanding of the great issues on which he is likely to have to pass judgment. Faced with a second great opportunity to appoint a real and com- prehending jurist, Mr. Hoover has indicated his respect for the Court by naming a political judge to whom there will apparently be no opposition for the good reason that there is nothing in particular to object to. THE HOOVER-HUSTON COMBINATION is a choice spectacle for the gods. Claudius H. Huston, as everybody knows, is chairman of the Republican National Committee. He is also, it appears, president of the Tennes- see River Improvement Association, an organization which has favored acceptance of the bid of the American Cyanamid Company for Muscle Shoals. For the benefit of this asso- ciation, the Senate lobby committee has discovered, the Union

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382 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 Carbide Company turned over to Huston two checks totaling $36,100, which amount Huston promptly deposited to the credit of his margin account with a New York broker, where it was used to buy and sell several hundred shares of stock out of which Huston made a profit, which profit he kept. The first effect of this disclosure was to make some of the party leaders at Washington feel that the only decent thing for Huston to do was to resign his chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, and something was even said about ousting him if he refused. Mr. Hoover, however, has a tough hide, and Senator Watson of Indiana, Republican leader in the Senate, after lunching with the President announced that he did not believe Mr. Hoover should ask for Huston's resignation and did not believe that he would do so. "Some persons may disagree with Mr. Huston's judgment," declared this apostle of purity, "but certainly I do not think his intrinsic honesty has been suc- cessfully attacked." Of course not. The Hon. Claudius didn't steal anything; he simply used some money that wasn't his and took a little private rake-off. The Republican gang ought to be able to stomach that. KEEP YOUR EYE on the Federal Reserve Board and the stock market. Stock sales on the New York exchange during the week ending March 22 totaled no fewer than 23,108,870 shares, the largest dealings of any week since the crash of last fall, while bond sales amounting to $115,372,500 were the heaviest since June, 1924. The fifty representative stocks of the New York Times list showed an average gain of $6.31 for the week; they have already recovered between 35 and 40 per cent of their losses in the smash. Call money has been down to 2 per cent, and the Federal Reserve Bank rediscount rate is only 3^ per cent. As the "happiness boys" in Washington have not succeeded in getting business to going by cheerful talk, it is reported that a reasonable inflation of credit is on the cards, and the stock market feels the first impulse, brokers' loans having increased by half a billion dollars during the past sixty days. The comment in our issue of November 13 last blaming the feeble policy of the Federal Reserve Board in failing to check the speculative mania has just been officially verified by the annual report of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, revealing the attempts of the directors of that bank to raise rates at various times between February and May of last year, which attempts were vetoed by the board. Nothing short of omniscience could run the powerful Federal Re- serve machine perfectly; ordinary sound business judgment could keep it from aiding wild speculation. THE ACQUITTAL of Edward L. Doheny on the charge of giving a bribe to Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall in connection with the lease of the Elk Hills naval oil reserve, following the conviction of Mr. Fall for accepting that bribe, will not greatly surprise those who are familiar with the intricacies of our legal procedure and the vagaries of our juries. Nor does the fact that Mr. Doheny will go free make any great difference except as it tends to shake confidence in the operation of our law. He wept successfully before the jury, and now he will doubt- less get his wish to be allowed to spend the evening of his life in peace. But the great body of intelligent Americans have needed to learn no more about the Elk Hills oil lease since February 28, 1927, when the Supreme Court of the United States declared it to be a "transaction not authorized by law and consummated by conspiracy, corruption, and fraud," or about the Teapot Dome transaction since Oc- tober 1 1 of that same year, when the Court stated that "the lease and agreement were made fraudulently by means of collusion and conspiracy between them [Fall and Sinclair]." WHILE MR. WHALEN is making up his mind if and when he will send his resignation to Mayor Walker, The Nation does not mind offering him a little free advice. It is to resign now. As a police commissioner, he is an excellent impresario. He is without peer in his ability to invent new uniforms for policemen and taxi drivers, to appear smartly dressed to the last gardenia at the scene of the more important crimes, to welcome famous visi- tors to New York City. But on the whole his talents seem better suited to a large and flourishing department store like Wanamaker's than to the problems presented by the pursuit of crime in New York. We are glad to give Commissioner Whalen credit for having improved the traffic system in the city; a kind word also might be said for his having won increased wages for the higher grades of policemen. Beyond that we confess to finding ourselves at a loss. The unem- ployed demonstration on March 6, which he handled well for two hours and a half, he permitted to degenerate into a melee during the last twenty minutes. Since then his utter- ances on Communists and the methods he employs to detect and defeat them have been unlawful and dangerous. The American Civil Liberties Union announces that it will take legal steps to force Mr. Whalen's dismissal. Mayor Walker is reported as not too cast down at the prospect of losing his police commissioner, on whom the limelight shines so efful- gently. Resign, then, Mr. Commissioner; don't wait till May Day. Wanamaker's needs you — New York does not. THE LAST QUAKER DELEGATION that went to Governor Young of California to plead for a pardon for Tom Mooney and Warren Billings received, according to Arthur Heeb, member of the delegation, assurances that the Governor still believes the two men guilty and does not propose to be swayed by public opinion to think otherwise. Governor Young subsequently denied that he had said exactly this, but he was not clear as to what he had said. The Quakers were quite sure. The Governor, according to the delegation, explained that he had read all the documents in the case and that although some of the evidence seemed to have been perjured plenty of unquestioned evidence led him to believe the men guilty. Moreover, he said Mooney was not "repentant." The latter point is interesting; it indicates that, in Mr. Young's opinion, the best way to make a man repentant is to keep him in jail for thirteen years for a crime which he persists in declaring he did not commit and of which many thousands of his fellow-citizens also believe him innocent. The Pardon Board has yet to act and the State Supreme Court must render its decision on Billings's appli- cation for pardon. Mooney and Billings may still hope. BEFORE CONSIGNING THE INCIDENT of the Harvard scrubwomen to a well-deserved oblivion, we wish to record with gratitude, as expressing the true Har- vard tradition and the social conscience that we know is not _.

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April 2, 1930] The Nation 383 dead in Cambridge itself, the protest of fifty-two alumni requesting payment of the back wages due the women under the minimum-wage decree. After calling attention to the variant explanations of President Lowell, Controller Endi- cott, and Treasurer Shattuck, they point out that the uni- versity authorities had full notice from the beginning, a representative of the Widener Library having appeared at the hearing of December 29, 1920, and protested inability to pay the added two cents an hour during the succeeding half-year, the budget being already made up. With nine years delay in compliance following, neither the commission nor the university appears in an enviable light. The pro- testing alumni characterize the university's attitude through- out the affair as "harsh, stingy, socially insensitive, and con- siderably short of the highest ethical standards of the time." The university answers the protestants in a formal statement of March 17: "The college authorities are now fully informed, and they believe that at all times in the past the cleaning women in Widener Library have been paid at least those wages required by the minimum-wage law and the decrees of the commission." There is nothing so con- soling as faith. OF GREAT SIGNIFICANCE is the fifty-year work- ing arrangement entered into by the Hamburg- American and North German Lloyd lines for the joint operation of their two fleets, while preserving their indi- vidualities and their house flags. This practically means that the entire merchant marine of Germany will be under one management, thus eliminating the needless competition of the two lines, coordinating the services, and, presumably, cutting out a great deal of waste due to duplication of effort. Thus it is already suggested that all traffic to the North American Atlantic coast will be concentrated at Bremen, and that Hamburg will specialize in the Asiatic, South American, African, and Australian services. Recall- ing the extraordinary re-creation of the German merchant fleet in the twelve post-war years it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that this pool means that Germany may in a short time wrest the mercantile supremacy of the seas from England. Germany already has the two fastest passenger liners, and it will be years before they will be surpassed by either British or American ships. It would not be surprising if the British should answer the creation of this German mo- nopoly by a combination of their own companies. MAHATMA GANDHI'S twenty-day march from Ahmedabad to Jalalpur on the Gulf of Cambay, on the west coast of India north of Bombay, where he and his followers will undertake to make salt from sea water in defiance of the British monopoly, is reported only scantily in our newspapers. The departure from Ahmedabad nat- urally drew a great crowd, but while the reception accorded to Gandhi and his few score companions in the villages through which they have passed appears to have been cordial, the great popular response to this spectacular challenge to British rule that was looked for and feared has not yet been reported, if it exists. Gandhi's speeches have sought to impress upon his adherents the need of devotion to the cause of independence, even to the point of death if that should prove necessary, but it is perfectly evident that he has not abandoned in the least his policy of non- violence or encouraged his followers to use force. The British authorities, while doubtless prepared for eventuali- ties, have as yet taken no public steps to interfere with the march. A special dispatch to the New York World by S. A. Brelvi, president of the Indian Journalists' Associa- tion, reports that extensive plans are being laid by the vari- ous Nationalist provincial congresses for mass civil disobedi- ence in support of Gandhi's movement. LET US HOPE that Lord Balfour, whose career Lord Ponsonby describes on another page of this issue, has left full diaries and that his memoirs will in time be pub- lished. For they might throw light upon one of the strangest mysteries of history. President Wilson, readers of The Nation will recall, solemnly and explicitly informed a Sena- torial committee in 1919 that he had no knowledge of the inter-Allied secret treaties until he went to Europe for the Peace Conference. They had, to be sure, been published in this country by the New York Evening Post and other newspapers; Colonel House knew of them; President Wil- son's own utterances had at times suggested knowledge of them. Balfour, in the House of Commons on March 4, had said that President Wilson was "kept informed" of the ne- gotiations, and at the end of June, just returned from his triumphal tour of America, he said again: "By these treaties we stand ; our national honor is bound up in them." It is hardly possible to believe that he said nothing in his long conversations with Mr. Wilson of the treaties to which Britain's honor was bound. Yet we have Mr. Wilson's word that just this happened. We are forced to conclude either that Mr. Wilson did not tell the truth, or that Lord Balfour, representing a government that was bending all its energies to win a war, did not hesitate to conceal some- thing that might, by antagonizing an ally he wished to keep at all costs, endanger that all-important victory. BORN TO GREAT WEALTH, the late V. Everit Macy never forgot the responsibility for public service which rightly goes with the possession of riches. Because of his ability and charm he could rightly have aspired to serve his country in high positions. Instead he chose to be- come Superintendent of the Poor in Westchester County, resigning from no less than twenty-three committees and governing boards to free himself for the task. At once he set himself to making over the entire method of handling the county's poor, sick, and criminal. The county "poor- house," full of drunken loafers, itself dirty, disreputable, and wretchedly managed, disappeared. In its place there rose a modern, clean, comfortable, orderly "hospital for the aged" — the mere changing of the name itself working won- ders for the self-respect of the occupants. Reelected as Com- missioner of Charities and Correction and of Public Wel- fare by both parties as long as he would take office, Mr. Macy gave freely of his private means as well as of his time. His finest achievement was the construction of a model county jail, wherein was instituted an advanced and scientific system of handling the prisoners. As head of the county parks he developed a chain of parks of enormous value to Westchester and to the city of New York. In other words, Mr. Macy found complete opportunity for the use of his business talents and the expression of his ad- mirable humanitarian ideals.

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384 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 The Virtue of Reed Smoot DIOGENES looked, with his lantern, for an honest man. We, in modest imitation, have for some time sought a virtuous one in the purlieus of the national Capitol. Now we have found him through his own confes- sion. It is Reed Smoot, Senator from Utah. Here are his words uttered in the Senate of the United States on March 18: "If I should lose my virtue the first thing I would do would be to leave the Mormon church." Of the Mormons he had just said: "I know they are as industrious as any people in all the world ; I know that the men and the women of the Mormon church are virtuous. . . ." Hence it is as an apostle of virtue that he has stood in the Senate combating that gallant, but mistaken, young Senator, Bronson M. Cutting of New Mexico, in his effort to "throw open wide the gates of this nation to a flood of obscene literature." We record this heroic admission because Senator Smoot confessed to his own virtue after having perused a great pile of, to him, obscene books, the basis of his exhilarating demand that every customs and postal inspector be given full censorship power. "If a customs inspector," said he once, "at the port of New York, with his knowledge of the world, regards on his own initiative a book as obscene it is about the nearest approach to a jury trial that can be had." Many of these inspectors, he explained, are "men of education, legal train- ing, and broad information." The New Mexican toreador, Mr. Cutting, was unkind enough to refer to D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" as Mr. Smoot's "favorite work." The Senator from Utah rose to the defense of his impugned virtue: Mr. Smoot. I resent the statement the Senator has just made that "Lady Chatterley's Lover" is my favorite work. Mr. Cutting. Then I withdraw the remark. I thought it must be, because the Senator has been reading it, appar- ently, since the Christmas holidays. Mr. Smoot. I will say to the Senator that I have not read it. I did not mark these books. They were so dis- gusting, so dirty and vile that the reading of one page was enough for me. Mr. Cutting. Ah, yes, Mr. President; but the courts of the United States say that the reading of one page is not sufficient, and that the book must be read as a whole. I am sure that between Christmas and the present time the Sena- tor must have had occasion to read the book from cover to cover. I know that he has been quoting it to Senators. Mr. Smoot. I have not read it and I have not quoted it. Not only that, but I would not read the stuff. . . . Mr. Cutting. If the Senator has only spent ten min- utes on the book I cannot see how he can tell whether or not there is anything elevating in it. Mr. Smoot. I could tell from the very beginning of the book; that is enough to indicate what the book is; it is enough to indicate that it is written by a man with a dis- eased mind and a soul so black that he would even obscure the darkness of hell. Nobody would write a book like that unless his heart was just as rotten and as black as it could possibly be. . . . Mr. Glass. That being so, why does the Senator from Utah calmly stand there and permit one of his associates to peruse that book? Not even the ribald laughter which followed Senator Glass's interruption could swerve the Mormon from Utah from his noble purpose. Senator Cutting pointed out that as a school- boy he was required to read passages of "King Lear," "Ham- let," and "Romeo and Juliet" that "might have seemed just as indecent when they were published as the books to which the Senator from Utah has been referring." "Therefore there is no reason to think, after the publicity which the Senator has given to this book, that a hundred years from now 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' may not be compulsory reading, perhaps in the kindergarten classes." To this also Mr. Smoot was deaf. Nor could he be trapped by Senator Cutting's quota- tion from Emerson's works, "Every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side." Ralph Waldo Emerson is dead ; besides, what was he in con- trast to our own Reed Smoot? And so the fight went on. Not, alas, to the complete triumph of virtue, for the Senate proved not to have all of Senator Smoot's faith in the knowledge of the world of New York customs inspectors ; they are not to be the final protec- tors of our youth hereafter. But as to the main issue, there a majority of the Senate stood firm. Mr. Heflin of Alabama put it well: "My God, the idea of saying that foreigners who write this vile literature, the perverted minds that bring forth this filthy stuff and put it on the printed page, should have the right to send it into the United States to be circulated among the people of our country, is something I cannot under- stand." He next scorned those who would stop the coming into this country on "a little peach-tree bush" of parasites which injure our country's peach orchards and would "then permit this devilish foreign literature, vile and corrupt, to come in to poison the little plants of the American household, the boys and girls in the American home." Viciously he at- tacked the president of Columbia for taking the other side, calling him "Nicholas Murray, the butler of Columbia Uni- versity." "He," roared Mr. Heflin, "is not loyal to the Con- stitution. He believes in social equality and teaches a school that admits both Negroes and whites on equal terms." Well, victory comes in the main to the just. Senator Smoot and his cohorts have saved the little plants of the Ameri- can household. In general no book "advocating treason or insurrection against the United States or forcible resistance to any law of the United States," or threatening the life of any person here, and no book which is obscene or im- moral shall be admitted into this country. Classics or books of established literary or scientific merit, even though judged obscene, may be admitted at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury, but only when imported for non-commercial purposes. Books seized as obscene by customs inspectors must be held by the collector to await the judgment of the nearest District Court — this a magnanimous yielding to Senator Cutting that there may be a court review of a collector's judgment. Thus is our country saved again! Let no one underestimate the glory of Senator Smoot, and above all let no one fear that the country will read some day that Mr. Smoot has resigned from the Mormon church. He is beyond seduction.

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April 2, 1930] The Nation 385 Time to Act THE unemployment situation is grave. Frances Per- kins, Industrial Commissioner for New York, and John B. Andrews, secretary of the American Asso- ciation for Labor Legislation, testifying before the Senate Committee on Commerce, declare that conditions in New York City are the worst that they have been since 1914, and that they have been growing rapidly worse since Oc- tober, when distress first appeared. Professor Benjamin M. Squires, of the University of Chicago, director of the Illi- nois State employment agency, testifies similarly that suffer- ing from unemployment in Chicago is the most acute that it has been in ten years, and that Chicago is just like other industrial centers. The Family Welfare Association of America, a federation of 234 charity and welfare associa- tions in more than 60 cities, reports an increase of 100 per cent in their expenditures for relief in January, 1930, as compared with those of January, 1929, and an increase of 200 per cent in the number of families in distress because of lack of work. Bread lines are crowded in the leading cities. The National Urban League estimates that there are at the least 330,000 Negroes with no work. The American Fed- eration of Labor, on the basis of figures from twenty-four cities, announces 22 per cent of reporting members unem- ployed in February, against 20 per cent in January. The employment figures of the New York State Department of "Labor, probably the best series in the country, in January stood at the lowest point in their fifteen-year history, ex- cept for three months in 1921, and February showed a fur- ther drop of nearly one-half of 1 per cent, although Feb- ruary ordinarily brings a gain of more than 1 per cent. The shocking disingenuousness of the Administration in treating this situation was the subject of comment in our issue of February 26. Since that time its pronouncements have become, if possible, even more discreditable. It has juggled the monthly figures of the Bureau of Labor Statis- tics, a useful series now running back over fifteen years, and its weekly figures, hastily called into existence in December and consequently quite worthless, to show that everything is growing better day by day in every way. When weekly figures could be used, as in January and early February, to show increasing employment, they were blazoned abroad, though the January monthly figures showed a drop of 2.6 per cent from December. When the weekly figures turned the wrong way, attention was centered on the February monthly figure for manufactures, showing a gain of one- tenth of 1 per cent — about one-fifteenth of the normal Feb- ruary increase, by the way. The tricks of the Administra- tion have already been quite thoroughly exposed, and it is scarcely too much to say that no informed person longer believes anything that the President, the Secretary of Com- merce, or the Secretary of Labor says on the subject. The importance of this last fact lies in the need for action and the desire of the Administration to prevent ac- tion— and, indeed, to prevent people from believing that there is any need for action. For years the American Asso- ciation for Labor Legislation and other experts have urged the need of legislation to prevent unemployment. For years the party medicine men have drowned their requests by beating the prosperity tom-toms, and Congress has not lifted a finger. It is an interesting and little-known fact that President Coolidge personally blocked the measure for estab- lishing a prosperity reserve when it was under consideration two years ago. Senator Wagner of New York has taken a commendable interest in the whole question, and following earlier efforts in the same field, on January 9 he introduced three bills — S. 3059 to provide for the advance planning of public work and the stabilization of industry, S. 3060 to provide for the establishment of a national employment sys- tem and for cooperation with the States in the promotion of such systems, and S. 3061 to provide for the proper col- lection and publication of employment statistics. Each of them deals with an essential part of a reasoned employment plan, and all of them together, combined with a measure of unemployment insurance, would constitute a reasonable fight- ing program. Senator Johnson promises that the Com- mittee on Commerce will take action. No legislation now, of course, can be of any use in the present crisis ; we must muddle through as best we can. Some cities, like Cincin- nati, however, deserve credit for making real preparation. But we can use this crisis to get the beginnings of an intel- ligent national policy for preventing unemployment. The President, either through ignorance or through a mistaken notion of how to advance his own political fortunes, re- fuses to offer any leadership toward such a policy; but he has discredited himself so thoroughly in this respect that Congress can scarcely do less than disregard him and go for- ward with legislation. It is time to act. The People's Power DURING the campaign of 1928 Mr. Hoover made abundantly clear his intention to prevent as far as possible any extension of public enterprise. That purpose extends to the exploitation of natural resources still under federal control, which the President seems determined to turn over to private enterprise for "development" if he can. The ill-received — and, we may add, ill-conceived — land policy announced last summer was one part of such a program. The handling of the Boulder Dam affair is a second highly important case. The protagonists of the Boulder Dam power project during the many years when the measure was pending were the cities and people of southern California that were friendly to municipal enterprise. They got the bill through, after many compromises, only against the most strenuous opposition of the power companies, among others. "The Boulder Dam law," says Judge George W. Woodruff of Pennsylvania, "is an arrow aimed directly at the heart of the power trust. It not only hurts the trust by freeing munici- palities in California, Nevada, and Arizona from its domi- nation, but it will be an example leading gradually to nation- wide freedom." The law, it will be remembered, requires the Secretary of the Interior in making contracts for Boulder Dam power to give preference to States and municipalities — a perfectly clear declaration of principle. But the Secretary of the Interior got an opinion from the complaisant Solicitor Finney that the law does not mean what it says and what the men who drafted it and put it through Congress say it

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386 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 means. Thereupon, though the States and cities applied for all the power, the secretary allocated to the Southern Cali- fornia Edison Company a certain part of that available for southern California. Secretary Wilbur's representative recently took to Los Angeles the actual contract that the department wants the city and the company to sign. The friends of public enter- prise were startled and greatly disturbed ; for according to in- formation given out by Senator Johnson, if the contract had been actually made the private companies might have got not only the power originally allocated to them, but also a part or all of that reserved for Nevada and Arizona, some of that assigned to the Metropolitan Water District, and finally the share of Los Angeles itself. The legal situation is highly complex, but the follow- ing were among the leading grounds of criticism : First, the allocation is changed. Second, the contracts give certain distinct advantages to the States, which cannot now utilize their power, over the cities, which can, thus increasing the opportunity of the power companies, which look forward hopefully to gobbling up the 36 per cent of the power on which Nevada and Arizona have an option. Third, the Edison Company is required under the contract to put up half the money for the machinery at the dam and will thus apparently get equal control with the city of Los Angeles. The danger of power-company control is increased by a provision for a joint board of control in which the city and the company each name two members, the fifth being appointed by the Department of the Interior. Los Angeles has not forgotten that Secretary Wilbur made Mr. Bonner secretary of the Federal Power Commission on the recom- mendation of California utility executives. Fourth, the city is required to enter, along with the company, into a joint and several contract with the federal government to carry out the provisions of the agreement, and if either of the parties fails to fulfil its contract, its power falls to the other. But it is pointed out that the city of Los Angeles cannot legally enter into a joint and several contract with a private company, and that if it undertakes to do so an obliging taxpayer's suit at the appropriate time would oblige the city to default, and thus throw its power into the hands of the company. Fifth, and in some ways most important of all, under the default provision mentioned above the com- pany, it will be observed, is given every motive during the entire fifty years of the contract to spend in city politics any money necessary to defeat bond issues or any other legis- lative or administrative measure requisite to the carrying out of the city's contract. No surer means could be found of corrupting the politics of Los Angeles and wrecking its suc- cessful municipal light-and-power plant. Faced by these criticisms, Secretary Wilbur, as we go to press, is reported to have announced a wholly new scheme. The allocations have been changed, and the federal govern- ment itself will now construct and equip the power plant, which will be operated by the city and the private com- pany under supervision of a government representative. All users of power will contract directly with the government, and the Federal Power Commission will determine the price of power. It is a hard struggle, but the battle must be fought through to its end if the purpose of Congress, clearly expressed in the Boulder Dam Act, is not to be frustrated bv the Executive. The Ninth Planet DESPITE the doubts voiced by a few British astrono- mers, the confirmation by the Harvard Observatory seems to establish definitely that the body discovered at the Lowell Observatory is a major planet. The new planet is the third discovered in historic times, as the other five, being visible to the naked eye, were known to the ancients. The manner of discovery of the new planet is curi- ously like that of Neptune in 1846. In 1820, when tables were constructed of the motions of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, the motions of Uranus could not be satisfactorily ac- counted for by existing theory. The vagaries in the observed motion of Uranus were finally attributed to the gravitational pull of an exterior planet, and John Couch Adams, a young English astronomer, and the Frenchman U. J. J. Leverrier almost simultaneously ascertained by intricate mathematical calculations just where the new planet should be looked for and found. This discovery was one of the great triumphs of the human mind ; it was a striking example of the precision reached by the theory of the celestial motions, and it added enormously to the prestige of scientific method. For the dis- covery of the latest planet emphasizes once more that "sci- ence" is not a mere body of verified knowledge; it is also, and more importantly, a method of discovery. The new planet has been found by applying the same methods which revealed Neptune. It has been impossible in this instance to know all the perturbations there may be in the orbit of Nep- tune, for that planet has made little more than one-third of the circuit of its orbit in the eighty-four years since its dis- covery. But small, still unexplained peculiarities in the motion of Uranus, which has completed nearly two and a half revolutions since its discovery, led the late Percival Lowell and others to make observations and calculations based on the possibility that this motion was being influenced by another planet in addition to Neptune. In 1914 Mr. Lowell calculated in a memoir the probable orbit of such a planet. Its dramatic discovery on January 21 of this year, when a photographer at Lowell Observatory, at Flagstaff, Arizona, came upon a tiny spot on one of his plates, marked the culmination of a masterly piece of detective work. All that remains is further data and an appropriate name. "Percival," for Professor Lowell, would be deplor- able, and "Cronos," suggested by Professor Shapley, lacks beauty. "Minerva" has everything that euphony could desire, with the added advantage of giving the goddesses a little more recognition than they have hitherto been accorded in planetary names. But whatever the name adopted for the new planet, we welcome it to the solar system. New and larger telescopes had assured us that we should increase our acquaintance with the stars, but a new planet; is an unex- pected pleasure. Its discovery, we are told, may even be followed by that of one or two others. Nor is the new- comer, as pessimists may suppose, merely another place where something is going wrong. It appears to be unusually dec- orous. "I have been informed from Lowell Observatory," remarks Dr. Shapley, "that their continued observations of the new planet show that it is behaving the way a trans- Neptunian planet should behave."

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April 2, 1930] The Nation 387 It Seems to Heywood Broun "U GH I" says the genius. "Why, the man is just a hack!" Accordingly, "ugh!" and "hack" get tossed about quite frequently because everybody who is not a genius right at this moment intends to qualify by tomorrow afternoon if he happens to get the time. The results are unfortunate. An honest label and a useful trade have come into disrepute. Always there is much commotion about the genius who consents to be a hack. This is called "artistic prostitution" and is generally identified with the sin against the Holy Ghost. I will agree that it is generally a pity for God's gifted to waste their time upon pot-boilers and best sellers, though I must admit that sometimes genius manages to be quite charming when casual and commercial. But after all, the sins of genius, although important, can never be numerous. I mean that even when a liberal allowance of transgressions is permitted to each genius the sum total of sinning will hardly bulk up into a crime wave. Even in America the supply of authentic masters is not terrific. According to the last official census, there were only two geniuses in the whole State of Texas and but one in Nevada, who has since died without progeny. The tragedy of the hack, then, is inevitably a more common occurrence in the daily life of us all. He has his tragedy. The genius turning hack is a rare spectacle, but on every hand we see the heartrending phenomenon of the hack consenting to turn genius. Naturally he never achieves the goal he has set for himself and the effort quite ruins him for his ordinary and useful occupation. The world can live, in sorrow of course, but still live without geniuses. But without hacks we can't go on at all. Somebody must hew the wood and draw the water. Hacks serve as footstools and stepping-stones for the aristocracy of high talent. Helotry there must be if genius is to survive. Shakespeare wrote plays in letters of living fire and carried them around to the theater where they were played by hack actors. Suppose the Globe (correct me if I'm wrong) had been stocked wholly with players each certain of his own personal dedi- cation and inspiration ! In such a case "Hamlet" might never have been played, nor yet "Othello." The gentleman of genius assigned to the role might conceivably have said : "Oh no! The part is not for me. It stifles my personality." And consider his fellow in greatness upon first reading the part of the Moor. "Me in burnt cork!" he might well have exclaimed. "Does this Shakespeare fellow think I'm Jolson?" And the poor bard would without doubt have been sent about his business. And around every great painter from the beginning of time there was necessarily an attendant following of hacks. Somebody had to clean the brushes and do the dirty work. Always there must be one to play the concerto and another to turn the music. An orchestra, even a jazz one, is none too well off when the trap drummer is seized with delusions of grandeur. Perhaps the argument may be advanced that genius can humble itself in minor roles and do the hard and useful work of the world until such time as opportunity comes. It can't. Arrogance is the mark of true genius. And a little more arrogance is the mark of the pretender. When a man or woman is seized with the idea that he's a genius, he becomes useful in nothing but his niche — if there. The general assumption is that experimental theaters, radical magazines, and modern music societies go to pot because there is not enough talent to go round. That's a mistake. Such organizations perish through a dearth of hacks. The place is always cluttered up with geniuses and there is nobody to answer the telephone. From full-page advertisements throughout the country thunders the admonition that each one of us must be up and on his way to far Olympus. You do not play or sing or draw comic cartoons? Very well, you may learn by mail and become, if not a brother, at least first cousin to Beethoven or Rembrandt. Even the art of conversation has been made obligatory. Oh the pity of it ! In days of old there used to be at every party one pleasant guest who took no part in the conversation. He was a genial fellow and be- cause he knew himself for a social hack it was his custom to sit a little apart and mix the drinks. Now each one must mix his own. Every guest at every party is a lion. The genial pleasant hack is not that way any longer. He's read the Five Foot Shelf and will insist on giving you the date of Emerson's birth together with extracts from his more important essays. He speaks French and plays the piano according to expeditious methods. "Allez," he says and sits down to warm up Chopin. In the middle of a selection he may pause, his attention attracted by some chance remark, and say with severity: "Why no, madam, you are wrong; it was not Poe but Walt Whitman whose line you have just been quoting. He wrote it in the late spring of sixty-five." In halcyon days all journalists were hacks and un- ashamed. Indeed "journalist" was practically a synonym for "hack." And, being hacks, the boys and girls worked hard and dug for news. They often found out who it was who committed the murder several days before the police had heard that anyone was injured. If the day's assign- ment was to type the weather reports, that was all right, too. Copy readers were accepted as friends and comrades by the writing men. There was no feeling that any great dam- age had been done to English literature if several para- graphs came out of the lead and a little more was snipped off at the end. Today there is a scene whenever the blue pencil rises. The man who wrote the story is no longer a reporter — he's Theodore Dreiser serving a brief apprentice- ship before proceeding to occupy a place among the planets. And, after all, just what does it matter as to the form in which the copy goes upstairs to the composing room? It will be jumbled there because the linotyper is serving as a printer at night in order to complete his course at the Art Students' League. "And how is your second act?" says the foreman of the press room. "Some little trouble with the peripetia and the motivation of Blanche in the bedroom scene," replies his assistant. And in the city room the hacks put on their coats and go home to finish that novel. They too belong among the geniuses. Heywood Broun

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388 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 A New Deal for the Red Man By RUBY A. BLACK Washington, March 18 THE forces fighting for reform in Indian affairs have gone through their first major struggle and have come out only partly victorious against a formidable and stubborn foe. Their adversary — and in fairness it must be said that he fought only part of their program — was Representative Louis C. Cramton of Michigan, chairman of the subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations which handles the appropriations for the Department of the In- terior. The gentleman from Michigan, who since 1921 has practically controlled Indian administration, is responsible for cutting down the appropriations asked by President Hoover to stop the slow starvation of Indian children in government boarding-schools. Fortunately the Senate, backed by public opinion, forced him in the end to allow twice as much money for food as he at first approved. It is something to have won any concession from this wilful and frequently obdurate man. He announced as soon as the question was made public that he would not "allow himself to be stampeded by any talk of starving Indian chil- dren." There are no starving Indian children in the Indian boarding-schools, he says, unless it is those who "have just come in from the sticks." This contradicts the report made by the group appointed by President Hoover to study the question, who reported that the children may continue to live on their present diet, but are unable to resist disease. Chronologically, the story of the battle for food and clothing is as follows: Experts made a study of the proper diet needed for Indian children. They found that an ade- quate diet would cost 39.1 cents a day for each child, as against 20 cents a day provided in 1929, the last year of the Burke-Meritt regime. The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimated that its purchasing and warehouse facilities would allow the proper standard to be bought for 37.8 cents a day. Commissioner C. J. Rhoads and Assistant Commissioner J. Henry Scattergood asked the Bureau of the Budget to approve estimates which would allow this standard to be at- tained in the fiscal year 1931. The bureau refused to do so. The Indian commissioners then took the question back to the Secretary of the Interior, Ray Lyman Wilbur, and the three decided that the project of feeding Indian children properly was sufficiently important to be placed directly be- fore the President. At the same time they determined to ask for appropriations which would bring the annual allot- ment for clothing in the Indian schools to $42 per capita instead of the 1929 figure of $22. President Hoover promptly directed the Bureau of the Budget to approve these estimates, and further suggested that the new standards be put into effect immediately. Accordingly, in December he sent to Congress a request for a deficiency appropriation of $1,100,000 for food and clothing and $400,000 for health work during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1930. When Commissioner Rhoads and Assistant Commis- sioner Scattergood appeared before the appropriations com- mittee of the House of Representatives to justify this re- quest, Representative Cramton refused to allow the full al- lotments for food and clothing on the ground that so much of the fiscal year 1930 had passed that the money could not all be used. He therefore required that the allotments be shifted so that $585,000 would go for equipment, furniture, and live stock; $300,000 for an enlarged program of study requiring additional personnel ; $30,000 for additional cloth- ing ; $50,000 for noonday lunches in day schools ; $40,000 for subsistence of pupils retained in boarding-schools during the summer; and $95,000 additional for subsistence in boarding- schools in the fiscal year 1931. President Hoover had asked for $555,156 for food, $14,000 for day-school lunches, $40,- 000 for summer subsistence, $252,000 for clothing, $189,000 for additional personnel, and $63,000 for equipment, the rest to go for miscellaneous items mainly connected with health and education. Commissioners Rhoads and Scattergood submitted to Representative Cramton's demands, and the bill was passed by the House of Representatives without any notice of the Michigan Congressman's diversion of the items. His pur- pose in asking the changes, he said, was to allow the schools to buy electric dish-washing machines, laundry equipment, and such labor-saving devices, and to hire operators for them, thus releasing the Indian children from part of the half- day of labor which they now perform, and allowing the em- ployment of teachers to give the children a full day's instruc- tion instead of only a half-day's. This is a wholly admirable aim, but it would seem that the Indian children would scarcely be able to take the proper advantage of their half- day of leisure or study if they are undernourished. The American Indian Defense Association made the whole situation public on February 27 at a hearing before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. It was very dis- couraging at that time to see Messrs. Rhoads and Scatter- good defending the action of Representative Cramton and praising the House committee for its desire to cooperate in aiding the Indians. On March 8, however, when Rhoads and Scattergood appeared before the Senate Committee on Appropriations, they reversed their stand of February 27 and reiterated their original requests for food and clothing. The Senate committee reported amendments to the bill allo- cating the $1,100,000 as follows: $480,000 for additional subsistence; $40,000 for summer-school subsistence; $50,000 for noonday lunches in day schools; $30,000 for clothing; $150,000 for additional personnel; $350,000 for equipment, furniture, and live stock. This allocation, while taking care of the food needs, would have hampered somewhat the pro- gram for reducing child labor in the schools and would scarcely have touched the clothing problem. On March 10 the Senate adopted amendments, proposed by Senator Hayden of Arizona, which without reducing the food appropriation increased the clothing appropriation to $200,000 and the personnel appropriation to $250,000, a total increase of $270,000. Of course, all these funds are in addition to the regular appropriation already made for the year. According to Assistant Commissioner Scattergood, this would allow the bureau to carry out its plan for 37.8 cents

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April 2, 1930] The Nation 389 a day for food from the date the money should be available to the end of the fiscal year 1931, but it would bring the clothing allotment to only about $31 a year for each child instead of $42, as he and Rhoads had wished. The slight reduction from the House allocation in personnel appropria- tion and the larger reduction in equipment would not, he felt, hamper greatly the program for reducing child labor. Besides, the provision of proper food had priority, he believed. The bill then went to conference, the conference com- mittee consisting of Senators Wesley L. Jones of Washing- ton, Frederick Hale of Maine, Lawrence C. Phipps of Colo- rado— the same Phipps who said in the Senate-committee hearings that Indian children need not be taught beyond the sixth grade, anyhow — Carter Glass of Virginia, and Lee S. Overman of North Carolina, and Representatives William R. Wood of Indiana, Cramton, Edward H. Wason of New Hampshire, Joseph W. Byrns of Tennessee, and James P. Buchanan of Texas. These conferees, after about forty-five minutes of discussion, agreed to cut out entirely the $270,000 increase granted by the Senate, and to reallocate the $1,100,- 000 as follows: additional food, $195,000; summer-school food, $40,000 ; noonday lunches in day schools, $50,000 ; clothing, $50,000 ; additional personnel for enlarged program of study, $200,000; equipment, $175,000; furniture, $240,- 000; live stock, $150,000. Both Houses agreed to the con- ference report without discussion of the Indian question, and Senator McMaster was later jockeyed out of his motion to reconsider these items. This allocation provides $360,156 less than President Hoover requested for food, but $100,000 more than Repre- sentative Cramton first allowed. It allows three and one- half times as much as the President requested for day-school lunches. The allotment for additional personnel is $11,000 more than he asked, but $100,000 less than Representative Cramton first allowed. The allowance for equipment, furni- ture, and live stock is $20,000 less than Representative Cram- ton first insisted upon, but $502,000 more than President Hoover asked for these "permanent utilities" which are so dear to Representative Cramton's heart. All these things are seriously needed by the Indian schools, but providing them now means that raising the food standard up to what was established as the minimum need for good nourishment must wait until the fiscal year 1932 — unless Representative Cramton has a change of heart. Bu- reau officials said this lay-out would make possible the ex- penditure of about 28 cents a day for each child up to July 1 this year, and about 35 to 36 cents a day during the year beginning July 1. Thus the Indian children will get more to eat than they have had for years. Figuring on a different basis, John Collier, of the American Indian Defense Associa- tion, estimates that the allocations made by the conference committee would permit the Hoover food standard to be put into effect for 47 of the remaining 80 days of this fiscal year and would allow only 32.78 cents a day per child during the fiscal year 1931, even taking the most optimistic view of the money available for food. So far, President Hoover has not been heard from in the storm which followed Representative Cramton's rejection of his request. Neither has Secretary Wilbur, although on No- vember 19 he told the House appropriations committee that "our sharpest obligation, particularly if we are going to try to get the Indian children really to take care of themselves, is to give them enough to eat and get enough clothes for them to wear and give them reasonable health protection." The enormity of postponing even for a day the pro- posed increase in the food allowance is revealed all the more strikingly when one notes that the allowances for food and clothing in 1929 bought much less than even the 1914 allow- ances. The United States Public Health Service reported in 1915, after a two-year study, that it was marvelous that the Indian children did not suffer more from tuberculosis than they did, in view of the food provided for them. Assist- ant Commissioner Scattergood showed, on the basis of the purchasing power of the 1914 dollar, that only $23.52 worth of food was bought for each child in 1929, as compared with $38.52 in 1914; that only $13 worth of clothes was bought in 1929 as compared with $21.81 in 1914; fuel expenditures were in 1929 equivalent to $14.95 on the 1914 basis as against $17.42 in 1914; while salaries of the Indian Bureau em- ployees in the schools in 1929 were equivalent to $69.97 per child on the 1914 basis as compared with $75.37 in 1914. Even the actual per capita expenditures for food and clothing in 1929, before Rhoads and Scattergood came into office, were lower than in 1914 — namely, $36.64 for food in 1929 as against $38.52 in 1914, and $21.04 for clothing in 1929 as against $21.81 in 1914 — while actual expenditures for salaries for Indian-school employees increased from $75.37 per child in 1914 to $119.86 in 1929. All estimates of food costs include the value of milk and produce raised on the school farms. Thus the 1929 food values were only 61.1 per cent of the 1914 values, and the 1929 values for clothing were only 59.6 per cent of the 1914 values, while the salaries were 92.8 per cent of the 1914 salaries and the fuel values were 85.9 per cent of the 1914 values. The allotments for food began to drop in 1921. That was the year in which Representative Cramton became chair- man of the subcommittee of the House Committee on Ap- propriations which passes upon appropriations for the Depart- ment of the Interior. He says that it is a lie to say that he has reduced the food appropriations. Congress, he explains, merely appropriates for maintenance of the schools, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs decides how to allocate the funds. But since Representative Cramton warmly praised the former commissioner and assistant commissioner, Charles H. Burke and Edgar B. Meritt, and in November placed in the record of the appropriations-committee hearings a defense, signed by Meritt, of conditions in Indian schools, he cannot with fairness be said to have disapproved of the allotments made by the bureau during those nine years. Certainly, Cramton, Burke, and Meritt understood one another and worked to- gether. Indeed, Representative Cramton is willing to boast that he has had much to do with framing Indian policy dur- ing these years and points with pride to increased appropria- tions for Indian administration. He controls the purse strings of the bureau and exercises the power this confers upon him. It is true, however, that President Hoover is the head of the Republican Party and is responsible for carry- ing out the new Indian policy he advocated when he ap- pointed the Quaker business men and philanthropists, Rhoads and Scattergood, as trustees of the property and welfare of the Indians. In this capacity, the President should be able at any moment to prevent any stubborn and domineering per- son, inside or outside the bureau, from crippling the plans made at his direction by Rhoads and Scattergood. That the

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390 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 President did not choose to exercise his power seems to be indicated by the fate of the Senate amendments providing food and clothing. Those intimate with the workings of the Bureau of In- dian Affairs say that Representative Cramton interferes with matters of personnel in the bureau. It is true that Rhoads and Scattergood hjve not "cleaned out" the bureau, as was Seartily desired by friends of the Indian. Practically no changes have been made. The director of Indian education, for example, is the same man who on November 22, shortly before President Hoover asked that food standards be imme- diately raised, told the committee: "We do not subscribe to the allegation that pupils in our schools are in a starving con- dition," and who, if Representative Cramton is right, is directly responsible for allocations of lump sums appropriated in recent years for Indian schools. Rhoads and Scattergood are kindly and trusting men who believe that anybody can be redeemed. They are seeking to reform the bureau by con- verting rather than discharging those identified with the old policy. It is a dangerous although generous procedure. Judas remained among the apostles because Christ was like that. Commissioners Rhoads and Scattergood have also per- mitted Representative Cramton to override the announced policy of Secretary Wilbur to transfer Indian irrigation and reclamation projects to the Bureau of Reclamation. They have allowed the Congressman to revive debt-laden projects and sink further money in them, the funds appropriated for such projects amounting to $1,000,000, or one-third of the boasted increase in appropriations and equivalent to the in- crease asked for food and clothing. In other matters, Rhoads and Scattergood are proceed- ing steadily and admirably. Results are naturally slow, be- cause, as Commissioner Rhoads said on December 1 1 in let- ters to the chairmen of the two Congressional committees on Indian Affairs, they found themselves in "a wilderness of past misadventures" when they took charge of the bureau last May. Much must be done by legislation, and the Senate and House committees on Indian Affairs will be found to be sympathetic. To settle the old claims of the various Indian tribes against the government, which have in some cases de- moralized the Indians into thinking they need not work today because they may get a fortune from Uncle Sam tomorrow, Rhoads and Scattergood are seeking the establishment of a court of Indian claims. When the details are ready, Con- gress will probably expedite the measure. To prevent the dissipation of income-bearing funds, they are asking that Con- gress make it possible for Indians to establish trust estates. This measure appeals to Rhoads and Scattergood because it may take from the Bureau of Indian Affairs some of the complicated and burdensome work of looking after those funds and preventing designing persons from stealing them from the Indians. The new commissioners would, of course, prefer to concentrate on health, education, the development of Indian leaders, and the advancement of the Indian toward independence of government restriction, but they have to spend most of their time protecting property. To prevent the dissipation of allotted lands and the con- sequent homelessness and landlessness of the children of In- dians whose allotments have been so dissipated, they have tentatively suggested that allotted lands revert to the tribal estate to be reallotted when conditions warrant it. They are convinced that the entire allotment system must be revised by legislation. To enable the Indians to become independent of the bureau without losing their property, Rhoads and Scat- tergood are inclined to favor steps to incorporate Indian tribes for the handling of the property, an advisory board to be created in each case in addition to the Indian board of directors. The advisory group would, under the bill being considered, consist of three members, one appointed by the President, one by the federal district judge, and one by the tribal stockholders. They know that these ideas are not panaceas and they are proceeding warily. They remember that the allotment of Indian lands was designed to make the Indian independent, and they have not forgotten that indiscreet allotments of lands resulted in conflicts with State and local governments over taxes and the impoverishment of many Indians who did not have the property sense of the capitalistic white man with whom they had to deal. Solution of the shameful matter of "reimbursable charges," which amount to $40,549,686, probably involves action by the courts and by the Congress. There is hope that a test may be made in the courts of the validity of the acts of Congress charging Indians for ex- pensive bridges and irrigation projects of value chiefly to white settlers in their vicinity. Allotted land held under government trust is now burdened with liens of more than $25,000,000. In some cases, the government is thus in the curious position of holding mortgages on property probably in excess of the value of the property. The House Com- mittee on Indian Affairs has just reported favorably a bill directing an investigation of the whole question with a view to scaling down or wiping out such of these "debts" as are found to be illegal or unjust. As yet the commissioners have made no progress toward providing vocational education for Indian boys and girls. They have given notice that they will ask for a supplemental appropriation for this purpose during the fiscal year 1931, be- ginning July 1, 1930, including equipment for print- and machine-shops and for agricultural directors. They have the idea that the Indian is particularly suited for skilled mechani- cal work, not necessarily high-speed factory work. They are placing upon district superintendents the duty of helping to find jobs for Indian boys and girls who do not wish to return to the reservation when they leave school. They are seeking a basis for advising the individual Indian how to make a living in competition with the white man. There is no doubt whatever that Rhoads and Scattergood will administer honestly and as greatly to the advantage of the Indians as possible the red man's resources of power, tim- ber, oil, minerals, and lands. A policy on water power is to be made public soon, it is indicated. Their big job is to find a way to clear out "the wilderness of past misadventures," compensate for the injustices of the past, clear up chaotic legislation, and combat the residue of the "old policy." It is a long, hard job. It is indeed fortunate that the first issue raised in their struggle to bring the bureau out of the morass was one which drew the support of people everywhere — the starva- tion of Indian children. Even though they did not win a full victory, the public support they received in this fight may strengthen them against the temptation to waver, even tem- porarily, when more complex and less human and comprehen- sible issues arise. They must refuse to yield to such tempta- tions if the "new Indian policy" is not to be abandoned.

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April 2, 1930] The Nation 391 Arthur James Balfour By LORD PONSONBY THE Earl of Balfour, or, as he was better known, Arthur Balfour, whose death at the age of eighty-one was announced on March 19, was the last of a type of leader in British politics which the rise of democracy in the second quarter of the twentieth century seems to have swept aside — the last aristocrat to be Prime Minister, the last aristocrat indeed to be leader of the Conservative Party. His mother, Lady Blanche Cecil, was Lord Salisbury's sister, so he belonged to the Cecil clan and had Cecil characteristics. His brilliance and subtlety of mind were recognized early. He mastered the technique of the House of Commons by watch- ing it in silence for a couple of years after his first election in 1874, when he was returned as member for Hertford. He gained experience in the art of parliamentary sharp-shooting when with Lord Randolph Churchill and Drummond Wolff he formed the little band of relentless critics which came to be known as the "Fourth Party." His rise on the ladder of promotion was assured. After holding office in the Local Government Board, the Scottish Office, and as Chief Secre- tary for Ireland, he became leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons in 1891, and after eleven years, only three of which were spent in opposition, he succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury, as Prime Minister in 1902. Three years later his administration fell, and on the formation of the Liberal Government with its huge majority he led his party in opposition until he was superseded in 1913. During the war he served as First Lord of the Admiralty, Foreign Secretary, and Lord President of the Council, became one of the very select few who received the Order of Merit, and was created an Earl in 1922. This is only the bare outline of his career of public service. When one comes to read the impressive list of this statesman's offices, from the days of his assistant private sec- retaryship to his uncle to the day when full of age and honor he was made a Knight of the Garter and an Earl, one might conceive the idea that he must have been the biggest figure in British politics in the last half-century. But he was not. While his success was undoubtedly due to his own conspicu- ous merits, his failure — failure in achievement, failure to im- press his personality on his fellow-countrymen — was due to his equally conspicuous defects. His dialectical skill was unrivaled, his originality of thought was captivating, his indifference to applause was at- tractive. As he stood up in the House of Commons, never with any preparation, thinking aloud in halting tones with no high flights of eloquence, he could arrest attention more com- pletely by what was known as his "elevated conversation" than the trained rhetorician could by eloquence and oratory. When he returned to an intensely hostile House in 1906 after his defeat at the polls, the uproarious Liberal majority howled him down. But he mildly assured an indignant col- league who was anxious to protest that it would be all right in a week or two ; and sure enough a fortnight later the same hostile mass of opponents was listening to him with rapt attention. He could fence with deadly thrusts, his banter was in the highest degree entertaining, and his sarcasm had a deadly sting. Only when he lost his temper did he lose his balance and miss his mark. On the platform he was never a success. The cheers which greeted him as he rose to speak were often vociferous. The cheers which followed as he resumed his seat were always meager. He felt he was wasting himself on the common herd. They knew his feeling, and frequently they could not follow the workings of his over- subtle mind nor grasp any policy for which he stood. They understood Joseph Chamberlain, who had not half his intel- lect but spoke in their own language. They expected a lead from Balfour, but they never got it. They hoped for a mes- sage, but he could not give it. King Edward was shy of Balfour because of inability to understand him. Thinking Balfour "very clever" he suspected that the latter thought him stupid. His Majesty, like his people, rather resented that and was greatly relieved when the time came for him to deal with a plain man like Campbell-Bannerman. At last in 1913 his party came to recognize that Bal- four's leadership was fatal to their fortunes. His curious lack of judgment and foresight in clinging to office in 1904-5 contributed largely to the hopeless defeat of his party in the subsequent election ; and in opposition he had no power to rally his supporters or inspire them with new hopes. His rivals and successors were all men of very different caliber. He found Campbell-Bannerman, for whom he had never hesitated to express his contempt, the supreme and dearly beloved leader of a vast triumphant party. He would regard him night after night with a puzzled expression of amazement, which one day turned to indignation when, after one of Balfour's favorite exhibitions of dialectic juggling, C.-B. brushed him aside with "Enough of this fooling; let us get on with the business," and the House roared approval. Similarly, when Balfour opposed the Liberal Prime Minister's gift of self-government to South Africa, they loudly ap- plauded C.-B.'s single sentence which condemned him as a mischief-maker. For so clever a man, Balfour's lack of statesmanship in the larger political issues was amazing. No aristocrat was ever to follow him in Downing Street. Asquith was his friend and his equal intellectually, but terse in expression and more human. Nevertheless, the friendship of the two men who would sometimes dine to- gether before fulminating against one another in debate had no good effect on either of their parties, which regarded poli- tics seriously as a clash of fundamental principles and out- look— not as a mere intellectual disputation and therefore somewhat of a sham fight. Some may wonder whether the Balfourian influence in trusting to the skill of brain power and disregarding the driving convictions of heart and soul had not a good deal to do with the compromising attitude and loss of hold over his followers on Asquith's part which became so apparent toward the end of that statesman's career. Lloyd George, curiously enough, Balfour admired. Detect- ing, as he thought, an illusive genius and power of leadership which attracted him, he forgave the magnetic Welshman his ignorance. Bonar Law, who took his own place as leader of the Tory Party, Balfour considered a man of little account,

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392 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 and he was utterly mystified that Baldwin, a humble man who had never arrested his attention for a single moment, should actually be chosen as leader of his party. Balfour was quite unable to master the fact that character in the long run tells more than brains. His standard was intellectual, and he had a fastidious dislike of what he judged crude or common. Epigrammatic brilliance interested him; ill- expressed sincerity bored him. After he was dethroned he kept away from Parliament, but when the war came and the Coalition was formed he was ready to put his services at the disposal of the government in a subordinate position, for he had a high sense of public duty. He greatly fancied himself as a military strategist, but he was not a man who could make swift decisions, and the course which clear conviction could make plain was blurred for him by hesitant doubts. He was interested in the war, again from an intellectual point of view, but of course never penetrated beneath the surface to examine its inner meaning or to discover the tragedy not of its barbarity but of its calamitous futility. In the hideous tangle of the peace negotiations, his want of directness and his inability to recognize the great fundamental principles upon which alone recovery could proceed undoubtedly increased the misunder- standings which produced friction among the Allies. If President Wilson was misled Balfour was largely responsible for it. The cross-purposes and confusion of the Peace Con- ference amused him. "We seem," he said one day in an aside to his neighbor at the council table, "we seem to be occupied in presenting places we have never seen to people we have never heard of." Disraeli remarked when he first noticed Balfour in the House of Commons in early days that he could not believe in a man who sat on his shoulder-blades. His physical postures were indeed indicative of his moral attitude. A. J. B. would lounge back with a look of ineffable boredom, but the position of his body and the expression of his face were often an excellent index of the abilities of the M. P. who happened to be addressing the House at the moment. Generally his eyes were shut and he appeared to be taking little notice; occasionally he would adjust his pince- nez and listen, and on rare occasions he would sit up and watch the speaker with careful attention. In this connection his judgment was sound, and it is interesting to remember that he invariably paid the compliment of careful attention when Ramsay MacDonald, the present Prime Minister, ad- dressed the House. Balfour loved the House of Commons; he enjoyed the conflict of keen debate because of his own admirable equipment. But he never seemed to see beyond the fray of words. He was impatient of any moral argu- ment and had a contemptuous disregard for humanitarian sentiments. He was aloof from the life of the common peo- ple. His associates were the "Souls," a band of aristocratic intellectuals in the sun of whose appreciation he loved to bask. His apparent indolence, however, was a pose, for there were subjects about which he cared deeply. He may have been right in his distrust of emotion, but he was wrong in his contempt for sentiment. His dislike of publicity and utter disregard of press criticism were greatly to his credit. One spark of political idealism might have given illumination and purpose to his great talents. Did he understand democracy? It is very doubtful. He seemed rather vaguely aware that a different type of man was forcing his way into Parliament. He resented them. He regarded them individually and did not see that they were symptomatic of a great change that would grow with sur- prising rapidity even in his lifetime. The movement in the country against privilege and in favor of better conditions and social justice undoubtedly made him apprehensive; and his greatest vigor as a political fighter was always displayed in defense of the old order. No one could find more ingen- ious arguments, no one on the spur of the moment could more dexterously open a new line of attack; but it would always be against a cause, more especially if that cause grew out of moral indignation. His outstanding powers in fact were crippled by a certain innate cynicism, so that he invariably chilled the warmth of blundering enthusiasm. Politically speaking he cannot occur again. That mold has been broken ; not that he was one of a pattern, for he was very individual and there has been no one quite like him. The aristocrats have thrown up the sponge and with very few exceptions have retired into a backwater. They are reluctant to compete with the commercials and the plutocrats. They have lost their old undisputed authority and with it, curiously enough, to a large degree they have lost their old distinction. Balfour, if not a great man, was a very distinguished one. Just as in politics with all his gifts he somehow failed to grip the popular imagination or command that deeper re- spect among his colleagues or opponents which far humbler figures have somehow managed to gain, so in philosophy he was no more than an attractive amateur. His "Defence of Philosophic Doubt" and "Foundations of Belief," the best- known of his books, brought him in close contact with the best minds of his day, who thought it interesting that an active politician could dabble so intelligently in philosophy. But on these books as on his other works on the shelf the dust is already fast accumulating, while Dizzy's novels are going into new editions. He was a great appreciator of art and music — he sought the best and found it. His culture and enlightenment were his great assets. We are proud in England, and rightly so, that our statesmen should recognize the supreme value of these intangible and imponderable elements without which politics, as we have reason to know, become materialistic and slip quickly into being sordid. It certainly was not fineness of mind but infirmity of purpose which prevented him from ranking high in our hierarchy of statesmen. He sat on his shoulder-blades morally, and on occasions he came danger- ously near to being condemned as a political trifler. The Balfour land policy for Ireland, the Balfour note with its scheme of debts and reparations, the Balfour policy for the settlement of Jews in Palestine are not achievements of sufficient magnitude long to be remembered. While many friends and associates will remember with affection as long as they live the charm of his attractive personality, no home in Britain as time passes will be able to register or recollect how this prominent statesman contributed to the well-being of their land by his action or added to their own hopes for the future by his sympathy. Neither in the field of industrial and economic politics, nor in connection with progressive measures of social welfare, nor in the serious constitutional problems which occurred in his time, nor yet in relation to the com- plexities of international relations, will any attainment of lasting value be placed by historians to the credit of Arthur James, Earl of Balfour.

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April 2, 1930] The Nation 393 Divorce — and After TWO PERSONAL NARRATIVES V. Divorce with Arbitration I HAVE been divorced for only a year. For that reason my conclusions as to the benefits or injuries of divorce must be regarded as merely tentative. Our marriage had a formal duration of six years, but during its last two years the arrangement was one of separation by mutual con- sent. My first conclusion is that the past twelve months of divorce have been a period of far more calm and happiness for my ex-wife, our one child, and myself than those twenty- four months of separation that preceded the divorce. I attribute the comparative peacefulness of the past year not to the fact that my wife and I were divorced, but to the fact that we got a divorce with arbitration. Since my wife has independent means, the only question for argument in the divorce proceedings was the matter of the custody of our six-year-old child. Declaring that she con- sidered me too irresponsible to be intrusted with any share of this custody my wife sought the complete custody of our son. I was determined to have custody at least to the extent of an equal right to determine matters relating to his health, education, and future — although I was quite willing he should spend the major part of every year with his mother. For two years I tried to gain this point without divorce. Lawyer after lawyer told me it could not be done. "The marriage status is so nebulous that the only way to end this quarreling over your son and have the matter of his custody definitely determined is to get a divorce." This, in substance, was what I was told by the men of law. Finally, my wife went to Reno. There she got a divorce on terms suitable to me. Briefly they are these : The custody of our son is considered as shared equally between my ex-wife and me, that is, we have equal power in determin- ing how he shall be brought up, although he actually lives ten months of the year with her and two with me (two summer months). During the ten months that he is with her he visits me every other week-end, from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. This equal division of authority would probably have led to a continuance of quarreling had not my wife's lawyer and my own attorney arranged in the separa- tion agreement for the appointment of an arbitrator to settle whatever differences might arise between us. This arbitrator was to be a neutral, selected by the two lawyers, but at my suggestion the person actually chosen for this job was a rela- tive of my wife's, a man older than either of us, who knows us both well and in whose judgment and ability to be impar- tial we both have great confidence. So far this arrangement has worked beautifully. Any threatened disagreement about Ted (our son), which would once have brought about a furious clash accompanied by re- criminations covering the whole term of our marriage, is auto- matically submitted to Jim (the arbitrator). So far Jim's * These articles are the fifth and sixth of a series on divorce. will appear shortly. — Editor The Nation. A seventh decisions have pleased both my ex-wife and me, and Jim him- self seems rather to enjoy his curious duties. As to the effect of divorce on my son, that is a matter which time alone can determine. I think he is better off than he would have been as a continual spectator of a marriage- with-bickering, but of course I cannot know. At first under the new arrangement he was a good bit upset by the transfer- ences from his mother's house to mine and back again. There were some pretty trying scenes when he was forced to part with one parent to visit the other, and more than once he said emphatically: "I wish you two people would live together." But he seems to be getting used to the situation, and for several months now there have been no tears at leave- takings. The fact that his parents are becoming much more amicable on such occasions as they have to meet is, of course, making the situation easier for him to bear. Soon after the divorce his mother married again. Ted likes his stepfather and his stepfather seems to like him, and that is all to the good. Of course, Ted does not know yet what marriage is. When, to test him out, I said the other day: "Ted, I think I'll get married again," he replied: "That's all right; that will be all right with me, Daddy." And just after his mother's marriage he said to me: "Daddy, why don't you get married, but not to anyone in particular." So far as I can see, if there is anything which other per- sons contemplating or practicing marriage or divorce might learn from my case it is the value of disinterested arbitration, which ought to be available in marriage as well as in divorce. VI. A Child of Divorce MY parents were divorced when I was four years old. Both remarried within four years, and until I was twenty-one my home alternated between them. I am now twenty-eight years old. I am impelled to write this account because it seems to me that much of the literature on divorce has been based on surmise and sentiment, and very little on fact. For about three years after the divorce I lived with my mother. Apparently I had skipped the "Mother, where is Daddy?" stage, and took it for granted that one lived with one's mother and saw one's father every few months. He was a cold man, who took me upon his knee, said a few things which meant nothing to a child, and then went away. I had noticed that the fathers of other children lived with them, but I never missed my father. Since he was always rather impersonal, he created a tension when I saw him, and it was something of a relief when he kissed me and went away. When I was seven my mother explained that Daddy wanted me to stay with him for a while. I rebelled, cried, and even screamed, but I went with him to his home in a city about forty miles away. In his home I found a woman about the age of my mother, who seemed friendly, but who could not understand my homesickness. I spent two months there,

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394 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 rather miserably, and was then taken back again to my mother. I returned to find that my mother also had a companion, whom I was told to call Uncle. He was rather cold, but kind when occasion demanded, and my joy at being again with my mother almost obliterated the feeling of novelty at having a man in the house. Sometime during the following year my mother gave birth to a child, and when she had regained her strength she and my stepfather decided to move to a city about a thousand miles away. My father came to visit me and say goodby. As usual I was glad to see him go. We moved, and for two years I didn't see him, although occa- sionally I received a typewritten letter which inquired into the state of my health and gave the state of his. When I was ten I was informed that I was to live with my father "for a while." Again I rebelled, but again I went. I lived with him for two years. These years were quite mis- erable; he had had two children by his second wife, who resented my presence in the family; her treatment of me infuriated my father and there were many quarrels. I was anxious to be sent back to my mother, but my father appar- ently thought that I needed a man's care. At the end of the two years, however, he surrendered and sent me back. I traveled alone, and probably the happiest moment of my life came when I ran up the stairs of the depot and found my mother waiting for me. I continued to live with my mother until I was sixteen. My relations with her husband were not particularly pleasant, but compared to my experience with my father's wife, they were quite all right. When I was sixteen we moved back to the city from which we had origi- nally come, and thereafter I saw my father about three or four times a year. When I was nineteen, having received the benefit of a high-school education, I went to work. I have gone rather carefully into the causes of the divorce of my parents. My mother was eighteen when she married, and my father twenty-four. For a year they were happy. But my father, it seems, was inordinately jealous and suspicious. My mother was of a sunny nature, free and open. There were long quarrels. My father accused her of being too friendly with other men. Once she left him and returned to her relatives. She was induced to return to him but within a month there were more quarrels. Shortly before they separated, he accused her of infidelity and struck her to the ground. She took me and left. At the present time my father is wealthy. My mother and her husband are poor. They have the bare necessities of life and little else. Since the divorce my mother's curve of fortune has gone steadily downwards with but few fluctuations. Poor health and pov- erty have conspired to make her life something of a ghastly joke. Recently I asked my mother if she ever regretted the divorce. "If I could know," she answered, "that your life had not been harmed during childhood, I would say that I have no regrets. For myself I have none. Obviously, I could not live with a man who thought I was unfaithful to him. It is only when I think of you that I have any doubts." Probably more than the average son, I love my mother. Had she continued to live with my father, bearing his sus- picions and his insults, I could not love her now; I could only pity her. My love is in great part admiration for her cour- age and independence of mind. Before she married her sec- ond husband, my father, already on the road to wealth, begged her to return to him. She refused, and married a man earning eighteen dollars a week. I have truthfully told her that I should feel very bitter toward her today if she had lived a life of humiliation with a man she did not love, merely because of me. I do not wish to fall, as others have done, into the error of generalizing about divorce, but let those who weep over the "child of divorce" remember that that child some day will grow up. If he loves his parents, and can keep from pitying himself, he will accept his childhood with a shrug of the shoulder and be thankful that his parents did not live together in misery in order to provide him with "a good home." In the Driftway TO a considerable extent Tampa, Florida, lives in order that America may smoke. The city has risen from the ashes of billions of cigars. A billion is a big number, but Tampa makes half a billion cigars a year, and t somebody, somewhere, must smoke them. The industry is an exotic one, transplanted from Havana, and the workers are mostly Cubans or Spaniards or their native sons and daugh- ters. The district known as Ibor City, once a separate municipality, is almost wholly Latin, and in many ways has the appearance of a little Havana. Take a walk through Ibor City on a Saturday night, when the streets are gay and pulsating with life, and you will hear hardly a word in any language except Spanish. But address almost anybody in English and you will get an immediate and fluent reply. Ibor City seems to be as truly bilingual as any spot the Drifter has visited. The street signs are a jumble of Spanish and Eng- lish, and one inhales an oddly cosmopolitan atmosphere as he follows the laughing, talkative crowds. At a corner one sees a swinging sign on one side of which is the announce- ment: "Tickets on sale here for Kid Chocolate vs. Benny Hall"; and on the reverse: "Tiquetas de venta aqui para la pelea de Kid Chocolate vs. Benny Hall." On a newsstand one sees cheek by jowl La Semana, Film Fun, the Diario de la Marina, the Quick-Trigger Western Magazine (published in Springfield, Massachusetts), the Love Story Magazine, La Politico Comica, Photoplay, and the Diario Espanol. THROUGH the swinging doors of the Centro Espanol [Spanish Club] one enters with the crowd. One's ears are filled with fervid, noisy chatter, one's nose is smitten with the odor of countless cigars, and one's eyes take in scores of tables about which sit groups of dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-skinned men playing dominoes or cards or shaking dice for the drinks. Waiters scurry around among the tables bearing bottles and glasses, while from part of the great room comes the click, click, click of billiard balls on a dozen tables. Go outside and walk on through the street. The glaring scarlet fronts of Woolworth and Kress leap out at you, while nearby you encounter the Madrid Hotel, advertising "Cuar- tos furnidos," the Chicago Bargain House (M. Cohen and Son), and Juan Baamonde, furniture. Across the street, side by side, are the Hub Pool Room, the Tom Lee Laundry, and La America Restaurant. One raises his eyes and they encounter a sign: "Los Dos Hermanos, Barberia y Per- fumeria — Ladies' Bob, 50c." Inside the shop one espies a notice: "El sabado no se fia (We do not trust on Saturday)."

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April 2, 1930] The Nation 395 OWING perhaps to the Latin tradition among the citi- zens of Tampa, the city owns an auditorium. It also owns a hotel. The Tampa Bay Hotel was built more than forty years ago by Henry B. Plant. He and Henry M. Flagler were the pioneer builders of Florida. Flagler was interested in the east coast, and finally pushed to completion the dream that many persons thought the pinnacle of folly — a railway along the Atlantic seaboard of the State clear out over the keys to the southernmost point. Plant, on the other hand, undertook to develop Tampa and the west coast. He built the Tampa Bay Hotel after the old model for resort structures. Like the Royal Poinciana at Palm Beach, it is long and narrow, stretching out in hall after hall, salon after salon, so that it is a quarter-mile walk from one end to the other. PJant used the hotel as a repository for a large amount of the valuable European furniture and bric-a-brac which it was his hobby to collect, and much of it is still there. After Plant's death the city of Tampa bought for a song the hotel and its lovely wooded grounds stretching back to the banks of the Hillsborough River. ***** WHEN Plant opened the Tampa Bay Hotel he invited Flagler to attend the ceremonies. "Where is Tampa?" Flagler is said to have telegraphed. "Follow the crowd," was Plant's retort. The Drifter Correspondence A Protest To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: I am not a Communist and I never was one. Furthermore, I am not in sympathy with the alleged "red" movement. The aim of this letter is to protest. The action taken by Commissioner Whalen in sending lists of Communists to employers and thereby violating — according to J. McKeen Cattell — Section 19 of the Federal Penal Code is atrocious enough, but to deprive a boy of his high-school education because he has some communistic ideas is worse beyond words. As a steady reader of The Nation I am asking you to lead the fight to have Saul Wellman reinstated in the Brooklyn Boys' High School, of which Dr. Eugene A. Colligan is principal. Brooklyn, March 12 Student Tabulation Cannot Help To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Morris Ernst ends his article on Children and Property in your issue of February 12 as follows: At present each person unhappily mated must learn everything for himself as if he were the first to break away from the family hearth. Somehow, for the benefit of those who have become involved and will continue to be- come involved in marital difficulties, we must find a way of collecting and organizing for use the enormous accumu- lating body of experience. The collection and organization for use of such information would be very humanly interesting. The information might even be valuable. But valuable to whom? Certainly not to particular Marys and Johns in the midst of separating and faced with the immediate problem of division of children and property. The problem of each couple is, and will always be, peculiar to themselves. The experience of others cannot help them. The emotional content of the two, their temperaments, their characters, their common experiences, the nature of their past relations, the particular reason for separation — all these and many other purely personal elements make each particular case sui generis. In the nature of things, each person unhappily mated must learn everything for himself as if he were the first to break away from the family hearth, because he is the first to break away from that particular family hearth. Tabulation cannot help him. New York, February 10 Harry M. Edelstein Cheering if True To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I wish to lessen the worries of those who contem- plate darning their own socks again, and who may have been misled by Mr. Ernst's references to alimony. It may be a source of great relief to those who wish to prove that married life is "not what it's cracked up to be" to know that once a divorce is granted and the parasite takes up with another "meal ticket," the previous worm is at once, upon application to a court of competent jurisdiction, relieved of "taxation without repre- sentation." I hope my criticism will not be misconstrued and that I will not be regarded as one who glories in wrecking the Ameri- can home. It is merely that I see no need of scaring people into such fits of delirium that they will let themselves be choked by the bonds of matrimony. New York, February 17 Leo Blum Navies Are Expensive To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Allow me to thank you for your article in The Nation of March 19, Parity the Enemy. Remembering clearly conditions in the eighties and early nineties, when we had no navy and no one was afraid, I find difficulty in comprehending the wave of terror that swept the country ten years ago and as yet has not receded. Having, according to our own proclama- tion, "won the war," we found ourselves scared to death. Thereupon we discovered that we must be "prepared." For what we must be prepared no one knew then or knows now, but we were convinced that we must be prepared for some- thing and that the only way to be prepared was to build a navy at least the equal of Great Britain's. A reversal of national attitude so sudden and so silly neces- sarily must have back of it at least a bit of substance. This is easy to find. It is essentially the recent and present frame of mind of the Middle West, which dominates the country, that we are going to do what we like in this world and that no one is going to stop us. We are going to send our merchandise whenever we please and wherever we please. We are going to recognize no blockade except the blockades that we maintain. We are going to dominate the earth. This attitude, of course, is intelligible ; it is the attitude of imperialism through the ages. It is, of necessity, utterly opposed to peace and certain to cause war. Our naval preparations in the late nineties, limited though they were, brought enough evil. They had not a little to do with that truculent and shameless aggression of ours known as

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396 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 the Spanish-American War. For this we have paid heavily and are likely to pay more. It brought us the Philippines and they, sooner or later, promise to bring us war — war not alone with Japan, but with Japan united with others. Such a war is likely to cost us, in addition to countless loss of life and treasure, the end of our national government as now constituted; perhaps, joined with other active causes, the end of our present union of States. Navies are expensive. New York, March 18 Herbert Fordham Absolutes and Progress To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: One does not look for logic in an extravaganza such as Mr. Rorty's The Inventor Enters Heaven, but the central idea follows fashion so closely that the effect on one reader at least is not satisfactory. It would seem, after all, that blackness and whiteness are the fundamental tests, only we have been mis- taken as to which is which. Are there no cases of arrested development in the orthodox hell? When I defended the present generation to one of its mem- bers he finally conceded: "Well, I suppose, after all, my gen- eration is more honest and sincere than yours was." My answer was: "My generation was addicted to the hypocrisy of virtue but sometimes it seems that yours is seeking the hypocrisy of vice." After all, does not the girl of today use rouge and the lipstick for much the same reason her great grandmother did not? On Sundays in Boston we have over the radio Catholic truth, Christian Science truth, fundamentalist truth (twice a day), and occasionally one fears that he is listening to modern- ist truth! If The Nation's pluralism were in vogue we should no doubt have a Soviet hour giving us atheistic truth. Fortu- nately paradoxes occur — in one home Dr. Fosdick is admired but the ladies are High Church, so the seats are arranged for con- venience in bowing toward the east, while incense gives the proper atmosphere. It is through such cross-fertilizations of the absolutes that part of our progress comes. Boston, March 11 Frank A. Manny For Western Readers To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I am at present making a speaking tour of the West- ern States under the auspices of the League for Independent Political Action. For the benefit of Nation readers who are interested in the league I give herewith a list of places and dates of my engagements, with the address at which I can be reached in each city. I should be very glad to get in touch with liberal groups. April 2-3, San Francisco, Stanley Hunter, 2640 College Avenue, Berkeley; April 4, Palo Alto, same address; April 5-8, Los Angeles, General Delivery; April 10, Eugene, Ore., General Delivery; April 11-12, Portland, General Delivery; April 13-15, Seattle, Harry L. Meyer, 5520 Seventeenth Ave- nue, N.E.; April 16-17, Spokane, J. J. Williams, Pacific Hotel; April 18-19, Missoula, Mont., General Delivery; April 20-21, Helena, General Delivery; April 23, Bismarck, N. D., General Delivery; April 24, Fargo, N. D., General Delivery; April 25-29, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Mrs. H. J. Williams, 3326 Oakland Avenue, Minneapolis; April 30, Iowa City, General Delivery. Colorado Springs, March 28 Howard Y. Williams Subscribe now to the new FREEMAN It challenges the old order; ex- amines the existing. It side-steps no issue. It just moves along. Why Not Move With It? Among the contributors to the current issue are: Albert Jay Nock — The Next War Roderick Seidenberg — Soviet Architecture Ernest Boyd — Readers and Writers the new FREEMAN 112 E. 19th Street New York City L^/ie K^-uvreni Clyssue oj THE BOOKMAN Contains three articles on Humanism A REVIVAL OF HUMANISM By PAUL ELMER MORE WHERE YOUTH IS TURNING By THE EDITOR TATE vs. SHAFER THE CONCLUSION OF A CONTROVERSY When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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Books, Drama, Films Marigold By ROBERT HUNT Let the flower be gently shriven Now the frivolous gold is shed. Let a mass of winds be said For the leaf and petal riven And the stem untenanted. Let the garden be forgotten While this creature of the sun Fadeth fast and is undone, Whose essential root was rotten, Flourishing ephemeron. O the flower was deeply bitten. Let the stricken pollen be Lost in larger botany, That in scent and flame had written Its deciduous history. An Apology for the Present An Argument to Prove that its Abolition may be Attended with Some Inconveniences, and Perhaps not Produce those Many Good Effects Proposed thereby. IT has been frequently charged by some of the critics of the sect called humanism that its doctrines have no relation whatever to the present time. I have myself hitherto re- frained from making this charge, for fear that it might be slightly unjust. Its truth, however, has now been freely con- fessed from within the humanist order, by that new but surely ardent disciple, Mr. Seward Collins, editor of the Bookman. "The humanists," writes Mr. Collins to Mr. Harry Hansen, "do not claim the present. They claim the best literature of the past and the best of the future. The contemporary they will dispose of to American naturalists and aesthetes at a very low figure." While many will think it a pity to gild this lily, I cannot refrain from raising a question or two about it. It seems un- wise, to begin with, to accept anything from the humanists, at however low a figure, without first carefully examining their own title to it. This applies particularly to contemporary lit- erature, of which, many suspect, they own next to nothing. Any title search, too, should go into the question of boundaries. When did the past end, and when does the future begin? Did the past end with Sophocles? Or with Rousseau? Or with W. C. Brownell? Or last Wednesday? Or a few minutes ago? Does the future begin tomorrow, or not till 2030, when we present pigmies shall all be dead? For the present, strictly speaking, is but a moving point in time, without extension; all behind it is the past and all before it the future. One would suspect Mr. Collins of deliberately trying to sell the naturalists a mere infinitesimal point, did not knowledge of his writings assure one that he is too innocent to think of such a thing, and that all attempts, indeed, to give precision to his ideas are resented by him as metaphysical quibbling. Yet even if we waive these perhaps technical considera- tions, certain other questions occur. How can the present be so vile, when it is but the child of the brilliant past? And how can we expect anything of the future, when it will be but the child of the miserable present? And why, above all, does the Bookman, Mr. Collins's publication, waste its time, month after month, in reviewing contemporary books — all of which are, by definition, worthless? Mr. Collins and his masters may not credit it, but there are people so benighted as to believe, with Mr. A. N. White- head, that "the only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. No more deadly harm can be done . . . than by depreciation of the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future." And I have myself sometimes ventured to think that an age that can cradle such important figures as Mr. Irving Babbitt, Mr. Paul Elmer More, Mr. Gorham B. Munson, and Mr. Seward Collins cannot be so unworthy as all four unite in declaring it to be. But I must concede that Mr. Collins's statement does set- tle one question. If the humanists are not interested in the present, then there is surely no reason why the present should be interested in the humanists. And with this solution, which is apparently satisfactory all around, why should not the con- troversy close? Henry Hazlitt England England. By Wilhelm Dibelius. Translated from the German by Mary Agnes Hamilton, M.P. Harper and Brothers. $5. IT is a little more than ten years since the World War ended. During this period many books have been written dealing either with the war or with the nations involved in it, most of them by nationals, a few by foreigners. It is proba- bly no exaggeration to say that Professor Dibelius's book on England is not only far the most important work of the kind produced during this period, but that it is one of the few books of enduring importance written by a foreigner about another nation. Professor Dibelius wrote in the years immediately follow- ing the war, when Germany lay crushed beneath the heels of its victorious opponents and when feeling between the recent enemies was at its bitterest. It is therefore conclusive evidence of his elevation of soul, the breadth and depth of his scholarship, and the soundness of his critical judgment that in the very first lines of his Preface he could say: "The idea of writing this book came to me in the war. It forced itself on me from my overwhelming sense of a people giving its best in fighting an enemy which it did not know." To this noble purpose Professor Dibelius remains constant throughout the book. With amazing objectivity and absolute fairness he describes, appreciates, inter- prets, and criticizes English institutions, customs, ideals, and achievements. In the first instance, Professor Dibelius is addressing his own countrymen. He is a cultivated, intelligent, and patriotic German, but he is not therefore blind to the virtues any more than he is blind to the defects of his country's great adversary in the war. He proceeds on the sound assumption that an important contribution toward international understanding can be made only as disinterested scholars bring their minds object- ively to play upon the achievements, the aspirations, the faults, the virtues of other nations. One feels certain that, as Pro- fessor Dibelius has written a fearless, scholarly, and apprecia- tive book about England, so he would be the first to welcome a similar book written by an Englishman about Germany. There is indeed no place for stupid and uncritical national sensitiveness if anything like mutual sympathy, tolerance, and

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398 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 comprehension is to be brought about among nations. Describ- ing England for the purpose of enlightening Germany, Dibelius holds the mirror before England so that no Englishman who reads the book in the spirit in which it is written will fail to understand himself better. The reduction of armies and navies, the perfection of transportation, the weaving of peaceful and beneficial interna- tional relations may all be aids to civilization and lasting peace; but although all these things had been in process during the fifty years preceding 1914, they did not prevent the war. At the crucial moment nations were willing to sacrifice everything —civilization, intercourse, wealth, life — in order that they might blindly dash themselves against one another for the pur- pose of achieving ends which ten years after the event no one is able to define and no participant has even remotely achieved — victor or vanquished. Will mutual comprehension weave still another and stronger bond? Dibelius is hopeful; at any rate, the two nations may now at last understand one another. The catch-phrases with which England has been characterized have here been analyzed and explained; henceforth the English may know how these catch-phrases came into vogue; the Germans, the limitations within which they possess meaning. But the interest of the book is by no means confined to Englishman and German. There is perhaps no nation in the world with so little insight and knowledge as America. Only in the most restricted fashion do we know foreign languages, foreign literatures, foreign history, foreign culture, foreign as- pirations, foreign difficulties and problems. However much it may benefit an Englishman or a German to ponder thoughtfully the pages of Professor Dibelius's book, it will benefit neither of them more than it will benefit an American, anxious, as all for- ward-looking Americans should be, to understand the signifi- cance and role of the two great nations with which directly or by implication this volume deals, for Dibelius shows a clear per- ception of the extent to which the war loaded upon us increased responsibilities at a time when we were hardly competent as a nation to bear the responsibilities we were already carrying. The translator and the publishers have therefore rendered a signal service to the American public by making this volume accessible at a time when the comprehension of foreign nations has become of overwhelming practical and cultural importance. The book was written clearly, vigorously, and concisely in the original German; Mrs. Hamilton has done her work so skil- fully that the reader is unaware of the fact that he is reading a translation. Abraham Flexner The Subjection of India India in Bondage. By Jabez T. Sunderland. Lewis Copeland Company. $4. IT was Sir John Seeley who said long ago about India in his remarkably wise book, "The Expansion of England": "Pro- longed subjection to a foreign rule is one of the most potent causes of national deterioration." This passage may be taken as the text of Dr. Sunderland's new volume. He writes as the advocate of India's freedom from the foreign yoke of Great Britain, and his words come from the depth of a very warm and noble heart. He cannot write dispassionately, for his whole soul is stirred by the subject he has chosen, and when he remembers all that India's subjection has meant of humiliation and injustice in the past to the Indian people, his emotion is roused and he pours forth a stream of passionate protest. Yet his spirit remains kindly and generous throughout, and he seeks in every way to be fair-minded and true to the evidence which he has laboriously collected. At the opening of his book he gives the following explanation of his motive: I very earnestly desire not to be misunderstood as to my motive in writing this book. Let no one say, or for a moment believe, that the book means enmity to Great Britain. It means nothing of the kind, any more than pleas for freedom of the slave in the old days of Ameri- can slavery. I speak plainly; but as already said, in everything I endeavor to be fair and just, and to treat with respect and courtesy those who hold views different from my own. I am in no sense whatever England's ill- wisher. What I advocate for India I believe to be for England's good as well as for India's. I want no wrong done to England, in connection with India or anywhere else. But I also want England to do no wrong to India, or through India to the world. The fact that this book of Dr. Sunderland's has been pro- scribed by the Indian government is itself a justification of the title "India in Bondage." Such a proscription obviously means a denial of essential freedom. The matter has not ended even there. A singularly upright and sincere Indian editor, Mr. Ramananada Chatterjee, was recently prosecuted for sedition and convicted because he had published the book in India. There are few men in India whose goodness I personally ad- mire more and whose friendship I value more highly than Mr. Ramananada Chatterjee's, and it was a very great shock to me indeed when his prosecution and conviction were announced. It brought home to me how helpless India is. If Dr. Sunderland is challenged, as an American, with living in a glass house owing to America's retention of the Philippines against the will of the people, he makes a splendid reply: "Whether we like your question or not, it is just and entirely proper on your part; and even if for the time being it makes us mad, as it will be likely to, in the end it will do us good." He also quotes Bishop Brent's words: "Moral ques- tions have no boundaries. The world of today is steadily re- vealing itself to be a world of identical moral interests. If we exploit abroad, the downfall of the exploited will eventually become our own downfall." The indictment which Dr. Sunderland makes is one that cannot be easily answered. The truth is that in earlier days there was much to be said for the continuance of British rule in India because it remained acceptable to the great majority of thinking Indian people, but today when it has become unac- ceptable the saying of Sir John Seeley about the evil of pro- longed foreign rule comes true. Autocracy has gone on far too long, and it has brought with it an inevitable chain of evils which make India feel her bondage more and more acutely. Dr. Sunderland's own solution for the Indian problem is a remarkably moderate one. He would himself be perfectly content to see India free and self-governing in the same way that Canada and Australia are free. He has not set forward in this volume as his own solution of the present deadlock any- thing further than this dominion status: As a result of a pretty wide acquaintance in England and a residence of some years in Canada, I am disposed to believe that nowhere in the world can be found gov- ernments that are more free, that more fully embody the intelligent will of their people, or that better serve their people's many-sided interests and wants than those of the self-ruling colonies, or "dominions," of Great Britain. I do not see but that these are in every essential way as free as if they were full republics. Probably they are not any more free than the people of the United States, but it is no exaggeration to say that they are essentially as free. The connection of most of them with England, their mother-country, is not one of coercion but of choice; it is one of reverence and affection. That the British govern- ment assures such liberty in even a part of its colonies is a matter for congratulation and honorable pride. To this extent it stands on a moral elevation equal, if not superior, to that of any government in the world.

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April 2, 1930] The Nation 399 With this idea of Canada in his mind he welcomes domin- ion status, and he would be glad if the people of India could be satisfied with that position. But at the same time he fully recognizes that the choice must rest with India herself; and if her choice were finally to be complete independence, he himself would accept that verdict as the will of the Indian people. Just as slavery had to be abolished because it was an infringe- ment of sacred human rights, so the foreign rule of Britain over India must come to an end for the same reason. This is Dr. Sunderland's main thesis, and the facts he brings forward uphold it in a convincing manner. C. F. Andrews Critic as Poet; Poet as Critic Poets, Farewell! By Edmund Wilson. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2. Gold Coast Customs. By Edith Sitwell. Houghton MifHin Company. $2. EDMUND WILSON disarms any reviewer when, with a gesture of farewell, he leaves the field of poetry to those who are indeed poets and betakes himself again to his own field of prose and criticism, a field where his name is already emblazoned. This farewell is indicated in his title. Since, however, Mr. Wilson has chosen to publish a book of poems, he has offered himself for criticism concerning his poetry. The present reviewer has always been much puzzled as to just how the difference between an excellent imitation of poetry — such as is written frequently by men of letters — and real poetry may be defined. Such imitations have the manners, the garments, the poses of real poetry, but in some subtle way they betray themselves as imitations. Strangely enough, any acute literary analyst can imitate poetic images, poetic language, poetic ideas; what betrays him usually is his rhythm, for in real poetry the rhythm is the emotion and the emotion is the rhythm. This is not true of poetry written by the literary analyst. Now it is not quite fair to put Mr. Wilson in the latter class: his poems spring from completely authentic experience, but in them the intellect rather than the emotion determines the rhythm. Only once or twice does the emotion dictate, and on these occasions, as in A Young Girl Indicted for Murder, the rhythm springs from the emotion. In general, Mr. Wilson's rhythms are not inevitable. His use of language is expert, his imagery subtle; he is a far better writer of verse than hun- dreds who proclaim themselves poets in the flesh, but he is not essentially a poet and he is acute enough to understand this fact himself. As for Edith Sitwell — here we have the opposite side of the picture, the poet attempting to be critic of her age, and failing whenever she loses sight of her art in order to stamp down her ideas. The world for Miss Sitwell is like a sampler on the wall: woven figures — romantic, pudgy, and wooden-faced, like a child's dream of maturity — figures seeming to move yet utterly incapable of motion! Miss Sitwell is very tired indeed, very completely lost — and she knows it. She remembers a childish and romantic past as delightful, but in this past she has no faith; the reality of the present she abhors. Life is a living death and death is an uncertainty which may be even worse. Hers is the dilemma of so many moderns. And so like a modern Lady of Shalott, a little angular, Miss Sitwell weaves her samplers, and the legend running underneath — whether it be "God Bless Our Happy Home" or something else — is always interpreted ironically. And while she weaves she sings her nursery songs, which, although they have nursery rhythms, are in idea very sophisticated and disillusioned. And she gazes into the mirror, already cracked from side to side and very old, because even its distortions are preferable to the view out the window. The long poem with which this book begins, Gold Coast Customs, is a superimposition of African savagery and canni- balism upon modern savagery and cannibalism as seen at one of Mrs. Bamburgher's parties. The criticism inherent in the situation is not new: that as a whole African savagery is more decent than is modern. I have deliberately oversimplified the poem in order to make my point, for Miss Sitwell's criticism fails, and what is valid as poetry is her emotion of horror at the sordidness of modern life and her yearning after faith: I have seen the murdered God look through the eyes Of the drunkard's smirched Mask as he lurched O'er the half of my heart that lies in the street 'Neath the dancing fleas and the foul news-sheet. Her six lyrics, which were to be a part of a longer poem never written concerning Bluebeard, add little to Miss Sitwell's ideas and are written with her usual amazing transposition of imagery from one sense to another; here again we see what we smell, taste what we see, touch what we smell. All poets use this trick, but with Miss Sitwell it becomes a definite technique of distortion, and the result achieved through it is always that of the superimposition of the actual world upon the romantic world — and disillusionment concerning both. Eda Lou Walton Mr. Callaghan's Medium It's Never Over. By Morley Callaghan. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.50. IN some respects Morley Callaghan is by far the most inter- esting member of the contemporary hard-boiled school of fiction. Under the surfaces of a prose style that runs in deadly parallel to the familiar technique of Ernest Hemingway, he uncovers a warm, vibrant, boyish personality. He exhibits a curiosity about human behavior that seems to be at war with the very method he has chosen as his medium. His short stories and novels are actually concerned with the subtle, often tender, sometimes downright sentimental phases of human relationship. As evidence of his vitality he displays a wholesome sense of humor in his very short story about a young priest facing a problem in practical theology as he tries to expel a drunkard from a confessional. Even in the hands of Ernest Hemingway, the hard-boiled manner is suspect — behind a brightly polished exterior you discern a soft, almost tearful admission that the world is no place for sweet young lovers — and in the case of Morley Callaghan you half expect the apparition of another Booth Tarkington, gifted with the naive curiosity of a Sher- wood Anderson. In his latest novel Callaghan throws the shadow of a man who died upon the gallows across the life of his protagonist, John Hughes. The story is told in the usual detached, simple, straightforward manner, but the situation that creates the story carries with it a world of complex interrelationships, depend- ing largely upon the fact that the human organism is some- thing more than a given assortment of sexual reflexes. John Hughes is a rationally ambitious young man, bewildered for the time being by an emotional attachment to two young women, Lillian and Isabelle. He is a thoroughly likable young fellow, a bit slow-witted and inarticulate. His particular ambition is a successful career as a concert baritone. He earns his living by clerking in a department store and singing in church choirs. Just before the novel opens he breaks his engagement to Isa-

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400 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 belle (quite at her suggestion) because of possible scandal aris- ing from her brother's death upon the gallows. By avoiding an obvious emotional complication, he steps into another that has all the elusive characteristics of a messy love affair. He acquires Lillian, Isabelle's closest friend, as his mistress. Help- lessly, hopelessly, he tries to forget Isabelle by immersing him- self in his affair with Lillian; meanwhile, Lillian, always easily stirred by a romantic appeal to her emotions, imagines that she is in love with Isabelle's dead brother. Isabelle, frustrated in her love for John, becomes reckless in her favors to other men. Both girls are in a fair way to go to the dogs and John is halted in the progress of his career. Putting it mildly, the situ- ation becomes intolerable; you feel desperately sorry for these three young people, even at the expense of your own emotions going a little bit soft and sentimental. Callaghan never fails to excite your sympathy for his char- acters; even the minor figures (there is an excellent portrait of Father Mason, a Catholic priest) are clearly outlined and convincing. Yet here as always there is a possibility of Cal- laghan creating something far more important than his self- imposed limitations allow, something well beyond the profes- sional novel patterned in the style of 1930. Horace Gregory A Philosophical Vagabond A Landlubber'? Log. By Arthur Warner. Little, Brown and Company. $3. RUNNING away to sea when one is young is the oldest and most romantic of adventures. No Wanderlust that halts at the sea's rim can ever find full and satisfying ex- pression; for the inland voyage, or even the voyage in the air, is tame compared to the majesty and mystery of the sea and the hallowed traditions of a thousand years that surround all ocean-going ships. Many generations of men have grown old haunted by an unfulfilled dream of youth to follow the gipsy trail to the far corners of the earth. A voyage such as Arthur Warner has recorded in "A Landlubber's Log" would leave the old age of most men with few regrets. Mr. Warner's book is an absorbing account of a youthful voyage in a tramp steamer to Australia and New Zealand some twenty-five years ago. After an interlude spent in wandering — as a "bindle-stiff" through New Zealand, as a beach-comber in Australia, and as a sailor on a windjammer — he returns to England in the hellish stokehole of a passenger ship. The narrative is realistic, but as in all good realism there hovers over it the mystery of the unseen, the spirit of romance. Mr. Warner's yarn has something of the hard fidelity to fact which one associates with a ship's log. There is not the remotest suggestion of deliberate dramatic heightening or ficti- tious falsification for the sake of a better story. Without the use of any gestures or obtrusive devices he has told his story quietly and simply. His veracity is the veracity of cool re- straint, even of understatement, and he is as skilful in this respect as is William H. Davies in "The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp." But he is more charming than Davies in his commentaries upon his experiences — upon men and things. He has the ability to turn informal essayist at a moment's notice, but he does it with fine artistic tact and an understanding of the requirements of effective narrative. These essays in little are always illuminating, and reflect in quizzical humor or in flashes of insight a man who enjoys the wonders and roaring paradoxes of creation. While rambling through New Zealand he expounds a bit of beggar's philosophy the wisdom of which I as an ex-hobo can heartily indorse. I quote it as a valuable bit of advice to the fraternity: When traveling as a tramp, as I have hinted before, one must be bold, insistent, and immediate. One cannot trifle or dally with people's generosity; it's an unstable quality that may ooze away or grow cool. Give people an inch and they'll take an ell. Let them off from giving you supper and they'll want to deny you breakfast too. You mustn't give them a chance to be ungenerous; if necessary, be generous for them. Keep their hearts bleeding; the flow clots all too readily. The incidents in this narrative are not sensational. There is no mutiny, no fire at sea, no encounter with Malay pirates. Several fights occur, a man falls overboard, the author has a narrow escape from death as a stoker — but the events for the most part are casual enough. All, however, are made to seem important and unique as transcribed by Mr. Warner. His is the art that fashions interest out of experiences which to a writer less alive and less skilful would yield little. His sojourn with the Salvation Army in Newcastle, Australia, is most amus- ingly presented, and his long trek alone across New Zealand is an excellent illustration of how the trivial can be made exciting. But most entertaining of all is the voyage on the tramp steamer, the Lethington, to Australia. The members of the crew are vividly delineated, each speaking a delightfully convincing idiom whether he be Cockney, Irishman, Norwegian, or Scotsman. As the Lethington plows the desolate seas from the Cape of Good Hope to Australia six thousand miles away, one learns of the sailor's peculiar insularity, of his language and preoccupations, his songs and chanteys, the motives that underlie his allegiance to the sea. Mr. Warner says in the opening pages of his book that he became a sailor in order to find reality. "A Landlubber's Log" is ample evidence that he found it; and what is no less important, he has written a book that belongs with the best of the vagabond travel narratives. Glen Mullin Boswell and Johnson Dr. Johnson and Mr. Boswell. By Harry Salpeter. Coward- McCann. $3.50. THIS volume has the pleasantly casual, conversational tone proper to a book about Johnson and Boswell, no matter how much industrious reading and research may have preceded the writing of it. Mr. Salpeter refers in the postscript to the more than sixty volumes he read, reread, perused, and dipped into during three years, and to his good fortune in having access to the first six volumes of the privately printed Boswell papers. As the publication of these papers goes on, Boswell emerges more and more as a vivid and various personality, in whose life Johnson was a golden incident, but an incident, "as Boswell was an incident in Johnson's." They met in 1763, and Mr. Salpeter tells all about that meeting, and what each man was like then and what he had done; and how after this first act of the friendship Boswell went off on his grand tour, became interested in Corsica, and Paoli, and Voltaire, and Wilkes, and presently established for himself a reputation on the Continent as considerable as that enjoyed by Johnson in England. Had Johnson rebuffed him when he decided to write his life, Boswell might have immor- talized some other celebrity, such as Wilkes, for he was "quite promiscuous in his biographical affections." That year 1763, central in the lives of Johnson and Boswell, can be regarded as central in the Johnsonian epoch; and Mr. Salpeter fills a dozen pages or so with facts about the rise of Methodism, inventions in industry, the progress of the novel, the beginning of the Romantic movement — facts that help the reader with a rich background to fill in the story, but offer a somewhat discon- certing challenge to the weak memories of most of us. Sup-

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April 2, 1930] The Nation 401 pose Crabbc was then nine, and Mozart seven, and Blake six, and Handel peacefully at rest for four years in Westminster Abbey? They might have made the age interesting poetically and musically if they had been older or younger, but they weren't; and Mr. Salpeter sums it all up as an age that would have left indifferent wracks behind if Boswell hadn't made it the golden age of biography. After this crossroads encounter in 1763, how did Boswell influence Johnson and Johnson Boswell? Johnson's best writ- ing had been done but his best talking was to come, and it might not have come at all in its rich profusion if Boswell had not helped to create it by his persistent questioning. He displayed great ingenuity in thinking up questions: what would Johnson do if shut up in a tower with a baby, for instance — questions that once made Johnson say, "Would not such talk make a man hang himself?" As for Johnson's influence, perhaps he stif- fened Boswell's moral spine, though the results were not strik- ing except from the standpoint of how much worse Boswell would have been without Johnson. That Johnson became his model was "to the greater ultimate advantage of the preceptor than the student." The later chapters contain sketches of Johnson's friends, an account of the club, a brief systematic narrative of his life, and a discussion of the always interesting contradictions and virtues and oddities of his character. The best things have already been said of him, and Mr. Salpeter puts down nothing new that is any better than Mrs. Thrale's "all he did was gentle, if all he said was rough." Dorothy Brewster Books in Brief The Virginia Plutarch. By Philip Alexander Bruce. Two vol- umes. The University of North Carolina Press. $9. These volumes contain biographical sketches of thirty-three persons, from Powhatan to Woodrow Wilson and Dr. Walter Reed, whose careers seem to Mr. Bruce to entitle them to remembrance and praise as Virginians. The Virginia connec- tion in some cases is rather incidental; most people do not think of John Sevier of Tennessee fame as a Virginian, nor of George Rogers Clark, Sam Houston, or Edgar Allan Poe as belonging primarily to the Old Dominion. Mr. Bruce's choice, however, has been determined more by what men did than by what they were, and while in the cases of the colonial and Revolutionary leaders, the first Presidents, and John Marshall the two stand- ards merge, something of reflected light shines from others who sought or found distinction afield. The sketches do not add anything important to what was already known about their subjects, nor does Mr. Bruce trouble himself to explain — if it can be satisfactorily explained — why Virginia has been so pre- eminently rich in distinguished names. The omission at this point is the more remarkable because Mr. Bruce knows the plantation system and the early social life of Virginia extremely well, and could, if he had chosen, have illumined his chapters with more than incidental references to the social and economic background. The volumes may be commended to readers who like to take their history in the form of biography. Elizabeth Gaskell. By Gerald DeWitt Sanders, Ph.D. With a Bibliography by Clark S. Northup, Ph.D. Published for Cornell University. Yale University Press. $3.50. This book is an excellent example of the depths to which professional American scholarship can fall. It fills all the re- quirements of method without exhibiting any intellectual dis- tinction except perseverance. Footnotes, bibliographies, and indexes are in perfect order; chronology and punctuation are faultless. With the tireless patience of a typical degree-getter Mr. Sanders has arranged a mass of biographical and explana- PROFITS OTTO LEHMANN-RUSSBULDT Translated and edited by Pierre Loving jLjLere are laid bare the far-reaching activities of the most unscrupulous group of men in the world — the in- ternational armament ring. Krupp, Schneider, Skoda, Vickers, Zaharoff — all these sinister, almost fabulous figures are depicted in their true colors . . . cold, ruth- less, without loyalty to man or country. The sensa- tional matter this book contains, now told for the first time, and supported by unimpeachable documentary evidence, is of vital concern to all interested in the prob- lems of armaments and international relations. $1.75 ALFRED H. KING, Publisher, 8 W. 40 St. wmmwmmmm by Scott earing Author of "Black America? 'Dollar Diplomacy", etc The manuscript of this book caused Dr. Nearing's expulsion from the Com- munist Party. In these pages he raises the question whether the United States has entered upon an imperialist cycle comparable to that of Rome and of other empires that have vanished. $2.50 VANGUARD At Bookstore^ When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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402 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 New York's First Labor Bank We share profits with our depositors. JS& Q / ^y-/ Therefore IJsL M /f\ Pay Tt/4/u to our Thrift Accounts All deposits made until April 30th will bear interest from April 1st THE AMALGAMATED BANK OF NEW YORK 11-15 UNION SQUARE The Foundation of the Home Library— Those young people whose growing minds are eager for infor- mation— and those older folk, too, whose minds are still growing— are in daily need of the ever-ready assistance of this great question-answerer. Webster's New International Dictionary "The Supreme Authority91 Universally accepted and used in courts, colleges, schools, business offices, and among government officials. 452,000 entries, including thousands of NEW WORDS, 32,000 geographical subjects, 12,000 biographical entries. Over 6,000 illustrations and 100 valuable tables. Get The Best See it at any bookstore, or send for new richly illustrated pamphlet containing sample pases ol the New International. FREE, if you men- tion this magazine. G. & C. MERRIAM COMPANY, Springfield, Mas.. tory facts under convenient headings and called it a day, or, to be exact, a study of Mrs. Gaskell's works. Yet "The Life of Charlotte Bronte" is dismissed with some gossipy anecdotes. There is no attempt made to discuss its merits or to relate it to the history of English biography. The generalities concerning Mrs. Gaskell's use of dialect are as trivial as the remarks about "Cranford." Such a performance, aside from the re- flection it casts on scholarship, is especially regrettable in view of the absence of any current appreciation of the subject in American literary criticism. Edward Coke. By Hastings Lyon and Herman Block. Hough- ton Mifflin Company. $5. This biography of the oracle of the common law, though written by lawyers, is evidently addressed not primarily to law- yers but to the reading public at large. The authors devote less space to Coke's legal writings than to an account of nego- tiations for the marriage of his daughter and the accompany- ing quarrels between himself and his wife. They rarely give any indication of their sources of information and never refer to earlier writings on Coke. They pay much attention to his- torical backgrounds and to creating atmosphere, but with the best of intentions they do not give us a convincing portrait of the tough old lawyer in all his strength and weakness. To do so would be, indeed, a remarkable achievement. Even Mr. Lytton Strachey, in his "Elizabeth and Essex," was not moved to attempt a vignette of Coke. Love's Illusion. By J. D. Beresford. The Viking Press. $2.50. First love — romantic love — comes to the youthful hero of this charming and delicate story of remembered youth during a holiday at home, after his Cambridge days are over and while he delays for a brief three months before entering on his career. He is an inexperienced youth ; so he falls in love with an illu- sion— a dream of perfection. But Brenda is a realist, as earthly as she is beautiful. Her he never sees and is quite incapable of knowing. Nor does he realize that it is she who subtly encourages him step by step as he presses his love-making, that she deliberately brings about all that happens between them. And then, inevitably, comes disillusion. The story glides by smoothly, and long before it is over one has succumbed to the spell cast by its well-sustained, idyllic mood. On Virgin Soil. By Balder Olden. The Macaulay Company. $2.50. The war as it was carried on in Africa gave this German writer material for an excellent book of sketches. Here are primitive characters — black and white — treated without the usual regard for their picturesque qualities; here are bare, sometimes mean conflicts; here are sharp, brutal scenes and brilliant descriptive passages. The author has an admirably objective manner in his treatment of simple souls and does nothing to soften — or, apparently, to heighten — the somewhat acrid atmosphere of existence in the tropics. Gall and bitter- ness are here, with just a modicum of war's heroic aspects. Pomp and Circumstance. By E. de Gramont, Ex-Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre. Translated by Brian W. Downs. Introduction by Louis Bromfield. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $3. There have been better memoirs, Mr. Bromfield to the contrary, and there probably will be better ones of the very period of which Mme de Gramont writes. The best part of these, and by best is meant the most illuminating and best written, is that devoted to the Rothschild family. These ac- counts have the intimate enthusiasm the rest of the book lacks. But Mme de Gramont admits the never-failing allure that the Orient has for her; so perhaps the other people she knew, in spite of their wit and mannerisms, never attained quite the When writing to advertiser* pitas* mention The Nation

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April 2, 1930] The Nation 403 same importance in her eyes — certainly they never have in the world's estimate. Yet distinguished memoirs have been made with far less international figures. The fault lies not in the matter but in the manner, which lacks both imagination and discernment and, what is most important, animation. Drama An Alien Art MEI LAN-FANG, called the greatest of Chinese actors, has been performing at the National Theater while a company of Japanese players has been appearing at the Booth. The coincidence is, I presume, no more than a coinci- dence, but it affords an unusual opportunity to compare the austere and highly formalized art of the former with the facilely graceful dance-pantomimes of the latter. Mei Lan-Fang is enigmatically interesting, but the danger is, I think, that the Occidental critic will speak with a too easy enthusiasm concerning the subtle beauty of his performance. For the purpose of analogy let us suppose that a Chinese, totally ignorant of English literature, is taken to see Forbes- Robertson in "Hamlet," and let us suppose still further that he comes away full of volubly enthusiastic opinions about Shake- speare. Would we not feel that his criticism was more than absurd? Would we not, as a matter of fact, consider it imperti- nent? And yet such an opinion would be hardly more absurd or more impertinent than any which the average New Yorker is likely to express concerning Mei Lan-Fang. That he is excellent in some fashion is obvious enough, but the plays which he plays are part of an ancient and totally alien tradition, while the style of his acting is as strange to us as the style of Duse would be to the laborer in the rice fields of a distant province. An Ameri- can who had spent his life in China from childhood on might possibly have a pertinent critical opinion. Any other, no matter how much he was intrigued or how many glimpses he thought he had got into the real meaning of the performance, would be pretty certain to miss the point. When Mr. Mei first enters the stage, singing in a high falsetto and waving the long sleeves which completely cover his hands, the impression which he gives is of something purely gro- tesque. The language of his gestures and the language of his intonations are as foreign as that which is articulated by his lips. They mean nothing because they suggest nothing in our experi- ence and because they awaken nothing in our memories. More- over, though one gradually begins to perceive that here is some kind of skill and some kind of eloquence; though one begins, in consequence, to watch with interest and a kind of wondering admiration, one never ceases to find even the gestures as unex- pected as the intervals of the Oriental music which accompany them. Thus at the end of one little play a man and wife who have just learned of the death of their only son break into a song and dance. And though the program obligingly informs us that the characters in such a play usually sing and dance at emotional crises, it is not information concerning the conventions of a form of art which we need in order to appreciate it. What we need is the understanding, the habitual acceptance, which comes only with long familiarity, and to attempt to appreciate Mei Lan- Fang through the aid of a program note is all too much like trying to read Homer with a dictionary. The only meaning we get is the meaning which does not really matter. Nor is this, indeed, all, for the intention of the plays is hardly less obscure than that of the acting. They are legendary in character, and they deal, some of them at least, with violent and bloody deeds. Yet I confess that I am not sure even how SOCIAL WORK AS A PROFESSION is becoming increasingly important and recognized. Some other professions may be financially more remunerative, but none offers greater returns in terms of intrinsic interest, social useful- ness and stimulating contacts. The Training School for Jewish Social Work offers graduate courses in Jewish Family Case Work, Child Care, Community Centers and Community Organization. Scholarships and Fellowships ranging from $150 to $1000 for each school year are available for especially qualified students. For full information, address M. J. Karpf, Director k The Training School For Jewish Social Work A graduate school 67-71 W. 47th St., New York The celebrations on May 1st dramatize again the events of igiy midst renewed outbursts of enthusiasm and a glorious panorama of color and costume. e .. . ... _, . Sail from^New York on ST. LOUIS April 12th BREMEN " 12th RELIANCE ... " 15th AQUITANIA . . " 16th OLYMPIC .... " 18th ILE de FRANCE " 18th or any other ship and join our party in Paris on April 26th. Members of thia tour will visit the Russian theatres and Universi- ties at the time of their greatest activity. Write or call for Information Amalgamated Bank Travel Dept. 11-10 Union Square, New York City •I Amalgamated Trust & Savings Bank 111 West Jackson Blvd. Chicago, IU. For Information on other Spring and Summer tripe write for booklet "N" CfoDPtt- When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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404 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 After War, What Is the World's Greatest Menace? A gigantic and deadly narcotic menace is upon our country and the world. "The yearly economic burden laid upon our people exceeds $5,000,000."* There are about 1,000,000 addicts in the United States. Have you read Consequences By JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD Author of IMAOINA, with illustrations by Lauren Ford and Arthur Rackham. In the introduction, John Haynes Holmes says: " 'Consequences' tells a thrilling story. It may do with the narcotic or drug evil today what Mrs. Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' did with the evil of chattel slavery yester- day." "Nothing more compelling has been written in years." — Ohio State Journal. Until the people rise up against government revenue from opium, the tragic bondage of "THE LIVING DEAD" will increase. * Congressman Fisk. Dutton and all bookshops. $2.50 THE DIVORCE AND SEPARATION OF ALIENS IN FRANCE. By Lindell T. Bates. Grounds and defences, power and jurisdiction of courts, procedure, rules of evidence, alimony, separation agree- ments, division of property, etc. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS. Price $7.00 □ LECTURES □ FREETHINKERS OF AMERICA Friday, April 4th. 8 P.M., 130 West 56th Street, N. Y. PROFESSOR ELLEN HAYES of Wellesley College will deliver an important address entitled "IS SCIENCE BECOMING RELIGIOUS?" Professor Ellen Hayes is coming to New York especially to deliver this address. Admission Free. Questions and Discussion. 7 East ir.th Btreel □ EXHIBITION □ FORUM ON CURRENT EVENTS March 20, 2 P.M. 26 Cents Admission CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL Renowned journalist and writer will speak on "AND THEY CALL THIS DISARMAMENT" RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Algonquin 8094 SPRING EXHIBITION FERARGIL GALLERIES 37 East 57th Street LAUREN FORD of whom Elizabeth L. Cary says: Her work "is steeped in the rare quality of imaginative poetry and whimsicality." March 31 to April 15 much of primary dramatic emotion they are supposed to contain, though I am inclined to suspect that, despite occasional scenes which seem tragic in our sense, they are not intended to move us much with "pity and terror." I suspect that through the course of time and endless re-treatment they have come to be no more than the materials used for formal decorative effects, that we are, for example, not expected to be frightened by the bandit king whom Mr. Mei, as a sort of Chinese Judith, finally kills any more than we are supposed to be frightened by the purely decorative dragon which St. George is slaying in a piece of Gobelin tapestry. I suspect, moreover, that such art may be very beautiful, and I know that our own opera — in which, for example, the death of the heroine is less an occasion for sorrow than an excuse for an aria — represents a less complete develop- ment in a similar direction; but after all I can only guess at the intention of "Vengeance on the Bandit General" and feel only obscurely its beauty. I should not like to convey the impression that there are no moments in Mr. Mei's performance which are clearly and com- prehensibly effective, for there are a number of such. Neither should I like to seem to imply that the performance as a whole is not very much worth seeing and studying. But I should rather give either of these false impressions than to pose as having a really intelligent appreciation of something too alien to be judged by a person like myself. I believe that Mei Lan-Fang is great, but I have only a very confused idea of the nature of his greatness. The Japanese are, by comparison at least, relatively simple and understandable. Their dancing and acrobatic pantomime is extraordinarily supple, but it is not so very different in kind from that with which we are familiar in ballets, and the rather facilely sentimental stories which they tell are not unlike the stories of Western ballets. No audience is likely to be much puzzled; neither, I think, is it likely to be rewarded by anything more than an excellent performance in an essentially familiar manner. The "all-star" revival of "The Rivals" (Erlanger's Thea- ter) has Mrs. Fiske and a number of other well-known per- formers, but they do not succeed in arousing more than an anti- quarian's interest in the play. "This Man's Town" (Ritz Theater) is a fairly good example of the "hard-boiled" melo- drama; "Love, Honor, and Betray" (Eltinge Theater) is quite the worst of all the bad plays in which Alice Brady has recently appeared. Joseph Wood Krutch Films I Small Mercies IN Soviet Russia the cinematic artist, like any other artist, is supposed to be concerned only with the cause of com- munism. Very often he will deny that he is an artist at all, claiming as Eisenstein does that he is merely an engineer, a tech- nician. It is something of a paradox, therefore, that outside of Russia Soviet films have been acclaimed as masterpieces of cinematic art, superior to anything produced in other countries, whereas their preoccupation with communism has been regarded as their least important feature. But paradox or not, Soviet directors continue to surprise foreign audiences by the vigor and resourcefulness of their imagination. "The China Express" (Cameo) fully maintains this reputation for high imaginative quality. Treated as a dramatic poem it unfolds its story with a tremendous power of imagery and movement, ending in a breath-taking climax of a rushing train which no powers on earth seem to be able to stop. This apotheosis of a rebellion as the sym- WHen writing to advertisers pitas* msntion The Nation J

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April 2, 1930] The Nation 405 □ THEATRES □ □ CIVIC REPERTORY "SXtt-ST 60c, $1, $1.60. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2:30 EVA LE GALLIENNE. Director Thurs.Mat.,Mar.27. "The Cradle Song." Thurs.Eve.,Mar.27. "The Open Door" and "The Women Have Their Way." Fri. Eve., Mar. 28, "John Gabriel Borkman." Sat. Mat., Mar. 29, "Peter Pan." Sat.Eve.,Mar.29, "The Would Be Gentleman." Mon. Eve., Mar. 31, "The Living Corpse." Tues. Eve., Apr. 1, "The Open Door" and "The Women Have Their Way." Wed. Eve., Apr. 2, "The Sea Gull." Seats 4 weeks in advance at Box Office & Town Hall, US W. 43rd St. JOHN GOLDEN Theatre, West 56th St., Sun. Eva Le GaUienne Presents BELLE Evening:, Mar. SO Dance Recital DIDJAH Only Appearance in New York This Year Net Proceeds to Charity PRICES $3-J2.50-S1.50-$l at Box Office or by Mail. THE THEATRE OF THE DANCE 116 West 66th Street, Studio 220— SUS. 0866. under the direction of DORSH A Presents an unusual program of interest to the discerning every Saturday evening. Subscription $1.00 The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present in her ORIGINAL CHABXCTBS SKETCHES RUTH DRAPER Evenings: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, 8:50. COMEDY THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats. Thurs. and Sat., 2:30. VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 Popular Price ($2.50) Matinee Saturday REBOUND With HOPE WILLIAMS "This is the best light comedy written by anybody hereabouts in ten or twenty years, and it's not so damned light, either." — Heywood Broun, New York Telegram, Arthur Hopkins presents DONALD OGDEN STEWART'S COMEDY Plymouth Theatre. Eves. 8:50; Mats. Thurs. & Sat., 2:40. HERMAN SHUMLIN presents THE LAST MILE "Far and away the most impressive new drama of the season." — George Jean Nathan, Judge. SAM H.HARRIS Theatre 42nd St. W. of Broadway Eves. 8:50. Matinees Wed. & Sat., 2:30 The Theatre Guild Presents A MONTH t£e COUNTRY Guild THE By IVAN TURGENEV THEATRE, 52nd St., W. of Broadway Evgs. 8:30. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:30. The Apple Cart Bernard Shaw's Political Extravaganza MARTIN RFflf Theatre, 46th St, W. of Eighth Ave. iTA2VX*-XAil AJs-jVjXV Evgs., 8:30. Mats., Thurs. A Sat., 2:30 □ D FILMS □ D Greatest Drama Since Dawn of Talkies! — Is New York's Verdict of "Grischa" Herbert Brenon, master director . . . blazer of daring trails . . . crasher of idols . . . arch- enemy of the common-place has brought to the talking screen the most heart-searching drama ever told. More than a great talking picture ... It is the screen's first great drama I RADIO PICTURES, Presents HERBERT BRENON'S THE CASE OF SERGEANT GRISCHA From ARNOLD ZWEIG'S World read book. With CHESTER MORRIS BETTY GOMPSON Jean Hersholt Alec B. Francis Gustav Von Seyffertltz NOW PLAYING! R K O CAMEO Phona Wl/IC, 42nd Street & Broadway onsin 1789 America's Foremost Actor in The Screen's Smartest Comedy JOHN BARRYM0RE in "THE MAN FROM BLANKLEY'S" A Warner Bros, and Vitaphone Talking Picture. PFNTRAI THFATRF Broadway and 47th Street. VC1N 1 IVrtL. 1 ntft 1 I\E. Daily, 2 :46— 8 :45 ; Sundays, 5— 6— 8 :46 WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Concerts, Recitals and Ball American Orchestral Society — Sylvia Lent, soloist — Carnegie — Tues. Aft., Apr. 8. The Barrere Little Symphony— Guild 52nd St., W. of B'dway. — Sun. Eve., Mar. 30; Apr. 6. Gigli — Carnegie — Sun. Eve., Apr. 6 (Benefit for Italian Hospital). Philharmonic Symphony — Carnegie — Thurs. Eve., Mar. 27; Fri. Aft., Mar. 28; April 4; Sun. Aft., Mar. 30; April 6. Students Philharmonic Symphony — Carnegie — Sat. Eve., Mar. 22; April 5. W. E. V. D. Radio Ball— Beethoven Hall— 210 E. Sth St.— Mar. 28. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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406 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 Don't Believe Everything You Read About Soviet Russia SEE IT FOR YOURSELF Under the auspices of the first American organization to present Soviet Russia to the traveler, educator, business man and student — ■ a tour — a never forgetful one — begins on APRIL 12th— S. S. BREMEN APRIL 16th— S. S. AQUITANIA MODERATE RATES include transatlantic passage both ways — accommodations in first class hotels — 3 meals daily— railway with sleeper — sightseeing tours — services of an Eng- lish speaking guide. Last Call for the International May Day Tour — Act Quickly These Groups Now Forming Two ivecks in Leningrad and Moscow during the theatre season. Sailing from New York S. S. Europa — May 14th. Price from New York — $533; from Stettin, Germany — May 21st — $330; from Helsingfors—Uay 23rd— $299. Thirty days in the Soviet Union: Moscow, the Caucasus, Crimea, the Ukraine and villages. Special interest of group — peasant handi- crafts and folkways. Leader: Fjeril Hess. Sailing from New York S. S. Europa — May 14th. Price from New York— $862; from Berlin— May 21st — $624. Registration Open Groups now forming for other itineraries and later sailings. Each party limited to eight plus American leader. 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK bol of the Chinese revolution, together with the sustained dra- matic movement of the picture and the rich variety of its char- acteristic human material, speaks highly for the art of its director, Ilya Trauberg. They prove not quite sufficient, however, to make the picture wholly convincing. The obstacle is chiefly in the scenario, which treats its social theme in a way that is too conventional to impart to the picture the quality of a fresh and independent approach to life which was so notable a feature of some of the earlier Russian films. "The China Express" is not merely a story of some passengers on a train. It is an attempt to show a cross-section of China with all the conflicting interests of its different classes. Here we have the downtrodden coolies, the babbling liberal merchants, the ruthless representative of the ruling European capitalists, and the native military who are the capitalists' obedient tools. The story is set in motion by means of an attempted rape of a Chinese child by a white overseer, which leads to a rising of the coolies and their seizure of the train by victory over the troops and their European masters. Now this may be good communism, but the schematic relation- ship of characters according to formula and their automatic falling into groups of heroes and villains can scarcely be de- scribed as a fresh and independent view of life. The Soviet films represent the highest development of the silent cinema. The advance made by the Hollywood talkies has been chiefly technical; artistically the talkies are still in the nursery. The high praises bestowed on some of the recent pic- tures leave this opinion unshaken. One finds very little that oversteps the Hollywood convention in the much-lauded "Sarah and Son" (Paramount), although one may admit that Ruth Chatterton acts her part with sincerity and splendid restraint, and that the general treatment of the picture is skilful. Nor can "Anna Christie" (Capitol), with Greta Garbo in the principal role, be accepted as a notable achievement in cinematic art. Again, it may be admitted that Greta Garbo acquits her- self quite creditably, particularly in some scenes, as for example the opening one. On the other hand even her performance is rather uneven, failing pitifully in the big scene at the end, while the picture as a whole, largely through poor direction, fails to maintain dramatic unity and suspense. Alexander Bakshy Contributors To This Issue Ruby A. Black is a Washington newspaper correspon- dent. Arthur, Lord Ponsonby, newly created Labor peer, during his years in Parliament and as principal private secretary to the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in the years 1906-8, was a close observer of the career of Lord Balfour. Robert Hunt is the editor of "Advertising Parade." Abraham Flexner is the director of the division of studies and medical education of the General Educa- tion Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. C. F. Andrews is the author of "Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas," recently published. Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at Washington Square College, New York University. Horace Gregory will publish this fall "Chelsea Room- ing House," a book of verse. Glen Mullin is the author of "Adventures of a Scholar Til ramp. Dorothy Brewster is assistant professor of English at Columbia University. IVhen writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Ramsay MacDonald and the I. L. P. RAMSAY MacDONALD recently ended his mem- bership in the Independent Labor Party, Left-wing organization of the labor movement in Great Britain, by announcing that he did not intend to continue his annual subscription to the party funds. The I.L.P. members of Parliament, particularly the Clydesiders, have been among Mr. MacDonald's most vociferous and stinging critics dur- ing his present term as Prime Minister. In the light of this fact the editorial comment of the New Leader, weekly organ of the Left wing, on what might be consid- ered Mr. MacDonald's defection is surprising and interest- ing. The editorial is called The End of a Chapter, and is signed by Ernest E. Hunter, who has only recently resigned his post as editor of the New Leader. We reprint it in full : Ramsay MacDonald's break with the Independent Labor Party after thirty-six years' membership, most of it spent in the active life of the organization, marks the end of an impor- tant chapter. That for some time past it has seemed inevitable did not prevent the feeling of emptiness which many of us ex- perienced when we saw the posters: Premier Leaves the I.L.P. The fact is that until the last few years the personality of Ramsay MacDonald was inseparable from the I.L.P. At con- ferences the discussion would storm around his policies and views. In the corridors and committee rooms the fight raged on. One would hear, "Mac said this," or "Mac did that," or "What will Mac do?" — in nearly any conversation he would be the King Charles's head. He was not a foundation member, but he joined the party in 1894, and up to the eve of the general election in 1922 his life story would be unrecognizable unless written in the light of his association with the I.L.P. As far back as 1895 he stood as I.L.P. candidate for Southampton, polling 867 votes, and in the years of stern fighting which followed before the Labor Party became a real force in Parliament, he, the chosen cham- pion of the I.L.P., was one of the master-builders. In those years of preparation three men stood out: Keir Hardie, the prophet, Ramsay MacDonald, the executive head and strategist, Arthur Henderson, the organizer. The I.L.P. can never forget that two of these came from its own ranks. All through those years Ramsay MacDonald towered up in the ranks of the I.L.P., and however much his colleagues found themselves — and it was many times and oft — in disagreement with his views, they were always proud of his company. Was it not Keir Hardie who in 1910 said that Ramsay MacDonald was the biggest intellectual asset which the Socialist movement had? Then came 1914. In that testing time the ties that bound Ramsay MacDonald to the I.L.P. were drawn tighter than ever. On the eve of the war he made the historic speech against the Grey policy which for so long cut him off from the main body of the Labor Party. He lost his leadership of the Parlia- mentary party, but the overwhelming majority of the I.L.P. rallied behind him. Rarely was a party so united and vigor- ous as the I.L.P. during those war years. At first it was only a handful of men and women standing out against the rest of the country. For a time its propaganda was difficult, but not for long. Soon it gathered momentum until throughout the length and breadth of the country the leaders of the I.L.P. could be assured of gigantic audiences to hear the case against the war, and, after 1918, against the peace. Never has the press of this country given such a false re- . flection of public opinion as during those tragic years. The his- torian of the future turning back the old files between 1914 and 1922 will get no indication whatever of the steady rise in Britain of the party which was so soon destined to assume the leadership of the nation. In this upward struggle the figure of Ramsay MacDonald stands out in bold relief. In 1922 the tide turned. I remember — it seems like yesterday — standing in a Welsh mining village. Ramsay MacDonald, after four years in the wilderness, had been returned for Aberavon the night before. We had left his headquarters to tour the constituency before the papers arrived containing the results for the rest of the country. As we stood in this village the miners came run- ning up with the morning papers and the moment when we read of the marvelous victories crowned with the Clydeside results, the return of Maxton, Wheatley, and others, stands out as one of those unforgettable experiences the memory of which still brings a lump in one's throat. And then we came back to London. I remember sitting in the I.L.P. meeting when it was decided to nominate Ramsay MacDonald as the leader of the Opposition. I remember the joy of victory, the feeling that justice was done when the man who had been down and out with us once again took his place as Labor's leader. But I remember that even then there were the still, small voices which warned the Clydesiders that they would be disappointed. It was in the nature of things that this should happen. All the differences which had been discussed and reviewed and fought about in the days of propaganda were bound to be intensified when responsibility and government came. And in 1924 when Ramsay MacDonald became Prime Minister for the first time it soon became evident that the divi- sion, temperamental and theoretical, between Ramsay Mac- Donald and his old colleagues was already beginning to assume formidable proportions. When the I.L.P. inscribed upon its banners: Socialism in Our Time, the rumbling of the storm became louder and louder. The fact is that the whole conception of the Socialism in Our Time program is alien to Ramsay MacDonald's mind and mood. It is stupid to say that he has changed. Few public men in this country have over a long period of time preserved a more consistent body of principle than has the present Prime Minister. His view of politics as a biological process in which by a series of gradual transformations and adaptations, society moves on step by step, stage by stage, to a more perfect form is in sharp antithesis to the present I.L.P. view. All his tradition, training, and thought were bound sooner or later to lead him to take his present step. Nothing would be gained by useless repinings. Without fuss or demonstration the Premier has decided to make a clean break. All the I.L.P. can do is to pay glad tribute to the work he did to build up this party, and to turn to the work of today and tomorrow. The past is behind. Only the future matters. But it will not be easy for the I.L.P. to escape from the shadow of this man's personality. He was not an easy man to live with. He is not likely to change. But he remains, and is likely to remain, the unchallenged leader of the Labor Party. Within that party the I.L.P. will have to fight, as it has always done, for its own point of view. In the day-to-day battle of ideas it will have to cross swords with its old colleague, but that it will do so with a vivid remembrance of the old days of intimate comradeship will be the deepest wish of all to whom the triumph of the common cause is the compelling motive.

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408 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3378 □ RESORTS □ THE LAKE VIEW 8ILVB8 * CAMBN Surpassing Accommodation* Atmosphere of Refinement Excellent Cuiaine Moderate Rates St MadisoD Atc. Phone Lakewood 287 Lakewood - New Jersey FOR YOUR SPRING VACATION Complete rest and rebuilding, in delight- ful country. Invigorating outdoor life. Saddle horses. Also ideal for week-ends. Only V/i hours from New York. TOPSTONE FARM IN THB CONNECTICUT HILLS Write: K.F.D. 4, Ridgefleld, Conn. Telephone: Ridgefleld 648 UNITY HOUSE FOREST PARK, PA. Open all year. Modern accommodation* Combining rare indoor comforts, with all the stimulating outdoor activities. Make reservation — New York Office Chelsea 2148 3 West 16th St. Owned by International Ladies' Garment Workers Union. Operated on non-profit basis. At'h Interesting People. Delicious Food. Host every room with bath. Reasonable Rates Phone LaUewood 867 • P. Welssberger H. H. Oxman Manhattan Beach Hotel Manhattan Beach, N. Y. C. [" 1YT In a modern fireproof hotel fcy tlie seashore for less tluui in trie crowded city — $0.00 per week and tip for one; $12.00 per week and up for two. All hotel services included. Tennis and handball courts. 37 minutes from Times Square (B.M.T. Brighton Beach Sta- tion). Phone Shecpshead aooo. BOEDER'S COTTAGE, IIKLLK IIARROK, LONG ISLAND ■pOR complete relaxation, invigorating sea air. -*- Modern accommodations, excellent home cooking. Reasonable rates. Forty minutes from city. Special arrangements for Passover and Easter. Call Belleharbor 0089. ZINDOREST PARK Monroe, N. Y. Phone 122 F 8 The most beautiful place for your early Spring Vacation. 1% hours on the Erie R.R. or Route 17. Make your reservations for Passover and Easter Holidays. D CHILDREN— SUMMER □ J^ILLITUT :: a new idea :: a camp for 4 to 10 year olds A lovely house in ideal surroundings, ac- cessible from New York. The entire staff are trained and experienced in the guid- ance of small children. Resident physician; trained nurse. Highly endorsed by edu- cators and parent groups. Limited to 40. Booklet. Anne Josephson, 1S80 University Avenue, New York (Raymond 4145). Combines advantages of home, camp and school. "C'AMILY will take 1 or 2 healthy, normal •*- children, 2 to 4 years, into privileged coun- try home May 1. Only persons with impeccable standing and able to appreciate unusual en- vironment need discuss terms. W. L. Martin, Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y. CARAVAN CAMP "America's Pioneer Touring Camp" Boys (13-21) Girls (15-25) A new idea in eamps Four weeks of travel by auto. Four weeks of ranch life in Colorado. Side trips to Yellowstone and Estes Park3, Gold Mines, Indian Reservations, Canada, etc. Fee of $650.00 includes food, lodging, camp equipment, transportation, horses etc. ( No extras.) For Booklet and information "Chief" Guide, LEE HERMANN, 16 Court Street, Brooklyn, N. Y. Cumberland S730 HOFFMANN SCHOOL for Individual Development 3997 Gouveneur Avenue, between Sedgwick Avenue and Van Cortlandt Park. announce! the opening at CAMP CEDAROAK at Shakon, Conn. June the 15th. Boys and Girls from 5 to 12. DEVELOP THE BEST IN YOUR BOY through HAPPY, HEALTHFUL, Well Supervised CAMP LIFE AMBER LAKE CAMP ROSCOE, N. Y. 126 .Miles from New York City Mr. and Mrs. Harris A. Gordon Mr. and Mhs. Isidor L. Chessen New York Office 162 West 42nd St. Wisconsin 5(181 Booklet mailed on request. SCHOOLS HESSIAN HILLS SCHOOL A modern country school for hoys and girls, nursery through first year high school, day and boarding. CROTON ON IIUOSON NLW YOUK Don't WORRY If you are wondering where to go this summer watch these columns for sug- gestions and if you don't find what you're looking for — state your require- ments in the Real Estate Columns at a small cost and settle your problem. For rates, •write or call Reader's Service THE NATION Fltzroy 9074 20 Vescy St. & SUMMER 3* BUNGALOWS AND CAMPS FOR RENT An Ideal Vacation Spot OEVERAL unusual studio bungalows for *~* rent, in artistic, intellectual colony at Westport, Conn. A delightful summer for children and parents amidst interesting surroundings and social activities. Bunga- lows with open fireplaces, spacious rooms and sleeping porches, city comforts, fur- nished artistically. Tennis courts, swim- ming pool, children's playground and social hall on property. Golf course and Sound bathing nearby. Convenient commutation from Grand Central. Chelsea 3299. Stonybrook, 32 Bank St. T HAVE a few houses for rent, in Rye, N. Y., furnished or unfurnished. For more informa- tion, 12 Pinehurst Ave., N. Y. C. Apt. 3 F. o1 TWO FURNISHED STUDIO COTTAGES N artist's farm, northern Ramapo Moun- tains, 1% hours out, 6 minutes' walk rail- road station. Adjoining 1,000 acres wild moun- tain land, unknown to tourists. Concrete swim- ming pool. Furnished, by year, $375 and $300. For two or three people only. References re- quired. C. W. B., 120 West 41st St. Pennsyl- vania 1086. CAMP FOR RENT "DIRCHBAY on Lake Memphremagog, ideal "^ summer camp for family with little chil- dren, or group of friends. Log cabins in sunny clearing, tent, four open fireplaces, unsurpassed bathing beach, beautiful shore, twelve acres woodland, running spring water, supplies ad- joining farm. Box 2346, % The Nation. T^OR RENT — May to October, nine room mod- -1- ernized Colonial farm house fully furnished; seven miles north of Westport, Conn. Swimming pool nearby. Hilltop view. On untravelled road one mile from highway. Owner going abroad. Special inducements for immediate rental. Box 2343, % The Nation. SUMMER HOUSE FOR SALE "C'OR SALE! — overlooking Huntington Bay and -*- Sound, furnished cottage, seven rooms, two baths, double garage, beautiful view, half block from private sandy beach, water rights, select community, easy commuting. Virginia 8267 J. APARTMENTS FOR RENT ATTRACTIVELY furnished 4 room apart- ■^*- ment, electric refrigeration, Greenwich Vil- lage, near subway express station. Use of gar- den which apartment faces. June 1st to Oct. 1st. Phone Worth 4550, between 8 and 9 A.M. or write Box 2344, % The Nation. GREENWICH VILLAGE. Tastefully furnished apartment. Large sunny room and bath. Extraordinary at $45 a month. Lease until Sep- tember. 57 Horatio Street. Telephone Cathe- dral 6460, Apt. 10. Please enquire Sunday or evenings. ^OTH ST.— 253 East. Sublet May to October • O or longer, living room 30 x 15, two fire- places, two bedrooms, bath, kitchen, southern exposure, through ventilation. $170. Furnished or unfurnished. Christoph, M. H. 4019. OAO W. 10th St. 4 room apartment, furnished, £yj£ fireplace, yard. May-Oct. $90. Conces- sion if someone home daytime. Also eub-basement studio, furnished, fireplace, dressing room, shower, separate entrance. $45. OFFICES FOR RENT CHANIN BUILDING ^TH Floor, 122 E. 42nd St. Small offices or ■ desk space, furnished complete or unfur- nished, including telephone, stenographic, por- ter, towel service. Phone Longacre 7248. — mtm MMMM SMS .-__

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 1930 No. 3379 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 409 EDITORIALS: Roping America at London 412 Hope for Haiti 413 The Ocean to the Swift 413 A Modest Proposal 414 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 415 "MY DEAR SENATOR" II. By Oswald Garrison Villard 416 RELIGION IN RUSSIA. By Louis Fischer 417 A CROSS-SECTION OF WASHINGTON. By Paul Y. Anderson.. 419 COLORADO BARS JUDGE LINDSEY. By Harry McGuire 420 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 422 CORRESPONDENCE 423 BOOKS AND DRAMA: Tabula Rasa. By Leslie Nelson Jennings 424 The Analysis of Morals. By Henry Hazlitt 424 The Novelist Fadeyev. By Joshua Kunitz 425 Cowboy Harris. By J. Frank Dobie 425 Through the Silver Screen. By Fred T. Marsh 426 A Conscientious Objector. By Oswald Garrison Villard 426 Another Coleridge. By Morton Dauwen Zabel 426 An Entangling Alliance. By William MacDonald 428 The Jew in Effigy. By Alter Brody 428 Comforting Reminiscence. By Ralph Volney H.irlow 429 Drama: Nosce Te Ipsum. By Joseph Wood Ki utch 430 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 432 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: The Haiti Commission's Report 433 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1. England. OPPOSITION TO JOHN J. PARKER as an asso- ciate justice of the Supreme Court, for which posi- tion he has been nominated by President Hoover, is gathering headway. William Green, president of the American Fed- eration of Labor, has given notice that the federation will oppose the confirmation of Judge Parker on the ground of his hostile attitude toward organized labor as shown par- ticularly in the so-called Red Jacket case. In this case Judge Parker, sitting as a member of the United States Circuit Court for the Fourth District, sustained an appli- cation for an injunction restraining the United Mine Work- ers' organization from soliciting members among miners who had signed "yellow-dog" contracts. A "yellow-dog" con- tract, it may be explained, is one in which the employee agrees not to join a union. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has also called Judge Parker to account for his alleged hostility to Negro voters. In his campaign for the governorship of North Carolina, in 1920, he was reported by the Greensboro Daily News as saying that "the Negro as a class does not desire to enter politics," that "the Republican Party of North Carolina does not desire him to do so," and that "the participation of the Negro in politics is a source of evil and danger to both races." It will be interesting to see how Judge Parker meets such serious attacks upon his fitness for a place one of whose requirements is an open and impartial mind. THE TARIFF BILL IS FINISHED, so far as the Senate is concerned, but the mischief that it will do abroad is only just beginning to make itself felt. So high are the duties that have been placed upon lace that the entire lace industry of France is in despair. About four million dollars' worth of lace has been imported into this country every year. The cutting off of this market means misery, if not starvation, to the French lace workers. What does your hard-boiled, log-rolling legislator in Washington care for the sufferings of other people? Unfortunately for this cold- hearted attitude the protest of the French lace-makers has already so stirred the French government that it is again planning extreme tariff duties on American automobiles and parts of automobiles, against which American manufacturers have been protesting on the ground that it would absolutely shut them out of the French market. In Spain, too, they are studying the situation to see what action they shall take to discriminate against American goods. European manufacturers everywhere are trying to ascertain how much they must further reduce wages and standards of living so that their goods may leap over our tariff walls, and Euro- pean statesmen are once more wondering how in the world they are going to pay the debts they owe us when we have made it so much harder for them to produce the goods. As a creator of ill-will against the United States our tariff legislation is unsurpassed. THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE on March 24 began suit in the United States District Court at St. Louis to prevent the proposed merger of the Standard Oil Company of New York and the Vacuum Oil Company an- nounced in our issue of March 5. This action, contem- plated by the companies, raises again the primary issue of the meaning of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The Supreme Court in the Standard Oil cases in 1911 decided that the act prohibited only "unreasonable" restraint of trade, but held that the union of the Standard companies constituted an un- reasonable restraint and ordered the union dissolved. Two of these great companies now bring the issue again up to the bar of the Supreme Court, practically calling upon it to decide whether a union illegal in 1911 is still illegal in 1930. Public opinion has changed greatly during the intervening decades, and it would not be surprising if the court found some ground for a practical, though not an avowed, reversal of its earlier decision. The old trust-busting days are gone, and we are faced with the problem whether or not we can devise effective methods of controlling these monsters in the public interest, since we cannot prevent their growth. We have repeatedly pointed out the impossibility of effective con- trol by competition ; again and again we have seen the failure of control by commission. What alternative remains but actual public ownership and operation with all its difficulties? ALIEN REGISTRATION is threatening us once more. We are advised by the American Civil Liber- ties Union that contrary to earlier reports the Blease bill for "voluntary" registration, which appeared dead when we went to press two weeks ago, may be reported out at any

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410 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3379 time by the Senate committee. We earnestly urge upon our readers the continuance of every effort to express opposition to this vicious measure and to every other proposal calling for registration of our alien residents. Protests should be addressed to Senator Arthur R. Gould, chairman of the Senate Immigration Committee. This is an issue of impor- tance to all friends of our traditional American liberties, and they must not let themselves be caught napping. The enemy is forever at the gates. AS A HAPPY FAMILY the Pennsylvania Republicans take the prize. The campaign there for the Sena- torial and gubernatorial nominations now in full swing bids fair to be as exciting and bloody as any prize-ring contest could possibly be. One candidate for Governor, Samuel E. Lewis, has already retired and run to cover. Mr. Lewis was on the Grundy ticket, but Grundy himself refuses to say die. Indeed, miraculous as it seems, Grundy is denounc- ing that power in Pennsylvania politics, General W. W. Atterbury, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, in terms unequaled since Theodore Roosevelt described the national Republican leaders as a set of thieves and robbers. For the moment Mr. Grundy talks just like a Progressive. Declar- ing that the most corrupt period in our history was that in which the big railroads dominated our political life, Mr. Grundy says that General Atterbury is seeking to put the railroads again in control of politics; that the General was made Republican chairman by grace of Messrs. Cunningham, Hall, and Salus, "with all the political mismanagement and corruption they represent." Meanwhile Gifford Pinchot is dancing around the ring getting in body blows on all of them when they are not looking and calling this same trio representatives of the "very worst in politics." The Demo- crats are now after Secretary Davis's scalp, charging him with being illegally a candidate since he is no longer a resi- dent of the State, and Secretary Davis, conscious of his own sublime virtue, has struck hands with Vare. Meanwhile Mr. Cunningham charges Senator Grundy with having un- loaded upon the State at "fabulous prices" pieces of land at Valley Forge upon which Washington never camped. This is Pennsylvania — the State which Mr. Grundy declares is one of the few fitted to rule the Union ! FREE SPEECH reared its provocative head in the Massachusetts legislature recently and was promptly suppressed, but the fight which preceded the suppression re- vealed strange enemies and stranger friends. Francis G. Goodale introduced a bill in the House designed to set aside certain portions of Boston Common and other public parks throughout the State in which speeches might be made with- out license or permit, though with certain other restric- tions and subject to the existing statutes. The bill, which had as its sponsor the Civil Liberties Committee of Massachusetts, provided for a relatively mild form of free speech. It was favorably reported from committee, where William G. Thompson, among others, spoke for it. On the floor of the House, Joseph Finnegan, a new mem- ber from a Boston district, led the fight for free speech. He was assisted by another Irish Catholic member, John P. Con- nolly. The opposition came mainly from Mayor Curley's supporters in the House. Lewis R. Sullivan. Jr., said it was "a Communist bill" and clinched his point by identifying Mr. Goodale as a law partner of Arthur D. Hill, "who, we remember, was last counsel for Sacco and Vanzetti"; an- other protestant enlarged upon "the danger of having our daughters go down to Boston Common and hear birth- control speeches." When a standing vote was taken the score was 59 to 58 in favor of free speech. It was at this point that Leverett Saltonstall, Republican leader and Speaker of the House, through whose veins runs some of New England's bluest blood, went over to the Curley contingent, and, by creating a tie, forced a roll call. The corridors were canvassed and in the final vote free speech on Boston Common was beaten by 134 votes to 81. NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, and Buffalo win highest prizes for disorderly conduct in the unemploy- ment riots on March 6. And of these three, New York is first, with fifty persons injured and five Communists charged with unlawful assembly and conspiracy to commit assault. A survey by the American Civil Liberties Union showed that in 38 cities demonstrations on that day took place; that 16 of these reported no trouble whatever; that in the remain- ing 22, 155 persons were injured enough to require medical attention ; that 265 persons were arrested, of whom more than half were at once released, no charges having been made against them ; that minor charges were made against 114 persons, and 22 convictions have already been reported, with small fines or jail sentences. After New York's fifty in- jured, came Pittsburgh with twenty-five, Cleveland with twenty, Detroit with fourteen, and Milwaukee with thir- teen. Thus the great Communist demonstration, in which this government was to be threatened with overthrow by force and violence, petered out into a general disorder in which a good many thousands of men and women, inspired largely by idle curiosity, stood around and listened to fiery speeches and were presently turned into more or less fight- ing mobs by the night sticks of the policemen. We are will- ing, as we mentioned above, to give the booby prize to New York; but if there could be a medal for sanity, humor in dealing with a dangerous situation, justice to all classes, and plain ordinary horse sense, it ought to go to the Free City of Baltimore. A parade was held in Baltimore; police protected it to the number of thrice the marchers; when the embattled Communists refused to ask for a permit, the chief of police gave them one on a silver platter. There was not one broken head. New York police commissioners please copy. GOVERNOR BILBO OF MISSISSIPPI has won the pardoning championship of the country by issuing to Carl Marshall, an attorney, two pardons, the first a couple of minutes after the State's House of Representatives had ordered the man's arrest, and both before he had been taken into custody. The House voted to put Marshall in jail for contempt, but when the sergeant-at-arms went after him he presented a pardon on which the ink was hardly dry. As the pardon was addressed to nobody in particular, the House instructed its deputy to present himself again before Marshall, whereupon the lawyer produced a second pardon, directed specifically to the sergeant-at-arms. Then the House voted that the Governor had no authority to issue a pardon in a case of contempt and ordered the sergeant-at- arms to arrest Marshall, even if he had a pardon in every I

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April 9, 1930] The Nation 411 pocket. But by that time the lawyer had fled, to appear later in New Orleans as a "political refugee." The House wanted to know from Marshall who got $80,000 which he received from Warren Brothers, a road-material firm of Boston, to stop an anti-trust suit. As an attorney Marshall may be within his rights in refusing information. As a governor Bilbo may or may not have the right of pardon in a contempt case — it is a disputed question. But cer- tainly he was too much in a hurry. THE BATTLE among the mine workers inaugurated by the insurgent convention at Springfield reported in our issue of March 26 goes merrily forward. The regu- lar convention meeting at Indianapolis under President John L. Lewis listened to an address by William Green, presi- dent of the American Federation of Labor, denouncing dual unionism, declaring that "the United Mine Workers of America — this United Mine Workers of America here — is the only organization recognized by the American Federa- tion of Labor," declaring that the federation would not take the initiative in a "family quarrel," but expressing a desire to bring about solidarity and union. Mr. Lewis was sustained in a tumultuous meeting and on March 26, in accordance with a resolution passed by the convention, he revoked the charter of District 14 of Kansas. This action automatically deposes Alexander Howat, district president, who was chosen to head the Springfield organization. It is noteworthy, however, that the Illinois union, which em- braces about three-fourths of the dues-paying members of the bituminous branch of the organization, is not ex- communicated. Mr. Lewis needs its money and its sup- port against the Springfield organization, which now claims to be the real miners' union. The question where authority does actually lie will probably have to be settled in court. In any case, the Lewis leadership has been thoroughly dis- credited by the disasters of the years just past, and all friends of intelligent unionism must hope for a new deal. "npHE OUTBREAK was from the beginning an at- X tack by Arabs on the Jews, for which no excuse in the form of earlier murders by Jews has been established," says the British commission of inquiry in fixing the imme- diate responsibility for the riots in Palestine last summer. Absolving the Arab executive as a body of deliberate incite- ment to disorder, but holding individual members of that group by no means guiltless, the commission likewise frees Mr. H. C. Luke, acting high commissioner, of blame for his much-criticized action, or rather inaction, at the out- break of the disorders, but holds that the Palestine govern- ment should have suspended newspapers that published numerous intemperate articles previous to the riots. The charge that the Palestine government was weak and gen- erally unsympathetic with the legitimate aspirations of the Zionists the commission meets by pointing to "the difficulties inherent in the mandate and the failure to appreciate the dual nature of the policy which the government has to ad- minister." The commission wisely urges the issuance with- out delay of a clear-cut comprehensible statement of policy, and also makes recommendations regarding self-government, immigration, and land tenure which indicate an apprecia- tion of the importance of those matters in any effort to work [ out a permanent solution of the problem. A LABOR ULTIMATUM to the MacDonald Cabi- net, giving the Government fourteen days from March 26 in which to show what it intended to do about unemployment, should bring matters to a head if the un- employment crisis, admittedly the worst since 1921 and getting more serious, can be met by legislation. The total number of British unemployed on March 25, according to official figures, was 1,621,800, an increase of 57,993 over the previous week and 439,346 more than a year before. Some of the increase, it is said, was due to the working of the new unemployment insurance act, but the main reason is the widespread industrial and business depression. In Lancashire, home of the cotton industry, 100,000 men and women have lost their jobs in the past three months, and notices of wage reductions in woolen establishments in the northern counties are imminent. The immediate response to the ultimatum was the adoption by the House of Com- mons of a resolution increasing by about £10,000,000 the unemployment insurance fund, but even this sum, it was ad- mitted, would last only until November unless trade condi- tions improved. THE REPORT THAT Philip La Follette, older brother of the present Senator, will become the Pro- gressive candidate for Governor in Wisconsin shows that the Progressives feel they must play their strongest card. It is a dangerous gamble, but well worth the risk, for defeat could not mean that Philip La Follette would not still have a career before him. The Progressive movement in that State needs new blood and bold aggressive leadership. It needs to eschew the old party methods, and above all it needs to map out a new economic program far in advance of that upon which the senior La Follette stood in his triumphant campaigns. We hear rumors of the coming of a labor party in Wisconsin with which the Socialists might become affili- ated. We hope it may come to pass, and that the Progres- sives in that State will cooperate with it. THE MILLENNIUM for ages five to twelve has arrived ! Unfortunately, it came to as distant a place as Copenhagen, so that American young ones will not have much opportunity to benefit by it. But we recommend it to the attention of a benevolent government for possible imi- tation. It appears that on April 2 the children of Copen- hagen were permitted to celebrate the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of Hans Christian An- dersen. And they celebrated, not by suffering dull speeches from their elders and themselves reciting selections from his works in the schoolroom, but in a proper way for the writer of childhood's fairy stories. The news dispatch describing the projected holiday says: "Lemonade and orangeade will gush forth from public fountains all day, while at all the schools and other public places free chocolate and candies of all sorts will be distributed. To enable them to do full justice to this treat, all the children will have a holiday." We repeat, the date on which this fete day was celebrated was April 2. If it had been April 1, we should not have believed a word of it, but should have considered it just another adult's idea of an April-fool joke to plague poor children. But April 2 is another matter. If it didn't happen, it should have, and we can think of nothing pleasanter to do on, say, the Fourth of July in the United States.

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412 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3379 Roping America at London A GREAT surrender has been preparing at London. Ever since France injected into the discussion of naval reduction and limitation the question of secur- ity, it has been increasingly plain that that issue would have to be settled before anything else was done. M. Tardieu, of course, can hardly have cherished any illusion about making the United States a party to a security pact. M. Tardieu knows American history and the American temper extremely well and, being a realist, does not waste time thinking of the impossible. He might be able, however, to induce the United States to consult, to lend the weight of its counsel and its moral influence if peace were threatened, and even to give an intimation of what it was likely to do if its advice were disregarded. Some time, he may have thought, might be needed to bring this about, but if France only stood pat on the ultimatum that unless it could have more security it must have a bigger navy, there was a good chance of extracting from the conference not only a security pact but a consultative pact as well. M. Tardieu may well have been encouraged to wait by contemplating the attitude of Mr. Stimson and the so-called "policy" of Mr. Hoover. Mr. Stimson's diplomacy at London has been of a peculiar order. He began by march- ing bravely up to within sight of the enemy and announcing, in his best English, that the United States had nothing definite to say but would be pleased to receive communica- tions. This done, he retired to observe the effect of his manifesto. When nothing happened he started skirmishing at the center and on both flanks, but without gaining any territory or capturing any guns. From the middle of February until well past the Ides of March he did little but twirl his thumbs while the French were busy fighting an important action in the rear. As for Mr. Hoover, it was a safe guess that, having allowed the American delega- tion to set out for London with no preparation for the campaign, there would be no quarrel between the President and his Secretary of State, and that whatever Mr. Stimson decided eventually to hand out would, after the customary hesitation, be accepted at Washington. The extraordinary statement which Mr. Stimson gave out hurriedly in the early hours of March 26 showed how well M. Tardieu and M. Briand had played their cards. A security pact to which the United States should be a party, Mr. Stimson let it be known, was definitely out of the picture; on that point the American delegation, which only a few weeks before was reported to be much divided, had not changed its mind. The United States would never "enter into any treaty, whether consultative or otherwise, where there is danger of its obligation being misunderstood as involving a promise to render military assistance or guar- anteeing protection by military force to another nation." Such a misunderstanding, it was pointed out, might arise "if the United States entered into such a treaty as a quid pro quo for the reduction of the naval forces of another Power" — the very thing, of course, which France had suggested. "If, however," and here the Secretary's logic took on what he doubtless regarded as convincing force, "this demand for security could be satisfied in some other way, then the danger of a misunderstanding of a consultative pact would be eliminated, and in such case the question would be ap- proached from an entirely different standpoint." The first reaction of Washington to this pronouncement was surprise and bewilderment. The correspondent of the New York Times reported "what amounted to utter con- fusion" as prevailing; the correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune found a "quagmire of contradiction." March 29, however, brought a statement from Mr. Cotton. Acting Secretary of State, issued with Mr. Hoover's ap- proval, that "there are no differences of view between the President and our delegation at London," that the delegation was still working zealously for naval reduction and "the preservation of the peace of the world," and that "it is the high hope that a plan for so doing can be evolved which will meet the approval of the American people and will be consonant with our traditional policies and ideals." Had Mr. Hoover approved a consultative pact? Mr. Cotton did not say. Had such a pact been disavowed? Apparently not, for "there are no differences of view" between Mr. Hoover and the American delegation. What is a consultative pact? Senator Borah promptly answered the question with his old-time clarity when he declared that it is "a security pact in disguise. In a security pact you state in the pact what you are going to do after you have consulted. In a consultative pact you conceal what you are going to do after you have consulted, but you will be forced by the logic of the hour to do precisely what you expressly agreed to do in the security pact." Is not the obligation, however, one that can be avoided ? "A consulta- tive pact," Senator Borah replied, "in which the parties would not go forward and do whatever would be necessary to be done in accordance with the realities of the situation would be a pious fraud." Mr. Stimson's logic is as tawdry as the real nature of a consultative pact is clear. Great Britain, it is thought, may be persuaded to pledge something, if not actual military aid, that France will accept as security, or some general agree- ment may link security to the League of Nations. Does Mr. Stimson not know that the quid pro quo is not to be got rid of by dividing it, one Power or group of Powers promis- ing force while America promises advice? Is anyone so blind as not also to see that more than advice is expected to come from a consultative pact? What France wants is American support in the next dispute that threatens war, and it may- be relied on to do its utmost to maneuver America into grant- ing such indirect but substantial aid as, for example, an em- bargo on commerce with the enemy. Such is the tragic pass to which the United States has now been brought. America is in danger of being en- tangled in the politics of Europe by the device of getting it to consult. It is to be urged to take a hand in solving the problems of alliances, although alliances are a potent cause of war. As we go to press, a consultative pact is being looked to as a necessary sacrifice in order to save the con- ference. It is America that now needs security.

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April 9, 1930] The Nation 413 Hope for Haiti THE report of the President's commission to study conditions in Haiti is probably as good as could be expected, and if its recommendations are carried out promptly in good faith Haiti will be a happier land than it has been for two decades. We could wish that the com- missioners had been franker in expressing the criticism of the American Occupation which their program implies ; we could wish, too, that they had demanded the immediate re- placement of our High Commissioner, General Russell, by a civilian minister, for we regard his continuing control, even though it be temporary, as more than likely to obstruct the changes that the commission recommends. Yet the commission dared to do, despite considerable pressure by his imperial-minded subordinates, what Presi- dent Hoover asked it to do. "The primary question which is to be investigated," he told the commission, "is when and how we are to withdraw from Haiti." We wish it had done only that. The President did not ask the commission to study the responsibilities of the past ; and we think it would have done an honester and decenter job if it had omitted its painful effort to whitewash General Russell's character and record at the moment that it was asking he be removed. Perhaps he was "whole-hearted, single-minded . . . patient and painstaking," but his single mind was working on the wrong track and he is responsible for a shameful blot on the American scutcheon. However, the positive program of the commission is definitely pointed right. Having caused the removal of the dictator whom General Russell had installed and supported, and promoted an agreement to name a new President pledged to honest and early elections, it recommends that General Russell be replaced — unfortunately not until autumn — by a civilian Minister, and that the new Minister devote himself to the rapid Haitianization of the Haitian government services. There is a certain irony in the commission's praise of an American administration which had dissolved parliament and forced Haitians out of control of one department after another of their government. There is a certain absurdity in the commission's legalistic ideal of returning to the lim- ited basis of Haitian-American relationship outlined in the treaty, for that treaty was forced down Haiti's throat as ruthlessly as any of the subsequent extensions of it. But the treaty expires in 1936, and the commission definitely posited that date as the time when the present regime should end. That is progress in fact, for to quote the report, which puts the truth very mildly indeed, "the acts and attitude of the treaty officials gave your commission the impression that they had been based upon the assumption that the Occupa- tion would continue indefinitely." The important thing now is that the recommendations of the commission actually be put into effect. The most significant phrase in the outline of "sequent steps" proposed is that in which the commission urges that "whether or not a certain loss of efficiency is entailed the new Minister to Haiti be charged with the duty of carrying out the early Haitianization of the services." Any neutral observer would dispute the "efficiency" of some of the depart- ments mismanaged by Yankees, but the mild phrase of the commission has a deep meaning. Some significant suggestions are buried modestly in the commission's report. Especially important is its recom- mendation that Haiti be permitted to return to its century- old prohibition of foreign ownership of land. And Haitians will welcome the suggestion that they be relieved of the vari- ous internal taxes unnecessarily imposed so as to speed pay- ment of the foreign debt. So, too, the commission's recognition of the part played by race prejudice in the Amer- ican failure in Haiti is encouraging, though it might, since it felt called upon to criticize the Haitian elite, have been franker in recording the incredible blindness of certain Southern officials who imported their color consciousness into the Negro republic. Yet it is almost impossible to induce an official com- mission to criticize government officials, and this commission, compared with its various predecessors, has done well, though we could wish it had done much better. Its recommenda- tions for the future are, after all, what counts most, and by implication they indorse the long and often solitary cam- paign of The Nation to set the American record in Haiti straight. Everything now depends upon the spirit in which those recommendations are carried out. There will, of course, be more of the sort of efforts to sabotage the work of the commission which some American officials indulged in during its stay in Haiti, and powerful forces are operating in opposition to its recommendations. The Hoover Adminis- tration must devote itself earnestly and energetically to exe- cution of the "sequent steps" recommended in the report if actual results are to be accomplished. All Latin America is wondering whether the recommendations will really be car- ried out. The Ocean to the Swift ALL hail to the Europa! If the margin by which she won the blue ribbon of the North Atlantic was slim it sufficed, and it will be added to beyond question. We welcome her, however, for more reasons than that. She, like the Bremen, is a thing of beauty, combining the aspect of tremendous power with exquisite lines; surely not even the dullest of landlubbers can regard the pictures taken as she was just arriving without a profound thrill. Here we have the machine at its best; the clearest demonstration that a great tool of commerce can be made a joy to the eye; the freshest proof of man's recurring capacity to triumph over nature and bend the seven seas to his will. Let it be noted, too, that the Europa is an improvement upon her predecessor, the Bremen, in the taste of her deco- rations, in the refinements and greater efficiency of her engine-room, in the lessened vibration. Her German engi- neers and designers have set a high mark for their rivals here and in England to attain. The bulbous keel and fore- foot, the anti-rolling devices, all prove that naval architec- ture has by no means reached the limits of its development. As for the speed of these German fliers, the public, of course, believes that they will in time be able to take ten hours off their existing records. The posted are not so sanguine. They know that each additional knot means higher fuel bills,

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414 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3379 and that there is no sense in speeding up your ship if thereby you arrive off the Ambrose Channel lightship at 3 or 4 a.m. or at Cherbourg hours before it is possible to land. The interesting fact is that speed rivalry has returned. We remember well being solemnly told only a few years ago by the head of a rival line of the North German Lloyd that the large, fast ship was a thing of the past, that it was uneconomic, frightfully costly during the winter deficit sea- son, and contrary to the trend toward moderate-priced cabin vessels and tourist-third-class ships. None the less, great fast ships are appearing again and the Bremen has carried such a large passenger list, even in mid-winter, as to give rise to the hope that the new racers will be fine money- makers. So Americans are out to rival them. Under the terms of their agreement with the government, the pur- chasers of the United States Line are to build, with the aid of loans of taxpayers' money, two monster ships to outrank and outspeed the Bremen and Europa. Horrible are some of the features announced for them — vaudeville, moving pic- tures, cabaret, night-club life; the jazz age is to invade the ocean. Not even there are we to escape. It is a tremendous task that has thus been given to the American designers. They — and in particular Theodore Ferris — have been turning out some very fine ships, but the largest of them, the Pennsylvania, of a greater tonnage than the combined tonnage of Dewey's fleet when he attacked Manila, is still far below the size of the Leviathan and the Majestic. When the new monsters are built and in service the question will then arise whether or not they can com- pete on equal terms with the German fleets. We are not surprised that the North German Lloyd has utilized the ar- rival of the Europa to emphasize again the fact that these two ships have been built without one dollar of subsidy, without loans from the government, without undue mail pay- ments. This is a magnificent example of courageous busi- ness independence, especially noteworthy in a country which only seven years ago was in complete economic chaos. It is the sort of thing upon which the United States used to pride itself. In Germany it has been possible not only be- cause of the courage of their shipping men and their invari- able custom of upbuilding their fleets without subsidy, but because the companies have behind them three-quarters of a century of technical shipping experience. In England it looked recently as if they had given up the competition. The keel laid for the proposed monster White Star liner is to be broken up and the material used for smaller vessels. This company has hauled down the flag. The Cunard, on the other hand, is reported ready to go ahead — in the nature of things it must soon replace the Aquitania and the Mauretania, remarkable as both those ships have been in service, ability, and longevity. But the financing of such a vessel is now an enormously difficult undertaking; and, in the present state of British finance, not so easy as in the past. That the merger of the North German Lloyd and the Hamburg-American Company, or better the pooling of their interests, will lead to similar ac- tion by the great British lines is now the belief in Ameri- can shipping circles. Beyond question the English will not permit either Germany or the United States to usurp pri- macy on the ocean without a struggle. But through the Europa and the Bremen the German lines have at least three years of undisputed championship before them. A Modest Proposal IN the case of Mae West the mills of the gods seem to be grinding even more slowly than is supposed to be their wont. Some two years ago she was arrested as the pro- ducer of a dull and possibly obscene play called "Pleasure Man." The court proceedings still drag on, long after the alleged offense has been generally forgotten. A short while ago the case came up for trial at last, but since that time there have been three postponements, and we are wondering how much it will ultimately cost the State of New York to dispose of this play which, if left to itself, would soon have died of its own stupidity without costing the taxpayers a cent. But if money must be spent in order to demonstrate a devotion to virtue then we are inclined, when we consider the case of John Cleland, to suspect that they order these things better in England — or used to at least. Cleland was the author of the most famous obscene classic in the English language, namely, "Fanny Hill, or the Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure," but though the work assured him a kind of immortality it is not generally known either that he received a government pension as the result of the scandal which it caused or that the pension was granted him in the interests not of obscenity, but of respecta- bility. Such, however, is indeed the case. The work was composed in the middle of the eighteenth century and sold for twenty guineas to a bookseller who is said to have made £10,000 off his property. So great was the uproar that the author was summoned before the privy council, but when he appeared he pleaded poverty in extenuation. He was a gentleman; he had served in the East India Company; he had fallen upon evil days. As a result of these excuses Lord Granville, president of the council, persuaded a most humane government to grant to Cleland a pension of £100 per annum on the understanding that he would compose no more works of this class, and to his honor be it recorded that he never did. Unfortunately, however, £100 a year is about as large a reward as virtue can hope for. Though Cleland subsequently composed several innocent works, in- cluding a treatise on philology, all of them have been com- pletely forgotten, while "Fanny Hill" is continually in print and may usually be obtained from those booksellers who supply the cognoscenti. Thus his single fall from grace assured to the author both his only income and his only immortality. The modest "Britannica," which devotes whole articles to men whose works are far less well known, has no mention of John Cleland's name, but those who wish to know more about him may consult the "Dictionary of National Biogra- phy." However, our present purpose is rather practical than historical. Could not the various societies for the suppression of vice raise a fund for the purpose of buying off the authors who offend them most persistently? Let them present to each offender a purse, proportionate in size to the gravity of his offense, and let them say to him, "Go and sin no more.' It would certainly be more Christian than the effort to put him in jail, and it very well might work better. Certainly it would save the state some money and it would give the police a little more time to spend on such minor crimes as robbery, extortion, and murder.

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April 9, 19303 The Nation 415 It Seems to Hey wood Broun IT is unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable, that when any- body writes a play or wins a battle there should be controversy about the credit. After every triumph there is generally a Sampson and a Schley. So it is in the case of "The Green Pastures." To be sure, the author of the book and the dramatist are wholly amicable, but here and there has come the shot of snipers from the sidelines. I've heard it charged by several that the critics of the New York press have tossed too many laurels in the direction of Marc Connelly and neglected Roark Bradford, who wrote "01' Man Adam an' His Chillun." Indeed Jay House of the Evening Post went to the length of declaring that all the credit should go to Mr. Bradford. But such a statement, if made sincerely, could only come from a man ignorant of the gulf which lies between the dramatic and the narrative form. If "The Green Pas- tures" were a straight dramatization it would still be true that much of its success upon the stage would in justice be allotted to the theatrical collaborator. Nothing marches straight from the printed page and by a mere turn of the head changes itself from narrative to drama. At the very least there must be a shaping, a pruning, a speeding up. And "The Green Pastures" is not a dramatization. Dis- tinctly this is an adaptation. The book of Bradford's served as a springboard for the play of Connelly's. I am aware that there are a number of lines in the play which are taken literally from "OP Man Adam an' His Chillun," but there is a vast change in mood. Mr. Bradford seems to have been interested almost exclusively in the humorous potentialities of Bible folklore told from a Negro point of view in Negro dialect. The agonizing, heartbreaking moments of the play are wholly Connelly. I do not hold that pathos is of necessity a higher artistic expression than the merely comic, but Connelly's contribu- tion is better rounded. He has taken black loam and breathed upon it. There is nothing in the book which lays hands upon my spine as does the march of the Children in the scene which pictures the road to the Promised Land. But whether the play or the book is better makes small difference for the purpose of this piece. It is enough to indicate that they are different. Of course, any successful play, whatever the source of the material and its treat- ment, must be in a sense a collaboration. When I speak of the march of Israel and its poignant effect upon one par- ticular spectator I am introducing other factors which are neither directly Connelly nor Bradford. Something of the emotion comes from the scenic scheme designed by Robert Edmund Jones. Mr. Jones once explained in my hearing that his theory of a setting for a play lay in the conception of the mass coming in toward the individual. He seemed to say that man's true portrait can never be painted except when he is put under pressure. And that pressure, I sup- pose, may be of color, or design, or emotional circumstance. The perfect studio, then, for a portrait painter should be set close by the shore of the eternal brimstone lake. In depicting the heads which bobbed above that surface the artist could not fail to find the true essentials of the char- acters which sat for him uneasily. And if, instead of a head, a mere succession of bubbles marked the presence of a lost soul, the painter would know that here was nothing suffi- ciently substantial to be worth recording on his canvas. Of course, it may be all as simple as the fact that Mr. Jones has picked precisely the right shade of blue to act as back- ground for the dusky little children as they are raised high upon the shoulders of the marching men and women. In the case of Marc Connelly it is well to bear in mind that he stems into "The Green Pastures" from sev- eral directions. I do not know just how well the play reads, for I have never seen the manuscript, but even if any por- tion of the printed words leaves you comparatively cold there is still the chance that the thing in action will effect your capture. And Connelly designed the action. Few are there so wise as to be able to announce with certainty just where the playwright ends and the actor be- gins upon his own. It is certain that players, upon occasion, have made much of fairly tawdry material and certain other roles are actor-proof, so that whoever is assigned to the part invariably figures in the notices as a person of indu- bitably high talent. Yet there is much to be said for the man who picks the pegs. If Connelly had nothing else to his credit the New York theater would still owe him a great deal because of the extraordinarily successful bit of casting he has done in choosing Richard Harrison to play the Lord. I should like to know just what inspiration lay behind that selection. In the beginning there was something to be said against it and I believe that Mr. Harrison did some of the saying. He was eager enough to accept the opportunity, but on account of his connection with various Negro colleges in the South he feared the criticism of fundamentalists with whom he came in contact. It was, according to the story, the late Bishop Shipman who convinced Mr. Harrison that the fundamental mood of the play was reverential and should not be offensive to the most orthodox. But over and beyond that I am puzzled as to how the playwright knew in advance that this was the precise and particular person to be Jehovah in the troupe. After all, here was a somewhat elderly dra- matic reader without stage experience who was being just a little reluctant to perform. I have never known an elocutionist who did not elo- cute even when one asked him "please." It is vital that the role of the Lord shall be played with the utmost simplicity. And that is the way Harrison plays it. Upon him rests a great responsibility. "The Green Pastures" stands or falls by one moment in the second scene. The sight of the heav- enly fish fry amuses us and then suddenly through the laughter rings Gabriel's great line, "Gangway for the Lord God Jehovah!" It is, I suppose, the most stupendous entrance ever ar- ranged for any actor and if the audience laughs when the man appears the play is almost done for. And no one laughs. And this is what I call a collaboration. The playwright has conceived the scene with free and courageous imagina- tion and then he has gone on to find someone able to play it in just that spirit. Heywood Broun

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416 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3379 "My Dear Senator ii >r My dear Senator: Thank you for your letter. Yes, the natural economic tendency is toward greater and greater combinations. I am afraid you are right that we cannot stop them by prosecutions under the Sher- man Anti-Trust Act. You are correct, too, in saying that the commissions we create to control the several industries are usually filled either by the tools or the nominees of the industries to be regulated, or by weaklings without views upon economic problems, who too often seek employment from the combinations they are supposed to regulate. Effec- tive regulation is, of course, further hampered by the fact that our Constitution prevents price control unless the com- panies involved are engaged in interstate commerce. I agree with you that there is nothing in the suggestion that has been made to you that the government set up a rail- road system of its own to compete with other railroads and develop its own power companies, and thus control prices and methods. The government corporation in each case would speedily find itself isolated and faced with a com- bination of private companies circumventing the Sherman anti-trust law by means of those private understandings within the trade which in some phases have appealed so much to Herbert Hoover. You then declare that the only alternative is outright government ownership. Next, you ask me: "How far could anyone get in this country with a real constructive program along these lines? So, after all, shouldn't your criticism of us Senators be directed also against the President, and against the whole people of the country who are at the present time enraptured with ma- terialism?" Your question reveals again the chief fault of the men who rule us at Washington. Rightly or wrongly, you believe that government ownership is the only way out, and yet you put aside your belief by the question: "How far could any- one get in this country along these lines?" There you have the expediency which makes of most of our legislation mere futile compromise. There you have the expediency which has reduced us to our present headlessness and leaves us without a constructive industrial or economic program. If you feel heart and soul that the time has come for the gov- ernment to take over the key industries of the country, it is surely your duty to say so and pay no attention whatsoever to the consequences. If you did this, you would immedi- ately stand out as one of the powerful and compelling per- sonalities in American life. You would prove yourself a leader because you were willing to have it known exactly how you stand, and were ready to face the inevitable consequences which come to any man who pioneers or takes an unpopular political path. If you will let me be frank, by taking such a stand and thus being true to yourself you would instantly cross the line which divides the politician from the statesman. That you would be widely attacked, probably as a Rolshevik, goes without saying. If you, too, like one of your colleagues * The second of a serifs of articles on the national political situation and the issues it involves. The third will appear in an early issue. — Eoitoi who wrote me the other day, can think of politics only as a game, if you think that you have got to compromise and be practical in order to remain in Washington and work for good causes, you will, of course, continue in your present course and will undoubtedly be reelected from your State for several terms to come. It is, however, just because men like you will not for- mulate a program representing your real beliefs and stand by it, come what may, that the American people are losing their interest in politics. I deny your charge that they are "enraptured with materialism." Multitudes of them are hungering and thirsting for genuine leadership. They want courage; they want a program, and when it is offered to them they will rise to it, just as they responded to the Pro- gressive program of Theodore Roosevelt, and to the idealism of the early Woodrow Wilson. They feel that they have a right to look to their public men for guidance and construc- tive economic proposals. That is what you men in our pub- lic life are paid for. You are our representatives, with time enough, despite the enormous pressure of your legislative work, to plan, to study, and to formulate. Many of your colleagues find plenty of leisure hours in which to have a good time ; but they are the ones who are wholly uncon- cerned with the great economic problems that confront every capitalistic country in the world. They lie back complacently and say that all is well with us. They refuse to listen to warnings. Many have forgotten the advanced character of the Roosevelt Progressive platform of 1912 and how far we are from realizing it. They do not even care to inquire what the Socialist program is, or any other program. They are intellectually on a par with the Daughters of the American Revolution, who wish to deport anybody who does not think our system of government and the results we are achieving 100 per cent perfect. It is impossible to get these legislators to think because they do not want to think, and because they are unaware how ignorant they are, and how far away from them the world has drifted since August 1, 1914. You can no more compel them to study what is going on in the world than you can compel a horse to drink, and so they see noth- ing inconsistent in the chaos into which our economic life has fallen. They applaud the creation of the greatest bank in the world in New York as a result of combinations, and at the same moment applaud the government's attack in the courts upon the proposed consolidation of the Standard Oil and the Vacuum Oil Companies. They see nothing signifi- cant in the government's complete reversal of its policy in the matter of the combination of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railroads. They actually believe that the present regrouping of the railroads into seventeen systems is the solution of the railroad problem, without in the least degree perceiving that this in no wise decreases the danger- ous influence wielded by the great railroad corporations in the molding of our financial and economic policies. But why go on? You understand these things, and this fact makes it all the more the duty of a thoughtful, pro-

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April 9, 1930J The Nation 417 gressive Senator like yourself not only to study and to think, but to plan and, most important of all, to take the lead. How far could you get? I presume you mean how far politically. Well, I think you might easily be defeated in your next contest for reelection, but I know that coming right out for your beliefs would more nearly assure you a permanent place in the history of our country than a dozen reelections from your mountain State. What does it avail a man to save his election and lose his soul if there burns within it the desire to strike out on new lines and his con- science tells him to do it? Must you always let "I dare not" wait upon "I would"? Is there a single moral or economic reform recorded in history that was not carried through by men who forgot entirely to ask themselves how far their perilous advocacy would get them, who cheerfully had their heads chopped off if necessary to advance their causes? Yours is a wonderful opportunity. You have a marvelous forum in which to speak. With you alone the decision rests. Yours very truly, Oswald Garrison Villard Religion in Russia By LOUIS FISCHER O Moscow, March 15 N the motion of the Archbishop of Canterbury the Convocation of Canterbury, at Church House, Westminster, yesterday 'recorded its in- dignant protest against the persecution of all who professed any form of religion in Russia' " (London Daily Herald, February 13, 1930). The allegation contained in this reso- lution is simply untrue. Communists suspected of religious inclinations or engaging in religious ceremonies are expelled from the party. In Dayton, Tennessee, a young teacher was dismissed for holding the view that we are descended from monkeys. In Samara or Baku a teacher would be dismissed for holding any other view. But apart from these two classes — the Communists who run the socialist state and the teachers who mold the mind of the young — Soviet citizens, including officials, may believe as they please, observe re- ligion, attend church, and contribute toward the upkeep of priests. The notion must have gained ground abroad that all churches, synagogues, and mosques in the Soviet Union are closed. This would be a preposterous impression. Every day services are held in thousands of houses of worship. These services are attended by thousands. Church weddings and funerals and baptisms suffer no interference from the authorities, absolutely none. It is probably safe to guess that as many Christian homes in Russia have ikons as not. The Bishop of Norwich, England, referred in an ad- dress to "savage" and "organized" persecution. "Religious faith of any sort is being brutally attacked," writes the Bishop of Chester. One is free, from these statements, to summon up pictures of executions, torture, and torments. Nothing of the sort has happened or is happening. No priests or rabbis or mullahs have been killed or imprisoned for believ- ing in God or ministering to the devout. General Higgins, in the Salvation Army's London paper, the War Cry, calls (upon all religious bodies to pray against those "who may be brutally doing to death men and women who in Russia seek to worship Him." This is merely hysterical froth based on the concoctions of Riga correspondents in their wildest and most imaginative moments. "Some of the atrocities." Lord Ponsonby said in a debate on religion in Russia in the House of Lords on February 20, "bore a very great resem- blance to the story of the Belgian baby without hands." The comparison is apt. Tales that receive wide circulation are not necessarily true, and when they are accompanied by outbursts of hate they may frequently be maliciously false. The anti-Soviet campaign on the ground of alleged re- ligious persecution has provoked a remarkable demonstra- tion of unity in the bourgeois world. The Pope, between 1922 and 1924, sought to exploit the Bolsheviks' opposition to Greek Orthodoxy in order to undermine it and convert its members to Roman Catholicism. Now, when the Vati- can no longer negotiates with the Kremlin for advantage, he appears as the champion of the Eastern church. Greek Catholic clergy, never so happy as when they vent their ancient traditional enmity against the Curia, today occupy a common platform with the Vatican. By the side of emigres Ukrainian and Great Russian fathers who blessed pogromists stand liberal and free rabbis whose resentment against Soviet measures for Jewish economic rehabilitation preceded and equals the vigor of their recent anti-Bolshevik denunciations. Misguided lovers of freedom uphold the hands of the most reactionary Morning Post. Due allowance having been made for the sincere protests of persons really pained by reports of Soviet repressions of the church, the recent un- controlled choral outburst of all the enemies of bolshevism nevertheless affords considerable ground for a suspicion of ulterior motives. In England, for instance, the Tories, who always worked for a rupture with Russia, fell on the re- ligious issue as an unexpected lever to achieve that end, but the no less religious Liberals and Laborites either held their peace or launched counter-attacks. This sharp cleavage sug- gests that the religious smoke screen was intended to hide a political offensive, and that antagonisms rooted in the most varied soils attached themselves to the crop of perse- cution rumors in the hope of benefiting from popular senti- ments so easily provoked by religious questions. One piquant fact : Mr. Sabline is a Russian monarchist. He was among the most active leaders of the anti-Bolshevik intervention movement in 1917-20. He still styles himself Diplomatic Representative of the Russian Government in London. But on necessary occasions, as when he recently protested in the London Times against church persecutions, he signs himself Churchwarden of Saint Philip's, Bucking- ham Palace Road. Unfortunately, the campaign abroad, the falsifications and exaggerations, have hidden and distorted the real status of religion in the Soviet Union. The present situation is without precedent and of great moment. In Russia a gen- eration is growing up that does not know God. More, the old generation is forgetting God. There is a social pressure

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418 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3379 against religion. Public opinion is a powerful force driving people into the atheist camp. It requires a tremendous amount of courage for, say, a university student to go to church or assert his faith in the presence of his comrades. They would laugh him out of court; he would be subjected to a kind of political-social ostracism. Our children's nurse is a peasant maid. About eighteen months ago she was promenading the streets with Yuri and Vitya, aged five and a half and four and a half. On pass- ing a church she crossed herself. They laughed. I cannot imagine who told them or taught them, but they laughed, and she does not do it any more. Recently a priest carry- ing an ikon and accompanied by a deacon passed through our court to visit an aged janitor. She thought the scene extremely funny. A few years ago she would have been filled with awe. Yesterday I asked her whether she believed in God. She said "No" outright. "Do you go to church?" I asked. She does not. Her last visit was at Easter time. She wanted to see the crowd and hear the choral singing. Some maintain that Russia was never Holy. The rau- jik is really a pagan frightened by the mystery of nature's power. The Greek Catholic church, wholly controlled by Czarist autocracy, traded on this primitive sentiment, en- couraged black superstition, discouraged literacy, and scoffed at science. The Russian church was never distinguished by strong moral fiber or big spiritual caliber. The licentious- ness of the monks is documented in prerevoluticnary Rus- sian literature. The white clergy or priests seldom earned the respect of the masses. The village "pope" engaged in drunken brawls with his mujiks; he rarely possessed any education ; as a force for good his value was almost zero. I think the elements of religion in Russia were, roughly, physical fear of God, the very strong habit of religious ob- servances, and the fact that the church was the only social center. When the Bolsheviks came to power the Greek Cath- olic church, with its Pobedonostzev traditions, its financial dependence on Czarism, its real-estate wealth, and its con- servatism, constituted perhaps the best-organized frankly anti-Bolshevik unit in Russia. To Tikhon, its patriarch, the Soviets were anathema and he gave his blessing to the armies of Denikin and Wrangel. Orthodoxy saw the menace of communism and fought fiercely to overthrow the "regime of the anti-Christ." The Bolsheviks want to abolish all forms of religion. They have not done so because it was inexpedient and im- possible. But one will readily understand how the Com- munists, intolerant of even mild dissenters in their own ranks, would aim to destroy an institution politically and ideologically hostile, psychologically foreign, and morally obnoxious to them. In the eyes of Bolsheviks the church and religion are an unscientific, useless vestige of bygone ages, preserved and harnessed by capitalism to serve its mundane purposes. The struggle commenced immediately after the Revolution, but when the Soviets had won the civil war and intrenched themselves internally, Greek Catholi- cism, characteristically docile and spineless in the face of established government, sought to make peace with the new state. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, were apparently torn between their hatred of religion and all churches and their desire to weaken Greek Orthodoxy by schisms and by encouraging Roman Catholics, Baptists, and other sects to make inroads on the Eastern church. This was the period of the almost-still-born Living Church and Church of the Resurrection ; of public debates — now unthinkable — between Lunacharsky and Bishop Vedjensky, both silver-tongued, evangelistic, and idealistic; of crude, vulgar, anti-religious street demonstrations; of offensive but some good "godless" posters ; of pourparlers with the Vatican ; and of the growth of sectarian groups. In general, the Bolsheviks' policy vis-a- vis religion was vacillating and indecisive: they harassed without destroying. Gradually methods changed. Fewer effigies of Christ, Mohammed, Moses, and God were burned in public and more atheist study circles sprang into existence. Sometimes the "godless" journals looked more like catalogues of machine manufacturers or electrical-supply companies. They were combating religion with science. All the time propaganda for the closing of churches continued with undiminished vigor. I saw churches and synagogues sealed in 1923. At that time, of course, religious instruction to minors below the age of eighteen was proscribed ; that proscription, as well as the disfranchisement of priests, dates back to 1918. Then commenced the present period of augmented athe- ist pressure. It differs from the preceding years quanti- tatively, but very little in quality. The crusading force of the anti-religious movement has gained fresh momentum but acquired few if any strikingly new characteristics. The fresh momentum is a by-product of the higher revolutionary wave now dominating the Soviet Union. I venture to suggest that religion in Russia will stand and fall with private capi- talism. Indeed, Stalin's article of March 2, 1930, urging moderation in the socialization of agriculture immediately reintroduced some slight possibilities of peasant private trade — the essential feature of NEP — and simultaneously, there- fore, brought relief to the church and priests. ( I spoke to a few priests on this matter just a few days ago.) The priest is the natural ally of the Nepman and kulak. They have been known to work together criminally to obstruct Soviet laws, but even in more ordinary circumstances the social and ideological tie between the merchant and the priest or between the Jewish petty trader and the rabbi is certainly stronger than that between religious leaders and workers or poor peasants. Revolution and socialist construction have now been given freer rein than ever before in Russia ; the result is more violent atheist propaganda and the closing of more churches. Because these two phases are so closely inter- laced, the Bolsheviks logically, if somewhat too primitively, deduce that it is opposition to socialism and the Five- Year Plan that dictates the religious protest of foreign interests. This may be generally correct but not always correct. Fundamentally, however, the insistence that Moscow pro- hibit anti-church agitation will avail as little as the demand that it scrap socialism. The Pope can no more stop the conversion of Soviet youth to atheism than he can add to the length of women's skirts. The time to save the church of Russia was in 1917, 1918, and 1919. Greek Orthodoxy could have been redeemed at that time by the overthrow of the Soviet regime. Now it must pray for the persistence of the vestiges of an anemic private capitalism. The ques- tion remains whether a country can live without religion or, at least, without the organized forms of religion. The Communists, apparently, answer in the affirmative.

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April 9, 193Q] The Nation 419 A Cross-Section of Washington By PAUL Y. ANDERSON Washington, March 29 PERHAPS it is too soon after the Hughes affair to expect the Senate again to assert its power of scrutiny over an appointment to the Supreme Court. The average level of courage in that body is distinctly mercurial. Nevertheless, as information accumulates the belief grows that the nomination of John J. Parker for the vacancy created by Justice Sanford's death is one of the worst in a generation. In the first place, it is a purely political ap- pointment, intended to strengthen the Republican Party in the South and particularly in North Carolina. The record of the nominee is the totally undistinguished one of the usual party hack. He served as Republican National Committee- man for his State, and as a delegate to Republican national conventions. He was a special Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice under Harry Daugherty. As a federal judge, he is known, if at all, chiefly for an opinion upholding the "yellow-dog contracts" which West Virginia coal-mine operators compelled their employees to sign. This medieval instrument of industrial coercion is prohibited by law in the enlightened State of Wisconsin. The circum- stances which attended his failure as a special prosecutor in war-fraud cases were so unusual, and have provoked such comment among lawyers, as to demand a thorough investi- gation. They recall those surrounding the parallel career of that great orator and statesman, Guy Despard Goff, who is one of Judge Parker's sponsors. By the time Hoover gets through, the "liberal minority" of the court is likely to consist of the justices appointed by Harding and Coolidge. RIGHT now Washington is suffering from a ghastly hangover. The worst tariff bill in the history of civ- ilized nations has passed the Senate at last and is on its way to conference, where there will be an earnest and pains- taking effort to make it still worse. But what a headache it leaves! A dozen Democratic and Progressive Senators have recovered their wits sufficiently to wonder what they took that caused them publicly to kiss and embrace the Old Guard in the closing orgy of rate-raising, and as they won- der their bitterness increases against "Old Joe" Grundy, who gave them the stuff. Oddly, "Old Joe" is no happier than his dupes. While the trading-post which he set up on the Senate floor was the means of raising the sugar duty and placing a tariff on lumber and cement, he was unable to pre- vent reductions in the rates on pig iron and aluminum. This failure doubtless contributed to developments which now point either to "Old Joe's" withdrawal from the Penn- sylvania Senatorial race, or to his ignominious defeat by James John Davis, biggest and best Moose of all time. Also, it now turns out to the great grief and astonishment of "Old Joe" that a comparatively small proportion of Pennsylvania voters are manufacturers, and that the overwhelming re- mainder tend to regard his Washington activities much as they are regarded by decent people elsewhere ; to wit, as those of an unscrupulous lobbyist. HIS present plight provokes reflection. Control of the Pennsylvania governorship, by which he always has set particular store and by which he was elevated to the Senate, has definitely been lost by the withdrawal of his candidate, and strong pressure is being applied from Wash- ington to secure his own withdrawal. The reason for the latter is simple: the Administration realizes that "Grundy- ism" will be one of the leading Democratic issues in the fall Congressional campaigns, and it believes that the issue will lose much of its sting if Grundy himself is out of the picture. This attitude on the part of the Administration makes it extremely difficult for the Mellons to lend "Old Joe" much support, without which his candidacy is hopeless. Uncle Andrew is unwilling to jeopardize his own tenure, especially since there still remain in the Treasury a few dollars in war- time excess-profits taxes that have not been refunded to the corporations which paid them. Nor is he in general one to sacrifice himself on the altar of friendship. THE situation resulting from inquiries into the lobbying proclivities and financial eccentricities of National Chairman Claudius H. Huston is equally disturbing from any sound Republican viewpoint. While it is recognized among loyal party men that Mr. Huston's habit of using trust funds to margin his personal stock account is but an- other proof of his genius, they realize that it is likely to be misunderstood by an electorate unaccustomed to large affairs. This impression is heightened by the disclosure of other episodes in his interesting career. Hence they are urging him to make the Great Sacrifice for the good of the party, trusting that God and Herbert Hoover will reward him. Thus far Doubting Claudius has stood pat, with an air that seemed to ask who was going to throw him out. Apparently it will not be his friend in the White House. Mr. Hoover shows a marked distaste for that job. It is true that, following the revelations of the lobby committee, a correspondent of the New York Times made the prompt discovery that the President had never recommended Huston for the post. This remarkable bit of detection was accepted, by those who know the accommodating nature of the Times, as the inevitable setting for that familiar Hoover drama, "Throwing an Old Pal to the Wolves," but the action has been unaccountably delayed, and it appears that the National Committee may have to act as its own bouncer. Eventually, of course, Huston will have to go. His methods are too ad- vanced for an old-fashioned firm. AN unhappy fatality seems to pursue those who occupy the office of Secretary of the Interior, and it should cause no surprise if the learned Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur proves not to be an exception. Poor Albert Fall had an insatiable craving for Liberty bonds and cash in satchels. The lamented Dr. Work had an unconquerable weakness for the sound of his own voice. Dr. Wilbur is addicted to the companionship of men recommended by the power mag-

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420 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3379 nates. He must have them around him. One such, whom he made executive secretary of the Federal Power Commis- sion, effectually wrecked its work in a short time. This inclination is peculiarly unfortunate at a time when the Secretary's attitude is so important to the power-using public. It may be partially responsible for the absent-mindedness which caused him to tell a Senate committee that he had not made up his mind about the form the Boulder Dam con- tract should take, when, in fact, his assistant was then en route to California with the draft in his pocket. It may have inspired him to repudiate an interview which he un- questionably had given the Associated Press, to the effect that the department was no longer interested in Samuel Insull's efforts to grab Cumberland Falls. This feeling of comradeship, or something equally mystifying, is responsible for his determination to give the Southern California Edison Company a substantial share of Boulder Dam power, in plain defiance of the law which confers a preference right on States, municipalities, and other political subdivisions. There is a growing desire here to learn at whose instance Dr. Wilbur was put in the Cabinet — and to what end. T confidently predict that he is heading for serious trouble. ***** THIS writer was one of that confiding multitude who acclaimed the new era of candor and freedom inau- gurated by President Hoover in his relations with the press. The battered and frayed White House Spokesman through whom the profound thoughts of Calvin had been conveyed to the public was abolished. As formerly, the correspondents would submit their questions in writing, but under the Hoover plan the answers could be published in one of three forms to be designated by the President: (1) as facts stated on the correspondents' own authority; (2) as information officially made public at the White House ; or (3) as direct quotations from the President. In addition, newspapermen would have daily access to Secretary George Akerson, himself a former Washington correspondent. It is my sad duty to report that the working of this plan has steadily been narrowed and restricted until now less reliable and printable information comes from the White House than at any time while Coolidge was President. Written questions have been so consistently ignored that few re- porters any longer trouble to submit them. The direct quo- tation phase has degenerated into a system of Presidential "hand-outs," palpably propagandist in character and seldom responsive to any inquiry. Many reporters have found to their sorrow that Akerson's information simply is unreliable — although not all of them believe he is to blame. His positive statement on the afternoon preceding the nomina- tion of Charles Evans Hughes that the new Chief Justice would be Justice Stone remains the classic example, although examples could be multiplied. In addition, the practice of having "fair-haired boys," once employed by Roosevelt, has been resurrected, whereby the President gives private audi- ences to correspondents who have demonstrated their willing- ness and ability to publish stories that he particularly desires published. It was often possible to ask Coolidge a question and obtain an informative answer. But now — "if you don't see it in the hand-out, it isn't there." The old Oriental habit is hard to shake. Colorado Bars Judge Lindsey Bv HARRY McGUIRE ON December 9, 1929, Ben B. Lindsey, internation- ally known as the founder of the modern juvenile- court system, was disbarred from the practice of law in Colorado by the Colorado Supreme Court. The opinion of the court, written by Chief Justice Greeley W. Whitford, declared with acid bitterness that Judge Lindsey had been "false to his oath taken as a judicial officer, and also false to his oath as an attorney and a counselor at law, and has thereby proved himself unworthy of the trust reposed in him by this court, and withal wanting in that indis- pensable moral character which the administration of justice demands of an attorney and counselor."* In pages teeming with sarcasm and recrimination the reason for this action was made clear. First, Judge Lindsey had practiced law while he was the judge of the Juvenile Court. Second, and more important, he had received $37,000 from Mrs. Helen Elwood Stokes and $10,000 from Samuel Untermyer, Mrs. Stokes's attorney, which was held to be in violation of the statute which limits the compensation of juvenile judge to the statutory salary. This much the public knows from the newspapers. What the general public does not know is the ,* ,-, ■ February 21' JudK« I.indsey was completely exonerated by the ( ah forma bar when the board of governors of the State association, after consideration of the charges on which the Colorado decision was based, an- .1 tint no irregularity on the part of Judge Lindsey had been dis- closed by its investigation and that no action would be taken against him. — Kditor Tiif Nation. history behind this decision — and because Judge Lindsey 's disbarment is the result of years of effort to "get" him, I propose to indicate something of the background. First, the grounds for the disbarment proceedings. The Supreme Court, in accepting the interpretation of Judge Lindsey's actions in the Stokes affair which was placed upon them by Philip S. Van Cise (a violent Lindsey-hater who dug up the whole matter and pressed it upon the Grievance Committee of the Colorado Bar Association), quite obviously interpreted the law in terms of the letter rather than of the spirit. It is a common joke in the clubs of Denver that if the Supreme Court were to test all lawyers by the criteria applied in this case, three-fourths of them would have to go back to selling insurance. As for the contention that Lindsey practiced law while a judge: It is alleged and admitted by Judge Lindsey that at the request of Helen Elwood Stokes he prepared a peti- tion which was thereafter filed in the County Court of the City and County of Denver praying the appointment of the said Mrs. Stokes as guardian of her minor children. Also that he thereafter, on June 25, 1926, prepared the formal order appointing the said Mrs. Stokes guardian of the estates of her minor children. That thereafter Judge Lindsey, at the request of Mrs. Stokes, went to the city of New York and actively engaged in negotiations and

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April 9, 19303 The Nation 421 conferences looking to a settlement of the claims of the minor children of Mrs. Stokes for a portion of their de- ceased father's estate in which they had been completely disinherited. It is claimed that this constitutes practicing law. The preparation of the petition for guardianship or any other probate matter and the order of appointment are purely formal or clerical. The clerk of the County Court, or his deputy, and in many counties the county judges themselves frequently prepare such petitions and other petitions for any person who needs the same and requests that it be done. No one has ever yet claimed that such courtesies extended to widows or the representatives of orphan children constituted practicing law. Indeed, it is a matter of such insignificance and unimportance so far as the practice of law is concerned that the Legislature of Colorado has authorized any male person over the age of twenty-one years, of good moral char- acter, to practice in the County Court sitting for probate business. And in the case of Judge Lindsey the informalities of his court work have gone to such a point that his argu- ments and briefs in child-welfare cases from his own court, or other courts, have been received in the Supreme Court without the slightest question or objection. It has been internationally recognized that one of Judge Lindsey's foremost contributions to jurisprudence has been his insistence that procedure in the Juvenile Court should be personal and often informal, and that judicial red tape should not stand in the way of the judge's doing his best for the children in whatever manner his discretion dic- tated. In the early days of the Juvenile Court these inno- vations in court methods led to many a brush with custom- bound guardians of law and order, but of late years they have been universally recognized and lauded. As for Judge Lindsey's practicing law when he went to New York in behalf of the Stokes children, the facts, un- obscured by personal malice, are simple. Mrs. Stokes im- plored Judge Lindsey to become the general guardian of her minor children so that he could carry on the contest of the will of their deceased father. This the Judge declined to do, but he did, at the urgent request of Mrs. Stokes and her Denver attorney, go to New York, where he participated actively in efforts and negotiations to bring about a fair set- tlement. Here he was a mediator and arbitrator, and his personal prestige and convictions were the sole weapons he could contribute in the fight for the disinherited children. Mrs. Stokes already had an eminent New York lawyer, Mr. Untermyer. Under the laws of New York Judge Lindsey could not have qualified to practice law if he had tried to. Morally, his personal aid for the Stokes children could not be wrong unless the children's property were under his juris- diction, which would open the possibility that his future decision might be prejudiced. But in this case the service performed by Judge Lindsey could not in any possible way conflict with his judicial duty. The service was wholly dis- sociated from his judicial service — the service being per- formed in New York in relation to a claim to property which under no possible circumstances could be brought within the jurisdiction of the Denver court. Mrs. Stokes and Mr. Untermyer judged that Judge Lindsey's influence had been highly helpful in winning the case for the children in New York. Mrs. Stokes, moreover, had long before openly admired Lindsey's juvenile work, with which she had been well acquainted for years before circumstances first brought her and her children into his court. Therefore Mrs. Stokes and Mr. Untermyer gave Judge Lindsey a gift of appreciation from their personal for- tunes, an amount calculated to provide him with a life in- come of $200 a month. This sum did not come from the estate of the children, as has been alleged. One important point should be clearly borne in mind : that it was the Pro- bate Court of the City and County of Denver which had jurisdiction over the children's estate and not the Juvenile Court; and that Lindsey, before accepting the gift from Mrs. Stokes and Untermyer, laid the whole matter before the judge (Luxford) of the Probate Court, and Judge Lux- ford whole-heartedly approved. These are the alleged grounds upon which one of the mo9t famous jurists of our times, who throughout more than thirty years of public service has time and again sacrificed his personal ends both politically and financially (it will never be known how many destitute mothers and children received help out of Lindsey's owrn pocket!) in the interests of his work for children and families, is declared "wanting in that indispensable moral character which the administration of justice demands." But neither the newspapers nor the people of Denver believe that these grounds, which rely upon the nicest of technicalities, are the true reasons for Judge Lindsey's dis- barment. People say, "Well, they finally got him." It is sometimes deplored that in a purely formal sense Lindsey may have been indiscreet in accepting a life income from Mrs. Stokes and Mr. Untermyer; but the regret is not that a public servant who kept himself poor all his life (Judge Lindsey still lives in the bare little house which saw his first struggles) in fighting for "the greatest good of the greatest number" has finally enough money to live on. It is simply that these circumstances allowed "them" to "get" him. Who are "they"? I shall very briefly summarize some of the outstanding cross-currents in Lindsey's back- ground, and you can judge who "they" are. 1. When first made a county judge, over thirty years ago, Lindsey openly fought the corporations. He found rank corruption in court, city, and State offices, and he denounced it. Public-utility officials and their lawyers have been his bitter enemies and have constantly sought underground means of getting him out of power. How they have tried to bribe him — sometimes with money and sometimes with hope of offices as influential as those of mayor of Denver and governor of Colorado — is recorded in Lindsey's early book aimed at corporation graft, "The Beast." These forces were relieved when he turned his attention to the Juvenile Court ; and public opinion forced them to bow before his work with children. But always they feared him. 2. He was first a Democrat politically, but such was the common people's admiration for his ability and honesty that the Republicans found it useless to oppose him, and after he formed the Juvenile Court he allowed his name to be unopposed on both Republican and Democratic tickets. But the politicians never loved him, because from the first he refused to kotow to the spoils system ; and as most cor- poration graft was also political graft, most of the big politi- cians in Colorado at some time or other found Lindsey em- barrassing. He gradually became non-partisan, a kind of non-political institution ; and when in one election the politi-

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422 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3379 cians in both parties decided they would cook his goose by refusing him nomination on either ticket, he ran as an inde- pendent and gave them the only beating rank-and-file politi- cians have ever taken in Colorado. Politicians have respected him, feared him, and wished that he lived in Lithuania. 3. When the specter of the Ku Klux Klan arose in Colorado, and turned to its mysterious will great men, from United States Senator and Governor down to the Mayor of Denver, there was one man who without waiting for it to intimidate him rose like a Daniel and denounced it. He could have ignored it, or winked a knowing eye at its dark doings, like many other judges and officials. But he poured on it a torrent of wrath out of the pure honesty of his sense of justice. "Get Lindsey!" became the subterranean purpose of the Klan. So he paid the price of his honesty in an elec- tion in which he clearly won, but which was protested to the Supreme Court. 4. Lindsey had often accused members of the Supreme Court of being in effect tools of the corporations. The court had seldom been friendly to him or to his reforms, having on some occasions given decisions against these reforms. When the Klan protested his last election, the Supreme Court, on the flimsiest of evidence, threw out in toto the precincts in the Hebrew section where Lindsey's lead had been immense, and awarded the election to the Klan candidate, a question- able figure who had meanwhile committed suicide. They awarded the salary Lindsey had been earning under his cer- tificate of election while the long-drawn-out case was being heard to the widow of this man. In short, the Supreme Court of Colorado has long been antipathetic to Lindsey. 5. Church members and women have been Lindsey's strongest supporters, crusaders in his defense when he was attacked. Now comes the juvenile judge with the idea of companionate marriage (that is, birth control, and divorce by mutual consent when there are no children). To many this seems a kind of "trial marriage," or free love. Lindsey is represented as a godless revolutionary attacking our good Christian moral order. Consequence: the "stable element" of the community, which once shared Lindsey's battles so lustily, now hangs back doubtfully. In their hearts these people are still for Lindsey — but his "liberalism" of late has been a bitter pill for them to swallow. 6. In addition to the fact that many of Colorado's ablest lawyers are corporation-hired or are politicians — and in either case Lindsey's hereditary enemies — Lindsey's cutting of red tape in his court, his successful attempts to save the costs of legal service to the poor people who came to him, and his late ideas for a House of Human Welfare in which many matters now subject to intricate court procedure and pleading by lawyers would be settled by a commission hear- ing the cases directly from those involved are important reasons why the legal profession fears Lindsey. I have roughly indicated who "they" are who "got" Lindsey; all these forces, in one form or another, were be- hind the disbarment, which even considered as an act apart from its background was a gross injustice to a great and honest public servant. To close in good legal fashion: the Supreme Court of the United States, recently reiterating the ancient principle of the spirit as opposed to the letter of the law, said: "All laws should receive a sensible construc- tion. General terms should not be so limited in their appli- cation as to lead to injustice ... or an absurd consequence." In the Driftway THERE is a new as well as an old New Orleans, and the proponents of the new city do foolish things sometimes in their efforts to achieve what they fondly imagine to be Progress. But fortunately New Orleans has a considerable and articulate body of citizens who look these efforts toward Progress in the mouth and make a hullabaloo if they disapprove of them. More for- tunately still, practically everybody in New Orleans real- izes that its historic and individual character is a commer- cial asset, attracting visitors and giving the city a standing distinct from that of other towns which is worth something in dollars and cents. And a commercial asset is treated with respect in every community with which the Drifter is acquainted. A RECENT instance is the vigorous protest against a proposed city ordinance which would require the re- moval of the old balconies in a part of the business district above Canal Street. In justice to the advocates of the ordi- nance it should be explained at once that the proposal would not apply to the old French quarter, the Vieux Carre, below Canal Street, where most of the balconies, with their beauti- ful iron grill work, are to be found. Nobody in New Orleans — at least no politician — would be rash enough to attack these. They are too precious a commercial asset. The ordinance was proposed in connection with a new "White Way" lighting system in the business section and would not affect many really worth-while old balconies. Yet it aroused a storm of protest. Grace King, the author of books on the city which are known far outside it, Professor Ellsworth Woodward, director of the art department of Newcomb College, and Walter Parker, a civic leader, came out publicly against the scheme. So did the Art Association and — strange as it may seem to some — the Association of Commerce, the leading business men's organization. It was pointed out that the balconies were useful as well as beauti- ful. Walter Parker, for instance, said in a letter to the city officials concerned: No sane tropical or subtropical city apes the architec- ture of cold climates, but builds to suit its own climate. In heavy rains or warm sun people on unprotected side- walks do not linger to look into store windows, but hurry to some protected spot. Just the reverse is true on well- protected sidewalks. If it is necessary to pass an ordinance relative to balconies above our sidewalks, pass one to preserve them, beautify them, and assure their continued utility and charm, but certainly not one compelling their destruc- tion. The Morning Tribune, in espousing the campaign against the proposed ordinance, also was wise in emphasizing the fact that the balconies are a commercial asset. It printed a cartoon showing a workman at the top of a stepladder knocking down a balcony, while a group of men represent- ing other cities — Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Omaha, and Houston — shouted their approval. The drawing was entitled: Helping Others to Our Tourist Trade. The Drifter

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April 9, 193Q] The Nation 423 Correspondence Showmanship in Oregon To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: When I was a boy in London I had heard about a distant land called America but not about a man named George Washington. Then one day, after seeing a marvelous circus, I knew that Phineas T. Barnum was the greatest show- man on earth and, ipso facto, the greatest American. Here in Portland, a man who owned and managed successfully theaters and other shows all his life became our mayor about twelve years ago. The other day, when the local Communists put on their own show at the Plaza Blocks near the City Hall, George L. Baker, mayor and ex-showman, instead of putting the cops and the militia to work, showed the poor dubs what a real barker can do by haranguing them. It may be that his impromptu speech was a lot of hooey, but so much the better ; for fighting hooey with hooey is akin to fighting the devil with fire. At any rate there were no cracked Communist heads. At least, not cracked by police clubs. Portland, Ore., March 18 Albert Jourdan Another Senator on Virtue To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: If you haven't already seen it, be sure to read Senator Blease's speech of March 18 in the Senate. I think it is the first time I have ever heard of a Senator boasting in the Senate that lynch law prevailed in his State. His exact words {Congressional Record, March 18, p. 5748) are these: I am proud to stand here a9 a representative of the State which was the mother of secession, which stood for manhood and for freedom, which stood, and today stands, above all States of this Union for the protection of the virtue of womanhood, because that State authorizes no divorce from the bonds of matrimony, and which stands, above all, on the decision that whenever any man, whether he be white or black, puts his hand upon a woman against her will and her consent, the punishment therefor shall be death; and, if necessary, the technicalities of the law will be thrust aside, and that sentence will be immediately put into execution. Don't miss the next page, either, where he indicates his idea of academic freedom in the University of South Carolina! Coleman B. Cheney Saratoga Springs, N. Y ., March 23 Power Control Breaks Down To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: For three years I was a resident of Alameda City, California, which has a municipally owned electric supply. Re- cently I moved to Oakland, which is supplied by one of the great power companies. In Alameda my monthly bill for electricity for 170 kilowatt hours was $5.92. Under the pri- vately owned supply my bill for 170 kilowatt hours is $6.65. The difference is $8.76 per annum, which enables the privately owned company to earn nearly 13 per cent on its valuation. The difference between the 13 per cent and the 8 per cent allowed as a "non-confiscatory" return by our enlightened Pub- lic Service Commission is plowed into the aggregate profits. Oakland, Cal, March 15 J. C. West SOCIAL ENGINEERING To the trained social worker, social engineering is not a phrase, but a daily opportunity and inspiration. The social worker whose work is with the Jews of America must be trained to grapple successfully with the peculiar problems that spring from the distinctive character of the Jewish individual and community in relation to the American environment. College graduates and those about to be graduated should look carefully into the advantages, both tangible and intangible, of Jewish Social Work as a Profession A number of scholarships and fellowships ranging from $150 to $1000 for each school year are available for especially qualified candidates. May 9th is the last day for filing applications for the maintenance fellowships. For full information write to M. J. Karpf, Director The Training School For Jewish Social Work A Graduate School 67-71 W. 47th St., New York ''■■■l ■•>■••••■•••••■>•••••■■■ ■■■■■■■! New York *s First Labor Bank We share profits with our depositors. Mk Q / ^^y Therefore fcJL I /f\ Pay rt/4/° to our Thrift Accounts All deposits made until April 20th will bear interest from April 1st THE AMALGAMATED BANK OF NEW YORK 11-15 UNION SQUARE When, writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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Books and Drama Tabula Rasa By LESLIE NELSON JENNINGS Aforetime it was written in the groan Of glaciers crawling slowly to the sea, Engraved on massy tablatures of stone, Told by a fern frond's cursive tracery. Earth is a palimpsest, a page that few Can read and not remember ; yet the mute Witness within us craves another clue To the incalculable Absolute. Nature, that old Historian, has grooved In granite such a text as must endure When our inventions all have been disproved. Who shall proclaim the primogeniture Of this frail substance which the wind can mold And one small crevice of creation hold? The Analysis of Morals Five Types of Ethical Theory. By C. D. Broad. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $4.50. IF Great Britain at the moment were not so rich in brilliant philosophers — Whitehead, Alexander, Eddington, Moore, Russell, to name but a handful — we should hear a great deal more of C. D. Broad, M.A., Litt. D., fellow and lecturer in the moral sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, author of "Scientific Thought," "The Mind and Its Place in Nature," and the present volume. Dr. Broad has many of the more impor- tant merits of a fine philosophical writer. He ingratiates him- self at once by his unpretentiousness and remarkable lucidity. He is a rigorous and acute logician, quick to smell and pounce upon a fallacy or an ambiguity. While he does not put his trust completely in "common sense" (else he would be no philosopher at all), he has a fitting respect for it. He dis- misses as "silly," for example, any theory, no matter how self- consistent, "which may be held at the time when one is talking or writing professionally, but which only an inmate of a luna- tic asylum would think of carrying into daily life." He dis- tinguishes sharply between critical philosophy — "the analysis and definition of our fundamental concepts and the clear state- ment and resolute criticism of our fundamental beliefs" — which he applauds, and speculative philosophy, which he deplores. It is speculative philosophy, of course, which interests most persons, because it pretends to supply a "total view" of the universe. But Dr. Broad finds speculative philosophers as a class pretentious dogmatists who have been "more certain of everything than they had a right to be of anything," and he dismisses their elaborate systems as moonshine. Dr. Broad's present volume is a critical examination of the ethical theories of Spinoza, Butler, Hume, Kant, and Sidg- wick. He remarks that he chose these five because their theories are extremely unlike each other, and because all are thinkers of the highest rank. He devotes much the largest space to Sidgwick, whose "Methods of Ethics" he regards as "one of the English philosophical classics," and "on the whole the best treatise on moral theory that has ever been written." It is chiefly the involutions and the dull dignity of Sidgwick's writing, he believes, that have resulted in his having less influ- ence today "than many writers, such as Bradley, who were as superior to him in literary style as he was to them in ethical and philosophical acumen." Dr. Broad's own ethical theories, developed in his criticism and in his final chapter, are too com- plicated for summary here. It is enough to say that they are developed along traditional academic lines, and that one of his most important (and to me most dubious) conclusions is that "the fundamental concepts and the fundamental judgments of ethics are a priori." Those of us who do not take a professional view of the subject are likely to approach a volume of this sort with a certain amiable skepticism. We are likely to reflect on the very negligible influence that any of the five philosophers dis- cussed, or even all the metaphysical moralists put together, have had on the actual working moral code of the majority of men. And we are likely to be particularly prejudiced against Dr. Broad, for not only does he discuss seriously thinkers and theories that most of us look upon as long since discredited or superseded, but he himself, in an age when our ethical ideas are being influenced as never before by our knowledge of such sciences as anthropology, psychology, and biology, and by political and personal experiment, still clings to the ancient assumption, stretching back through Spinoza and Plato, that we can discover all we need to know of the ethics of human conduct by looking within ourselves, by examining the common facts known for centuries to everybody, and by simply being careful not to fall into any logical fallacies. Dr. Broad be- trays this attitude not only by the type of his argument throughout the volume, but by his statement in the preface that "everyone has the necessary materials [for the study of ethics] at his disposal." We may take as an example his treatment of Kant. A writer like Havelock Ellis, who may be taken as typical in many respects of our "modern" outlook on ethics, does not trouble to analyze Kant's particular arguments at all. He derides the whole idea of attempting to "rationalize morality," a temptation chiefly felt, he thinks, by "the man whose brain is hypertrophied and his practical life shriveled to an insignifi- cant routine — the man of whom Kant is the supreme type." Dr. Broad would probably think it extremely unphilosophica] to bring in such personal references in an attempt to discredit any thinker's views, though he apparently admits that others would find such considerations relevant, for he extends an engagingly candid warning to his reader, in the preface, that his own "range of experience, both practical and emotional, is rather exceptionally narrow even for a don." Dr. Broad's own approach to Kant is one of great apparent respect; he expounds the Konigsberg professor's ethical theories in detail and ex- amines them step by step. And I find the result extremely entertaining, for Dr. Broad's patient and unhurried logic finally demolishes the Kantian ethics pretty completely. Dr. Broad would not apparently be greatly troubled by Havelock Ellis's charge regarding the "harmlessness" of aca- demic moral teaching. He remarks in his concluding para- graph: "We can no more learn to act rightly by appealing to the ethical theory of right action than we can play golf well by appealing to the mathematical theory of the flight of the golf ball. The interest of ethics is thus almost wholly theoretical, as is the interest of the mathematical theory of golf or billiards." But I do not believe we can be so cavalier about the matter as this. What Dr. Broad probably means is that it is only the fundamental theoretical presuppositions of the subject that interest him and philosophers like him, just as it is merely the fundamental concepts of physics, and not any of its details or practical applications, that interested him in his "Scientific Thought." Ethics is not, as Dr. Broad seems to believe, merely a branch of critical philosophy; it is, or ought to be, a

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April 9, 1930] The Nation 425 social science on the plane of economics. Now economists may fittingly concern themselves with the examination of funda- mental concepts, such as the meaning of value, but if they con- fined themselves entirely to such purely "theoretical" problems, and never troubled with such practical affairs as taxation, tariffs, unemployment, and particular prices, the result would merely be that such questions would be settled solely (as they very nearly are) by persons ignorant of basic theory. There is, of course, nowhere any definite line between theory and its application; it is by application, indeed, that economists test, extend, refine, and modify their theories: application and theory must enrich each other. What we have at present in the field of ethics is, on one hand, abstract theorists of the Dr. Broad type, who regard their subject as a sort of fascinating logical game, and, on the other hand, writers like Ibsen, Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, Ellis, Wells, who have a very real influence on actual moral codes, particularly in the sexual realm, but little interest in fundamental problems of theory. Perhaps only when the two types of thinking are united will ethics come into its estate as a genuine instrument in helping us to conceive and realize the good life. Henry Hazlitt The Novelist Fadeyev The Nineteen. By Alexander Fadeyev. Translated from the Russian by R. D. Charques. International Publishers. $2.50. WHEN Fadeyev's novel first appeared, in 1927, the Rus- sian critics acclaimed it as the best and most authentic depiction of the red partisans — irregular, spontane- ously organized Soviet troops — in their bitter struggle against the whites. What distinguished Fadeyev, a Communist, from the middle-class writers who dealt with the civil war and the Revolution, from Blok, Pilniak, Biely, Leonov, Ivanov, and others, was, the Russian critics pointed out, the restraint, the realism, one might almost say, the naturalism, of his narrative. While the middle-class "fellow-travelers," lashed by their own fears and passions, envisaged the Revolution as an apocalyptic upheaval and the partisans as a blind, elemental mass of beasts or supermen, Fadeyev saw and described his partisans as ordi- nary beings — fools, cowards, intellectuals, and cutthroats, who love, hate, eat, talk, fight in an atmosphere of everyday exist- ence in the midst of ordinary human sorrows and joys. Hence the simplicity of Fadeyev's style. There are no artifices here and no inflations, no symbolical storms and impressionistic ex- travaganzas; the work is free of the "fellow-travelers' " ecstatic outbursts, mystical shudders, and prophetic ravings. Not that it is devoid of the heroic; indeed, it is surcharged with it. But Fadeyev, in the manner of Tolstoy, to whom he is greatly indebted, humanizes his heroes by lowering them. With him heroism is never exalted or forbidding; it is simple, natural, the outgrowth of everyday conditions, not infrequently the result of weakness, the concomitant of despair. Instead of drawing his revolutionary figures as mythical monstrosities or lifeless alge- braic symbols of the mass will, Fadeyev individualizes them, endowing each one, through a subtle process of inner, psycho- logical illumination, with a distinct character, a glowing per- sonal quality. The Siberian steppes and forests, the civil war, the vicissi- tudes, defeat, and final annihilation of a red company, form the background against which are pitted the magnificently con- ceived, boldly hewn figures of a few partisan men and one woman. The incomparable Morozka, half-peasant half-worker, who leads a loose, devil-may-care existence, steals vegetables from the peasants, gets drunk, and carries on with women, but who for all that is a lovable, generous, brave fellow, loyal to the point of self-forgetfulness (though his class loyalty is intui- tive rather than conscious), is one of the most appealing char- acters in the book. As a contrast there are the repellent Chizh, cultured and utterly cynical, and the pitiful student, Mechik, feeble, sensitive, self-conscious, unstable. Not less real are the other partisans. However, the most interesting and complex character among them is the leader of the company, Levinson. He illustrates best Fadeyev's method of humanizing his heroes by lowering them: "A small man, wearing large topboots, dis- tinguished by a long, red, pointed beard, in appearance rather like a gnome in one of those drawings in children's fairy books." This sickly little Jewish intellectual, who tells salacious jokes, who knows the anguish of doubt and fear and indecision in the face of inevitable cruelty, is certainly no legendary hero, no monumental figure. Yet as the story unfolds he grows in stature; with all his handicaps and faults he reveals himself as a genuine hero, a sterling revolutionist, a devoted friend, a wise and self-sacrificing chief. The peasants and workers of his company cannot resist the impact of his personality. He enforces discipline through persuasion and example, through threats and severe punishment. Only once do we see him break down. It is at the end of the story, when his forces are deci- mated, his best comrades killed, and he, huddled up on his saddle, weary and heartbroken, tears running down his beard, heads the little band of nineteen survivors. Despite the tragic ending, this story is not at all depressing. Like all real tragedies it is cathartic. We close the book with strengthened faith in a new Russia and with a feeling of affec- tionate admiration for the heroic little Bolshevik leader who "ceased crying" because he realized "that it was necessary to live" and that "a man had to do his duty." Joshua Kunitz Cowboy Harris My Reminiscences as a Cowboy. By Frank Harris. Charles Boni. 75 cents. (f Jk M Y Reminiscences as a Cowboy," by Frank Harris, is IV' I the most absurd farrago of falsities I have ever read. The only possible reason for writing it must have been to provide words to sell; the only reason for review- ing it is to prevent people from buying it. The author has certainly lived up to his reputation for ignoring the truth. If he was ever a cowboy — and there is not so much as one homely metaphor of the soil or one fresh fact to show that he once rode the range — his memories of the experience have become so dim that in writing he found himself obliged to construct rather than arrange them. The construction is about as convincing as the most strained Western thriller. The account opens with Mr. Harris working in a Chicago hotel in the "early seventies." Here he meets two cowmen from Kansas, throws in with them, and sets out to buy cattle. They go to Taos, which Mr. Harris says is "near" the Mexican border below El Paso, but which any road map will show to be close to four hundred miles from that stretch of the Rio Grande. However, Taos is a good place to have a bloody fandango, which sounds like an echo of the real thing as de- scribed by Harvey Fergusson in "Wolf Song." Then with one of his partners Mr. Harris slips over into Mexico and steals fifteen hundred head of cattle, which unaided they drive back across the Rio Grande. Indeed, Mr. Harris drives them alone while his associate shoots pursuing Mexicans. In exchange for a few hundred head of the booty a Texan agrees to aid the thieves. This Texan owns a herd of six thousand cattle which three cowboys constantly keep under guard. Now, even a modern bell hop should know that thirty times three men could

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426 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3379 not among them keep six thousand cattle constantly under herd. Accompanying Mr. Harris's outfit is Wild Bill Hickok, who in fact was never a cowboy and who was at this time very busy as marshal at Hays City and Abilene. This makes no difference to Mr. Harris. He says that his three heroes are Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Wild Bill; it is to be hoped that he knows more about the first two than he shows himself to know about the last. He gets back to Chicago just in time for the great fire of October, 1871, his original investment of $3,000 having been converted into $12,000. Mr. Harris does not give the date of the fire. He does not give a single date in the whole book, nor does he give more than half a dozen geographical locations, counting that of Taos, "near the border." Such vagueness may be an aid in making the narrative plausible to the ignorant; to anyone at all judicial it suggests the account a little boy might spin to his mother of having taken a ride on the tail of a buzzard. A few people who are conscious of art are trying to write of the old West with sincerity and truth. The difficulty they experience in securing a serious hearing is largely explained when such a travesty as Frank Harris's "Reminiscences" is soberly sent forth as an outstanding book of the month — even in paper binding. J. Frank Dobie Through the Silver Screen A Voyage to Purilia. By Elmer Rice. Cosmopolitan Book Corporation. $2.50. THE land of Purilia, surrounded by pink clouds and lulled in eternal melody, lies somewhere between Lilliput and Erewhon. Elmer Rice, author of "Street Scene," has now written a scholarly work on the life and habits of a most extraordinary people. Although almost immediately after land- ing on Purilian soil he is caught in a vast network of tangled lives, undergoing the most terrible hardships and encountering the most thrilling adventures, surely, that ever fell to the lot of any scientific explorer — adventures which carry him over half the Purilian globe and which end with the violent death of his "pal," Johnson, the thwarting of the scoundrelly Millwood, and the rescue of the beautiful Pansy Malone from a fate worse than death — he is never for an instant deterred from his pur- pose. Even while playing the hero he remains the ethnologist. Only one or two of the many amazing phenomena of Pu- rilian life may be indicated here. One of these — the disem- bodied voice which the author has named the Presence — is quite inexplicable. At odd intervals it speaks, seemingly out of nowhere, to make some announcement ("Spring comes early to the Purilian hills"), to introduce some person ("Mrs. Malone, Pansy's mother, old before her time from work and worry"), or to offer a bit of mild philosophy or humor ("Jim Slocum, the hired man, never ate peas for fear of cutting his mouth"). The Purilian people seek salvation through tremendous physical and emotional stresses, salvation taking the form of a kind of Nirvana in spiritual union between a man and a woman. But this goal is rarely achieved save by the upper castes. For the caste system is rigidly enforced in Purilia and Mr. Rice has gone into the subject in great detail, arranging and classifying the various orders and explaining how the several castes im- pinge upon one another. Mr. Rice's satire is admirably sustained, with its intricate plot, its absurd solemnity, and its mordacious irony. He has surmounted what must have been enormous difficulties with such apparent ease that never for a moment does the writing threaten to go off key. It is to be hoped that the motion pic- tures acquire the rights. Fred T. Marsh A Conscientious Objector "Hey, Yellowbacks!" The War Diary of a Conscientious Ob- jector. By Ernest L. Meyer. The John Day Company. $2. THIS is a well-worth-while little book, the unvarnished, simple tale of what an American youth had to endure in 1917-18 because he took literally the commandment "Thou shalt not kill." The conscientious objectors were the real moral heroes of the war. They were literally tested by fire. While Mr. Meyer did not have to undergo the inhuman tortures such as crucifixion, tying up by the wrists, drenching with ice-cold water at midnight, solitary confinement on bread and water, and all the other crimes in the name of the war to preserve democracy and righteousness endured by others, he had enough to undergo in all conscience, beginning with his expulsion from the University of Wisconsin by a trial board of war-crazed professors. That Mr. Meyer was able to keep up his courage, yes, preserve his mental balance, is remarkable; it gives fresh proof that the will and power to endure for one's beliefs have not yet passed out of this materialistic world. Altogether it is a moving narrative bound to touch any- one except the men in uniform who are too blind or dull to see that the preservation of liberty of conscience is the most important thing in the world, and that next to it comes refusal to bow down before the power of the state when one's mind and conscience dictate revolt. Mr. Meyer's volume is an ex- cellent companion piece to Norman Thomas's "The Conscien- tious Objector in America." We wish for it a wide distribution. Oswald Garrison Villard Another Coleridge Coleridge, the Sublime Somnambulist. By John Charpentier. Translated by M. V. Nugent. Dodd, Mead and Company. $3.50. BY reason of the strange territories which Coleridge's imagination explored in his poetry, the contrast between his works and his restricted middle-class life has always seemed peculiarly marked by pathos and tragedy. The popular view of the man who wrote four of the finest poems in the English language and one of the first masterpieces of modern literature has been of a frustrated individual whose years, ex- cept for a brief period of brilliant creative activity, were spent in ill-fated pursuits or under the shadow of incapacity and men- tal decay. The backgrounds of his unhappy career are familiar: the rural obscurity of Devon, the schooldays at Christ's Hos- pital, the restless Cambridge years, the distress caused by the French Revolution and the Pantisocracy scheme, the somber winter in Germany, the later London period divided between irregular employment and lecturing, and finally the incarceration with the Gillmans at Highgate in a firm but dispiriting attempt to cure himself of the opium habit. The golden years were brief; they came when he lived for a short time in the Quan- toc Hills near the Wordsworths and wrote "The Ancient Mari- ner," "KublaKhan," "Christabel," and other early poems. With- out achieving the respectable and rather sanctimonious serenity of Wordsworth's old age, and incapable of carrying out many of his ambitions, Coleridge joined the sorry ranks of those poets who must nourish their lyric inspiration in a body racked by all the ills which misfortune, bad habits, and domestic misery sup- ply. But the drabness and mediocrity of his surroundings and private life can never detract from his front-rank position, gained by a few great poems and his profound criticisms.

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April 9, 1930] The Nation 427 (Note: This is an advertisement, inserted in paid space. It does not commit the paper or papers in which it appears, one way or the other, on the subject. — F. F.) Religious Liberty f CLAIMS have often been advanced that the establishment of Religious Liberty in America was the work of George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, and that the Maryland Province was the first to grant toleration to all. See The Commonweal, March 19 and March 26. Without any comment, or expressing any opinion, we beg leave to cite some facts, quote some authorities, and ask some questions. 1. From The Roman Catholic Church in the Modern State, by Charles C. Marshall (Dodd, Mead & Co.), pp. 118-119, footnote: "The liberal spirit of Virginia in 1776 and of her great Statesman (Jefferson) brings out in strange contrast the early spirit of the Province of Maryland under Lord Baltimore, so often referred to by Roman Catholics as the paradise of religious liberty. By the Maryland Statute entitled 'An Act concerning Religion,' enacted 21st April, 1649, and approved by Lord Baltimore himself, it was pro- vided that all persons within the Province who deny Jesus Christ to be the Son of God, or who deny the Holy Trinity, or speak reproachfully thereof, shall be punished with death and confiscation of all lands and goods. (Archives of Maryland, vol. 1, p. 244. Cf. Woodrow Wil- son, A History of the American People, vol. 1, pp. 130- 131). ... It is indeed today a whimsical notion of tolera- tion that would take the life and confiscate the goods of a man who does not believe in the Holy Trinity." 2. From the Encyclopedia Britannica: "Williams and his companions founded their new settlement upon the basis of complete religious toleration, with a view to its becoming 'a shelter for persons dis- tressed for conscience.' . . . He was the first and the foremost exponent in America of the theory of the abso- lute freedom of the individual in matters of religion." WILLIAMS, ROGER (1604-1684), founder of the colony of Rhode Island and pioneer of religious liberty . . . in June, 1636. QUESTION: Was the Maryland Act of 1649, provid- ing for death and confiscation, or the Rhode Island Decla- ration of 1636, the first "establishment of religious liberty in America?" 3. From The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII, issued upon his death in 1903 by Benziger Bros, with the imprimatur of the late Cardinal Farley, p. 149: "Let us examine that liberty in individuals which is so opposed to the virtue of religion, namely, the liberty of worship, as it is called. This is based on the principle that every man is free to profess as he may choose any religion or none." After arguing at some length against this principle, the Pontiff declares it to be "no liberty, but its degradation, and the abject submission of the soul to sin" (p. 150). 4. From Pope Pius XI, letter to Cardinal Gasparri, May 30, 1929 (Cf. Current History Magazine, August, 1929) : "In a Catholic State liberty of conscience and liberty of discussion are to be understood and practised in accordance with Catholic doctrines and Catholic laws." (From the same letter) : "In matters of conscience, jurisdiction lies with the Church, and with her only, by virtue of her divine mission." 5. From The Manual of Christian Doctrine, whose forty-ninth edition was printed 1928 by John Joseph McVey, with the imprimatur of Cardinal Dougherty, stated in its preface to be for use in "the classes of High Schools, Academies, and Colleges," we read the following instruction for the students — future voters — treating of the relation of the Roman Catholic Church to the State, on page 133: "122. May the State separate itself from the Church? "No, because it may not withdraw from the supreme rule of Christ. "123. What name is given to the doctrine that the State has neither the right nor the duty to be united to the Church to protect it? "This doctrine is called Liberalism. It is founded prin- cipally on the fact that modern society rests on liberty of conscience and of worship, on liberty of speech and of the press. "124. Why is Liberalism to be condemned? "1. Because it denies all subordination of the State to the Church. 2. Because it confounds liberty with right. 3. Because it despises the social dominion of Christ, and rejects the benefits derived therefrom." The State and the Church is a volume written by John A. Ryan, D.D., LL.D., Director of Social Action, National Catholic Welfare Conference, and Professor of Moral The- ology at the Catholic University of America, published 1924 under the imprimatur of Cardinal Hayes. Discussing religious liberty as guaranteed by modern constitutions (such as our own), Dr. Ryan, pointing out that the principle he enunciates has no immediate application in the United States, writes, p. 38: "But constitutions can be changed, and non-Catholic sects may decline to such a point that the political pro- scription of them may become feasible and expedient. What protection would they then have against a Catholic State? The latter could logically tolerate only such religious ac- tivities as were confined to the members of the dissenting group. It could not permit them to carry on general propaganda." QUESTION: Are Lord Baltimore's co-religionists to- day the advocates of freedom of conscience, toleration, and religious liberty? Defenders of Truth Society, Inc., (Operating Station WHAP) FRANKLIN FORD, President. Will you help finance our educational work in the press and over the radio? Tear this out and mail: DEFENDERS OF TRUTH SOCIETY, INC. 154 W. 57th Street, New York 1. Please send me free literature about your Society, without obligation. 2. Please apply the bill enclosed (or check drawn to Auditor WHAP) toward the work of the Society. Name Address Listen to WHAP (230.6 meters) Friday 8-12, Saturday 8:30-11:30, Sunday 9-11, Monday 4-6, all p.m., for talks on this subject. Also Wednesdays 6.30-9, talks against Communism. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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428 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3379 M. Charpentier establishes no original point of view in interpreting Coleridge's life, and his subtitle shows it. A biog- rapher does not gain much in lucidity when he tries to solve the problems of an erratic genius by conferring somnambulism upon him. The historical facts are not enhanced in the process, and the interpretation of the poet's work is clouded by a smoke screen of psychological assumptions. In the case of Coleridge this method appears defective at once, for it may be compared with Professor Lowes's researches in "The Road to Xanadu" (one of a half-dozen obvious titles missing in the present bibli- ography), where with no lack of glamor the history of the poet's mind and imagination is traced with profound insight. M. Charpentier employs all the trappings of the popular biography of the moment, but he is most successful when he discards the showy appeal and considers his man judiciously. Two sections of his book — those dealing with the Nether Stowey and Kes- wick periods and the final years at Highgate — contain some admirable explications of the evolution of Coleridge's aesthetic theory; and his high tribute to Coleridge's critical genius, which is scarcely overstated when he speaks of "the most stimulating criticism which has ever existed," will serve to emphasize the importance of a great modern critic. The reader will also see the general drift of French opinion about Coleridge and his fel- low-poets. There is meager stylistic charm in this biography, but it will be found smoothly readable in its present transla- tion, and throughout there is revealed a warm sympathy in pre- senting, within too handy a circumference, the dreams and ideals of the second genius of English romanticism. Morton Dauwen Zabel An Entangling Alliance The Franco-Russian Alliance, 1891-1917. By Georges Michon. Translated by Norman Thomas. The Macmillan Company. $4.50. The Franco-Russian Alliance, 1890-1894. By William Leonard Langer. Harvard Historical Studies, Volume XXX. Har- vard University Press. THE appearance at about the same time of two books on the same subject, with identical titles except for the dates, is an unusual coincidence. Dr. Michon, whose book was published in French in 1927, remarks in his introduc- tion that the history of the Franco-Russian alliance "has never been written." Professor Langer, who speaks of Dr. Michon's book in his bibliography as "the only systematic treatment of the history of the alliance as a whole," also observes in his preface that there has been "no exhaustive treatment" of the subject "to date." Professor Langer has apparently outstripped his col- league in the use of documentary material, and his account of the formation and early years of the alliance is the more de- tailed. The essential difference between the two books, however, does not lie in a more systematic treatment on the one side or a more exhaustive treatment on the other, but in the fact that Dr. Michon, by carrying forward his study into the period of the World War, is able to exhibit at length the evil conse- quences of the alliance to which Professor Langer, holding him- self to a shorter period, does little more than allude. It would be difficult to find, in so small a compass, a more vivid picture than Dr. Michon draws of the black cloud which the alliance with Russia hung over French politics and the French mind until revolution had sent Czarism toppling. The smug self-satisfaction of the French bourgeoisie in the decade before the World War, the vicious policy of Poincare, the indif- ference to the appeals of Jaures and others, the vast corruption of the French press by Russian money expended with the knowl- edge of Poincare and under the direction of Klotz, the Finance Minister, the complete misunderstanding of the nature of the Russian government, and the enormous losses which the flotation of Russian bond issues brought to the French people — all this, and much more of the same amazing kind, is to be read in Dr. Michon's pages. Professor Langer does not go so far chrono- logically, but he, too, notes that "if mutual assistance in the event of a German attack was the common denominator of the Franco-Russian alliance, it was a miserable thing from the start," that over four billion dollars in loans was sent to Russia with the clear understanding at Paris that most of it would eventually be lost, and that France was "obliged to assume the unenviable position of supporting the odious Russian autocracy in its struggle with the liberal movement" in that country; for all of which it won, after 1891, only an "extremely precarious" position. Anyone who imagines that political alliances make for peace should ponder the facts which these two books present. William MacDonald The Jew in Effigy Jews Without Money. By Michael Gold. Horace Liveright. $3. IN the itemized account of our divinely ordained martyrdom which we Jews are keeping to present to the Lord on the day of final reckoning, one of the longest and fattest col- umns will be under the heading of Literary Damages. As a matter of fact, our literary ordeal at the hands of Jew and Gentile alike, Zionist and anti-Semite, yellow journalist and red has in many ways been more trying than our physical one; and, frankly, if we had known in advance of this gratuitous sup- plement to our sufferings, we should rather have chosen not to be the Chosen People. And not because we are getting crotchety in our old age. Being burnt in the flesh, as we have frequently had occasion to find out, is a painful enough business, but at least there is some dignity to it. But to be burnt in effigy! To be hissed and applauded — in effigy! To be vilified and deified — in effigy! To be laughed at and cried over — in effigy — as we have been subjected to in literature past and present, up to and including this latest affront — that is merely humiliating. Perhaps that is what Shylock, one of the earliest effigies made of the Jew, had in mind when he cried (to all the Ghetto- mongers of the future) — "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?" Shakespeare, perhaps, had never seen one, and for all he knew a Jew might have had horns and a tail. But what are we to say of Jewish writers — not literary Jews like Ludwig Lewisohn, but genuine products of the Ghetto like Michael Gold and others, whose books people the East Side with crudely carved effigies about as realistic as a crowd of totem poles. I can only reply that Mr. Gold is not really to blame. All those totem poles have been fathered before him by visiting Gentiles, and nursed at the breast of kindly Gentile reviewers, and all he did was to continue the breed. For centuries the Ghetto was an exotic corner of European cities, partaking of the unreality and colorfulness and crude conventionalizations of all things foreign to Gentile eyes. Out of this "conditioning" grew the "Jew," a mystical entity like the Holy Trinity, one in all and all in one, subdivided not into individuals but into the embodiments of various sentimental fancies about things Jewish. This peculiar, exoscopic romanticism was assimilated by the Western Jew with whatever language he learned, and unconsciously he got to see himself that way and, ultimately, to exploit himself that way for a receptive public. His temptation is not lessened by the fact that reviewers, quite able to hold up other fiction to some sort of aesthetic standard, would hail "Bertha, the Sewing- Machine Girl" as stark realism if it were only equipped with the proper East Side setting.

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April 9, 1930] The Nation 429 If the Gentile, sick of such regurgitations of his own fancies, is really bent on finding out what honest-to-goodness Jews look like, act like, taste like in fiction, let him try the following recipe. Quarantine all the Jews in one country — I don't care whether it is Palestine or these United States so long as the Gentile is kept out — and confine them to a language exclusively their own — Yiddish or Hebrew or perhaps their own brand of English. Then the Jews would be forced to write for them- selves for a change, instead of posturing for the Gentile. The Ghetto would no longer be a pushcart devoted to cheap literary trimmings, for its inhabitants could not go on peddling their picturesqueness to each other. The word "Jew," deflated of its rhetorical content, would cease to be a figure of speech for the convenience of literary politicians like Ludwig Lewisohn and Michael Gold and become a noun that a self-respecting artist could handle without blushing. The Jewish writer would stop regarding himself as a foreign correspondent stationed among his people and would have to satisfy a critical jury of his fellow- Jews — for whom "Jewish life" would have no news value — who would apply the same standards that American critics apply to Sherwood Anderson or Elizabeth Madox Roberts. Only under such Utopian conditions, perhaps, will the "great Jewish novel" get itself written. It occurs to me that I have not really reviewed this book, so I will let Mr. Gold himself sum it up: "All these things happened. They were part of our daily lives, not lurid articles in a Sunday newspaper." Can it be that Mr. Gold is getting self-conscious? Alter Brody Comforting Reminiscence Grandmother Browns Hundred Years, 1827-1927. By Harriet Connor Brown. Little, Brown and Company. $3. THIS volume, the $5,000 prize biography of the Atlantic Monthly, is almost unique. Reminiscences of the aged are common enough, of course, and some of them find their way into print, but most of the latter are concerned with life more or less completely removed from the common level, either with great events, or with participation in them, or with such bizarre maunderings as appeared in "Trader Horn." Grandmother Brown's story deals with none of these things. It is, on the contrary, an account of everyday life, of the work, play, and philosophy of an intelligent, courageous, loyal woman, the kind of life that has been duplicated, except in length, by the hundred thousand in this country. The con- stantly recurring round of hard work of a pioneer farmer's wife, relieved by the variety necessarily incident to bearing and raising a large family, might seem to furnish material for only a commonplace narrative. As the author handles it, how- ever, the story is far from commonplace; it is significant and entertaining, made so both by the large element of universality and by Grandmother Brown's distinct individuality. Her portrait might be regarded as a composite picture of all who have lived through experiences similar to hers, although by no means all who have had such experiences have met them as successfully and serenely as she did. Her mission in life was her home and her family. To these she devoted her years and her strength, and from them she drew her reward. They were her contributions to the well-being of the community. If the contributions of all indi- viduals were equally good, she believed, many of the problems requiring the services of the reformer and uplifter would cease to exist. Like most women who have seen life as she saw it she had strong convictions, but she was never bigoted in forcing them upon others. Her philosophy was the product of her WAR PROFITS OTTO LEHMANN-RUSSBULDT Translated and edited by Pierre Loving JTiere are laid bare the far-reaching activities of the most unscrupulous group of men in the world — the in- ternational armament ring. Krupp, Schneider, Skoda, Vickers, Zaharoff — all these sinister, almost fabulous figures are depicted in their true colors . . . cold, ruth- less, without loyalty to man or country. The sensa- tional matter this book contains, now told for the first time, and supported by unimpeachable documentary evidence, is of vital concern to all interested in the prob- lems of armaments and international relations. $1.75 ALFRED H. KING, Publisher, 8 W. 40 St. t$tst$t$t$t$t$t$t$ UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON CHAPBOOKS Edited by Glenn Hughes America's Most Distinguished Pamphlet Series JUST PUBLISHED THE NEW GROUND OF CRITICISM By V. F. Calverton A brilliant contribution to modern critical theory "The New Ground of Criticism is an excellent piece of work and many of the things you said badly need saying." — Lewis Mumf ord. "The latest fuel to the flame of literary controversy has been added by V. F. Calverton in his little brochure The New Ground of Criticism. Considering the vio- lence of certain expressions in critical quarters, Mr. Calverton writes with the urbanity of a master of the Renaissance." — Harry Hansen. OTHER NEW CHAPBOOKS THE REALISTIC WAR NOVEL, by Sophus Keith Winther. VERNON LOUIS PARRINGTON: AMERICAN SCHOLAR, by Joseph B. Harrison. SPEAK THE SPEECH: REFLECTIONS ON GOOD ENGLISH AND THE REFORMERS, by Barrett H. Clark. Price of each Chapbook, 65 Cents Order from any book-dealer or from the publisher UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON BOOK STORE Seattle ~~~~~~^ nn mi mi ii bmi J When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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430 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3379 Now the woman at war tells her story! SOLDIERS of all nations have written their farewell to arms. This savage record of a girl ambulance driver speaks for the woman at the front. You may shudder and squirm while you read it but you will not lay it down ! 20,000 copies sold before publication. $2.50 STEPDAUGHTERS OF WAR by Helen Zenna Smith E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC., 300 4th Ave., N. Y. C. What Is Your Emotional Age? JOHN FARRAR— "I have found the One Game Book that has been delighting the family circle. Try it in your parlor." PROF. JOSEPH JASTROW— "I find it of great interest— you have shown great ingenuity." A book of 65 highly amus- ing tests that everybody is enjoying. Great for parties. The New Yorker, Elsie Mc- Cormick, Nunnally Johnson, Walter Winchell and many more sophisticates are recom- mending and having fun with this lively and different form of group entertainment. Its 225 pages are good for twenty eve- nings. Test score sheets go with the book. Order your copy today 1 $2.25 POSTPAID at book sellers and BOB DAVIS— "Thru it I have become so well acquainted with myself that it amounts to familiar- ity." Business Bourse, 80 West 40th St., N. Y. G A Few of the Tests Love "Complex" Moral Turpitude Show-off Gold-Digger Tight- wad Moron Wife Husband Genius Temperament Charm Beauty Honesty THE MODERN QUARTERLY FORUM A New Educational Center for Radical Thought The Challenge off CONTEMPORARY CIVILIZATION Sunday night, April 6—8:30 P. M. V. F. Calverton — The End of an Epoch Sunday night, April 13—8:30 P. M. Scott Nearing — Whither Civilization? Sunday night, April 20 — 8:30 P. M. Harry Elmer Barnes — Education or Enlightenment? Sunday night, April 27—8:30 P. M. Samuel D. Schmalhausen — The Pathology of the Leisure Class Sunday night, May A — 8:30 P. M. V. F. Calverton — Humanism in an Inhuman Civilization held at PYTHIAN TEMPLE 70th Street, East of Broadway, New York If you are a radical and believe in the necessity for a new radical forum, where anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics, literature and art will be subjected to revolutionary analysis — then support us now by responding to this appeal. MODERN QUARTERLY FORUM Room 1210 Equitable Life Bldg. 393 Seventh Ave., New York City Phone 9160 Chickering Enclosed find $ for D$2.50 for course D50c. for single lectures. Name Address own observation, tinged at times with sadness but also, on occasion, with delightful humor. And not infrequently, where Grandmother Brown's own views were too earnest for her to see humor in them, her daughter-in-law author contrives skilfully to let the reader see the amusing side. "I have al- ways felt this way," said Grandmother Brown, "that it is a woman's duty to make a happy home and teach her children to vote the Republican ticket." The book has little to do with public affairs, but it is a very interesting contribution to the study of an important phase of American life. Ralph Volney Harlow Drama Nosce Te Ipsum THE Theater Guild's experiments with standard plays have not always been among its happiest efforts, but with "A Month in the Country" (Guild Theater) it has achieved a delightful production of a delightful play. Chekhov himself never imagined a more charming group of people than that which Turgenev has here brought together, and Chekhov himself never scrutinized character with a keener or more toler- ant gaze. One will look in vain for that tumultuous despair which is commonly supposed to be inevitably a part of the famous Russian soul, but one will find in its place something which is, perhaps, hardly less characteristic — a gently bubbling gaiety just tinged with melancholy and a quiet, almost elegiac beauty. These people are, to be sure, all idlers; they have eaten of some lotus and they dream their lives away, content to watch the birches grow and to speak of love. But no one ever justi- fied idleness more completely by making it graceful, for they talk divinely about nothing in particular, and they get the full savor of the tiniest, almost non-existent adventure. After two hours in their company it seems that life could not be more profitably spent than in such doings as these. Natalia Petrovna, married to a gentle, ineffectual country gentleman, has a lover of long standing; but when a young tutor appears in the house she confesses a penchant for him. The tutor is flattered by the favor of the great lady, and the lover, tardily scrupulous now that he has been displaced, persuades him that they should leave together. They say goodby after some nervous references to the delicacy of their honor, and the lady accepts their farewell with an irony whose delicacy makes its deadliness almost imperceptible: "I am sure that you are both honorable men — very honorable men. In fact, I think that you are the most honorable men I have ever met." And that is all, but it is quite enough. Quite enough because, I think, both the author and his creatures are so exquisitely aware of every value which the situation contains. Turgenev sees through them all. He follows every turn of every individual's psychology. But he does not see through them any more completely than they see through themselves, or know them any better than they know themselves, for it is, indeed, in learning to do just that that they seem to have spent their lives. Self-knowledge, com- plete in the adults, may be still growing in the youths, but as one watches the keenness with which they note their own emo- tions, one is sure that their experiment with living will achieve the success at which it aims. Doubtless they will never do any- thing, and quite probably they will be unhappy. But they will be thoroughly familiar with their own souls, and they will get the full value out of every emotion. They will see it coming, they will know when it is there, and they will reflect upon it after it has passed — even though, perchance, they have never heard of the "hard and gem-like flame." li'hen writing to advertise™ please mention The Nation

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April 9, 19301 The Nation 431 D □ THEATRES □ □ FILMS □ D MUSIC □ ° The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present in her ORIGINAL CHARACTKB 8KHTCRBS RUTH DRAPER Evenings : Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, 8:60 flOMRDY THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats. Thurs. ^^ ^ and Sat., 2 :S0. VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.60 Popular Price ($2.50) Matinee Saturday REBOUND The Theatre Guild Presents A MONTH & COUNTRY By IVAN TURGENEV i^-m-mil^t THEATRE, 52nd St., W. of Broadway VjUlICl Evgs. 8:30. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:30. The Apple Cart Bernard Shaw's Political Extravaganza AM A T> TUX! UsTs^sV Theatre, 45th St., W. of Eighth Ave. JjlAl*. 1JLH OIIiVjIV Evgs., 8:30. Mats., Thurs. A Sat., 2:80 Metropolitan Opera House, Tues. evening-, April 8, at 8:45 Benefit Russian Cultural Centre Under Distinguished Patronage, Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, Chairman; Mrs. Otto H. Kahn, Treas.; Prince Paul Chavchavadze, Secy. FIRST TIME IN AMERICA. Russian Gypsy Song In two acts preceded by Concert Program Soloists : Bourskaya (Met. Op. Co.), Dubinsky, Fulon, Koshetz, Kriona, Kurenko, Leonoff, Mamonoff, Mardkin, Oulukanoff, Sabanleeva (Met. Op. Co.), Stojnevsky; Orchestra, Chorus, Olshanetky, conductor; Ballet, Mordkln, director; Oulukanoff, stage director. Tickets at box office. Mgt. R. Copley (Steinway). America's Foremost Actor tn The Screen's Smartest Comedy JOHN BARRYM0RE tn "THE MAN FROM BLANKLEY'S" A Warner Bros, and Vitaphone Talking Picture. TFMTRAI TWFATRF Broadway and 47th Street. \,Cl\ 1 1YAL. 1 rlLA 1 l\C Dai]y, 2 :45— 8 :46 ; Sundays, 8—6—8 :46 RESTAURANT Circle 8449 121 West 40th St. THE NOOK In the heart of the theatre district the Continental spirit of the old "FIREFLY" and the "RUSSIAN NOOK" is revived by A. KIMCHE, Host. Entertainment impromptu. LUNCH TEA DINNER CAFE With HOPE WILLIAMS "This is the best light comedy written by anybody hereabouts in ten or twenty years, and it's not so damned light, either." — Heywtod Broun, New York Telegram. Arthur Hopkins presents DONALD OGDEN STEWARTS COMEDY Plymouth Theatre. Eves. 8:50; Mats. Thurs. & Sat., 2:40. The Greatest Screen Drama Of All Time! TIFFANY PRESENTS JOURNEY'S END From the stage play by R. C. SHERRIFF TUESDAY World Premiere APRIL 8th at 8.30 P.M. GAIETY THEATRE. B'way b 46th St. Twice Daily thereafter at 2 :45 — 8 :46 — 8 Times Sunday at 2:45—5:45 and 8:46. WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See **A Month in the Country — Guild — 52nd St., W. of B'dway. ••Apple Cart— Beck — 45th St., E. of Eighth Ave. •Berkeley Square — Lyceum — E. 45th St. *Civic Repertory — Until April 21st — Philadelphia, Pa. •Death Takes a Holiday — Barrymore Theatre — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •Dishonored Lady — Empire — B'dway and 40th St. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st St., E. of B'dway. •••Fifty Million Frenchmen — Lyric — W. 42nd St. •••Flying High— Apollo— W. 42nd St. ••June Moon — Broadhurst — W. 44th St. ••Rebound— Plymouth — 45th St., W. of B'dway. ••Strictly Dishonorable— Avon — W. 45th St. •••Strike Up The Band— Times Sq.— W. of B'dway. ••The First Mrs. Fraser— Playhouse — 48th St., E. of B'dway. •The Green Pastures — Mansfield — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •The Infinite Shoeblack— Elliot— 39th St., E. of B'dway. •The Last Mile— Sam H. Harris— 42nd St., W. of B'dway. •The Matriarch— Longacre — 220 W. 48th St. ••Topaze— Music Box — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •••Wake Up and Dream— Selwyn — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. First Nights House Afire— Little — 44th St., W. of B'dway. Broadway Shadows — Belmont — 123 W. 48th St. Troyka— Hudson — 44th St., E. of B'dway. The Joy of the Serpents — Macdougal — Macdougal St. Films Journey's End — Gaiety — 46th St. and B'dway. The Man From Blankley's — Central — 47th St. and B'dway. 'Drama. **Comedy. "Musical. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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432 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3379 Visits to flSSOVIET RUSSIA Groups Now Forming Twenty-five days in the Soviet Union Leningrad, Moscow, Volga, Rostov, the Ukraine . . . agricultural and industrial regions. Leader Colston E. Warne, Prof, of Eco- nomics, U. of Pittsburgh. Sailing from New York S.S. Bremen — June 28. Price from New York, $696. Price from Stettin, Germany — July 5 — $495. Registration open 2 weeks in Leningrad and Moscow during the theatre season. Sailing from New York S.S. Europa— May 14th. Price from New York— $533; from Stettin, Germany— May 21st— $330; from Helsing) or i— -May 23rd— $299. Registration open Other Parties Diversified itineraries allowing from 5 to 36 days in Russia; sailings May 3, 14, 30, June 3, 18, 24, 28, July 5, 24, August 21. Each party lim- ited to eight plus American leader. 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK If you are interested in THE INTELLIGENT STUDENTS' TOUR OF SOCIALISM organized by the League for Industrial Democracy with the assistance of The Open Road Leaders: Dr. and Mrs. Harry "W. Laldler Leaving New York June 28, 1930 by Bremen — Returning August 23. Visiting England, Russia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France. Membership restricted to 15. If rite immediately to League for Industrial Democracy 112 East 19th Street, New York City The Christian Science CENSOR by Henry Raymond Mussey A limited number of copies of this recent Nation serial are now obtainable in handy booklet form at 25 cents a copy. THE NATION, 20 Vesey Street, New York Turgenev and Chekhov are the only writers I know who have completely justified a pause on the road which leads from tragedy to comedy. Both have reached the detached and critical intelligence which belongs to the latter. Both are completely sophisticated and, in certain senses at least, completely disillu- sioned. Yet neither has even approached the brittle hardness of pure comedy. Each is knowing without being quite cynical, and though neither has any lingering tendency to find cosmic signifi- cance in man or his doings yet both feel with and for him. In them human nature is neither funny nor grand, but somehow, without being either, it is charming. And that perhaps is the secret of their fascination. Here for once one does not have to make one's choice between intelligence and feeling or be put off with comedy tinged with inappropriate sentimentality. The clarity of vision is never clouded; no veils are drawn in order to make people or things seem softer than they are. And yet their little joys and little sorrows take on a significance which is more than comic. In such a play as this, where everything depends upon the evocation of a mood, it is obvious that only the most expert act- ing and the most expert direction will do, but the production at the Guild Theater leaves almost nothing to be desired. Nazim- ova, as Natalia Petrovna, gives a finely modulated perform- ance which seems to me quite the best she has achieved since her return to the stage; Henry Travers and Dudley Digges are very fine in comic roles; and in fact the whole cast, including Eunice Stoddard, who was seen first in "Red Rust," is excellent. More- over, the settings, modeled by Raymond Sovey upon the designs by M. S. Dobuzhinsky for the Moscow Art Theater production of the same play, contribute much. Perhaps the garden scene reveals the weakness of all attempts to treat outdoor scenes realistically with the aid of paper flowers and poisonous-looking grass, but the empire room, done in blue, is one of the loveliest I have ever seen. Joseph Wood Krutch Contributors to This Issue Louis Fischer, Moscow correspondent of The Nation, will soon publish "The Soviet in World Affairs." Paul Y. Anderson is the national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Harry McGuire, a resident of Denver, is editor of Outdoor Life. Leslie Nelson Jennings contributes verse to various periodicals. Joshua Kunitz is the author of "Russian Literature and the Jew." J. Frank Dobie is the author of "A Vaquero of the Brush Country." Morton Dauwen Zabel is professor of English litera- ture in Loyola University and one of the editors of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. William MacDonald is a regular contributor of historical and political reviews to The Nation and other periodicals. Alter Brody is the author of "Lamentations," a book of plays dealing with Jewish life. Ralph Volney Harlow is professor of history at Syra- cuse University. TX/HEN changing your address for the summer, please be sure to send your old as well as your new address, and allow about two weeks for the change to be made. Circulation Dept., THE NATION, 20 Vesey St., N. Y. C. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section The Haiti Commission's Report THE President's Commission for the Study and Re- view of Conditions in the Republic of Haiti was appointed on February 7 and consisted of the fol- lowing members: W. Cameron Forbes, chairman; Henry P. Fletcher, Elie Vezina, James Kerney, and William Allen White. On February 4 President Hoover, in announcing that such a commission would be appointed, said: "The primary question which is to be investigated is when and how we are to withdraw from Haiti." The work of the commission in Haiti was fully reported in our International Relations Section by Mrs. Helena Hill Weed, special representative of The Nation in Haiti. The commission's report, which was unanimous, has just been published. We print below the principal sections and the recommendations of this report. . . . The reasons which impelled the United States to enter Haiti in 1915 are so well known that they need not be set forth in this report. Conditions were chaotic; means of communica- tion were largely non-existent; the peasant class was impov- erished; disease was general; property was menaced; and the debt of the government, indeterminate in amount, had risen — at least on paper — to staggering proportions. . . . The commission desires to record its high praise of Gen- eral Russell's whole-hearted and single-minded devotion to the interests of Haiti as he conceived them, his unremitting labor, and his patient and painstaking efforts to bring order out of chaos and to reconstruct a governmental machine which had been largely destroyed by years of abuse, incapacity, and anarchy. Since the Occupation the Haitian government, espe- cially under President Borno, with the guidance and assistance of the American officials in its service, has a fine record. . . . The commission was disappointed at the evidence it re- ceived of the lack of appreciation on the part of the educated and cultured Haitians of the services rendered them by the Occupation and their own government. Out of many dozen witnesses only one or two made favorable mention of the achievements of their administration. . . . Under the American Occupation — and with its consent — the legislative chambers were dissolved in 1918, and by an in- terpretation of a new constitution adopted under its aegis, they have not since been reassembled. The country has been ruled by a President and a Council of State exercising, under the direction of American officials, the legislative authority. Local self-government has also largely disappeared. The im- portant municipalities and communes are ruled by commission- ers appointed by the President. The members of the Council of State itself have been appointed and removed by him. . . . The people of Haiti, since the dissolution of the National Assembly by President D'Artiguenave, have had no popularly ; elected representatives in control of their government. The American Occupation has accepted — if not indeed encouraged — this state of affairs. Certainly reforms could be instituted and governmental measures carried through more easily in these :ircumstances, and were. The acts and attitude of the treaty officials gave your commission the impression that they had been Dased upon the assumption that the Occupation would continue ndefinitely. . . . The commission was disappointed to find that :he preparation for the political and administrative training of Haitians for the responsibilities of government had been inade- luate. . . . The commission is not convinced that the foundations for democratic and representative government are now broad enough in Haiti. The educated public opinion and literate minority are so small that any government formed in these circumstances is liable to become an oligarchy. The literate few too often look to public office as a means of livelihood. Until the basis of political structure is broadened by education — a matter of years — the government must necessarily be more or less unstable and in constant danger of political upheavals. The commission is of the opinion that the progressive steps looking toward the withdrawal of the assistance now be- ing given by the American Occupation should be taken on the theory and understanding that the present treaty will remain in force until 1936, it being understood that such modifications as circumstances require and the two governments agree upon may be made at any time. It is too early to suggest in what form the American Occupation should be liquidated upon the expiration of the treaty or in what form such further aid and assistance as the Haitian government might desire from the United States should be provided. . . . The commission rec- ommends the gradual reduction of the marine brigade if and as, in the judgment of the two governments, the political situation warrants. . . . It is obvious that after the withdrawal of the American forces, the orderly functioning of the Haitian government will depend in large measure upon the efficiency and discipline of the Garde. The primary and principal duty of the Garde — the maintenance of law and order — has been well and conscien- tiously performed. The replacement of American officers of the Garde by Haitians, contemplated by the treaty, has not been carried out, however, as rapidly as, in the opinion of the commission, it should have been done. There is not now and there never has been a Haitian officer of the Garde above the grade of captain. There are now but 2 Haitian captains on duty with troops out of a total of 23, 17 Haitian first lieuten- ants out of a total of 58, 19 Haitian second lieutenants out of a total of 57, and 28 aspirant officers (cadets), all of whom are Haitians. . . . The commandant of the Garde testified that American officers serving with the Garde could be transferred back to the Marine Corps at any time to make room for the promotion of Haitians, and this should be done where vacancies occurring in the ordinary course are not sufficient to give the opportunity for a faster promotion of Haitians. Notwithstanding the fact that there are a number of American non-commissioned officers serving as company officers in the Garde who have rendered fine service for from eight to fourteen and one-half years, not one of them has ever been promoted above the grade of captain in the Haitian Garde. The commission believes that some of these men are at least as well fitted by training and experience to be promoted to field rank as marine officers who have not had their experience in Haiti. . . . The financial achievement of the American administration is noteworthy. . . . Some witnesses who appeared before your commission criticized the financial management of the government and even went so far as to charge improprieties in connection with it. Many complained that they were kept in ignorance as to how their money was collected and how spent. This shows that they had not read the careful reports issued by the Financial Adviser in both English and French. . . . The Service of the Public Debt has been cared for and several million dollars of the principal thereof paid off Out of

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434 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 337< ASter War, What Is the World's Greatest Menace? A gigantic and deadly narcotic menace is upon our country and the world. ''The yearly economic burden laid upon our people exceeds $5,000,000,000."* There are about 1,000,000 addicts in the United States. Have you read Consequei By JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD Author of IMAGINA, with illustrations by Lauren Ford and Arthur Rackham. In the introduction, John Haynes Holmes says: " 'Consequences' tells a thrilling story. It may do with the narcotic or drug evil today what Mrs. Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' did with the evil of chattel slavery yester- day." "Nothing more compelling has been written in years." — 07u'o State Journal. Until the people rise up against government revenue from opium, the tragic bondage of "THE LIVING DEAD" will increase. * Congressman Fisk. Put ton and all bookshops. $2.50 STATEMENT OF THE OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, CIRCULA- TION, ETC., REQUIRED BY THE ACT OF CONGRESS OF AUGUST 24, 1912. Of The Nation, published weekly, Wednesday at New York, N. Y., for April 1, 1930. State of New York 1 ss County of New York J Before me, a Notary Public in and for the state and county aforesaid, personally appeared Oswald Garrison Villard, who, having been duly sworn according to law, deposes and says that he is the Editor and Publisher of The Nation and that the following is, to the best of his knowledge and be- lief, a true statement of the ownership, management (and if a daily paper, the circulation), etc., of the aforesaid publication for the date shown in the above caption, required by the Act of August 24, 1912, embodied in section 411, Postal Laws and Regulations, printed on the reverse of this form, to wit: 1. That the names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Publisher, Oswald Garrison Villard, 20 Vesey St., New York, N. Y.; Editor, Oswald Garrison Villard, 20 Vesey St., New York, N. Y.; Managing Editor, Henry R. Mussey, 20 Vesey St., New York, N. Y.; Business Managers, None. 2. That the owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and ad- dress must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding one per cent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a firm, company, or other unincorporated concern, its name and address, as well as those of each in- dividual member, must be given.) The Nation, Inc., 20 Vesey St., New York, N. Y.; Margaret DeSilver, 93 Joralemon St., Brooklyn, N. Y.; Katherine S. Dreier, 88 Central Park West, N. Y.; Mary Knoblauch, 55th St. and Seventh Ave., New York, N. Y.; Agnes Brown Leach, 170 East 64th St., New York, N. Y.; Ellen McMurtrie, 1104 Spruce St.. Philadelphia, Pa.; Estate of Mary D. McMurtrie, 1421 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pa.; Maria C. Scattergood, 355 Bourse Bldg., Philadelphia, Pa.; R. L. Selene, 334 California St., San Francisco, Cal.; Oswald Garrison Villard, 20 Vesey St., New York, N. Y.; Edward S. Waters, 52 William St., New York, N. Y.; Maurice Wertheim, 57 William St., New York, N. Y.; Estate of J. Wertheim, Central Union Trust Co., 80 Broadway, New York, N. Y. 3. That the known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 per cent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are none, so state.) None. 4. That the two paragraphs next above, giving the names of the owners, stockholders, and security holders, if any, contain not only the list of stockholders and security holders as they appear upon the books of the company but also, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary rela- tion, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, is given; also that the said two paragraphs contain statements embracing affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustee, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner; and this affiant has no reason to believe that any other person, association, or corporation has any interest direct or indirect in the said stock, bonds, or other securities than as so stated by him. 5. That the average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers dur- ing the six months preceding the date shown above is: (This information is required from daily publications only.) , __, . , OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD Sworn to and subscribed before me this 17th day of March, 1930 „ , MARY E. O'BRIEN My commission expires March 30, 1930. (Seal) revenues in excess of the amount called for by the amortiza- tion plan. The wisdom of this course is open to question; il might have been better to have reduced the taxation, especially the export tax, and left the debt to work itself out during its normal term, thus keeping more money in the country where experience has shown it was badly needed. Little by little the American Occupation has extended its intervention in the finan- cial operation of Haiti, until 60 per cent of the revenues are now expended under American supervision, including the Ser- vice of the Public Debt. . . . Friction between the Haitian courts and the American treaty officials has arisen at various times because, on the one hand, the courts have refused to enforce or have obstructed the execution of certain administrative measures and because, on the other, the treaty officials have refused to obey the orders of the court on the ground that the treaty is the law of the land and its observance and the agencies set up by it cannot be ob- structed or interfered with by the judiciary. The question raised is delicate but goes to the heart of our treaty relations with Haiti, and the commission recommends that in case of future conflict of authority on this score the matter be settled by direct negotiations between the two governments. . . . One accusation persistently brought against the American intervention concerns the inserting in the constitution of 1918 of an article granting to foreigners the right to take title to Haitian land. It is evident that the change has produced much irritation and suspicion. From the inception of the Republic in 1804, the Haitians had consistently excluded foreigners from owning real property, and in the face of such a tradition it was unfortunate to have had the land policy altered under American auspices. The commission recommends, in case the Haitian people desire to amend this provision, that our government make no objection thereto, merely limiting itself to seeing that rights and titles acquired under the present constitution — which are comparatively few — be respected. The commission found no instance of undue advantage having been taken by Americans of the clause enabling foreigners to acquire real estate. . . . Race antipathies lie behind many of the difficulties which the United States military and civil forces have met in Haiti. The race situation there is unique; the Negro race after more than a century of freedom has developed a highly cultured, highly sophisticated, race-conscious leadership. This group, which is proud to be known as the "Elite," forms the govern- ing class. . . . Their language is French. Their Catholicism is French. The masses of Haiti are poor and ignorant. Gen- erally speaking, they are of pure African descent. Illiteracy keeps the peasant masses politically inarticulate, except in case of mobs or bandit gangs, which formerly infested the country- side and often furnished the forces of revolution. These bandit gangs have been broken up and have disappeared under Ameri- can rule, but the social forces that created them still remain — poverty, ignorance, and the lack of a tradition or desire for orderly free government. . . . The failure of the Occupation to understand the social problems of Haiti, its brusque attempt to plant democracy there by drill and harrow, its determina- tion to set up a middle class — however wise and necessary it may seem to Americans — all these explain why, in part, the high hopes of our good works have not been realized. . . • The commission recommends: 1. That the detail of naval and marine officers for all Haitian services be made for a minimum of four years and that an effort be made to secure Americans who will agree to continue employment in these services, so that upon the expiration of the treaty a force of American doctors, engineers, and police officers will be available for continued assistance to the Haitian government, should it then desire it; 2. That, if possible, some form of continuing appropria- tion for roads be urged for expenditure by the Haitian govern- When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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April 9, 19301 The Nation 435 ment, with a policy that will provide enough funds to keep all existing roads in suitable repair before any new construction is undertaken; also in regard to further construction that only roads most urgently needed to develop regions now settled . . . be undertaken until the present economic depression has passed; 3. That the United States interpose no objections to a moderate reduction of the customs duties, internal revenue taxes, especially those imposed upon alcohol and tobacco, or to a reduction or elimination of the export tax on coffee, if the con- dition of the Treasury so warrants; 4. That it be suggested to the Haitian government that it employ one American adviser in each administrative depart- ment of the government to perform such work as the respective cabinet minister may delegate to him, these officers to give expert advice and assistance to the Haitian government; . . . 5. That, as an act of graciousness on the part of the United States, a moderate appropriation be made available during the continuance of the treaty to defray the cost of American civil officials in the Haitian government service ; 6. That an appointment of a military attache be made to the legation when the time shall have arrived for a minister to replace the high commissioner, as the question of the preservation of order is of first importance. . . . Complying with your instructions to suggest sequent steps to be taken with respect to the Haitian situation your com- mission offers the following: 1. That the President declare that the United States will approve a policy, the details of which all the United States offi- cials in Haiti are directed to assist in working out, providing for an increasingly rapid Haitianization of the services with the object of having Haitians experienced in every department of the government ready to take over full responsibility at the expiration of the existing treaty; 2. That in retaining officers now in the Haitian service, or selecting new Americans for employment therein, the utmost care be taken that only those free from strong racial antipathies should be preferred; 3. That the United States recognize the temporary Presi- dent when elected, provided the election is in accordance with the agreement reached by your commission with President Borno and the leaders representing the Opposition; 4. That the United States recognize the President elected by the new legislature, acting as a National Assembly, pro- vided that neither force nor fraud has been used; . . . 5. That at the expiration of General Russell's tour of duty in Haiti, and in any such event not before the inaugura- tion of the permanent President, the office of High Commis- sioner be abolished and a non-military Minister appointed to take over his duties; . . . 6. That whether or not a certain loss of efficiency is en- tailed, the new Minister to Haiti be charged with the duty of carrying out the early Haitianization of the services called for in the declaration of the President of the United States above recommended ; 7. That, as the commission found the immediate with- drawal of the marines inadvisable, it recommends their gradual withdrawal in accordance with arrangements to be made in future agreement between the two governments; 8. That the United States limit its intervention in Haitian affairs definitely to those activities for which provision is made for American assistance by treaty or by specific agreement be- tween the two governments; 9. That the new Minister be charged with the duty of negotiating with the Haitian government further modifications of the existing treaty and agreements providing for less inter- vention in Haitian domestic affairs and defining the conditions under which the United States would lend its assistance in the restoration of order or maintenance of credit. BEGINNING NEXT WEEK The Press Today A New Series by Oswald Garrison Villard UNDER the above title Mr. Villard will inaugurate in THE NATION of April 16 a series of articles of unusual interest and importance to both the professional and the lay reader. During the last decade the evolution of the press has been proceeding at an accelerated pace toward operating efficiency. But during this time there has been no corresponding improvement in the character of news-reporting, and no agency has been born to insure the public against the dangers inherent in the increasing capitalistic control of the daily papers. Long in contemplation, these articles rank among the most timely and authoritative ever to come from Mr. Villard's pen. Due to his well known com- mand of the subject, there has been an increasingly insistent demand for such a series, and he has now consented to begin it at once. The first four titles will be: April 16 — The Associated Press (No. 1) April 23 — The Associated Press (No. 2) May 7 — The United Press May 21— The Chain Daily and What It Connotes A mine of vital information, illustrated by a wealth of anecdote, is here thrown open to Nation readers. Immediate return of the coupon will enable us to start your subscrip- tion with the opening of the series — April 1 6. THE NATION, 20 VESEY ST., NEW YORK Enter my one-year subscription to The Nation. I enclose $1, and will complete payment in four monthly instalments of $1 each. Name Street City 4-9-30

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436 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3379 ETCHINGS Artists' proofs, now available di- rect from artists of international experience, and established repu- tation, associated with THE BROWN COUNTY ARTISTS' COLONY. Send for booklet of reproductions. THE ARTISTS' SHOP, g' Tj^OR a monthly fee of $1.00 you may buy all books of all publishers at wholesale cost — usually 1/3 off list price (except texts 20%). Write for details. Bookconomy Service, 789 St. Marks Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y. OPEN SHELF BOOK MANUSCRIPT Wanted — Let u» publish your book. The inai service at lowest coat. Mbados Publimhinc Oo. 27 Beach St., Boston. Mass. Atheist Poetry Collection of poems. Sample copy free. Catalog of books free. Set of tracts, 10c. Am. Assn. for Adv. of Atheism, Inc. 119 E. 14th St. New York, N. Y. BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY TDARTNER wanted in going summer hotel, •*• Catskills, good reputation, catering to liberal circles. For one season or for more. Only those with substantial following need apply. Box 2350, % The Nation. PERSONALS PROGRESSIVELY freeminded, congenial few, -*- invited to form unconventional cultural movement. Particulars from J. Grimm, 36 Park Ave., New York City. A /TALE teacher, Jewish, wants male traveling ■"-'- companion, Europe, 8-9 weeks' tour, sail July 1. Pay own way. Box 2361, % The Nation. □ POSITIONS WANTED □ HARVARD graduate, now tutoring in famous preparatory school, desires position as tutor in private family for summer. Box 2355, % The Nation, 'TREACHER, aptitude writing, knowledge typ- ing, filing, office routine ; kindergartner, camp, playground experience. Summer, city, country. Box 2353, % The Nation. YOUNG man, 29, seeks position mountain hotel, camp ; bookkeeper, waiter ; stage ex- perience ; well bred ; educated. Box 2354, % The Nation. YOUNG German college man, 34, European business experience and five years' broad Wall Street experience, resourceful, conscienu. ous and reliable, with executive ability, seeks suitable connection, preferably industrial enter- prise. Box 2349, % The Nation. INTELLIGENT, responsible lady wishes room and board exchange four evenings ; every other Sunday, staying in with children. Box 2351, % The Nation. "DEFINED woman, experienced traveler, nurse, -*-^- masseur, desires position as traveling com- panion lady or charge children. Box 2352, % The Nation. "D HYTHMICS and Dramatics Counsellor de- ■*■*• sires position in Progressive children's camp. Excellent references. Box 2358, % The Nation. A LERT young woman, college graduate, will ■**■ act as secretary, companion, or tutor for expenses on European tour, summer 1930. Box 2357, % The Nation. [" AW CLERK, passed New York bar exami- nations, seeks clerkship, salary immaterial. Box 2356, % The Nation. T~\OES anyone need the services of a man *-' trained in agriculture and rural community work. At present U. S. D. A., employed but wishing to make some new connection. Com- plete history upon request. Address Box 2359, % The Nation. RUSSIA from a Car Window by Oswald Garrison Villard All who contemplate reading this eighty-page ac- count by Mr. Villard of his recent tour of Russia should order the booklet now, before the few re- maining copies are sold. The price is 40c a copy. THE NATION 20 Vesey Street New York □ EDUCATIONAL D 1 THE PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE Program — April 4-12. at Cooper Union, 8th Street and Aator Place, at 8 o'clock. Admission Free. Friday, April 4 DR. EVERETT DEAN MARTIN The Psychology of Progress (D) Sentiment in the 19th Century. The Idei of "Humanity" and the Revolt Against Ration- alism. Ethics and Social Science Sunday, April 6 DR. HORACE M. KALLEN "The Warfare of Religion Against Science." Tuesday , April 8 MR. NORMAN HILBERRY "Light as a Particle." MUHLENBERG BRANCH LIBRARY 209 West 23rd St., at 8:30 o'clock Monday, April 7 PROFESSOR KARL N. LLEWELLYN Law in Society "The Three Eternal Problems: The Dispute Fact." Wednesday, April 9 MR. CLIFTON P. FADIMAN Contemporary European Literature "The Revolt Against Anatole France." Thursday, April 10 DR. E. G. SPAULDING The Ways and Means of Rbasonino "Reasoning in Chemistry : The Structure of th Atom." Saturday, April 12 — DR. RICHARD McKEON The Old and the New Physics: "Motion: Th Beginnings of Mechanics." THE BOOK YOU NBKD To help you atudy 6 Languages : Eaglis! French, Spanish, German, Italian (Five-ln-OD» containing 6,000 practical words attr&etlvaly s ranged. Price only $1.50. Limited supply. Orda yours today. Universal Institute (D 10), ISM Lexington Ave., New York. LANGUAGES ; FRENCH, SPANISH. ITALIAN, GEKMAN, ENGLISH Conversational method. Native teachers. Prtrs.^ essons, 75c, short course, 9 to 9 daily. 18th tm FISHER'S SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES 126i Lexington Avenue, N. W. Cor. 86th Str* FRENCH-SPANISH-fTALIAI GERMAN. Private lessons 75c (Daily 9-9). Nl, tive teachers. Interesting conversational metho 13th year. Also neglected English educatio UNIVKKSAL SCHOOL OF LANGUAGE' 1265 Lcxlncton Ave.. Northeast Cor. 85tta § by professional teachi Imperial university gra uate, instructor in Russi: at Berlitz School. Private leesone or claeti M. Jerlitzyn, 26 W. 123rd St, Harlem 04S RUSSIAN INSTRUCTION WANTED INSTRUCTION WANTED: Gentleman far well read in psychology desires advanc psychological instruction from holder of candidate for Ph.D. degree in that subject. B: 2348, % The Nation. DISCUSSION THE GROUP A Clearing House of Opinion meets at Auditorium — 150 West 85th St. Tuesday, A;>rll 8th, at 8:80 P. M. DR. LORINE PRUETTE (Author of "Women and Leisure") will speak on : "DECLINE OF THE MALE" Admission Members 50c Non-Members 75 (Membership Ones— $1.00 for the year Weekly notices will be mailed on request. Organized 1918 When writing to advertisers please mention The Natii

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The Nation FOUNDED 186S Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16, 1930 No. 3380 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 437 EDITORIALS: Conscription 439 The Power Trust and the Indians 440 The Palestine Report 441 Virtue in Cans 441 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 442 THE PRESS TODAY. I. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. By Oswald Garrison Villard 443 BRITISH BUDGET PROBLEMS. By James Dunbar 445 SPRING BOOK SECTION THE NEW NATURALISM. By Irwin Edraan 447 WHO READS THE CLASSICS NOW? By Henry Hazlitt 449 BOOKS, FILMS, DRAMA: Interior. By Stanley J. Kunitz 452 Gorki's Trilogy. By Joshua Kunitz 452 Shelley's First Child. By Mark Van Doren 454 Tragedy, Q. E. D. By Granville Hicks 454 A Great Poet. By Isidor Schneider 456 From Belly to Mind. By Smith Ely Jelliffe 458 Maurois and the New Biography. By Joseph Wood Krutch 460 Russian-American Chimera. By Matthew Josephson 462 Witnesses Against War. By Sidney B. Fay 462 Dr. Levin's Life. By Fred T. Marsh 463 The Sitwells Present — . By Florence Codman 464 Films: Delightful Lunacy. By Alexander Bakshy 465 Drama: Shakespeare Without Pain. By Joseph Wood Krutch.... 466 ,. SOME NOTABLE SPRING BOOKS 468 CONTPT"*TTORS TO THIS ISSUE 476 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors a FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor H JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors ■HN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN B NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager "• Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. »i THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: *' Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude -M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. mi -,'TpHE CENSUS ENUMERATOR that ran into a w JL woman who hadn't spoken to her husband for thirty- iiltwo years — "and I'm damned if I'll speak to him now for i-' you or anybody else" — was matched by the other one that bS-turned in only thirty-two names after a whole day's work ^. because the women insisted on telling her all their troubles £|and she hadn't the heart to break away. The public has J", been so thoroughly warned against the fake census racketeer, -whatever that strange animal may be, that the genuine ^.enumerator finds it necessary to wear dog-proof puttees. *jEver since Augustus sent all the world home to be taxed, i oeople have regarded the census-taker with a certain sus- picion as maybe the precursor of fresh ills to come. When ~"ve consider the World War, Uncle Andy Mellon, Reed — imoot, last winter's daily bulletin from Little America, the >resent race of world's-champion pugilists, and all the other j orms of taxation without representation, we sympathize '■ vith their feeling. Yet if we are not counted how can we ,, -rag how many of us there are? For ourselves, then, we hall cheerfully answer not only the twenty-nine impertinent eneral questions that a prying Uncle Sam has devised, but a lso the thirteen queries he is directing to our being out of job. We wonder who slipped those last ones over on a Republican Administration. THE MUSCLE SHOALS BILL (Senate Joint Reso- lution 49), creating a government corporation for the operation of the great power plant on the Tennessee River, was passed by the Senate on April 4 by a vote of 45 to 23, after a brief debate in which Senator Norn's put into the record additional information about the crooked lobbying that has been done against the measure. The bill provides for the building of another great dam at Cove Creek, Tennessee, on the Clinch River, 300 miles from Muscle Shoals, practically doubling the capacity of the enter- prise at the latter point and making possible a development of nearly 450,000 firm horse-power. If the House passes the bill, as is expected, we shall face an interesting situa- tion. President Hoover is opposed to "the operation by the government of either power or manufacturing business ex- cept as an unavoidable by-product of some other major pub- lic purpose." Will his devotion to this principle cause him to veto a bill twice passed by Congress? His position is not made easier by the existing public knowledge of the shame- less activities of his handy-man, Claudius H. Huston, chair- man of the Republican National Committee, in lobbying against the bill. WHEN IS A MONOPOLY not a monopoly? When it belongs to the Secretary of the Treasury, and when an inconvenient Attorney General is promoted to the Supreme Court. If you don't believe it ask the Federal Trade Commission, which on April 4 dismissed all mo- nopoly complaints against the Aluminum Company of Amer- ica, Mr. Mellon's concern that owns or controls all the bauxite deposits in the United States, produces something like 95 per cent of our virgin sheet aluminum, owns 36 per cent of the stock of the Aluminum Goods Company, our biggest manufacturer of aluminum goods, and all t>e stock of the United States Aluminum Company, our next-largest producer, not to speak of various other unconsidered trifles like 75 per cent of the stock of the American Body Com- pany and 89 per cent of that of the Aluminum Die Castings Corporation. When that honest lawyer Harlan F. Stone was Attorney General he proceeded against the company for violating the consent decree of 1912, finding that, con- trolling the raw material and enjoying high protection, it controlled the price of sheet aluminum. When Mr. Stone left the Cabinet for the Supreme Court, his great successor John J. Sargent forgot all about aluminum, and William D. Mitchell has not happened to think about it yet. Now comes this reassuring decision by the Trade Commission, just three days after argument before that body was con- cluded. We are glad to know that the Aluminum Com- pany is not a monopoly; we had supposed it was. UNEMPLOYMENT has commanded widespread at- tention during the past ten days. President William Green of the American Federation of Labor surprised the Senate Commerce Committee by testifying that unemploy- ment among federation members had never fallen below 9 per cent during the past twenty-seven months, and that

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438 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 it had this winter reached a peak of 22 per cent. He urged a federal employment service, special counsel and training for workers displaced by technological change, job analysis to keep places open for older workers, and long-time plan- ning of public works. He declared that revolution might well be the alternative to unemployment insurance under non-union conditions. Governor Roosevelt of New York, in a rather notable message, calls attention to the "accumulation of unemployment" due to seasonal and cyclical business fluc- tuations and technological changes. In appointing a com- mittee to develop plans of stabilization he emphasizes the possibilities of cooperation of government and industry. Meanwhile the Senate Finance Committee has reported fa- vorably Senator Wagner's bills providing for the better col- lection and publication of unemployment statistics and for creating what is popularly called a "prosperity reserve" in the building of public works, with a maximum annual ap- propriation of $150,000,000. His third bill, creating a fed- eral employment agency, has not yet been reported. Despite the President's lamentable lack of leadership, the existing emergency is thus driving us slowly in the right direction, though nobody yet boldly advocates unemployment insur- ance, which of course is an essential of any thoroughgoing program under private industry. INSTEAD OF THE $555,000 requested by President Hoover, Congress made a deficiency appropriation of only $195,000, it will be recalled, to stop the slow starva- tion of Indian children in reservation schools during the rest of the school year. The amount, though inadequate, will give some, relief to the hungry children, but only if promptly used by the Indian Bureau. Next year's fight is now on in the Senate Appropriations Committee. In order to make possible the Hoover standard (surely a modest one) of 37.8 cents (against the 20 cents of the Burke-Meritt regime) per child per day for food and $42.20 per year for clothing, appropriations of $475,000 for food and $370,000 for clothing in excess of last year's allowances will be neces- sary. Certain Senators have given notice of their intention to fight, if need be, for these items. It is to be hoped that they will stand by their guns, and that they will have the unwavering support of the Indian Bureau against Represen- tative Cramton if he attempts to continue longer the national disgrace of letting these children go naked and hungry. CENSORSHIP IN MASSACHUSETTS is two words less absurd than it used to be. After a long fight cer- tain citizens in the Bay State who feel strong enough to meet even a so-called dirty word without flinching have brought about an important change in the censorship law. That famous law, which has kept Massachusetts pure and the rest of the world amused, formerly condemned "a book . . . con- taining obscene, indecent, or impure language." It now con- demns a book "which is obscene, indecent, or impure." The Citizens' Committee for the Revision of the Book Law tried to insert before the word "obscene" the words "considered as a whole," but were unsuccessful. Massachusetts still has many words to go before censorship will disappear completely from its borders, but at least we may hope to be spared in future the sorry spectacle of seeing such works as "An Ameri- can Tragedy" and "Strange Interlude" barred from "the hub of the universe." THE NEWS FROM HAITI is not wholly reassuring. An Associated Press dispatch of April 2 brought the welcome tidings that Dr. George Freeman, head of the Ser- vice Technique, whose tactlessness was the occasion of the December outbreak, had been recalled and expected to leave Haiti on April 10. The same dispatch, however, reported that the Nationalist group led by J. Jolibois, which stood with the others in support of the commission's plan, has now requested the withdrawal of General Russell at once and the immediate ending of the Occupation. President Borno, meanwhile, continues his efforts to dynamite the commission's work, and in consequence, the Associated Press reported on April 4, General Russell has issued an order that the President can send no telegraph messages except those that have been approved in writing by the High Com- missioner— an interesting example of the actual location of power under the decree of martial law put into effect last January. Leaders of the patriotic group are reported, how- ever, as believing that things are going well and that Presi- dent Borno's efforts will fail. Nevertheless the situation ' needs close watching. GANDHI HAS MADE SALT in India and by his act inaugurated the long-awaited campaign of civil dis- obedience. He set out from Ahmedabad on March 12 and after a march of 200 miles reached Dandi, a small town on the Gulf of Cambay. Early on April 6, almost eleven years after the massacre at Amritsar, Gandhi waded into the sea and filled an earthen jug with sea water to be heated for the manufacture of salt. In challenging the government monopoly of salt Gandhi has chosen a simple and clear-cut issue. A tax on salt is indefensible in any case since it works a greater hardship on the poor than on any other class. In India, where according to one estimate the number of persons living below the margin of subsistence is never less thar 40,000,000, the situation is further aggravated politicall) by the fact that soon after the war the government of India in order to prevent a deficit in the budget, doubled the salt tax by fiat after the Legislative Assembly had voted agains such action. So far the government has refrained fron arresting Gandhi, though it has arrested many of his asso ciates and even his son. But the news from India, whicl i has increased greatly in volume, is filled with riots am rumors of riots. In the past, reports from India have to< often been unsatisfactory both as to reliability and as til emphasis. In the present crisis some of the dispatches seen to reflect the political sympathies of the reporters. Neve was there greater need of unprejudiced reporting. ANOTHER INDEPENDENT WEEKLY, the Iris Statesman, has succumbed to financial difficulties an changing taste. Founded in 1923 largely with the aid American friends of Sir Horace Plunkett, it traveled fror the first a hard financial road, until at last a costly lit suit and the loss of subscribers through its stalwart oppos tion to a censorship bill ended its career. While it laste it was easily the most distinguished organ of free and er lightened opinion that Ireland possessed. For that its bri liant editor, George Russell (JE), was chiefly responsible Russell made the Irish Statesman not only the organ of cooperative movement which revolutionized the Irish daii industry, but also the friend and exponent of the school <

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 439 Irish writers which numbers W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge among its distinguished names. He was too reasonable, however, to be a partisan, and while he gave his powerful support to the treaty which ushered in the Irish Free State, it was always for a large and generous attitude toward politics that he pleaded. Something of jealousy of his in- tellectual distinction, his moderation, and his fame undoubt- edly showed itself as time went on and a younger group of writers, artists, and men of affairs forged to the front. THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS worth of hate is for sale cheap in London. J. Hartley Manners, English playwright, who died a year ago, bequeathed $3,000 to the Royal General Theatrical Fund of London on con- dition that two of his plays, both of them violently anti- German, should be given annually for at least six years at benefit performances in the Drury Lane Theater. Ac- cording to his own words, the bequest was made in order that "the remembrance of the atrocities committed by the Ger- mans on the English people be kept alive at least for that period." We are glad to record that the Royal General Fund has turned down the offer. An English ship captain who died recently provided that all his savings be used for the benefit of German sailors; the German author of the "Hymn of Hate" has regretted his words publicly; a British naval officer not long ago received cordially in England the U-boat commander who had torpedoed his ship and gallantly rescued him and his crew; German students may once more study at Oxford as Rhodes scholars ; the common soldiers who fought each other have compared notes and found out that war is one part insanity and three parts mud and terror. The persistent malice of Manners's bequest, made eleven years after 1918, is equaled only by Whitney Warren with his insistence on an angry inscription at Louvain. COSIMA WAGNER GONE? It is true that for years Bayreuth has no longer known her dominating personality, yet that determined figure seems indissolubly connected with the great music festival which she and her husband founded in the days when the world was still skep- tical of the "Master." To Richard Wagner she went from her husband Hans von Biilow, just as her mother had left the Count D'Agoult for Franz Liszt. The latter's daughter could hardly be less than musical and a strong character. In and out of wedlock she was an able wife for Wagner. She even bore with adequate composure his biting sneers at her father, whom he once accused of "rendering service only in fingering for piano-playing." When Wagner died she entirely dominated the scene, pushing her musically un- trained and ungifted son Siegfried to the front and insisting so strongly upon all her rights and royalties as to earn an unenviable name abroad. Yet as late as 1896 Bayreuth barely covered its expenses. Especially in connection with "Parsifal" was malign influence attributed to her. As Lilli Lehmann recorded in her memoirs, Cosima Wagner herself laid violent hands upon "Parsifal" in 1883, entirely chang- ing it, and thereafter "depended solely on her own wishes and taste." Often her interference and her personal "breaking- in" of great and experienced artists drove them to despair or flight. Yet when all is said and done people might dis- like but finally they came to respect the daughter of a great talent and the wife of a genius. Conscription ON April 1 the House of Representatives resolved itself into Committee of the Whole to consider the conscription of men and money in war time. This is merely another milestone in the ten-year-old argument that has been occupying the Committee on Military Affairs and the American Legion and plaguing those members of the citizenry who oppose conscription by whatever name it is called. The resolution in question the other day was one introduced by Representative Snell providing for the creation of a commission to "study and consider the feasibility of equalizing the burdens and to minimize the profits of war, together with a study of policies to be pursued in event of war, so as to empower the President immediately to mobilize all the resources of the country." With several minor amend- ments and one very important one, the resolution passed. Proponents of the measure divided themselves into two camps: those who said the resolution would eliminate that naughty and unpopular fellow, the war-profiteer, and those who said it was perfectly meaningless and harmless and there- fore they proposed to vote for it. Those who opposed it pointed out that whereas the alleged purpose of the measure was to provide some means for placing the burdens of war upon capital as well as labor, actually it did nothing of the kind. The Constitution of the United States provides that the government may not confiscate property without just compensation. Therefore the idea of conscripting capital in war time — without, of course, compensation — is clearly un- constitutional. The burden of conscription would, accord- ingly, fall upon labor, and capital would be left to its own devices. At this point in the discussion Representative Hud- dleston of Alabama introduced his important amendment to the bill, which was passed by only 123 votes to 120. The amendment provided that the commission "shall not consider and shall not report upon the conscription of labor." Debate on the resolution provided some very elegant Congressional oratory. Gentlemen who frankly looked for- ward to the next war and wished to prepare for it gave place to gentlemen who remembered that there was in existence a Kellogg pact to outlaw war; gentlemen who talked vaguely about conscripting capital were reminded not only that capi- tal cannot, by the Constitution, be conscripted, but that capi- tal has a way of protecting itself in emergencies of this sort, mainly at the expense of labor. On the whole the discussion was highly illuminating. It disclosed that there were men in the House willing to consider favorably the idea, as Mr. Huddleston said, of permitting the government to seize "upon a workingman whether a farmer or a mechanic or whatever he may be" and put him to work for a private industry at a soldier's pay so that the owner of the industry might make a profit out of his labor. But others vigorously opposed so thoroughly un-American a procedure. It is evident that a body of opposition to a conscription law exists and will be heard. The resolution, as amended to exclude labor, is meaningless. But let no one suppose that therefore the idea of universal conscription of men, if not actually of money, is dead and need not be guarded against. Loose talk about prohibiting Avar profits must not be allowed to confuse the issue. Con- scription is still a menace.

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440 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 The Power Trust and the Indians THE best site in the United States for the production of cheap power in large quantities is about to fall into the capacious maw of the power trust. As the Senate passes the Norris bill for public operation of the Muscle Shoals plant, which with auxiliary steam can pro- duce some 450,000 horse-power, the Federal Power Com- mission is on the point of handing over to the Rocky Moun- tain Power Company the five great sites on the Flathead River, in western Montana, where it is possible to develop 214,000 units of primary power without auxiliary plant of any kind. The circumstances of the proposed lease, unhappily shrouded in secrecy, demand the most rigid scrutiny; and President Hoover, Secretary Wilbur, Commissioner Rhoads of the Indian Bureau, and Assistant Commissioner Scatter- good, if they are to safeguard their own reputations as capable public servants, must act with the greatest care. Owing to particularly favorable natural conditions, nota- bly natural storage and uniform flow, the Flathead sites, the third-largest water power in the United States, which are owned by the Flathead Indians, offer extraordinary oppor- tunities for cheap power provided a near-by market can be developed. Site Number 1 controls the flow at the lower sites; all five must be leased and operated as a unit. There are two bidders. One is the Rocky Mountain Power Com- pany, a subsidiary of the Montana Power Company, con- trolled by the great Electric Bond and Share Company and intimately related to that Montana giant, the Anaconda Copper Company. The other is Walter H. Wheeler, a Minneapolis engineer whose financial support is not a matter of public record. Mr. Wheeler proposes to use all five sites provided he can develop a market, as he is confident he can, thus producing 214,000 horse-power and paying the Indians $\.\2l/2 per horse-power, or $240,750 a year. The Rocky Mountain Power Company proposes to develop only site Number 1 and that only to the extent of about two-thirds its capacity, or 68,000 horse-power, for which it will pay $1 per horse-power, or $68,000 a year, a little more than one-fourth of the Wheeler offer. Assistant Commissioner Scattergood has declared that neither bid represents by any means the full value of the power. Mr. Wheeler professes his ability, if granted a permit, to secure contracts for the industrial use in the immediate vicinity of the plant of power which he proposes to sell at $15 per horse-power per year, the lowest rate in the United States, thus bringing about the development of a great electro-metallurgical and fertilizer industry for which he declares great stores of material are readily available in the adjoining section of Montana. The Rocky Mountain Power Company, that is, the Montana Power Company, on the other hand, proposes to transmit the power 140 miles to Anaconda, where it will be merged into its general power system. Company officials express a doubt whether they will develop more than site Number 1, as they have sources other than Flathead more advantageously located with reference to their existing system. In fact, they now have 200,000 undeveloped horse-power in reserve, enough to take care of the increase of consumption at the present rate for the next twenty years. Under these conditions it is charged, with great show of reason, that the real purpose of the power company is to get hold of the Flathead sites, thus preventing competition with its own system and especially preventing the development of an electro-metallurgical and chemical industry that will compete with the Anaconda. There is no space to go into the history of the negotia- tions leading to the present situation, in which the Federal Power Commission, without any adequate public explana- tion, proposes to award an enormously valuable lease, not to the highest but to the lowest bidder, on terms that appear no less than downright spoliation of the Indians who own the sites. The power company, by the use of funds which it proposes to charge to the development cost of the project, with the active aid of Superintendent Coe of the Flathead agency organized a so-called Flathead Indian Association, a group of 20 Indians out of 3,000, which in opposition to the authorized tribal council urges the acceptance of the power- company bid. This association has been defended by Repre- sentative Cramton on the floor of the House. Assistant Com- missioner Scattergood began in November writh a brilliant de- fense of the rights of the Indians. His later course has been hard to understand, and his present position is by no means wholly clear to the public. Mr. F. E. Bonner, executive sec retary of the Federal Power Commission, is charged with having prejudged the case on an incorrect statement of fact We make no suggestion of corrupt motives against any of the actors in this remarkable drama. We do not urge acceptance of the Wheeler bid ; we feel strongly that there is much in the situation that needs clarification, and that un der the present circumstances no permit should be granted to anyone. There is no reason whatever for haste and every reason for deliberate procedure. The President of the United States favors the development of our water power by private enterprise ; he must therefore guard himself against every suggestion of favoritism to the huge financial interests that stand to profit by his policies. His Secretary of the Interior should be on the alert to protect him. If there are adequate reasons for the lease, which on its face appears thoroughly indefensible, surely they can be made clear to' that great body of citizens like ourselves whose only interest is the welfare of the Indians and the public. Unless and until those rea- sons are made clear neither President Hoover, who is funda- mentally responsible, nor Secretary Wilbur, who is his ac- tive agent, nor Commissioners Rhoads and Scattergood who are the guardians of Indian rights, nor the Montana delegation in House and Senate, who will bear a heavj responsibility for what is done, nor the Montana Powei Company itself can afford to incur the risk of odium thai will attend the making of this lease today. Why does noi Mr. Wilbur forthwith rid the Power Commission of thai incubus Secretary Bonner, and send him back to the powei companies who recommended him? Failing that, let som< Senator come forward and sponsor the Kvale resolutior postponing the making of any lease at all until it can be dom by a reorganized power commission in whose knowledge anc purpose there can be unqualified public confidence. And le Congress pass the resolution without delay.

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 441 The Palestine Report BRITISH royal commissions rarely make reports that satisfy everybody, and there should be no surprise that the report of the Shaw Commission on the dis- turbances last August in Palestine evokes some hostile com- ments from Zionists. Judging from the summary of the report which has been cabled to this country, the commis- sion has taken much pains in collecting evidence, and in apportioning responsibility has made every effort to be fair. The primary cause of the August outbreak, as the com- mission sees it, is in "the Arab feeling of animosity and hos- tility toward the Jews, consequent upon the disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future." The Arabs cherish the twofold fear ''that by Jewish immigration and land purchase they may be deprived of their livelihood and in time pass under the polit- ical domination of the Jews." The particular incident that led to the outbreak was the Jewish demonstration at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem on August 15, but to this are to be added, as inciting influences, the activities of rival societies, "exciting and intemperate articles" in Arabic and Hebrew newspapers and in a Jewish paper published at London, propaganda among the less-educated Arabs, inade- quate forces of military and police, and apprehension of political influences in the decisions of the Palestine govern- ment. Fundamentally, however, the difficulty appears to be economic and political rather than racial or religious. To meet the economic difficulty, the report urges a re- striction of Jewish immigration to a point which shall ac- cord with "the economic capacity of Palestine to absorb new arrivals," and the development, with the aid of scientific in- quiry, of better agricultural methods so as to provide for a larger population. In spite of ordinances intended to protect small landowners, large sales of land between 1921 and 1929 have left many Arabs without land and with no alternative lands available. "No criticism," the report de- clares, "can be levied against the Jewish land companies in respect to these transactions," but the practical effect has been to create "a landless and discontented class" which con- stitutes "a potential danger to the country." Politically, the difficulties in the situation have to do with the desire of the Arabs for self-government and the policy of Great Britain as a mandatory Power. The com- mission regrets that the Arab leaders did not accept the offer af a legislative council made in 1922, but it recognizes that the Arabs "are united in a demand for a measure of self- government" and that resentment over continued failure "is greatly aggravating the difficulties of local administration." \s for Great Britain, the report stresses the importance of i clear statement, to be issued "with the least possible delay," )f the policy which the British government proposes to iursue in Palestine, particularly in regard to the provisions >f the mandate safeguarding the rights of non-Jewish com- nunities. Such a statement appears to be forecast in the leclaration of Prime Minister MacDonald in the House of Commons, on April 3, that it is "the firm resolve" of the British government to "do equal justice to all sections of he population of Palestine," and that to the discharge of hat duty "it will apply all the resources at its command." Virtue in Cans MR. WILL HAYS, Moses of the Movies, has gone his illustrious prototype several better, for he has just descended from his own particular Sinai (located at 469 Fifth Avenue) with no less than twenty-one commandments intended for the guidance of the Children of Hollywood. Among other things the new code provides: 1. That crimes against law shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime as against law and justice. (Note. Law and justice are assumed to be inevitably the same. The Boston Tea Party is ruled out.) 2. Revenge in modern times shall not be justified as a motive. (Note. "Modern times" probably lets "Hamlet" in.) 3. The use of liquor in American life shall be restricted to the actual requirements of characterization or plot. (Note. Whatever that may mean.) 4. Scenes of passion shall not be introduced when not essential to the plot. (Note. Whatever that may mean.) 5. Ministers of religion in their character of ministers of religion shall not be used as comic characters or as vil- lains. (Note. The New Art of the Movies being what it is, it is obviously inadvisable to suggest that there may be such a thing as hypocrisy. Those who pretend to be good are good.) 6. The history, institutions, prominent people, and citi- zenry of other nations shall be represented fairly. (Note. We sell our films almost everywhere. Bolsheviks need not be considered as "people." In case of war all citizens of the enemy country automatically become villains and sadists.) Mr. Hays is so transparently simple-minded that it is hardly worth while to accuse him of deliberately using virtue for commercial purposes, but whether he happens to be in on the game or merely a tool in the hands of others the fact remains that he always manages to strike the proper attitude — the one, that is to say, which surrenders every right to every sincerity while promising to respect all the prejudices of every convention. Some years ago the industry discovered that suggestiveness and sensation were necessary to its profits but that truth and consistency were not. Accordingly it invented the perfect formula — five reels of transgression fol- lowed by one reel of retribution ; it hired Mr. Hays to con- secrate that formula ; and Mr. Hays has been busy at his task ever since. Obviously it is now the job of the directors to stay within the letter of his law without ceasing to be as lurid, as salacious, and as tawdry as the audience demands. And to judge by their achievements of the past there is little reason to doubt that they will succeed magnificently. We are willing to leave aside all questions of art and its duty to comment upon life as the artist sees it. We should, however, like to point to the results already achieved by Mr. Hays's method. He has proposed above all to keep the movies sexually clean, and yet there was never any form of artistic expression which was so completely drenched with sex. The suggestion of everything which he has attempted to suppress has diffused itself through every scene, and the mind of the audience is encouraged to play about every idea that cannot be stated. Perhaps if an occasional film "justi- fied adultery" or admitted that otherwise respectable girls sometimes have illegitimate children it would not be necessary for every film to deal with seduction arrested at the bedside.

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442 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 It Seems to Heywood Broun NOBODY can touch unemployment in any of its phases without finding that there is one step in gov- ernment ownership which should be taken as soon as possible. There should be no such thing as a private employment agency. To a certain extent I am waiving the fact that some of them are dishonest. I refer chiefly to those handling unskilled labor and supplying men for rail- road construction gangs and similar enterprises. The crooked ones are probably in a great minority, but I have heard a sufficient number of stories to be convinced that certain agencies are active in fomenting a labor turnover. But with the best intentions in the world and the highest degree of efficiency, it seems to me that unemploy- ment affects the life of the nation so directly that the nation cannot afford to neglect making this its own private and exclusive business. There are plenty of voters still who do not favor municipal ownership of public utilities. How- ever, we have gone past the day in which it was the custom to scream "Communism" at the suggestion of a city-operated subway. If it is considered rational for the city to move the workers from their homes to their jobs it seems to me wholly logical that this same city should manifest a con- cern about finding a job for the individual to be transported. Moreover, the matter of unemployment falls not un- readily under the scope of public health. It is not fantastic to contend that poverty is a disease and far more catching than smallpox. It seems to me just as useful to send city employment agents to the bread line as to rush doctors with vaccine to a stricken tenement. Most of my information comes from Mr. William Ross, with whom I have been working in a study of a single New York City bread line — that maintained by contributions to the Little Church Around the Corner, of which Dr. Randolph Ray is rector. This seems to be one of the few churches in the city which have really taken any very active interest in working to alle- viate the conditions caused by unemployment. The various ministers who were extremely busy in urging on recruiting in the last war have been singularly silent in the matter of calling the community to the hiring line. Mr. Ross, who was an organizer in the American Fed- eration of Labor strike in Marion, North Carolina, has made inquiries among the bread liners as to their political philoso- phy. He is shocked to find that for the most part they have none. Even the seasonal workers, whose plight seems palpa- bly the product of a vicious and inefficient system, have no complaint to make. "Bad breaks" suffices to comfort the ego of most of them even though it cannot feed and clothe them. Until I talked with jobless men I never realized how thoroughly America has been sold on the theory that there is a direct boulevard even from the bottom to the very top of the economic heap. All but the oldest men in the job line are hopeful. They have had bad luck for a few months, or a year, but the turn may come at any moment. It's all part of a game which they accept without much resentment. Of course the line is filled with unfounded legends as to the antecedents of some of the liners. I was told in all serious- ness that doctors and lawyers were waiting for the daily dole and that one of the men in the ranks had been a million- aire in the long ago. For these stories I could find no con- firmation. Of course some of the unemployed are a little cautious when anybody talks to them about communism. They have a feeling that possibly it is an effort to pin something on them. Yet even when their confidence is gained they mani- fest no knowledge of any of the left-wing movements and very little interest. One did state that he felt the Com- munists were right in a few things but much too radical. Good old standpat Republicanism does not by any means disappear at the first pinch of adversity. One old gentleman without a shirt to his name was very stuffy in his attitude toward trade unions and the reds. He never did quite say, "If they don't like it here why don't they go back where they came from?" but it was not far from the tip of his tongue. Yet on the whole one finds small trace of acute class consciousness of any sort in the line. Very hungry and dispirited men seem poor tinder for the revolutionary urge. Still, one can't escape the feeling that the Communists are doing a rotten poor job in propagandizing the unemployed. I rather think that their violence on irrelevant subjects is to some extent a defensive mechanism to cover up inefficiency. Thus I read in Revolutionary Age, Mr. Lovestone's organ: "It is entirely natural that of all the New York papers Hey- wood Broun's liberal New York Telegram should be the loudest and most virulent in the demand that the arrested Communists should be railroaded to jail with the speed of the most powerful locomotive. This is the role of liberal- ism in a show-down. The Brouns and their philosophies are only symbols of capitalist decay and degeneracy. Let the workers be on guard . . . especially against their soft, sweet, 'clever' words, which are only a mask for capitalist bru- tality!" Aside from the fact that none of that is true it all seems a singularly trite theme. I'll give a silver dime to each and every Communist faction in New York, no matter what it costs me, if anybody can prove that I ever urged railroading Communists to jail. Of course it isn't my Telegram. That's a Communist gift. And the Telegram has not been in any sense a red-baiter. But if the charge against me were true I think it would be singularly small matter from the point of view of anybody intent upon world revolution. Here in America communism lies in sterile hands. Aside from Michael Gold and Max Eastman, I don't know anybody connected with any of the various warring groups with a capacity for writing forceful and simple English. Communism has not been able to adapt itself to the vernacu- lar of the masses. I watched handbills being sent along the bread line in which unfortunate, hungry, and unskilled work- ers were asked to disarm "the fascisti of the bosses." No- body in that line could have disarmed a fascist because there was no one whom I saw who even knew what the word meant. The revolution stands in bitter need of a red Ring Lardner. Heywood Broun

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 443 The Press Today I. The Associated Press' By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD NO more than a river can the stream of news rise higher than its source. For the Associated Press the sources within the United States are its members, except where it has established its own bureaus in the leading cities with special reporting staffs. Thus in all places where it cannot maintain its own correspondents it calls upon each member newspaper for all the local news which that member has gathered. The member cannot sell that news to other news services, and must hold itself in readiness to supply as much or as little news of a given event in its territory as the Associated Press may desire. Each member must print on its masthead in its every issue this legend : "The Associated Press is exclusively entitled to the use for republication of all news dispatches credited to it or not otherwise credited in this paper, and also the local news of spontaneous origin published herein." The stream of the Associated Press's news must, therefore, reflect the intelligence, the taste, the integrity, the news and business standards of its members — it cannot rise any higher. If its standards have sunk seri- ously in the last thirty years, this is in response to the chang- ing methods and ethics of its 1,250 members. Its best fea- ture is that it is not a money-making concern, but a co- operative, non-profit-making organization, incorporated as a membership society under the laws of New York State. But its strength is its great weakness as we shall see, for the fact that it is a cooperative organization puts it at the mercy of the mass psychology of its members. A member can be admitted only by a vote of the direc- tors, who do not confer a franchise, as is so commonly believed, but merely elect the new member to receive that form of service which, in accordance with his means, he seeks to obtain. Thus, the daily news report varies from a few hundred words for the smallest members to 75,000 words in the larger centers. In a single normal week recently the news report amounted to 2,562,715 words, excluding the figures of bond- and stock-market prices. To collect and distribute this news — at a cost in 1929 of about $10,000,000 — the Associated Press has no less than 3,300 employees. If the staffs of the Associated Press newspapers should be counted in, the association could legitimately claim that about 80,000 persons were gathering its news every day of the year, every hour in the twenty-four. Plainly it has become one of the most powerful engines for the creation of public opinion in the world. Together with its rivals, the United Press and the International News, or Hearst Service, it supplies all the newspapers of the country. Its standards, its integrity, its leadership, its attitude toward the great political ind economic issues of the day become, therefore, of the Jtmost importance to everyone who believes that the safety r>i American institutions depends upon there being a correctly nformed and intelligent electorate. If the service is biased . * This is the first of two articles on the Associated Press in a series of rticles on the American press. The second will appear in our next issue. — Editor The Nation. or unfair it is obvious that tremendous damage can be done. As it is, the very fact that in the smaller cities and the rural districts it must rely upon its members for accounts of local happenings, places it at the mercy of their reporting. Thus, if there are labor troubles in Pennsylvania or in the Southern States, the news is affected by the bias of the local Associated Press dailies, unless the issue becomes one of such magnitude that a special correspondent is sent to the scene; even he will have to rely upon member help if there is a large territory to be covered. Since the newspapers of the great industrial towns of Pennsylvania are usually con- trolled, directly or indirectly, through advertising or owner- ship, by the large capitalists, it is obvious that in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred their reports will represent the view of the employing class, just as, if there were a group of labor dailies in the Associated Press in a given territory, its news from that section would inevitably reflect the labor point of view. To illustrate: In the steel strike of 1919 the press of Pittsburgh sided entirely with the employers; scarcely a reference to the strikers' actual demands can be found in the columns of the five newspapers that were the Pittsburgh members of the Associated Press during the strike period. Their whole stress was upon the pestiferous foreign laborer and radicalism, with frequent charges of bolshevism. Actually in only one issue out of four hundred did an article appear which described the scandalous violations of American liberties and of the federal Constitution by local authorities, and the arrest of many men merely for daring to exercise that right to free assembly guaranteed by the Constitution. Naturally the public, either in or out of Pittsburgh, got little or no impression of this, despite the fact that the Asso- ciated Press had its own Pittsburgh bureau. Out of fifty- six clergymen in the city at that time, forty-four went on record as declaring that the newspapers were unfair to the strikers. But if anyone should allege that the Associated Press deliberately lent itself to any suppression of news, or misrepresentations during this strike, he would make a false statement. I believe that its highest officials were not con- scious at that time of the character of the service they were rendering. It is, I repeat, a question of the news stream not rising higher than its source. The misfortune remains that in labor matters the Associated Press is too often dominated by the class tendency of its members. Take another case : In the South there are no daily papers owned and operated by colored men, or any colored reporters employed by any daily or by any news service. All the news which gets out of the South comes from white reporters who record occurrences involving race friction with the bias of their race. Being a white man, the reporter of a lynching or the like must inevitably side with his crowd, for he would lose his job if he did not. The Negroes assert with reason that many injustices and many terrible events are often suppressed. They declare that nearly 9,000,000

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444 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 blacks living in the South have no means of getting unbiased news to the American people, save through their own little- read papers North and South. The only Negro, they declare, who can reach the first page of the great dailies is the Negro criminal; if there is occasional recognition of a great Negro musician or scientist, it is usually with surpassing condescen- sion, as one admires a reading horse or a trained seal. There are exceptions, of course, for there are editors like Gonzales in South Carolina, Breckinridge of Lexington, Kentucky, until lately Julian and Julia Harris in Columbus, Georgia, and a number of others who seek to do justice to every man irrespective of color; but the facts in general are as stated. If anyone doubts this I can supply him with an Associated Press report of the murder of some Negroes whose sole crime was that they tried to vote in Florida. Its local correspondent failed to inform it that men, women, and children were burned alive in this election trouble — a crime as horrible as was ever reported out of revolutionary Russia. It never carried this news. Again, the Associated Press was the medium of wholesale lying and crass misrepresentation in reporting some race troubles in Phillips County, Arkansas, which it portrayed to the American people as a "Negro re- bellion," "of more than a local nature, possibly planned for the entire South." The simple truth was that a group of white men attacked a meeting of colored tenant farmers held under the guidance of a white attorney to formulate the inno- cent demand that they receive written settlements of their accounts from their white landlords. This was all there was to the Associated Press's rebellion — the facts being all established later before the Supreme Court of the United States. The Associated Press, however, never apologized for the wrong it had done, or rectified its error. I desire here, however, to stress that there are real and legitimate difficulties in the way of the Associated Press's reporting the troubles of the disfranchised and the disadvan- taged. Its proper aim is to present actual news of events, not essays on given problems or situations. Hence, in cases like the recent strikes in North Carolina and Tennessee it carries only the dramatic event, such as a murder, or a "battle" between police and strikers, or the evidence in a sensational trial. It makes no effort to portray the actual condition in such social dramas. The public does not know that at Marion, North Carolina, at this writing, a thousand American-born workers and their children are living in tents and being maintained by philanthropy because they dared to strike against intolerable living conditions. The average laboring man who believes that our entire press is "kept," and its news services likewise, does not understand the technique of news reporting, or realize that no member of the Associated Press is compelled to print all or any part of the news furnished to it. It is a fact that the Associated Press is frequently blamed for its apparent failure to wire news which it actually did furnish, but which the recipient discarded. No reader can, therefore, be certain that a charge of suppression or omission lies against the Associated Press until he has seen what the service originally contained. Finally, it must be remembered that those who are deeply engaged in causes are frequently the last ones able to gauge correctly the treatment they arc receiving in the press. This applies just as much to those on the side of the larger battalions as to those who are battling for forlorn hopes or radical reforms. An interesting anecdote of the late President Taft is in place here. During the Pinchot-Ballinger contro- versy which ended so disastrously for him, Mr. Taft received many complaints from friends throughout the country that the Associated Press was not adequately reporting the Bal- linger side of the case. To the head of the Washington bureau, John P. Gavit, Mr. Taft presented a pile of protests. But Mr. Gavit, being forewarned, had brought with him a similar pile of complaints from Mr. Pinchot and his friends. When the President had perused these he turned to Mr. Gavit in his kindly, good-natured way and said, "Well, if you are being scolded by both sides like that you must be about right in your reporting." The Associated Press has often felt reassured when it has been abused by both sides to a quarrel. The most striking example, in the writer's own knowl- edge, of this is worth recording because of the light it throws upon the difficulties even an ideal news service would en- counter. The Standard Oil case of 1908 attracted national attention. One of the foremost attorneys for the government, Mr. Frank B. Kellogg, subsequently United States Senator from Minnesota, Ambassador to Great Britain, and Secre- tary of State, wrote the following letter on October 29, 1908, to Mr. George Thompson of the St. Paul Dispatch: I am very busy these days taking testimony in the Standard Oil case. Your friend Melville E. Stone is con- trolled absolutely by the Standard Oil people. He will not, of course, send out any reports of the testimony that he is not obliged to, at least that is my opinion from all I have seen. I told Don Seitz of the World, and Hamlin of the Tribune, and the man on the Times, and they have had special men at the trial, and as you will see from the in- closed clippings they have published some of the testimony I have been bringing out. But from Chicago not a word came out against the Standard Oil. It is astonishing that that concern can control the Associated Press. The writer of this article was chairman of a special com- mittee of the Associated Press appointed to investigate this and other charges. It reported upon Mr. Kellogg's allega- tion by saying that "your committee is convinced that what- ever the individual faults of reporting may have been or whatever attempts were made to color the reports nothing was carried during this long hearing which violated the integrity of the A.P. service." Mr. Kellogg was immediately compelled to retract his baseless charge against Mr. Stone under threat of suit for libel. This case is illuminating also because it exemplifies the enormous difficulty of reporting which often confronts a news-gathering agency. There were ninety-five hearings in New York City alone, some interesting, many dull, tiresome, and extremely technical. It was a most difficult legal battle to record ; a trained legal mind would often have found itself at a loss to report adequately to the public just what was going on. Not only are such cases peculiarly open to mis- understanding by partisans of either side, but they are fre- quently seriously affected by the headline writers, who often give a color and slant to the whole story which does the Associated Press great harm. The only wrongdoing brought out by the investigating committee in this case was that of a member of the Associated Press. Himself in the train of Standard Oil, he gave $300 to a reporter of the New York City News Association (an organization which has no con- nection with the Associated Press, but which is frequently

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 445 confused with it), not, as he said, to corrupt the news, but to insure accuracy in reporting and justice for the Standard Oil. That this man should promptly have been expelled from the Associated Press goes without saying. Indeed, its failure to discipline its members, or to set up any ethical standards to which they should conform, is one of its greatest weak- nesses ; here again the cooperative form of the society and the low moral standards of the entire press intervene, precisely as they did in the later case of William Randolph Hearst. For years the Associated Press carried on an action against Mr. Hearst because he had been guilty of "improper and un- conscionable use of the memberships held in the complainant by representatives of the New York American, the San Fran- cisco Examiner, and the Los Angeles Examiner." It would be impossible to frame a more complete indictment of a man than the Associated Press's portrayal of Mr. Hearst as a violator of its own by-laws and as a thief of its news, which he stole by fair means and foul. Yet when the Associated Press's contention was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in a decision of far-reaching importance, estab- lishing as it did a vital principle, namely, the right to owner- ship of news created by an individual or an agency, the Board of Directors lacked either the moral or business courage to rid their service of the Hearst connection. Indubitably, no press association anywhere else under- takes to censor the journalistic morals of its patrons. But the Associated Press does impose certain standards of conduct upon its members besides refusing to permit them to sell the news delivered to them, or the local news which they origi- nate. Thus, they are held rigidly responsible for releasing advance matter at the proper time, and are fined for any violations of instructions. They may be suspended or ex- pelled for violation of the by-laws, though the latter step may be taken only after it is approved by four-fifths of the membership. Moreover, the Associated Press does not hesi- tate to punish its critics among its members. Thus, it fined the editor of the Philadelphia North American $300 for say- ing that an Associated Press cablegram had in all probability been written "in New York or Washington, and never was near an ocean cable." Later the Lancaster Intelligencer was made to apologize for the heinous offense of falsely charging that the Associated Press was "scooped" by another news service. If it can set up regulations and standards of conduct in cases like these it certainly seems incomprehensible that the Associated Press should have permitted a man to remain a member who had struck at its very integrity and had not hesitated at the use of any means to gain his end. It is the simple truth that a small newspaper doing these things would have been expelled ; the Associated Press was afraid of Mr. Hearst's power, and the growing number of news- papers brought into his chain of dailies. Here, again, we have an example of an inherent weak- ness due to the cooperative character of the service. It is only fair to point out, however, that in the field of reporting of political events the fact that the membership comprises both Republican and Democratic newspapers has helped to make its officials hold the scales even. In the many years that I have been familiar with its work, it never did better re- porting than in the last Presidential election when, as far as I can ascertain, it was scrupulously fair to the Socialist can- didate, precisely as it reported the La Follette campaign with evident desire to do complete justice. When it comes to reporting happenings in Washington, and to its relations to the Government of the United States, there is a different story to tell. But here the explanation is not so much the cooperative character of the organization as the false philoso- phy of the two men who are today the powerful influences in the Associated Press, Adolph S. Ochs, its leading director, and Frank B. Noyes, its president. But this must be left to a subsequent article. British Budget Problems By JAMES Edinburgh, March 25 AS the financial year draws to a close it becomes possible to estimate with a fair degree of accuracy the likely trend of Mr. Snowden's budget. The latest returns of revenue indicate that the deficit on this year's accounts will not be so heavy as was anticipated even a nonth ago; while on the other hand the publication of the estimates of expenditure for 1930 makes clear the exact imount of the increase over the estimates for the current ear. Certain loud protests that have been made against ligher taxation should be discounted at the outset. Organi- sations like the Federation of British Industries, the National Jnion of Manufacturers, and the Income Tax Payers' So- ciety are all interested in reductions of direct taxation and hey enter their warnings no matter which party holds the eins of government. Their protests this year may have been ouder than usual ; but that is to be attributed to the fear hat the Labor Government intends to embark on costly ocial services. The Federation of British Industries, for xample, issued recently a manifesto on taxation. Attention DUNBAR was drawn to the undoubted increase in unemployment and to the fall in prices during the past few months, and the assertion was made that "the limits of industry's taxable capacity have been reached." It is necessary, however, to look at other objective facts than the figures of unemployment and prices. The statistics of income in the annual reports of the Inland Revenue show a different picture, and in relation to taxation are more accu- rate data to work upon than the data quoted by the federa- tion. The following table shows for each year since 1923 the gross income from all sources, except weekly wages, which the Inland Revenue brought under review: 1923 £2,584 millions 1924 2,599 " 1925 2,669 " 1926 2,705 " 1927 2,704 " 1928 2,765 " Throughout all these years there has been a great burden of unemployment and depression in the basic industries. Never-

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446 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 theless, as the table shows, the gross income was nearly £200 millions higher at the end of the six years; and indeed it was higher in 1923 than in 1920 when the post-war trade boom was at its height and there was practically no unemployment. These protestations of the F.B.I, and kindred bodies are to be taken as no more than public attempts to intimidate the Chancellor. How much Mr. Snowden is susceptible to these blandishments is of course another matter. The Hague negotiations last year left Mr. Snowden with a world-wide reputation for stern, unbending will ; and it can be taken for granted that if he wanted money badly enough he would shrink from no measure of new or additional taxation. He has often given in speech and writing the surest indications of where he will seek more money for the purposes of gov- ernment. He accepts the media of income tax, supertax, and death duties, and he would add but one shot to his locker, namely, the taxation of land values. He would not add to the tax burdens of the man of moderate income but rather would lighten them. He would tax investment income more heavily and steepen the rates of supertax and death duties. In a pamphlet he wrote at the time of the general elec- tion last year, Mr. Snowden dealt plainly with these matters. Referring to the supertax he pointed out that 98,000 persons in 1927 had incomes over £2,000 a year, to a total of £568 millions; and that the supertax paid amounted to £58 millions. "There is a little margin left there," wrote Mr. Snowden, "for meeting the cost of some of the Labor Party's social schemes." Again, on the subject of the death duties, Mr. Snowden wrote that in 1927 estates valued at £511 millions paid duties amounting to £77 millions, and added, "There is scope there for some addition to the duties with- out reducing the heirs to a state of starvation." Since the war both Sir Austen Chamberlain and Mr. Churchill have increased the death duties, adding between them over £20 millions a year to the revenue. On the taxation of land values Mr. Snowden was more definite. He put the capital value of the land of Great Britain at £5,000 millions, and stated that "a tax of 3d. in the pound on that value would bring in a revenue of over £60 millions a year." From these three sources Mr. Snowden would not find it difficult to get as much as £100 millions if he required it. Perhaps the F.B.I, believes that the Chancellor is going to seek such a sum this year. If they do they are very much mistaken. At The Hague Mr. Snowden made a determined stand for an extra £2 millions a year in Britain's share of reparations; and since he returned he has devoted a similar determination behind the scenes to the task of keeping down expenditure. There have been two main instances of that. The act extending the widows'-pensions scheme is not nearly so comprehensive as the previous declarations of the Labor Party foreshadowed. And the same can be said of the Un- employment Insurance Act. On both these measures the left wing of the party, led by Mr. Maxton, put up a strenu- ous fight for greater benefits than the government proposed. There were revolts and even talk of the expulsion of Mr. Maxton and his associates from the party. The important point here is that the rebels were met always with the same answer: the government cannot afford the money. Mr. Snowden's determination has won and the extent of his suc- cess is revealed in the recently published estimates of ex- penditure for the financial year 1930-31. Increases are recorded to the extent of £20 millions on certain social services; war pensions and some other accounts show a de- crease of £4 millions, and there is a like decrease in the estimates for the navy, army, and air force combined. The net result then is that for social and defense services Mr. Snowden has been able to limit expenditure to an increase of £12 millions over the revised estimates for 1929. There is no doubt that Mr. Snowden has been keeping the rein on expenditure for a very definite purpose which can be guessed. It is not that he desires to produce a popular budget. In 1924 he was fortunate enough to inherit a sur- plus of £48 millions from his predecessor and became doubly popular by giving relief from indirect taxes and imposing no new taxes. He may have disturbing recollections of that former budget, but today his mind is bent on a vastly differ- ent project. He has already paid much attention to the conversion of debt on favorable terms, and in the past few years Mr. Churchill has given him a great deal of worry over the sinking fund. On these points Mr. Snowden's mind is well known : he wants to strike at the huge burden of national debt, to provide an adequate and even increasing sinking fund, and thereby to reduce the enormous bill of £300 millions a year for interest. Mr. Snowden's preoccupation with that problem was evident in 1924 when he appointed the Colwyn Committee to inquire and report upon the national debt and existing taxation. The committee, reporting in 1926, recommended that the sinking fund should be increased to £75 millions within five years, if necessary by additional taxation, and to £100 millions within a further seven to ten years. Unfor- tunately for these recommendations Mr. Churchill's dealings with the sinking fund in the past five years were most un- satisfactory ; and for the current year the best he could do was to provide for £50 millions. It is certain that that sum is not enough for Mr. Snowden, and it may well happen that he will increase it to £62^ millions this year and then next year to the £75 millions of the Colwyn Committee. For the past few months the Chancellor has been much baited in the House of Commons on the McKenna duties on motor cars and the safeguarding duties on lace, buttons, and a half-dozen other articles. He has persistently refused to declare his intentions on these duties. Deeply pledged to abolish them, he is, however, faced with a double problem in dealing with them at the present time. The unemployment figures mount up, and supporters of safeguarding keep re- peating that to abolish the duties is to aggravate unemploy- ment still further. More important, from the Chancellor's standpoint, is the revenue from the duties, estimated to be £32^2 millions for the current year. That is no mean sum and with a deficit facing him, increased expenditure to meet and the sinking fund to be raised to an adequate figure, Mr Snowden can scarcely sacrifice £32}/> millions of revenue. There is one other contingency Mr. Snowden mus have in mind. The doings of the government at home ha' caused profound disappointment among its supporters am in the country generally. Expectations were undoubtedlj high and the performance has been meager. Mr. Snowden therefore, if he can afford to do little this year in the wai of social services or of remitting indirect taxes, will have tc revive drooping hopes by budgeting for a surplus at the enc of 1930. If the Government is to stand a chance of bei returned to office, it must have much more on the books t< its credit than there is at the present moment.

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SPRING BOOK SECTION The Nation Vol. CXXX, No. 3380 Wednesday, April 16, 1930 THE WOMAN OF ANDROS BY THORNTON WILDER 'Wilder's Third and Best" -N<™ York Herald Tribune "Better Than The Bridge of San Luis Rey"- New York Times 00,000 COPIES $2.50 90,000 COPIES THE LIFE OF BOCCACCIO BY THOMAS CALDECOT CHUBB Here for the first time is the fascinating life-story of Boccaccio, that gay and passionate amorist who graced the dawn of the Renaissance. »4°° (Illustrated) I.I MARCEL PROUST THE SWEET CHEAT GONE Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff The sixth, and penultimate, part of Proust's vast panorama of French society in the closing years of the Nineteenth and first two decades of the Twentieth centuries. loos THE ADVENTURES OF MARIO BY WALDEMAB BONSELS Mario, left alone by his mother's death, sets out into the mysterious forest whose creatures he has known and loved since a very small boy. Here he lives for many months and learns, the secrets of the woods: that the forest only reveals its plentiful and varied life to those who wait with stillness and with infinite patience. April selection of the Junior Literary Guild. MOUNTAIN CITY RY UPTON SINCLAIR A swift and gripping tale of an impoverished ingenuous, often cruel — and invariably they attain youth's determination to annihilate the great ob- their questionable ends. The novel is devastating btacles which stand in his way to an ullimate and in its implications; it is an indictment of the 'go- magnificent success. His methods are sometimes *2S0 getter' which will win many readers. THE UNITY OF THE WORLD BY GUGL1ELMO FEBBEBO Foreword by Charles M. Beard If I am not grievously mistaken this book will become one of the uni- versal classics to be read with Plato and Aristotle. — From the Foreword Albert and Charles Boni 66 Fifth Avenue ISew York When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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IV The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 Carl Sandburg's POTATO FACE The Potato Face Blind Man sits with his accordion on the corner nearest the Post Office and tells a whole new series of delightful Rootabaga stories, — for grown-ups. You know Sand- burg, the poet, — Sandburg, the biographer, — but do you know Sandburg the genius of nonsense? $1.50 Ernest Pascal's THE AGE FOR LOVE Jean Hurd's career as a suc- cessful young literary agent, as an intelligent wife trying to stay in love with a dull hus- band is material for an insol- uble problem and an absorb- ing novel. By the author of "The Marriage Bed". $2.50 Louis Untermeyer's BLUE RHINE- BLACK FOREST This is a travel book. And Mr. Untermeyer, poet and anthol- ogist, is probably one of the best travelers alive. Imagina- tion and wit — plus practical advice — give the fabled allure- ments of the Rhineland and the Black Forest a most in- sistent and modern reality. $2.50 Percival Wilde's THE DEVIL'S BOOTH "Every page", says the N. Y. Times of this chronicle of New York, "is packed with real and dramatic emotion." $2.50 THIS IS THE BOOK! CEemenceau 9s GRANDEUR and MISERY of ICTORY UNCENSORED AND UNABRIDGED — THE ELOQUENT AND MOVING LAST MESSAGE OF THE LEADING STATESMAN OF THE MOST EVENTFUL PERIOD OF MODERN TIMES THIS is the book— the last will and testament of the Tiger, which he kept himself alive to finish — whose contents the entire international press has been attempting to guess for months. This is a book which will settle some controversies and stir up others for a generation. "It will be part of the essential material of modern history," says the London Observer. NOW . . . here it is, the one post-war revelation that has caught the imagination of the world. And the dynamite is here! I AM not disposed to withdraw so much as a single comma from what I have said," writes Clemen- ceau in the last chapter. His executors and publishers hold themselves responsible that his last wish has been carried out. Uncensored and unabridged, this is not only the conclusive book on the War and the years after — it is much more. For, with the same brilliant flashes of genius which made him the greatest statesman of our time, be leaves many hints as to the future of Europe, and the part that America will play in world politics. (Less than a fifth has been serialized). $5.00 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 383 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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Spring Book Section The New Naturalism By IRWIN EDMAN THE new naturalism is as old at least as Lucretius, which is to say, as old as Democritus, or even older. Since labels are in order and to become a public possession an idea must first attach to itself an ism, a suffix, it is hereby proposed that naturalism be the name given to a point of view which, though it had its inception in the lucid and direct intelligence of the Greeks, has been forgotten enough in our time to have its mere revival regarded as a novelty. It is here suggested, first, that it will provide that clarity and order in the search for which many of us are engaged among the confusions of our own day, and because of which we are ready to jump at the first shabby promise of a philosophy, even if that promise, in performance, turns out to be merely a flight to some alleged authority or de- corum. It is here suggested that that clarity and integration can best be found not by fleeing nature or condemning it or bemoaning it, but (it is so simple, indeed, as to be almost banal) by starting with nature, by beginning, as somebody once said, with what we have and going on from where we are. What have we then, and where are we, "in the middle of the road of our life," in terms which, granted the general intellectual setting of the twentieth century, we can with some degree of honesty accept? Well, whatever qualifica- tions the new physics may have put into the twentieth- :entury version of nature, it is in a natural world that we lave to conceive ourselves to be living, that is to say, i world with a structure that is, however complex in its details or in its operations, intelligible, a world whose gen- eral movement physics can describe and of which even the ayman with a paucity of physics can discern the hang. It s a system if not with any purpose at least with an order. There are no miracles in it, unless its wonderful variety, cope, and possibilities continually mounting be themselves egarded as miracles. Its stellar infinity may be a theme or cosmic amazement; its complexity artfully studied may rield us marvels of comfort, luxury, swiftness, ease, and con- rol. It is the setting, the theater, and the material of our- elves; our nature is part of it, though cosmically an acci- lent, geographically and temporally an incident in it. So far from regarding nature as something hostile >r alien or absurd, as was the sentimental fashion of he nineteenth century, or such echoes of it as we find in iertrand Russell or Aldous Huxley or Joseph Wood Crutch's "Modern Temper" in the twentieth, we are in- lined to regard it as being, like Jehovah, that that it is. And what it is, is the matrix and material of all our ideals nd the locus of all possible destinies. It is what we have, |: is where we are. For this, too, is the modest recognition f the new naturalist, that the eyes with which he beholds ature are natural eyes, and that the mind with which he bserves or condemns or in imagination transfigures nature i itself a movement in and a flowering of it. The spirit which others would have contend against the flesh is itself simply the expression, luminous and climactic, of animal life, the flesh become radiant and subtle and consciously alive. Not birth but death is a sleep and a forgetting, yet before that somnolent oblivion there is much that may be done, imagined, and remembered. The memory may be extended, through history, to the beginning of the race and before; the imagination may compass more than generations through doing may translate into existence. The naturalist is aware of the tragic frustrations and corruptions of the spirit by the flesh, by society, and by the world. But he knows that spirit is only the flesh articulate ; he knows that society nourishes it and that it can find its only employment somehow and somewhere in the world. He is, therefore, less ready than spirits less conscious of the soil which alone nurtures them to disparage the body, to cry down society, to say farewell to the world. He hesi- tates to set up a dualism between the flesh and the spirit, between man's higher and lower nature, because he knows how deep in the flesh lie the foundations of those altitudes the spirit sometimes touches. He does not flee to an ivory tower of saintliness or aestheticism, since he is too aware of how much the language of his hopes and aspirations comes from his fellows for whom he could develop a dainty or an unctuous contempt. Nor can he come to disdain or to dis- trust that earth out of the colors and forms of which he has built his most unearthly paradise. He knows he is but a nostalgic stranger in heaven ; he may be an angel looking homeward, but clay is his body, men and women his com- panions, and earth his home. It is because he recognizes himself as thus "umbilical to earth" that the naturalist seeks to discover the morals implicit in, rather than to impose a morality upon, the nature of which his animal body is the expression. He is inclined to feel the pulse-beat of vitality in forces and impulses in him from which a mind debauched by genteel conventions might flee in horror. He cannot see what there is horrible or shameful or disintegrating about sex. He can see rather what horrors, shames, and disintegrations may follow upon the attempt to hide, ignore, or repress that vital energy. He knows how much the golden thread of physical love quali- fies much that seems to have a subtler texture. He knows how much that glamorous energy contributes to the beauty of the world and his passion for it. And by the same token he respects, as a force to be reckoned with and as a material to be made much of, any impulse or vitality that ani- mates the animal frame of any human creature. He will think twice before condemning any of those great natural drives out of the simple homely elements of which the most spiritual enthusiasms are ultimately derived and complicated. It would be a want of understanding to suppose that the naturalist would therefore counsel anarchy or caprice as the goal of life. Order will be to him, as to any soul at peace or in search of it, a desideratum, but the order will

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448 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 be that of a harmony, not that of a regiment. It will be dictated by the scope of a possible music, by the given ele- ments in his frame and in his world ; it will not be an order imposed by authority for its own sake nor restraint for the negative satisfaction of saying "No." The art of life is a possible art, he realizes, though a difficult one, since the elements in it are so mercurial, in an individual so often at war, and since the individual has not only himself to war with. Toward that harmonizing of himself within himself and of the society of selves the naturalist will welcome with already justified hope, rather than condemn with traditional dismay, those sciences, young but auspicious, which teach him to recognize and deal with the forces and energies at large in his own psyche and in the society by which his own psyche is conditioned. That a body of knowledge and a technique as young as psychoanalysis should have generated much quackery and much nonsense, he will be well aware. But he will respect its already demonstrated therapeutic value and realize those potentialities of integration which it brings to light. From it he has learned to think twice before hurling about epithets of abnormal and normal, per- verse and sane, high or low. He has learned from it not simply to see the seamy side of nobility but the seeds of nobility in what the rough condemnatory language of tra- dition calls evil. But most of all he will have learned from the newer psychiatric sciences of psychology and psycho- analysis that the business of morals is that of the integrity or, better still, of the integration of character. And a large part of that technique by which a soul is rendered whole is its release from those deviousnesses and evasions, those repres- sions and shames, which prevent it from facing the realities of its self and its world with candor, generosity, and cour- age. An order that excludes half and the more urgent half of the energies by which men live and by whose drive they continue to care to live is a fraudulent peace. It is indeed because, naturalistically regarded, the indi- vidual is himself so largely the expression of the society in which he lives that one becomes a little impatient of those who frame a moral code, a theory of criticism or of life, without reference to the social, economic, and educational conditions which make the soul, under any social order, characteristically what it is. The two forces now dominant, as writers as different as John Dewey and Stuart Chase con- stantly remind us, are science and the technology related to it, the machine. It is possible for a few spirits to flee from these, to live physically at some lovely "Fiesolan" distance and spiritually in some flight to the Middle Ages or to Greece, as if those forces and resources were not the domi- nant determinants of the character of the age and the lives of its contemporaries. But their peace will be half built on what they half forget, and there will be, inevitably, a tincture of revolt or disdain or despair in their quietistic raptures. Their joy will have the internal poison, moreover, of con- scious irrelevance, as will even more profoundly that of those who try to bask in vanished sunlight and live as correctives, scolding, petulant, and doomed, in the midst of the con- temporary world. No. One cannot be at peace even with oneself in a society that is not in its whole organization, so intervolved are contemporary lives, at peace. It is not simply because he feels that some new war might wipe out for all eternity the fragments, lingering and lovely, of a dying civilization that the new naturalist feels it necessary to study — that he may help reasonably to control — the economic and scientific and industrial forces afoot in the world. It is because he is aware that the ordered (which is to say once more, the harmonized) life is socially conditioned that he wishes to face frankly the facts of science, machinery, industrial democ- racy, and internationalism to see what may be made of them. He has already had evidence enough of what science and the machine can do to the forms and to the formulas of our lives. The five-room apartment and the suburban bungalow, the radio, the airplane, and machine production have given him many goods cheaply, and have without his realizing it changed the whole matrix of his and of every- one's life. Part of the disorder in the contemporary soul I is that persistent living "between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." A large part of the current disillusion or the endemic retreat into citadels of vanished authority comes from the fact that practically we are compelled, intellectually resigned, to live in the present I world of science and the machine. But our imagination from childhood has been nourished on the ancient symbols, | the antique creeds, the inherited beauties. We work in the twentieth century and dream in the twelfth; we are neigh- bors to the dynamo and we escape to a marble temple shin- , ing on an ancient Mediterranean hill. A large part, indeed, of what passes for love of the classics and for the classical temper is simply a timid and t uneasy refusal to let the imagination brood or play upon the contemporary scene. That form constitutes half of beauty, and the love of it half the aesthetic experience, there can be no doubt. And it is not surprising that a civiliza- tion comparatively simple or relatively stable should have generated forms upon which the eye and the mind are prone to linger. But the challenge to literature and to the other arts in our generation is precisely that of giving some pat tern and coherence to the new world, the new themes and the unprecedented urgencies that have come into our lives with the new order. Man is a half happy but, historically considered, quite explicable accident. There are moments of the angel in him and he is, as an old naturalist once remarked, "in apprehen sion how like a God." But he is compelled, willy-nilly, to absent himself from felicity awhile and in this harsh world draw his breath in pain to tell his story. But if it were not for this harsh world there would be no story. If it were not for that world and for his own complex nature in it, there would never be felicity. The naturalist surveys life and nature and greets with welcome understanding all that art and literature which render the lusts of the beast and the loves of the god in that earth-bound and heaven-dreaming creature which is man. Being human, he loves as much as any classicist those achieved forms and beauties which are part of the human tradition. But being human, he is not simply an inheritor of a past. He is the living part of a present. He is, too, the living imagination of the future. And it is to the litera- ture and art of his own age, however formless they be or however half articulate their forms, that he will turn for the expression of his sense of nature, his love of life, his hopes, his fears, and his illusions — what used, in short, to be called his religion. I

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 449 Who Reads the Classics Now? By HENRY HAZLITT IT is hardly necessary to remark that any culture worthy of the name must draw its life both from the finest minds of the present and the greatest minds of the past. If it confines itself to either to the exclusion of the other it becomes deformed. The disease of reading too exclusively the books of dead authors is probably confined, in the mod- ern world, to the older pundits of India and China, and in America and Europe to a few scattered academicians. Our real danger is that of reading too exclusively the works of our own time. That the present tendency is too heavily in favor of current books there can be no reasonable doubt. The chief questions we have to answer concern its extent. What is the approximate present ratio in the reading of old books as compared with current books? Has the tendency in the last generation, or in the last few years, been toward the reading of relatively more old books or fewer? Exactly which of the old books are being most read today, and which have been forgotten? In an effort to get at something beyond mere impres- sions, the present writer sent an inquiry to the leading publishers who carry old books or classics on their lists, to the American Library Association, and to a number of the leading libraries throughout the country, to obtain what- ever figures were available in regard to the comparative reading and buying of old and new books, or impressions in the absence of such figures. One of the most interesting results of this inquiry is the remarkably wide differences of opinion among those whom one would assume to be in the best position to know the facts. Thus Miss Marilla W. Freeman of the Cleveland Public Library reports that "in almost every field the gen- eral reading public demands more than ever before the books which are currently reviewed and discussed," while Mr. Arthur E. Bostwick of the St. Louis Public Library gives it as his impression that "old books are being still read to a very considerable extent side by side with the new." Dif- ferences among the publishers are even more pronounced. Mr. J. W. Lippincott, who expressed his opinion on the subject several months ago, now writes: "We are profligate with our riches and would rather pay $2.50 for a new novel on the chance that it may be good reading than to give $1 for an old book that is sure to be interesting." And Robert M. McBride and Company add: "The public is becoming less and less interested in the older and hitherto I standard books. This applies particularly to that group of authors who were considered 'staple stock items' by virtually =very bookseller a few years ago. Formerly these authors, • who shall remain nameless, were stocked in their entirety; I 'now any bookseller will tell you that he finds it necessary o carry only a few outstanding titles of each." Little, Brown ind Company remark: "It is definitely our feeling that the )lder books are steadily losing ground." "The majority of Publishers," according to the Houghton Mifflin Company, 'now agree that new books (published during the current ear) are having a larger proportional sale today than ever before. Many houses find that whereas a few years ago there was an approximate fifty-fifty division between old and new books, today there is, generally speaking, a sixty-forty ratio in favor of new books." Mrs. Blanche W. Knopf writes: "Obviously, the reading of very old classics has prac- tically disappeared and it is amazing how few are read today as compared to current books." This is supported by Mr. M. G. Michaels of Brentano's: "From my own observation, the reading of the old classics is almost a thing of the past. Even a current volume becomes old in sixty days unless it is an obvious best-seller." Such opinions, as I have said, meet with flat disagree- ment from other publishers. Mr. John Macrae, Jr., of E. P. Dutton and Company, writes: "I know that some of the publishers have reported a decreasing sale in the classics. . . . This, however, has not been true as far as we are con- cerned. ... In my opinion the public is just as much inter- ested in the classics and just as much interested in older books of real merit as it ever was." Mr. Harrison Smith of Cape and Smith remarks: "I should say that there was a steadily increasing demand for old books." Dodd, Mead and Company conclude: "Our experience . . . would seem to indicate that the classics are having a happier time today than they ever had." The publishers who confine themselves almost exclusively to reprints are of the same opinion. The Modern Library finds that "the classics don't do so badly. Probably the days of the old parlor sets of Dickens, Scott, Jane Austen (those wedding-present books behind glass cases) are over, and when we remember some of the typog- raphy and illustrations and bookbinding that were used on these sets the change seems like a good one. When people buy the classics now they at least read them." Before venturing to say which of these opinions seems most justified, or whether there is a possible reconciliation of some of those that appear to be opposed, I shall present such general figures and such information regarding specific books as I have been able to obtain. Any comparison of "old" and "new" books, of course, must involve the draw- ing of some arbitrary line. In my own inquiry I asked which were the best-selling or most widely read books to- day that first appeared ten years ago or more, and if these were mainly books published in the twentieth century, which were the best-selling or most widely read books that first appeared more than fifty years ago. The most general answers, naturally, came from li- braries rather than individual publishers. Unfortunately, the libraries do not keep continuous statistics indicating the number of times specific books are taken out ; one has to fall back, in the main, upon impressions of librarians. The Pub- lic Library of the City of Los Angeles, in answer to my inquiry, tabulated the book checks of various authors for "a representative day." The nine most popular fiction au- thors were taken in four groups: (1) classics, (2) "stand- ard" authors from the period of approximately 1885 to 1900, (3) better writers of today, and (4) late or living writers of love, mystery, adventure, and Western stories. Of the books of the last group of authors, consisting of (arranged

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450 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 338C in order of popularity) Zane Grey, Bower, Oppenheim, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Kathleen Norris, Kyne, Gene Por- ter, Temple Bailey, and Ethel Dell, 241 copies had been taken out ; of the books of "better writers" of today — Gals- worthy, Cabell, Dreiser, Bennett, Wassermann, Garland, Wells, Atherton, Tarkington, Walpole, and Wilder— 119 copies; of the books of the standard authors of the period 1885-1900— Doyle, Conrad, London, Hardy, Kipling, France, Lew Wallace, Harte, and Churchill — 77 copies; and of the books of the "classics" — Dumas, Scott, Dickens, Hugo, Tolstoy, Cooper, Hawthorne, Bronte, and Jules Verne — 76 copies. With allowance made for local pref- erences and for the possibly misleading indications which one day's record would give, these figures have some value as indicating ratios. This classification, it will be noticed, is made partly on the basis of age of volumes, and partly on the basis of supposed merit. There is no virtue, of course, in reading old books per se. There is no necessary relation between the age of a book and its value. This might seem too obvious to be worth stating, were it not for the common supersti- tion, shared often by the most intelligent people, that only the bad books die and only the good survive. A certain quasi-permanent type of sentimentality, as the results of the present survey show, may appeal to sentimental readers in- definitely, and some rubbish lives for ages. Here are the books over ten years old given by Mr. Bostwick in a letter to the writer as among the most popu- lar at the St. Louis Public Library: "Tarzan of the Apes," "The Crisis," "Pollyanna," "The Americanization of Ed- ward Bok," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "The Virginian," "Up from Slavery," "Ben Hur," Roosevelt's letters to his chil- dren, and "The Mill on the Floss." H. M. Lydenberg, assistant director of the New York Public Library, reports that both from agreement of impressions and the statistical support of the number of copies it is necessary to keep on the shelves, the following six volumes that appeared ten years or more ago are among those highest in demand : Dostoevski's "Crime and Punishment," Shaw's "Man and Superman," the earlier volumes of Galsworthy's "Forsyte Saga," O'Neill's earlier plays, Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray," and Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina." The most popular books that appeared fifty years ago or more are several plays of Shakespeare, several novels of Dickens, Voltaire's "Candide," Goethe's "Faust," Hugo's "Les Miserables," Browning's poems, and Plato's "Republic." Perhaps the most unexpected inclusion here is Browning, while Dreiser is an unexpected omission in the first list. Dreiser's novels are in more de- mand, however, in the library's East Side branches. The Cleveland Public Library gives as "the most popu- lar classics": Rabelais, Boccaccio's "Decameron," Barrie, Shaw, Keats, Shelley, Emerson, Whitman, Mark Twain, Kipling, and Robert W. Service. If the total number of copies of a book kept on the shelves may be taken as a fair index of the demand for it, the following list of the dozen leading novels fifty years old or more is inter- esting: Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," 62 copies; Wallace's "Ben Hur," 50; Stevenson's "Treasure Island," 49; Scott's "Ivanhoe," 45 ; Hugo's "Les Miserables," 43 ; Dumas's "The Three Musketeers," 43; Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," 41; Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 39; Dickens's "David Copperfield," 36; Bulwer Lytton's "The Last Days of Pom- peii," 36; Eliot's "Adam Bede," 34; Cervantes's "Dor Quixote," 32. Among publishers the best indication of the relativi popularity of old books can be gained from the reprin series. Many of these volumes sell annually in number that any publisher would be delighted to see as the tota sales of a new book. Unfortunately, even where publisher have shown the present writer figures for his own informa tion, they have expressed the wish not to have the figure published, so that exact comparisons of sales of old and nev books cannot be made. Moreover, certain old titles may b issued in various editions by as many as half a dozen or J dozen publishers, and if the totals of these could be com piled the sales of many of the leading titles would easil;n run to a higher total than those of many of the leadin; current titles. The Modern Library probably offers an excellent inde: of the current popularity of older volumes. Its best-sellin; books in 1929 were, in their order, Merejkowski's "Th Romance of Leonardo da Vinci," Dostoevski's "The Broth ers Karamazov," Rostand's "Cyrano de Bergerac," Voltaire' "Candide," "The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Hudson's "Green Mansions," and Hardy's "The Return oJ the Native." Oscar Wilde's "Dorian Gray," "Mob Dick," Anatole France's "The Red Lily," Butler's "Th Way of All Flesh," Zola's "Nana," and Flaubert^ "Madame Bovary" also rank high. The A. L. Burt Com, pany cite as their half-dozen best-selling classics : Emerson' j "Essays," "The Three Guardsmen," "The Mill on th Floss," "Oliver Twist," "Ivanhoe," and "The Last Day of Pompeii." Grosset and Dunlap list as their six best -selling boot j published ten years or more ago: Wharton's "The Age c j Innocence," Grey's "The Border Legion," Hutchinson's "II Winter Comes," Tarkington's "The Magnificent Ambei J sons," Lewis's "Main Street," and O'Brien's "WhhJ Shadows in the South Seas." Their best-selling books firs! published twenty-five years ago are London's "The Ca' j of the Wild," Churchill's "The Crisis," Stoker's "DraculaJ Wiggin's "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," London's "Th j Sea Wolf," and Wister's "The Virginian." Their best-sell ing books published fifty years ago are Mark Twain's "Th 1 Adventures of Tom Sawyer," Wallace's "Ben Hur," Verne j "The Mysterious Island," Stevenson's "Treasure Island, and Melville's "Moby Dick." The Book League of AmeJ ica, which offers its subscribers to new books their choic p of a list of older books, finds that books of the earlier twer 4 tieth century were chosen in the following order: Butler I "Way of All Flesh," Ellis's "Dance of Life," DouJ las's "South Wind," Frazer's "Golden Bough," Phelps] "Essays on Modern Novelists," and "The Education (J Henry Adams." Books of the late nineteenth centum (1890-1900) were chosen in this order: Whitman's "Leav(8 of Grass," Ibsen's "Selected Plays," Chekhov's stone ■ France's "Thais," Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad," an i Hardy's "Return of the Native." D. Appleton and Company report as their best-sellin books published ten years or more ago : Stephen Crane "The Red Badge of Courage," and Phillips's "Susan Leno> | Her Fall and Rise." Their most popular volumes publishe fifty years or more ago are Bryant's poems, "Alice i Wonderland," the works of Charles Darwin, Spencer, an

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pril 16, 1930] The Nation 451 uxley, "The Three Musketeers," and Joel Chandler arris's "Uncle Remus." Dodd, Mead and Company find ipert Brooke's poems still enjoying "a steady and phe- menally large sale"; and a very high sale also for Lau- lce Hope's "India's Love Lyrics," France's "Penguin and," Douglas's "South Wind," Dunbar's "Complete ems," and several titles by Lafcadio Hearn. Among the ich older books their most successful is their set of An- jny Trollope, the demand for whose work is apparently :reasing. There is also "still a tremendous demand" for : Elsie books. Doubleday, Doran and Company report ong their best-selling books Conrad's "Lord Jim," "Nig- ■ of the Narcissus," "Youth," and "Victory," the short ries of O. Henry, Helen Keller's "Life," half a dozen umes of Kipling, "Cyrano de Bergerac," Tarkington's enrod," Maugham's "Of Human Bondage," Bennett's 'Id Wives' Tale," Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," and llery Radot's "Pasteur." In the Star Dollar Library the t-selling volumes are Wells's "Outline of History," asputin," "Catharine the Great," and Cellini. E. P. Dutton and Company find that their sales among classics in their Everyman's Library, as well as in the : >adway Translations and other reprint series have all in- :'ased during the past year. In fiction, outside of these I rint series, their best-selling old books are "The Four : rsemen of the Apocalpyse," "On the Branch/' "The [ rple Land," and "Joanna Godden." The two most active » books of Harcourt, Brace and Company are Louis Un- ■ neyer's anthologies of "Modern American Poetry" and Modern British Poetry." The first of these has sold over 1 1,000 copies and the second 80,000. Harper's best-selling >;ks, ten years or more old, include the earlier volumes of ?ie Grey, Van Dyke's "The Other Wise Man," and Booth I'rkington's "The Turmoil." "Ben Hur" and "Trilby" Hi sell very largely. In fact a million copies of "Ben I r" were recently sold to Sears, Roebuck and Company. I:: best-selling older books of Henry Holt are Rolland's '. an-Christophe," Dorothy Canfield's "Understood Betsy," Stevenson's "Home Book of Verse." Houghton Mif- l. Company's best-selling older books are Havelock Ellis's *'ie Dance of Life," "The Education of Henry Adams," lot's "What Men Live By," and Cather's "My Antonia." Knopf's best-selling older books are: "Growth of the i« ," by Knut Hamsun, "The Prophet," by Kahlil Gibran, '.r Hudson's "Green Mansions." Books of general interest u'lished between 1900 and 1920 that sell best today on the 13. Lippincott Company's list are "The Life of Whis- 1 " by the Pennells, Jack London's "The Daughter of the ♦fws," and the various volumes in Dr. Furness's "Vari- •r'n" Shakespeare. The most popular volumes published be- v.n 1890 and 1900 are Paul Leicester Ford's "George A >hington," Marie Corelli's "Barabbas" and "Sorrows of I n," and Ouida's "Under Two Flags." Among the Lit- u Brown publications about 12,000 copies were sold last if of "Ramona," by Helen Hunt Jackson, first published n 884. "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson" and 'iick Parkman's "The Oregon Trail" also sell well, and *,| 0 copies were sold last year of Alcott's "Little Women," W published in 1868. El'inor Glyn's "Three Weeks," first M ished in 1907 and now issued by the Macaulay Corn- er, still sells about 2,500 copies a year. The most successful books of ten years ago published by Macmillan's are Dostoevski's "Brothers Karamazov" and "Crime and Punishment," London's "Call of the Wild," Wister's "The Virginian," Stephens's "The Crock of Gold," and Churchill's "Richard Carvel." Of these by far the most successful are "The Call of the Wild" and "The Virgin- ian." In general non-fiction, the best-selling books are Jane Addams's "Twenty Years at Hull House," Frazer's "Golden Bough," and Bryce's "American Commonwealth." The most successful books appearing more than fifty years ago are But- ler's "Way of All Flesh," Ibsen's "Selected Plays," "Marco Polo," Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," the collected poems of Browning and Tennyson, and "Alice in Wonderland." Cabell's "Jurgen," published originally in 1919 by Robert M. McBride and Company, still sells well. The Oxford University Press's best-selling book, first published more than ten years ago, is "The Oxford Book of English Verse," and their best-selling reprint volumes are Boswell's "John- son," a one-volume Shakespeare, the poems of Keats, the poems of Shelley, Euripides's "Electra," Melville's "Moby Dick," and Chaucer's poems. The five best-selling volumes of Scribner's first published ten years or more ago are "The Americanization of Edward Bok," Galsworthy's "Forsyte Saga," Roosevelt's letters to his children, and Edith Wharton's "Ethan Frome." Of books published fifty years ago their highest-selling volumes today are "Hans Brinker," by Mary Mapes Dodge, and "Old Creole Days," by George W. Cable. The Vanguard Press's best-selling old books are "Love's Coming of Age," by Carpenter, Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class," Lenin's "The State and Revolution," and Sinclair's "The Jungle." Bellamy's "Looking Backward" still enjoys a considerable sale. The Viking Press still sells annually about 5,000 copies of Zona Gale's one-act play "Neighbors." The general conclusions that can be confidently drawn from this survey are perhaps meager. A few generalizations, however, seem reasonably safe. The current reading of older books, as shown by the experience of libraries and by the reprint series of many publishers, is at least far from negli- gible. Indeed, the current sales of, say, the ten leading old books, in all editions, would probably compare quite favor- ably with those of the ten leading new books. We must remember, too, that the reading of older books is probably comparatively greater than either current sales of such books or library borrowing would indicate: there is, for example, the important factor of inherited home libraries. On the other hand, it seems to be true that just as the book clubs tend to concentrate public attention on fewer current volumes, so under the new dispensation attention is being concentrated on fewer "classics." As a nation we have been trained to ask for the advertised product, and this is true of books as of other merchandise. Books are sold far more than they used to be by ballyhoo. Mass-production economics is beginning to be felt in the book field as it has been elsewhere. The book clubs are merely the outstanding example of this. There is also the growing tendency of pub- lishers generally to concentrate advertising and publicity on a limited number of titles. There is less buying scattered over a wide range of older books, and more con- centrated buying (or should one say concentrated selling?) of a few of them. Such a situation is, of course, potentially dangerous, but its effect must depend also to a large extent on which volumes are eliminated and which retained.

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452 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 33* Interior By STANLEY J. KUNITZ I close my book; tonight, tonight, When wet gusts tug at the chestnut burr, Permit my will, that's half my light, To sit domestic by the fire; And watch the clock in present tense Draw circles of the time to love; And contemplate the simple beans Profoundly baking in the stove. Having beheld with recent eyes The sterile pits of reason's moon, I shall not be, I think, less wise For homely things and homely rune; Nor wholly trust the merely true Of prose; nor hear with tempered vein The feathered devil in the flue, The breaking vowels of the rain. Gorki's Trilogy Bystander. By Maxim Gorki. Translated from the Russian by Bernard Guilbert Guerney. Jonathan Cape and Har- rison Smith. $3. FOR years the prophet and reporter of the proletarian revolution, Gorki, when he found himself a little too old to keep up with the terrific onrush of events, decided to settle down, survey the traversed path, and try to recap- ture for posterity the colorful people and stirring incidents of his arduous and variegated life. Though he is not any longer in the vanguard of the revolution, Gorki is still tremendously popular with the laboring masses of the world. In Russia he is a veritable idol. "Every one of us, no matter what cate- gory he belongs to," once said a Soviet worker, "has one warm, living spot in his breast, and that is the memory of Gorki." In the Soviet Union Gorki is honored not only as the father of proletarian literature and as the man whom Lenin called "the most important representative of proletarian art," but also as the guardian angel of Russian culture, as the friend and counselor of numberless young proletarian authors, and as the only outstanding Russian man of letters who has remained loyal to the working class. Ever since 1913 Gorki has been writing almost exclusively in a mood of serene retrospection. His marvelous series of autobiographical works, his book of "Recollections," his "Frag- ments from My Diary," as well as most of the fictional works written by him during his later years, have all been in the reminiscent vein. "The Life of Clim Samghin" — a three-vol- ume epic of which "Bystander" is the first part — attempts to give not only the intimate story of the hero Samghin, but also a comprehensive picture of Russian life during the forty years preceding the October revolution. Taking the "gloomy eigh- ties" as his background for "Bystander," Gorki proceeds slowly, laboriously, with a wealth of meticulous detail, to unfold be- fore us the gruesome panorama of social struggles and cultural upheavals in prerevolutionary Russia. Epoch follows epoch; one generation follows another— the nihilists of the sixties and the populists of the seventies, the Bazarovs and the Niezhdanovs; the rebellious sons of Turgenev's novels are njj themselves fathers who are spurned by their "decadent" sons I having "aroused hopes they had not been able to fulfil" i] for "having occupied themselves with questions of a purely c terial nature, ignoring the riddles of spiritual life." By a ri combination of scientific objectivity, artistic sympathy, and cl ative imagination, by a discreet use of contemporary poems :i episodes and personages, Gorki evokes the spirit of those nigs marish years: a phantasmagoria of repressions, imprisonmeij| exiles, executions, pogroms; the intelligentsia, frightened :\ humiliated, scuttling away into their holes, there to seek c- solation in pale dreams of a remote social justice, in mysti explorations of the twilight regions of the soul, or in the biza worship of Beauty and the Self. The most usual escape, he ever, is in drink and debauchery. "Let's drink. We must dr: Brother!" shouts one of the Dostoevskian characters in book. "We are a serious folk; we must drown four-fifths our soul in drink. To live with all one's soul in Russi strictly forbidden by everybody. By everybody: the police, priests, the poets, and the prose writers. But when we h drunk our four-fifths, we'll begin collecting little pornogra] pictures and telling smutty stories from Russian history to another. There's our prospect in life." Horror. Deject Utter hopelessness. Yet within the womb of the present germs of the future begin to stir. The working class is g: ually becoming a potent social factor. New "sons" come f to replace their degenerate fathers. A new generation of M: ists, scientific socialists, proletarians invade the arena, and bi to prepare the settings for the momentous events of 1905 1917. Thrown against this shifting background, there is a of dynamic, evolving characters, men and women and <J dren, intellectuals, peasants, workers, bureaucrats, merchj priests. But while the delineations of many characters are o uncommonly felicitous, some being brilliantly original in ception and unforgettably vivid in form, those of some of major characters, we regret to say, are somewhat blur] shadowy. Clim Samghin himself, the central personage inl novel, the prism through which most of the occurrences inj book are refracted, is utterly unreal, invented. Hence of the events refracted through him, though historically aut tic, also appear unreal and invented. In his treatment of (| the author tries to be super-subtle, analytical, keenly psy logical. But he is not very successful. We are shown a dred different traits belonging to Clim, yet we never com know Clim himself. We learn a great deal about his relat with his family, sweethearts, friends; we learn of his vac tions, pretensions, and disillusionments, but our knowledf never synthesized into a living image. The same applie Lidia, and Tomilin, and many other characters. They they philosophize, they go and come and go again, and can never make out why, where, and whither. The truth is Gorki is no master of form, particularl big form. His novels and plays are almost invariably ai phous, rickety, loose. To conceal these fundamental struct defects he is often forced to resort to dogma, tendentious romantic vaporing, and endless and vapid philosophizing, (i there was an element of beguiling novelty in having a seri tious tramp regale us with sparkling bits of Nietzschean dom ; by now the novelty has worn off. And as regards losophizing intellectuals such as we find in this book, u they achieve the devastatingly explosive results of an Karamazov they almost always manage to become unmitig bores. In the nineties of the last century their discus • might have sounded very profound; in the year of our J^ 1930 they strike one as insupportably piddling and unn I sary. Gorki seems never to have learned that long spet« can never make up for a poor plot, and that without orgai*-

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Ipril 16, 1930] The Nation 453 urrene, larshal of ranee General Max Weygand his is the life story of one the world's great sol- ers whose military genius minated the Thirty Years rar. Illustrated, $3.50 ew etters of incoln Elected by wl M. Angle is astonishing that so :rge, diversified and im- • rtant a collection of Lin- iln letters could now be ade. Many of these cuments throw fresh ;ht on Lincoln's person- ify. Illustrated, $5.00 * I naf raid : , Life of .tine Hutchinson i Winnifred King Rugg 'Cere is a book with a lisp of the essential great !:ts of this woman's life, ; d understanding not only

DAUGHTERS OF EVE by Gamaliel Bradford "Bradford at his most delightful best. Surely no biographer of the present nor of the past can equal him in finding the motivating influence of a man's or a woman's character." — Boston Transcript. Illustrated, $3.50 •f. 4» <g» THE SON OF JOHN WINTERINGHAM by Warrene Piper "This is an amazing first novel. To write a story at once intensely dynamic and subtly psychological is no mean feat. This young woman has done it with such ease and fluency that we find it difficult not to praise her work too much." — Phila. Ledger. $2.50 Malta of the Knights by Elizabeth Schermerhorn "Vivid, heroic, highly col- ored. The story of these fierce and turbulent sol- diery moves like a pageant. Corsairs or crusaders, the Knights were bonny fight- ers."— New Statesman. Illustrated, $7.50 The Lore of the Unicorn by Odell Shepard No other animal in history or fable has ever possessed the elusive, fantastic charm of the Unicorn. This book is a rare combination of philosophy and folklore. Illustrated, $7.50 The American Rhythm by Mary Austin Indian songs, poems, and recitations, translated in all their stark and simple beauty. No one interested in poetry, drama, or rhythm can fail to have his imagination fired by this collection. $2.50 Secular Movements in Production and Prices by Simon S. Kuznets The first adequate treat- ment of the long-period changes in output which have remade the world since the United States be- came a nation. $3.50 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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454 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 338 tion, concentration, and clarity no novel, however "splendid in scope" and monumental in bulk, can be properly called a masterpiece. Ironically enough, according to the publishers Gorki con- siders this trilogy his "life work," his "ultimate test." If true, it is a strange commentary on human nature, particularly on the artist's nature. For Gorki is not the first or the only artist to set a wrong relative value on his own work. Perhaps he does not consider his autobiographical works "art." Perhaps they came too easily to him — those vivid recollections, so free of plot, literary convention, and intellectual hokum. Perhaps Gorki himself does not fully realize the incomparable beauty, the greatness he has achieved in those broad, flowing, artless streams of throbbing life. Joshua Kunitz Shelley's First Child Shelley's Lost Letters to Harriet. Edited with an Introduction by Leslie Hotson. Little, Brown and Company. $8. MR. HOTSON has added another triumph to that list of triumphs which promises to grow so long as to make him the leading literary detective of our day. He has discovered nine of the letters which Shelley wrote to Harriet Westbrooke after he had left her for Mary Godwin. One was already known, but it was insufficient. Others had been searched for, by Peacock, Kegan Paul, and perhaps in- numerable unknown men, in the Public Records Office during the century which followed the miserable confusion attending the affair. Now Mr. Hotson has turned up — not the letters themselves, but court copies of them consulted in the case of Shelley vs. Westbrooke. And the situation of Shelley during those painful months between July and October, 1814, is at last quite clear. If it is of any importance to know how he felt about Harriet, and what he said to her, we know it. In a certain sense nothing is added here to our knowledge of Shelley's character. It was always to me an unpleasant character, and it becomes no more so now. That is to say, it still does not become quite detestable. The only difference is that he is permitted to display it with a more preposterous fulness, he is forced — and this may be a violation of his privacy of which one ought not to take advantage — to seem more un- pleasant than ever. The trouble with the letters is that they are so just, so noble, and so righteous. Shelley was a man of principles, and a man of principles is so dreadfully concerned with proving himself right. He fails to see that the question of right or wrong seldom comes in at all. Shelley is not to be blamed for the original injury he did Harriet; his passion for Mary was apparently quite uncontrollable. He is to be blamed, I think, for writing Harriet a series of sermons about her duty as a liberal — a thing, incidentally, which a more sensible man would have known she never had been. He is to be blamed for his brotherliness, his fatherliness, his exacerbating fairness. He is to be blamed, indeed, for writing at all — for thinking there was anything he could say to make Harriet feel better. I am sure that everything he said made her feel worse. For she was a child — his first child — and did not know better than to be hurt. "I repeat," he says, "that my attachment to you is unim- paired." What could that mean to Harriet? "It is no re- proach to me," he continues, "that you have never filled my heart with an all-sufficing passion." Of course not, and I sus- pect that Harriet never thought so. If she hated anyone it was Mary — whom Shelley wants her to see, she is so wonderful. But then, "I murmur not if you feel incapable of compassion and love for the object and the sharer of my passion." No, no, Mary also will be a martyr to the fiendish prejudices of man- kind, which Shelley fears Harriet is now beginning to shar But Shelley is chiefly anxious lest Harriet think him in t wrong, and asks her whether what he is now doing to h heart is not balanced by all the improvement he has given h mind in the past — and perhaps overbalanced by the improv ment he still offers. "Consider how far you would desire yoi future life to be placed within the influence of my superinten ing mind." Later on, when Harriet has become hysterical has lost caste with him by showing herself still a slave to "t vilest superstitions" — a slave, that is, to anger and jealousy- he reminds her sorrowfully: "I would have superintended 1 progress of your mind, and have assisted you in cultivating elevated philosophy." The spectacle of Shelley abusing his wi for an abandonment of principles which did not apply in I least to her feelings, and which if she had ever understo them she had shared with him merely because they were part of him, is not exactly edifying, nor can it make me li Shelley. I prefer Keats's confessed jealousy whenever Fan* Brawne went to a dance without him; I prefer Byron's willin ness to admit himself a sinner, even though a proud one;i prefer — well, in the case of Shelley I should have preferr a certain amount of silence. Deliver me from all persons want to depose that they have hurt me in the cause of highe truth. Better that they should hit and run. Mark Van Doren Tragedy, Q. E. D. ■ Gallows' Orchard. By Claire Spencer. Jonathan Cape ail Harrison Smith. $2.50. FROM the first sentence of "Gallows' Orchard" Ml Spencer has the respect of the reader. Here, one fee I is, at the very least, a craftsman. And when the noM is finished one looks back with admiration on the spare, strofl lines of its structure. Wise in her selection of incident, sparul but effective in her description, Miss Spencer conducts her stoj with an assurance that can only be born of complete imaginatrH comprehension. So sharp is the impression of maturity whii the novel makes that one wishes to give the author the benej of every doubt, even when she employs a device seemingly cumbersome as the alternation of the historical present wi the past tense. One knows she has her reasons though th may seem inadequate. It is with an ethical problem that Miss Spencer has ce cerned herself. Effie Gallows, says the minister, has a rs quality: "It isn't her looks or her character or her way looking at things; it's something else; it's something hard explain. It's something that you feel everybody ought to ha on the strength of being alive, and yet I have never met anye but her who had it." In such a woman the sense of persot integrity is naturally strong, but Effie has sinned against h integrity by marrying a weak and colorless admirer to provi a father for another man's child. The wrong she has done she soon realizes, and she resig herself to her punishment. "If people are low in their heai they can do low things and not hurt themselves, and never punished; but when you know a thing is wrong and still y do it, you are doomed." The inhabitants of Durkie, the Scot town in which she lives, gladly take upon themselves the r< of avenging furies. Always distrustful of her because possesses something they lack, and now outraged as much her pride as by her misdeeds, they persecute her by every mea, they can devise and in the end stone her to death. Five me according to the varying degrees of their strength and wea ness, suffer with her.

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 455 From an Extensive List of "Possibilities" We Choose 6 "Positive Books" for NATION READERS "A fascinating and spirited book." — HEYWOOD BROUN, The Nation Jews Without Money By MICHAEL GOLD Eugene O'Neill urged "Mike" for years to write his story of the East Side. Now he has written it; the sort of book that is called : "One of the most eloquent stories disgorged by the Ameri- can Press in many a moon." — H. L. MBNjCKEN. "In the whole work, crowded with unforgettable pictures of reality, the portrait of 'mother' is best . . . is magnificent. "— WILLIAM BOLITHO, N. Y. World. 4th Large Printing. Illus. $3.00 The Old Love and the New Divorce and Readjustment By WILLARD WALLER Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Nebraska What are the psychological costs of divorce? Other books say good bye to the unhappily married at the door of the divorce court; this book takes up the story at that point, explain- ing and analyzing, from the vantage points of psychology and sociology, the turbulent, con- flicting emotions of the 5,000,000 divorced per- sons in the United States. Just Published. $3.00 Orpheus A History of Religions By SALOMON REINACH Author of Apollo, etc. An imperative book; it must be read; it must be owned. It belongs next to The Story of Philos- ophy and The Story of Mankind on your book shelves. "The fairest analysis we have read of the might- iest search mankind ever undertook."— F. F.V., N. Y. Evening Post. $yoo Year in, You're Out By SAMUEL HOFFENSTEIN "Of his greatest power yet," says F. P. A., in The Conning Tower, as he compares this, Hoflen- stein's latest volume, to Poems in Praise of Prac- tically Nothing (now in its 13th edition). Other praising voices are: DON MARQUIS, ISABEL PATERSON, WILLIAM SOSKIN, WALTER YUST, etc.; and a complaining voice, JO RANSON, Brooklyn Eagle, who writes: "There is only one tremendous fault with Mr. Hoflenstein's verse. Once you start quoting, you go on forever." $2.00 Indecency and the Seven Arts And Other Adventures of a Pragntatist in Aesthetics By HORACE M. KALLEN Author of Frontiers of Hope, Why Religion?, etc. Here is a series of wise and witty essays that de- flates current cults (and not least among them is Humanism), that exposes the seven arts with sly humor and deep understanding. Other men have told the truth about the priest, the politi- cian, the patrioteer. Dr. Kallen here reveals the truth about the poet, the critic and the censor. Just Published $2.50 The Bridge By HART CRANE Author of White Buildings "The Bridge, in many respects, is the most im- portant volume of American poetry since Whit- man's Leaves of Grass."— MALCOLM COWLEY. We announce with pride the publication of this important long poem by HART CRANE, of whom ALFRED KREYMBORG writes in "Our Singing Strength: "Hart Crane is a poet stemming from the major tradition of our soil and literature . . . He is one of the few poets with a definite future." Just Published $2.50 (^b HOHACJB XIVBHIGHT ny. good books When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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456 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 Two books may be compared though they are not of equal merit, and it is not unprofitable to place "Gallows' Orchard" beside "The Scarlet Letter." Not only are they alike in theme; their weaknesses, however they differ in degree, are of the same kind. The spectacle of the inevitable workings of unalter- able law is grand, but it is not moving. Effie's remark, "When a thing has started it has to work itself out," like Chilling- worth's "Let the black flower blossom as it may," is impressive rather than stirring. The situation is justly presented; Effie's character is clearly defined; the five men act their appropriate parts. But something is missing, and the tragic ending brings from us only the satisfied admiration that is given to the last line of that kind of sonnet one calls neatly turned. In part, no doubt, the explanation lies in the essential difficulty of the task: the character of an Effie Gallows is easier to define than to convey. Beyond that, however, is the obstacle of Effie's passivity, a passivity implicit in Miss Spencer's con- ception of the situation. Effie is made for affirmation, for struggle, and when she does momentarily struggle the reader feels with her. But she is committed to negation, forced to be something less than herself, less than a person. Like the characters in "The Scarlet Letter," she is by definition two- dimensional, and her death fails to lay strong hands upon our emotions. Granville Hicks A Great Poet A Vision of the Mermaids. By Gerard Manley Hopkins. Com- plete Facsimile Edition Limited to 250 Copies. Oxford University Press. $7.50. The Life of Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J. By Father Lahey, S. J. Oxford University Press. $3.50. TWO hundred and fifty copies, I have heard, made up the whole edition in which for the first time the few but wonderful poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins were pub- lished. That was in 1918. Their extraordinary author had been dead twenty-nine years. Save for occasional publication chiefly in religious periodicals and anthologies, on whose reluc- tant editors they had almost to be forced, the poems were known only to a handful of impressed but not always understanding friends. They knew the man to be remarkable and respected the poetry as his utterance. These friends included Coventry Patmore, who esteemed Hopkins enough to take his advice in revising his own work, but who gave up the effort of following Hopkins's bewildering innovations, and Robert Bridges, who in his understanding and will to understand becomes an example of a good friend. It was to Bridges that Hopkins intrusted his manuscripts to be published after his death. Victorian timidity no doubt, and later the war, lengthened the delay; finally the book was published in the carefully and conscien- tiously annotated edition of 1918, which is being reprinted within a few months with additional poems. To precede this reprinting we have now a useful biography and a facsimile of one of the longer Hopkins manuscripts. Bridges may seem to have been a hesitant sponsor; but the temper of Hopkins's generation and the general impatience with experiment will account for his hesitation. He may seem to be too defensive in his editorial notes, to dwell too submissively on the defects and too shyly on the excellences. But in 1918 matters were different. Today we have become not so much tolerant of as styled to experiment. Mr. Bridges could not have anticipated the quick acceptance of this poetry, and still less its immediate and increasing influence. In the twelve years since their publication the 250 small books have been searched out and become scarce. Five English booksellers in a year's time could not locate a copy for one insistent purchaser. Among poets the possessors' names were exchanged and the copies were borrowed oftener perhaps than those of any book in recent years. With the publication of the forthcoming new edition of the poems it will probably be ob- served that in some recent poetry influences attributed to other poets are in reality Hopkins's. The Poet Laureate's work owns it, and Hart Crane's "The Bridge," unquestionably £ great poem and one of the few of our generation, show; the present benefits of Hopkins's liberating and enriching experiments. This influence cannot, I think, be attributed mainly to his many and extraordinary contributions to English versification although they are the first to be noticed and both in quality anc in quantity constitute probably the greatest addition made by z single poet. Today we are inclined rather to imitate an atti- tude of mind than a form; and for that reason a T S. Elio] exerts more authority than an E. E. Cummings. In Hopkins however, it is not so much an attitude of mind — else we shouk; all seek some individual form of asceticism — as the virtue of ar example. Here is a poet who was not afraid to write exacth as he wished, who dared to take the risk of a crabbed anc queer appearance, of obscurities into which readers would no, follow him. Such independence has always been rare in literature. Few poets seem to have been so indifferent to or disciplined agains the pleasure of publication. It is the only form of his asceticisn that it would be profitable for us to imitate, though devou. Catholics may think differently. Hopkins was even conten after his admission to the Society of Jesus to give up writing poetry altogether. He wrote to his friend Canon Dixon: What [verses] I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit [i.e., 1868] and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of 75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account, and hap- pening to say so to my rector, he said that he wished some one would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realized on paper. ... I do not say the idea is altogether new . . . but no one has professedly used it and made it the principle throughout that I know of. . . . However, I had to mark the stresses . . . and a great many more oddnesses could not but dismay an edi- tor's eye, so that when I offered it to our magazine, the Month . . . they dared not print it. He wrote, as he said elsewhere, to satisfy a love of design but he wrote, too, out of a love and understanding of words, c their sound and of their sense, that is unrivaled in our litera ture. He played almost boisterously with them, running ther out in delightful repetitions, in transformations and substitv tions. This freedom with words is even more characterise than his rhythms or his marvelous imagery. This and th exigencies of his bold rhythmic scheme led to the oddities fo which Bridges apologizes too much, and of which the autho was fully conscious, as this passage from a letter to Bridge shows : No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling "inscape" is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinc- tiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 457 VIKING A tale worthy of Boccaccio — the tempting of a modern St. Anthony. KINDNESS IN A CORNER by T. F. POWYS "Another one of those strange and strangely beautiful books which none but T. F. Powys can write ... a genius so rare it seems not of the earth, a humaneness of spirit not fre- quently to be encountered, and a wit so exotic it will seem at times little other than perverse." — New York Times. $2.50 BOOKS You are affected by these world problems AMERICA LOOKS ABROAD THE NEW ECONOMIC HORIZONS by PAUL M. MAZUR Author of American Prosperity What good or ill do the years 1930-1940 hold for us? The stock-market crash was only a symptom of something much more far-reaching. Dangers that threaten the whole structure of our business and social life should be understood by every well-informed man and woman, if the best way out is to be found. The social and economic reform of Europe, a war of tariffs, a United States of Europe, the cancellation of war debts, international trade — these are just a few of the possibilities which this brilliant young banker discusses. America Looks Abroad opens up new avenues of thought for the intelli- gent reader, who will arrive at a greater understanding of world problems through a reading of this clear and sane book. $3.00 He never reached the forbidden city ofTarudant MOGREB-EL- ( ACKSA A JOURNEY IN MOROCCO by R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM With an introduction by Edward Garnett Cunninghame Graham, Spanish hidalgo and Scotch laird, one of the few real adventurers in the grand tradition and a writer revered by Joseph Conrad and G. B. Shaw, Stephen Crane and Theodore Roosevelt, Max Beerbohm and William Morris, has written his story of adventure in Morocco. For sheer excitement it rivals Lawrence's adventure in Arabia, for literary content it belongs beside Doughty 's Arabia Deserta. How he started for the forbidden city of Tarudant, how he was captured, how he never reached his goal makes one of the most magnificent travel books in the language. A National Travel Club Book. Illustrated. $3.50 Sophisticated laughter MEN IN SHIRT-SLEEVES by BENVENUTO SHEARD One of the most refreshingly original books of many seasons is this satirical novel of the mauve young men about the towns of Europe. Lithe ladies and elegant escorts talk like characters out of a Lonsdale or a Wilde comedy and act with the unconventionality of a doomed race. Not since Antic Hay has there been a gayer novel of the scoffing sophisti- cates. $2.50 18 East 48th Street THE VIKING PRESS New York City When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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458 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 And again two months later: Moreover the oddness may make them repulsive at first and yet Lang might have liked them on a second reading. The elements of Hopkins's originality are bewildering. He is astonishingly bold with words and with forms of speech; he is free with ellipses, coins new words, breaks them in two, transfers the parts of combined words, as when "brimful in a flash" becomes "brim in a flashful"; rhymes internally, alliter- ates, omits that's and which's to have every word dynamic, and displaces prepositions so that their very movement in the sen- tence adds to their force; combines words to sharpen their rhythm, quicken their meaning, and harmonize their sound. Such a procedure is inimitable; it is his poetic personality, which will certainly stimulate and encourage other poets along the paths of their own individuality, but which it would be very dangerous to copy. It is his prosody that is his main con- tribution. "For purpose of scanning," he writes, "it is a great con- venience to follow the example of music and take the stress always first. ... If this is done there will be in common Eng- lish verse only two possible feet — the so-called accentual trochee and dactyl." This may seem to conflict with the admitted fact that English verse is largely iambic; and his own use of trochaic and dactylic rhythms gives his poetry its oddness. In develop- ing his rhythm he substitutes good English words for the Latin and Greek terms. Thesis he calls "stress"; arsis, "slack." The iambic he calls "rising"; trochaic, "falling" rhythm; where the stress falls in the middle he calls it "rocking" rhythm. "Mixed" (logaoedic) rhythm results where these are mingled for variety. Again taking example from music (in which he was adept enough to compose fugues) he contrasts rhythms for counterpoint and achieves striking effects. However, his most important contribution to versification is what he names "sprung" rhythm, which is counterpointed throughout. Each stanza is scanned continuously so that the lines merge together. It may have "hangers" or "outrides," a series of unaccented syllables which contribute pauses and variety. The feet have from one to four syllables, the accent falling always on the first. Hopkins makes remarkable use of the one-syllable foot, which gives concentrated and intense effects. I give this example of a poem in "sprung" rhythm that contains some of his other effects: PIED BEAUTY Glory be to God for dappled things — For skies of couple-color as a brindled cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced— fold, fallow, and plow; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him. If the innovations strike us first we must remember that it is the major poetry heightened by them that is his real con- tribution. Beyond question Hopkins belongs among the great poets of English literature. The experiments may be taken as evidence of the subtlety and diversity of one of the greatest minds to express itself in poetry in his generation. How diverse and fertile his mind was the two books now published before the new edition of his poems reveal. Father Lahey's biography is useful for its information and its supple- ment of examples of Hopkins's prose, a prose as remarkable and as rich as his poetry. He was always intensely interested in clouds, and kept a journal of day-to-day changes in the sky which contains some of the most wonderful descriptive writing I have ever seen — sensitive, accurate, powerful, and always musical. The biography is too formally a memoir to attempt to solve the problems of his asceticism and his conversion to Ca- tholicism. Father Lahey is intelligent and sensitive but his answers are those of a cleric. The evidences of suffering in the "terrible" sonnets of the later years are piously explained away as a mystic source of happiness. Perhaps Hopkins's love of forms led him to adopt the most formalized way of life offered in the contemporary world. There can be no question of the sincerity and the profundity of his belief, but there can be no question either, from the evidence of his poetry, that the beauty of ceremony, the bodying forth of belief, attracted him sen- suously. Hopkins, who was a composer, philosopher, naturalist, and philologist, was also a painter. The reproduction of his auto- graph of "A Vision of the Mermaids," an early but beautiful poem which won a university prize, contains a Blake-like illustration that shows a powerful fancy. It is published in a limited edition that is certain to become a prized collector's item, especially since the poem is not published in full in any other form. Isidor Schneider From Belly to Mind ^ The Human Mind. By Karl A. Menninger. Alfred A. Knopf. $5. IN the limestone rocks in and about Buffalo, New York, the flattened impression of a curious lobster-like animal may be found. It was but one of many a crustacean that darted here and there in that great sea and its sluggish marshy reaches that once filled the interior of the North American continent countless millions of years ago. One of these fossils, the gift of the recently deceased genial and honored curator of < the Buffalo Academy of Sciences, Henry R. Howland, lies temporarily as a paper weight upon this masterly work of; Dr. Menninger's upon the human mind. The apposition is not without interest, for, in a sense, above may be found the fossilized shadow of the creature that started the human brain on its upward pathway and below a concrete model portrayal of what that evolutionary product can bring about after all these millions of years. The geologist has given the name "Eurypterus" to the fos- sil; the psychiatrist — Karl A. Menninger — has given a consum- mately valuable outline of the living instrument, the "humar mind," that makes man's activities different from those of his paleostrachean ancestor. In spite, however, of the millions of years of steady climb- ing up the ladder from Eurypterus, when, if Gaskell's fascinat ing hypothesis is to be given some credence, the structures whicl were primarily belly were cast aside in order that those to b< brain might advance, we still hear the ancient and faulty one sided slogan, "Mens sana in corpore sano." Even the Euryp- terus so many eons past knew that body had to be sacrificec for brain. Thus this oft-quoted "a healthy mind in a health; body" should have bracketed with it that even more importan correlate, that without a healthy mind a healthy body is o little service, and the still more important higher synthesis dear to the Hegelian dialectic, that only a healthy mind, in th highest sense, will produce a healthy body. What this "high est sense" of mental health, as an ideal, and its counties variants are and may be is told in this unusually attractiv volume. Dr. Menninger has discarded the colossal humbug of th

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 459 The brove stage-coaching days recalled by one who knew them SIX HORSES By CAPTAIN WILLIAM BANNING and GEORGE HUGH BANNING A solid, meaty, yet tremendously exciting history of stage-coaching in the West, by the last of the active stage drivers. Describes the growth, perils, and actual conditions — often far different from those our fancy paints — of this romantic and important industry, and brings to life its great figures. Illustrated from photographs and old prints. $4.00 An American "inland Voyage" SHANTY-BOAT By KENT and MARGARET LIGHTY Down the Mississippi with a houseboat, an outboard motor, and an incorrigible sense of adventure. Says F. F. Van de Water in the N. Y. Post: "Even those who walk way around the average travel book will find SHANTY- BOAT a most engaging, colorful and amusing volume." Illustrated. $3.50 Muraer in a Broadway night club — and its sequel! THE NI6HT CLUB MYSTERY By ELIZABETH JORDAN Author of "The Devil and the Deep Sea," etc A mystery romance which takes the trouble to be literature as well as sensational drama — Miss Jordan's most successful thriller. "A rous- ing baffler. . . . Belongs on your list," urges Will Cuppy in the N. Y. Herald Tribune $2.00 Still the Most Original of All the War Books RETREAT A NOVEL OF 1918 By C. R. BENSTEAD "IT CAN STIR YOU TO THE ROOTS." — Philadelphia Public Ledger "Psychologically the story stands foursquare; it is written with a fine penetration, an emo- tional honesty, and an insight that are most unusual. It is free of any compromise with ordinary conceptions ofVeligion or of the priest; in short, it is an exceptionally good, readable novel." — The Nation "It has a reality about it which lays its heavy hand upon you and holds you in a grip so firm that you will never forget it." — Chicago Tribune "There is a note of quiet authority about this book which stamps it as true. One of the best of the present offerings on the war." — William McFee in the N. Y. Sun Fourth large printing $2.50 Published by THE CENTURY CO. 353 Fourth Ave. New York, N. Y. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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460 The Nation [Vol 130, No. 3380 normal mind and has adopted the case method of presenting his subject. Every human mind is different and he tells us how and why — not in the prolix and ponderous terminology of the classifiers and Dewey card-index systems, but in simple, under- standable, and yet quite scientifically correct terms, such as "personalities" that have to meet "situations" and develop "symptoms" if unsuccessful. He discusses the "motives" of "per- sonalities" and the power of these motives; and "treatments" and "applications." Here is the simplest of skeletons filled in with a richness of detail that is informing and fascinating. Dr. Menninger's handling of the most satisfactory recent methods of obtaining self-knowledge and of conquering our narcissism, namely, those of psychoanalysis, is essentially mod- erate and sound. He fortunately does not lose himself in psychoanalytic intricacies, but portrays only the more stabilized and usable conceptions which this method of investigation has made available. He shows above all that the method is only for the expert, and he holds that it is of the highest importance that those who value mental activities above those of the body should seek to have their mental discomforts treated only by properly trained individuals. Smith Ely Jelliffb Maurois and the New Biography Byron. By Andre Maurois. Translated from the French by Hamish Miles. D. Appleton and Company. $5. FOR the preparation of this volume M. Maurois was given access to several unpublished sources of material. From them he has selected various anecdotes which fill out with- out essentially altering the accepted outline of Byron's char- acter, and he has achieved a clear if not particularly profound or original portrait of the man whose psychology is well summed up in the statement that "his tastes inclined him to intellectualism, his pride to dissipation." Perhaps M. Maurois, reacting against the reaction which followed upon Byron's enormous popularity, tends rather to exaggerate his merits as a poet. Perhaps he does not sufficiently take account of the fact that, however tumultuous Byron's rebellious passions may have been, the symbols which he used to express them were peculiarly childish, and his diabolical gestures — drinking out of a skull and making love to his half-sister — characteristic of a wickedness hardly more original or inventive than the virtue of the conventional people whom he despised. Yet despite a certain diffuseness, and despite an occasional laboring of the obvious in the psychological analysis, the book is extremely readable. M. Maurois has, however, considerably altered his method since the days when he allowed his imagination full play in "Ariel." In part, perhaps, because the materials for the life of Byron are so copious that there is little temptation to fill in imaginary details he has made but sparing use of novelistic embroideries, and he has appended a long list of sources to the individual chapters. Nevertheless, the most interesting question in connection with his work still remains the question of method, and the advisability of making biography come as close as even this biography does to historical fiction. In order to point the question let us take one or two examples. The conventional biographer might, for instance, begin something like this: "Newstead, the ancestral home of the Byrons, had been formerly an Augustinian monastery." M. Maurois, on the other hand, opens his book thus: "Through the enchanted Sherwood Forest, close to Nottingham, a little band of black-habited monks, canons regular of the Augustinian Order, came wandering among the oaks. King Henry the Second of England, threatened with excommunication for the murder of Thomas a Becket, had promised the Pope to do penance and to endow monasteries. A site was chosen in a valley, close to a spring and lake; the trees were felled, to the glory of God and for the salvation of the king's soul." Now a hundred recent biographies have made this picturesquely narrative beginning extremely familiar and it may reasonably be questioned whether it has not, by becoming conventional, already lost whatever justification it may once have had. Yet this, after all, is a matter of taste, and the method is less obviously open to serious objections than is the method of certain other passages where M. Maurois uses details which, so far as the reader can tell, may be either drawn from docu- mentary sources or merely imagined. Consider, for example, some sentences near the beginning of the third chapter. " 'And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth and why is thy countenance fallen?' — May Gray was reading the Bible aloud, and the little Byron was listening with passionate eagerness. He did not understand all the words but he felt the strange and terrible poetry of the Book. Why did the Lord refuse poor Cain's sacrifice? 'Because of his sin,' said May Gray. Sin? What was sin? . . . All Scotland seemed full of ghosts. ... In the darkness the child could feel evil things prowling about him." The list of sources gives four references for May Gray, but how many of the details do these sources give? Doubtless they establish the fact that she read him the Bible. But do we know that she read just that passage? Do we know that the little Byron asked specifically about sin, and that he was afraid of ghosts ? Or, to take another example: When Maurois, speaking of the expeditions which the young man made with Mary Chaworth, says that "sometimes during these excursions their bodies touched, or hand brushed hand," and when he adds that "the contact made the boy's blood leap," are these details taken from Byron's journal or are they merely the biographer's conception of what probably would happen? Perhaps these questions seem trivial, but the implications are not. The biographer must, of course, use his imagination, but the whole difference between the biography and the histori- cal novel lies just in the fact that in the former one knows when the author is interpreting or imagining, while in the second one does not, and no little part of the pleasure which belongs to the reading of biography is just the pleasure which comes from following the process of the writer as he builds his picture out of the fragments of fact. When M. Maurois says that Byron's pride was responsible for his dissipation he is using his imagination, but since no concrete fact is involved we know that he is using it. When, on the other hand, he writes of Byron's mental state at the time of his marriage ceremony: "A mist seemed to float before his eyes; he was thinking (Heaven knew why!) of the parting scene with Mary Chaworth, conjuring up the room at Annesley, the long terrace, the grassy fields, that lovely face now twitching with un- balanced fears," we do not know whether we are reading a novel or not. One may turn to the list of sources, where one will find: "Byron's thoughts during the religious service are derived from his poem 'The Dream.' " But if one happens to be one of those general readers for whom a biography like the present is intended, one will have to look up the poem to dis- cover, first, how literally these details are taken from it and, second, how nearly indisputably the poem is direct autobiography. Few will deny that M. Maurois writes the kind of thing he does write more skilfully and with greater taste than most of those who adopt similar methods, but it is still worth ask- ing whether or not it is worth while to jeopardize the difficult and beautiful art of biography by allowing it to merge even slightly with the totally different art of historical fiction. Dramatic form, vividness, and psychological significance are all virtues in biography, but the art of the biographer is the art of attaining them in the highest possible degree without adopting means which make the so-called biography into something else. Joseph Wood Krutch.

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 461 THE HUMAN MIND by Karl Menninger, M.D. Through fascinating case-histories, this well-known psychiatrist explains the puzzling eccentricities and weaknesses in your mental make-up. $5.00 CONVERSATIONS WITH GEORGE MOORE by Geraint Goodwin The individualistic opinions of this great English author on such varied subjects as fame, posterity, his fellow authors, women, life and the hereafter. $3.00 THE COLLECTED POEMS TREATISE ON THE GODS by H. L. Mencken In this extended survey of religion from primitive times to the present day, Mr. Mencken reaches some startling conclu- sions. "Easily stands among the best of his books."— Henry Hazlitt. "The best popular account we have of the origin and nature of religion." — The Forum. $3.00 PORNOGRAPHY and OBSCENITY by D. H. Lawrence This brilliant and highly original essay on censorship and the present standards of sexual morality is Mr. Lawrence's final answer to the "self-righteous mor- alists." $1.00 BOOKS BY THOMAS MANN 1929 Nobel Prizeman in Literature BUDDENBROOKS A new and cheaper edition of his most popular novel. 704 pages. Cloth binding. $2.85 EARLY SORROW His latest prose fiction. $1.50 THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN His acknowledged masterpiece. 900 pages. $3.50 OF STEPHEN CRANE This popularly priced edition is a complete and definitive collection of the poems of the author of The Red Badge of Courage and contains three hitherto unpublished poems. $2.50 PIERRE by Herman Melville Edited with an Introduction, by Robert S. Forsythe This edition of Melville's popular novel is the nearest approach to the first edition of 1852. In the Americana Deserta series. $3.00 TALL TALES OF THE SOUTHWEST An Anthology of Southern and Southwestern Humor, 1830-1860 Edited by Franklin J. Meine A rollicking collection of stories from frontier days, containing an early sketch by Mark Twain reprinted here for the first time. In the Americana Deserta series. $3.00 MAN THE HISTORY OF THE JEWS by Abram Sachar, Ph.D. The dramatic story of the Jewish race has never been more completely and adequately told in a single volume. $5.00 vs . MICROBES by Nicholas Kopeloff Dr. Kopeloff writes simply and concisely of the deadly microbes that destroy us as well as of the helpful bacteria and yeasts that are indispensable to agriculture and industry. $5.00 At All Bookshops ALFRED A. KNOPF 730 FIFTH AVENUE N. Y. When zvriting to advertisers please mention The Nation

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462 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 Russian-American Chimera The Two Frontiers. By John Gould Fletcher. Coward- McCann. $3. EMPLOYING the Spenglerian method of historical intui- tion and analogy, Mr. Fletcher arrives at the vision of Russia and America as the two great barbarian, fron- tier nations, encircling and pressing upon a harassed European civilization, and between them determining its doom. The world finds itself in the dilemma of having to make either a choice or a compromise between "the two opposed conceptions of the destiny of mankind": the triumphant new capitalism of America and the equally vigorous social mysticism of Russia. Conflict is inevitable between these giant adversaries and spells disaster for all that Europe represents of human values and arts. The duty of intelligent Russians and Americans is to "oppose the tides of bolshevism and Americanism. . . . We must save America and Russia from themselves." "The Two Frontiers," with its richness of prophecy, analogy, fantasy, and sheer nonsense, falls thus into the class of those ceuvres de synthese, those vehicles of generalization, whose frequent appearance has been an interesting sign of the time. The appealing notion of Spengler that modern man has become a historical animal, his whole attempt at a mor- phology of civilizations, has encouraged this form of specula- tion. But for this dangerous new game one needs a generous equipment; one needs a large and curious documentation and intellectual daring enough to stun or enchant the reader, now with paradox and now with brilliant intuitions. Else one comes to grief. Certainly Mr. Fletcher comes to grief. The technique of the gifted Spengler in the hands of a faltering historiographer becomes a lamentable instrument. The whole system of judg- ment by historical analogy, which lures Mr. Fletcher as far back as Egypt and Babylonia in search of parallels to the Russian and American situation, breaks down before our eyes. We become aware instead of all those terrible antitheses and baffling lacunae with which the record of man on earth abounds; so that all that passes for "philosophy of history" seems still suspect, a debased form of metaphysics. In that dark past from which all nations emerge, amid ludi- crous analogies drawn from ancient Egyptian dynasties, Assyria, or early Rome, Mr. Fletcher is simply lost upon the historical ocean. Few readers will fail to perceive the futility of liken- ing one of our Presidents to Amenophis IV, or Catharine the Great to George Washington! Nor at a later stage do any of the comparisons and contrasts between the mysterious em- pire of Eastern Europe and the colonies, the provincial repub- lic beyond the Atlantic, seem much more valid. The greatest portion of this work, devoted to a confused account alter- nately of Russian and American history, was intended no doubt to substantiate the author's convictions about the pres- ent epoch in both countries. It tells us no more than the definitive genealogy of Mr. Henry Ford, traced back to Nor- man times, would tell us about his qualities as an automobile- maker. The treatise on the growth of the two literatures during the nineteenth century is written out of a better equipment. But even here one marvels at the uselessness of likening Haw- thorne to Gogol, the Byronic Pushkin to Irving, and Mark Twain to the obscure Lyeskov. No, it would have been far better for Mr. Fletcher to have confined himself to the pres- ent, the actual character of the two great "frontier nations," which under the sign of certain ruling economic ideas seem rather to show an astonishing resemblance, even affinity, for each other than to be on the verge of deadly conflict. Once we look beyond the surface phenomena and the pro- fessed doctrines which governments conveniently choose to adopt — such as "capitalism" or "communism" or "democracy" — the actual will and impetus of these two nations declare themselves for precisely the same ideas of incessant material- istic progress. Today Russia subjects all other interests to that of the vast Five-Year Industrial Expansion Plan. And the direst Rotarian in our land could not fail to applaud such booming enterprise. The leaders of both nations have the common ideal of raising the physical dignity of the mass, while ignoring or discouraging those individual liberties, those human arts and refinements which were usually predicated of perfected societies. Both peoples are apathetic toward politics: no such shades of opinion or opposition are tolerated as in politically minded England and France. The development of both nations, in short, is toward collectivism and uniformity in response to the working of sheer economic force, which in their case is seldom checked by the limits of tradition or religion, as in the case of the little jealous countries of old Europe. One begins to believe that Moscow is closer to Wall Street with its bee- hives of engineers and promoters than to our political liber- tarians who make abortive demonstrations in its honor. The American ideals of Ford and Edison have been added to the Russian religion of equality and state service. And by the same token one may hope that a certain moral fervor will some day he communicated to Americans by Russia's example, so that a heightened social responsibility might work again upon the somewhat successful, but rather unfinished, native system. In any case Mr. Fletcher's chimera of war between the Russian and American titans seems scarcely to justify the long, pious pilgrimage to ancient Babylonian oracles for veri- fication. One sees these giant nations, each committed to its "great experiment" by economic causes long in preparation. Neither will be stayed by issues such as freedom of thought, personal liberty, or gay passions. Art and learning, as well as the disinterested classes who contribute to them, will have to make shift within the system; while the old illuminated na- tions of Europe can hardly hope, through the force of their culture or their rooted prejudices alone, to combat the resistless economic tides that sweep upon them today. Matthew Josephson Witnesses Against War Temoins. By Jean Norton Cru. Paris: Les Etincelles. 100 francs. A REMARKABLE book, of great interest to historians, psychologists, librarians, pacifists, students of literature, and many others. Unless suppressed by a conspiracy of silence it will cause many a militarist to rage and many a French writer to gnash his teeth, but it deserves to be con- sulted carefully as a notable contribution to what war really is. It confirms Sherman's dictum. Mr. Cru has collected, annotated, analyzed, and skilfully compared several hundred French war diaries, reminiscences, reflections, and novels of persons who claim to have fought at the front and to have been "witnesses" of the realities of the World War. With extraordinary diligence he has ferreted out a brief biography of each writer, indicated all the regiments or divisions, with dates, to which he successively belonged, and given brief typical selections from the works of each. His closely printed volume of more than 700 large pages is both a bibliography and to some extent a critical anthology of the war literature of the common poilu like himself. In addition to a very complete index he has added eleven ingenious analyses, which enable the reader to find out what the men in the

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\pril 16, 1930] The Nation 463 :rcnches thought and wrote about, and which give interesting statistics of their ages, peace occupations, geographical origins, ighting sectors, and publishers. Mr. Cru, though a professor at Williams College, was jorn in France and fought throughout the war. He under- itands thoroughly the psychology of his fellow poilus. By com- paring their written accounts, by using maps, and by internal ividence, he is able to sift out discriminatingly the relatively few reliable and accurate books from the majority which are vitiated by ignorance, imagination, self-importance, and the false bombast of "glory." One of his tests, for instance, is the boilu's reference to rain, which is easily checked up. One author he discredits because he uses Boche in August, 1914, whereas the true word in the first weeks of the war was ilboche, the shorter form not coming into general use until the early autumn of 1914. He uncovers the plagiarism from :he memoir writers of the Napoleonic period. By intensive itudy of this kind he is able to rescue from obscurity or oblivion ;uch excellent and reliable writers as Ardant du Picq, Deau- nlle, Genevoix, Lintier, and Pezard; and also to dissect with levastating criticism such ignorant, overestimated, and fantas- ic best-sellers as Barbusse, Bertrand, Pericard, and Stephane l»auzanne. Mr. Cru concludes that whatever illusions about the ;lory of war the poilu may have had at mobilization, as soon is he was in the mud of the trenches with shells exploding round him his dominant thoughts were fear, weariness, horror, isgust, and the desire to live and to leave. He has some scath- lg remarks about staff officers, both on account of their out- f-date prejudices arising from hard-boiled past training and n account of their ignorance of front-line conditions. It is Dmewhat the point of view of Philip Gibbs's "Now It Can Be "old" or of Jean de Pierrefeu's "Plutarch a menti." It is to be hoped that similar studies may be made of Jerman, English, and American "witnesses." Spade-work of lis kind, distinguishing fact from fancy, will be of great ser- ice to the future historian. It will also debunk the notion i the gloriousness of war, show its utter terribleness for those i the front line, and consequently strengthen the peace move- ment. Sidney B. Fay Dr. Levin's Life outh in Revolt. By Shmarya Levin. Translated by Maurice Samuel. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $3.50. r N The Nation for January 1 I reviewed Dr. Levin's de- lightful and moving "Childhood in Exile" without knowing that it was only the prelude to what promises to be one the important autobiographies of our time. This second vol- ne carries on its author's personal fortunes through the eight- s and nineties, in and out of high schools and universities, id from Russia to Germany. But it is much more than a rsonal record. Along with the youthful Levin we come to ips with Russian history and Jewish sufferings; we pass rough the terrible period of the pogroms; we go deeply into \z whole Jewish question; and we make contacts with the :|nal revolutionary forces. Dr. Levin, of course, writes from j: standpoint of the profoundly sincere Jewish Nationalist, the jonist, a man who has devoted his life brilliantly and effec- ely to a single cause. And though the style is graceful and ijbane there is no compromise in the point of view. But what- ler one's political views, one will be deeply moved as one I serves the naive country boy developing into the hot-blooded I'Jng dialectician, the university student in the thick of every ^vish Nationalist disturbance, meeting leaders, writing poetry 1 essays, and making passionate speeches. Here is a young NEW BIOGRAPHY Anne Hutchinson — An American Jezebel by Helen Augur "The central character is so thoroughly feminine, so thoroughly alive, there is so much poetry and so much passion in her, that she ought to prove enthralling to many readers." — Gamaliel Brad- ford. $3.50 LAUD — Storm Center of Stuart England by Robert P. Tristram Coffin One of the most dramatic characters in English history — the Ram of God — the Man of Thunder — the Shepherd in Purple who handled his crook like a sceptre and wore his prelate's cap like a crown. $3.50 The Empress Elizabeth of Austria by Karl Tschuppik "This story of Elizabeth bears the stamp of ve- racity and is distinguished by an intuitive perception of the conflict of temperaments." — London Times. $4.00 August Strindberg — The Bedeviled Viking by V. J. McGlLL A complete revelation of this Titan, of his three wives, three divorces, fifty books and his ceaseless battle on the borderland of insanity. $4.00 Lope de Vega — Monster of Nature by Angel Flores A colorful Don Juan, a jovial friar, a daring sol- dier, an incorrigible wit, a brilliant author. To quote Cervantes, "Behold the Monster of Nature, the great Lope de Vega." $3.50 BRENTANOS Publishers New York When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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464 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 HARPER BOOKS STEPHEN ESCOTT By LUDWIG LEW1SOHN "The book is written with such restraint, so meticu- lous a selection of words, that it is read throughout with a remarkable pleasure. Definitely one of the best novels written today."— New York Sun. $2.50 ENGLAND By W1LHELM DIBELWS "I know no better book en England than that of Dibelius. Within its scope It is not unworthy to stand with books like those of Bryce on America and Bodley on France. "—Harold J. La ski. $5.00 CHRISTINE AND OTHER STORIES By JULIAN GREEN Four short novels by the author of "The Dark Jour- ney" and "The Closed Garden." "They are typical both of his talents and of his interest. These stories pile up evidence for Mr. Green's mastery of a rich finished style."— The Outlook. $2.50 EMILY DICKINSON By JOSEPHINE POLLITT "As charming as any novel. The most noteworthy chapters are written about Miss Dickinson's un- happy love affair with Lieutenant Hunt, which is treated with the dignity such a human drama deserves."— The New Yorker. $4.00 THE FOOL'S PARADE By JOHN W. VANDERCOOK "In this strange and colorful collection of stories the reader feels that in Africa anything may prove to have life — the river, the jungle, the continent. This is the author of 'Black Majesty' at his best." — N. Y. Evening Post. $2.50 MATA HARI : Courtesan and Spy By MAJOR THOMAS COULSON "Major Coulson is to be congratulated upon having shown her as she was — a pagan adventuress with nothing feminine about her but physical grace and quick intelligence."— Sir Basil Thomson. $3.00 OL' KING DAVID AN' PHILISTINE BOYS By ROARK BRADFORD THE "Here those who chuckled over the first book about 'Ol' Man Adam' and who have sampled the rich- ness of 'Green Pastures' may read anew about the I.itMii's efforts to improve the manners and con- dition of his earthly children."— Harry Hansen. $2.50 THE 42nd PARALLEL By JOHN DOS PASS OS "The book has the effect of setting the reader down in the midst of America with some of the terror of being in a Chicago gun fight, and some of the exhilaration and chaos of Broadway at night, and much of the passion and misery of private lives anywhere." — Gilbert Seldes. $2.50 PURE GOLD By O.E.ROLVAAG Author of "Giants in the Earth" "A tenser and tighter book than the two preceding novels by Kolvaag. It is powerful because it is so concrete and sure in its progression."— N. Y. Herald Tribune. $2.50 HARPER & BROTHERS 49 East 33rd Street, New York man who had something to work for, to fight for, to dream for. Here is a type of the university student of whom one has read — the type who in times past has played an important part in every revolution, but a type which, alas, in our own glorified institutions one has never seen. Many fascinating people crowd this vivid story of intellectual youth. Some are old friends from Swislowitz; some are or are to become famous — scholars, Jew- ish leaders, socialist leaders. One expects to hear more of them in the forthcoming volumes of the work. Fred T. Marsh The Sitwells Present The Man Who Lost Himself. By Osbert Sitwell. Coward- McCann. $2.50. IT was to be expected after the first flurries of Anglicized French verse, after "Fagade" and the sea farce and "South- ern Baroque Art" that the problems besetting the nove! would not have long to wait for a Sitwellian solution. It was equally to be expected that the result would follow the family'f general characteristics and be original, brilliant, and a triflt confused. Many of the aesthetics of Mr. Osbert Sitwell's book mus be discounted. Whether biography is the only material whid offers a perfect design for a novel; whether, to obtain a prope perspective of a man living today, it is necessary to postulat the remote future; whether the typical twentieth-centur novel will set a balance between mind and action are question Mr. Sitwell plays with but to which he makes no definite re plies. What is important is that, eschewing the paths of th advance guard of the modernists, Joyce and Proust, refusing t chart another stream of consciousness or to record the psy chology of a social stratum, Mr. Sitwell trys to weave a pat tern between a mental phenomenon and a landscape. Poe, b J divorcing both his characters and setting from reality, achieve magnificent designs, and Mr. Sitwell might well have succeede within realistic bounds had he not chosen a phenomenon whic could have occurred if Tristram Orlander had stayed in Lor don and never set foot in Granada. The gifted young authc whose unrequited love affair eventually told on his nerves e> perienced his readjustments to life in acute visionary form but what Mr. Sitwell fails to show is the indisputable influenc of Granada on these experiences. The result is a cleavage i the design: Tristram never really merges with his backgrounc his story and Granada's never become one. Yet this separation confusing as it is in view of the author's emphasis of his teel nique, does not harm the essential quality of the work. "The Man Who Lost Himself" is ironic fantasy such s only the Sitwells concoct with grace. Its impressions of gr< tesque beauty are built as much from the delicate mixture ( farce, realism, and a peculiarly poetic awareness of nature infinite guises as from the tragedy of Tristram's fatal sens tiveness. The picture of Granada, of its changing shape colors, odors, and sounds under the rising and setting sun ar moon, succeeds in that most difficult of all descriptive tasks — tl creation of a personality for a portion of the earth's surfac What the great romantic poets were wont to. do for the Rhii and Greece Mr. Sitwell does for this hill in Spain. On tl pages from which this image rises is some of the richest coi temporary prose — prose which for its fecundity, resilience, ar dignity reverts for comparison to the masters of the eighteen century. Rhetoric of this kind, with its intricate structural ar emotional convolutions, is a lost art among the cinematic write of the day, but as Mr. Sitwell revives it, it contains inflectioi of wit and elegance which are not to be ignored. Florence Codman W ken writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 465 Films Delightful Lunacy TODAY the author's part in the talking picture is un- doubtedly much more important than it used to be in the days of the silent picture, but his exact contribution till remains a great deal of a mystery. As an example one nay quote "The Man from Blankley's" (Central), the honors if whose authorship are distributed by the program among the author," the "screen adapter," and the "dialogist." In this ase therefore, unless one has read Mr. Anstey's original story, ne really does not know whether the credit for the delightful ialogue of the picture should go to him or to the "dialogist" ; ; or does one know whether upon him or the "screen adapter" hould be fastened the blame for the thinness of the plot and -he triviality of some of the scenes. Despite this uncertainty, owever, let it be stated with all haste that "The Man from Uanlcley's" is a picture decidedly different from the general run f Hollywood productions. It has "quality" — the quality of ibtle and imaginative literary intelligence — shining through its ,nes, though it lacks similar distinction in its dramatic and (nematic aspects. It gives one a quite pleasant shock to discover a world as pignantly grotesque and whimsical as that in "Alice in Won- • srland" or in Chekhov's "The Wedding" in what ostensibly is i unpretentious farcical comedy poking gentle fun at a collec- ,on of Victorian freaks. Indeed, the Dickensian flavor of the cture, to which reference is made in the program, extends no iirther than the make-up and costumes of its characters, ■ hereas there is a distinct echo of Lewis Carroll and Chekhov the delicious disquisition on the peculiarities of scarabs, and I such bits of conversation as the remark by one of the guests ,iat "hair does not grow under the legs of a rhinoceros." The , riking resemblance of "The Man from Blankley's" to "The Tedding" can hardly escape notice, particularly in the parallel a lord and a general who unknown to themselves act the ,irts of hired guests at a party. But in both plays the plot is dy a peg on which the authors hang the wistful lunacy of eir characters, and one's only regret is that compared with ,hekhov's play "The Man from Blankley's" is just a little too me. Mr. John Barrymore plays the tipsy lord excellently, id of the rest of the cast the midgety Miss Jones in the small rt of Miss Bugle mingles her eccentricity with almost enough thos to create a memorable image. Apart from its dialogue d acting the picture can boast of no cinematic virtues. It litates the stage quite expertly, but gets no farther than that. is to be hoped that even Hollywood will one day realize that lematic treatment of dialogue is not confined to close-ups of e speaking characters. Though Hollywood has not yet learned how to give music om the screen instead of reproducing it as it is given from yz stage, Mr. John McCormack's "Song o' My Heart" (Forty- Jrth Street Theater) deserves praise for the technical quality •) its reproduction of sound and the simplicity and persuasive i|inquillity of its acting and setting. One does not look for any kind of "sophistication" in Mr. .lson's pictures, but it seems as if the brand of sentimental | ieal so skilfully exploited by this artist were beginning to wear her thin. "Mammy" (Warner Brothers) is, of course, an- ler instance of backstage life, this time of the minstrel variety, 1 with its simulacrum of a plot it provides Mr. Jolson with sficient opportunities for singing Irving Berlin's reminiscences c the world's music direct from the stage platform. Mr. Jol- si is a gifted enough artist to try to get away from a formula ginning to pall. Alexander Bakshy Announcing the winner of the £1000 prize offered for the best religious novel THE SHIP OF TRUTH By LETTICE ULPHA COOPER This provocative story of a young clergy- man who finds himself losing faith weaves problems of modern religious thought into the lives of real and appealing characters. $2.50 SOVIET RUSSIA By William Henry Chamberlin Many of the intimate details of everyday life and politics one wants to know are re- vealed in this unbiased history. 16 illus- trations and map. An Atlantic Book. $5.00 A FIGHTING PARSON: The Autobiography of Alexander Irvine The lively record of a poor Irish boy whose life has been a swift romance and who became one of the fore- most orators and molders of opinion in England and America. Frontispiece. An Atlantic Book. $3.00 LARSON, DUKE OF MONGOLIA By F. A. Larson A missionary - turned - horse - trader's experiences with Mongolians and their customs will interest even the most casual reader, and bear re-telling well. 16 illustrations. An Atlantic Book. $3.50 THE ROAD TO WILDCAT: A Story or Southern Mountaineering By Eleanor Risley Describes moonshiners, religious reviv- als, queer hermits, many customs and tradi- tions of a strange and fascinating country. 14 illustrations. An Atlantic Book. $2.50 BAUDELAIRE : Flesh and Spirit By Lewis Piaget Shanks A sympathetic and revelatory study of a strange figure whose fame as the founder of a new school of poetry and producer of beautiful verse lives to-day. 8 illustrations. $3.50 Considered by many critics his best and most important work since "Napoleon" LINCOLN By EMIL LUDWIG This human story of the Great American is now kindling the imaginations and hearts of thousands of Americans. "It is more like 'Napoleon' than any other of his biographies." — St. Louis Globe - Democrat. 15 illustra- tions. A leading nation-wide best seller. $5.00 Boston These books are for sale at all Booksellers LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY Publishers When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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466 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 After War, What Is the World's Greatest Menace? A gigantic and deadly narcotic menace is upon our country and the world. "The yearly economic burden laid upon our people exceeds $5,000,000,000." Congressman Ftsk. There are about 1.000,- 000 addicts in the United States. Read Consequences By JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD Author of IMAQINA, tenth illustrations by Lauren Ford and Arthur Rackham. In the introduction, John Haynea Holmes says: " 'Consequences' tells a thrilling story. It may do with the narcotic or drug evil today what Mrs. Stowe'e 'Uncle Toms Cabin did with the evil of chattel slavery yesterday." Ellen LaMotte says : " 'Consequences' is a rich book. It is rich with humor, philosophy. The opium part is fine. You have com- pletely eliminated all technicalities, and simply brought out the moral question — the right of a strong nation _ to exploit a weak one. The close is very dramatic and moving." Until the people rise up against Government revenue from opium and over-production of narcotics, the tragic bondage of "THE LIVING DEAD" will increase. Dutton and all bookshops. $2.50 SPRING EXHIBITION FERAGIL GALLERIES 37 East 57th Street LAUREN FORD of whom Elizabeth L. Cary says: Her work "is steeped in the rare quality of imaginative poetry and whimsicality." Through April Twelfth WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See ••A Month in the Country — Guild — 52nd St., W. of B'dway. ••Apple Cart— Beck— 45th St., E. of Eighth Ave. •Berkeley Square — Lyceum — E. 45th St. •Civic Repertory — Until April 21st — Philadelphia, Pa. •Death Takes a Holiday — Barrymore — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •Dishonored Lady — Empire — B'dway and 40th St. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st St., E. of B'dway. •••Fifty Million Frenchmen — Lyric — W. 42nd St. •••Flying High— Apollo— W. 42nd St. ••June Moon — Broadhurst — W. 44th St. ••Rebound— Plymouth — 45th St., W. of B'dway. ••Strictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. •••Strike Up The Band— Times Sq.— W. of B'dway. •The Green Pastures — Mansfield — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •The Infinite Shoeblack— Elliot— 39th St., E. of B'dway. •The Last Mile— Sam H. Harris — ^nd St., W. of B'dway. ••Topaze — Music Box — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •Troyka — Hudson — M-th St., E. of B'dway. First Nights Jonica — Craig — 54th St., E. of B'dway. They Never Grow Up — Masque — 45th St., W. of B'dway. Films A Lady to Love — Little Carnegie — 57th St. Dance of Life; The Passion of Joan of Arc — Fifth Ave. Play- house— 66 Fifth Ave. Her Private Affair; Around the World with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson— Film Guild— 52 W. 8th St. Journey's End — Gaiety — 46th St. and B'dway. The Man From Blankley's — Central — 47th St. and B'dway. The Night Ride; The Doctor's Secret — Little Picture House — 151 East 50th St. 'Drama. "Comedy. 'Musical. Drama II Shakespeare Without Pain jl MUCH can be said in favor of the Shakespearean stock I company. To its members the bard has become an everyday affair and that fact in itself is enough to | remove one of the curses which rest upon the Shakespearean performance. No one can play him week after week without losing the awkwardness which too great reverence induces, and, nothing is more likely than too much reverence to destroy the acting value of plays which are eminently actable as well as a great many other things. Doubtless certain fine shadings are lost; but it is hardly less likely that some of them were lost when Burbage was a star, and what one seeks in the theater is not the thing which one can get better in the study but the thing which one cannot get there at all — the rush of the action and the physical confrontation of creatures endowed with flaming eloquence. No one, I suppose, ever accused Fritz Leiber or any mem ber of his company of brilliance. Neither have I ever heard serious discussion of any original interpretation invented by him, for he is, I believe, not wont to discover that Hamlet suffered from an Oedipus complex or that Shylock was a hero But he is, on the other hand, an experienced war horse whe has not only played with Julia Marlowe and Robert Mantell but barn-stormed as well, and though I do not know how many commentaries he may have read he has at least nine of th major roles by heart — which implies a certain familiarity with the text of the dramatist whom he plays. The result of it all is that the performances which he and his Chicago Civic Shake- speare Society have been giving at the Shubert have at leasi those elementary virtues which count for much. His Hamlei is clear and comprehensible, his Petruchio amusing, his Richard III rather thin, and his Lear pretty bad. But most of the per- formances are undeniably interesting, and accordingly, whatevei else Shakespeare may or may not be when thus interpreted, he certainly is not a bore. Mr. Leiber makes something of a boast of avoiding the academic. He prefers, so he says, to present Shakespeare rathei than to inflict him, and in the effort to achieve this laudable end he cuts without mercy (though by no means without judg- ment) when the occasion seems to demand. Moreover, despite his promise to present the dramatist "as he wrote," he has nc scruple against employing that most famous of interpolation; "So much for Buckingham" or, what is infinitely more objec tionable, against the rather frequent interjection of certain col loquial "well's," "why's," "yes's," and "no's" not in the text Indeed, he gags his "Taming of the Shrew" most unmercifully and seems to have forgotten that in addressing the players i few evenings before he had described that sort of thing as the result of a "most pitiful ambition." He could, in other words, be a bit more faithful without approaching pedantry, and dem- onstrate the faith he professes to have in Shakespeare's skill a; a popular entertainer by making fewer such minor improve- ments. But these are, after all, matters of no very great mo ment, and even if we insist that they are blemishes, the faci remains that much can be subtracted from Shakespeare without greatly diminishing what is left. It is not often that we get an opportunity to see any one of the plays performed with an\ sort of competence at all. Mr. Leiber gives us nine, gives then tolerably well, and on the whole gives them for their own sake; rather than because he has some trick scenery to show off oi because he has become infected with an itch to disport himsell in some production designed for his own aggrandizement. Chi cago is fortunate to have him, and I hope he will visit us again When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation '&-•"

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Lpril 16, 1930] The Nation 467 D D THEATRES D FILMS □ LECTURES □ □ The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER SKETCHES RUTH DRAPER Evenings : Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, 8 :50. "flMFnY THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats. Thurs. jU^ilui and gat 2.30 VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 Popular Price ($2.50) Matinee Saturday HERMAN SHUMLIN presents rHE LAST MILE Hast remain the last word in drama for a long: time to come." Benchley, New Yorker. i\f IT Tl A ppTC Theatre 42nd St., West of Broadway. A1Y1 XT. XZAXXIXIO Eves. 8:50. Matinees Wed. & Sat. 2:30. The Theatre Guild Presents i MONTH the COUNTRY By IVAN TURGENEV i^ 1 1 1 1 *-l THEATRE, 52nd St., W. of Broadway VJU11U Evgs. 8:30. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:30. rhe Apple Cart Bernard Shaw's Political Extravaganza f AUTTXT UliT'K' Theatre, 45th St, W. of Eurhth Ave. lAAllil OEiljJV Evgs., 8:80. Mat*., Thurs. * Sat., 2 :80 THE GROUP Invites you to its Entertainment and Dance Open House on Tuesday, April 15th, at 8:30 P. M. at Ball Room— 150 West 85th St. ORSHA will dance. JAMES PHILLIPS will sing. )aneing until 1 A. M. Admission $1.00 Sunday afternoon at 4 P. M. (April 20th) Informal Discussion Group SEYMOUR A. SELIGSON will speak on : "ARE WE CIVILIZED?" Tea will be served I mission 50c (Weekly notices mailed on request) Organized 1918 THIS \ lkr-£s-7/SEEMS to Im^y ueywood brgun /CHALLENGING EXPOSE IN TWO LECTURES RI. EVE, APR. 25 MARRIAGE MADE I HEAVEN?— Starv- g Amidst Plenty — ho Reads Books — and hy? Reserved section 75c— $1.00 Res. front seats, $1.50 FRI.EVE.,MAY2 IS SEX NECESSARY? -What's Wrong With Religion ?— What's Wrong With the Thea- tre? COMMUNITY CHURCH, 34th Street and Park Ave. for Information and Reservations: DISCUSSION GUILD 15 East 40th Street— Phone: LEX. 7483 The Greatest Screen Drama Of All Time! TIFFANY PRESENTS JOURNEY'S END From the stage play by R. C. SHERRIFF GAIETY THEATRE, B'way * 46th St. Twice Daily 2:45 — 8:45—3 Times Sat. & Sun. at 2:45—5:45 and 8:45. MID NIGHT SHOW EVERY SAT. THE LITTLE g~\ Jk ry f^J f g^* f t* PLAYHOUSE Circle 7551 ^^^V*V lN Hi Vjl Hi 146 W. 57th St. "Distinguished Motion Pictures in Distinctive Surroundings" SATURDAY TO TUESDAY, APRIL 12 TO 16 INCLUSIVE VTLMA BANKY in "A LADY TO LOVE" Her first talking picture. An adaption of the play "THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED" By Sidney Howard America's Foremost Actor tn The Screen's Smartest Comedy JOHN BARRYM0RE in "THE MAN FROM BLANKLEY'S" A Warner Bros, and Vitaphone Talking Picture. Broadway and 47th Street. Daily, 2:45—8:45; Sundays, »— 6— 8 :45 CENTRAL THEATRE b^-^.-m «* L street. FREETHINKERS OF AMERICA Friday. April 18, 8 P.M. 130 W. 56th St., N. Y. DR. A. L. F E I N B E R G Former Rabbi, will deliver an important address entitled "Should I Have Remained in the Ministry?" in this address Dr. Feinberg will answer his critics DR. E. BOYD BARRETT, Chairman (Former Jesuit Priest) Admission free Discussion

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468 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 338( MEDDLERS UPLIFTING MORAL UPLIFTERS by H. I. Brock Mr. Brock hits straight, and hard, in a book that is very likely to upset the indifference of the long- suffering American public. Nicholas Roosevelt says: "You did a fine job and I only hope you will be roundly abused by all meddlers, so that the whole country will read you. I admire your freedom from sectional, denomina- tional and occupational bias. This makes you invul- nerable— except by the meddlers themselves." "Shows to what extent minorities govern in the United States ... on every conceivable phase of censorship of the individual . . . My guess is that we are going to see more books like it. MEDDLERS is proof of the growing crystallization. As Mr. Brock suggests, . . . there ought to be a law'." — Harry Hansen in the N. Y. World. $3.00 Debunking Our Modern Thinkers THE NEW HUMANISM by Leon Samson "Presents the 'new' humanism in a simpler and a far more completely co-ordinated form than is achieved by (other) writers . . . read this spicy and provocative book and find yourself sitting up and taking notice of a writer whose skepticism is expressed with commendable candor and in words whose meaning is crystal-clear." — Robertus Love in the St. Louis Globe Democrat. ". . . thoughtful and daring attempt to solve some of the most important problems of human adjust- ment."— A. A. Brill. $3.00 At Your Bookseller's IVES WASHBURN NEW YORK When writing to advertisers Not much else of importance has appeared recently upo our Lenten stage, though "Dear Old England" (Ritz Theater is indubitably laughable. The author has taken the new poo as his theme, but treated them in the manner of the extravs ganza. The widowed Lady Shoreham has been reduced to li\ ing in a discarded tram-car set somewhere in the wastelam Other equally impoverished members of the nobility call upo her to boast of a weeding job they have secured, and whenevci the fun lags there is always a dilapidated piece of furnituil which can crash, or a goat which, to the immense delight of tr| audience, actually eats a legal document after the fashion of h,, comic-paper brethren. The general impression left is of a rathe superior college play, but there is both good humor an entertainment. Joseph Wood Krutch Some Notable Spring Books ART, ARCHITECTURE Dreier, Katherine S. Western Art and the New Era. Bre| tano's. $3.50. Drepperd, Carl W. Early American Prints. Century. $4. Faure, Elie. History of Art: The Spirit of Forms. Trar Walter Pach. v. 5. Harper. $7.50. Frankl, Paul T. Form and Re-Form: A Handbook of Mode Interiors. Harper. $5. BIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, LETTERS Addams, Jane. The Second Twenty Years at Hull Hou Macmillan. v. 2. $4. Anderson, Margaret. My Thirty Years' War. Covici-Friei $5. Andrews, C. F. Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas. Macmillan. $3. Augur, Helen. An American Jezebel: The Life of AnJ Hutchinson. Brentano's. $3.50. Boas, Louise Schutz. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. LorJ mans, Green. $3.50. Boughton, Rutland. Bach. Harper. $2. Bradford, Gamaliel. Daughters of Eve. Houghton Mifflin. Brandes, Georg. Voltaire. Trans. Otto Kruger and Pie Butler. A. and C. Boni. 2 vols. $10. Brock, H. I. Meddlers: Uplifting Moral Uplifters. Wa burn. $3. Cecil, David. The Stricken Deer, or the Life of Cowp Bobbs-Merrill. $5. Chubb, Thomas Caldecot. The Life of Giovanni Boccact A. and C. Boni. $4. Clemenceau, Georges. Memoirs of a Victory. Trans. F. Atkinson. Harcourt, Brace. $5. Coffin, Robert P. Tristram. Archbishop Laud, Storm-Cen of Stuart England. Brentano's. $3.50. Coleman, McAlister. Eugene V. Debs. Greenberg. $3.50 Claudel, Paul. Christopher Columbus. Yale University. D'Abernon, Viscount. Rapallo to Dawes: The Diary of Ambassador. Doubleday, Doran. $5. Dostoyevsky's Letters to His Wife. Trans. Elizabeth H Richard R. Smith. $5. Dunn, Waldo H. Froude and Carlyle: A Study of the G troversy. Longmans, Green. $5. Eckenrode, H. J. The First Modern President, Rutherfi B. Hayes. Dodd, Mead. $5. Erlande, Albert. Life of John Keats. Trans. Marion Roc son. Cape and Smith. $3. Finger, Charles J. Seven Horizons. Doubleday, Doran. Flores, Angel. Lope de Vega, Monster of Nature. Brentarn $3.50. Gold, Michael. Jews Without Money. Liveright. $3. please mention The Nation : : i;

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pril 16, 1930] The Nation 469 >ldsmith, Margaret and Voigt, Frederick. Hindenburg: The Man and the Legend. Harper. $4. izman, Martin Luis. The Eagle and the Serpent. Trans. Harriet V. Wishniefr. Knopf. $2.50. lrdy, Florence Emily. The Later Years of Thomas Hardy. Macmillan. v. 2. $5. :rringham, Wilmot. The Life and Times of William Har- vey. Oxford University. jtson, Leslie, ed. Shelley's Lost Letters to Harriet. Little, Brown. $8. ighes, Rupert. George Washington. Morrow, v. 3. $5. jrn, Philip Dutton and Root, Waverly Lewis. The Truth About Wagner. Stokes. $3.50. ikins, MacGregor. Emily Dickinson: Friend and Neighbor. Little, Brown. $3. kyser, Rudolf. Stendhal. Trans. Geoffrey Dunlop. Holt. $3. [ nton, Edna. Simon Kenton: His Life and Period, 1755- 1836. Doubleday, Doran. $3.50. Issler, Harry. Walther Rathenau: His Life and Work. Trans. W. D. Robson Scott and Lawrence Hyde. Har- court, Brace. $3.75. fupp: The Life of the World's Greatest Ironmaster and the Growth of His Business Seen Through His Letters. Dial. r hey, Father. The Life of Father Gerard Manley Hopkins. Oxford University. $3.50. Ivin. Shmarya. Youth in Revolt. Trans. Maurice Samuel. Harcourt, Brace. $3.50. Idwig, Emil. Lincoln. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. Little, Brown. $5. t :Gill, V. J. August Strindberg, the Bedeviled Viking. Bren- tano's. $4. Distinguished Books A HISTORY OF MODERN CULTURE Volume One— The Great Renewal: 1543-1687 By PRESERVED SMITH This volume contains an accurate and variegated survey of the intellectual progress of Western culture during the period of its great renewal. Professor Smith describes in turn the sciences, the humani- Ities and the spirit of the age as they were reflected in the work and expressed thought of the leading men of the time. $5.00 1 THE GROWTH AND DECADENCE OF CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT By J. ALLEN SMITH "The late Professor Smith appears in the present book as a quiet |>ut outspoken challenger of a good many cherished notions about J he merits of American democracy. . . . His temper is so fine, his ourage so unflinching, and his learning so obvious though carefully concealed, that what he says may not safely be neglected even if one I liMgrees."— WILLIAM MacDONALD in Current History. $3.00 Soon to appear AN INTRODUCTION TO MENTAL HYGIENE By Ernest R. Groves and Phyllis Blanchard THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN CIVILIZATION By Charles S. Johnson |JENRY HOLT ;Dne Park Avenue AND COMPANY New York Chapel Hill Announces Six New Books for Spring 1930 SOME SOUTHERN COTTON MILL WORKERS AND THEIR VILLAGES By Jennings J. Rhyne Gaston County, the scene of the recent labor struggles, is likewise the scene of this book, which treats of 500 families in the four types of mill villages represented in that area. Housing, wages, hours, mobility, origin of family, relationships with management — and many other aspects of mill village conditions have been studied. The survey was made before the strike and was pre- pared for the Institute for Research in Social Science under the direction of Professor Howard W. Odum. Ready noiu. $2.50 THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN NORTH CAROLINA By Clarence G. Norton An account covering one of the most important periods of our history — 1835-1861 — and dealing with the issues that culminated in the Civil War. It discloses the background of much party machinery familiar to us today. May. $3.00 THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY SHERIFF By Cyrus Harreld Karraker Studies of local government have given too little attention to English origins. This volume, containing many illustrative docu- ments not before printed, does give the background, showing how local government diverged from the orginal in colonial Virginia and Maryland, and using the sheriff as a typical officer of that background and of the departures from it. May. $2.50 NORTH CAROLINA: Economic and Social By Samuel Huntington Hobbs, Jr. In these days of ballyhoo it is often very difficult to come upon an honest appraisal of a state. Yet that is what Mr. Hobbs has made in this survey of North Carolina's resources, wealth, indus- tries, population, agriculture, water power, education, illiteracy ratios, farm tenancy, etc. He has studied the state closely for 15 years and knows whereof he speaks. His book is therefore a model for "home-state" studies. May. $3.00 MATERIALS FOR THE LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE By Pierce Butler Not an outline, but a narrative, in which the most important source documents are deftly inserted at their proper places and slightly modernized for convenient reading. Particular emphasis is placed on those materials relating to contemporary opinion of Shake- speare. A book for the reader, teacher, and student of Shakespeare and for libraries lacking Shakespeare sources. April. $2.00 RELEASED: A BOOK OF VERSE By Anne Blackwell Payne A slender little first volume of lyric verse by a Southern poet whose work has appeared in leading magazines and poetry an- thologies. Her sonnets, light lyrics, and "poems for a child" are all admirably sincere, simple, clear in imagery, and true in their rhythms. April. $1.50 The University of North Carolina Press When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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470 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 Write for the complete International catalogue THE NINETEEN By A. FADEYEV The outstanding So- viet novel. An heroic episode in the Russian Civil War, beautifully presented. "The best of recent war novels" — London Times. $2.50 GUIDE BOOK TO THE SOVIET UNION WHITHER U.S.S.R.? THE GREAT RECONSTRUCTION By G. T. GRINKO An analysis and complete interpre- tation of the famous Soviet Five Year Plan, together with a de- tailed evaluation of the first year's progress. By the Vice Chairman of the U.S.S.R. State Planning Commission. $2.50 THE IMPERIALIST WAR By V. I. LENIN The causes and back- ground of the World War. The fourth vol- ume to be issued of Lenin's own writings. $4.50 The only guide available to the U.S.S.R. Complete tourist informa- tion: hotels, railways, etc. combines the functions of guide, book of gen- eral information and a handy atlas. Many large, folding, colored maps. You cannot properly visit the So- viet Union without it. $5.00 "It is impossible to understand our his- toric present or con- jecture the future without taking him into account." — The Ne<w Freeman. Send for complete descrip- tion of this series. INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS CO. INCORPORATED 3SI FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK LOVE t'hNe MACHINE AGE A Psychological Study of the Transition from. Patriarchal Society By Floyd Dell A lucid, straightforward inquiry into the sex problems that face us today. "Love in the Machine Age" is readable, stimulating — free of hysteria and cant. Dr. William A. White, of St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, calls it "altogether satisfying, constructive and profoundly significant." $3.50 FARRAR & RINEHART 12 East 41st Street, New York Martet, Jean. The Life of Georges Clemenceau, as Told by Himself to His Secretary. Longmans, Green. $5. Maurois, Andre. Byron. Trans. Hamish Miles. Appleton. $5. May, J. Lewis. Cardinal Newman. Dial. $3.50. Meyer, Ernest L. "Hey ! Yellowbacks !" The War Diary of a Conscientious Objector. Day. $2. Michaud, Regis. Emerson, the Enraptured Yankee. Harper. $4. Mottram, R. H., Easton, John, and Partridge, Eric. Three Men's War. Harper. $3. Palmer, John. Moliere. Brewer and Warren. $5. Pancoast, Charles Edward. A Quaker Forty-Niner. Uni- versity of Pennsylvania. $3.50. Papini, Giovanni. Life and Myself. Trans. D. Emmrich. Brentano's. $3. Pollitt, Josephine. Emily Dickinson. Harper. $4. Preston, John Hyde. A Gentleman Rebel: The Exploits of Anthony Wayne. Farrar and Rinehart. $5. Robertson, William Spence. The Life of Miranda. University of North Carolina. 2 vols. $10. Rodionow, Tarasow. February. Trans. William A. Drake. Covici-Friede. $5. Sforza, Carlo. Makers of Modern Europe. Bobbs-Merrill. $5. Shanks, Lewis Piaget. Baudelaire: Flesh and Spirit. Little, Brown. $3.50. Shaw, Clifford R. The Delinquent Boy's Own Story. Uni- versity of Chicago. $3. Sitwell, Edith. Alexander Pope. Cosmopolitan. $4. Springer, Fleta Campbell. According to the Flesh: A Biog- raphy of Mary Baker Eddy. Coward-McCann. $4. Steel, Byron. Sir Francis Bacon: The First Modern Mind. Doubleday, Doran. $3. Stephenson, Nathaniel Wright. Aldrich, an Inner Leader of American Politics. Scribner's. $6. Terry, C. Sanford. John Christian Bach. Oxford University. $8.50. The Diary of Tolstoy's Wife. Brewer and Warren, v. 2. $3.50. Van Loon, Hendrik. R. V. R. : The Story of an Artist in the 17th Century. Liveright. $4. Warner, Arthur. A Landlubber's Log: Around the World as Sailor and Tramp. Little, Brown. $3. Wassermann, Jacob. Columbus: Don Quixote of the Seas. Trans. Eric Sutton. Little, Brown. $3.50. Werner, Johannes. The Love Letters of Ernst Haeckel. Trans. Ida Zeitlin. Harper. $3. Werner, M. R. "Orderly!" Cape and Smith. $2.50. Wilson, P. W. William Pitt the Younger. Doubleday, Doran. $3. Wrangel, General. The Memoirs of. Trans. Sophie Goul- ston. Duffield. $6. DRAMA, MUSIC Beerbohm, Max. Around Theatres. Knopf. 2 vols. $7.50. Chekhov, Anton. That Worthless Fellow Platonov. Trans. John Cournos. Dutton. $2.50. Yeats, W. B. Oepidus at Colonus. Random House. $10. ECONOMICS, SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, LAW Barnes, Harry Elmer. World Politics in Modern Civilization. Knopf. $6.50. Bates, Ernest Sutherland. This Land of Liberty. Harper. $2.50. Beard, Charles A., ed. Toward Civilization. Longmans, Green. $3. Bent, Silas. Machine-Made Man. Farrar and Rinehart. $3. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 471 Catlin, George E. G. A Study of the Principles of Politics. Macmillan. $6. Dennett, Mary Ware. Who's Obscene? Vanguard. $2.50. Douglas, Paul H. Real Wages in the United States. Hough- ton Mifflin. $7.50. Dubreuil, H. Robots or Men? Harper. $3.50. Ernst, Morris L. and Lorentz, Pare. Censored: The Private Life of the Movies. Cape and Smith. $3.50. Ford, Henry and Crowther, Samuel. Moving Forward. Doubleday, Doran. $3.50. Frank, Glenn. Politics in a Machine Age. Macmillan. $2. Frankfurter, Felix and Greene, Nathan. The Labor Injunc- tion. Macmillan. $5. Glueck, Sheldon and Eleanor T. Five Hundred Criminal Ca- reers. Knopf. $5. Grodinsky, Julius. Railroad Consolidation. Appleton. $3.50. Haas, Wilhelm. What Is European Civilization? And What Is Its Future? Oxford University. $1. Haider, Carmen. Capital and Labor Under Fascism. Colum- bia University. $4.50. Johnson, Charles S. The Negro in American Civilization. Holt. $4.50. Keynes, John Maynard. A Treatise on Money. Harcourt, Brace. 2 vols. $8. Laski, Harold J. The Dangers of Obedience. Harper. $2.50. Lehmann-Russbuldt, Otto. War for Profits. Trans. Pierre Loving. Alfred H. King. $1.75. Macy, John. About Women. Morrow. $2.50. Mazur, Paul M. America Looks Abroad: The New Eco- nomic Horizons. Viking. $3. Nearing, Scott. Imperialism. Vanguard. $2.50. Pupin, Michael. Romance of the Machine. Scribner's. $2. Randall, John Herman. A World Community. Stokes. $2.50. Rappard, William E. Uniting Europe. Yale University. $3. Rhyne, Jennings J. Some Southern Cotton Mill Workers. University of North Carolina. $2.50. Smith, J. Allen. The Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government. Holt. $3. Spann, Othmar. The History of Economics. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. Norton. $3.50. Warburg, Paul M. The Federal Reserve System. Macmillan. 2 vols. $15. ESSAYS, CRITICISM, LITERARY HISTORY Eliot, T. S., West, Rebecca, and Sitwell, Edith, etc. Tradition and Experiment in Present-Day Literature. Oxford Uni- versity. $2.50. Foerster, Norman, ed. Humanism and America. Farrar and Rinehart. $3.50. Freeman, Joseph, Kunitz, Joshua, and Lozowick, Louis. Voices of October: Art and Literature in Soviet Russia. Van- guard. $4. Josephson, Matthew. Portrait of the Artist as American. Harcourt, Brace. $3. Kallen, Horace M. Indecency and the Seven Arts. Liveright. $2.50. Lohrke, Eugene. Armageddon, the World War in Literature. Cape and Smith. $5. Orage, A R. The Art of Reading. Farrar and Rinehart. $2.50. Quiller-Couch, Arthur. Studies in Literature. Third Series. Putnam's. $2.50. Rosewater, Victor. History of Cooperative Newsgathering in the United States. Appleton. $3.50. Stowell, F. M. and Dickinson, G. Lowes. Goethe and Faust. Dial. $3.50. Zweig, Stefan. Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. Viking. $3.50. A poet . . . much better than he should have been Alexander POPE by Edith Sitwell A biography of the man as the arti- fice and intrigue of his times made him — and of the poet who raised himself to immortality by sheer genius. SJ. nn "Challenging, brilliant, ruthless." — Arnold Bennett. Two important books on the new psychology by Dr. Alfred ADLER Problems of Neurosis Going beyond Freud, Dr. Adler finds the source of psychic difficulties within the individual, and points the way to new courage. The Pattern of Life A 6tudy of child psychology, and Each particularly of the problem child, $3.00 charting a safe course for the formative years. A hilarious satire on the movies by the author of STREET SCENE ELMER RICE A Voyage to Purilia "Satire of a high order ... A savage and grotescpie contortion of the truth as it is known to every man of sense." — N. Y. Times. Price $2.50 COSMOPOLITAN BOOK CORPORATION When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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472 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 THE NEW FREEMAN, 112 East 19th St., New York I enclose herewith my check for $4.00 for which you will send The New Freeman for one year to NOTE: Special offer of $4.00 a year expires May 1, 1930. Subscription rate $5.00 a year thereafter. For the new VIEWPOINT the new PLAYS the new LITERATURE the new MUSIC Read the new FREEMAN There is nothing static in its policy, its opinions, its list of contributors. Are you missing its weekly budget of vigorous thinking and lively criticism? If so, begin your subscription with the current issue before it is too late to catch up. 15c the copy $4.00 a year until May 1 The new 112 East 19th Street FREEMAN New York City Just Published American Charities and Social Work . . By Amos G. Warner, Stuart A. Queen (University of Kansas), and Ernest B. Harper (Kalamazoo College). Fourth Edition {26th printing) Revised and Reset The "Charities" of 1893 and the "social work" of 1929 display striking differences. Professor Queen has contributed an introduc- tory section giving the reader a perspective of the whole field. Then comes the original Warner material, which is followed by a sur- vey of recent social work. The new material comprises two-thirds of the entire text. 630 pages, $3.75 THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY 393 Fourth Avenue New York FICTION Love and the Luxembourg. Covici-Friede. ^ovici- $1.50. Wyck Live- $2.50. Aldington, Richard. Friede. $10. Alverdes, Paul. The Whistlers' Room Amiel, Henri Frederic. Amiel's Philine. Trans. Van Brooks. Houghton Mifflin. $3. Asch, Sholom. The Mother. Trans. Nathan Ausubel. right. $2.50. Benoit, Pierre. Axelle. Trans. Rita Wellman. Dial. Benstead, C. R. Retreat. Century. $2.50. Bloch, Jean-Richard. "— & Co." Trans. C. K. Scott Mon- crieff. Simon and Schuster. $3. Bowen, Stirling. Wishbone. Dutton. $2.50. Bradford, Roark. Ol' King David an' the Philistine Boys. Harper. $2.50. Callaghan, Morley. It's Never Over. Scribner's. $2.50. Calverton, V. F. Three Strange Lovers. Macaulay. $2.50. Chamson, Andre. The Crime of the Just. Trans. Van Wyck Brooks. Scribner's. $2. Coffey, John. Lockstep. Day. $2.50. Dahlberg, Edward. Bottom Dogs. Simon and Schuster. $2.50. de la Mare, Walter. Desert Islands. Farrar and Rinehart. $3. de Unamuno, Miguel. Three Exemplary Novels and a Pro- logue. Trans. Angel Flores. A. and C. Boni. $2.50. Dos Passos, John. The 42nd Parallel. Harper. $2.50. Eggebrecht, Axel. Pilgrim to the Abyss. Alfred H. King. $2.50. Ehrenbourg, Ilya. The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurento. Trans. Usick Vanzler. Covici-Friede. $2.50. Erskine, Tohn. Uncle Sam, in the Eyes of His Family. Bobbs- Merrill. $2.50. Fadeyev, A. The Nineteen. International. $2.50. Ferber, Edna. Cimarron. Doubleday, Doran. $2.50. Fergusson, Harvey. Footloose McGarnigal. Knopf. $2.50. Fleg, Edmond. The Life of Solomon. Trans. Viola Gerard Garvin. Dutton. $3. Freeman, H. W. Down in the Valley. Holt. $2.50. Gide, Andre. The Immoralist. Trans. Dorothy Bussy. Knopf. $2.50. Gorki, Maxim. Bystander. Cape and Smith. $3. Green, Julian. Christine and Other Stories. Harper. $2.50. Guedalla, Philip. The Missing Muse. Harper. $2.50. Hasek, Jaroslav. The Good Soldier, Schweik. Trans. Paul Selver. Doubleday, Doran. $3. Hergesheimer, Joseph. The Party Dress. Knopf. $2.50. Heyward, Dorothy. Three-a-Day. Century. $2.50. Hull, Helen. The Asking Price. Coward-McCann. $2.50. Huxley, Aldous. Brief Candles. Doubleday, Doran. $2.50. Jesse, F. Tennyson. The Lacquer Lady. Macmillan. $2.50. Lewisohn, Ludwig. Stephen Escott. Harper. $2.50. Maugham, W. Somerset. The Gentleman in the Parlour. Doubleday, Doran. $3. Mauriac, Francois. The Family. Trans. Lewis Galantiere. Covici-Friede. $2.50. Mavnard, Lawrence M. The Pig Is Fat. Farrar and Rine- hart. $2.50. Metcalfe, John. Arm's-Length. Scribner's. $2.50. Neumann, Alfred. Guerra. Trans. Huntley Paterson. Knopf. $3. King Haber. Alfred H. King. $2.50. Flood. Trans. William A. Drake. Covici- Return of the Brute. Harcourt, Brace. Neumann, Alfred. Neumann, Robert. Friede. $3. O'Flaherty, Liam $2.50. Olden, Balder. On Virgin Soil. Trans. Lorna Dietz. Ma- caulay. $2.50. ONeil, George. Special Hunger: The Tragedy of Keats. Liveright. $2.50. Ornitz, Samuel. "Call Me Ishmael." Liveright. $2.50. :! When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 473 Parsons, Alice Beal. John Merrill's Pleasant Life. Dutton. $2.50. Paterson, Isabel. The Road of the Gods. Liveright. $2.50. Paul, Elliot. The Amazon. Liveright. $2.50. Phillpotts, Eden. The Three Maidens. Richard R. Smith. $2.50. Powys, Llewelyn. Apples Be Ripe. Harcourt, Brace. $2.50. Powys, T. F. Kindness in a Corner. Viking. $2.50. Proust, Marcel. The Sweet Cheat Gone. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff. A. and C. Boni. $3. Rice, Elmer. A Voyage to Purilia. Cosmopolitan. $2.50. Richardson, Henry Handel. The Way Home. Norton. $2.50. Roberts, Elizabeth Madox. The Great Meadow. Viking. $2.50. Ryan, Don. A Roman Holiday. Macaulay. $2.50. Salten, Felix. The Hound of Florence. Trans. Huntley Pat- erson. Simon and Schuster. $2.50. Sandburg, Carl. Potato Face. Harcourt, Brace. $2. Seaver, Edwin. The Company. Macmillan. $2. Seghers, Anna. The Revolt of the Fishermen. Trans. Mar- garet Goldsmith. Longmans, Green. $2. jhiel, M. P. The Purple Cloud. Vanguard. $2.50. 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I I FROM AN EDITORIAL I Want to persuade my readers to secure the current issue of The Bookman. In my opinion, this is the most important and the most significant number ever printed. I have known The Bookman from its birth in England, October, 1891, and have but to turn around in my chair to reach for the first eleven volumes. In 1897 I left England and a little while later transferred my allegiance to The Bookman in America, whose first editor was, I believe, Professor Thurs- ton Peck. In all these years since I do not recall a single issue which, for interest, insight and courage, comes up to the one that lies on my desk at this moment. Glenway Wescott's appreciation of Elizabeth Madox Rob- erts, Chesterton's characteristic outburst on "Magic and Fan- tasy in Fiction," Francis Hackett's essay on "The Post-Vic- torians," and Hamlin Garland's "Roadside Meetings," would, by themselves, make any magazine notable. But that which makes this issue so worth while for the student of contempo- rary tendencies in literature is the space that it gives to, and the attitude it reveals toward, humanism. Not to speak of the rather militant controversy between Allen Tate and Robert Shafer on what Mr. Tate called "The Fallacy of Humanism," there are two other articles that should be read by everybody who would understand what all the excitement is about. Mr. Seward Collins, the editor, devotes his whole article on "Chronicle and Comment" to humanism. In fifteen two-column pages Mr. Collins gives his readers the most thorough and intelligent review and exposition of the humanistic movement it has ever been my good fortune to read. It would be impos- sible to give in a few paragraphs the gist of this comprehensive essay. I think there is scarcely a point at issue between hu- manists and anti-humanists on which Mr. Collins has not something illuminating to say. The whole movement is here set forth with a sympathetic understanding and a clarity of expression that makes the essay of immense value to those of my readers who know of humanism only what its enemies have ignorantly said of it. But the chief place is given to Mr. Paul Elmer More's arti- cle on "A Revival of Humanism." It is far more than the re- view of Humanism and America, which it modestly pretends to be. It is an answer — and a magnificent answer — to all those sneering critics who delight in pointing out that human- ists "can't even agree among themselves," and who draw the damning conclusion that humanism is nothing but confusion worse confounded. That there should be divergencies in so critical and delicate an attitude toward life and letters as hu- manism implies is a foregone conclusion, the human mind being what it is. But the truly impressive thing is the unanimity of humanists on certain essential and revolutionary views and attitudes. \\r g £_,. In the Foxboro (Mass.) Reporter, March 29. THE BOOKMAN At Leading News Stands When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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474 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3380 by Scott Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Development of Harvard Uni- versity, 1869-1929. Harvard University. $6. Paxson, Frederic L. When the West Is Gone. Holt. $2. Pokrovsky, M. N. History of Russia. Trans. J. D. Clark- son. International, v. 1 and v. 2. Each $3.50. Pomfret, John Edwin. The Irish Land and the Irish People. Princeton University. $3. Roosevelt, Nicholas. America and England? Cape and Smith. $3. Sachar, Abram Leon. The History of the Jews. Knopf. $5. Siegfried, Andre. France: A Study in Nationality. Yale Uni- versity. $2. Smith, Preserved. A History of Modern Culture: The Great Renewal, 1543-1687. Holt. v. 1. $5. Smuts, Jan. Africa and Some World Problems. Oxford Uni-j versity. $2.50. Author of "Black America!' "Dollar Diplomacy", etc The manuscript of this book caused Dr. Hearing's expulsion from tbe Com- munist Party. In these page* he raises the question whether the United States has entered upon an imperialist cycle comparable to that of Rome and of other empires that hare vanished. •2.50 . . . VANGUARD At Bookstore* Published March 20th 30,000 COPIES SOLD the first week Guild Publishing Corp. 19 West 44th Street, New York POETRY Bacon, Leonard. Lost Buffalo. Harper. $2. Blunden, Edmund. Near and Far. Harper. $2. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Trans, into Mod- ern English Verse by Frank Ernest Hill. Longmans, Green. $3.50. Colum, Padraic. Old Pastures. Macmillan. $1.50. Crane, Hart. The Bridge. Liveright. $2.50. Crane, Stephen. The Collected Poems of. Edited by Wilson, Follett. Knopf. $2.50. Deutsch, Babette. Fire for the Night. Cape and Smith. $2. Dreiser, Theodore. Epitaph. Autographed Edition. Liveright. $12.50. Dunsany, Lord. Fifty Poems. Putnam's. $2.50. Eliot, T. S. Ash Wednesday. Random House. $7.50. Imagist Anthology, 1930. Preface by Ford Madox Ford. Fore- word by Glenn Hughes. Covici-Friede. $3.50. Kunitz, Stanley J. Intellectual Things. Doubleday, Doran. $2. MacLeish, Archibald. New Found Land: Fourteen Poems. Houghton Mifflin. $5. Mullins, Helene. Balm in Gilead. Harper. $2. Norman, Charles. The Bright World. Morrow. $2. Quennell, Peter. Poems. Cape and Smith. $2.50. Recht, Charles. Manhattan Made. Liveright. $2. Scott, Evelyn. The Winter Alone. Cape and Smith. $2.50. PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, RELIGION, EDUCA- TION, SCIENCE, ANTHROPOLOGY Adams, George P. and Montague, William Pepperell. Con- temporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements. Macmillan. $5. Adler, Alfred. Problems of Neurosis. Cosmopolitan. $3. Allen, A. H. Burlton. Pleasure and Instinct. Harcourt, Brace $5. Broad, C. D. Five Types of Ethical Theory. Harcourt, Brace $4. Coulange, Louis. The Rise and Fall of the Devil. Trans. Stephen Haden Guest. Knopf. $5. Darrow, Floyd L. The New World of Physical Discovery Bobbs-Merrill. $3.50. Dell, Floyd. Love in the Machine Age. Farrar and Rinehart. $3. Fishbein, Morris. Shattering Health Superstitions. Liveright $2. Fisher, H. A. L. Our New Religion. Cape and Smith. $2.50 Fite, Warner. The Living Mind. Dial. $3.50. Fulop-Miller, Rene. The Power and Secrets of the Jesuits Trans. F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait. Viking. $5. Goldberg, Isaac. The Fine Art of Living. Stratford. $2.50 Grudin, Louis. A Primer of Aesthetics. Covici-Friede. $3. When writing to advertisers flease mention The Nation

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April 16, 1930] The Nation 475 You will Talk about this Trip the Rest of Your Life Under the auspices ef the first American or- ganization to present this country different to the Traveler— Educator— Business Man — Student. A tour, a never forgetful one, to Soviet Russia BEGINS ON MAY 28th— S. S. AQUITANIA $340 Includes Transatlantic Passage Both Ways Trip through the North Sea on S. S. Lancastria 1st Class Hotels in Russia 3 Meals Daily Railway with Sleeper Sightseeing Tours Services of an English-speaking Guide Taxes on American Passports. Cost of the Soviet Visa Illustrated Booklets, Itineraries, etc., y Mailed on Request. 3RLD TOURISTS, Inc. ifth Ave. New York Algonquin 6656 — -^—= New York's First Labor Bank We share profits with our depositors. Therefore Pay to our Thrift Accounts All deposits made until April 20th will bear interest from April 1st HE AMALGAMATED BANK OF NEW YORK 11-15 UNION SQUARE The Gaiety of Speed UROPfl In Lloyd Express DRGTlffl Less than five days to Europe on the world's two fastest liners. The COLUM3US is now re-turbined and stream-lined for speed. Lloyd Cabin Quartet Weekly Sailings by BERLIN -STUTTGART MUENCHEN -DRESDEN Every Lloyd Liner Carries Tourist Third Cabin. NORTH GERMAN LIOYD 57 Broadway, N. Y., or your local agent Visits t Soviet Russ i Twenty-five days in the Soviet Union Leningrad, Moscow, Volga, Rostov, the Ukraine . . . agricultural and industrial regions. Leader Colston E. Warne, Prof, of Economics, U. of Pittsburgh. Sailing from New York S.S. Bremen — June 28. Price from New York, $696. Price from Lubeck, Germany — ■ July 5— $495. Registration open Ttcenty Days Leningrad, Moscow, Villages, Kiev . . . surveying social legislation and community welfare programs. Leader Karl Borders, Asso- ciate Director, Chicago Commons. Sailing from New York S.S. Bremen — June 28. Price from New York, $650. Price from Lubeck, Germany — July 5 — $449. Registration open Other Parties Diversified itineraries allowing from 5 to 36 days in Russia ; sailings May 3, 14, 30, June 3, 18, 24, 28, July 5, 24, August 21. Each party limited to eight plus American leader. 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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476 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 338» jiiiHiiiiHinmiiiiimiiiiwuiMinimniiiiiiMwwiii ■■»»■•■■••••■»■■■•■••' Building for Happiness The common impression that social work is primarily concerned with salvaging unfortunates is only partly correct. Social work is concerned not only with normalizing the socially maladjusted individual but also with building up a happier and culturally richer community life. In Jewish social work the oppor- tunities for constructive work are especially numer- ous and promising. Have you chosen your career? If not, you should examine carefully the advantages, both tangible and intangible, of Jewish Social Work as a Profession A number of scholarships ajid fellowships ranging from $150 to $1000 for each school year are avail- able for especially qualified candidates. May 9 is the last date for filing application for the $1000 and $750 fellowships. For full information vvrite to M. J. Karpf, Director The Training School For Jewish Social Work A Graduate School 67-71 W. 47th St., New York City ■■•■■••■■■•■••■•■••■>■■■■■*•■••••■■■*■■•■••••••••■•••••» Visit Russia Intellectuals, social workers, professional men and women are welcomed most cordially in Soviet Russia. . . . .... where the world's most gigantic social experiments are being made — amidst a galaxy of picturesque nationalities, wondrous scen- ery, splendid architecture and exotic civili- zations. . . . .... with Continental standards of safety and comfort in a land as yet untrodden by tourists. Send for booklet "N" Amalgamated Bank Travel Dept. 11 -IS Union Square, New York City or Amalgamated Trust & Savings Bank III West Jackson Blvd., Chicago, 111. Jennings, H. S. The Biological Basis of Human Natui Norton. $4. Kopeloff, Nicholas. Man Versus Microbes. Knopf. $5. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Revolt Against Dualism. Norton. $ Martin, Everett Dean. Liberty. Norton. $3. Mencken, H. L. Treatise on the Gods. Knopf. $2.50. Menninger, Karl. The Human Mind. Knopf. $5. Millikan, Robert A. Science and the New Civilization. Scril ner's. $2. Morgan, C. Lloyd. Mind at the Crossways. Holt. $3.75. Miiller-Lyer, F. The Evolution of Modern Marriage. Trai Isabella Wigglesworth. Knopf. $4. Nicod, Jean. Foundations of Geometry and Induction. Ha court, Brace. $5. Paget, Richard. Human Speech. Harcourt, Brace. $6 Parsons, T. R. The Materials of Life. Norton. $3. Powys, Llewelyn. Christianity. Lippincott. $1. Redfield, Robert. Tepoztlan: A Mexican Village. Universi of Chicago. $3. Riley, Woodbridge. The Meaning of Mysticism. Richard Smith. $1.25. Robertson, J. M. A History of Free Thought in the Nir teenth Century. Putnam's. 2 vols. $7.50. Samson, Leon. The New Humanism. Washburn. $3. Singer, Charles. Religion and Science. Cape and Smith. $.( Slosson, Edwin E. Short Talks on Science. Century. $2. Thomson, J. Arthur. Modern Science. Putnam's. $3.50, Warbeke, John M. The Searching Mind of Greece. Do< Mead. $5. Webb, Clement C. J. Pascal's Philosophy of Religion. C ford University. $2. Wickham, Harvey. The Unrealists. Dial. $3.50. Woolley, C. Leonard. Dead Towns and Living Men. Oxfc University. $2.50. TRAVEL, GEOGRAPHY, ARCHAEOLOGY Matson, Norman. The Log of the Coriolanus. Vanguard Untermeyer, Louis. Blue Rhine — Black Forest. Harcoui Brace. $2.50. Waugh, Alec. Hot Countries. Farrar and Rinehart. $3. Contributors to This Issue James Dunbar is editor of the Edinburgh Labour Stand- ard. Irwin Edman is assistant professor of philosophy at Co- lumbia University. Stanley J. Kunitz will shortly publish a book of poems, "Intellectual Things." Joshua Kunitz is author of "Russian Literature and the Jew." Mark Van Doren is editor of "An Autobiography of America." Granville Hicks is assistant professor of English at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Isidor Schneider is author of "The Temptation of Anthony." Smith Ely Jelliffe, one of the outstanding neuro- psychiatrists, is managing editor of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Matthew Josephson is author of "Portrait of the Art- ist as American," which will be published this spring. Sidney B. Fay is professor of European history at Har vard University. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. cxxx NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23, 1930 No. 3381 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 477 EDITORIALS: Court, Beer, and Politics 480 Another War Truth 481 Saving the Children 481 A Lover of America 482 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 483 RUTH McCORMICK SMASHES THROUGH. By Frederic Babcock 484 POLITICS, PURITY, AND PELF. By Paul Y. Anderson 485 THE PRESS TODAY: II. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. By Oswald Garrison Villard 486 THE TURNING FINANCIAL WORM. By J. G. Curtis 489 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 490 BOOKS, MUSIC, DRAMA: To Spring. By Virginia Moore 491 Gide's First Novel. By Henry Hazlitt 491 Two Kinds of Satire. By Eda Lou Walton 491 The Soviet Achievement. By Oswald Garrison Villard 492 Salvation Through Monism. By C. Hartley Grattan 493 Another Love-Life. By Joseph T. Shipley 493 A Pioneer Fairy Story. By Dorothy Van Doren 494 Hymn of Hate. By Lewis S. Gannett 494 At the Bottom. By Fred T. Marsh 496 Music: Young Mr. Purcell. By Hubbard Hutchinson 497 Drama: Shakespeare and Expressionism. By Joseph Wood Krutch 498 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Gandhi's Campaign Begins. By Herbert Adolphus Miller 501 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREX ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREX LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. | THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. THE BUDGET SPEECH of the Chancellor of the Exchequer brought to the British taxpayer the un- welcome, though not wholly unexpected, news of an increase in the normal rate of income tax, together with an increase in the surtax rate, a raising of the death duties from 40 to 50 per cent on estates exceeding £2,000,000, and an ad- ditional tax on the brewing industry, all the new taxes together being calculated to bring in some £42,000,000. As Mr. Churchill bequeathed his successor a deficit and made unsatisfactory provision for the sinking fund to boot, and as the present Cabinet has increased expenditures, Mr. Snow- den had a hard task, and he has performed it with charac- teristic British courage. He announces that the Government is planning a valuation bill to serve as a basis of taxation of land values, a reform generations overdue. He states that the safeguarding duties will be allowed to lapse as they ex- sire, and while expressing regret that the present financial -ituation does not permit him to wipe out the McKenna luties now, declares that the Government will keep its )ledges regarding them. Philip Snowden may be depended to keep faith. (RESIDENT HOOVER and Secretary Stimson have both expressed their lively satisfaction with the results the London conference. In doing so the President gives he tonnage basis of the parity agreement for the British and American fleets. We set down his figures, and beside them the figures of our present fleet, reported by the Navy Depart- ment as of July 29, 1929: Treaty basis Present navy Capital ships 460,000 525,850 Cruisers 339,000 305,000 Aircraft carriers 135,000 92,500 Destroyers 150,000 337,996 Submarines 52,700 81,807 A few points deserve notice: Battleships are obsolete, and there are to be no replacements for six years. Our actual cruiser tonnage afloat last July was 75,000 tons, the figure given above including cruisers building as well as the addi- tional fifteen only authorized. The treaty figures would mean an addition of nearly half to our present tonnage in aircraft carriers. As for the last two categories, both Great Britain and the United States wanted to abolish the sub- marine entirely. We are glad that the President finds the figures satisfactory. THE PROTEST AGAINST JUDGE PARKER has become so formidable that Republican leaders in the Senate have waited on the President and warned him of the party danger involved. It is a fitting judgment on Mr. Hoover for making a purely political appointment of this sort to the Supreme Court. The strength of the Negro opposition, based on Judge Parker's anti-Negro utterances, is notable, and the fear that it inspires in Republican breasts is encouraging. Labor objection, due, of course, to Judge Parker's action in upholding so-called "yellow-dog" con- tracts, under which workers pledge themselves not to join a union, has disturbed the President so much that he has found it necessary to issue a public defense of his candidate. Oppo- sition is strong in the Senate and in the Judiciary Commit- tee itself and the committee report has been deferred a week. Altogether, it begins to look as though the North Carolina politician might be taken for quite a ride before he is firmly seated on the Supreme Bench. Perhaps after a few more tries President Hoover may come to consider the de- sirability of nominating to the Supreme Court a genuinely intelligent and liberal jurist. THE FLATHEAD POWER LEASE, which we dis- cussed two weeks ago, is still pending as we write, but is likrly to be awarded at any moment unless the strong hand of Congress intervenes. The record in the case is clear, and each step in the affair makes the position of the respon- sible government officials worse. Assistant Commissioner Scattergood at the November hearings demonstrated that the minimum Indian rental should be $319,000 a year. By basing the rental on the earnings of the dummy Rocky Mountain Power Company, which will sell cheap to its owner, the Montana, this figure has now been juggled down to $104,000, and there are reports that it may go even lower, despite heated Indian protests. Senator Frazier deserves public thanks for exposing the fraud on the floor of the Sen- ate and making a gallant fight for the Indians. Senatorial

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478 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 courtesy ought no longer to prevent the introduction and pas- sage by the Senate of the Kvale resolution to refer the whole sorry business to a reorganized Federal Power Commission, particularly now that the Couzens resolution for such reor- ganization has been reported. If the lease is now jammed through, President Hoover, Secretary Wilbur, and Commis- sioners Rhoads and Scattergood are going to find them- selves in a most unenviable position in the eyes of informed men. THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT must choose be- tween two immediate unknowns in India. It must decide whether Gandhi at liberty is more dangerous than Gandhi in jail. At first, apparently, the Viceroy thought that the campaign of non-violent civil disobedience would die of anemia if it were met by non-violence. But the campaign has been increasing in volume. Jawarhalal Nehru, president of the Indian National Congress, has been sen- tenced to six months' imprisonment for violating the salt law; the Mayor of Calcutta has been sentenced to six months on charges of sedition. The Gujarat district— the region in Bombay province in which both Ahmedabad and Dandi are located — is thoroughly roused. In the city of Bombay, to the south, several hundred thousand followers of Gandhi demonstrated against the salt tax, and the salt law is being flouted as it is in most of the large cities of British India. Meanwhile the boycott of foreign and especially Brit- ish cloth is gaining adherents, while according to a New York Times dispatch the boycott of police and government officials in the Gujarat district referred to above is so com- plete that the authorities have been compelled to establish a store of their own to provide food and other commodities for themselves. So far there have been remarkably few ar- rests and practically no violence in the civil-disobedience campaign, though there have been several clashes between police and striking workmen in various parts of India. Whatever the government decides about Gandhi, however, and whether the present campaign fails or not, the events now taking place make it seem impossible that the relation- ship of India to Great Britain can be again what it has been in the past. India's demand for self-government can no longer be answered either by a recital of the good works of the British raj or by reiteration of the opinion that Indians are not fit to rule themselves. AFTER A CLOSE SQUEAK things seem to be past the immediate crisis in Haiti. The central question was whether or not President Borno's Council of State on April 14 would ratify the choice of M. Eugene Roy, the candidate agreed on for temporary President by the various political groups and the Hoover commission. The intrigues of Borno and his followers brought matters to such a pitch that there was imminent danger of an outbreak, and it be- came necessary for the American Department of State to take strong ground in sustaining the commission. According to a United Press dispatch, President Borno on April 13 accordingly adjourned the Council of State, officially declar- ing such adjournment "indispensable to the public peace." This action leaves the legal situation somewhat mixed, but the State Department has warned President Borno that no one but Roy will be recognized as temporary President, and President Hoover gives evidence of a commendable determi- nation to carry out the recommendations of the commission. So long as this policy is adhered to and the Haitians feel assured of American good faith, immediate difficulties can be overcome. ALL HONOR to the Supreme Court of Minnesota, which has actually had the gumption to declare a veteran-preference law invalid. To be sure, it was a fla- grant case, and it touched the monopolistic spirit of the lawyers' guild, for it was a measure admitting to the bar without examination any veteran whose disability under the World War Veterans Act was rated as at least 10 per cent at the time of the passage of the Minnesota law. Even so, it is refreshing to hear the court, after asserting the familiar legal principle that the basis of any legal classification must be germane to the subject matter, say flatly: We are unable to conceive how the fact that the appli- cant has served in the World War and has been disabled therein to an extent rated under a federal statute as at least 10 per cent at the time of the passage of this act has any tendency to show that he possesses the qualifications necessary to fit him to practice law. If other courts had the nerve to apply the same principle in other cases, most of the veteran-preference acts that at pres- ent serve to prevent the best men from being selected for various lines of public service would disappear from our statute books. RESPECT FOR LAW has been so much touted ever since Mr. Hoover solemnly called for the observance of all the laws in sight that important steps in the great campaign ought not to be overlooked. The New York courts, as usual, have been doing their bit, while in one of the most notorious cases the House of Representatives has graciously helped out. Federal Judge Grover M. Mos- cowitz of the Eastern District of New York, whose gross misconduct in office has been under investigation by the Judiciary Committee of the House for about a year, has just been censured by the House for "unethical and dangerous" conduct "threatening the destruction of the confidence of the bar and the community in the court and calculated to bring it into discredit," but the honorable judge, it is re- ported, intends to stick to his job. Chief Magistrate William McAdoo of the New York City courts has also been censured by the City Bar Association for depriving William Z. Foster and other Communists of their constitu- tional rights and "abusing his powers without justification" in refusing to admit them to bail, but the Chief Magistrate's retirement to private life has not yet been announced. We daresay that technicalities by the yard are on the side of the New York court which on April 11 ruled out summarily pretty much everything that counsel had to offer in defense of Mr. Foster and others for their conduct in the Union Square demonstration on March 6, and then allowed the great and only Police Commissioner Grover Whalen to hold forth for an hour and five minutes, but to the average man the proceedings of the court smell to heaven. ON APRIL 6 Inspector Piaggio, of the United States Immigration Service, strode on the stage at an anti- Fascist meeting in Cooper Union, in New York, and at tempted to arrest Armando Borghi, Italian anarchist, wanted !

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April 23, 1930] The Nation 479 for deportation. A small riot ensued, in which Borghi escaped and a policeman shot and killed Carlo Mazzolo, an American citizen and a war veteran. Inspector Piaggio could scarcely have done worse if he had deliberately under- taken to incite a riot. His action lends too much color to the charge that he is animated by hostility to American anti- Fascists, and abundantly warrants the investigation promised by Immigration Commissioner Day. We trust that it will be a thorough one, and will show whether Mussolini has been able to extend his influence to our immigration service. The case calls attention again to the operation of our present immigration law in destroying the right of asylum. Political refugees are likely to reach our shores without proper papers. The immigration service then may find itself engaged in the task of catching them and sending them back home to prison, or by special arrangement deporting them to countries that express a willingness to receive them. We believe that the United States ought to be today, as it has been in the past, a refuge for the oppressed of other lands. A VERDICT carrying the penalty of death has just been returned by a jury against a man for the mur- der of a fourteen-year-old girl. This sounds ordinary enough until one learns that the man is white, the girl was black, and the scene is New Orleans. By the law of the State a jury in returning a verdict of murder in Louisiana must stipulate either for the death penalty or for some lighter punishment, and New Orleans newspapers say that, so far as is recalled, the case is the first one in the city in which a white man has been condemned to death for slaying a Negro. Several verdicts of guilty have been returned in similar circumstances heretofore, but not with the death i penalty. There was nothing unusually atrocious in the mur- der. The slayer was a supernumerary policeman who shot his victim in a hotel kitchen after she had repeatedly re- pulsed his advances. His defense was intoxication, but there . was testimony that he could talk coherently when questioned immediately after the tragedy. The New Orleans Times- Democrat, a conservative organ of the old regime, says editorially that "had the slayer been a Negro and his four- teen-year-old victim a white girl, the crime would have aroused a storm of indignation" and that the jury "deserves community approval and thanks for prescribing the penalty provided by the white man's law." The Nation, as its read- ers know, is not in favor of capital punishment, but it is in favor of one law for all, and it is glad to see respect for this rising superior to race feeling in the heart of the old South. ON APRIL 7 Malcolm MacDonald, son of the Prime Minister, and Megan Lloyd George, daughter of David Lloyd George, made their maiden speeches in the House of Commons under the eyes of their respective and doubtless beaming parents. "As always happens when the opportunity offers," runs the New York Times's special cablegram, "the whole House rose to the occasion, made a most friendly non- partisan demonstration in honor of the two young parlia- mentarians, and offered congratulations to their respective fathers." What could be more charming and more charac- :eristically English in its sportsmanship? The House of Commons is rigid in its rules, severe and caustic in its judg- nents, and determined to keep its proceedings at a high level, but it is always kindly to the beginner whether he or she be a youngster or well beyond middle age. That fact must give great courage to the youths about to make a debut in the room where Cromwell and all the long line of famous Englishmen since his time took the plunge and then learned how to make history. WITH THE PALESTINE REPORT still the sub- ject of lively and acrimonious debate, it is a pleas- ure to record the dedication at Jerusalem on April 15 of the Wolffsohn Memorial Library of the Hebrew Univer- sity. The fifth anniversary of the opening of the university shows its library of 217,000 volumes already the largest in the Near East. Open to the public of all races and re- ligions, it is used by Moslems and Christians as well as Jews. Its medical library, the only one of importance in the whole region, is already performing an important service. It in- cludes, also, the Jewish National Library, founded thirty years ago by the Lithuanian physician Dr. Joseph Chasano- vitch, and the great mathematical library of Professor Klein of Gottingen, and its collections in these fields are already among the finest and most complete in the world. One in- tensely interesting item is the original manuscript of the theory of relativity, presented by Dr. Einstein, a member of the first board of governors of the university. The library building was erected by the labor of Jews and Arabs, men and women, scholars and students, many of them coming from Eastern Europe. We congratulate the chancellor of the university, that great American Judah L. Magnes, and his associates, and their supporters all over the world, who in the short space of five years have brought to a state of fruition their great enterprise for the healing of the nations. THE NEW YORK TELEPHONE COMPANY announces that its experiments with television are progressing nicely, thank you. It is now possible to sit in a sort of booth that shuts out other sights and sounds, with a glass plate in front of you and a system of instruments above your head, and, speaking into no transmitter, listen- ing with no receiver, to talk to the plainly perceived image of someone any number of miles away, whose face you see, whose voice you hear, whose watch, held up before your distant eyes, you can tell time by. As yet the device is far too elaborate and expensive for commercial use. But we are convinced that it is only a question of time before the face of our vis-a-vis on the telephone will be as visible as his voice is now audible. And when that day comes we are going to be very uncomfortable at the thought of possible next steps after television has become a commonplace. What if some scientist should invent a button that could be held in the hand and that, when lightly touched to the forearm of a companion, would disclose the unfortunate person's secret thoughts, his inmost desires and distastes? We have enough confidence in modern science to be afraid that just such a hideous invasion of our privacy may one day take place. These inventing fellows will stop at nothing. We hereby give warning, therefore, that if the time ever comes when we cannot think our own thoughts without detection this paper will suspend publication and its editors will form in line and jump off the nearest bridge. We are as yet not worried about what sort of communication will be estab- lished if the corpses are recovered.

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480 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 Court, Beer, and Politics TO be the daughter of a Senator, the wife of a Senator, and herself a Senator — that record may be assured to Congressman Ruth Hanna McCormick by the astounding majority she rolled up over Senator Deneen in the Illinois primary. As a wife she revenged herself for the defeat in 1924, by only 6,000 votes, of her husband by Sena- tor Deneen; as a daughter she proved that she has not for- gotten the teachings of Mark Hanna, whom, even as a young girl of fifteen and sixteen, she accompanied on his political campaigns. For herself she proved once more a most uncom- monly shrewd politician. She did not run for Congress until she was sure of her nomination. Her campaign for the higher office began the day of her election to the lower House, but she did not strike against Deneen until she was sure that every- thing was ready. Having eliminated the weak Senator Deneen — to the profit of the party — she will now organize against former Senator James Hamilton Lewis, the Demo- cratic nominee, and put him to his trumps to win. It would be easy to prophesy victory for her just on general principles. Not that we feel that her election would mean a great change in the representation of Illinois in the Senate, or the appearance of another genuine Progressive in that body. Mrs. McCormick should stand with the Progressives. She and her husband championed Roosevelt in 1912. No one could ever charge that she admired Calvin Coolidge ; indeed there were times when it would apparently have taken but little to put her into the La Follette campaign. Had she been true to her better self she would have landed there. But she was too practical and too much of a politician, and so she is, by grace of Mayor William Hale Thompson and his ally, Crowe, the first woman to be nominated for the United States Senate by a popular ballot. We are well aware that she denied in a preelection statement that there was any alliance between her and Mayor Thompson. But Messrs. Thompson and Crowe are claiming her victory as theirs, and the fact is that no criticism or denunciation of this evil political pair has yet fallen from her lips. She has been quite willing to profit by their aid, while taking no position for or against them, precisely as she let it be known that she was a Dry but failed during the primary campaign to state her position as to prohibition in any straightforward fashion. That is being "practical" and "playing the political game," but the rotten political life of America is to be redeemed in no such way. Mrs. McCormick herself at once shrewdly identified her triumph with her opposition to America's entrance into the World Court, against which she protested in every speech that she made. But Senator Deneen, too, was opposed to the World Court in a mild way. There was thus no real issue between them. Indeed, the whole contest savored of the shadow-boxing so familiar in our political life. Already it is reported that the Wets, the pro-Leaguers, and other groups are going to wage a determined war upon Mrs. McCormick, and there are those who see in all this the emergence of prohibition as the great national issue. Both parties are split in pieces on it. Yet somehow or other it is believed by many that there will be a clear-cut line-up on this issue by 1932. They are encouraged in this belief by the poll taken by the Literary Digest, and by the action of the New York Assembly in voting 82 to 61 for the repeal of the New York State enforcement act and demanding a con- stitutional convention to eliminate the Eighteenth Amend- ment from the Constitution. We do not look for any such upheaval. For the present wTe shall continue to see the same old pussyfooting on the liquor issue. In the coming Congressional elections, on the other hand, the impending severe chastisement of the Republican Party will come chiefly because of the general depression, the lack of employment, the low price of grain, the denial of any real relief to the farmer through tariff revision, and other economic reasons. Prohibition may enter here and there, as in the State of Massachusetts, where the proposal to repeal the State enforcement law will be overwhelmingly carried next fall. But by and large it is not beer that is going to decide whether the Republicans or Democrats shall control the next Senate and House of Representatives. It is the general economic status of the country that will count. Mr. Hoover and his party have so long declared themselves the custodians of prosperity that it ill behooves them to quarrel with anybody who votes against them. There is nothing that Mr. Hoover can now do about it except to pray for a revived industry, for bumper crops, and for high prices all around. Since the last are so largely controlled by the world market, the President is in a difficult position. He can pretend that he got what he wanted in the tariff bill ; he has already declared that there has been a really satisfactory achievement in London ; and he can insist that but for him and his conferences the industrial crash would have been far worse. The public, unless there is a marked change, will hold him and his party accountable. Were our press in possession of its former critical faculty, were our public willing to analyze critically, Mr. Hoover would be in for an even severer chastising than is indicated at the present hour. Every week confirms his lack of leadership. Had he, for example, sent to the Senate last fall our agreement to enter the World Court, subject to the revisions agreed to by the other signatories to the Court, it would hardly have been an issue for Mrs. McCormick. In- stead, her success raises the question whether it will now be possible to ratify the convention. Mr. Hoover refuses to lead in the matter of unemployment. Instead, it is left to a Democrat, Senator Wagner of New York, to insist that the Senate, at least, shall in some degree face this difficult sub- ject. For all the brave words uttered by Ramsay Mac- Donald and Herbert Hoover after the Rapidan meeting, we face a naval agreement which makes possible the scrapping of two battleships and involves the building of a number of new cruisers. The naval conference has been a failure from the point of view of reducing the military and naval burdens against which Mr. Hoover protested, declaring that they were the heaviest borne by any large country in the world. It is not surprising that the President's stock falls. It will be amazing if the electorate does not soundly trounce him and his party at the polls next fall. '

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April 23, 1930] The Nation 481 Another War Truth AN extraordinary and vitally important historical ad- mission has just been made by David Lloyd George as to the manner in which England entered the war in 1914. It was made in the course of a debate on April 7 in which Prime Minister MacDonald reaffirmed his readi- ness to consult with the leaders of the Opposition concerning any particular phase of the negotiations of the Naval Dis- armament Conference in order that Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Lloyd George should be posted as to exactly what was talcing place. Mr. Lloyd George heartily praised this attitude of the Prime Minister and went on to say that it was very im- portant that "we should know what we are being committed to because these commitments are matters of peace and war." He continued as follows (italics ours) : There has been a good deal of discussion as to whether or not we were committed in 1914. If we were, we were committed to something which was very vague, but where it was a question of honor, whether there was a real com- mitment or not, we gave the benefit of the doubt to the others. We don't want those conditions to arise again. We don't want any commitment by which the French will assume we have incurred certain obligations which we did not intend to incur. We have in these words high confirmation from one of England's war premiers of the worst charges made by the critics of Sir Edward Grey and the Asquith Government as to their plunging England into the hell of the World War at a cost of a million British lives. It was known at the time that the commitments to France had been concealed not only from the British people and their Parliament, but also from a majority of the Cabinet. They had even been jesu- itically denied. Only a small inner group knew. But when the fatal hour came Sir Edward Grey and the Prime Min- ister assured the country that the agreements with France were solemn and binding, admitting of no question and no indecision. The honor of England, they stated, was abso- lutely involved. Now we have Lloyd George's word for it that, in that same historic Parliament, it was all "very vague," that there was doubt as to whether there was a "question of honor" ; but "whether there was a real commit- ment or not" the statesmen then in charge were willing not only tc sentence to death a huge number of their country- men, but to jeopardize the very existence of Great Britain herself. This confirms us in our belief that the men who so light-heartedly plunged England into the war should rank among the great criminals of our time. Even before the war began, England's economic and financial position was being seriously challenged by Germany and the United States. It is at this hour not established that she will ever regain the status she held on August 1, 1914. We know that some of her industries have not rewon their former health, and that there has hardly been a time since the armistice that there have not been from 800,000 to 1,500,000 persons out of employment. That the Empire has passed its prime and that it is actually disintegrating is the opinion not merely of 1 foreign observers, but of numerous Englishmen whose judg- mously accelerated because there was some "very vague" commitment between an inside ring in the British Cabinet and the French government, and their respective military staffs; because, as Lloyd George says, England gave the "benefit of the doubt" to France in 1914; because Edward Grey and one or two others insisted that the sacred honor of England called for the most frightful blood-letting in history! If Lloyd George now has had a change of heart on this as on so many other matters, that is surely to the good. It is a step forward in government, too, that Ramsay Mac- Donald is willing to consult with the Opposition, and to let Parliament as well know just what commitments his Gov- ernment proposes to undertake. But that, of course, is not enough when it comes to a matter of war and peace. There we must continue to take our stand with Alanson B. Hough- ton, lately our Ambassador to Great Britain. Having been a diplomat and a highly successful one, he insists that no small group of men in high office is wise enough to be in- trusted with the power to make war ; that no government should have the right to begin hostilities without having a plebiscite of the masses, who are the ones who pay the price when war comes. Sir Edward Grey sat safely at home and never risked his skin after condemning a million of his fellow-citizens to death — a whole generation whose absence goes far to explain why it is that England in industry and commerce seems to lack at this moment its historic aggres- siveness and efficiency. The oncoming generations in Europe certainly have the right to demand that they shall not be condemned to death because somebody had a "very vague" commitment with somebody else, and was at the same time able to say whether or not the country should go to war. Saving the Children AMERICAN children have a great stake in what happens at Washington during the coming weeks, for the work of the Children's Bureau is in peril. President Roosevelt in 1909 called his White House Con- ference on Child Health and Welfare. This conference gave great impetus to Lillian D. Wald's idea of a Children's Bureau, which at the insistence of the National Child Labor Committee, guided by Dr. Alexander McKelway, was estab- lished in 1912. President Taft signed the act creating the bureau and appointed Julia C. Lathrop of Hull House its first chief. The act assigned to the bureau for investigation a long list of subjects, including among others infant mor- tality, diseases of children, mental deficiency, and child labor. The first study undertaken was that of infant mortality. This was so brilliantly done, and aroused such sustained public interest, that it was continued until eight cities had been covered. These earliest studies showed that six nations were more successful than we in keeping their babies alive to the first birthday; that our maternal death-rate was the highest among civilized nations which kept records ; and that a baby's chance of living was six times as good if its mother lived and could stay at home with it during its early weeks, as when she had to go back to the factory or do heavy work at home. From these and other discoveries the maternity and infancy work followed almost inevitably in 1920. In 1919, out of the special reconstruction fund of

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482 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 $100,000,000 placed at his disposal by Congress, Presi- dent Wilson allotted to the bureau (besides its regular ap- propriation) $150,000 to be spent for a Children's Year. Among other ingenious means of increasing interest in the care of maternity and infancy, the services of Sir Arthur Newsholme, the leading English authority on infant mor- tality, were enlisted. In consequence of the year's work there arose a nation-wide movement for joint effort of the nation and the States to promote the welfare of mothers and babies. President Harding, during the campaign of 1920, sug- gested the establishment of a social-welfare department to include the work in behalf of maternity and infancy. He was persuaded, however, to substitute his approval for an annual appropriation for five years of $1,240,000, to be used under the so-called Sheppard-Towner Act by the States for this work, besides the regular work of the Children's Bureau. President Coolidge recommended the extension of this act for two years; but unhappily in his last message to Con- gress he urged that there be no further extension of the appropriation for maternity and infancy. On June 30, 1929, accordingly, the seven years' joint work of the government and the States came to an end, without intervention in its favor by President Hoover. Hoping to forestall this disaster, Senator Jones and Representative Cooper on April 19, 1929, had introduced a bill providing $1,000,000 (in place of the former $1,240,- 000) annually for five years to continue the bureau's ma- ternity and infancy work. The measure slumbered in com- mittee for a year, and nearly a year of cooperation between the nation and the States has thus been lost since the Shep- pard-Towner fund lapsed on June 30, 1929. Fortunately, the Jones-Cooper bill was favorably reported in the Senate on April 8. Compared with the vast sums appropriated for agricul- ture, roads, and other like purposes the annual appropriation for saving the lives of mothers and babies has always seemed trivial. But it has been spent with extraordinary care and skill. Thousands of mothers and children are alive and well because of the bureau's energy in promoting health work, in cooperation with the States. When the bureau was founded only eight States were included in the birth-regis- tration area. By patient cooperation thirty-eight States have been added, and the last two will soon be included. With the example of his five predecessors before him, what will President Hoover do? Representative Cooper caused great confusion by introducing on February 14 a measure intended ostensibly to turn over to the Public Health Service all the health work of the bureau, and declaring that he did this at the request of the President. It is late in the session, and prompt action is necessary. If the Presi- dent will make the Jones bill, which has now been reported out of committee, an Administration measure, as he can con- sistently do, following his address to Congress on December 6, there will still be time for an appropriation to be passed and money made available for the Children's Bureau to resume its beneficent activity at, or even before, the begin- ning of the new fiscal year. It is greatly to be hoped that this work, which has shown so large a measure of accomplish- ment with so small an appropriation of funds, may be con- tinued without further interruption. It is for President Hoover to say the word. A Lover of America UNUSUALLY sympathetic interest is due a bill now pending in Congress for the appropriation of $100,- 000 to be expended on a suitable monument, to be erected at his home in Henderson, Kentucky, to the memory of John James Audubon, the naturalist. Audubon was born in Haiti, but the United States was his adopted country which he ardently explored and loved throughout his life. His great work, "The Birds of America," made him famous here and abroad. For that he spent years wandering over the American forests, observing, listening, taking notes for the paintings which with scrupulous care he made in color and life size of each specimen, as he conceived it, of Ameri- can bird. The English engraver, Robert Havell, Jr., col- laborated enthusiastically with Audubon in preparing the pictures for the press. For twelve years the volumes were in the making. They were Audubon's life work, and are in themselves a monument to his genius. It is pleasant, however, to think of him not as the author of a noble and imposing book, but as the "American Woodman," the man who loved nothing so much as to wan- der alone through the wildernesses of this country a hundred years ago. Audubon possessed the tough and generous physique coupled with gentleness that seems to be a prerequisite of the successful observer of animal life. He was tireless and unafraid ; he was freshly eager with each new day for a new area to explore. He could sit for hours in perfect quiet while the life of the forest moved around and above him. He loved the forests, the beasts and birds in them; above all he loved the strange or desperate or merely kind frontiersmen whom he met on his journeys. When he heard the squatters along the lower Mississippi dismissed as "a sallow, sickly-looking sort of miserable be- ings," and he later had occasion to inspect them, he cried : "See the joyous mother and daughters as they stand on the bank! ... A store of vegetables lies around them, a large tub of fresh milk is at their feet, and in their hands are plates filled with rolls of butter." He could color even poor white trash with his own abundant life. At Henderson, Kentucky, he started his adult life with his young wife and their first child. There he made several unsuccessful essays at business, but he was not destined to be a business man. He was a lover of the woods, and in the woods and occupying himself with what he found there his wife very sensibly — and perhaps generously — let him alone. There could be no more fitting place for an Audubon memorial, however, than in this place where Audubon spent his earlier years. And the United States could well afford to make a gesture of thanks to the memory of one of her first and most devoted lovers. A national monument at Hen- derson, designed so that it might have some practical value to those who share Audubon's interests in American fauna and flora, would go a long way toward softening the un- pleasant impression made by others of our national tributes to the defunct great. One hundred thousand dollars is not a sum to dicker over. Let us spend it for a man of peace, one who celebrated his country by what he found to look at there, not by what he hoped, either by military or other con quest, to acquire.

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April 23, 1930] The Nation 483 It Seems to Heywood Broun MY radical friends seem to be of two minds. All of them expect the social revolution, but they mean various things when they speak of it. To some it suggests an actual setting up of barricades upon the streets and the shooting down of capitalists and bourgeoisie. In fact, some of the reddest of my acquaintances will not guar- antee the success of their plans unless they have the privilege of cutting down a few million inevitable dissenters. The revolution contemplated by the Socialists seems to me a more thoroughgoing affair. As I understand it, they think less of musketry and more about the power of ideas. I never could understand why a fellow who wants to stick a bayonet into an opponent's ribs is considered a realist, while the man who wants to put a notion into his head is said by some to be a sentimental idealist. For instance, what justification is there for the scorn which Left-wingers are fond of tossing over their shoulder at Norman Thomas? Why is it impractical to suggest that even a revolutionary change can be voted in by an aroused majority? In a revolution the more numerous side is pretty apt to win. If you have sufficient power to swing a revolt you ought to have enough to carry an election. As I under- stand my Communist friends they maintain that winning the election would be of no use to a proletarian party because the minority would still set up too active and violent a resistance. But I fail to see why the same thing does not hold true of revolution. After you've got a revolution won you've got to keep it that way. It is hard to build secure foundations on a coup. Although I am not one to applaud everything done by the Soviet Republic I should hardly care to deny that the present regime has scored unmistakable triumphs. There seems, at the moment, not the slightest serious threat of any overturn of the general policy which is now functioning. Indeed, I view with marked suspicion many of the shrieking noises which come from Russia about the danger of attack from without its borders. Lenin, and the men who followed him, may have made many fundamental changes in the atti- tude of man, but they have not succeeded in eliminating the human penchant to play politics. And I believe that when a Soviet leader rouses the mob with a story of the manner in which England, America, or France is waiting to pounce upon the "workingman's fatherland" he is talking largely to consolidate the support of his fellows. He is following a very old principle. It is never difficult to secure loyalty by holding up a bogy man in front of your followers and frightening them with that. I find it difficult to locate the main thread of the Com- munist propagandic theory over here. In the same speech an agitator will predict the imminence of the day on which the comrades are to take over the whole economic and gov- ernmental structure of the United States and immediately after he will shed tears of woe at the prospect of an attack upon the Soviet Republic by the powerful financial interests of this country. They are going to swallow us or we are going to swallow them. It seems to me that these two pre- dictions are mutually exclusive. Personally I feel that the Communists have made little headway over here. I am not necessarily rejoicing in this. I am merely stating it as an opinion. Often I wonder how a thoroughgoing, scientific revolutionary can justify the petty squabbles and riots which have featured recent red activity in the city of New York. Somebody will have to tell me in clearer language than I have heard yet just what purpose is fostered in baiting the police until the cops lose their heads and make fools of themselves by indiscriminate clubbing. Where does this rather trivial activity leave the famous old theory of economic determinism? Marx, if I read him aright, thought of the eventual proletarian revolution as in- evitable. Capitalism would grow and grow and swell and swell until at last it would drop to the ground like an apple too long in the sun. If this is true no Whalen can stay the process nor yet promote it. And so I am at a loss to under- stand why so much energy should be wasted in the effort to prove the man a fool. If I were a Communist I would most certainly refuse to have my head broken in order to demonstrate a fact so obvious to all observers. If the great day is being borne along upon the billows of vast subterranean streams it would seem rather petty to waste much effort in the dissemination of little handbills. Of course I know that the Communists are not the first nor yet the last group to lay the whip across the flanks of the very steed which they have picked to be the certain and inevitable winner of the race in question. For instance, people who say "The Lord will provide" are very seldom content to let it go at that. Even though they put their trust in Him, even so they think it not a bad idea to nudge the Creator upon occasion and to call His attention to the thing which they have proclaimed He will surely do. To switch the subject of the sentence somewhat, even I, a humble columnist, have been accorded the honor of Com- munist heckling. Last week I spoke at the Rand School about unemployment, and a few Communists were there among the socialistic audience. I must say for the Left- wingers that they played fair enough and let me have my stuttering say without the handicap of outside interference, but when I asked for questions the deluge came. A Com- munist is, among other things, a man incapable of expressing himself in anything less than ten thousand words. And of course he doesn't ask questions. He makes speeches. Still, even that cannot justly be condemned by me. I'd made a pretty long talk on my own account. But my friends the reds pay no great compliment to the Russian experiment by behaving as if it might be knocked down by the slightest puff of air. For instance, my departure from the lecture hall was signalized by the little knot of Left-wingers going into a huddle, like a Yale football team, and defiantly giving a long cheer with three "Soviet Re- public's" on the end. Now I had not lifted so much as a finger against the "workers' homeland." But if I had, even if I had lifted two, I can't quite understand why that should constitute a menace worthy of the attention of any busy man intent upon world revolution. Heywood Broun

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484 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 Ruth McCormick Smashes Through By FREDERIC BABCOCK Chicago , April 11 RUTH HANNA McCORMICK'S smashing success in the Illinois Senatorial primaries is being hailed as the greatest political victory ever won by a woman. It was indeed a triumph for feminine leadership, but it had many other significances. It indicates (1) that the West, led by its foremost State, is still anti-World Court and anti-League of Nations; (2) that it is still po- litically dry; (3) that it does not look with favor on many of the policies of the present national Administration ; (4) that it has made up its mind to crash through the sex barrier surrounding the Senate. Perhaps the best idea of how Mrs. McCormick did it may be gained by visualizing the campaign. Picture a woman tremendously alive and tremendously ambitious, brilliant, likable, tireless; a shrewd campaigner, equipped with amazing organizing ability and a thorough knowledge of all the tricks of the game; thin, with thin, determined lips and brown eyes that laugh ; a walking, talking adver- tisement of what one can do with wealth and brains — and charm. On the other side was Senator Charles S. Deneen : "The good Lord cast him in the mold of a statesman, but gave him the mental operations of a ward politician." A beautiful specimen of futility, not unlike Dear Old Charlie of "Strange Interlude": full of desire, but impotent. His answer to his opponent's slashing attack on the World Court was an 8,000-word pamphlet, all dressed up in legal phraseology, defending his vote for America's adherence. Nobody read it and nobody cared. Senator Deneen let his campaign drag until two months before the primaries. By that time the enemy had walked off with most of his votes and there was no getting them back, even if he had been a good campaigner. In Chicago, the main battleground, the Senator had a well-oiled machine and the support of a large number of the best people. But Mrs. McCormick picked up what was left. The Thompson machine, dealt a death blow two years ago, saw a great opportunity for resurrection. It supported Mrs. McCormick to advance its own purposes. So did all the other anti-Deneen people (and there are hordes of them), all the petty local machines, and all the guerrillas not included in the Deneen ranks. Tammany in New York and the Vare machine in Philadelphia have their counterpart in the City Hall crowd in Chicago. Mrs. McCormick joined hands with this gang to capture the Republican nomi- nation. For this she was roundly berated. Personally, I cannot blame her. She accepted all the support she could get. She denied that there was any alliance — and many of us believed her. There is little to choose between the Thompson gang and the Deneen gang. They shift around every two years. Today's ally is tomorrow's enemy. Mrs. McCormick was a candidate needing votes. She had her own organization, built up through years of effort. If un- desirables insisted on climbing aboard her band wagon she was not the one to shove them off. So Mark Hanna's daughter, defying Hughes and Root and Hoover on the World Court question and staking everything on that issue, came to Chicago and waged war like the seasoned veteran she is. Daughter of one Senator and widow of another, she deemed it necessary to deal with gangsters, gunmen, racketeers, and political parasites. Op- posing her was a Senator offering the noble spectacle of herding church vote and gang vote into the ballot booths together. Chicago shouted its choice, and "downstate" echoed the decision. The vote was an emphatic rejection of the World Court, with or without reservations. I doubt if one voter in a thousand could define the Root formula or a protocol, but he had an idea that the Court was tied up with the League of Nations and he wanted none of it. The vote further showed that discrimination against women in Illinois politics is almost negligible. Still further, it was an indirect protest against the economic policies of the Hoover Administration, which has no blinder or more faith- ful follower than Senator Deneen. The first hurdle cleared, Mrs. McCormick must face the Chesterfieldian James Hamilton Lewis. Twelve years ago Medill McCormick defeated Lewis for reelection to the Senate. Six years ago Deneen defeated McCormick for re- nomination. Now McCormick's widow has turned the tables on Deneen, and is out to win again over Lewis. With Mrs. McCormick a Dry and Lewis a Wet, the Wets will make a prodigious effort to put him across. Some say it will be done. My own guess — seven months in advance of the anticipated event — is that Mother Illinois's next Sena- torial offspring will be a girl. If unemployment and Hoover prosperity continue till November Lewis will get a huge vote from the discontented. But he will have to overcome a normal Republican majority of half a million and, on top of that, the opposition of thousands of determined women and church members who may not approve of Ruth McCor- mick as an isolationist, but do approve of her as a dry. If one were to judge by the straw votes and the noise made by the Wets one would say Illinois was wet. At the risk of getting into hot water I venture to say it's dry. In the Literary Digest poll it has been going wet by three to one. But in the April primaries Mrs. McCormick and Sena- tor Deneen, both Drys, between them rolled up a vote of something like 1,200,000. The only wet candidate on the Republican side got a few thousand. On the Democratic side, Lewis, the Wet, got about 300,000. Of course, the comparison between that total and the combined dry total, four times as great, is unfair, and Lewis's is the minority party anyway. But the dry majority is there, and it will be there next November. One of Mrs. McCormick's ambitions was to make her husband President. As long as he lived she remained in the background. When he died she set out on her own career. Now she has been nominated for the Senate. She will be elected. She will make a good Senator if not a great one. She is no idealist. In the Senate she will play the game and make friends. After that, will she try for the Presidency? There's no law against it.

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April 23, 1930] The Nation 485 Politics, Purity, and Pelf By PAUL Y. ANDERSON Washington, April 12 AN odor — thick, oppressive, and horribly reminiscent of the Ohio Gang — is settling down on the capital. Just as the Republican leaders were beginning to hope the public might be induced to forget the politico- financial adventures of National Chairman Claudius Huston, they were confronted with the prospect of an infinitely greater scandal, arising from the history of post-office leases during the past ten years. That gigantic frauds have been practiced on the government and the investing public, with the knowledge and collusion of officials of the Post Office Department, has long been suspected by those who realized how perfectly the leasing system lends itself to corruption. Unless my reportorial judgment is sadly defective, the worst of those suspicions will be confirmed during the Senate in- vestigation which now impends. I expect to see it disclosed that a number of syndicates are actively in the business of leasing post-office buildings to the government ; that they are receiving exorbitant rentals under long-term, non-cancelable contracts awarded by the Post Office Department ; that more than $100,000,000 worth of bonds were sold to the public on the basis of these contracts, and that many have been pur- chased under the impression that they were government securities. I expect to see it disclosed that officers or former officers of the government were interested in the leases or profited from the sale of the bonds. I am confident it will be discovered that nearly half of the $18,000,000 annually paid by the government in post-office rentals has been un- necessarily expended, and that a considerable percentage of the profits from the leases and the bonds has been passed on in the form of "commissions" and "attorney fees." Nor should the Senate investigating committee confine itself to leases. It should make a thorough inquiry into the mail con- tracts awarded to ship companies and air-mail carriers. It should ascertain whether any former officers of the govern- ment are interested in the companies receiving such contracts, what service they are rendering, and what they are being paid for it. In connection with the leases, it is important to know the identity of the lessors, the names of the persons who represented them in the negotiations with the Post Office Department, the size of the fees paid for that service, the amount of bonds that have been issued, the names of the banks and investment houses through which they were floated, and the size of the commissions paid on them. Finally, the committee should take pains to learn whether any political contributions have been made by the benefi- ciaries. Before the work is finished we shall doubtless have the pleasure of gazing again on the frank and open counte- nance of that exemplar of ethics and morals, Elder Will Hays. And how some of us will enjoy it! • * » * • THE lobby committee performed a sufficiently good job on Muscle Shoals to insure Senate adoption of the Norris bill for government operation of that great plant, but there are excellent reasons for believing that further in- quiries would be amply rewarded. For example, what names are signed to the canceled checks cashed by the Muscle Shoals lobby? What public officials are stockholders in the American Cyanamid Company, the Union Carbide Com- pany, or affiliated corporations? Have the officers of those corporations contributed to any political campaign funds in recent years? Information tending to answer some of those questions has been reported to members of the committee, but the answers have not been made public. The fact is that the members have grown weary under the torrent of hostile criticism directed at them by ill-informed or partisan editorial writers and by ignorant business men, and have lost the zest which characterized the committee's earlier pro- ceedings. Chairman Caraway is disgusted with the public's ingratitude, and Senator Walsh is having one of his periodi- cal attacks of legalistic conservatism. Incidentally, the latest breeze from the direction of Republican national headquar- ters serves to remind us that the eccentric Claudius is still clinging tenaciously to the party chairmanship, though his friend in the White House has done everything except set the dog on him. The melancholy truth is that Hoover, for one reason or another, is afraid to throw him out. Probably he will remain until certain gentlemen in New York, Penn- sylvania, and Illinois serve notice that campaign funds will not be forthcoming until his successor is elected. That will turn the trick. It always does. * * # » » THERE must be a surfeit of laughter on Olympus these days, when the gods peer down on the Washington scene and harken to the voice of "Old Joe" Grundy denounc- ing machine politics and corruption in Pennsylvania. How they must have roared when they saw him appear before the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee to demand the adoption of a resolution providing for the strictest investiga- tion of campaign expenditures in the Republican primary in which he is opposing "Puddler Jim" Davis! Make no mis- take— this is the identical "Old Joe" who proudly admitted raising and spending $250,000 in the last Republican Sena- torial primary held in that State, and who even more proudly confessed raising $800,000 for the last Republican Presi- dential campaign! It is the same "Old Joe" who a few months ago scornfully admonished the "backward States" of the West and South to "talk darn small," and proclaimed Pennsylvania as one of the few commonwealths fit to have a voice in the government of the nation ! Now we find "Old Joe" sallying forth in the armor of a reform candidate, bent on redeeming his precious Pennsylvania from boss rule and graft, and actually intimating that he would welcome the assistance of Senator Norris in his crusade for civic purity. I have listened to his piteous cries, and they leave me un- moved. As between the Vare Gang and the sacred Mellons, I will take the former every time: they have more honesty, and they are less expensive. And a Puddler is never so dan- gerous as a Grundy. The Illinois situation is but slightly less diverting. There "Next-Week Charlie" Deneen, who managed at one and the same time to be the bosom friend of the late "Diamond Joe" Esposito and the representative of

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486 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 "the better element" in Illinois politics, has just taken a handsome licking at the fair hands of Mark Hanna's daugh- ter. The elevating influence of women in politics was strik- ingly demonstrated when Mrs. McCormick made her can- didacy the occasion for an alliance which restored the un- speakable Thompson-Crowe machine to power in Cook County. As was to be expected, "Next-Week Charlie" and his lovely opponent fought it out on everything except the issues. On the bogus World Court question Mrs. McCor- mick gave an exhibition of demagoguery that filled Tom Heflin and Cole Blease with melancholy envy for a fortnight. My Illinois agents report that the exquisite J. Ham Lewis stands a good chance to beat Mrs. McCormick. Certainly he is entitled to the prayers of all honest people. ***** INDIGNATION probably is a form of weakness, but the temptation to indulge in it is almost irresistible when one contemplates two examples of partisan meanness that have lately come to light here, one designed at the expense of the finest character in American public life, and the other at the expense of the unemployed men and women of the country. Ten months have elapsed since the Senate, for the fourth time, adopted the Norris resolution providing for the submission of a Constitutional amendment abolishing "lame- duck" sessions of Congress. A few days ago its author made the astonishing discovery that Speaker Longworth, instead of referring it to a committee of the House, had calmly pocketed it. At once Senator Norris prepared to introduce a resolution calling for an investigation of this high-handed business. The House leaders, learning of his intention, hastened to report a similar resolution of their own, in a vindictive determination that no amendment to the Consti- tution should be permitted to bear the name of the Progres- sive Norris. It was perfectly characteristic of them. The other instance was one in which the Old Guard leaders in the Senate resolved that a Tammany Democrat, namely, Senator Robert Wagner, must not be permitted to have the credit for helping to relieve unemployment. Three bills, each intelligently drafted to accomplish that end, were intro- duced by him more than two years ago. They were referred to a committee, and there, the Old Guard decreed, they must remain. It made no difference that unemployment was in- creasing. The obstruction finally ceased only when Hiram Johnson succeeded Jones as chairman. As is well known, Hiram wastes no affection on either the Administration or the Grundybund. He moved the Wagner bills by main strength and vocabulary, and it is possible that Congress may now do something to help the starving — that is, if the House leaders do not decide that famine is preferable to its relief by an Al Smith Democrat. The Press Today II. The Associated Press* IN the last analysis any organization is what the men in it make it. What of the men in the Associated Press? It is a pleasure to record the fact that despite the rela- tively poor salaries paid the Associated Press has generally been served by a devoted, honest, and loyal set of men and women, a credit to themselves and to the service. There is no eight-hour and no twelve-hour day for them. They must be the first into any disease-ridden or calamity-scourged town, and, of course, they must not be afraid of the firing line — David Lawrence, the well-known Washington correspondent, for instance, is the possessor of a gold watch awarded to him by the A.P. for risking his life to report the battle at Juarez in one of the Mexican revolutions, when he stayed on duty for three days and nights without rest. The men are drawn to the service by the extraordinary fascination of all news- paper work, and by its excitements. They feel that they are in a measure public servants and the interest of the "game" compensates for the small salaries and the exacting hours. Sometimes they exercise a profound influence upon the prog- ress of political events, becoming guides, philosophers, and friends to men in high office. Rarely is any charge of manipu- lating the news for personal profit brought against an em- ployee of the Associated Press. Indeed I have never heard it alleged that anybody in the Associated Press was using his position in order to make money, although there have been • This is the second of two articles on the Associated Press in a series of articles on the American press. The third, on the United Press, will appear in our issue of May 7. — Editor The Nation. By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD plenty of opportunities because of the custody of important public documents in advance of publication. Where irregu- larities have occurred, as in the matter of misreading a Su- preme Court opinion, it has almost invariably appeared that the error was accidental. Naturally, since they are human beings, Associated Press men are liable to make mistakes. Rarely, indeed, does a black sheep like Edgar G. Bellairs, a former chain-gang convict with a lifelong career of crime behind him, get into the service. Even he used it, however, not to feather his own nest, but to build up ficti- tious reputations for General Leonard Wood and other army officers to whom he was particularly devoted. But this incident could just as well have occurred in any other news- gathering agency. The danger is not that unworthy men will get into the Associated Press, but that its reporters will prove to be unable to write their dispatches without coloring them, consciously or subconsciously, as they think that Frank B. Noyes of the Washington Star, president of the Asso- ciated Press, or Adolph S. Ochs of the New. York Timet would like to have them colored. Their orders are to refrain absolutely from bias, to be "truthful, accurate, unbiased, de- cent, and interesting." Nothing was held more vital than this by Melville E. Stone, who was for so many years the be- loved head of the organization. In consequence of his efforts to keep the service free from bias the charge was frequently made that it was dull in the presentation of news, illiberal, uninterested in the great currents of social reform and in the

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April 23, 1930] The Nation 487 progress of labor. That the English it used was often ex- tremely bad was, I think, beyond denial. In other words, the news report was written in the early days of the Asso- ciated Press as men like Victor Lawson of the Chicago Daily News, William R. Nelson of the Kansas City Star, Charles Hopkins Clark of the Hartford Courant, Melville E. Stone, and the other giants of a bygone journalistic age wished it written. Today it seems to me that the besetting sin of the Asso- ciated Press is its worship of authority. This is in no small measure due to the personal attitude of Messrs. Noyes and Ochs. Mr. Noyes is a resident of the District of Columbia where his newspaper, the Washington Star, depends for its success upon the army of office-holders, whether of Repub- lican or Democratic origin. The Star never offends and rarely criticizes the powers that be. It is not doing it an injustice to say that it has one of the most colorless editorial pages in the world ; it can become excited over the question of retiring pay for the departmental clerks, and it can, of course, denounce with the best the I. W. W., the Socialists, the Bolsheviks, and the bootleggers. But as for daring to go counter to authority, or fearlessly exposing the mass of corruption which since the war has corroded our public life, the Star is to seek. Mr. Noyes is not a fighting man either by temperament or philosophy. In consequence the Associated Press reporter in Washington is just about as conscious as anybody could be that it pays to stand in with those who are in office lest one be shut out of official con- ferences as were two reporters of the Federated Press, a radical organization, at one time. Mr. Ochs, too, does not believe in criticizing severely men in high office. It is, per- haps, common knowledge that several years ago he planned to appoint a national advisory committee to supervise the editorial page of the New York Times, and that the negotia- tions broke down when, after having given assurances that the committee would have freedom to formulate policies, it appeared that this did not apply to the President of the United States and other high officials. It is therefore easy to understand why the Associated Press not only reflects the viewpoint of the great capitalistic interests of the country, but also the attitude and the point of view of those in authority in Washington. One constantly gets the impres- sion that the Washington bureau, consciously or uncon- sciously, considers itself under obligation to seek a creditable explanation of any disclosure adversely affecting high officials. During the war, of course, the Associated Press lent itself as freely to the uses of the government for propaganda purposes as did the corresponding services in England, France, Germany, and Italy to their governments. Even before we entered the war it carried the wholesale falsifications of the late John R. Rathom of the Providence Journal, whose romancing finally became even too vivid for the United States government to brook. It was responsible for a wickedly cruel and false report of a speech made by Senator La Follette in which he was made to say that we had no quarrel with the Germans over the sinking of the Lusitania, when he said precisely the opposite. No other alleged quotation from his lips did so much harm to this brave and patriotic American citizen, whose statue now stands with those of the greatest men of our public life in Statuary Hall in the Capitol at Washington. Not until years later was this wrong corrected on the initiative of the writer of this article. Dur- ing the years prior to our entrance into the war the A.P. quite failed to obey the injunction of President Wilson to be neutral in thought and deed — an exception to its rule always to obey authority. As for Russia, the Associated Press always knows well where its duty to God and our country lies. In the early days of the Bolshevik government the Associated Press was as eager as the New York Times to grab any absurd rumor and spread it abroad. It still believes in the high news standards of its service, but can it look back with anything but shame on some of its Russian reports? Thus, in April, 1918, it overthrew the Bolsheviks and reestablished the old regime under the Grand Duke Alexis. In August it had Lenin and Trotzky running hand in hand to Kronstadt for safety. On the eighteenth of that month it kindly allowed the Germans to seize Kronstadt. On September 1 it reported Lenin as back and in charge, for it announced that he had been shot by a girl. The next day he died, only to be resurrected by the Associated Press, for three days later he had a relapse — to see Petrograd revolting and peasants "storming the city" a few days later. On October 17 poor Lenin was shot again. In December he was about to flee to Sweden ; before he could make his getaway, doubtless at the instigation of the Associated Press, he was arrested on Jan- uary 9 by Trotzky himself and imprisoned in the Kremlin. Fortunately the Associated Press was soon triumphantly able to report that he had escaped to Barcelona ; a couple of days later he had buried the hatchet and was making speeches with Trotzky in Moscow. All of which is delightful romancing, but hardly worthy of a service which believes that its re- ports are the most accurate and reliable and unbiased in the world. If its news from Moscow has now steadied down, it is in no wise as valuable as that sent by Walter Duranty to the New York Times. Now such things happen during the hysteria of war time, or of events leading up to war. But the continuance of the policy of playing the game of the men who are tem- porarily delegated to run our government at Washington, and of letting them give out their propaganda anonymously, is just a little bit too much for journalists to stand who believe in fair play and professional ethics. Yet the practice goes on, and not only in the purlieus of our Capitol, as wit- ness the fact that during a large part of the American occupation of Haiti the Associated Press has been rep- resented in that island by an officer of the Marine Corps, just as if this officer were in a position to report freely and frankly the Haitian criticisms of the Occupation, of which the Associated Press correspondent was an official and uni- formed member, or the acts of his superiors. If the revela- tions of the justified Haitian criticisms of our occupation, which led President Hoover's commission to that island to reverse our policy there, came as a surprise to the American people it must be in large part due to the fact that the Associated Press has had a marine officer as its correspondent. It is only just to add that when trouble broke out there the Associated Press immediately rushed to the island a civilian correspondent, and that it did its utmost to bring out the truth about the Aux Cayes massacre. But no amount of good intentions or actual honorable achievement in a crisis can atone for the fact that during periods of quiet the only news source of the Associated Press in Haiti was an officer of marines. For it was in the quiet periods that those policies

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488 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 were formulated which so aroused the population of Haiti against us that there would have been worse bloodshed than ever had not the commission fortunately intervened just when it did. Nor is the excuse that the Associated Press could not afford to maintain a special correspondent in Haiti a valid one. It maintains correspondents at places far less important than Haiti, especially if one considers that what we did in Haiti aroused the bitterest indignation against us in every Central and South American country, to our financial as well as moral cost as a nation. As I write, it is about to begin a service of "comic strips" to its members. This it can finance; but it was unable to raise the money needed to insure a fair and accurate report of a situation which to all South Americans was a touchstone of our national good faith and of our honorable intentions toward all of Latin America. Unfortunately, in Nicaragua, in Mexico, and in our other extraterritorial ventures the Associated Press invariably re- gards every situation through the spectacles offered to it by our officialdom. Here, as has been said, is the greatest weakness and the greatest danger of the Associated Press. I find myself far less interested in the decay of the character and quality of the news service, which has deeply stirred other critics of the service, notably Mr. Dewey M. Owens in the American Mercury for April, 1927. It is true, however, that Melville E. Stone must be turning in his grave if he is aware of the kind of sob stuff that is now appearing in the Associated Press reports — banal and bathetic stuff of the kind to shame a college sophomore despite the fact that the rules of the A. P. urge "a simple narrative style" and deprecate fine writing. Here are two examples quoted by Mr. Owens: Death advanced and beckoned for the last time. The tired, worn-out man drew a long breath, there was a slight flutter of the eyelids, an almost imperceptible twitch of the nostrils. Woodrow Wilson's soul had drifted out on the great dark tide that runs around the world. Outside a sickly sun broke through a clovidbank. A little native warbler, a pilgrim venturing forth in search of early spring and sun, stopped for a moment and from his twig aloft twittered a happy note. Almost at that moment Mr. Wilson was passing out. Luther Burbank, withered by age, died here early today amid the flowering fruits and blooms he had created for the benefit of mankind. The noted horticulturist passed on to the great adven- ture of a hereafter in which he had no faith. Only a few weeks before the end he had declared that he could not believe in a life after death. And as life ebbed away and he stood on the brink he did not falter in his conviction. If this is the sort of stuff the 1,250 members of the Associated Press want how can we expect to find anything else, seeing that we are dealing with a cooperative news service? Mr. Kent Cooper, the present able general manager, who rose from the ranks and represents an entirely new school from that of Melville E. Stone, has to face an in- tense, rapidly growing, and successful competition from the virile and liberal United Press. He has broken with tradi- tion after tradition of the service — the comic strips are his latest venture. So the Associated Press has long since aban- doned its original conception of being a service devoted ex- clusively to the gathering of news; it is now engaged in the merchandising of purely amusement features. Side by side with a vast deal of really -admirable and altogether praise- worthy reporting of the vital happenings of the world, a great deal of it well, soberly, and accurately written, it disseminates a line of trivial and often nauseating human- interest stories wholly devoid of any news value. I append two of them which I clipped from the first page of Mr. Noyes's worthy Evening Star on January 18 last, when I happened to be in the capital: By the Associated Press. Waukegan, 111., January 18. — Trixie, George Van Valkenberg's police dog, isn't dead after all. She's sick, but the doctor says she'll be all right. Several days ago Trixie's master arranged to put her out of her misery via chloroform. Afterwards he took Trixie to the garage to await suitable burial weather. Yesterday the grave was dug, and Van Valkenberg went to the garage to get Trixie. From her blanket shroud the dog scrambled up and ran to her master. By the Associated Press. Chicago, January 19. — Animals, real and imagi- nary, have driven Mrs. Sophie Seidler to seek a divorce from Walter. She says her husband imagined the existence of pink elephants and wiggly snakes, and that they annoyed him dreadfully. In an effort to get rid of them, his wife asserts, he got real animals and took them to bed with him. One night he would come home with a cat, another night a dog, and some times with a rabbit, a pigeon, or a chicken. Mrs. Seidler told of a strange pastime favored by her spouse. When funds for beverage purposes were scant, she charged, he would run around and around the room in cir- cles until he got dizzy. She wants, besides a divorce, custody of their child. The purpose of this sort of thing is, of course, to help publishers to sell their "stuff" by "brightening up" their numerous pages. Here let us recall that in his memoirs, "Fifty Years a Journalist," Melville E. Stone declared that "the Associated Press is writing the real and enduring his- tory of the world, and is not chronicling the trivial epi- sodes, the scandal, and the chit-chat"! Plainly Mr. Cooper has no use for such sentiments. Other times, other morals! The amazing part of it remains that this descent to coarse vulgarity and trivial banality is the work of an organization which has no private-profit motive. It is what one might have expected of Hearst, but never of the men who fell heir to the Associated Press which was founded in its modern form in 1893 with such high hopes, such high standards, and such a sense of responsibility to the American public and to their profession that the founders never could have stooped in any such way to conquer large circulations. The fact is, however, that the newspaper profession in America has changed in our time from a profession to a busi- ness— a purely money-making affair in which the. professional aspect has disappeared in all but a few of the dailies of the country. They are being affected by the great eco- nomic currents that are hourly producing greater and greater aggregations of capital, larger and larger financial and eco- nomic and industrial units. The newspaper owner, as I have so often pointed out, is caught in the vicious circle of steadily rising costs, steadily increasing competition, and the demand for larger and larger circulations and more and

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April 23, 1930] The Nation 489 more advertising. To the great merchants of the newspaper world the Associated Press is delivering the goods. Why all this tiresome nonsense about ideals and standards in its journalism? The Associated Press is what its members are willing that Mr. Noyes and Mr. Ochs and Mr. Cooper shall make it. They have much to be proud about, can boast of many fine things done, and have many admirable personal achievements to cite in reply to their critics. What does the rest matter as long as Cyrus H. K. Curtis and William Randolph Hearst and our other newspaper barons are content, and Washington officialdom finds their society wholly congenial? Let only those who are chronic fault- finders dwell upon the curious fact that it is the cooperative non-profit-making service which is illiberal and is so rapidly lowering its standards, and that it is the money-making United Press which has wide human sympathies and consid- erable idealism. But the reasons why the United Press is what it is must be reserved for another article. The Turning Financial Worm* By J. G. CURTIS AMONG the distinctions possessed by Chicago is that of having been the center of opposition to branch " banking in the United States. California formerly shared the burden and the honor, but California has since been lost to the cause. She can do no more now than serve as a desolate object-lesson to the Cook County patriots who have long and steadily realized how wholly dependent the well-being of this country was upon the independent banker. To be sure, as was told recently in The Nation, some five thousand of those independent bankers have disas- trously failed to live up to their responsibilities. And to be sure, in California, where branch banking is practically universal, there have been only about ten failures in ten years, though the banks of that State were afflicted with the same depression that tried those in the Central West. In San Francisco, it is true, the Fleishhackers of the Anglo and London Paris National, once the biggest bank in Cali- fornia, and Mr. F. L. Lipman of the Wells Fargo Bank and Union Trust, once the second biggest, still look con- temptuously upon their upstart competitors, the Bank of Italy and the Bank of America, which singly or together are the greatest branchjbank organizations in the country, and say that of course branch banking is "still experi- mental." To the Royalists in France the Republic is also "still experimental." Mr. Giannini has in twenty-five years made the Bank of Italy not only bigger than any two of its local competitors, but the fifth largest bank in America. In Chicago there is nothing so wicked as the shame- less branch banks of New York, Boston, Cleveland, and other cities, running wide open in broad daylight and even under State supervision. In Chicago there are quiet, gentle- man-like, unofficial arrangements linking banks together in bonds that are concealed from the public and from the regu- lating authorities. But not branches — God forbid ! But the practice of having private connections only has recently been challenged by the brazen Mr. George Woodruff of the National Bank of the Republic, who instead of keeping things dark has come out frankly and announced the forma- tion of a legal holding company with associate banks. What Mr. Woodruff has in his National Republic Bancor- poration with its fifteen banks in and near Chicago is some- thing technically different from branch banking in that in- stead of one corporation with numerous offices, which Is the characteristic of branch banking, his different banks •This is the second of two articles on branch banking. The first ap- peared in the issue of February 26. — Editor The Nation. retain legal entity but are owned by a holding company. It is therefore like the American Telephone and Telegraph, which controls the associated operating companies of the Bell system. Mr. Woodruff is not the pioneer with such corporate structure for banks. He was preceded by Mr. Andrew Price of the Marine Bancorporation of Seattle, with ten banks; by Mr. E. W. Decker of the Northwest Bancorporation of Minneapolis, with ninety banks in the Northwestern States, Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Montana; by that great competitor, the First Bank Stock Corporation, with eighty banks; by the First Security Cor- poration of Ogden, with twenty-five banks; by the South- western Corporation of Oklahoma, with fifteen banks; and by similar groups in Michigan, Oregon, Wisconsin, Ken- tucky, Ohio, Georgia, and elsewhere. These groups are peculiar to the West and to agricultural regions. They are composed of the strongest banks in their respective terri- tories. They are extending themselves aggressively. Why? The answer is that the beloved independent bank is obsolescent. Yet in spite of its inability to stand the gaff economically, legislatively it has been successful in secur- ing laws for its own protection. It is as if the manufac- turers of old oaken buckets had got laws passed to prohibit the establishment of municipal water S5fstems. It would be natural to suppose that a way would be found to get around such laws. It would be necessary, though, not only to get around the laws, but also to surmount considerable prejudice based on a notion that old oaken buckets were an American institution, and that their use kept the people in control of their own water supply and preserved the nation from decay. Reform in the direction of branch banking — and by branch banking is meant regional or nation-wide branch banking — has not only been prevented by law, it has been obstructed even more effectively by the interests which stood behind the law. The inventors of group banking over- came this twofold obstacle only by making it possible for the independent bank to retain its identity (and its officers their jobs), and yet at the same time gain the strength through association which is one great advantage of branch banking. Group or chain banking is therefore a compro- mise of economics with law and with prejudice. It has the advantage for the public interest of the safety of branch banking; it has the advantage for the private interest that there can be as many bank presidents as ever. On the other hand, it has the disadvantage for the public interest that it cannot be so readily supervised by the State as branch bank-

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490 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 ing; and the disadvantage for the private interest that it is administratively more cumbersome and expensive. But to get back to Chicago. Just why has there been all this banking purity there? The fact is that the big Chi- cago banks, like the New York banks, have for years been cultivating the country-bank-correspondent business. If the independent country banks became members of branch sys- tems their accounts with their city correspondents would be closed and the money would stay in the branch system. The same thing would happen that happened in California: every time a country bank joined the Bank of Italy it made the Bank of Italy bigger and the Anglo and London Paris National or the Wells Fargo relatively smaller, since one of the latter lost the account. At the same time the coun- try independents were in a panic for fear the more efficient branch systems would enter their towns and begin competing with them. The interest of the country bank and of its city correspondent became one. Since branch banking was a sharper issue in the West than in the East, the banks there being weaker, the Cook County bankers were drawn more actively into the opposition to branch banking than were the New York bankers. But New York has not been indifferent. Mr. G. W. Davison, of the Central Hanover Trust Company, made a moving appeal at the last meeting of the Bankers' Associa- tion for the "correspondent relationship." He hoped and be- lieved that the big city bank was the country bank's best friend. Of course, that was something for country bankers to laugh at, no matter how much they feared branch bank- ing. In the latter system a local banker knows at least where he stands, and that he can count on his organization, whereas if he is merely the correspondent of a city bank he knows he may be left in the lurch. But it is clear why so many New York and Chicago bankers do not want branch or group banking. It means change. The Pacific Coast and the Northwest will no longer have to supplicate the East. The hinterland is at last concentrating, its finan- cial resources for a bit of real independence, and the estab- lished money centers are not at all sure they like it. This strengthening of sectional finances is obviously a gain. But it leaves untouched the charge that branch bank- ing or its substitute, the group or chain system, will monopolize credit. Mr. Henry Dawes, who with his distinguished brothers controls the Central Trust, a Chicago bank with a correspondent business it does not want to lose, paints frightful pictures of the branch system sucking all the money out of the rural cen- ters. Even if this possibility existed — which is not for a moment admitted — there remains the present inadequacy of banks as they are. It is a calamity for banks to fail, a calamity to borrowers and a calamity to depositors. It is better to have them niggardly in their local loans than insolvent. But as a matter of fact a branch or group bank brings stability to a community and an increase of funds rather than a decrease. The great branch systems of Canada go into pioneer settlements where no sane and scrup- ulous independent banker like Mr. Dawes would ever go. And even in an established community where the inde- pendent is safe enough, a branch organization can maintain better service than the independent one. On the other hand, it would be ridiculous to assume that great regional branch-bank systems are without danger to the public. They will, of course, need regulation and supervision beyond what banks now have. The advantage is that they can be supervised to some purpose. They fur- nish by the fact of their size and geographical spread a groundwork of practically invulnerable safety which the individual banker cannot approach. They offer the oppor- tunity for increased services to small communities which the independent cannot afford to provide. In the Driftway THE Drifter is embarrassed. Not financially — or at least no more so than usual — but socially, as it were. He is indebted to a lady for a gift, but he can't make out who she is. Several weeks ago, when declaring himself in favor of a liberal use of color, he mentioned his predilec- tion for what are commonly called "loud" ties. Not long after, a communication arrived on gay orange paper bearing the letterhead in red type of the Indian Craft Shop of Mon- terey, California. The letter read : After reading your column this week we couldn't resist sending you one of our ties. Now the great difficulty for us is to find men brave enough to wear them. . . . My sympathies were always stirred by the dulness and ugliness of men's clothing; but after I went to Santa Fe and looked upon Witter Bynner I felt less unhappy, and now when you descend upon Monterey in a Kelly green suit and red tie I shall know that further sympathy is needless. This much was typewritten and presented no difficulties. But then followed the signature in script. The first two names were readable, indicating, as the Drifter has already revealed, that the writer was a lady. But the last name, after a brave, bold beginning, wandered away indefinitely toward the rainbow's end. The Drifter has examined the signature — at intervals — several times since, but in vain. There was a man once who, whenever he received a letter he couldn't read, wrote at once to the sender : "I accept with pleasure your kind invitation to dinner next Wednesday evening." But to do that one has to be able to read at least the name of the writer. And anyhow Monterey is a long way off. The dinner might be cold before the Drifter arrived. ***** IN the meantime, the tie reached the Drifter under sepa- rate cover. There is nothing vague or indecipherable about the tie. Undeniably its color, as the sender says in her letter, is red. There is brilliance, sparkle, and energy in that tie. So much so that when the Drifter unfurls it to the breezes and struts along the street he is practically a parade. People line up along the sidewalk as he goes by, and if Presi- dent Hoover were to walk on one side of Pennsylvania Ave- nue dressed in the Stars and Stripes and the Drifter on the other side wearing his Monterey tie, the Drifter would with- out question draw the larger gallery. Almost any day the Drifter expects to be arrested for taking part in a parade without a permit. And he once stopped traffic on a busy highway by coming unexpectedly around a corner. The leader in a line of speeding automobiles jammed on his brakes and came to a grinding halt, having mistaken the Drifter's red tie for a "stop" signal. The Drifter

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Books, Music, Drama To Spring By VIRGINIA MOORE Unsullied Spring, O .just-about-to-begin : Fresh river-flags, cold crocuses, low bed Of deep-dyed violets where snows have been ; Tulips as pale as butter or as red As Aphrodite's bosom where it bled; Sweetpeas crowded together, dappled with dew (Pink, pale, color of salmon, lavender almost blue), Pushing the fence — and over all the spell Of a rich, rank, germinating smell Out of the earth, an odor green and brown — Bushes of rainy lilacs weighted down. O Spring, O light of limb, O lovely stepping one, Brushing the speared grass, leading the warm sun; O leafy glade, unspoiled, unspotted, cool, Dipping your matted roots into the rain's pool: Mortal am I, mortal and twisted with pain, But I would begin too — I would begin again. Gide's First Novel The Immoralist. By Andre Gide. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. STRANGE are the mysteries and accidents of translation. Andre Gide, commonly regarded as the foremost author of France, has been writing for forty years. Translations of his works did not begin to appear here until 1926. "Les Faux Monnayeurs," published in France in 1925, came out in English translation in 1927. But his first novel, "L'Immoraliste," pub- lished in 1902, only now appears in an American edition. The story, told in the first person, is that of Michel, a man brought up as a student of dead civilizations, and entirely ab- sorbed in his studies, who marries a young girl at his dying father's wish. On his honeymoon he is attacked by tuberculosis, and he emerges from the shadow of death with his outlook upon life completely altered. For the first time he realizes the ex- quisite delights of pure sensation; his older studies no longer appeal to him, except as he finds here and there something rele- vant to his new feeling. He becomes fascinated by the last years of the empire of the Goths, and what attracts him most is the figure of the young king Athalaric, "this fifteen-year-old boy, . . . rebelling against his Latin education and flinging aside his culture, as a restive horse shakes off a troublesome harness; . . . preferring the society of the untutored Goths . . . plunging for a few years into a life of unbridled pleasures . . . and dying at eighteen, rotten and sodden with debauchery." Michel becomes constantly more restive as he feels this im- pulse toward "a wilder, more natural state"; and at his country home in Normandy, where he goes with his wife, Marceline, to spend the summers, he consorts by preference with the coarsest and most disreputable of his farm hands. It is now Marceline who succumbs to tuberculosis, and though Michel has an odd sort of love for her he knowingly takes her to climates bad for her health, and does not conceal from her his changed views. He is troubled not only by his new impulses but by doubts which affect all culture. What can man do more? he asks himself. "Is what man has hitherto said all that he could say? Is there nothing in himself he has overlooked? Can he do nothing but repeat himself? . . . And every day there grew strong in me a confused consciousness of untouched treasures somewhere lying covered up, hidden, smothered, by culture and decency and mo- rality." It seems to him then that he has been "born to make discoveries of a kind hitherto undreamed of"; he soon goes to the length of "sympathizing only with the wildest outbreaks of conduct in other people" and of regretting that such manifesta- tions are subject to any control whatever; the worst instinct of every human being appears to him the sincerest. At the end he betrays Marceline with the mistress of an Arab boy, and comes home to find her dying. Were it not for its depressing close, the novel might almost be considered a seductive argument for immorality. It was in- deed so considered by reviewers at its first appearance, and M. Gide has felt called upon to defend it in a preface, in which he complains: No one was grateful to me for the indignation he felt against my hero; it was as though he felt this indignation in spite of me; it overflowed from Michel on to myself; I seemed within an ace of being confounded with him. But I intended to make this book as little an indictment as an apology and took care to pass no judgment. The public nowadays will not forgive an author who, after relating an action, does not declare himself either for or against it. Yet it is evident that Gide intended his novel to be regarded at least in part from the moral side — to raise, if not to answer, a fundamental moral question. From this angle, the book is slightly dated. It recalls that "religion of sin" with which the name of Baudelaire is most frequently associated, and which troubled the fin de siecle group. The present-day reader is let down, too, when he finds, after so much profoundly philosophical preparation, that the protagonist's revolt takes forms no more original than those of egoism, unfaithfulness, and sexual aberra- tion. After all, vice is as commonplace as virtue. But as a psychological study, as a work of art, "The Im- moralist" is almost a masterpiece. The mental change in Michel and his moral disintegration are made thoroughly con- vincing; they do not proceed step by step like a logical theorem, but with those advances and recessions so frequent in life. Michel's drift toward homosexuality, in particular, is suggested with the utmost delicacy and skill. One might think of this as an acute psychoanalytic novel, free from jargon, were it not that it was written long before psychoanalysis effectively made its appearance. The minor characters, the Arab boys and the Normandy farm hands, are drawn with great shrewdness, and the figure of Marceline, while not perhaps as sharply realized and full-bodied as it might be, is lovely and pathetic. Admira- bly translated by Dorothy Bussy, the book is written in a graceful idyllic prose. It is a novel that puts to the test once more two dubious, weather-beaten words, for it is completely "classical" in form and completely "romantic" in message. Henry Hazlitt Two Kinds of Satire Lost Buffalo. By Leonard Bacon. Harper and Brothers. $2. Droll Parade. By Carlton Talbott. Horace Liveright. $2. LEONARD BACON can tell a rattling good story in ex- pertly written verse, and he has told another one in "Lost Buffalo." Here again, in his usual exact metrical pattern, his accustomed eighteenth-century manner, Mr. Bacon's purpose is satire. His laughter is, however, always a bit forced and his satire is frequently based more upon a pedantic and aristocratic snobbishness than upon true wit. He looks do^-hp ncjS£("a^MB[ PUBi V

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492 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 n whatever he is describing and consequently always sees it a bit askew. In "Lost Buffalo" the poet is debunking what he con- siders the sentimental attitude toward the American Indian. In so doing he sometimes cheapens himself more than he does the Indian. He is a very prejudiced man; he doesn't think much of Indians or Jews or radicals — and he tells us so. To destroy these false idols he uses no rapier-like thrust, no ridicule other than that of character depreciation. He makes his Indian a drunkard and a fool, and although some Indians may be both this type of Indian is not in the majority. He calls Lenin (or says that his child calls him) "funny man." This method of caricature would be equally effective or ineffective regardless of what subject is caricatured. Mr. Bacon has always been debunking something, and often very successfully. He was most entertaining indeed when he started after Ph.D.'s and the scholastic pretense and folly in degree-hunting. He is often an amusing and annoying poet at one and the same time. This is probably what he wishes to be. One wonders, however, why he has never quite become the expert intellectual satirist that he promised to be. Carlton Talbott in "Droll Parade" is a rollicking antic and trick performer. His touch is as light as Mr. Bacon's is heavy; his verse form more varied but less expert. He is lusty and hilarious — neither of which attributes could ever be Mr. Bacon's. He writes alleged historical incidents, but his stories always have to do with kings in their off moments, with priests not entirely priestly, with virgins not quite virginal, with emascu- lated dragons, and with aristocratic stomach aches. His poems dash along through naughty incident after naughty incident. They make no pretense to complete story-telling nor to serious character portrayal. They read easily and entertainingly. Mr. Talbott has not the polish or skill of Mr. Bacon, but he is more fun. Eda Lou Walton The Soviet Achievement M' Soviet Russia. By William Henry Chamberlin. Little, Brown ^— and Company. $5. Russia Today and Yesterday. By E. J. Dillon. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $3.50. R. CHAMBERLIN, who is the Moscow correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, has been for seven years a resident of Moscow and, what is even more important, has a Russian wife to aid him. He has traveled in remote portions of the country, living for weeks at a time in peasant villages in central Russia, the Ukraine, and the Cau- casus. His desire to be non-partisan is obvious on every page; his objective is to furnish an intelligent, balanced understanding of what is going on, supported by the historical background of the Revolution and the Communist movement. He has as a result achieved a volume which will be for some time to come one of the best reference books on the achievements of the Soviets, especially from the historical point of view. His vol- ume is crowded with facts that every visitor to Russia should know to enable him to understand what he sees on his travels. Here he will find answered most of the innumerable questions with which the tourist is confronted on his return to America, such as: Are there still wild, homeless children? How many Jews are there in the ruling clique? How many Communists are there, and how does the central commission function in disciplining and purifying the party? What is the exact story of the break between Trotzky and the group headed by Stalin, etc., etc.? The very fact, however, that Mr. Chamberlin desires to be as judicial as possible makes the book hard reading. His style, too, is dull and heavy. It is to be hoped that in later editions there will be more careful editing to eliminate frequent repeti- tion, and to catch some slips, due presumably to the difficulty of revising the manuscript at such long range. Thus, he speaks of Lunacharsky as Commissar of Education although Luna- charsky was dismissed from office in the early fall of 1929. The book is also not up to date as to the more recent developments in the war against the kulaks, or the successful grain-collecting campaign of the fall of 1929. It is only fair to add, however, that no book on Russia can be up to" the minute. I know of one that is on the stocks two chapters of which, involving months of research and study, were destroyed on a single day by a couple of Soviet decrees introducing an entirely new system of law, or legal procedure. For the human element in the situation, as well as for a colorful picture of what is going on in Russia, one must turn to other volumes than Mr. Chamberlin's, such as Maurice Hin- dus's admirable "Humanity Uprooted." Mr. Chamberlin, for example, has given little space to the vexed questions of sex relations and the making-over of the family. Finally, it may be added that he believes that "bolshevism is a Russian rather than an international phenomenon." The positive gains for Russia from sovietism he finds to be the annihilation of agricultural landlordism, the cultural autonomy of the non-Russian nation- alities, and the emergence of a new spirit of what may be called plebeian democracy. He feels that the substitution of state for private control and operation in industry, transport, banking, and trade has yet to prove itself. But he adds that it is "now so firmly rooted and established and taken for granted . . . that one can no more imagine its replacement by private capitalism than one could imagine the introduction of communism in America. For good or evil Marx's economic ideas are to receive a long-term, thorough, practical demonstration in Russia." The interest of Dr. Dillon's volume lies first in his extraor- dinary knowledge of pre-war, Czarist Russia, in which he was for many years professor of comparative philology in Kharkov, editor of an Odessa paper, and correspondent of various Eng- lish and American dailies, and then in his extraordinarily favor- able view of the Bolshevik achievements. He revisited Russia in 1928 after an absence of fourteen years and portrays the astounding difference in the Russian scene as he viewed it, usually with the highest praise. His book is not meant to be as searching a volume as Mr. Chamberlin's, and it obviously lacks Mr. Chamberlin's depth of knowledge of Soviet Russia. Like Mr. Chamberlin's, Dr. Dillon's volume is already in places out of date, and one feels in it the need of more definite and unqualified statements. Dr. Dillon has every reason to be bitter against the Bolsheviks. They not only seized his life savings, but robbed him "of one near and dear, whose loss all the money in the world cannot make up." Despite this he remains remarkably detached and non-partisan in his judgment of the Bolsheviks, of whose achievements he often speaks with genuine enthusiasm. For instance, writing of the Ukraine he knew so well, Dr. Dillon declares that it "has risen from the dead" into a most impressive "independence, vigor, and relative prosperity"; that it "has become animated with a new soul." As for the embattled peasant, Dr. Dillon declares that "the dis- enthralment and cultural uplift of the peasantry by the leaders of bolshevism is one of the most marvelous feats on record." Foreigners who like himself had studied in Czarist days "the habits and the wretched social status of the peasantry will find it hard to recognize them as they are today." Similarly he can- not withhold his admiration of what the Soviets have accom- plished in other fields. Here is his conclusion: The Bolshevists then have accomplished much of what they aimed at, and more than seemed attainable by any human organization under the adverse conditions with which they had to cope. They have mobilized well over

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April 23, 1930] The Nation 493 one hundred and fifty millions of listless dead-and-alive human beings, and infused into them a new spirit. They have wrecked and buried the entire Old World order in one-sixth of the globe and are digging graves for it everywhere else. They have shown themselves able and resolved to meet emergency and to fructify opportunity. Their way of dealing with home rule and the nationalities is a masterpiece of ingenuity and elegance. None of the able statesmen of today in other lands has attempted to vie with them in their method of satisfying the claims of minorities. In all these and many other enterprises they are moved by a force which is irresistible, almost thau- maturgical. Oswald Garrison Villard Salvation Through Monism The Proving of Psyche. By Hugh I'Anson Fausset. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $3.50. MR. FAUSSET'S book is in two parts, but the argument which runs through them both is of one piece. In the first part he sets forth a philosophical position which is called "true romanticism" and in the second he criticizes the ideas of Irving Babbitt. The whole book is closely reasoned and well written, but it is not easy reading; Mr. Fausset em- ploys a terminology to express his ideas of which it is difficult to approve, and he indulges in references to a certain "ideal" personality which arouse my suspicions of his whole program. I have an ineluctable hostility to writers who employ the figure of Jesus as a symbol for the perfect man. We know too little about Jesus for the reference to have any precise or con- vincing meaning. It is impossible to say that Jesus supports this or that argument. If the evidence about Jesus were as overwhelming as the writers who employ this device imply, it would never have been possible for a whole school of not entirely idiotic Biblical critics to maintain that Jesus never ex- isted. In any case, to employ Jesus as a symbol for an ideal, and particularly to employ his alleged ideas to sustain an argu- ment as intricate as that Mr. Fausset sets forth, is to indulge in indefensible myth-making. Other than as a religious symbol Jesus has precious little to do with present-day intellectual dilemmas. Of course the reason Mr. Fausset appeals to his version of the ideas of Jesus is that he wants to reestablish what he calls a religious synthesis of the personality. He wishes to "formulate a faith in which intelligence need no longer prove fatal to imagination." "The essential problem that lies before humanity," he writes, "is how to combine creatively, as distinct from balancing negatively, apparent opposites, how to harmonize the individual and the social, the fact and the desire, the natural and the human, the conscious and the unconscious, the idea and the thing." The great enemy of his program is dualism. He correctly believes that all dualisms are destruc- tive of human personality, setting up false antitheses within man. He chooses to believe that Jesus solved that problem by synthesizing the conflicting claims upon man into a religious monism. Official syncretic Christianity restored dualism to a basic position in Western philosophy. It has been perpetuated ever since in literature by the classicists, and it has been fought in literature by the romanticists. The classicists tend to achieve a perilous negative balance, artificial in nature, be- tween the conflicting elements of life. The romanticists have perceived the artificiality and perilousness of the classic balance and have revolted against it. But while they have seen the weakness of classicism they have rarely had the resources to achieve a true synthesis. Mr. Fausset believes that the ma- terials are now at hand and that they point to a synthesis be- yond dualism; they point to a religious monism. Mr. Fausset admits that the old supernaturalism is dead. He says, how- ever, that "the supernatural is being recovered ... as the cre- ative principle in the natural." He talks about "the divinity im- manent in life." One apprehends this divinity apparently by an imaginative apprehension of life, a sort of cooperation of reason and instinct. Mr. Fausset would surrender himself to this impersonal power, this divinity. This surrender, he main- tains, will save him from hypostatized egotism, which is the dangerous element in all philosophies grounded exclusively in reason. His final aim would be, as said before, a religious monism which reconciles the moral and the mystical impulses, the instincts and the reason, the animal and the human (i.e., ap- parently, the cultural heritage), and similar dualisms. And, finally, he calls the creative will of life (i.e., the "divinity" in life) the "Father." He alleges that is what Jesus meant by Father! It is easy to see from the preceding rapid and crude sum- mary of Mr. Fausset's closely reasoned argument that the chief indictment of Mr. Babbitt is that he not only desires to per- petuate a dualism, but actually glorifies it. Now I too think that the central dualism of the new humanism is one of its major flaws, but I do not agree that it is necessary to drag in a somewhat far-fetched interpretation of the alleged teach- ings of Jesus in order to discredit it. I do not know of any greater disaster to contemporary thinking than this use of terms like "religion," "Jesus," "Father," and so on to sustain an argument for a modern necessity. There is small evidence that Mr. Fausset (and this is true of most of the people of his type) has ever engaged in the labor of "dissociating" the emo- tional incrustations which make the use of such terms danger- ous. Such terminology befuddles rather than clarifies modern thinking. And, finally, it is apparent that all Mr. Fausset wants is an integrated personality, a personality harmonious in its workings, not split into opposing fragments to the point of dis- integration. I fail to see anything in this ideal which cannot better be achieved through the technique of science, and conse- quently I cannot but object to the use of such muddied words as "religion" in advocating its necessity. C. Hartley Grattan Another "Love-Life" Balzac: The Man and the Lover. By Francis Gribble. E. P. Dutton and Company. $5. A DISCUSSION of this book might, as one reluctant re- viewer has shown, present the current estimate of Bal- zac's achievement, the results of scholarly research into his life, or other matter incidental to the author's purpose. Otherwise, one must baldly declare that the writer of the "love- life" of a dozen famous figures has added a thirteenth. In an early letter to his sister Balzac wrote: "I have two and only two passionate desires: to be famous and to be loved." Mr. Gribble tells us this in the first sentence of the first chapter and reminds us of it constantly, his aim being to show how the second desire was realized. The author's ability imaginatively to re-create his hero may be illustrated in his account of the newly unearthed fact that an uncle of Balzac's was guillotined for murder. He begins: "It is not even certain that Balzac himself knew anything about it. He would hardly, if he had done so, have written of the guillotine as 'the pillar of society'." And he ends the tale: "Balzac was a lad of nine- teen at the time the murder was committed. The matter may (though it is unlikely) have been hushed up so successfully that even he knew nothing about it, in spite of the fact that he was at one time in correspondence with his cousin, Louis

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494 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 Balssa's son. But though the story stands in no direct relation to his career, it seems right and reasonable for his biographer to tell it. It is a new fact — a striking and significant fact. It offers, on the assumption that he knew of it, a partial explana- tion, for what it may be worth, of that morbidity which always haunted Balzac." The frequent digressions, however, such as the considera- tion as to whether a charming woman is more desirable at twenty or forty, and the love episodes themselves are presented with a delicacy that probably will both please the inhibited reader and satisfy the unavailing censor. Joseph T. Shipley A Pioneer Fairy Story Cimarron. By Edna Ferber. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. WITH the instincts of a true story-teller, Miss Ferber has chosen for her latest dashing novel an irresistible protagonist. The hero of her tale is the West — mad, generous, loud-mouthed, colorful, untamed. The Wild West, the West of infinite distances, of men and horses, of six-shooters and daylight bank robberies, of Indians in beaded moccasins and blankets, of mud huts and red "likker," the West that Okla- homa was forty years ago. And her hero was obliging enough to be not only untamed, which gave him an altogether pictur- esque beginning, but to be full of ambition, which made his tam- ing a matter of less than a quarter of a century. And when he had settled down to a tidy existence of front porches and twenty- year-old elms blossoming in the desert, he came into a fortune! Oil; oil that made him so rich he could buy diamonds by the bucketful — and being a simple soul, he did exactly that. Our hero, then, turns out to be none other than our old friend Cin- derella. With this background, Miss Ferber, practiced writer that she is, could not fail to make a tale that would fire the imagina- tion of a great many thousand readers. But she has done more than draw a brilliant picture of Oklahoma. She has created men and women who go there to live — and in a measure do live there in the pages of her book. I say in a measure because I think Sabra and Yancey Cravat, and certainly Sol Levy and Dixie Lee and Cim and Donna and Felice, have a tendency to be gorgeous painted figures on the back drop of the West. I can see them well enough; but I cannot quite feel them or hear them. Not because they are preposterous or exaggerated. Miss Ferber assures me in her preface that only the more credible incidents in her book are not bona fide. The most unbelievable ones are the true ones. Yet I never get inside Yancey's skin; I never penetrate, indeed, beyond his white sombrero and his Prince Albert. I never feel that he is more than an actor to whom the great panorama of a civilization that is rolling out behind him is no more than a scene in a play. I see the strug- gle, in the case of Yancey and Sabra his wife, of soul with sense, of the dreamer with the practical man — in this case, the practi- cal woman. I see Yancey full of zest and poetry, eager for a new life, afraid of security, afraid of monotony; I see Sabra passionately set on making a home for herself in the wilderness, a home that shall be neat and snug and warm like the home she left in Kansas. But when I have finished reading all that Miss Ferber has to tell me of Yancey and Sabra they are still strangers to me, I do not know them. I suspect that this is due to Cinderella. If the magic flow of oil had not drenched the erstwhile Indian Territory in gold, Miss Ferber would not have been betrayed at the end of her story by a falsely romantic conclusion. It is all so easy. Neither Sabra nor Yancey, it is true, strikes it rich. But they do not need to. Their daughter becomes first the mistress and then the wife of the richest man in the country; their son marries one of the despised and downtrodden Osages, but she is really a princess in a white buckskin gown. Sabra is the leading woman in the State; Yancey is the most famous figure, the model for a monument to the Pioneer, and dies a hero, magnificently catch- ing in his arms a can of nitroglycerin that was hurled unex- ploded from a gusher. It turns out to be a fairy story. No matter if it really happened. It is the Fairy Story of the Pio- neer and the Indian. It delights my eye but, like most fairy stories, it does nothing to my heart. There were, of course, blood and tears on this last of the frontiers; there were death and despair. Miss Ferber knows it as well as anyone. But somehow her despairs are less convinc- ing than her triumphs. Yancey, dying with a broken chest, will play Hamlet tomorrow night, or if not Hamlet then Buffalo Bill. And if Yancey is a stage hero, the Osages in "Cimarron" are stage Indians. Only in the incredible hour of their triumph, I when they wear blankets over beaded Paris frocks and cerise silk shirts, when they buy Packards by the half-dozen, when the miserable spot of earth that they had been last exiled to bursts with oily wealth beyond any dreams, are they real. They will help make "Cimarron" a successful musical comedy, a super- feature movie. Even they, even the Wild West, cannot make it into the great book it ought to be. Dorothy Van Doren Hymn of Hate Grandeur and Misery of Victory. By Georges Clemenceau. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $5. CLEMENCEAU'S last book reveals the soul of the Tiger of France, but it adds nothing to his stature. It is a prolonged snarl of hate — hate of Foch, of Poincare, of Haig, of Pershing, of the Germans, of Briand and the League of Nations. There is in it surprisingly little hate of President Wilson, and just one admiration — for Clemenceau himself. Raymond Recouly's "Foch: My Conversations with the Marshal" inspired the eighty-year-old hermit to pen these savage reflections. Half the book is a reply to what he calls that "impu- dent farrago of troopers' tales"; the rest is a bitter attack upon the Frenchmen and others who had "mutilated" Clemenceau's own Peace of Versailles. But what Clemenceau makes most clear is his own tremendous egotism, his blank incapacity to see good in any but his own work. Foch had failed to give Clemenceau credit for his achieve- ments and had criticized Clemenceau's peace. Clemenceau re- plies first and most shatteringly by exposing Foch's own ambi- tion and vanity. Foch campaigned to win the supreme com- mand and even stooped to have terra cotta busts of himself made and distributed to his political friends, including the un- forgetting Clemenceau. Next, Clemenceau declares that he was himself responsible for Foch's appointment to the united command, and that he saved him from disgrace after the defeat on the Chemin des Dames. Third, the ex-Prime Minister asserts that Foch was insubordinate — a "soldier in a state of rebellion" — and a liar. All of which may be, but these are vices characteristic of both antagonists. Clemenceau himself cer- tainly never yielded to any higher authority, and he too has been accused of lapses of memory. Poincare is to Clemenceau "the man of inaction," Briand "the leading light of French defeatism." He says he told Lloyd George that from the day after the armistice he had found him an enemy to France and that Lloyd George, a man of a "bright, two-fisted smile," replied, "Was it not always our traditional policy?" The American soldiers, according to Cle-

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April 23, 1930] The Nation 495 * * « * WazUct&tL- The independent character of this bank d*te* back to its founding in 1 784 whea Alexander Hamilton wrote its Conjaruooa. BOARD OF TRUSTEES JOSEPH ANDREWS EDMUND L. BAYLIES JOSEPH H. CHOATE. J«. HENRY D. COOPER LINCOLN CROMWELL WM. M. CRUIKSHANK NORMAN H. DAVIS THOMAS DENNY CLEVELAND E. DODGE PHILIP T DODGE JOHN FOSTER DULLES EDWARD J HANCY ROBERT C HILL EUSTIS L. HOPKINS COLUMBUS O'D. ISEUN U P. KIESEWETTER JAMES B. MABON ALPRED E. MARLING WILLIAM J. MATHESON EDWIN G. MERRILL LEWIS SPENCER MORRIS RAY MORRIS FRANK C. MUNSON HENRY PARISH WALTER WOOD PARSONS W. EMLEN ROOSEVELT EDWARD M. TOWNSEND HOWARD TOWNSEND PAUL TUCKERMAN ALLEN WARDWELL Declaration of INDEPENDENCE by the oldest BANK in the UNITED STATES AN OPEN STATEMENT of POLICY by THE TRUSTEES »/ THE BANK •/ NEW YORK and TRUST COMPANY IN view of the many changes that have taken place in the banking field during the past year, and firmly convinced that the interests of its customers and future customers can be best secured by the preservation of the inde- pendent position of the bank, the trustees feel that the following outline of its policy will be of particular interest at this time THAT the Bank of New York and Trust Company must pre- serve its independent position and that the historic continuity of what is now the oldest bank in America, retaining its original name and the first financial in- stitution in America to use "Trust Company" as part of its title, must remain unbroken, THAT there is a real place in New York for conservatively' managed banks and trust compa- nies of moderate size where cus- tomers, both in the Banking and Trust Departments, may have easy access to and personal ac- quaintance with the senioromcer*. THAT the Capital and Surplus of the Bank of New York end Trust Company, when con- sidered in relation to its respon- sibilities, rank the institution among the strongest in the coun- try and that it is entirely adequate to take care of the requirements of the great majority of wealthy cor- porations, firms and individuals. THAT its Trust Department— continuously operated for more than one hundred yean by the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company and the Bank of New York and Trust Company- is completely equipped to care for the largest estates and trusts as well as for those of moderate size and that its record for admini- stration of fiduciary trusts of all kinds entitles it to rank among the leaders. \ THAT the fact that the company is not a distributor of securities, either directly or through an affiliated company is of distinct advantage to its customers and to all those interested in its trust funds, as its advice and informa- tion concerning investments are entirely impartial. THAT the Company's unique Charter, under which Trustees are elected for life or "good be- havior" with power to fill vacan- cies in the Board as they occur, affords a guaranty of continuity of management that is of ines- timable value to the creators of trusts, some of which are intended to continue fir into the future 1 S3 3 1119 1983 !J fi a • ■ 9 t a 11 anno a o m a n BANK ^NEW YORK WTRUST COMPANY capital, surplus and undivided profits $20,000,000 48 Wall Street, New York Uptown Office: Madison Avenue at 63rd Street hew ) ati CLEAUMG HOUSE MEMIUSHir UVMtEJL ONE * When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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496 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 New Titles in the famous MODERN L 1 Is at 95/ a copy James Huneke/s PAINTED VEILS Complete and unabridged No. 43 The PLAYS of TCHEKOV The Sea Gull — The Three Sisters — The Cherry Orchard — Uncle Vanya, etc. Introduction by Eva Le Gallienne — 171 menceau, did not go into the battle line until the war was "prac- tically over," and Pershing's desire for a complete separate army cost the lives of thousands of Frenchmen. And today "America, who has made a separate peace after growing in- credibly rich through the war, claims for her treasury the con- tributions earmarked for restoring French soil to a productive state." But the Treaty of Versailles, Clemenceau's own baby, appears in a new halo. Foch and Poincare had attacked him for not annexing the Rhineland and he defends his handiwork, even so far as to declare that no one has a right to change it. Its keynote, this strange old man says and repeats, "is the liberation of the peoples, the independence of nationalities." This of the treaty which calmly divided Germany's colonies among the victorious empires, allotted Shantung to Japan, vivi- sected Germany with the Polish corridor, forbade the union of Austria and Germany, and created the monstrosity of the Free City of Danzig! It is not the entire treaty, however, upon which he pronounces his blessing. President Wilson's League of Nations was to him "nothing more than an epitome of the parliaments of all nations, to which all historic dis- agreements, all diplomatic intrigue, all coalitions of national, or even private, egoisms were to come and concentrate, multiply, intensify, and perhaps sometimes even find some momentary mitigation." The tragedy of Europe, to Clemenceau, was that his treaty had not been maintained intact. Every mitigation of it was a crime — the failure to hang the Kaiser, the admission of the Germans to international conferences and to the League of Na- tions as equals (it is typical of Clemenceau's mind that he completely forgot the Germans when he said that the Peace Conference called before it and heard "all the parties inter- ested"), and all the gradual steps by which the settlement of reparations was reduced from an abstract principle to a calcu- lation of economic possibilities. In 1929 Clemenceau was still thinking in 1918 terms. He was still passionately sure of Ger- OtJl£V TitL£S many's exclusive and complete responsibility for the war; posi- tive that the German revolution was "mere window-dressing," The Sun Also Rises By Ernest Hemingway — 170 and that the Germans were still deceitful Huns, a menace to the peace of Europe. The outstanding phenomenon of 1929 The Dance of Life By Havelock Ellis —160 Europe, to his inflamed eyes, was that "Germany was arming, *-> i, j oi c • r , , i France was disarming." He died a disappointed man, sorry Great Modern Short Stories Include stows by for France because she had left him alone in his old age and Conrad, Galsworthy, Hemingway, Anderson, James Joyce, had turned to weaker leaders who had undone his great work. Glenway Wescottand others— Edited by Grant Overton —US I" the darkest days of the war this man had indeed that c j _ "stubborn will to win" whose lack in Haig and Petain he Sons and Lovers By D. H. Laurence —109 deplored. But in peace time— even in war, one may believe— A~~„ v~~^~. :~„ r> *r i ->-7 that is not enough. One turns the last page of this sometimes Anna Jvarenina By Tolstoy — 37 , .. *» * 1 * 1 ?.■ . .4. J J eloquent, often pungent, almost always petty book with a sense The Brothers KaramaZOV By Dostoycvsky —151 ol rclief that France so soon relieved Europe of the incubus of such a man of hate. Lewis S. Gannett Tristram Shandy By Laurence Sterne —147 Candide By Voltaire -47 A|. ^ BottOITl I SEND FOR A COMPETE LIST OF 171 TITLES Bottom Dogs By Edward Dahlberg With an Introduction To YOUR BOOKSELLER or THE MODERN LIBRARY. INC. N-«o by D' H' Lawrence' Sim0n and SchuSter' *2-50' 20 East 57th Street, New York fTT^HIS is a hard book. It grows out of the rough pavement Please inail me MODERN LIBRARY books Nos of the meaner streets in our Mid-Western cities. It is not Q I enclose $1.00 for each volume (95c for the book, 5c for postage). ■*■ dramatic ; not about hobos or criminals or sporting char- □ SenJ books C O. D. acters. It is about bottom dogs, youngsters like Lorry, whose □ Ple.isc send me, free of charge, your new catalog, describing all of the mother has established the Star Ladies' Barber Shop in a poor books m the Modern L.brary. section of Kansa$ Cty L()rry rung about Jn ^ streets untU y, N"'"Jf mother decides it is best for him to be sent to an orphan asylum AJdrus in Cleveland. He enters the home when he is twelve and stays City State there five years. We learn a great deal about this home, which ^^^^^^^^__^^__ seems not to have been worse than the average place of the kind m^i^a^^mma^ammmmm (which is bad enough), and a lot about the other boys there. When writing to odvtrtittrs fl*iu* mention The Nation & t k —

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April 23, 1930] The Nation 497 After Lorry gets out he hangs around Cleveland for a while, then goes back to his mother in Kansas City. He seems to be getting nowhere. Finally he rides the rods to the Coast. Ameri- can life on Lorry's level is surely the crassest form of life known to man. In this novel there are no lurid scenes, no extraordinary pictures of depravity, cruelty, or crime. But the whole is raw and hideous — and true. Except for the last chap- ters about the Los Angeles Y.M.C.A. and its hangers-on and Solomon's Dance Palace, in which the writing is jazzed up, the book is written in a stale, flat, back-alley Americanese — an ugly argot. There is a lot of meaningless foul talk which, however, is important, for it tremendously enhances the realism. D. H. Lawrence writes an interesting preface. In it one feels both the fascination and the revulsion with which a sensitive spirit, himself once a boy of the laboring class in the Old World, views this admirably perfected photograph of a portion of the Ameri- can scene. But like so many American novels, of both high ind low degree, it is a novel about a background. Fred T. Marsh Music Young Mr. Purcell THE very early spring, shining, keen, a little bare, touched with the sadness of things young, clothed itself in sound not long ago when the Friends of Music finished their eason at the Mecca Temple with "Dido and Aeneas." It was vritten in 1690 by a man of thirty-two for a young ladies' semi- lary in a London still fresh with the great winds of the Eliza- iethan springtime. Mr. Bodanzky, with the penetration into the central spirit >f whatever he conducts which usually characterizes his read- ngs, had felt and understood those winds. Under his direction he work unfolded like a veritable banner of youth, high-colored .•ith the robust patterns of the choruses or brocaded with the elicate supple lines of the arias. It lived from beginning to nd. The secret of such vitality in performance is notoriously lusive, but this time it arose from very subtle modulations in :mpo and dynamic. The larger dynamic curves and the larger hythmic designs were never distorted, but their lines were lightly and constantly varied. The regulation of this inner ulse seems to be the interpreter's chief task. If none exists ie performance becomes an anatomical survey of a musical orpse; if it beats too strongly hysteria results. Mesdames Telva and Flexer and Mr. Schlegel brought to ieir roles sincerity and much beauty of tone, though the latter's roduction was marred by a shake which sometimes left one in oubt as to the exact pitch. Mr. Meader made up in fine legato nging and excellent diction what he lacked in fire — a criticism :rhaps unmerited, since the Trojan prince seems to have been istastefully cautious. Mme Matzenauer's voice and musician- lip realized entirely the range of emotion and the great musical :auty of the Dido. Her When I Am Laid in Earth, the tragic id moving song which Bach incorporated into the St. Matthew ^ssion, stirred the audience profoundly. Thus projected Purcell's music produced something of the nazement of a miracle. Here is a score written over two cen- lries ago by a man who died at thirty-seven and was even iso- ted from the most significant musical developments of his time, e may have been curtailed as well by the exigencies of a new rm, for this was the first "opera" in English. He was cer- inly limited by the harmonic palette of the seventeenth century, mere sheaf of accepted colors if compared with the iridescent lances, the all-permitted tonal combinations of the modern When writing to advertisers The Six Most Fatal Diseases From Figures by U. S. Census. All Causes of Death 100% 1. Heart Diseases 17.24% 2. Pneumonia 8.13% 3. Cancer 7.96% 4. Nephritis (Kidney Diseases) . . . 7.88% 5. Cerebral Hemorrhage and Softening 722% 6. Tuberculosis 6.57% "Most Prolific Source of Dangerous Disease" — Dr. Foges, Rudolfinerhaus Hospital, Vienna THE 28 feet of human intestine, says the famous head of the great Vienna Clinic, Is the most prolific source of dangerous disease. He states that 90% of civilized women over 25 years and men above 35 suffer from Intestinal Stasis (Constipation) in some form. Sir Arbuthnot Lane, noted King's Surgeon of London, directs attention to this greatest single cause of ill health in these words : "The material which accumulates, decomposing beyond normal, In- fects the mucous membrane of the colon and appendix. Organisms extend into the dammed up and stagnating contents, infecting the food supply. The absorption of these toxins and organisms by the blood vessels and lymphatics, being in excess of what the liver, kid- neys and ductless organs can deal with, circulate through the entire body, lowering the vitality of every cell and causing; their degenera- tion. In consequence, the whole gamut of disease as known to us in civilization appears." Newer Methods of Treatment Developed by 300 Famous Physicians Now Presented in "THE LAZY COLON" by O. M. Campbell and Albert K. Detwiller, M.D. NOT a health book In the usual sense nor given to fads or theories. Presents In clear, non-technical language the newer methods of treating Intestinal Stasis as developed in the re- search and practice of 300 Physicians and Scientists of International reputation. Over 37,000 copies sold. Price $3, postpaid. If you find it does not contain information of the utmost importance, you may return the book for refund of money. Prof. E. V. McCollum, Johns Hopkins University: "It Is very well written and should accomplish much good." Lewis J. Belknap, M.D., Pres., Garden City Sanitarium, San Jose, Calif.: "I consider It the best book In my library." Dr. J. H. Kellog, Battle Creek Sanitarium: "An excellent work." Lloyd H. Wright, San Ga- briel, Calif.: "Send by re- turn mail one copy of 'The Lazy Colon,' recommended to me by my physician. Dr. Olson of Los Angeles." Read this Partial List of 36 Chapter Titles Biggest Dividends In Life Paid by a Healthy Colon ; Contrary to General Belief There Is Little Digestion in the Stomach ; Surpris- ing Theories of Water Drinking: Mysteries of the Intestine Re- vealed by X-Ray Investigators; Causes of Intestinal Stasis; Com- monest Form of Stasis; The Greedy Colon; Poor Appetite a Cause of Stasis; Startling Theories of Self-Poisoning; Story the Urine Tells; Coarse Food in Its Relation to Colon Output; Hardening of the Arteries and Blood Pressure ; Purgatives — Their Proper and Im- proper Use; Infection of the Small Intestine from Colon; Mineral Oil as a Laxative; Agar or Bran? Which?; Vitamin Knowledge; Effects of Tobacco on Longevity ; What Is the Truth About Alco- hol ? ; The Real Facts About Good Complexions ; Prominent Au- thorities on Loss of Hair ; A Bad Colon and Bad Teeth ; Starting Right with Infants and Children ; Some Interesting Facts About Food; New Light on Longevity; The Ounce of Prevention; The Greatest Menace of All ; Intelligent Use of the Enema ; Abdominal Exercise a Vital Requirement ; The Coated Tongue — Its Cause and Meaning; Is Sugar of Milk the Long Sought Remedy? Educational Press, Dept. H8, 8 E. 12th Street, New York r.DrCATIONAL PRESS, Dept. H8, 8 East 12th Street, New York, N. Y. Kindly send me The Lazy Colon for the enclosed $3.00. If I do not find that it is a book of extraordinary interest and value, I may return it and my money will be refunded. Name Address please mention The Nation

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498 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 "It is really something for the culture, of our Mega- lopolis, this audience that you have at The Group." JOHN COWPER POWYS Twelfth Year THE GROUP A Clearing House of Opinion For the Intellectually Adult meets every Tuesday evening at AUDITORIUM, 150 West 85th St. (one block East of Broadway) Tuesday Evening, April 22nd, at 8:30 P. M. DR. ALFRED ADLER (Eminent Viennese Psychologist) will speak on "LOVE AND MARRIAGE AS A TASK" April 29th, MORRIS HILLQUIT will speak on "OUR CHANGING SOCIAL ORDER" May 6th, FLOYD DELL will speak on "LOVE IN THE MACHINE AGE' Admission — Members 50c. Non-members 75c (Membership dues for the year $1.00) (Weekly notices mailed on request) The Group invites you to its membership. Informal Discus- sion Groups. Little Repertory Theatre. Musicals. Dance recitals. Monthly Entertainment and Dance. "I think that voluntary organizations, groups for dis- cussion and action, will give individuals lost in the sice of things, greater solidaritv and confidence." PROF. JOHN DEWEY So gripping you're afraid to read the next page" SO one excited reviewer called this seething mass of thrilling adventures — the true story of the noted Hungarian artist's imprisonment in Siberia, his escape, and his entanglement in the civil war between the Whites and Reds. The whole book moves swiftly and incredibly as the wildest motion picture and is ten times more entertaining. Second printing. $3.75 THROUGH BLOOD AND ICE by Ferenc Imrey E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC., 300 4th Ave., N. Y. C. THE TALK OF THE TOWN Is our newly opened Health Food Luncheonette, where the most fastidious and elite In matters gastronomic are fully satisfied — both in regards to taste and nourishment Only the freshest and best of foodstuffs and no processed prod- ucts nor injurious Ingredients are used. Come with your friends and join the Increasing host of our enthusiastic patrons. Open every day until mid- night, Including Sunday and holidays. HEALTH FOODS DISTRIBUTORS 45 East 34th Street (Between Madison and Park Aves. ) New York City SUMMER IS COMING- see pages 500, iii and iv composer's canvas. Yet this genius contrives with his seven- teenth-century tools, the tonics and dominants and cadences whose boundaries the most naive dance tune of today exceeds in every measure, a music marvelously fresh and various. For nearly an hour he distributes melodic declamation, woven polyphony, fragile, exquisite melodies, and full-blooded lusty choruses. So dextrously does he apportion them, so rich is his invention, that the listener is passed from change to change without one moment of slackened interest. That idiom he found so meet looks very cramped to us now. Not one composer living could move in its narrow rooms with grace. Why, with all our new resources, is a great deal of contemporary music such spiritless stuff, so merely clever? Have we no Purcells? Perhaps the expansion of the musical idiom has been so rapid, we are so perturbed by the sheer strangeness of the intervals employed, that we stand confused in a din of atonality and cannot hear our Purcells for the noise they make. Hubbard Hutchinson Drama Shakespeare and Expressionism FLITZ LEIBER'S King Lear was the most unsatisfactory of his performances. The play is probably the most diffi- cult of the Shakespearean tragedies, and no matter how vigorously Mr. Leiber vociferated he never once succeeded in convincing the audience that his passion rose to a height which would justify the wildness of the words he was called upon to utter. And yet, inadequate as the interpretation was, the rule that any performance of a Shakespearean play is likely to reveal values unnoticed in the study held even here, and I confess that I had never before caught the full force of certain of the scenes or realized the extent to which it is true that in this play the poet not only anticipates the utterance of the completest nihil- ism ever achieved by a Strindberg or an Andreyev, but antici- pates also even their method of expression. For if the scene on the heath — the scene in which the maddened Lear discusses the universe with a naked man and a fool — were written today, critics would surely not let it pass without some reference to both Russian gloom and the technique of expressionism. When Lear, come to his dotage, renounces the power which had served to protect him from knowledge of things as they are, he experiences first of all the depth of human ingratitude, and he realizes that what he had hitherto supposed to be virtue was in fact no more than avarice and fear. Appalled by his discovery, he renounces his kindred and, not yet wholly disillu- sioned, he goes forth to discover what kind of peace a plain man can make with the natural world. But the scene on the heath reveals the utter failure of his quest. Wisdom, embodied in the Fool, reveals her impotence and is reduced to offering the cold comfort of cynicism. Inanimate nature, whom some, even before Rousseau and Wordsworth, had imagined as a kind mother, shows her solicitude by pouring down rain upon them and crashing her thunder above their defenseless heads, There remains only the innate dignity of the creature man, but the nakedness of Poor Tom reveals clearly enough how much that amounts to when the forked radish is brought to the final test. "What is your study?" demands Lear. "How to prevent the fiend and to kill vermin," answers Tom, and that, no doubt, is the whole duty of man, for the phrase means, I take it, how to achieve both peace of mind and peace of body. But the scene in which the words are spoken reveals how utterly the whole company has failed to do either. Lear has appealed in turn to each of the three abstractions in which it is possible for man to have faith — to Wisdom, to Nature, and to Man. All When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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April 23, 1930] The Nation 499 THEATRES □ FILMS LECTURES D □ The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present RUTH DRAPER in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER SKETCHES Evenings : Tuesday, Wednesday. Friday, Sunday, 8 :60. fOlV/f FTlY THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats. Thurs. VuVyivii^J-' x and g^ 2.30 VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 Popular Price ($2.50) Matinee Saturday HERMAN 8HUHLIN presents THE LAST MILE "Altogether an Amazingly Successful Play." Richard tockridge, Sun. C A TVf IT H iVDT( Theatre 42nd St., West of Broadway. OA1T1 XI. IT/VAAIO Eves. 8:50. Matinees Wed. & Sat. 2:80. The Theatre Guild Presents HOTEL UNIVERSE A NEW PLAY By PHTTJP BARRY MARTIN BECK

Theatre, 45th St., W. of Eighth Ave. Evgs., 8 :40. Mats., Thurs. & Sat., 2 :40 A MONTH Z COUNTRY By IVAN TURGENEV tT^viiltf'l THEATRE, 52nd St., W. of Broadway VXUUU Evgs. 8:30. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:30. The Apple Cart Bernard Shaw's Political Extravaganza A I \7I1VI Theatre, 52nd St., W. of Broadway /-\.1_< V 11^1 Evgs., 8:30. Mats., Wed. & Sat., 2:30 THE THEATRE OF THE DANCE 116 West 65th Street, Studio 220— SUS. 0866. DORSH A Present* an unusual program of interest to the discerning every Saturday evening. Subscription $1.00 CIVIC REPERTORY THEATRE SUN. AFT., APRIL, 27 AT 3 FAREWELL, "DANCE RECITAL OF MODERN MUSIC" HENRI "THE BEGINNING OF NEW THEATERS" THOMAS MANN ARTIST-PATRONS Muriel Draper, Will Durant, H. L. Mencken, Joseph Stella SEEK "JOURNEY'S END" The all-talkingr screen version of R. C. Sherriff's World-Famed Play with a powerful cast headed by COLIN CLIVE, creator of the stage role of Captain Stanhope. CI A I FT TV THEATRE. B'way & 46th St. V***«E« M. 1 Twice Daily, 2:45—8:45. 3 times Sat, Sun. & Holidays 2 :45— 5 :45-« :45. Midnight Show Every Saturday Night. Seats selling 4 weeks ahead. g g"th St. Playhouse. Just East of 7th Ave. Circle 0129 J^ Continuous 1:80 until Midnite Now American Premiere The First German-Made Dramatic Sound and Talking Picture CONRAD VEIGT (Stt? °£ "Dr c.H«*ri») "Die Braut Nr. 68" (Bride 68) with Elga Brink and Clifford McLaglen. America's Foremost Actor tn The Screen's Smartest Comedy JOHN BARRYM0RE in "THE MAN FROM BLANKLEY'S" A Warner Bros, and Vitaphone Talking Picture. Broadway and 47th Street. Daily, 2:46—8:46; Sundays, t 6 8:46 CENTRAL THEATRE »«**«*-■»« «* **«*• STEPHEN VINCENT BENET Author "John Brown's Body" will speak on "NATIONALISM IN POETRY" RAND SCHOOL 7 East 15th Street Friday, April 18th, 8:30 p. m. Admission 50c A CHALLENGING EXPOSE IN TWO LECTURES This COCKEYED WORLD as it seems to HE, Wq oD BROUN FRI. EVE., APR. 25 IS MARRIAGE MADE IN HEAVEN?— Starv- ing Amidst Plenty — Who Reads Books — and Why? Reserved section 76c— $1.00 Res. front seats, $1.60 FRI. EVE., MAY 2 18 SEX NECESSARY? -What's Wrong With Religion ?— What's Wrong With the Thea- tre? COMMUNITY CHURCH, 34th Street and Park Ave. For Information and Reservations: DISCUSSION GUILD 15 East 40th Street— Phone : LEX. 7483 WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plats to See ••A Month in the Country— Guild— 52nd St., W. of B'dway. ••Apple Cart— Alvin— 52nd St., W. of B'dway. •Berkeley Square — Lyceum — E. 45th St. •Civic Repertory — Beg. Apr. 21 — Romeo and Juliet. •Death Takes a Holiday — Barrymore — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •Dishonored Lady — Empire — B'dway and 40th St. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st St., E. of B'dway. •••Fifty Million Frenchmen — Lyric — W. 42nd St. •••Flying High— Apollo— W. 42nd St. Hotel Universe — Beck — 45th St., E. of Eighth Ave. Jonica — Craig — 54th St., E. of B'dway. ••June Moon — Broadhurst — W. 44th St. ••Rebound— Plymouth — 45th St., W. of B'dway. ••Strictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. •••Strike Up The Band— Times Sq.— W. of B'dway. •The Green Pastures— Mansfield — 47th St., W. of B'dway. ♦The Last Mile— Sam H. Harris-^42nd St., W. of B'dway. ••Topaze— Music Box— 45th St., W. of B'dway. Films Dich Hab Ich Geliebt and Return of Sherlock Holmes — Begin- ning Sat. Apr. 19 — Fifth Ave. Playhouse, 66 Fifth Ave. Hunting Tigers in India and Lone Star Ranger — Beg. Apr. 16. The Locked Door— Beg. Apr. 19— Little Carnegie. "Die Braut Nr. 68"— 55th St. Playhouse— E. of Seventh Ave. The Doctor's Secret — Beg. Apr. 17 — Little Picture House — E. 50th St. Journey's End — Gaiety — 46th St. and B'dway. The Man From Blankley's— Central — 47th St. and B'dway. •Drama. ••Comedy. 'Musical. When writing to advertiser! please mention The Nation

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500 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 New York's First Labor Bank We share profits with our depositors. M g / ^y Therefore £JL / /q Pay A/4 to our Thrift Accounts All deposits made until April 20th will bear interest from April 1st THE AMALGAMATED BANK OF NEW YORK 11-15 UNION SQUARE {••■■'■■■■■■•■»a>*>* Why a Training School for JEWISH SOCIAL WORK? BECAUSE experience has shown that the social worker can only be successful if he knows and reckons with the social, religious and cultural background of the people among whom he works. BECAUSE the Jewish group in America represents a religious and cultural group possessing a highly distinctive character. BECAUSE the social worker who identifies his work with the Jewish group in America should, by special training and knowledge, be able to contribute to the problems of its adjustment to American life with a view to its own greater happiness and to the greater enrichment of the culture of America. College graduates are invited to examine carefully the advantages of Jewish social work as a profession. Scholarships and Fellowships ranging from $150 to $1,000 for each school year are available for specially qualified students. May 9th is the last date for filing application for the $1,000 and $750 fellowships. For further information address M. J. Karpf, Director The Training School For Jewish Social Work A graduate school 67-71 W. 47th St., New York City three have failed him, and so, while the elements seem to join him in his imprecations, he curses God. There is no principle of good upon which the human being can count. If the scene says anything it says that man can believe in the goodness of the universe only so long as he is not compelled to contemplate it; that he may have faith while he lives in an artificially constructed world which seems to be governed by love and loyalty and duty, but that the structure is a fragile one likely to collapse at any moment as Lear's world has col- lapsed. It is made up of illusions; it is founded, in part at least, upon a misapprehension of the motives of such people as Goneril and Regan whose hypocrisy reassures such people as Lear. And when it does collapse it leaves those who have taken temporary refuge there lost in that anarchy of the heath to which nature is always tending to return. Shakespeare, to be sure, saves himself (as he always does) from the madness which this way lies by a partial retraction. The very nature of tragedy as he writes it demands that some kind of order shall be reestablished; that something shall be salvaged from the wreck of human lives with which the tragedy deals. And it is, of course, Cordelia who performs this func- tion. She is lost even at the moment when she is found again, but she does not die until she has restored to Lear his faith that goodness may exist — just as Desdemona docs not die until she has given back to Othello the faith without which his death would have been intolerable. But whatever the scope of this retraction may be, it is not made until after Shakespeare has said all that can be said in defense of the belief that darkness rather than light is the ruling principle of the universe, and until, moreover, he has set forth the argument by means of a technique peculiarly "modern." Surely the scene on the heath is the inspiration of all the Walpurgis nights of literature, from that of "Faust" down to those of "Ulysses" and "Antic Hay." Surely also the fact is one which might profitably be remem- bered by those who believe Shakespeare outmoded, as well as by those conservatives who find only a distressing kind of in- sanity both in what some of the moderns say and in the way they say it. It is not only to men of the twentieth century that, in the words of a recent poet, "life has bared her bones." Joseph Wood Krutch SUMMER THURSDAY FRIDAY —-SATURDAY SUNDAY Decoration Week-End 4 GLORIOUS $ FUN DAYS SO VIA DE LUXE 'NON-STOP' TAVERN SPECIAL A trip on a 'magic carpet' — Echo Lakers have smoothed the path for a real vaca- tion jaunt — a great time in store for every one fortunate enough to be, ''among those present !" I — Includes — Fare Trans- portation AH Meals Camp Stay Lv. 6 P. M. Reach Camp Midnight ACCOMMODATIONS LIMITED EARLY RESERVATION URGED You wouldn't know the old place, nowt . . . the same old friendly spirit . . . but what improvements . . . what facilities . . . e'en the golf course nearing completion t Special June Rates $25 Weekly ECHO LAKE TAVERN 475 5th AVE. Phone: LEX 887» R. B. NCDELL M. NCDELL ■<^r^L ;£CH0 LAKE- Mv rrwvef5tK ■ ■ ^DinONDACK: Other SUMMER Advertising pages iii and iv When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Gandhi's Campaign Begins By HERBERT ADOLPHUS MILLER Bombay, March 15 I HAVE just spent three days at Gandhi's ashram, shar- ing all its activities, as the climax to five exciting and interesting weeks in India. During my five weeks I talked with missionaries, Englishmen, and Indian leaders of many religious faiths and political thought, Hindu, Moslem, Christian, and Parsee, liberal and radical. All agreed that there are only two real forces in India — the government and Gandhi. I arrived at the ashram, a combined school and religious retreat, at the very moment when the ultimatum was being delivered to the Viceroy. The atmosphere was electric, as might have been expected at the general headquarters of an avowed army of revolution, but controlled, fearless, and confident. With this ascetic self-discipline I could not help contrasting the government at Delhi, housed in extravagance and surrounded by pomp and secrecy. Here in the ashram was a monastic life without secrets. Its messenger, carrying a declaration of war, was being sent on a fifty-hour trip third class. This messenger was a young English Quaker, expressly chosen to be a constant reminder to Gandhi that he himself has no hatred against Englishmen. Gandhi was in the best of health and spirits, running and skipping with the children on his daily walk, and on. all occasions full of laughter and banter. He has girded his loins for the battle of his life to arouse and free India; he has absolute confidence that the final outcome will be victory. When I asked him how large was his following he said that he did not know, but it was necessary to start in order to find out. He likened his efforts to arouse the people to a surgeon applying a blister to make a cure, always with the possibility that he may kill instead. In reply to the claim that India has benefited by Eng- lish rule, he said that there was no doubt that the British had done many good things — the hospitals, for example — though these good things reached only a microscopic per cent of those needing them and could not make up for the killing of self-reliance and the impoverishment of the masses. To the claim that only the government is able to preserve peace between Hindu and Moslem, Gandhi answered that the two religions had got on harmoniously before the English came. When the Mohammedans had shown a tendency to draw away, naturally the English had seized upon this divergence and stimulated it, on the principle of "divide and rule." "Hindus must be developed to such a point of self-control that the Moslems can have no fear," said Gandhi. Mr. Gandhi, as is his custom, was sitting on the floor spinning during our interview. As I took my leave I said : "In wishing you success I do not know whether to express the hope that you will or will not be arrested." He laughed heartily and said: "It makes no difference; either is good. There will always be others to carry on, and the work will never stop." At evening prayer, -with all the members of the ashram sitting on the ground around him, Mr. Gandhi read the list of those who had volunteered to go out in the first group on March 12. There were many questions about details from the audience. They were met with witty repartee by Mr. Gandhi and called forth bursts of laughter, but I could hardly keep back the tears. Before four o'clock the next day all had enrolled except a few men whose respon- sibilities in the ashram made it necessary for them to remain. The women were disappointed at not being allowed to go. Mr. Gandhi said the presence of women might embarrass the English and thereby make the fight unfair. The work of preparing the men for the march and the women for taking over the men's work in the ashram was begun at once. I overheard an older man telling a younger one how to behave in jail and how to throw himself between the warring factions in case violence should break out. He was as matter of fact as though he had been giving directions for taking a journey. Mr. Patel, the accepted first lieutenant of Mr. Gandhi and the brother of the president of the National Assembly, was arrested the last day we were at the ashram. As the police car approached, the members of the ashram lined up on both sides of the road. Mr. Patel burst out laughing and said : "I had expected to be the last to be arrested and here I am the first." He was loaded with garlands and given cotton to spin and then went on to the prison a mile beyond. This arrest was like "the shot heard round the world." Thousands flocked to the ashram, filling the four miles of dusty country road from Ahmedabad and camping by the gates of the ashram. The next day Ahmedabad de- clared a hartal (cessation of activities) and in the evening 60,000 persons gathered on the bank of the river to hear Gandhi's call to arms. This call to arms was perhaps the most remarkable call to war that has ever been made. The dominant notes were non-violence, non-hatred, self-discipline, and sacrifice, fear- lessness and persistence to the end. On the same day stu- dents at universities throughout India went on strike to continue until the day of the march. The casual observer could not fail to feel the complete absence of fear among all those who had committed themselves to the battle. There was much speculation as to whether the march would be allowed to begin, since its openly avowed purpose was to proceed to the sea and begin civil disobedience by illegally making salt as a protest against the iniquitous salt tax. But the march did begin at six-thirty on the day appointed. At eight-thirty in the morning, at a mass-meeting of youth in Bombay, I heard it reported that Gandhi had marched three miles with 125,000 people following. In the actual group there were seventy-two volunteers. By the time this letter reaches New York Gandhi should have begun his work. The English are on the horns of a dilemma. They cannot overlook civil disobedience, but the arrest of Gandhi will take away the only man who can prevent violence. When he is arrested groups all over India are prepared to take up the work of civil disobedience, and the order has been issued for a general hartal for the day.

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502 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3381 Visits to Soviet Russia Two weeks — Moscow and Leningrad visiting Hamburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsingfors en route. Twenty-nine days abroad. Leader : William Clark Trow, Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Michigan. Sailing from New York S.S. EUROPA— June 18th. Price from New York— $756; from Hamburg- June 26th— $521. Registration open. Other Parties with programs of varied interests — industrial development, the theatre, art, education, social work, etc., following diversified itineraries al- lowing from 7 to 36 days in Russia; sailing May 14, 30, June 3, 18, 24, 28, July 5, 24, August 21. Parties of eight plus American leader. Registrations open. 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK ?TME-QREN^R-0,Aa CZ) A Personal Message From DR. JOSHUA KUNITZ (Lecturer on Russian Literature — College of the City of New York) Last year it was my privilege to act as cultural leader for the World Tourists, Inc., of their eminently successful tour to SOVIET RUSSIA. So many letters of commendation and enthusiasm were re- ceived by .educators, travelers, teachers and business men who made up this group, that the WORLD TOURISTS have de- cided to send a similar tour this year to SOVIET RUSSIA under my guidance. The tour begins June 26th, S. S. Lafay- ette, and includes 35 days in Soviet Russia. It will be my pleasure to interpret the re- markable changes that have taken place in Russia. A never forgetful tour. I earnestly invite immediate inquiry. Full details will be sent including itineraries, rates, etc. Address Dr. Joshua Kunitz WORLD TOURISTS, INC. 175 Fifth Ave. New York City CZD CZ1 Gandhi's greatest strength is among the masses in the villages, in whose eyes he is a saint. The liberals and the intellectuals think it is better to strive for dominion status, although many of them are working heart and soul with Gandhi. There is vivid recollection of the methods of vio- lence used successfully in Ireland, so that there is not com- plete unanimity about the use of non-violence. Many told me that they thought the first reprisals on the part of the government would be followed by sporadic outbursts of vio- lence. They were not convinced that this would not be a good thing. One of the most prominent Indians in the government told me that it might take 200,000 Indian lives to 2,000 English lives, but that the Indians could afford their loss, while the loss of 2,000 important men would de- moralize the government. Even the most convinced follow- ers of Mr. Gandhi assume this outbreak of violence. Jawaharlal Nehru, president of the National Congress which at Lahore in December declared for independence, is one of the closest workers with Mr. Gandhi, though he differs from him widely. The younger Nehru, a Brahman who lives in his father's palace, is an uncompromising Socialist, and thinks that all religion hampers progress. He radiates sincerity and faces the prospect of jail with the same fearless calm as Gandhi. He agreed with me that some guaranty to minority groups would help allay internal con- flicts, but he had been unable to interest Gandhi in it for the reason I have given above. When I was in Delhi a con- ference was actually going on at which there were repre- sentatives of the divergent groups. No one expected much from it except an indication of purpose. No one knows what policy the government will pursue. On the surface it does not seem worried. I heard the budget presented by the Finance Minister and noticed the remark that no allowances had been made for expenses in the event of civil disobedience or other disorders, though it was implied that there might be such disturbances. The Associated Press representative said that the call for news about India from England had multiplied many times in the past two months. The English press in India gives the news of the movement in detail, but is trying to belittle it with ridicule. While I can make no prophecy as to immediate develop- ments I am convinced that the Indians have actually started on the road from which they will not turn aside until inde- pendence is secured. Contributors to This Issue Frederic Babcock is a Chicago journalist. Paul Y. Anderson is the national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. J. G. Curtis is the pseudonym of a careful student of present-day financial and industrial developments. Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at Washington Square College, New York University. C. Hartley Grattan is the author of "Why We Fought." Joseph T. Shipley is the dramatic critic of the New Leader. Lewis S. Gannett is contributing editor of The Nation. Herbert Adolphus Miller is professor of sociology at Ohio State University. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation -

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30, 1930 No. 3382 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 503 EDITORIALS: The Crumbs of London 506 Merger on Merger 507 Defense of Freedom 507 A Plague of Locusts 508 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 509 PROHIBITION IN LITTLETOWN. By William W. Norton 510 "MY DEAR SENATOR" III. By Oswald Garrison Villard 512 THE LATEST BOLSHEVIK ZIGZAG. By Louis Fischer 513 THE MODERN CRITIC'S POINT OF VIEW. By C. Hartley Grattan 514 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 517 CORRESPONDENCE 517 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 518 BOOKS, FILMS, DRAMA: Of Changing Seasons. By Eda Lou Walton 519 Last Testament. By Henry Hazlitt 519 The Sensibility of Proust. By Joseph Wood Krutch 519 The Rediscovery of America. By Granville Hicks 520 Wisdom of an Elder Statesman. By George E. G. Catlin 522 Fiction in Brief 523 Films: "Journey's End." By Alexander Bakshy 524 Drama: Weltschmers on the Riviera. By Joseph Wood Krutch.. 525 NTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Ferment in Spain 529 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor OSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors OHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN ORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager ubscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States id Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal nion, $6.00. HE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: ation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss .rtrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. rHE GUILT for the horrible loss of life in the Colum- bus penitentiary fire rests squarely upon the State of 'hio. Here is a penitentiary just a century old, built to mtain 1,500 persons and actually crowded with 4,900. It id already been the scene of one fire with terrible loss of e, yet nothing was done to remedy conditions. The 1929 indbook of the National Society of Penal Information de- ared that the overcrowding was worse than in any other rge prison and that less than most other penitentiaries had grown away from the old ideas of penology. In other )rds, this prison has for years been a disgrace to the rich d prosperous State of Ohio, which is now reaping just lat it has sown. It cannot escape universal condemnation persons who have a spark of humanity and decency within i :m, who believe that no American State should be allowed t outdo its criminals in its criminal mishandling of those i :s supposed to redeem and cure. We do not know or care tio or what started the fire. Whether it was incendiary c not, the black guilt of this mass murder rests on the State ^ ich has tolerated so horrible an institution. V E ARE GLAD the Conference Committee on the tariff bill has run the rates up all along the line, Ieeing invariably on the highest duties. We hope that » measure will emerge just as bad as it possibly can be, the worse it is the quicker will come the punishment and the reaction. Never, we believe, was there a spectacle of national economic folly similar to this of putting up tariff walls to a greater height than ever before in a period of business depression — the very moment when everything should be done to stimulate foreign trade. Meanwhile France has retaliated with a new high tariff on imported automo- biles, trucks, and parts, passed in the Chamber of Depu- ties by 472 to 2, thus putting tariff burdens of about $1,000,- 000 a year on the American companies which are trying to sell their cars in France, the minimum duty on tourist cars being 45 per cent ad valorem. On April 16 the Cuban Minister to the United States, Dr. Orestes Ferrara, declared before the Southwest Foreign Trade Conference that the relations of his country to ours were "too sinister" to discuss before "so optimistic a gathering." But he felt obliged to point out that because of the new tariff "our sugar crisis is ruining our interests and at the same time yours, also." Once large and prosperous American companies in Cuba, he de- clared, "are going into the hands of receivers," and "have seen their investments reduced from $1,500,000,000 to less than $700,000,000." It is refreshing to note that one Democrat, ex-Senator James A. Reed, has told the truth about this bill. After rudely referring to President Hoover as a "misplaced cipher" he declared that the new tariff "per- petuates gross robberies for the benefit of a favored few." IN FACE OF THE FACT that Senator Hiram Bing- ham was censured by his associates of the Senate for reprehensible conduct in deceiving the Senate Committee on Finance by sneaking a lobbyist of the Connecticut Manu- facturers' Association into the committee's sessions as his private secretary, the President of the United States has chosen Mr. Bingham to head a commission to survey the situation in Samoa this summer. In face of the fact that his national Republican chairman, Claudius F. Huston, has been proved to have used for speculation for his private profit funds sent to him in trust to be used for lobbying purposes, Mr. Hoover permits him to remain as chairman. The Presi- dent is either without the courage to oust him or without sufficient moral sensitiveness to be moved by the revelations of Mr. Huston's misconduct. What is the public to think of its Chief Executive in the light of these two happenings? Is it surprising that his stock steadily sinks? The rejection of his nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Parker, by the Judiciary Committee of the Senate by a vote of 10 to 6 will still further diminish his prestige. The President might, it would seem, have looked up Judge Parker's record suffi- ciently to have ascertained all the details of his career both as a politician and as a judge before sending in his name. MORE DELAY AT MUSCLE SHOALS! The House Committee on Military Affairs has discarded the Norris resolution for government operation of the Muscle Shoals plant, which passed the Senate by a vote of 45 to 23, and has selected a subcommittee of five to draft a bill for private operation under lease with an alternative plan for public operation if no satisfactory bid is forthcom-

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504 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 ing. If the Norris bill could be brought before the House that body would probably pass it; for the lobby revelations have made it politically dangerous to support the power com- panies. If a leasing bill can be reported, on the other hand, the extensive Southern interests that properly desire indus- trial development may be brought to support it as offering the only promise of action. With the Senate committed to public operation, however, such action by the House would only bring another deadlock and further delay in the utiliza- tion of this great plant. Apparently the power trust plans, if necessary, to continue the delay indefinitely in the hope that Senator Norris may be tired out or worn out in his magnificent fight for the public interest. THE CHOICE OF ROLAND W. BOYDEN as a member of the Permanent Court of International Arbitration at The Hague is one of Mr. Hoover's appoint- ments that can be commended. Mr. Boyden has had a use- ful and creditable experience in diplomatic or quasi-diplo- matic business. He was a member of the American dele- gation at the Paris Peace Conference, and later, for some four years, served with dignity and general acceptance as the unofficial representative of the United States on the Reparations Commission. A few months ago he was desig- nated by Mr. Hoover as umpire of the German-American Mixed Claims Commission. One of the early duties of the four American members of The Hague tribunal will be to nominate a successor to Chief Justice Hughes in the World Court of the League of Nations. The importance of this choice may be considerable if the United States decides to adhere to the court under the modifications of the court statute which have been made for its benefit. It is to be hoped, however, that the choice may not fall upon Professor John H. Wigmore, of Northwestern University, who has been strongly urged for the position. Professor Wigmore has high standing as a legal writer, but his attitude toward pacifists and radicals during the time, 1916-1920, when he was attached to the Judge Advocate General's office was so openly hostile as to unfit him for judicial honor. UNCLE JOE GRUNDY'S campaign for election as Senator for Pennsylvania goes merrily forward, sup- ported by a weird aggregation of wets, drys, labor leaders, and Mellons. The Mellon indorsement, announced by W. L. Mellon of Pittsburgh, spokesman for the family interests, declares that Pennsylvania needs a man of Grundy's "char- acter, exceptional ability, unquestioned courage, and long ex- perience," praises him to the skies for the way in which he "fearlessly" jammed through the tariff bill, and becomes posi- tively eloquent in its defense of protection as the key to all of Pennsylvania's prosperity. Unfortunately, the day before the Mellon paean was issued the campaign committee that is supporting Secretary of Labor Davis came out with the charge that Grundy was planning to buy his nomination at the primaries, but such an allegation in the chemically pure political atmosphere of Pennsylvania is, of course, beneath contempt. A third Republican candidate, Professor Francis H. Bohlen, regarded as friendly to labor, is running on a wet platform. Even to Pennsylvanians the situation looks confused, but to the fearless Grundy the course is as straight as a string. The tariff bill, he told a crowd the other day in the face of all the other candidates, is "not what it ought to be" ; the duties must be further revised — upward. This in Pennsylvania is known as statesmanship. WHEN HENRY H. CURRAN, bearing the name of a lieutenant-colonel who gave his life for his country at Chancellorsville, appeared before the Senate Lobby Inquiry Committee, he charged that the Eighteenth Amendment had made the government "a murderer and an invader of the peoples' rights." When asked if he would favor a resort to arms if necessary, Mr. Curran, having previously declared that the "rights of mankind" as defined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights should be "defended in every way that may become necessary," sidestepped the question by saying: "We will cross that bridge when we come to it." Had any Socialist or red taken this position the welkin would have rung with demands that he be jailed for threatening to upset our government by force. In ad- dition Mr. Curran testified that the great popular revolt against the Constitution, which his Association Against the Prohibition Amendment leads, was chiefly financed by seven . multimillionaires, five of whom gave $5,000 a year each for Mr. Curran's own salary of $25,000 a year. Of these seven men five were Irenee du Pont, Pierre S. du Pont, Lammot du Pont, John J. Raskob, and Charles H. Sabin. Mr. Curran's society took in $427,213 in 1929 and is ask- ing for $1,000,000 this year to elect a wet Congress. As a whole Mr. Curran's showing was anything but edifying, even to the wets who listened to his two days' grilling. Neither side shines in the hearings. THE UNEMPLOYMENT SITUATION continui acute. The Federal Council of Churches has urgei the churches to give special attention to the problem on April 27. The National Unemployment League, seconding the suggestion of an Unemployment Sunday, urges that col- lections be taken on that day for relief purposes and that ar appeal be made for a huge public-works program to relieve the existing distress. In the important matter of plans foi the actual prevention of unemployment the federal govern ment has allowed the leadership to pass to New York State whose Committee on the Stabilization of Industry for thi Prevention of Unemployment recently appointed by Gov ernor Roosevelt has already submitted an interesting prelimi nary report. Calling attention to the striking results attainei by some progressive employers, the committee says: "Whei employers become convinced of its value the habit of stabiliz ing will be included in their business practice just as nat urally and completely as the habit of filing. . . . Th 'slump bugaboo' is not necessarily an act of Divine Prov dence. It is a problem to be faced and worked out, like an other business problem." This is looking in the right direc tion, but if we are to get anywhere we shall have to trav< a long way. An intelligently planned system of unemplo) ment insurance, which as yet has scarcely begun to be di: cussed, could be made an effective agency to convince bad ward employers of the value of stabilization, for it could 1 arranged so that they would save money by steady operatioi THE RECORD OF THE DAUGHTERS of tl American Revolution, whose annual congress has ju: been held in Washington, remains unsullied. On Mond; the Daughters heard President Hoover advocate the ei

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April 30, 1930] The Nation 505 trance of the United States into the World Court. On Wednesday the Daughters resolved against "involvement in European affairs" and in favor of "adequate" national, par- ticularly naval, defense. On the same day resolutions were passed advocating registration of aliens, investigation of subversive organizations, and deportation of subversive aliens. But on Friday when one brave Daughter tried to line up her sisters in favor of the Eighteenth Amendment she was immediately suppressed by a resolution pledging the society to avoid controversial or dividing subjects such as religion, politics, and prohibition. On the same day Mrs. William T. Brown and Mrs. Carroll Miller, prominent members of the D. A. R., resigned because of the society's attitude toward the World Court and naval disarmament. On Saturday Mrs. Lowell Fletcher Hobart, President Gen- eral, cried "Pacifist!" at the two resigners while the society reaffirmed its position by adopting another sheaf of resolu- tions calling for adequate naval and military defense and opposing the limitation plans of the London conference. Once more the Daughters have convened and adjourned. Once more, we are glad to say, they have upheld with char- acteristic courage the inalienable American right of resolu- tion. But their ranks are thinning. Miss Margaretta Fort, daughter of the late Governor of New Jersey, and Mrs. Lois Kimball Rosenberry, wife of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, are the latest to announce • their resignations. UNION SQUARE in New York City on May Day is not big enough to hold a meeting, accompanied by Datriotic flourishes, of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and a (neeting, accompanied by communistic and severely non- jatriotic flourishes, of the Workers' Party. Police Commis- iioner Whalen has issued to the representatives of the Com- nunists a permit for a demonstration to take place on May Day one hour after the Veterans of Foreign Wars are cheduled to end their program. If this is not looking for rouble we do not know what is. The workers have claimed Jnion Square as their own for nearly half a century; it was ormerly in the heart of the organized clothing-workers dis- rict and in it, times without number, speeches for the labor- ng man have been made which would have drawn listeners n no other part of the city. Now in this square of territory, sew York's Hyde Park if it has any, we are to see two roups, almost at the same time, which are bitterly antago- istic to each other. On March 7 Richard J. Kennedy, unior Vice-Commander of the V. F. W., declared a propos f the May Day parade : "The Commander will issue orders 3 let the police and the National Guard units take care of ay rioting. . . . But no one need worry that the veterans .ron't be ready for any trouble and fully able to protect lemselves. They will wear their tin hats and will have ixed bayonets on their rifles." In view of this sort of lan- guage, in view of the fact that May 1 is the traditional ,-orkers' holiday all over the world, Mr. Whalen and Mayor talker take upon themselves the gravest responsibility in emitting these two groups to meet on the same ground, he sentencing of Robert Minor and William Z. Foster id their companions arrested on March 6 to from one day > three years in the penitentiary will not help matters. Un- <s Mr. Whalen can be persuaded to change these plans we i ok forward to the occasion with grave apprehension. VLADIMIR MAIAKOVSKY, the "proletarian" poet, committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart in Moscow on April 14. One hundred thousand people are said to have passed his bier in a single day, but his suicide, which occurred after his return from a late party and is reported to have been for love, is likely to be the occasion of some scandal. Communists are supposed to be above romantic follies of this sort, and the case is particularly striking in view of the fact that the dead man composed a bitterly satiric poem upon another Soviet poet, Serge Essenin, who went to a similar death for a similar reason. Scoffers will doubtless find in the event a proof of their contention that even the most enthusiastic Communists end by finding communistic life unendurable, but the suicide probably proves only that certain traditional Russian gestures are not likely to be for- gotten immediately even by the most ardent of a new gen- eration. Maiakovsky once accompanied Trotzky on a speak- ing tour and had formerly been regarded as the leading poet of communism, though his last two plays are said to have been failures and, what is worse, to have come under the suspicion of being doctrinally unsound. In spite of his suicide, he is to be given a civic funeral. BOOKS AND LETTERS have sustained a great loss in the death of Charles Scribner, head of Charles Scribner's Sons ever since 1879. A man of the best of taste, and of standards he was never willing to lower, he brought to the publishing business the love of a master-craftsman. His books were to be books, but they were also to be crea- tions of which he and his firm could be proud. So he lent distinction to his volumes, to his magazine, even to his ad- mirable bookstore. Mr. Scribner was far more than just their publisher to his authors. His friendships were deep and varied, especially overseas. To American audiences he helped to introduce Kipling, Barrie, Galsworthy, Meredith, and Stevenson. Between himself and most of these as well as many American writers there were strong personal ties. It was a great achievement to conduct a fine house, to keep it intact and strong during so long a period, and to leave it receptive to new ideas. He was able to look back on his career with complete satisfaction and the knowledge of a life honestly, earnestly, and richly lived. TO DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH at eighty our respectful homage. It is a long, long way from the Minute Man of Concord, his first great achievement, to his recently completed Flanders Fields; but it is a journey marked all the way by high standards, absolute devotion to his art, and the modesty characteristic of the noblest artists. There will be differences of opinion as to which is his great- est work ; to us it is the deeply pondering Lincoln at Wash- ington in Henry Bacon's marvelous setting, with the chil- dren of the capital sailing their toy boats under the Emanci- pator's eyes. Who can behold that and remain unmoved ? His best-known work, Death Staying the Hand of the Sculp- tor, designed as a monument for the tomb of the sculptor Martin Milmore at Boston, is universal in its appeal. Re- cently Mr. French was asked to speak of American art as it is. He refused. It was in transformation, he said — in process of crystallization. Who could say where it was heading? So is art reflecting our politics. We are on our way — whither no man knoweth.

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506 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 The Crumbs of London THAT the outcome of the London Disarmament Con- ference is a bitter, almost a crushing, disappointment we cannot deny. That it closely approximates fail- ure will, we believe, be the verdict of all clear-thinking per- sons. We had hoped for half a loaf; then for a slice. We have obtained only a few crumbs. We are well aware that President Hoover has hailed it as a great achievement. His assurance to the D. A. R. convention that "the conference has been able to bring about an actual reduction in the arma- ments of the three nations to about 25 per cent less than the standard discussed during the conference which was held at Geneva three years ago, and a reduction of about 12 per cent below present naval programs as rapidly as the pres- ent ships become obsolete" has not in the least convinced or impressed us. Why should anybody throw up his hat be- cause of a reduction of 25 per cent below standards proposed in vain three years ago, or because of a reduction of 12 per cent from the present program as soon as some of the exist- ing ships, unnamed, become obsolete? If this is all that can be said of the outcome at London it is little indeed. One re- calls the drunkard who, on being reproved for his inebriation, sought to defend himself by saying how much drunker he would have been had he indulged in a lot more whiskey and soda. As a matter of fact, this is the usual face-saving of the politician determined to make the best of a bad situation. Mr. Hoover's first year in the White House has ended with almost nothing constructive or worth while to show. He is soon to sign or to veto the worst tariff bill in history. He would be less than human if he did not endeavor to make London appear a great triumph. It is self-evident that his paean of satisfaction will not bear analysis. For example, he was very careful in his ad- dress of April 14 to say nothing of the fact that if we are to build up to the parity conceded to us at London we shall have to construct new ships to cost no less than $1,000,- 000,000. Is it Mr. Hoover's plan to recommend this? A disarmament conference which wound up with appropriations of $1,000,000,000 would be such a scandal, such a mock- ery, that we cannot think that even Mr. Hoover would dare to acclaim it as a long step toward peace. If Congress moves in that direction we shall consider the conference not only a failure but a dreadful disaster. Certainly no one can deny that the effects of such an additional building program would far offset the few concrete achievements, such as extending the battleship holiday until December 31, 1936, destroying two more antiquated battleships, the Utah and the Florida, and certain limitations of destroyers and submarines. Even this slight achievement is gravely weakened by a clause which provides that "any Power which deems its national security impaired by the new construction of an outside Power may upon due notice to the two other Powers increase its figures with a provision for a proportionate increase in their figures in the same category or categories." How much really remains? The most substantial achievement of the Washington conference of 1922 was a psychological one — the ending of all talk of a possible war between the United States and Japan. From the day of the acceptance of the 5-5-3 standard the menace of an armed conflict with Japan came to an end in the press of the United States, with an occasional exception to prove the rule. No longer did the Sunday newspapers present their sensational articles as to the imminence of hostilities; no longer was it possible for some of those who betrayed the United States in the oil scandals to allege that the turning over of valuable government resources to private individuals was necessitated by the imminent coming of war between the United States and Japan. If the London conference should have a similar psychological result in putting an end to the constant talk of war between ourselves and the mother country, it would be an achievement well worth the cost. That Mr. Hoover thinks this will be the result is demonstrated by the following passage from his speech of April 14: "But, most important of all, it [the conference] has been able finally to turn the tide of constantly increasing naval arms and to end the poison of suspicion and ill-will generated by constant rivalry in construction." One danger to our mind is that the conference, while cutting off a few ships and extending the battleship holiday until 1936, has not done anything to decrease or really to chasten the personnel of the various fleets. There lies the real menace — the constant discussion by naval men of the next war, and their increasing effort to alarm somebody as to the invariably inadequate war preparations of their governments. That they are little to be blamed for this is obvious. They must have an objective to keep up the fighting spirit. They are paid to plan and drill for the next war and therefore they must have a possible enemy. If England should dis- appear under the ocean tomorrow the navy men would at once find it necessary to build a fleet competent to handle the navies of France and Italy combined. If these fleets were to disappear there would still be Japan and Russia tc give cause to the fear that leads to more appropriations foi more guns and more ships. Whether we may actually lool for any real demobilization of the spirit which engenders th( naval rivalries that provoke wars remains to be seen. Bui if something has been achieved along that line, we repea it will have been worth while and Mr. Hoover will be en titled to all the credit therefor — even if that leaves us fa: from those high hopes we all cherished after Ramsay Mac Donald's visit to this country. What should be the attitude of liberals and peace lover toward the new treaty? There is nothing to be gained b' an effort to defeat the convention which the delegates wil bring back to this country. But it must be ratified with : clear understanding that the lovers of peace think it but i tiny step forward, and even that only if there is no effor to build up to parity. Peace workers should serve notio now that they will fight as never before against any furthe effort to construct more ships, to squander more funds, fo keep up that hideous waste which Mr. Hoover himself ha said makes our expenditures on army and navy greater thai those of any other country in the world. Against the con tinuance of this abomination the conscience of America mu? set itself without the possibility of concession or compromisi

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April 30, 1930] The Nation 507 Merger on Merger THE announcement of a reorganization whereby the General Electric Company and the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company will own 51.3 per cent of the voting power of the Radio Corporation of America calls attention once more to the process of unifica- tion and threatened monopoly in the radio field. If the plan is ratified by the stockholders at their meeting on May 6, the Radio Corporation, in return for 6,580,375 shares of stock valued at some $390,000,000, will acquire exclusive licenses under General Electric and Westinghouse patents to manufacture radio apparatus, together with their radio- manufacturing facilities and the stocks that they own in Radio Corporation subsidiaries, giving that concern exclusive ownership of the National Broadcasting Company, the R.C.A. Victor Company, the R.C.A. Radiotron Company, and R.C.A. Photophone. In addition to these companies, R.C.A. Communications, and the Radio-Marine Corpora- tion, the Radio Corporation is also heavily interested in the amusement industry through the Radio Keith Orpheum Cor- poration, and in various other undertakings. A mere list of the interests owned by this giant, formed by the General Electric Company less than eleven years ago, is bewildering. The activities of the Radio Corporation in its effort to get a monopoly of the air were the subject of much un- favorable testimony, it will be recalled, before the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce last winter, and Senator Dill is now quick to call attention to what he declares to be Dwen D. Young's plans for "a world-wide radio trust." The General Electric, he asserts, "is to be not only the jarent company of the power trust and of the electrical nanufacturing business but the parent company of the radio msiness with all its ramifications." Noting Mr. Young's )art in founding the International Bank and adverting to he Radio Corporation's exclusive contracts with every great government except Russia, he demands that the Department )f Justice determine "whether or not under our law today hey have the right to form an organization leading to world- vide monopoly of radio development." It is a great ques- ion, which affects not only the business life of competing adio manufacturers, but, as Senator Dill points out, the very levelopment of public opinion itself. The movement toward integration and unified control, vith all the accompanying dangers of private monopoly, is >y no means confined to the radio industry, however, nor is t limited to our own country. An interesting article in a ecent issue of the Japan Chronicle calls attention to exactly he same phenomenon on the other side of the world : The Big Five include Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Yasuda, Sumitomo, and Okura, and they operate in such a variety of forms that one never knows for certain that one is not dealing with them. Mitsui's have banking, insurance, and "trust," merchandising, textile mills and materials, fishing and other food industries, machine-making, mining, smelt- ing, and metal refining, chemical industries, shipping and land transport, light and power, buildings and warehouses — in fact, it is difficult to say what Mitsui does not do. The last-named company alone, with a capital above 600,000.000, though it devotes less than 12 per cent of that capital to trade, yet carries on more than one-fifth of all Japan's foreign commerce. The Chronicle writer does not believe that these great concerns are genuinely enterprising, or that they promote the larger interests of Japan ; yet he rather gloomily forecasts their further development and in- creased control over government. Similar facts are reported from all over the world. The great German shipping merger is fresh in mind, and the operations of the steel car- tel have already passed national boundaries. One important and sobering conclusion emerges from a consideration of facts like these. While all honest men must sympathize with intelligent governmental efforts to prevent unfair competition and thus to keep the way open as far as possible for the small concern, the problem of the future deals with the great company, probably to an increas- ing degree with the monopolistic company. We have not yet devised any satisfactory machinery for its control in the in- terest of all the people where that interest clashes with the profit of shareholders. Our present confidence in the omnis- cience and benevolence of big business is only a passing phase of public feeling. The statesmanship of the future must help private industry to organize itself for the efficient per- formance of genuine public service if the great private com- pany is to survive. Defense of Freedom ON April 5 Judge Canaga of the Ohio Court of Common Pleas sentenced two young women under the new Ohio syndicalism law to terms of from one to five and from five to ten years, respectively, accord- ing to an Associated Press dispatch, for distributing "anti- government literature at a Martin's Ferry (radical) demon- stration last fall." The one who received the longer sentence "told the court she had not advocated use of force." Last fall five girl rusticators were sentenced in California by Judge Allison (one for from six months to ten years, four for from six months to five years) for raising in front of their camping ground a flag bearing the insignia of Soviet Russia. Since the Russian program entails the overthrow of capitalist society our safety, it appears, demands that these young conspirators be put out of the way. More recently Judge Young of the Juvenile Court in New York sent a small boy back to the Jewish protectory, whence he had been released on parole, for playing hooky from school to attend an unemployment demonstration. As a result, this latter-day Huckleberry Finn may conceivably be detained in the protectory until he is twenty-one years old. Meantime, someone in New Jersey has unearthed a sedition law, passed in 1902 after President McKinley's assassination, as a means of jailing speakers of the left-wing labor move- ment. These are examples of the method of dealing with dissentient opinions in our lower courts. What can be done about it? How untwist the curious kink in the thinking of a man who hopes that harsh and unjust punishment applied to a discontented minority will reduce that minority, first to silence, and at length to non- existence? We have one suggestion. Let him lock himself in his study and read a little book called "A History of Freedom of Thought," by a great historian, J. B. Bury,

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508 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. Professor Bury says: "A long time was needed to ar- rive at the conclusion that the coercion of opinion was a mistake, and only a part of the world is as yet convinced. That conclusion, so far as I can judge, is the most impor- tant ever reached by men." Professor Bury does not defend free thought and speech because they are rights. "The truth is that no valid argument can be founded on the conception of natural rights, because it involves an untenable theory of the relation between society and its members." The gov- ernment, he argues, may well contend that it should pro- hibit the circulation of pernicious opinions. It can point out, with little fear of contradiction, that a man can do as much harm by propagating anti-social doctrines as by steal- ing his neighbor's horse. Theoretically, then, he maintains, the government may stand on firm ground in suppressing free speech; morally, also, it may seem right. But practically it is wrong. For during the entire period through which Bury traces the long and painful struggle of the human spirit against sup- pression, from the Greek and Roman republics to the Eng- land of Darwin, Huxley, and Arnold, the effort to sup- press, whatever its logical and moral basis, has been a com- plete and ghastly failure. For it has not suppressed. On the contrary, it has given strength, vitality, and currency to every doctrine, either good or bad, to which it has been applied. But if our judges should read Bury's book they would discover that the effort to make people keep still leads para- doxically to a complementary effort to make them speak. Not satisfied with forcing the objector to disavow his own beliefs, intolerance insists that in order to escape punishment he shall proclaim the beliefs of his accusers. Here in America we may already watch the advance of this inevitable extension of the principle of suppression. A judge denies naturalization to a college professor of good standing, not on the ground that he voices opposition to our government or our Constitution, since the contrary is true; but because, suspected of pacifism, he refuses to pro- claim in advance that in case of war he will bear arms. The same principle is present in the so-called "yellow-dog" contract now at issue in the case of Judge Parker. This form of contract rejects the man applying for work unless, going beyond neutrality on the question of unionism, he af- firmatively declares against it as a condition of his employ- ment. Out of the drive against free expression of opinion, comes the drive for forced expression of opinion. And with that drive, just as in war or in the days of the Inquisition, the minority, in order to be safe, comfortable, or self-sus- taining, must go about forever pinning someone else's opinion to its sleeve. America has a noble tradition of liberty — free thought, free speech, the right of assembly, the right of minorities to be heard. It was built up by wise, farseeing, courageous men — Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Garrison, Wendell Phil- lips, and the rest. This tradition we have accepted as a supreme condition of social progress. It goes beyond the sphere of momentary expediency. There is no reason why we cannot keep this tradition alive. History, common sense, common decency, are on its side. No doubt there are diffi- culties in preserving it. They are certainly no greater than those encountered when it was built. A Plague of Locusts THE news from Egypt has a strange Biblical sound. A plague of locusts has infested the land. But this time the Egyptians are not helpless. They do not look upon the plague as a punishment for their sins — unless it be the sin of having failed to exterminate the enemy. They are making open war, and the dispatches are as dramatic as any that ever came from the western front. There is no quarter asked or given, no means of warfare, however horrible or unscrupulous, that remains unemployed. A cable in the New York Times from Cairo reports that the heaviest fighting has occurred around El Arish. The Egyptian opera- tions are being directed by the inspector general of the Egyptian army, with the help of an entomologist. Trenches a mile long were dug across the locusts' line of advance. As the locusts fell into these they were destroyed as fast as possible, but fresh arrivals immediately took their places. On April 11a dense mass of locusts, estimated to have been seven miles long, emerged from Wadi. They rapidly filled the original trenches and others hurriedly dug. Paraffin was poured in and ignited. The charred remains of the locusts were flung out to make ready for the next advance. Flame guns decimated their ranks. At the end of the battle an area about two miles square was black with dead locusts, in some places four inches deep. Thus Egypt has checked an invasion that might have done incalculable harm, but the danger is not yet com- pletely past, for an army of locusts has been reported in Palestine. It must be kept in mind that so far all news of the war has come from only one side. Perhaps the locusts do not mind. They need not worry about propaganda as long as they may fall back on propagation. And their pros- pects are surely not hopeless. They are invading Egypt again after 3,000 years — so far as we can learn, as great in numbers as ever — and they may still be invading Egypt 3,000 years from now. While the Greek cities fought each other, the Macedonians came down and conquered them. While the nations of mankind are either warring with each other or arming for that purpose, our most sinister enemies, the insects and the microbes, continue their relentless depre- dations. Man has reached his present power on the earth chiefly through the use of one weapon, his brain. The insects and microbes have reached their enormous numbers on the earth by the use of another weapon — their appalling powers of reproduction. It has still to be shown whether, in the remorseless competitive struggle for survival, man's weapon will prove more effective than that of his minute enemies. The locust horde, for one thing, needs no navy. A considerable number of them, reached England in 1869, and it is believed that they were part of a swarm that came from the west coast of Africa. Other locust swarms have been seen at sea, 1,200 miles from land; one swarm that crossed the Red Sea in 1889 was estimated to be about 2,000 square miles in extent. Here is a war to which the D. A. R., the American Legion, and other organizations straining for ex- ercise of their bellicose instincts may profitably devote their excessive energies. Here is one enemy against whom not even the most confirmed pacifist would wish to disarm.

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April 30, 1930] The Nation 509 It Seems to Hey wood Broun CAMPAIGNS for the purity of the King's English or for better national enunciation leave me a shade coolish. I am against the "whomers," the "should and woulders," and all the "me and I" clan. If any man or woman corrects your pronunciation of a word in a public place I think you have the right to punch him in the nose. No good American jury would convict you. Of course, the people who take it on themselves to keep the other fellow's English pure and accurate advance high- falutin excuses for their activity. They adopt an "it hurts me more" attitude. One might believe that but for their bus- tling the world would go to pot and all of us live in pent- houses on Babel. It is not the love of interference which moves them, so they say, but only a devotion to the mother- tongue. Yet upon their own assertions I would indict them down to the last blue-stockinged heel. Take the classic Cyril, who first piped up, "Whom are you?" Mr. Ade, his creator, explained that the lad had been to night school. I hold that most of the gross mistakes of grammar arise less from sheer ignorance than from a little knowledge — coupled, of course, with much fright. It is the urge for elegance which leads us into error. For a month I have kept careful but silent count and I find that "me" is almost never put in the wrong place. I am not scoring such over-technical errors as "It's me," for that, I hold, is entirely permissible. Generally speaking there is a widespread popular belief that "me" is always essentially plebeian and vulgar. Mistakes arise in seeking to show off with "I" and place it in spots where it by no means has the right to go. "It was so good of you to take Mae and I to supper," says the beautiful blonde from Mr. Ziegfeld's show. I hasten to add that the beautiful blonde is entirely fictional. She exists, of course, but the author of this essay is not the "you" of the sentence. And she may add, "Between you and I, she's a good kid and I would hate to see her go out with anybody who wasn't a perfect gentleman." Gladwys, you see, was frightened as a child by a gram- mar lesson. She didn't quite get the idea. It is her notion, and the notion of all the insufficiently educated, that there is something fundamentally coarse and crude about "me." It is not a lady's pronoun. And so Gladwys always strings along with "I" when there is any doubt and even if there isn't. She is not likely to be improved much by chance cor- rectionists. They will only succeed in confusing her a little more. As things stand, Gladwys has at least a system. If they continue to pester the poor girl they will merely suc- ked in frightening every "I" out of her vocabulary. If it were possible for each and every one of us to be a irecisionist and to carry his education like a gentleman I night be in favor of movements for speech reform. Still, wen such a state of society is open to certain criticisms. This vould not be the best of all possible worlds if every man :rom porter to president exchanged the morning's greetings n a finished Harvard accent. I suspect that life would be easier and more natural if nobody ever undertook to hold his :ellows up to grammatical and linguistic perfection. In fact, if no more eyebrows were ever arched we might all speak with far more forthright vigor. The natural man will find his way more readily to eloquent and truthful expression than the one who lives in constant terror of the lash of ridi- cule. All this is said by a man who feels that his own address is Halfway House. "Me" and "I" are managed moderately well by this particular hack. This is not said with any swagger. He ought to know something about "me" and "I" since in his function of columnist he uses both so frequently. But as for "shall" and "will" I must admit terrific terror. The rules they taught in school have flown entirely. I try to pick the proper one by ear alone, but I am almost tone deaf. Time was when clients who pointed out mistakes could wound me. Now a happy callousness has been estab- lished. In a world in which not more than 5 per cent of my associates know all the subtleties of the words denoting fu- turity why should any commoner be abashed to stand with the majority? And if one meets this particular problem in his stride and does not tighten up one has, at the very worst, at least an even chance of picking the right word by sheer accident in any specific instance. Some of the most fascinating talkers I know are men and women with scarcely a shred of grammar. Surely it is more important to talk in a wise and interesting manner than to speak correctly. "Why not do both?" you suggest. It can be done, but there are barriers. Too great a preoccu- pation with form is apt to war against the substance. I have known disciples of better speech who never failed to let each vowel sound come trippingly from the very tip of the tongue, and they afforded me neither pleasure nor profit. People with this particular phobia are so intent upon forming each letter correctly that words are wholly a sec- ondary consideration and sentences must shift for themselves. Once every week upon the radio there is, or used to be, a lady who appealed to all the tots within the sound of her voice to articulate until it hurt and never slur a syllable or put an "r" on after an "aw." As one who has never been able to break himself of saying "I sawrit" (i.e., I saw it), my opinion may be thrown out as malicious and incompe- tent. This is, no doubt, a vile linguistic fault. And yet I shudder to think of little children all hobbled and brightly burnished in their innocent prattle. If it were within my power to wipe out the individual eccentricities of every local dialect I would not do it. The dulcet tones of the man from Georgia often annoy me, but I love to hear the lady from the same locality talk Southern. There is an Indiana dialect not altogether beautiful and yet it serves to lend variety to any drawing-room. In the election which gave us Herbert Hoover a number of voters cast their ballots against Smith because he used the "oi" in "bird," as is our native custom. To me the Governor was never more effective and never more palpably sincere than when he grew excited and talked pure Oliver Street. I even suspect that by now there are many who regret their choice and would rather have taken the New York liberal, "raddio" and all. Heywood Broun

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510 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 Prohibition in Littletown By WILLIAM W. NORTON LITTLETOWN — that is an assumed name — is one of the northeastern townships of New York State. It lies close to the foothills of a prominent and popular mountain section and boasts a population of some 1,200 souls. The township came into being during the last decade of the eighteenth century and rapidly became a typical settlement of Easterners. A small potash factory, a tannery, and several small mills are largely responsible for the present existence of the three hamlets, North, South, and East Littletown, each of which was once known for its cider mill, its saloon, and its hotel. Protestantism is regnant in Littletown but applied Christianity hardly exists. When Klan agitation enveloped the township a few years ago all Roman Catholic school teachers were disposed of in the name of the Great Jehovah. Like Zenith, Middletown, and the rest, Little- town is distinctly a type town. All social activities are con- fined to the Masonic Lodge, the Eastern Star, the Grange, the Ladies' Aid Societies of the churches, some very minor clubs, and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. The township is Republican and dry, a unit in a county hopelessly controlled by an arid G. O. P. organization. Republicans outnumber Democrats by about ten to one and almost every- body is squarely behind the noble experiment. Let us now examine the transformation wrought in this dry, ail-American, Republican, eighteenth-century settlement by the Eighteenth Amendment. As far back as January, 1920, it was discovered that the legal fermentation of fruit juices provided a real measure of practical farm relief. Dur- ing the first year of the big drought the manufacture of hard cider and elderberry, rhubarb, and dandelion wines increased by leaps and bounds ; many a dirt farmer, whose former in- dulgence was limited to a glass or two of cool lager on rather infrequent market trips to near-by towns, now takes the pre- caution to stock his cellar with beverages that grow in strength as winter comes. The first six years of the dry spell produced two stills, both operated by small farmers who have paid off their mort- gages and now confine their efforts to home production and home consumption of various home brews. The art of mak- ing home brew is now so generally understood that stocks of bottles, caps, cappers, hops, and malts are regularly carried in some of the local stores. Of late, many of the newer concoc- tions made from imported fruits have become popular, mak- ing Littletown, considering its size, a very good market for lemons, oranges, and grapefruit. Each local artist in alco- holics assumes that his next-door neighbor is ignorant of both his thirst and his own particular method of slaking it ; and the W. C. T. U., the victory won, continues to hold its regular meetings and white-ribbon teas as faithfully and with the same gullibility as a generation ago. Littletown, of course, has its improvident sots, but none of them ever die from thirst. Many of them manage to hire out to the dry-voting, wet-drinking farmers and thereby eke out a more or less cheerful existence from the sparkling beakers of sassafrassed hard cider brought up from cold farm cellars. Others who crave the strongest, and are willing to part with a large portion of their wages, know when and where to purchase poor-grade alcohol flavored with juniper at four dollars per quart, and the transaction is completed within the township. There was a time when pure grain alcohol could be purchased from one of the choir singers in town, but to obtain this favor one had to have the proper social, fraternal, or family connections. It was a service extended only to those mute residents who had the good fortune to have been born in local purple. A very favored few still continue to get this splendid service. Even some of the local merchants gladly, and with due knowledge, supply the needs of transient bums with extracts and canned heat. There seems to be a sort of underground system in this town and it is in good working order. Through credentials or acquaintances one can get in touch without much diffi- culty not only with those hospitable folk who will provide gratuitously anything from a social glass to a social knock- out, but with those more practical cider dealers who dispense the juice for a consideration only. A j'ear ago there were at least twenty places in town where hard cider could be pur- chased at one dollar per gallon. The marked increase in the demand for hard cider has so extended its production that good quality has largely been sacrificed and the more dangerous prohibition drinks have been substituted. Elderberry and elderblow wines have come into their own during the past few years. Many farms located back from the improved highways, farms that have been practically abandoned or have been poorly operated by tenants, have responded to the great urge, and vast clusters of elderberry bushes now grow in the hill sections of the township. This annual crop is making it possible to press the wine in barrel lots. The town's aged people, who require some little libation before meals and upon retiring, have long since spurned the regular herb tonics and have adopted the technique of the most discriminating whiskey drinkers. They have become the regular patients of knowing and near-by physicians. They have taken the prescription route to Scotch and rye, and the good doctor's fee is only one dollar for his services. The prevailing price at the drug-store ranges from three to four dollars per pint. One physician in particular has been known to canvass to some extent for this type of practice. The top of his office desk is adorned with a copy of the Holy Bible, which in the minds of his more law-abiding patients at once creates a desert-like atmosphere. However, the mid- dle drawer of the same desk conceals an engraved United States Treasury prescription-blank book, the lone stubs of which indicate a good business in whiskey. Whiskey is pie- scribed for everything from hemorrhoids to hypochondria. In still another drawer of the same professional desk the doctor always keeps a broken pint, ready for any emergency, social or otherwise. Operators of alcohol taxis make periodical though infre- quent trips to some of the near-by incorporated villages where a variety of vile beverages can be purchased at a low figure and afterward disposed of at highway-construction camps at a neat profit. With all these conditions obtaining, Littletown

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April 30, 1930] The Nation 511 is just about as bone dry, or as sopping wet, as it ever was. In the days of local option it made little difference whether the town voted license or no license; the citizen who han- kered for a drink was always able to quench his thirst in home territory. It is the same now. There are many damp places scattered over a township which prior to 1920 never at any one time boasted of more than one real oasis in each of the three hamlets. Mere boys were never permitted to enter these ancient places, and they were seldom patronized by the younger men, for they were too much exposed to public view. Now, however, many of the younger set enjoy the adventure of snooping around for a drink in the more secluded nooks of the countryside. It is far from exaggeration to conclude that the per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages in Littletown is somewhat in excess of what it was twenty years ago. Con- ditions seem to justify more drinks at a single sitting. In addition to this, there has developed a state of mind that blindly condones the hyper-hypocrisy of it all. Littletown folks seem to want the outside world to understand that their town is dry. Whatever may go on inside is strictly a private matter. The people are opposed to prohibition violations — by others. Some of the members of the W. C. T. U. will tell you that the township is as dry as a cork leg. The local clergymen generally corroborate this theory in sermons, ad- dresses, and reports to the outside world; and deep-quaffing hypocrites contribute regularly to the collections taken for the benefit of the Anti-Saloon League and State reform bodies. A series of interviews with many of the more prominent residents indicates that there are some who are, and who always have been, prohibitionists. These can see nothing but success in their cause. They are fully convinced that prohibi- tion is actually in full force and effect. There are still more of those who believe that prohibition has failed to some extent and whose heart-to-heart, on-the-quiet conviction is that a change must be made. Outwardly these are dry. Another, still larger group, made up of well-to-do, temperate men, occa- sional or moderate drinkers, seems to be content with the present situation, and they will remain content as long as a beneficent nature yields her native fruits. This group is on the dry side. There are those wets who were in real sym- pathy with the Smith program, but whose religious life is coextensive only with its hatred for all things Roman Catho- lic. These have not yet worn off their first loyalty to the noble experiment. There are still others who are dry solely because of their affiliation with the Republican Party and its local organization. There is, of course, a group of out-and- out wets, and, lastly, there is a rather choice group of open- minded, observing folk who believe in temperance in all things, a reasonable modification of the law, and an imme- diate return to normality in human conduct. Throughout its entire history the township has been al- most entirely free from any serious crimes. An examination of the criminal records shows a steady decline in minor crimes since 1913. Prior to that date, there seems to have been no direct or indirect connection for the most part between crime and liquor. There were several convictions for public intoxi- cation prior to 1920 and few, if any, since. Public intoxica- tion is as manifest now as a generation ago, but constables do not concern themselves. Liquor or the lack of it has never had any visible effect upon the criminal records of the township. The locality is not so prosperous as it used to be ; there is less money in the town ; many of the well-groomed farms of twenty-five years ago are now dilapidated in both land and buildings; tenants are supplanting owners and the farmers' estates of the next generation will require little at- tention from the probate court. Of course, this may have nothing to do with prohibition, but it makes it a little diffi- cult to believe that the countryside has benefited economically by prohibition. Neither has prohibition had any noticeable effect upon the general health of the churches. Attendance is as small as it ever has been, perhaps smaller; the same occasional whiffs of alcoholic pungency permeate the church atmosphere at meeting time, and now and then the collection basket is passed, as of yore, for special contributions to be applied to the upkeep of the lobby at the national capital. The local churches have made prohibition their only fetish and total ab- stinence their greatest virtue. In the last analysis, Littletown has been made safe for hypocrisy. It is at the public dances that prohibition has one of its most positive effects in a social way. The boys somehow manage to bring high-powered beer in their cars and higher-powered gin in ornate hip flasks ; and the more adventurous young girls of today are easily be- guiled into drinking — drink for drink — with the town's "regular guys." Such a thing, we are well informed, never happened in Littletown before 1920. Then again the town has some evidences that synthetic liquor and young people are bad mixers under rural moons as well as under urban lights. When there are no dances there are always roadhouses not too far away where young couples get the required kick out of existence. No real effort has been made to check these conditions. Parents will not sense the facts — Littletown and all surrounding territory are dry. Littletown differs slightly, if at all, from the numerous townships in the same section of the country. Select any one of these more or less isolated settlements and make a pains- taking investigation. You will make the same discoveries and vary little in your conclusions. You will feel the same sting of repulsiveness too. You will find all of the specimens of the handiwork of a blind fanaticism. Here are some of the exhortations that were thundered from Littletown's pulpits during the last Presidential campaign: You can't be a true Christian in these days — or a decent American citizen either — unless you vote the straight, dry, Republican ticket next Tuesday. Prohibition and Re- publicanism have come to be one and the same thing. The only event comparable to the second coming of our Lord is the coming of prohibition. Rum is the only issue in this campaign. I am perfectly willing to state publicly that I shall for- ever be ashamed of any member of my church who may cast his vote for Smith and booze. No man can be sin- cerely opposed to this victorious prohibition. There are several ancient cemeteries in which sleep scores of Littletown's best people. The inscriptions on the quaint stones indicate that many loved their country well and it is purported that they loved their God. Could these early Easterners return, they would find their old home town no more temperate than in their own day and generation. They would be deeply impressed with automobiles, radios, and air- planes, but they might find prohibition to be the most stupe- fying marvel of them all.

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512 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 "My Dear Senator in w MY dear Senator: I have your letter in regard to the revolt of various Senators, yourself included, against the nomination of Judge John J. Parker as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. You say that it should improve my opinion of the Senate that so many of its members are willing to look upon this question from the national point of view, and are ready to refuse a seat on the highest bench to a man who has publicly evidenced his readi- ness to deny to an entire group of our fellow-Americans par- ticipation in elections and in the administration of the coun- try. Well, I can only reply that I am happy, of course, that more than seventeen Senators are already on record as opposing the confirmation of Judge Parker because of his views on the colored race. But I should frankly take greater pride in this showing if it were not for the fact that many of these Senators are up for reelection next fall, and that they come from States where the Negro vote is now so large that they fear the loss of the election if the colored people should take it into their heads to rise in rebellion against the Re- publican Party. In other words, I shall be more impressed if men like Borah of Idaho and Nye of North Dakota, in which States there are few Negroes, oppose confirmation. That Judge Parker should be defeated admits of no question. There are constantly coming before the Supreme Court of the United States questions vitally affecting the liberty and the pursuit of happiness of our colored Americans. The city of Richmond, for instance, recently enacted an ordinance segregating the Negroes residentially despite the fact that the Supreme Court of the United States has re- peatedly held such ordinances unconstitutional and invalid. Other equally important decisions have been in regard to the right of Negroes to participate in primaries and of the politi- cal parties to restrict their membership on the basis of color. There are now several important cases on the way up to the Supreme Court which will settle the question whether pri- vate covenants arrived at by property owners binding them- selves for a period of years, or in perpetuity, not to sell their property to Negroes will or will not be upheld as constitu- tional. Such cases will ere long come before Judge Parker if he is confirmed. When Judge Parker stated that the colored people of North Carolina did not wish to par- ticipate in elections and were ready to be eliminated from politics he uttered a falsehood. When he committed the Re- publican Party in that State to the lily-white policy he led that party in a complete break with the traditions of its founders. He was certainly traitorous to the memory of Abraham Lincoln and what Lincoln and his war-time asso- ciates achieved. How could he conscientiously take the oath that would be administered to him by Chief Justice Hughes to support and uphold the Constitution when he is already on record, as a gubernatorial candidate, in favor of nullifying it in the case of Negroes ? This issue is so vital that it would be a disgrace to the Senate if there were not men in plenty to rise up and pro- * The third of a scries of articles on the national political situation and the issues it involves. — Editor The Nation. test against Judge Parker's nomination. Beside it the ques- tion of Judge Parker's upholding the so-called "yellow-dog" contract is of small moment. Beside this issue it is of far less importance that none of his work as a judge has been marked by the ability or the distinction usually considered essential before a man can be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. It would be bad enough to face the fact that we might have thirty years of a judge on this bench who was appointed merely to strengthen the Repub- lican Party in a State which voted for Herbert Hoover. The amazing thing is the prospect that a man who does not pro- pose to permit the Negroes to remain under the protection of the Constitution of the United States may for thirty years to come be voicing in the Supreme Court his race prejudice and antagonism whenever the opportunity offers. I repeat that every Senator who believes in the Con- stitution and in simple elemental justice to every American citizen irrespective of race, creed, or color ought to vote against Judge Parker. On the merits of the case, however, and not because of any fear of the immediate political con- sequences! I notice that the State Chairman of Missouri, Mr. Voorhees, has sent a strong telegram to Washington declaring that "the confirmation of Judge Parker means that the Republican Party might just as well say goodby to Missouri for the next two or three elections at least. . . . It was a long hard pull to put Missouri into the Republican column. It seems a pity that the fine results achieved through many years of unremitting effort in Missouri on the part of the Republican State organization should be thrown away in two short years." Here again we have the politi- cian's way of looking at the problem. As I have pointed out to you before, you and your associates are prone to look upon every question from the point of view of its imme- diate effect upon your home fences, or somebody's local political conditions. From the tariff up or down, the whole gamut is run in this spirit. It has, for example, been con- sistently stated in Washington that the reason why President Hoover has not yet asked the Senate to ratify the new World Court convention was his desire not to embarrass Senator Deneen in his recent and unsuccessful primary contest with Mrs. McCormick. Personally I am not sure that the colored people are united enough to make quite certain the punishment at the polls which the Senators from the border States and those having large masses of colored voters fear. But more important by far than the willingness of some Senators to bolt in fear of punishment is the fact, now established, that the Senate hereafter will take a different attitude toward nominations for the Supreme Court than the purely negative one it has held to heretofore, and the truth that the Negroes for the first time since emancipation have demonstrated to the entire country that they propose to use their political power hereafter in safeguarding their rights. If they succeed in defeating Judge Parker it will be an epoch in the history of the race. Yours very truly, Oswald Garrison Villard

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April 30, 1930] The Nation 513 The Latest Bolshevik Zigzag By LOUIS FISCHER Moscow, March 27 NOTHING must be allowed to create the false im- pression that the Soviet Government has abandoned its program of completely collectivizing agriculture. The recent very radical shift in policy, first announced in Stalin's article on March 2 and finally formulated in the March 15 circular of the Central Committee of the Com- munist Party, in no way signifies a change of principle. The Bolsheviks have no choice. They can ( 1 ) allow village pro- ductivity to continue at its present low level, or (2) give the individual mujik freedom to become rich, rent land, and hire labor, or (3) organize agriculture cooperatively. But the Russian village cannot today yield sufficient surpluses for feeding the cities and for export ; the rise through personal enrichment of a class of private capitalistic farmers would constitute a political and, more particularly, an economic menace to bolshevism. There remains the third alternative of land cooperatives. After 55 per cent of all arable land in the Soviet Union had been collectivized within some six months, and after millions of mujiks had entered the kolkhozi, or cooperative farms, the party and the government in March suddenly called a halt. Compelling circumstances made retrenchment imperative. This retrenchment along a second line of de- fense represents one step backward after three or four steps forward. It was accompanied by moderation in the treat- ment of the church, and by the interdiction of arbitrary, oftentimes illegal and unjustifiable, suppression of private traders and other disfranchised elements. The headlong dash toward socialism which commenced in September, 1929, or thereabouts and developed its full momentum in December has now slowed down to a steady trot. NEP was in the death house impotently awaiting the hangman. But a reprieve arrived at the eleventh hour, for the govern- ment still needs the services of the "criminal," private capi- talism. The economic system in Russia is working at maximum pressure. Never was the tension so great ; never were such colossal, almost inhuman efforts being made. I sometimes think that the officials, the party leaders, the activists must simply collapse from sheer physical and mental exhaustion. They rarely rest or relax. Yet where man did not complain, the machine began to creak. The weakest section of the machine proved to be that which fed the cities. The food problem had already become aggravated by reason of the fact that products needed within the country were exported to pay for foreign mechanical equipment and tractors. Col- lectivization complicated matters. Since the government's chief concern is the poor peasant, he was admitted into the kolkhoz whether or not he owned a cow or sheep or horse. The mujik who possessed such animals therefore quickly sold them or slaughtered and ate them, for he knew that even without live stock he would not be barred from the collective. Threats from Moscow did no good, for Moscow had com- mitted the grave error of socializing all the peasants' effects at the moment of organizing a collective (thus forming a commune) instead of merely socializing the wherewithal of production — land, seed, machinery, and draft animals (thus forming an artel). This mistake was corrected by Stalin on March 2, but not before a very appreciable per- centage of the Soviet Union's live stock had been destroyed. Now the order has gone out that collectives take the form of artels, and not communes. Accordingly, cows, goats, geese, chickens (but not horses) were returned to their owners, and immediately more milk, butter, cream, cheese, and poultry appeared on the urban market. By socializing all the sources of the mujik's salable sur- plus, the kolkhoz movement had almost made superfluous the essential feature of the NEP — the free marketing of peasant goods. It was possible therefore to suppress the city Nepmen by economic and administrative means. Thus, pri- vate capitalism on the land and in the metropoles seemed doomed. Contrariwise, the recent resurrection of NEP potentialities in the village by the restoration of live stock inevitably brought with it a relaxation of the persecution of urban private merchants, and both measures are part and parcel of the less militant attitude toward the church. This is the latest Bolshevik zigzag. For a time the curve of socialism went extremely high — almost to the peak of 100 per cent. Today a drop is registered, but not to the former level, for the collectivization of 50 per cent of the acreage under grain and technical cultures withdraws from the Nepman's activity just that much marketable produce. Be- tween the kolkhoz and the government there can be no pri- vate middleman. Moreover, since there is and could be no guaranty that the Nepman will not again be exposed to sup- pression, expropriation, and exile at some future upward trend of the socialist curve, he will doubtless refrain from excessive or ostentatious expansion. The city Nepman must grasp the present new opportunity because it is his only straw, but he can have no trust or hope in the future. Grad- ually, therefore, the utility of private trade to the govern- ment may fall so low as to justify complete and irrevocable proscription. Before that consummation, however, the kolkhozi must improve and multiply, the cattle and vege- table state farms now organizing or planned must begin to throw their produce on to city tables, and the city coopera- tives and state stores must attain greater efficiency, show more initiative, and increase their stock. In the interval, which may last years, private capitalism in Russia will re- main anemic, lack resistance, and play the role of a Bol- shevik pawn. The future of socialism in Russia depends on the col- lectives. During the past six months, however, the Com- munists behaved as if their life's purpose consisted in em- bittering the biggest possible number of peasants against this form of economy. They seemed bent on making unpalatable a really attractive type of agricultural organization. Had the government and party waited a single semester, clever agitation and the example of improved conditions might have been sufficient to stimulate a flood of mujiks into the kolkhozi. Instead, officials used violence and threats to

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514 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 obtain quick quantitative results. But there were not enough tractors, trained agronomes, and machines for all the new collectives. The socialization of live stock, poultry, homes, and even rickety furniture violated the deep private-capital- istic instincts of the peasant and blinded him to the advan- tages of the artel. He was ready to resist forced collectiviza- tion with arson and murder, if need be. He retaliated, moreover, by massacring cattle wholesale. The city's food supplies diminished. The situation commenced to divert to the village precious governmental energy, care, and man power. The precipitate character of the recent change and the manner in which the government and party introduced it prove that it was highly necessary and long overdue. Stalin displayed fine statesmanship in making the move. But a greater statesman would have made it three months earlier and taken to himself part of the blame for the errors com- mitted by his followers at his instructions or with his ap- proval or at least with his knowledge. The shift in policy represents a rightward zigzag. It delights those who insist that the tempo of Socialist progress has been excessive. It probably pleases men like Bukharin who urged peasants to enrich themselves and who logically would have opposed rapid collectivization. But the Right wing will not trust Stalin to pursue a Right policy very long ; and the Lefts are sour. Already, although the ink of the reforms is scarcely dried, the more radical faction seeks to obstruct them. Pravda did not print the government ordi- nance providing for better treatment of Nepmen. In some provincial districts, Stalin's article and the Central Com- mittee's circular were suppressed by zealots who either ob- jected in principle or feared the effect of furnishing the mujik with the Kremlin's unbridled strictures against them- selves. These facts and many of a similar nature testify to a large potential of "Leftness" which may act as a guaranty against any permanent or far-reaching swing to the Right. Like much else in Russia, a great deal will be determined by the coming crop. The recent reforms came at the height of preparations for the sowing campaign and occasioned con- siderable chaos. Stalin swapped horses while fording a stream. But gigantic efforts are being made today to strengthen the collectives and to persuade the peasants out- side the kolkhozi to plant all their land and to work hard. Those who have faith in the collective will wait hopefully till harvest time and pray for favorable weather. Apart, however, from the politics and possibilities of the more immediate future, the advantages of collectives over private peasant farming are too obvious in Russia to be doubted. Whoever knows the miserable hut of the mujik, his almost animal standard of living, and his primitive methods of production will realize that practically any change must be an improvement. The kolkhoz is a rationalized, scien- tific substitute for the most backward economic unit in Eu- rope— the Russian village. It will use more machines; it will make better use of its horses ; its land will not lie fallow after the time-honored system of pre-Petrian times. In pro- ductivity, the collective should be to the mujik's holding as a modern, electrified textile factory is to the hand loom. Soviet authorities tell me that in this first big collective year the average yield per acre in the kolkhozi will exceed that of the private farm by 30 per cent. If this is so, then col- lectivization has won, and Left policies must conquer. The Modern Critic's Point of View By C. HARTLEY GRATTAN I THE opponents of humanism, if I interpret them rightly, agree that literature is a serious concern of thinking men. But they have a keener sense than the humanists of the fact that literature is but one of the many interests that go to make up a complete intellectual life. Literature provides but one kind of experience. It is not the epitome of all the intellectual interests to which contemporary man is the heir. One who studies literature alone will not thoroughly understand life. The exclusively literary discipline is one of the most narrowing and least productive of all intellectual disciplines. A major intellectual disaster of our time is the compart- mentalization of the minds of the so-called leaders of thought. They tend to be superlatively well informed about their narrow specialty and actively resist the intrusion of unin- formed non-specialists into their domain. But they do not hesitate to affirm the truth of traditional and outworn ideas in fields other than their own. This characteristic is excel- lently illustrated by those physicists now so actively engaged in supporting antiquated ideas in the field of religion. But nowhere is this compartmentalization more evident than in the field of literary criticism. In reading some of the narrowly educated young critics whose minds have been sharpened and polished by a particularistic discipline, you feel that a needle is being applied to the probing of a haystack. It is one of the major ironies of current literary disputation that however high the ideals of the younger critics may reach, their practice is earthbound by the fact that they are, after all, men living in a man-made world. And if we com- pose our ideal of perfection from literary materials we are apt, by the very nature of the exercise, to arrive at a formu- lation considerably at variance with the possibilities of the human animal. The modern necessity is to integrate our minds and buttress ourselves against the tendencies toward diffusion, disorder, and discontinuity. This applies in all phases of intellectual endeavor. Consequently, it is the first necessity of a rounded literary criticism that it be grounded in as wide a knowledge of the ancillary sciences dealing with man and culture as is compatible with an exhaustive knowledge of the writer or the literary object being criticized. As has been remarked, literature is but one phase of the experience open to man. This statement locates literature where it belongs in the total life of the individual. And since it is integral to man and culture it must be approached with all the weapons available for the understanding of both man and culture. To define it as something apart from both is to

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April 30, 1930] The Nation 515 make it something irrelevant to man and the concern of no- body but a group of literate eremites. The view of the position of literature here set forth does not translate it into a subordinate part of psychology, soci- ology, or anthropology. It simply advocates the placing of the findings of these and all other contributory sciences in the hands of the literary critic. Superficially this ideal would seem to be at wide variance with the opinion of the most con- spicuous advocates of the newer approaches to criticism, but it is recognized as valid by T. S. Eliot. In the Bookman for November, 1929, he wrote: "There are other branches of knowledge (or at least of science) some acquaintance with which you take for granted in any applicant whom you may employ as literary critic [he has previously named biology, anthropology, and philology], especially, of course, psychol- ogy, particularly analytical psychology. All of the studies I have mentioned and more do themselves touch the edges and handle some of the problems of criticism ; so conversely the critic is distinguished, first, by the current notions which he shares with all educated or half-educated persons, such as the notion of evolution, and by the number and variety of sci- ences of which he has to know a little. And he has to know them not in order to do their work for them, but to col- laborate— and also in order that he may know where to stop. We require much general knowledge in order to see the limits of our particular ignorance." The upshot of this is that, though literary criticism need not be written in terms derived from any one or even all of these disciplines, the light they shed upon the central problems of criticism must become available to the critic. II The conception of literature as a phase of experience requires elaboration. Experience, to borrow I. A. Richards's usage of the word in this connection, is "any occurrence in the mind. It is equivalent to 'mental state or process'." The ultimate purpose behind all intellectual activity is the clarifi- cation of experience with the object of understanding it and giving it meaning. Literature serves the purpose of giving us vicarious experience, of clarifying experience, and of lend- ing it meaning. In addition it offers a peculiar sort of pleasure. It offers us in concentrated form a range of ex- periences which, in all probability, would not otherwise be open to us in the circumscribed lives we are forced to live, even in such a mobile civilization as the present one. Further- more, the complete artist (in contrast to the reporter of life, whose work, particularly in the novel, is ubiquitous at pres- ent) has exercised some definite principle of selection in which the guiding light has been his idea of what the material signifies. By selection he interprets life; he bodies forth his peculiar view of life by bringing to the reader's attention those aspects of the limitless range of material he might use which seem to him to carry the highest emotional and intel- lectual implications. The reader, then, lays himself open to an experience which is heightened beyond life and which yet is life. It is a legitimate abstraction from the flux and flow of life. And it is an inescapable aspect of art. Even the artist who expends his highest powers in attempting to render a welter of "meaningless" episodes, a discontinuous flux of events, has arbitrarily selected those elements in ex- perience which best objectify his vision. There never yet has been a complete, exact, unbiased reproduction of actual life in literature and it is inconceivable that there ever will be. Faced with a literary object the critic may approach it from two angles and he may choose to write from either or both in any given essay. I. A. Richards states the angles as follows: "In a full critical statement which states not only that an experience is valuable in certain ways, but also that it is caused by certain features in a contemplated object, the part which describes the value of the experience we shall call the critical part. That which describes the object we shall call the technical part." Naturally the bulk of what is gener- ally written as criticism consists of the first kind. And into that part of the statement which is the "critical" part the critic incorporates his sociological and psychological diag- nosis of the artist as a man in society and of the work of art itself. The crux of the problem, however, lies in the matter of the "value of the experience." It is in the attribution of the value of a work of art that critics disagree. For the attributed value is, and of necessity must be, contingent upon the complexity of the mental development of the critic. By complexity I do not mean intricacy; I mean the totality of the intellectual experience of the critic. And it is precisely at this point that the matter of the possible contributions of the ancillary disciplines reenters. For since these disciplines are to serve the critic as tools for understanding, tools with which he is to conduct his critical operation, it naturally fol- lows that a critic provided with such tools will render a quite different verdict from the critic lacking them. And in the opinion of the writer the verdict of the former will be much more sound. Into this complexity of mind there will enter (it almost goes without saying) all the literary information, biographical knowledge, and sociological erudition of which the critic is possessed. The resultant criticism will be a long way from impres- sionism and equally distant from dogmatic criticism, which I take to be an exercise in measuring the agreement or disagreement of the literary object with a predetermined set of arbitrary rules. It will differ from impressionism in that it will not be grounded in the emotions but will be the prod- uct of controlled knowledge operating to determine the worth of the experience offered by the literary object. And it will differ from dogmatic criticism in that the critic will not have any fixed preconceptions as to what the experience offered should be nor about the technical means by which the experience is rendered. A critic of the type I am describing will be above all experimental in his attitude. The very nature of his equip- ment will make that attitude inevitable. He will be re- ceptive, eclectic, and as sympathetic to the traditional as to the experimental. On the other hand he will not tend to accept the traditional because it conforms to certain forms of value which have been adjudged as of significance in the past. He will, indeed, be highly discriminative of the traditional as it appears in his time, because he will, in so far as it is repetitive in value, recognize that the author has presented nothing new. And he will be equally skeptical of the experi- mental because he will demand from it new and valuable experience as well as technical virtuosity. With regard to the latter matter, he will examine technical innovations and adjudge them according to their merits as vehicles of communication. As an eclectic he will not be tempted to stand forth as

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516 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 the apologist for one particular mode of literary practice. He will find valuable experience in realistic works as well as in romantic works; in the classics as well as in contemporary writings; in the traditional as well as in the experimental. Indeed he will have to face but one constant temptation and that is a too great receptivity to the "classics" written in his own time, which will, inevitably, embody those values with which he is intimately familiar from living in constant con- tact with them. His judgments of these writings will be the final test of his merit as a critical guide. The written conclusions of a critic operating in this fashion will be a record of the peculiar value of the experi- ence offered by a given object or group of objects, a state- ment of the skill or lack of skill with which the author has communicated the experience to the reader, and frequently a statement of how the strengths or deficiencies arose out of the unique situation in which the author functioned and the peculiarities of his personality. Such a statement will be fairly inclusive, for the critic will have defined (a) the value of the experience ; (b) the skill of the communication; (c) the sociological setting in which the work was produced and its effect on the object; (d) the psychological constitution of the author and its relation to his work. Naturally the reports of such a critic will have literary significance in them- selves in so far as his own skill in communication is developed and in proportion to his ability to detect and express the values in the object; and the latter will have direct relation to the complexity of his mind. Ill It may prove revealing to examine this program in the light of the issues raised by Gorham B. Munson writing in the Bookman for December, 1929. What audience will such a critic have in mind ? He will have the only audience any critic can hope to have — those persons intelligently inter- ested in books and to whom reading is one of the modes of deepening, strengthening, and clarifying experience. He will not appeal to those who read to kill time. Neither will he appeal to those to whom literature is a source for moral precepts or to whom the study of literature must result in a pseudo-religious discipline. Nor will this critic appeal to those whose interest in literature has been particularized by allegiance to some literary cult or program, except as they are interested in literature in general. In fact, such a critic will appeal to a decided minority in any social group. Critics have never had a wide appeal. It is idle to suppose that they ever will have. What will be this critic's practical object? I think that this question has already been answered by implication. His practical object will be the bringing to the attention of his readers the values he has detected in the writings he has sub- jected to scrutiny. In dealing practically with current litera- ture, he will serve a selective function. And by the very seriousness of his point of view he will disagree as frequently as not with the judgments of the critics who write of books chiefly as news. This critic will not advise his readers about the fashionableness of this book or that. He will be con- cerned only with its worth. Anything else is mere by-play, though the writer would be the last one to minimize the importance of literary by-play. What scheme of values will he support? He will not support any rigidly formulated scheme of values. He will point out that he has already ruled such rigid schemes out of his literary interest by placing the emphasis on the value of literature as experience. This change of emphasis re- lieves him of the necessity of measuring a work of art by its agreement with a predetermined scheme of values. It concentrates his attention upon the worth of the experience. Finally, we may examine this critical position in the light of three dominant concerns of American criticism as formulated by Dr. Norman Foerster. First, what is the re- lation of literature and morality? Our critic will dissociate his criticism from any rigidly formulated code of morality. The judgment of the value of literature as experience does not necessitate a judgment of its "morality," for he will have escaped the confusion of mind which identifies contemporary folkways with what is moral. He will be keenly aware of the fact that all valuable experience to be derived from literature is not to be confined within the conventions of the group of which he is a member. He will recognize the relativity of morals and also that what his group may regard as a presentation of most "immoral" conduct may offer him more valuable experience than endless perfectly "moral" objects. On the other hand he will recognize that a true work of art has an inherent morality of its own — a morality which proceeds from the fundamental integrity of the artist. But it is impossible to measure this by external codifications. What is the relation of literature to reality? Our critic will maintain that literature has a close and intimate con- nection with reality. But he will not be blinded by the apparent dissimilarities of authors. To use examples with which all readers will be familiar, he will find it within the range of his interests to examine closely the work of both Theodore Dreiser and James Branch Cabell. He will not consider it proof of a lack of discrimination if a critic or reader admires both of these writers, for he will recognize that both proceed from the same reality and both offer a selective presentation of that reality. He will see that both are creators of valuable literature for their times (to keep close to the ground). Dreiser happens to project his view of life on a plane which we call realistic, and consequently his novels contain a great deal of material from which we derive the secondary pleasure of recognition. Cabell, on the other hand, prefers to offer his criticism of life in romances, in "flights from reality" more apparent than real, for if closely read he offers as much criticism of life as Dreiser. What is the relation of literature to the national spirit? Our critic will differ from the critics who came to notice in this country after 1910 in not emphasizing the elements of "nationalism" in literature. He will, however, recognize that every country produces its peculiarly national writers and that all writers within a given country respond to and embody in their work the national ethos. In considering the relation of a work of art to its sociological and psycho- logical genesis, he will isolate and define its embodiment or rejection of the national ethos. But he will not be inclined to praise or condemn a work of art solely because of its peculiarly national quality. In essence, what this critic will do is to return to a position roughly resembling that of the critics in English up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Those critics specialized in plain good sense. The modern writer of criti- cism will buttress his good sense with the solid and relevant contributions of the sciences ancillary to literature. He will

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April 30, 1930] The Nation 517 take a comprehensive view of his task. But his primary purpose, on the positive side, will be to communicate to his readers something of the peculiar pleasure which is to be derived from writers of merit. In the Driftway NO census-taker has yet snared the Drifter, nor is one likely to, for a census-taker must have some definite clue as to the whereabouts of his quarry and the Drifter's trail is hard to follow. He has neither a palpable home of his own, nor does he command on his wanderings that attention which would remind his pro tern host to point him out when the census man comes round. The Drifter is almost sorry, as he would enjoy answering a few questions. He is nearly tempted to break the laws of his nature and put down roots somewhere — small, tentative roots which need not bind. But he is deterred by the knowledge that, for him, the putting down of roots would have as questionable results as the instinctive home-making of a dog when he turns him- self about on the floor before lying down to sleep. ***** THERE was a time when a sudden question would have alarmed the Drifter as being too reminiscent of a cer- tain stuffy schoolroom presided over by a benign man, whose benignity had limits. But there comes a time in everyone's life when questions are likely to change from a form of per- secution to a form of flattery. The Drifter, though he has long since quitted the former state, has never properly arrived at the latter, for no one ever thinks to ask him anything. It is years since he has been asked a question more serious than "Light or dark meat?" or "How will you have your tea?" People never ask him the time, and even those who have lost their way in a strange town do not turn to him for help. They seem to know by instinct that he, too, is generally a stranger here. Once, indeed, some one asked him whether it was difficult to get to Abyssinia. "Why, no," he said, "you just go down the Red Sea and turn to the right." But the next week the man left for Alaska, without asking for direc- tions. He is still there and sends an occasional post card, crisply informative. ***** IN all fairness, though, the Drifter must admit certain printed questions that find their way through the mail. These, indeed, are rarely of the flattering kind. Some are calculated to inspire terror: "Are you prepared for the Judg- ment Day? Buy our Bibles." Some allow a note of hope: Are you a social failure? Learn to play a musical instru- ment by mail." The ones that the Drifter likes best, how- ever, are the simple ones such as those which come patiently, year in and year out, from a shop which he has never visited : 'Have you lost your umbrella? Let us replace it." He has never kept an umbrella and can hardly begin now. ***** TO return to the census, there are two questions which it would give him the greatest pleasure to answer. They 'are: "Were you at work yesterday?" and "Have you a .radio?" The answer to both is No. The Drifter Correspondence Thanks from Haiti To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: To the genuine regret of all those who have had the privilege of coming in contact with her, Mrs. Helena Hill Weed is leaving Haiti tomorrow. This third visit that Mrs. Weed has paid our country has appreciably strengthened the admiration and gratitude of the Haitian public in general, and of the Haitian press in particular, for the fearless and generous manner in which The Nation has championed Haiti's cause ever since its first protests aroused your attention and indignation. And now that President Hoover's commission has so well fulfilled its mission we wish to assure you of our conviction that it is in no small measure due to your publication's whole-hearted and untiring defense of our interests that certain of our most pressing problems are about to be satisfactorily solved. By her keen insight into these problems, combined with her unerring tact and genuine human sympathy, your able collaborator, Mrs. Weed, is more firmly intrenched than ever in the esteem and affection of the Haitian people. Her keen intelligence, which gave her a thorough grasp of the Haitian situation, is no less the subject of our admiration than is the sympathy she has invariably displayed toward our oppressed nation. Such finely balanced qualities of head and heart are as admirable as they are rare, and we congratulate The Nation upon having so invaluable a collaborator as Mrs. Weed. To you and to her, and through you both to The Nation, the Port au Prince press voices Haiti's deep appreciation of the moral and material support you have unstintingly given its cause, and it is convinced that time will only serve to strengthen the bonds of friendship existing between us. Ernest G. Chauvet, Editor Le Nouvelliste Charles Moravia, Editor Le Temps Seymour Pradel, President The National League for Constitutional Action. Port au Prince, March 17 "My Dear Senator" To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: If I am right in assuming that "My Dear Senator" in The Nation of March 26 was addressed to Senator Dill there is a little discrepancy to which I should like to call your attention. I refer to the two sentences: "You repeat that the sugar-beet industry is highly important to your State, and that the existing tariff does not enable the sugar-beet farmers to make a living"; and "Can you complain if people ask whether it is merely be- cause you wish to get a few thousand dollars for the lumber men and beet growers of your State?" Now look at the statistics of the United States Department of Agriculture for 1925 and 1927 and see how "highly impor- tant" sugar beets are in the agriculture of the State of Wash- ington. These statistics show a total of 1,287 acres in sugar beets in the State, with a production of only 8,263 tons yearly. There are only two small areas in the whole State where farmers even try to grow them and they don't do a very good job of it com- pared with Colorado sugar-beet farmers, who get eleven tons to the acre and produce more than two million tons a year. No one familiar with farming in the State of Washington would be likely to tell you that sugar-beet growing is very important; and if you want to run your finger still farther down the statistical

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518 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 table, you'll find that except for Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon, which grow no sugar beets worth tabling, Washington has the lowest production among the Western States. But in the same breath with sugar beets you mention lum- ber interests. Now you're talking! Run down the list of lum- ber-producing States in the West (according to the 1929 Year- book) and notice that Washington topped the list with a pro- duction of 7,324,862 board feet during 1927, more than three million board feet in excess of its nearest competitor and neigh- bor, Oregon. Beet growers and lumber men, indeed! Might as well group salmon and wheat together in Kansas! Spokane, April 2 Edith D. Abbott Detroit and the Reds To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: On Thursday, March 6, I was on the streets of our downtown section to watch the demonstration of the unem- ployed. Many citizens, myself included, had previously waited on our mayor, our police commissioner, and our superintendent of police with the request that the crowd be handled sympatheti- cally and no violence done by the police force. There were many acts of violence committed by the police on that day, including the usual clubbings, but what struck us observers as being both new and amazing, and therefore worthy of comment, was the fact that at point after point mounted policemen in groups of three, four, and five rode on to the side- walks and charged straight into the crowds of orderly, peaceful people. The Detroit branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has sworn affidavits of these and other brutalities of the police on that day. Detroit, March 12 Caroline Parker President Masaryk To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: In an editorial in The Nation of March 12, on page 285, you charge President Masaryk of Czecho-Slovakia with "the forcible wiping out of all traces of German influence and culture in Prague." That is a charge which, it seems to me, disproves itself by its very enormity. According to recent re- ports the German university and the German institute of tech- nology at Prague are still in existence; in the winter semester of 1927-28 the former had 4,073 students and the latter 2,087. German schools, theaters, newspapers, German speech — all these are still to be found in Prague, although the Germans represent but a small fraction of the population of the city. The only monument of German culture in Prague that has really been "forcibly wiped out," so far as I know, is the tall Pillar of the Virgin Mary, erected by the Hapsburgs as a memorial to their victory over the Bohemian Protestants in 1620. When the Hapsburgs fell, their pillar fell with them. On February 15 when Dr. Ludwig Czech (a German, in spite of the name), the Minister of Social Welfare, celebrated his sixtieth birthday, President Masaryk in a personal letter wished him good health and long life, and concluded with the following words: "By entering the Cabinet you have contributed to the rapprochement cot only of the two Sociati&t parties but also of the two races, on whose mutual amity the future happi- ness of our Republic is largely dependent." I do not know that President Masaryk has ever been faithless to his professions. Washington, March 13 J. J. Kral When writing to advertisers A Trip to Russia To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The Nation has become so much the source of in- formation to which all who are interested in Russian affairs look for authoritative news and significant comment that I thought you might be willing to bring to the attention of your readers a cooperative trip that is being planned by a group of economists, primarily to learn at the source more fully about the Gosplan and the progress that is being made under it. The party will start from Berlin July 7, reaching Moscow July 9, and will devote thirty-five days to the study of condi- tions in Moscow, Leningrad, the leading cities along the Volga between Nizhni-Novgorod and Stalingrad, and the iron, steel, and coal region of the Donetz basin, ending the journey at Kiev. Full information may be obtained by writing to me in care of Columbia University, Department of Political Science. New York, March 31 Henry R. Seager Contributors to This Issue William W. Norton is a member of the bar of New York State. Louis Fischer, Moscow correspondent of The Nation, will soon publish "The Soviets in World Affairs." C. Hartley Grattan is the editor of a forthcoming book, "The Critique of Humanism." Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at Washington Square College, New York University. Granville Hicks is assistant professor of English at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. George E. G. Catlin is a member of the boards of directors and of editors of the Realist. THE LOVE POEMS OF JOANNES SECUNDUS Translated by F. W. Wright \ N unabridged and unexpurgated edition of these •**• famous love poems, translated for the first time from the Latin. Through the lines of these frank and rhythmic litanies of love can be heard the irresistible chuckle of the dextrous author as he thumbs his artistic nose at the pedagogues. The poems are presented in four groups: "The Kisses," "The Loves," "Occasional Poems," and "The Bridal Night." Beautifully bound, jacketed, and boxed for gift purposes. $5.00 K. P. DUTTON & CO., 300 Fourth Ave., N. Y. IS PROHIBITION DEMOCRATIC? The editor of Democratic Youth examines important questions of public interest each month, draws his own conclusions, and invites his readers to do the same. Of prohibition he says, in the April issue, "The important question for the voter is not whether he wants to drink. . . . The liquor question alone is comparatively trivial; if there were nothing else to consider I would be a prohibitionist." If you are young in years or in spirit you will enjoy the refreshing discussions in Democratic Youth, pub- lished at West Liberty, Kentucky, for young idealists who still believe in democracy. The subscription price is only $1 a year; three years for $2. please mention The Nation

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Books, Films, Drama Of Changing Seasons By EDA LOU WALTON Darkness was symbol. Now the low full moon Lifts a white grail above the stony hill, And where the lips denied, they must affirm, And where the heart was stoic, it must turn Tearful from out its fortress. All too soon The frail leaves feather the far trees and burn On the near maples; this, the sweet hour, will Shelter within the valley while the air Gathers again to snow. And heart compelled Now by the downy forest soon is knelled. And heart and moon and stony hill must quell Always their earliest singing, black their glow Even when the smothered choir shall swell, and slow Flowering become a madness to unfurl The bright cocoon of summer, to unwind The silver-threaded orchards, and trees twirl In radiance down the valleys. Alas, the mind Delirious then with fragrance and delight, Even in its ripest hour thinks on night, Recalls a stark December, and remembers Darkness was symbol. Last Testament Assorted Articles. By D. H. Lawrence. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. THE fugitive pieces gathered here add little to Lawrence's message to the world. Had he lived longer it seems unlikely that his reputation would have greatly increased. His future writings would probably have been mere repetitions of his earlier work, would have come as anti-climax. He had shot his bolt. Among the articles in the present volume the two that I find most attractive are a portrait, at once delightful and scath- ing, called Laura Philippine ; and the autobiographical sketch. The latter tells of the "pneumonia illness" which attacked Law- rence at seventeen and at twenty-five, damaging his health for life; and it gives also the reasons why he felt that he could not "rise in the world and become even a little popular and rich." The other articles are, in the main, preachments, passionate declamations. No matter what his ostensible topic may be, Lawrence keeps returning to his central doctrines — that life must be a direct sensuous contact with people and with nature, that life must be a flow, that sex must be a flow, a real flow of sympathy, generous and warm, that we must stick up for our own instinctive feelings against the things we are taught, that we have shut Life out from our living, and that we must strug- gle down to the heart of things, where the everlasting flame is, and kindle ourselves another beam of light. Lawrence sometimes talks in the terms of the social re- former, but we cannot deal with him as we can with the usual social reformer. We are not to pin him down to particulars, to expose his contradictions, to ask him what, concretely and spe- Icifically, his passionate phrases may imply. For Lawrence's strength surely did not lie in any ability to reason closely and carefully. I do not believe he ever once hesitated before making a sweeping generalization to think whether or not it was quite true. Indeed, I suspect that for what is called reasoning he had spised logic, or the exact mathematics, the patient verifications, that are necessary for the conclusions of science. Much of his influence came from his "mysticism," but this mysticism often reduced itself, on examination, to mere vagueness and unintelli- gibility, a persistent inability or refusal to reduce his sweeping indictments to specific terms. What does he mean, for example, when he says: "So intense and final is the modern white man's conviction, his internal conviction, that he is not a man, that he dares anything on earth except be a man"? Or what does he mean when he tells us that "people flaunt their bodies to show how unphysical they are," or that "the young are, in a subtle way, physically repulsive to one another, the girl to the man and the man to the girl"? How did Lawrence know all that? What reason have we for supposing any of these statements, as generalizations, to be true? Are we being asked to apply, the principle of "credo quia absurdum"? Must we assume the mys- tical truth to be the exact opposite of the literal truth? We are obliged to come back to the conclusion that we cannot judge Lawrence's message by any literal standards. Or rather, we must adopt the standard that Walter Lippmann once applied to Mencken — we must judge him as we would a barrage of artillery, for the general destruction rather than for the accu- racy of the individual shots. Lawrence thought of himself as a rebel against tradition, but he wrote in a tradition with deep historic roots. Irving Babbitt would have little trouble in showing, for example, that a part of Lawrence's attitude and many of his ideas stemmed ultimately from Rousseau. But we need not go so far back. He was essentially in accord with Pater's doctrine that the artist should burn with a hard gemlike flame; and in form of utterance if not in doctrine he belonged in the tradition of Car- lyle and Nietzsche. In brief, he was a prophet of our day. He impressed his personality and his doctrines on his generation by returning with passionate insistence to the same everlasting preachments. He was against routine, against mechanization, against stock emotions, against everything that was sheeplike and safe and "nice" and dull. He was a prod and a gadfly, and he set an example of splendid courage. He felt that we were all somehow trapped by civilization, and he shook the bars of the cage and shouted for release. Henry Hazlitt The Sensibility of Proust The Sweet Cheat Gone. By Marcel Proust. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Albert and Charles Boni. $3. ADEMOISELLE ALBERTINE is gone !" With this exclamation the penultimate volume of Proust's great romance begins, and though the author is not accus- tomed to commence in any fashion so simply dramatic the sen- tences which follow instantaneously recapture for the reader that particular mood of elegiac contemplation which has been, through- out, so consistently and so charmingly maintained. A moment ago, as I lay analy2ing my feelings, I had supposed that this separation without a final meet- ing was precisely what I had wished, and, as I com- pared the mediocrity of the pleasures that Albertine afforded me with the richness of the desires which she prevented me from realizing, had felt that I was being subtle, had concluded that I did not wish to see her again, that I no longer loved her. But now these words: "Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!" had expressed themselves in my heart with an anguish so keen that I would not be able to endure it for any length of time. . . . Tender toward myself as my mother had been toward my dying grandmother, I said to myself with that anxiety which we feel to prevent a person whom we love "M

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520 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 from suffering: "Be patient for just a moment, we shall find something to take the pain away; don't fret, we are not going to allow you to suffer like this." Proust has many remarkable excellences, but there is no passage which better illustrates one of the most striking — which is his power to communicate an egotistical absorption in the poignancy of a cherished pain. Nor does he, in the whole of the present volume — devoted exclusively to the history of the gradual fading of the narrator's love for Albertine — once fail to maintain in the reader an interest, almost equal to his own, in the intricate involutions of a spirit which is nursing its sorrows in order that it may note and describe the effect of each fluctua- tion of pain. In the tenth volume of a continuous novel one would hardly expect to find anything which is strictly new, and indeed one does not, but one seems almost to do so, for so rich is the origi- nality of Proust that, as one reads the successive sections of his work, it is almost impossible to refrain from concentrating one's attention upon different aspects of his originality and from taking each individual volume as an illustration of the particular quality which one has in mind. Certainly, for example, nothing about his work is more striking than the particular form assumed by the sensibility which informs it, and certainly "The Sweet Cheat Gone" is at least an example as striking as any other of the nature of that sensibility peculiar to him. It is obvious that Proust finds in contemplation the meaning of life, and that of all things Love is, for him, the one which can be made the most fruitful object of contemplation. But he has achieved his own selection from among those many simples from which love is said to be compounded, and no little part of the unique experi- ence of reading his work is the result of sharing with him the emotions of that very particular kind of love which he cele- brates. The value which he puts upon it is as high as the value assigned by the most extravagant of romantics, and yet Proustian love shows not a trace of many of the elements which usually accompany and which are, perhaps, usually thought necessary to a love so romantic. It has no reticences, for Proust analyzes even the most intimate of its sensual aspects; it has no selfless- ness, for it makes little pretence to unselfish desire for the hap- piness or welfare of the beloved object; and it is, moreover, com- pletely dissociated from the idea of permanence, for Proust, even in the midst of his transports, never fails to remember that the time will come when the desire which masters him will seem distant and incomprehensible. Proustian love has then no ra- tional element and no rationalized value, yet it has a power to absorb and a power to torture which cannot belong to sense, simple and unadorned. To the making of it has gone (besides sense) only sentiment, but it has become, without the aid of moral ideas, something marvelously elaborate and something well-nigh unique in literature. Perhaps this love of his, this emotion which is so obviously neither the sacrament of the romanticists nor the devaluated amusement of the cynic, might indeed be made the type of his sensibility, for in many other respects also he manages to achieve an attitude poised somewhere between the extremes which have so often seemed inevitable alternatives. Disillusioned enough he was with many things, with morals for example, and he had neither any code nor any standards besides those which his tastes supplied. Yet there were capacities and faiths which he still retained. He still believed, for example, in the suf- ficiency of the senses and in the value of art. He never, like so many moderns, found himself in a world limited and de- based by the impossibility of escape from psychology, anthro- pology, and Freudianism. The world was still absorbingly, still amazingly, interesting. Women, most women, were to him magical and mysterious. Conversations were witty, salons were thrilling, and artists — even contemporary artists — incalculably great. In a word, he respected his desires, his tastes, and his amusements, and hence, though experience might be predomi- nantly painful, it was neither meaningless nor mean. And that perhaps is the secret of the individual charm of his world. It is one viewed with the critical freedom of modern thought and one in which skepticism rules. Yet it is somehow glamorous as well. Joseph Wood Krutch The Rediscovery of America The Bridge. By Hart Crane. Horace Liveright. $2.50. THOUGH a number of critics have "discovered" Hart Crane, his has been one of the esoteric names. "The Bridge" should change all that. There is no good reason why he should be the private property and more-or-less-patron- ized poet of a few of the intelligentsia. His work is difficult, but it is not obscure in any cheap or wanton fashion. Much contemporary poetry is more difficult, and there is very little that is so rewarding. Perhaps a reviewer can perform no better service than to outline the poem. The opening stanzas of the proem, To Brooklyn Bridge, suggest the nature of Mr. Crane's vision and its elusiveness: How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty — Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; — Till elevators drop us from our day . . . The seagull, it is to be noted, remains a seagull and yet fulfils another purpose. This is the way Mr. Crane uses sym- bols. The picture of the bridge at night, sharp in its compact imagery, reveals the same quality: Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, Beading thy path — condense eternity: And we have seen night lifted in thine arms. The final stanza indicates that the bridge is a kind of cosmic symbol as well as a symbol of the American spirit: O Sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod, Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship lend a myth to God. With Ave Maria, the soliloquy of Columbus as he returns from his first voyage, the lines swell in somber dignity. Colum- bus, bringing back Cathay, remembers that the secret may yet be buried at the bottom of the sea. He recalls his thoughts when land was sighted and warns Ferdinand against reckless exploitation of the new continent. Finally his voice lifts in prayer, which becomes a petition on behalf of the questing mind: O Thou who sleepest on Thyself, apart Like ocean athwart lanes of death and birth, And all the eddying breath between dost search Cruelly with love thy parable of man, — Inquisitor! incognizable Word Of Eden and the enchained Sepulcher, Into thy steep savannahs, burning blue, Utter to loneliness the sail is true. The next section, Powhatan's Daughter, is divided into five poems. The basic symbolism here, as suggested by the first poem and the marginal annotations, is sexual. The theme is the American continent, the very soil itself, its traditions and potentialities. One of the poems, The River, begins with

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April 30, 1930] The Nation 521 an expressionistic treatment of a railroad train, turns to a passage on the hobos, "born pioneers in time's despite," and ends with a description of the Mississippi, which is also a description of the flow of these wanderers. The hobos, "who have touched her, knowing her without name," are uncon- sciously in love with this America. The Dance, which follows, celebrates a conscious love, such as was possible in the "tribal morn" of the Indians. Cutty Sark, a short poem with a dream organization, sings of the sailing-ship days. But this is little more than a preface to Cape Hatteras. Here, taking Whitman as his inspiration, Crane grapples directly with the theme of contemporary Ameri- ca. He tells how after our wanderings we return home : ... to read you, Walt, — knowing us in thrall To that deep wonderment, our native clay Whose depth of red, eternal flesh of Pocahontus — Those continental folded eons, surcharged With sweetness below derricks, chimneys, tunnels — Is veined by all that time has really pledged us. He speaks of the machine age and the dual effect of science: Seeing himself an atom in a shroud — Man hears himself an engine in a cloud! America is not "our empire yet, but labyrinth," and Whit- man's eyes, like Columbus's, ferret out the path. We have our machines, such as the airplane: The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reacnes Already knows the closer clasp of Mars. But as Columbus saw the possibility of evil in tne uis- covery of the new continent, so the poet perceives the potential menace of aircraft: While Iliads glimmer through eyes raised in pride Hell's belt springs wider into heaven's plumed side. Crane describes the airplane and the dirigible, "enormous Lounger of pendulous auroral beaches." He reminds the flier that he is commissioned "to conjugate infinity's dim marge anew." He describes, once more using the aid of typographical arrangement, the fall of a plane. Then he returns to Whitman, speaking of Whitman's meaning to him, comparing Whitman to the bridge, defining Whitman's message to the American people: O, something green, Beyond all sesames of science was thy choice Wherewith to bind us throbbing with one voice, New integers of Roman, Viking, Celt — The poem ends with the poet going — onward without halt, — Not soon, nor suddenly, — no, never to let go My hand in yours, Walt Whitman — so — Three songs follow. After them comes Quaker Hill, con- trasting the mystic and poet with the American business man, calling on the poet to transmute silence with "that stilly note of pain that Emily, that Isadora knew." Then The Tunnel brings us again into the confusion of urban civilization. In the subway train comes the apparition of Poe, and the poem ends with the contemplation of the bridge. The last stanzas of The Tunnel provide the transition from the hectic, expressionistic description of subway hubbub to the noble, chorale-like movement of Atlantis. Here is the bridge again: Through the bound cable strands, the arching path Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings, — Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate The whispered rush, telepathy of wires. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation i -^^^^■■^■.^■■^■^■^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^■^^^^^^^^^^^ ^ Senator Couzens Wants to Know "Does it mean anything to you," the Michi- gan Senator asks, "that three million men with perhaps fifteen million people to sup- port, are out of work in the United States?" The Senator lectures employers as if it was their fault. But is it? The true causes and the remedy for Poverty, Low Wages, Business Depressions and Un- employment are set out with eloquence and unanswerable logic in the world-famous book Progress and Poverty By Henry George New Edition, Unabridged Fiftieth Anniversary ONE DOLLAR, POSTPAID Prof. John Dewey says: "We find in this book the analysis of the ?cientist combined with the sympa- thies and aspirations of a great lover of mankind." ROBERT SCHALKENBACH FOUNDATION 13 Park Place, New York City My uje An Attempt at an Autobiography by Leon ITroI slcy Emil Ludwig says of this astounding book — "A great writer has here set forth his fantastic life in such a way as to make me wonder why people still read novels, or even write them. The book begins like Hamsun, and closes like a third act " 600 pages. $5.00 The Unknown Washingfon by John Corbin Author of "The Return of the Middle Class " "In the immense literature upon Washington Mr. Corbin's book will take a position quite its own. It is the first thorough ex- amination of Washington's posi- tion in our constitutional history." — Allan Nevins in the N. Y. Times. 454 pages. $4.00 At your Brawny Wycherley Courtier, Wit and Playwright by Willard Connely "His life makes fascinating and enriching biography. ... A vivid picture of the playwright and his time." — Philadelphia Public Ledger. 352 pages. $3.00 Xenophon : f„^ by Leo V. Jacks A vivid biography of the Greek who matched wits with Socrates and swords with the Persians with equal assurance. S2.00 bookstore Charles Scribner's Sons New York

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522 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 The most important For Those Interested in Soviet Russia This is a sailing date of a Never Forgot- ten Tour under the auspices of the first organization to present Russia to the Educator, Student, Traveler, Business Man. S.S. AQUITANIA $340 INCLUDES Round Trip to and from Soviet Russia. Trip through the North Sea on the beautiful S.S. Lancastria (Cabin Class) Illustrated Booklets, Itineraries, Sailing Schedules, giving future sailing dates, etc., mailed on request, WORLD TOURISTS, Inc. 175 Fifth Ave. New York Alg. 6656 Visits to Soviet Russia Russian Villages with Maurice Hindus Two weeks Leningrad-Moscow; 4 weeks visit- ing peasant districts and collective farms with Mr. Hindus. Party of 6. Sailing from New York S.S. BREMEN— June 28th. Price from New Vork— $1052. Particulars from The Open Uoatl. Other Diversified Itineraries: Leningrad, Moscow, the Volga, Caucasus, Crimea, Ukraine. 5 to 36 days in the Soviet Union. From $395 including steamship pas- sage. Sailings May 30. June 3. 18. 24, 28, July T>, 24. August 21. Parties of 8 plus American leader and Russian Interpreter. Registrations open. 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK .TME^QREN-R^AD, When writing to advertisers Up the index of night, granite and steel — Transparent meshes — fleckless the gleaming staves — Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream As though a god were issue of the strings. Slowly, with dignity, in lines compact with thought, in phrases soaked with implications, the poem moves to its ulti- mate, mystic vision, in which the bridge, symbol of all that America may be, is symbol also of that union of the individual soul with the eternal reality which is the goal of every mystic's quest. Long essays could be, and one trusts will be, written about "The Bridge." There is not an angle from which it cannot profitably be scrutinized. Its technique should be studied, to bring out the principles <by which the variations of rhythm and rhyme are determined. Its imagery, as even a few quota- tions show, is sound and amazingly original. The methods of its symbolism should be considered. Its philosophical implica- tions are worthy of comment. Its affirmativeness should be contrasted with the elegiacism of most contemporary poetry. But we need not worry; all this will be done, for "The Bridge" is not a poem to go unrecognized. Granville Hicks Wisdom of an Elder Statesman Africa and Some World Problems. By J. C. Smuts. Oxford University Press. $2.50. THIS book contains a collection of addresses about sub- jects superficially at least very heterogeneous — Living- stone, Africa, the League of Nations, Democracy. Any- one, moreover, who would detect an inner unity, believing that a man's attitude to African native problems will excellently indicate how truly he is a democrat, may well be deceived. When he is discussing matters non-African General Jan Chris- tiaan Smuts is the great liberal Elder Statesman, the show-piece to prove the success of the British Commonwealth idea. When, however, he is discussing Africa, local politics come into play, and General Smuts becomes very definitely a South African advocating the territorial segregation of the black and white races. This policy is quite impracticable in view of the labor situation. Hence General Smuts would make the rather sig- nificant exception of the Negro engaged in industrial labor. But at least his wife and children are to remain territorially segre- gated under tribal conditions; the Negro laborer will presum- ably see them, a few hundred miles away, in his spare moments. As General Smuts says, "The new policy of native self-govern- ment [by disfranchised and segregated natives] will provide the natives with plenty of bones to chew at and plenty of mat- ter to wrangle over." It surely will. About the desirability of instantaneously industrializing the African (although, left alone, he is "the happiest of humans" and, moreover, obligingly decreasing in numbers) in order to make Africa materially productive and full of a resentful black population, General Smuts appears to have no doubts. The General is a good Occi- dental, all out for doing something — as is indeed the habit of generals. The same masterful passion for organization can be de- tected even in Smuts the liberal philosopher and world states- man. A "mere declaration of policy" such as the Kellogg pact — this moral gesture which declares: I will enter into no entangling commitments with my fellow-world-citizens but I declare that I, at least, am righteous — is not sufficient. Wisely enough Smuts insists on an institution; for institutions, not declarations, change the course of history. "The function requires a struc- ture." He denounces the French demand that "teeth" be put into the League — a new war association to fight war, "Satan (•least mention The Nation

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April 30, 1930] The Nation 523 enlisted to fight sin." But he insists that the condemnation of war for national ends as a legitimate expedient for sovereign states to use at discretion involves, in theory, a distinction be- tween "public war" (not for such ends) and "private war." It involves, in practice, an undertaking among the nations of the world to confer to prevent these private wars. Perhaps the most important chapter in the book is that on Democracy. Here, not unexpectedly, we find General Smuts insisting upon the importance of the expert, while admitting the danger of the bureaucrat. He sees the work of the financial advisers of the Dawes and Young commissions as constituting a significant departure and precedent in removing the thorniest questions of politics from the sensational arena of inflamed and ignorant public opinion. The statesman is cowed by this pub- lic pressure. If democracy is to cope with these infinitely com- plex new problems of politics and to survive, "science should have its functional relation to the state." "The scientific ex- pert should come in as a new additional organ of the modern democratic state." "Political democracy is in essence unassail- able . . . but democracy is not enough." Would that these words of a statesman mellowed by experience and ripe with the fruits of a trained mind could be blazoned over every polling- booth in the civilized world. One of the most far-reaching revolutions of our age is that responsible statesmen are point- ing out that politics is a department of science, not a branch of rhetoric. George E. G. Catlin Fiction in Brief The Kramer Girls. By Ruth Suckow. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. In Miss Suckow's latest novel, along with her usual excel- lence in pure representation, there is, perhaps, a stronger emo- tional current than in any of her previous books. She has yielded a little of her aloofness, and she has gained in power and depth. The story is of three sisters in the familiar Iowa environment. Miss Suckow's characters are never to be summed up in a sentence. It is only at first glance that they seem to be types. For she has developed to perfection her own technique of word portraiture — that of approaching a character from many angles, disregarding inconsistencies, until the figure emerges, three dimensional, astonishingly like life. If Miss Suckow has not achieved as yet in sustained power all that her admirers have hoped from her, the fact remains that she is one of the few of our important novelists whose powers are still on the increase. The Excursion to Tilsit. By Hermann Sudermann. Trans- lated from the German by Lewis Galantiere. Horace Liveright. $2.50. The four long stories of Lithuanian peasant life included in this volume belong with the best of Sudermann's work. They are realistic, even to the point of being ethnological studies of a little-known people. At the same time they are much more. The characters are warmed and brought to life by a detached but loving understanding, and the events are selected and woven together into splendid dramatic fragments. The longest story, Jons and Erdma, is a little "Growth of the Soil," without the starkness of that great novel. It is touched with humor and humanity. The shortest, the title story, which tells the tale of Ansas and Indra, of how Ansas, led astray by another woman, takes Indra with him on an excursion intending to murder her on the way home but ends by saving her life at the expense of his own, belongs with the greatest of its kind. So fine a book should do much to revive interest in an author whose prestige, in America at any rate, has been for some time on the decline. Jewish Social Work a Career and Challenge Do your criteria of a successful career include also the intangible values of inherent interest, stim- ulating contacts and social usefulness? If so, then you should study the advantages of Jewish Social Work as a Profession May 9 is the last date for filing application for fellowships of $750 and $1000 For full information, address M. J. Karpf, Director The Training School For Jewish Social Work A graduate school 67-71 W. 47th St., New York City tiiniDtiitiiMit iiiiDitiiaiiiiiiiiiiatiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiuti. for unforgettable impressions VISIT SOVIET RUSSIA Continental travel comforts From Leningrad to Moscow and down the picturesque Volga to the Caucasus or the Crimea and Ukraine. Witness, at first hand the powerful drama of Communism on trial. Interesting itineraries. Frequent sailings. Write for Booklet "N" Amalgamated Bank 11-15 Union Square, New York City TRAVEL DEPT. or Amalgamated Trust & Savings Bank 111 West Jackson Blvd., Chicago, III. :e§^^^^:a^w^;5i<^a'.^s:^^*,^a'^&T^*6^x<^^:^v.<^iAG^ When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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524 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 □ FILMS D LECTURES □ America's Foremost Actor tn The Screen's Smartest Comedy JOHN BARRYMORE in "THE MAN FROM BLANKLEY'S" A Warner Bros, and Vitaphone Talking Picture. fCMTDAI TUCATDC Broadway and 47th Street. IsElM JAAL, tnil/ill\l-i Daily, 2:45—8:45; Sundays, 3 — 6—8:45 ™f*„N«^ "JOURNEY'S END" The all-talking screen version of R. C. Sherriff s World-Famed Play with a powerful cast headed by COLIN CLIVE, creator of the stage role of Captain Stanhope. /-» AITTV THEATRE, B'way & 46th St. UAidl I Twice Dally, 2:45—8:45. 3 times Sat., Sun. & Holidays 2:45—5:45—8:45. Midnight Show Every Saturday Night. Seats selling 4 weeks ahead. ^ LITTLE Direction Leo Brecher CARNEGIE PLAYHOUSE 146 W. 57th St. SATURDAY TO TUESDAY, APRIL 26 TO 29 INCLUSIVE "THE CASE OF SERGEANT GRISCHA" With Chester Morris. From the novel by Arnold Zweig THE MODEPN CONT&OVEPSY V*W WILL IT SUCCEED?^* ^0 HUWAN5ST SPOILSMAN »YES" HENRY M INI. CANBY EHTOR MURMf C£>TEW sm'YZSAUT- WUAT BRAND?' RMJiKY HANSEN LlTEQ/JTf EDITOR CARL van dokn LTITCR UTtPARY CUIID AW "MS" CD AMMAN CARNEGIE HALL, FRI. EVE., MAY 9 57th St. & 7th Ave. at 8:45 TICKETS $l-$1.50-$2-$2.75 (Boxes on Application) For Sale at Box Office, Kand School Book Store, 7 Rant 15th St. Columbia Hook Store (Journalism I'.liln.i TWO LECTUKES: "THIS COCKEYED WOULD" AS IT SEEMS TO UEYWOOD OUN Fri. Eves, at 8:30, April 25th and May 2nd. COMMIXITY CHUKCH, 34th St. & Park Ave. DISCI SSI ON' GUILD — K 1002 — 15 E. 40th St. LEX. 7483 For ticket* to both events. Open Eves, to 8:30. When writing to advertisers The Hoax. By Italo Svevo. Translated from the Italian with an Introduction by Beryl de Zoete. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2. This novelette, published in Italy in 1928, the year of the author's death, is the first complete story by Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz) to appear in English. Svevo was an obscure Italian writer whose two novels, "A Life" and "Senility," had long been forgotten when James Joyce, who had known him since 1906, succeeded in convincing the literary world that a great novelist had been overlooked. His novels were revived and in 1923 he published "Zeno," his best-known work. "The Hoax" tells the story of a single incident in the life of a dreamy office worker who in his youth had published an unsuccessful novel, and who now satisfies his creative longings by writing, for his own pleasure, fables based on the antics of the sparrows whom he feeds outside his window. A practical joker convinces him that a foreign publisher is eager to purchase the rights to his forgotten novel for a large sum of money. Mario is completely taken in; but his gentle character stands the test of the humiliat- ing ordeal through which he passes. It is a pleasant but not particularly important tale. One looks forward to the transla- tion of one of Svevo's major works. The Trough of the Wave. By Olaf Duun. Translated from the Norwegian by Arthur G. Chater. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. This is the first volume of a six-volume translation of Olaf Duun's Norwegian saga of a family of peasant freeholders, the whole to bear the title, "The People of Juvik." The volumes are to appear separately from time to time. The tale opens on an epic note with its recital of the traditional lore of the Juvikings of olden time, goes on to tell of Per Anders, the last of the "old men," and then takes up the story of his two sons, Jens and Per, who bring the family fortunes down with them into the trough of the wave. As befits a prelude to so long a work, the movement is slow, the acceleration gradual. Standing by itself "The Trough of the Wave" evokes a mood and por- trays a background — and does little else. But further criticism had best be withheld until more volumes have appeared. Films "Journey's End" IS "Journey's End" the masterpiece that it is claimed to be, or is its popularity merely a passing vogue? Whatever the answer it is clear that the story owes its present success not so much to the fidelity with which it reproduces the life at the front line (its picture of that life sinning rather on the side of idealization), as to the moral appeal of the unobtrusive and mat- ter-of-fact gallantry that culminates its action. But having already asked: What price glory? it is quite possible that some day some of us may also ask: What price gallantry? We may become critical not only about the business of killing, but no less so about the business of being killed. For it is true that we admire gallantry in others because we recognize the ordeal that being in their place would be to us; because, too, as a rule we are directly or indirectly benefited by these feats of heroism, and therefore cannot possibly regard them as deserving anything but our greatest admiration. Hence, as long as society is conceded the right to call upon the individual to perform the supreme sacrifice, so long shall we have this far-from-disinterested cult of heroism, and so long will the "gentlemanly" Anglo-Saxons glory at the spectacle of gallantry that is unobtrusive and self- effacing. To brand the specific code of honor which permeates please mention The Nation

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April 30, 1930] The Nation 525 "Journey's End" as bourgeois (which it undoubtedly is) will no more solve the problem than to invoke the same code, with ap- propriate adjustments, in behalf of proletarian class rule or the Nietzschean superman. After all it does not really make much difference whether one is invited to destroy oneself for the greater glory of a nation, of a class, of the human race as a whole, or of the improved human species of a million years hence. With these reservations concerning the fundamental values embodied in "Journey's End," one must admit that the actual spectacle of guiltless men walking docilely their "last mile" is in itself stirring enough to hold one in its grip from first scene to last. In this respect the film version of "Journey's End" (Gaiety) is even more tense than the original stage play, for it is less diluted by the orderly's amusing remarks on food, and unlike the play provides a few scenes of actual fighting. It also gains in comparison in the greater detail and relief which the cinematic treatment bestows on its characters. On the other hand, tensely as the story is told on the screen it lacks the more subtle play of contrasts which marks the progress of action on the stage; and it also fails to create that atmosphere of uncanny ordinariness and uneventfulness hiding the inferno of war hor- rors which the stage somehow succeeds in suggesting. Never- theless, of its kind the film is a remarkable achievement, notable for the success with which it has preserved the dramatic quali- ties that went into the making of the original play. It would be an exaggeration to say that it is a cinematic masterpiece, for it never attempts to assert its independence of the stage and to express itself entirely in terms of the cinema; but it is skilful and intelligent as far as it goes, and this is no small merit for anything that comes out of Hollywood. "Under a Texas Moon" (Winter Garden) is as different from "Journey's End" as a light extravaganza can be from the grim realities of life. Unlike the latter picture, too, it shows a divided mind in both its story and direction, with the disastrous result that inevitably follows such indecision. The trouble with the picture is that its producers could not make up their minds whether it was to be a piece of exaggerated romanticism or a satire on such romanticism. Had the satire been left out the picture would have gained immensely, and Mr. Frank Fay would have been able to make the character he plays with such penetration and charm a piece of truly unique and subtle por- traiture. Alexander Bakshy Drama TVeltschmerz on the Riviera PHILIP BARRY is the author of two extremely successful light comedies and of a group of more pretentious plays which range in manner from the whimsicality of "White Wings" through the somewhat preachy emotionalism of "In a Garden" to the tragic earnestness of "John." The two comedies are as fine as anything of the kind ever written in America, but Mr. Barry seems much to prefer his less successful efforts, and his opinion is seconded by a considerable number of critics who never tire of repeating that "White Wings" and "In a Garden" failed because they were too good for the public. Now I have never been one to subscribe to the opinion that theatrical audiences are more nearly infallible than any other section of "the general," but in the particular case of this play- wright I have always believed that the public was right both when it acclaimed "Paris Bound" and when it turned thumbs down to the plays which were supposed to be above its head. I have never seen any reason why a social comedy replete with When writing to advertisers CIVIC REPERTORY "^IsftSr 50c, $1, $1.50. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2:30 EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Thurs.Mat.,Apr.24, "Peter Pan." Thurs.Eve., "The Living Corpse." Fri.Eve.,Apr.25, "Romeo and Juliet." Sat. Mat., Apr.26, "Peter Pan." Sat.Eve.,Apr.26, "Open Door" and "Women Have Their Way." Mon.Eve.,Apr.28, "Cherry Orchard." Tues.Eve.,Apr.29, and Thurs.Eve., May 1, "Romeo and Juliet." Wed.Eve.,Apr.30, "Living Corpse." Thurs. Mat.,May 1, "The Sea Gull." Seats 4 weeks in advance at Box Office & Town Hall, 113 W. 43rd St. The Actor-Managers, Inc., has the honor to present in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER SKBTCHBS RUTH DRAPER Evenings : Tuesday, Wednesday. Friday, Sunday, 8 :50. rOMFDY THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats. Thurs. v-«vyiviJ-,i^ j. and g^ 2;30 VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 Popular Price ($2.50) Matinee Saturday HERMAN 8HCMLIN presents THE LAST MILE "Called out the rare 'Bravos' of this season." — Gilbert Seldes, Graphic. ^ A 1VF W H APRK Theatre 42nd St., West of Broadway. 0/*.lTX Ll» M.M.fVl\l\U Eyes. 8:50. Matinees Wed. & Sat. 2:80. The Theatre Guild Presents HOTEL UNIVERSE A NEW PLAY By PHILIP BARRY H/f ARTTTV HFrif Theatre. 45th St., W. of Eighth Ave. iTli\X\ *■ A-L^ OHi^ IV Evgs., 8 :50. Mats., Thurs. & Sat., 2 :5« A MONTH Z COUNTRY By IVAN TTJRGENEV •T^a^il^ THEATRE, 52nd St., W. of Broadway VXlt&lU Evgs. 8:30. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:30. The Apple Cart Bernard Shaw's Political Extravaganza Jk W T/llvT Theatre, 52nd St., W. of Broadway J\i-i V llN Evgs., 8:30. Mats., Wed. & Sat., 2:30 CIVIC REPERTORY THEATRE SUN. AFT., APRIL. 27 AT 8 FAREWELL, "DANCE RECITAL OF MODERN MUSIC" HENRI "THE BEGINNING OF NEW THEATERS" THOMAS MANN ARTIST-PATRONS Muriel Draper, Will Durant, H. L. Mencken, Joseph Stella 6 Splendid Speakers in One Splendid Evening Symposium: THE NEW GENERATION TOWN HALL— MONDAY, 8:30, MAY 5th John Watson Harry Klmer Barnes Sidonie Gruenberg Fritz Wittels Samuel SchmaLhaasen Victor Calverton Tickets: $1, ti, $S — at Town Hall Box Office or Roxanna Wells Lecture Bureau. S93 7th Ave., N. Y. please mention The Nation

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526 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See tA Month in the Country — Guild — 52nd St., W. of B'dway. tApple Cart— Alvin— 52nd St., W. of B'dway. *BerkeIey Square — Lyceum — E. 45th St. •Civic Repertory — 14th St., W. of Sixth Ave. *Death Takes a Holiday — Barrymore — 47th St., W. of B'dway. ♦Dishonored Lady — Empire — B'dway and 40th St. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 41st St., E. of B'dway. tFifty Million Frenchmen — Lyric — W. 42nd St. tFlying High— Apollo— W. 42nd St. *Hotel Universe— Beck^Sth St., E. of Eighth Ave. ^Jonica — Craig — 54th St., E. of B'dway. tjune Moon — Broadhurst — W. 44th St. tRebound — Plymouth — 44th St., W. of B'dway. tStrictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. ^Strike Up The Band— Times Sq.— W. of B'dway. *The Green Pastures — Mansfield — 47th St., W. of B'dway. *The Last Mile— Sam H. Harris— 42nd St., W. of B'dway. tTopaze — Music Box — 45th St., W. of B'dway. Uncle Vanya— Cort— W. 48th St. Films Journey's End — Gaiety — 46th St. and B'dway. The Man From Blankley's— Central — 47th St. and B'dway. Sins of the Father and Roadhouse Nights — Beg. April 27th — Fifth Ave. Playhouse — 66 Fifth Ave. Street of Chance — Beg. April 25th; Madame X — Beg. April 28th — Little Picture House — 50th St., E. of Lexington Ave. The Night Ride and Lonesome — Beg. April 23rd; Such Men Are Dangerous — Beg. April 26th — Film Guild — 52 W. Eighth St. The Case of Sergeant Grischa — Beg. April 26th; Little Carnegie Playhouse— 146 W. 57th St. Lectures The Cockeyed World as it seems to Heywood Broun — 2 lectures — Fri. Eve., April 25th, and Fri. Eve., May 2nd — Com- munity Church, 34th St. and Park Ave., under auspices of Discussion Guild. First Nights Romeo and Juliet — Civic Repertory — 14th St., W. of Sixth Ave. Sir Harry Lauder — Jolson — 926 Seventh Ave. Antigone — American Laboratory — 222 E. 54th Si. Courtesan — President — 247 W. 48th St. Art Exhibits Seventh Annual Exhibition of the Allied Artists of America — Allied Artists of America — Fine Arts Galleries — 215 W. 57th St.— April 12th to May 4th. Watercolors by Capt. Vivian Guy — Babcock Art Galleries — 5 E. 57th St.— April 16th to May 3rd. Exhibition of paintings by Jean Dufy — Balzac Galleries — 102 E. 57th St.— April 15th to May 5th. Fxhibition of modern French paintings — Chambrun Galleries — 556 Madison Ave. — to May 10th. Paintings, tapestries and works of art — Charles of London — 730 Fifth Ave. Exhibition of cubism from 1910 to 1913 from important Euro- pean collections — De Hauke Galleries — 3 E. 51st St. — to April 30th. Primitive negro art — Jan Kleykamp Galleries — 5 E. 54th St. Tenth official loan exhibition, illustrating the relations of the Mar- quis de Lafayette with this country — Museum of French Art — 22 E. 60th St. — to May 2nd. Works of art from Japan and China — Yamanaka Galleries — 680 Fifth Ave. 'Drama. tComedy. (Musical. urbane wit should be necessarily inferior to anything whatso- ever, and the production of "Hotel Universe" (Martin Beck Theater) has only served to confirm my opinion that such plays as this are artistically much inferior to what their author apparently regards as his insignificant potboilers. In the new piece he tries once more to deliver an extremely hazy "message," and succeeds only in revealing to his audience what an ill exchange he makes when he trades the clear good sense of his wit for the pompous platitudes of a sentimental and second-rate mysticism. The idea behind "Hotel Universe" is simple enough, once one has been permitted to glimpse its outlines behind the mist which envelops it. It seems that a collection of ever-so-rich and ever-so-sophisticated people has gathered at a house party given by a young girl devoting her life to the care of a semi- insane father who used to be a physicist but who appears to have lost his wits as the result of some very loose thinking about space-time — a subject which, by the way, may be all very well for mathematicians but which is disastrous for those who, innocent of mathematics, are prone to suppose that Professor Alexander is promising us all a kind of second chance (vide "Dear Brutus") in life. It seems, still further, that each mem- ber of the company suffers from one kind of Weltschmerz or another because each has got himself "fixed" by an emotional experience in the past. Fortunately, however, there is some- thing in the atmosphere generated by the physicist which liber- ates everybody. Each goes into a kind of trance, relives the crucial scene of his existence, and then awakes so completely purified and liberated that the whole party leaves, ready to begin a new life in the great world, while the physicist, his task completed, lies dead in a very comfortable chair. The idea is passable and, I believe, sufficiently good Freud- ianism; but what the play needs desperately is more matter and less art. Every incident loses its outlines because every incident is swathed in layer after layer of fuzzy verbiage about Life, Death, the Great Beyond, and the fact (announced by a mysterious white cock given to apparently untimely crow- ings) that "somewhere it is always dawn." The dramatis per- sonae are supposed to represent the intellectual as well as the social elite, but they indulge in the most appalling mystical chit- chat and are responsible for a stream of discourse upon the surface of which float fragments of mangled Einstein together with all sorts of spongy, half-digested or completely indigestible bits which seem to be the remains of a meal formerly made upon some of the more repulsive varieties of New Thought. Such ideas pass current in Village salons when dusk and cock- tails have combined to elevate the spirits and depress the judg- ment, but they are not taken seriously by captains of finance and other authentic bigwigs, unless the upper classes have degenerated farther than even the Michael Arlens maintain. Cannot something be done to persuade Mr. Barry to respect and to cultivate the very considerable gifts which the gods have been good enough to give him? Cannot he be made to see that the "message" of wit, of urbanity, and of comic good sense may be just as valuable and just as profound as that delivered by any other kind of philosophy? If his "Holiday" is mere com- mercial entertainment and "Hotel Universe" is art, then I have made a discovery. I proclaim myself from henceforth a low- brow, unrepentant and unashamed. I have all but forgotten to add that the production is extraordinarily polished — rather more expert indeed than the play deserves. Joseph Wood Krutch "Three Little Girls" (Shubert Theater) is an extremely elaborate Viennese operetta mounted lavishly upon a revolving stage and unusually well sung by a very large company. It offers a very full evening of the kind of entertainment it under- takes to provide. A. S. B.

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April 30, 1930] The Nation 527 SUMMER 9 THURSDAY FRIDAY — SATURDAY SUNDAY Decoration Week-End 4 GLORIOUS $9 A FUN DAYS J** NO EXTRAS. EVERYTHING INCLUDED. 1. Round Trip Fare 3. All Meals, coming and going 2. Camp Transportation 4. Stay at Camp VIA SPECIALLY CHARTERED "NON-STOP" TRAIN Leaves Thursday, 6 P. M. ACCOMMODATIONS LIMITED EARLY RESERVATION URGED You wouldn't know the old place, now I . . . the same old friendly spirit . . . but what nr LA r-| improvements . . . what facilities . . . e'en the C^n V I . golf course nearing completion I - I At/ £m J Special June Rates $25 Weekly " if-/?* i^j^ivl ECHO LAKE TAVERN r J Y J?, 475 FTFTH AVE. Phone: LEX 887» ' ^«- R. B. NCBELL M. NCDELL WARRENSBURG N. Y. Other SUMMER Advertising page iii To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Owing to an unfortunate error on the part of the publicity manager for the World Tourists, Inc., an "ad" advertising Dr. Joshua Kunitz's tour has appeared in the issue of April 23, 1930, before it was seen or approved by any one responsible in the World Tourist Office or by Dr. Kunitz himself. We regret the personal tone in which the "ad" was written, and we apologize to Dr. Kunitz for this slip. We wish, however, to state that the second World Tour- ists, Inc. tour under the leadership of Dr. Joshua Kunitz still continues and from time to time announcements with reference thereto will appear. Very truly yours, WORLD TOURISTS, Inc. Mrs. N. Markoff Director Tours to Soviet Russia Dept. NEVER BEFORE HEARD OF A summer in the Orient ------- Circumnavigation of South America - - ALL EXPENSE PACIFIC ERA TRAVELS, Inc. "Upton Close Cultural Expeditions' Write or Wire $495. 780. 1703 Exchange Bldg. Seattle, Wash. 25 W. 43rd St. New York City Phone: BRYant 7216 HOW AMERICA LIVES by HARRY W. LAIllLtR An exceptionally useful handbook of industrial facts containing an analysis of wages paid to various classes of labor, standards of living among the workers, unemployment, industrial accidents, etc. 56 pp. 15c a copy, 10 copies $1. Order from LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL, DEMOCRACY 112 East 19th Street New York City An Analogy IF 114,000,000 of the 115,000,000 population of the United States should adopt the prac- tice of snapping at other people's ears at home and in public places — And if the snaps often reached their mark — The one million non-snapping minority would be faced with a tremendous problem. Attempts at legislation would accomplish little. The non-snappers would have to edu- cate that overwhelming majority to the social and economic disadvantages of mayhem. To be sure, the thoroughly patriotic non- snappers would suffer attack, disfigurement, and abuse. Y t their devotion would carry them through, eventually, to some measure of success. Though its problem is vastly more complex, The Nation is in a position comparable to that of the non-snapper. It champions the cause of individual sanity and corporate fair- play in a world that has never been cele- brated for a preponderance of either. Everyone who is willing to think should read The Nation. Each week it brings to light important but elsewhere neglected news. Also it sifts the fiction out of such news as is not neglected, and sets up a comprehensible structure of truth. $1 with the coupon below will bring you the magazine for 13 weeks — a special acquaintance rate. THE NATION 20 Vesey St. NEW YORK The enclosed $i is to start my 13-week acquaintance subscription at once. Name Street City 4-30-30 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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528 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 "Here one experiences constantly the fine rapture of discovery' Between the covers of The American Mercury one finds some of the best writing in America. The magazine speaks for the civilized minority. Here the submerged tenth re- ceives a hearing. The price carries it beyond the reach of the majority — the tabloid thinkers. Here one experiences constantly the fine rapture of dis- covery. Here one finds, on every page, writing of marked quality. In the field of clinical criticism it is for the moment supreme. There is no avenue of approach like it in a world where and an era when, in places, one may walk for days and encounter of intellectual life no trace. — Pittsfield Eagle. 'f££ THE AMERICAN MERCURY $5.00 the year 9.00 two years with The Nation $7.50 Vanity Fair 6.80 The Manchester Guardian 6.00 Send me The American Mercury and I enclose $ NAME ADDRFSS Harper's 6.80 N— 1-30-30 Add 50 cents for Canada and $1.00 for a foreign address for each magazine. The American Mercury 730 Fifth Avenue New York City When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Ferment in Spain TT 7E reprint the following comment on the situation ^^ in Spain from the Manchester Guardian. It has become apparent since this article was written that the relaxation in the censorship was only temporary. For domestic news it is stronger than ever. Several news- papers have been altogether suppressed and many others fined. The early edition of the newspapers of Valencia was recently confiscated because it carried the speech of Senor niceto Alcala Zamora, prominent liberal, who declared him- self in favor of a conservative republic in a meeting that had to be held in a small theater seating 2,000 while more than 50,000 stood outside. The censorship of foreign dis- patches, on the other hand, was at the same time lifted once more, for the speech of Alcala Zamora was reported in the American press. General Primo de Rivera, Dictator of Spain, was removed from office in much the same ignominious way in which an unwanted petty official is retired. The King decided that he must go, and go he did, without fuss, trouble, or dispute. Dictatorships are not accustomed to disappear so quietly, nor does Spain seem destined to furnish an exception to that rule. On February 28 the Cabinet held a meeting and decided that it would be inopportune to hold elections at present; that the . censorship should be continued and possibly be made more stringent. Spain, then, despite General Berenguer's fair promises, is as far from democracy as ever. The instrument of dictatorship, General Primo de Rivera, has been changed; the royal dictatorship continues. At the time of the removal of General Primo de Rivera it was still permissible to hope that King Alfonso had learned from the universal unpopularity of his dictator that personal rule was folly and might end in disaster. One might still hope that he would realize that his best course was to place himself at the head of the movement back to normality. A true Bourbon, he has chosen the other way. Only the minimum concessions to popular feeling have been made, and they have plainly been made in a grudging spirit. To what do they amount? Political exiles have been allowed to return, and they have been allowed a carefully limited number of opportunities to speak. Local self-govern- ment has been restored on a basis that makes nonsense of the word; the new councils are composed partly of the richest taxpayers and partly of those candidates who headed the polls at the last elections before the dictatorship. The censorship has been relaxed but it still exists. Very significant here is the fact that while the correspondents of foreign newspapers were at first, under the new regime, entirely free of restric- tion, latterly a measure of censorship has been reimposed. This is the sum of liberty reintroduced by General Berenguer and King Alfonso. It amounts to little if any more than that prom- ised by General Primo de Rivera in his program of a gradual return to normal government. Can Alfonso wonder that his people demand an account of his responsibility for the dictator- ship? Has not his action during the past month made it abun- dantly clear that he is no reluctant victim of circumstances but a full-blooded believer in personal, irresponsible government? King Alfonso, then, has set his hand to hinder the return of freedom. Is he likely to succeed? The most important force behind him is undoubtedly the church. The Spanish church is still on the whole a great pillar of reaction. The dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera long enjoyed the support of the great Catholic newspapers, while the ineradicable hostility of the universities to the government was largely due to the favoritism of Catholic student societies in which that govern- ment indulged. However, even in this ecclesiastical stronghold of absolutist sentiment there are groups who would not imperil their church's future by identifying it with an unpopular and anti-social system of government. There has of recent years been a great growth of Catholic Social groups, who have tried to introduce into organized Christian life a spirit of reforming tenderness. Prominent among their leaders are men like Senor Ossorio Gallardo, the president of the Madrid Associa- tion of Lawyers and a well-known Conservative leader, who has been making speeches deeply critical of the dictatorship and of the King's share in it. Have these men any chance of influencing the great body of parish priests? It is a question of supreme importance, for on the attitude of the great mass of ill-educated, silent, non-political peasantry depends the stability of any form of government. It is not that they will take any active part in deciding the fate of their country, but rather that no government can survive without their passive tolerance. Their attitude is to a large extent determined by the opinion of the miserably underpaid parish priests, who looked in vain to the dictatorship for any alleviation of their position. Would they now be willing at least to tolerate a republic, or is the very idea of free government so associated in their minds with anti-clericalism that they would withhold their support? They have as yet given no sign. . . . The forces making for a republic, or at the very least for a change of king, are more active and virile, even if less numer- ous, than those which tend to support the present form of government. The concentration of almost all political opinion in favor of a thorough scrutiny of the King's behavior is- a remarkable sign. Naturally one would expect Senor Unamuno to be of this opinion, but one would hardly have supposed that he could become, as he has, the voice of all awakened Spain. The Socialists, of course, are republicans, but there is real significance in the conversion of Conservative leaders to a skepticism of royal government. Senor Sanchez Guerra has accused King Alfonso of having brought in the dictatorship, and declared that in consequence the King can no longer take refuge behind his constitutional irresponsibility, as he has vio- lated the constitution. That is a sign that the most responsible and the most moderate section of Spanish opinion no longer believes that the monarchy can safeguard its interests. These men are the most timid in the face of change, because they have most to lose by revolution. They are men of loyalty and honor, who would never leave a sinking ship unless it had first been deserted by its captain. . . . But why is it . . . that General Berenguer is still able to rule without a Parliament? So far there have been a few demonstrations and rumors of several political strikes, but nothing that has given the police any trouble. Spain is quiet today because the army has not yet spoken. It spoke once and General Primo de Rivera was dis- missed. Since then it has been silent. But the army is the greatest political force in Spain. It can make and unmake min- istries and kings. That is a very unhealthy condition, and the first business of any democratic government would have to be to take the army out of politics. But does the army wish to be- come less political and more professional? Until it has answered that question it is idle to speculate on the chances of free gov- ernment in Spain. Monarchy or republic, as long as soldiers are politicians, citizens are at a discount.

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530 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3382 Forbidden in Russia— by AMIIti; SOBOL lie dares lo tell, in thrilling fiction, the Mart ting, suppressed details about life in Soviet Russia. He reveals the faith and terror, joy and shame of men and women in the throes of an amaz- ing social experiment. With woodcut illus- trations. S3. 00 CLAUDE KENDALL EDUCATIONAL sJ THE PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE Program — April 25-30. at Cooper Union. 8th Street and Astor Place, at 8 o'clock. Admission Free. Friday, April 25 DR. EVERETT DEAN MARTIN Tub Psychology ok Progress "The Mental Habits which Make for Civiliza- tion." Ethics and Social Science Sunday, April 27 DR. STRINGFELLOW BARR "History as a Social Science." Tuesday, April 29 MR. NORMAN HILBERRY "Light as a 'Wavicle.' " MUHLENBERG BRANCH LIBRARY 209 West 23rd St., at 8:30 o'clock Monday, April 28 PROFESSOR KARL N. LLEWELLYN Law in Society "Contract: A Study in Application." Wednesday, April 30 MR. CLIFTON P. FADIMAN Contemporary European Literature "Russia and the Possibility of a Proletarian Literature." "Sex Life and Propor Living" Dr. Alfred Adler at Rand Auditorium, 7 East 15th St, Friday, May 9th 8:30 I*. M. Admission 50c. Reserved $1.00 Tickets: Columbia University Book Store. Rand Book Store. Algonquin 3091-5. Auspices loans; People's Socialist League circle 1 FIVE LANGUAGES IN ONE French-Spanish German- Italian-English. Contain- ing 5,000 practical words attractively arranged. Limited supply. $1.50. Order today. Universal Institute, 1263 Lexington Ave., New York. TREACHER (former college and high school -1- instructor) v:ivcs lessons in languages and science: English. French, Spanish, German, Latin, etc. ; chemistry, biology, physics, mathe- matics, etc. Also preparation for examinations. Box 2395. •>; The Nation. a DISCUSSION D THE GROUP A Clearing House of Opinion meets at Auditorium — 160 West 85th St. Tuesdiiy, April '29th, at 8:80 P. M. COUNT ILYA TOLSTOI will speak on "LEO TOLSTOI: HIS LIFE AND TEACHINGS" Admission Members ROc Non-Members 75c (Membership dues $1.00 for the year) Weekly notices mailed on request. Organized 1918. THE VAGABONDS POETRY SOIREE EVERY Friday evening at 8:30 P. M. ; Origi- nal poetry recitals, refreshments served. The Green Witch Inn. 63 East Eleventh St., West of B'dway., N. Y. C. DANCE 1KCAS LODGE Masquerade Reunion Dance at Hotel Greystone, 91st St, &• B'way. Sunday evening, April 27th, 8:30 V. M. Costume prizes. Lucky door numbers. Refreshments. Admission $1.25. LANGUAGES FRENCH, SPANISH, ITALIAN, GERMAN, ENGLISH Conversational method. Native teachers. Prlve', lessons, 75c, short course, 8 to t daily. 18th »«*_ FISHER'S SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES 1284 Lexington Avenue. N W Cor. Kits ttfev FRENCH-SPANISH-ITALIAN GERMAN. Private lessons 75e (Daily 9-9). Na- tive teachers. Interesting conversational method 19th year. Also neglected English education I'MM-JKSAI. SCHOOL OK LANODAOKs 1203 I.xinttou Aic. Northeast Cor. 8Mb HI FORMER school teacher in Russia, seeks scholars for Russian language. Private or groups. Knows English. Your house. Reason- able. Mrs. M. Ginsburg, 3734 Laurel Ave., Sea Gate, N. Y. RUSSIAN RECORDS made by VICTOR TALKING MACHINE CO. Information on request M. Jerlitzyn 25 West 123rd St. Phone HARlem 0487 □ SCHOOLS □ HESSIAN HILLS SCHOOL A modern country school /er boys and girls, nursery through first year high school, day and boarding, CROTON ON HUDSON NEW YORK ^ OPEN SHELF Atheist Poetry Collection of poems. Sample copy free. Catalog of books free. Set of tracts. 10c Am, Assn. for Adv. of Atheism, Inc. 119 E. 14th St. New York. N. T. PERSONALS "V7"OUNG lady, 23, Jewish, wishes to join or •*■ form group of intelligent young women planning to rent cottage this summer in sea- shore or mountains, convenient commuting to N. Y. Box 2390, % The Nation. POSITIONS WANTED "L7XPERIENCED trained nurse, college, mid- -L-< die-age, social, child welfare ; knowledge Russia, Russian ; desires connection or chaper- one, companion — adult or child going abroad. Box 2387, % The Nation. YOUNG woman, eyes strained from office work, wishes any kind of job not requir- ing close eye work ; city or country ; live in or out ; fond of children ; two years college ; modest wage. Box 2388, % The Nation. LEGAL YOUNG man, liberal, admitted to bar two years, graduate cum laude, desires connec- tion on salary basis or exchange of services. Box 2386, r/c The Nation. YOUNG man, sociable, educated, versatile, strong, capable, drives car, wants work driving wagon, car, cutting hay, etc., but not too strenuous or long, on small farm during summer, for nerves. Box 2391, % The Nation. CECRETARY, stenographer, extensive experi- '-' ence with prominent writere, part-time pre- ferred. Manuscripts typed, careful, accurate work. German translations. Highest references. Riverside 8966, or Box 2386. % The Nation. (JUNG German college man, 34, European business experience and five years' broad Wall Street experience, resourceful, conscienti- ous and reliable, with executive ability, seeks suitable connection, preferably industrial enter- prise. Box 2349. % The Nation. YOUNG LADY, experienced in teaching music Good pianist, typing, restaurant ex- perience. Columbia B.S. Bookish tastes. Box No. 2362, % The Nation. OMAN, thirty, by profession a teacher of art, creative writing, desires entertaining and lucrative summer position. Box 2382, % The Nation. DARNARD College senior, planning trip abroad early June, wishes to earn passage, as chaperon, companion — adult or child ; excellent sailor ; references. Box 2379, % The Nation. T AWYER, SO, able, intelligent and enterpris- ing, in private practice, seeks part-time employment. Box 2392, e/c The Nation. A RT student — college graduate, excellent ■**■ craftawoman, seeks position with promise for future — preferably in relation to the theatre. Wadsworth 0046, 12 Pinehurst Ave. Apt 3F. HELP WANTED Y( W< W; 'ANTED — Registered nurse for social case work with N. Y. organization, where medi- cal background is necessary. Interesting work for nurse with enthusiasm and pleasing person- ality. Must speak Yiddish. Box 2394, % The Nation. "W'OUNG LADY, accomplished pianist, pleasant personality, for adult camp. Box 395, 120 E. Fordham Road, Bronx. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, 1930 No. 3383 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 531 EDITORIALS: Law the Servant of Life 5J4 Political Discount Rates 535 Labor in Travail 5 j 3 Poetry and Laurel 3i° IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 537 WASHINGTON GRINDS ON. By Paul Y. Anderson 538 THE PRESS TODAY: III. THE UNITED PRESS. By Oswald Garrison ViUard 539 FRANCE WINS AT LONDON. By Robert Dell 542 WAR ON THE CHAIN STORE. By Harry W. Schacter 544 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 546 CORRESPONDENCE 546 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 547 BOOKS, MUSIC, DRAMA: Migrant. By Leslie Nelson Jennings 548 A Great Trilogy. By Henry Hazlitt 548 The British State. By Robert Livingston Schuyler 549 Harsh Words. By H. L. Mencken 549 Conscience Makes Us Men. By Pierre Loving 550 The Southern Mill Worker. By Broadus Mitchell 550 Books in Brief 552 Music: A "Spiritual" Concerto. By Hubbard Hutchinson 553 Drama: Lillian Gish Keeps a Secret. By Joseph Wood Krutch... 554 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEIIM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, .Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. SENATOR BORAH was at his best when he opened the attack upon Judge Parker's confirmation. He showed that the judge's reasoning was faulty in the Red Jacket case; that the precedent he cited, the Hitchman case, was not a proper one, thereby demolishing the Parker contention that he was compelled to follow the Supreme Court's reason- ing. As for the judge's own defense in his letter to Senator Overman, we find it distinctly weak ; indeed, the press dis- patches report that it did not help but injured his case. Meanwhile, in addition to the letter we publish elsewhere, we have letters from Congressman Charles A. Jonas of North Carolina and Wyndham R. Meredith, a former president of the Virginia bar, pointing out that the editor of The Nation in his letter to "My Dear Senator" on the Parker case failed to note that it was Judge Parker who declared the Richmond anti-Negro segregation ordi- nance unconstitutional. This is true; it was an oversight. But Judge Parker was clearly bound by the Supreme Court precedents because that body had twice unanimously out- lawed two such ordinances. There was no possibility of misinterpreting this precedent. Nor does this affect the fact that in his campaign for the governorship of North Carolina he took the familiar Southern position that Negroes should ot be permitted, and do not wish, to participate in politics. e are glad to record the fact that Mr. Jonas and Mr. eredith praise Judge Parker in the highest terms. HPHE AMERICAN DELEGATION has arrived from England blowing its own horn, more than content with its achievements. Let no one, however, be so unkind as to ask any member, publicly or privately, just what con- tribution or concrete proposal the American delegation ad- vanced beyond Mr. Stimson's fortunately abortive suggestion that by way of disarmament the United States build one more battleship. It is plainly not his fault that we are actually to destroy two of our older vessels of this type. Mr. Stimson himself is coming in for severe criticism from mem- bers of the press for his mishandling of the American press representatives in London. Karl Bickel, head of the United Press, has taken the most unusual course of publicly protest- ing because during the entire conference the American dele- gates never gave a single "formal interview revealing to the American people any important news facts or affording them to any degree important interpretative background material," although they gave a number of radio talks to the entire country — talks which could not appear in the press for from twelve to thirty-six hours thereafter. Frank Simonds, too, declares that Mr. Stimson held to "a policy of complete and uncompromising silence," and "refused all access to himself in press conferences such as MacDonald gave occasionally and Grandi, Tardieu, and Briand frequently." BUT THE WORST PERFORMER among our American officials of the London conference is Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, chief of the navy bureau of aeronautics. Having come from the gathering which, so President Hoover, the Admiral's Commander-in-Chief, has informed us, "has been able finally to turn the tide of con- stantly increasing naval arms and to end the poison of sus- picion and ill-will generated by constant rivalry in construc- tion," the Admiral backed up his chief by demanding . . . parity in merchant marine. A merchant marine is a large part of sea power. A navy is only part of it. As long as we have a merchant marine inferior to any other nation we will not have parity in sea power. We can gain it by building merchant ships precisely as we build cruisers. Nothing could, of course, be more calculated to increase "the poison of suspicion and ill-will" than for us to embark upon such a policy — especially in advance of an economic need for any such vessels. As to naval parity, the Admiral had the effrontery to assert that our people, with no previous thought of naval parity, "have recently demanded it, and there is every indication that we will have it by 1936. It is neces- sary in order to retain our self-respect" ! Could anything more completely justify our statement of last week that the conference has probably done nothing really to chasten the naval mind ? HERBERT HOOVER, ECONOMIST, certainly plays the part powerful poorly by comparison with Calvin Coolidge. The latter consistently gloried in the title of penny-pincher, and the public service often suffered grievously in consequence. But President Hoover preaches alternately the gospel of salvation from depression by spend-

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532 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3383 ing and salvation from deficit by saving. First we were treated to a public-buildings program that was to give every unemployed man a job by spending $175,000,000 additional over a period of ten years. Then on February 24 Congress was solemnly warned not to pass bills (which it had not the slightest intention of passing) which would involve expenditures of $1,735,000,000 in excess of the budget. Next day Congress expressed its opinion of the President, who in reply assured Congress that he referred, not to Congress, but to the extravagant folks back home. On April 4 he signed (with two pens) a measure appropriating "the largest amount for road-building ever sanctioned in a single measure," and on the same day forecast a deficit for 1931 and called for the "most rigid economy and deferment of otherwise justifiable expenditures." On April 22 he again scolded Congress for 125 bills that it has not passed but that would increase his deficit by $350,000,000 if it did pass them, and in the same breath expressed approval of supplemental public-buildings appropriations for 1931 total- ing more than $28,000,000. There is certainly nothing like having an economist for President — except having a juggler. THE WILY AND INDEFATIGABLE M. Briand, if a recent Paris dispatch to the New York World is to be believed, found time during the naval conference at London to push forward the United States of Europe project. One of the objects of M. Briand's diplomacy at London, according to this authority, was to force Ramsay MacDonald to admit, in the presence of the American delegation, that Great Britain was after all one of the European Powers, that it had, like France, rather definite and important obli- gations to the League of Nations, and that it was not, be- cause it could not be, an independent umpire in European differences — a job open to the United States. Meantime, presumably in the long intervals in which there was nothing else to do, M. Briand and his associates worked out a ques- tionnaire which will shortly be sent to some twenty-six Euro- pean states, asking them what they are prepared to do in the way of lowering tariff duties, furthering the cartel move- ment for the grouping and control of industries and natural resources, and so on. Of course there is nothing in this, not a single thing, antagonistic to America. But if the astute French diplomatist does not give his proposed U. S. E. a twist that will make American business penetration of Europe much more difficult, he will be a bigger altruist than his warmest friends have ever asserted that he was. ALL TANGLED UP and nowhere to go was the happy state of the Senate recently after a two-days' bout with the national-origins provision of the pending im- migration bill. On Tuesday, April 22, it voted to repeal the national-origins clause, thereby automatically reestab- lishing the quota basis, but ;«n unamended part of the bill was also changed so as to cut the quota basis from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. It was also proposed to reduce the total annual immigration from about 150,000 to 80,000. The supporters of the national-origins clause, who see in it a greater obstacle to immigration than the quota basis presents, thereupon rallied their forces and on Thursday, by a margin of a single vote, the Senate voted to send the bill back to the Committee on Immigration, thereby putting itself on record ns opposed, at least until it has another thought, to doing away with the national-origins stipulation. As the matter stood at that stage the bill appeared to provide for both systems, with the promise, according to immigration officials, of chaos in administration. The national-origins provision is tolerably acceptable to old countries which for years have furnished large numbers of immigrants, and highly objectionable to new countries some of which have not been many years in existence. As the bill that was recommitted is especially obnoxious to Latin America and has hanging over it the intimation of a veto, the committee may decide to put it in cold storage until December. PUBLIC UTILITY REGULATION is to be the issue in New York State if Governor Roosevelt has his way. The Republican majority in the legislature passed a whole flock of little bills tinkering the Public Service Commission Act in minor particulars, but rejected out of hand the recom- mendations of the minority of the Knight Commission, put forward with the Governor's tacit approval, proposing a really serious scheme of rate control. This minority would set aside by legislative declaration the slippery concept of "reasonable return on a fair value of the property." Pro- viding for an initial valuation of property now in use, which once accepted is to be final, it would have further additions to the property valued at actual cost. The rate of return, to be determined by the commission, is likewise to remain fixed. Utility investors will then know what they may ex- pect to get and consumers what they must pay, and utility properties will cease to be the happy hunting grounds of financial pirates. As John Bauer demonstrated in his nota- ble book, "Effective Regulation of Public Utilities," regula- tion, if it is ever to be effective, must take some such form as this. The companies promptly smashed the minority pro- posals and at the same time accepted innocuous amendments to the existing ineffective law, thus affording additional evi- dence in support of the growing conviction that effective regulation is impossible. We sincerely hope that Governor Roosevelt will push his campaign for the minority utility program with all vigor. EVERYTHING that comes out of Columbus makes worse the calamity at the Ohio State Prison. No one asserts now that the fire which killed 320 convicts was started by them. The city firemen have testified that every life lost could have been saved if there had been prompt efforts to release the prisoners. There have been vigorous convict protests against the regime of the warden, who is charged with brutality, with the result that he called in the National Guard on April 28 and put fifty prisoners into punishment cells. As we go to press news dispatches state that after guards had fired on unruly prisoners in their cells. State troops were called out to quell the riot. Warden Thomas has put the blame on the Ohio Legisla- ture for its refusal to heed his demands for additional and adequate accommodations, and there can be no doubt that his censure is merited. It is the State of Ohio which is arraigned at the bar, and the only question is whether its public conscience will demand action or whether the Execu- tive and the legislature will wait until the storm blows over and then do nothing. Meanwhile, in Dannemora, leaders of the last riot have been for nine months in solitary con- finement with no work to do. and the warden of the New

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May 7, 1930] The Nation 533 Jersey State Prison at Trenton declares that "no power in God's heaven can prevent rioting under conditions we are facing at the prison." There are 1,658 prisoners there con- fined in 1,115 cells. There are 700 idle men occupying cells twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four, and the warden declares that "nobody knows when the lid will blow off." LORD IRWIN has revived press censorship in India. It is true that the native nationalist press is very sen- sational and provocative, but it has been so for a long time, and the fact that the Viceroy feels that he must employ the weapon of suppression indicates the seriousness of the present situation. The report of comparative quiet on the Afghan frontier, where twenty Indians were recently killed in a riot, may be as much the result of censorship of foreign dispatches as of any actual calm. Meanwhile, the sparks of revolt grow thicker and more widespread. Each day brings news of more deaths, more arrests, and more ominous fervor, particularly on the part of Gandhi's immediate followers. At Karachi, as a British war plane circled overhead, a pile of foreign cloth fifteen feet high went up in flame and smoke while women chanted hymns of sedition. V. I. Patel has resigned his post as Speaker of the Indian Legislative Assembly and it is reported that government has practically ceased in the Gujarat district where Gandhi's campaign was inaugurated. Now Gandhi, in a statement which seems hardly consistent with his program of non-violence, threatens to capture a government salt depot, a move which the government could hardly ignore. Latest and most significant news declares that a mutiny has occurred in at least one of the native regiments. EFFICIENCY and conservatism have marked the first month of the Bruening Cabinet in Germany. The ministerial declaration, read to the Reichstag on April 1, was a clear intimation that unless the wrangling and dila- toriness that had characterized the regime of Chancellor Mueller were promptly replaced by attention to government business, the Reichstag would be dissolved and a new elec- tion ordered. The accomplishments since then have been remarkable. Only about two weeks were needed to force through the Reichstag the Government bills imposing new taxes and laying new import duties on food — a record speed in German parliamentary history. Incidentally, Chancellor Bruening has abandoned the secrecy which the Mueller Cabi- net affected, and has carried issues of policy directly before the Reichstag and fought them out on the floor in open debate. It is significant that the Hugenberg Nationalists have felt compelled to excuse and defend the thirty-one mem- bers who supported the Government on the food duties. The swing toward the Right, on the other hand, is evident not only in the decision of the Government to go ahead with ! a second cruiser of the Ersatz Preussen type, but also in the i virtual dropping of the quarrel with Thuringia over Fascist control of the Thuringian state police. The Left parties, ; of course, are unhappy, but the Socialist opposition has been I a good deal discounted by the apparent disposition of the j Nationalists to give the new Government a chance. A TRANSCONTINENTAL railroad 1,700 miles long, built from Siberia to Turkestan in four years and i finished three months ahead of time — this is the latest feat of the Bolsheviks. It ought to give pause to those who por- tray the Soviet leaders as mere wild visionaries, for it dra- matically illustrates the creative powers of the men in charge of the Soviet government, their grim determination to drive through with their tasks, and the speed with which they are modernizing Russia. Had such a railroad been undertaken by the Czar it would certainly have been financed by French money, would have taken a dozen years to finish, and would have reeked of graft and corruption. More interesting still is the fact that this railroad has been put into opera- tion ahead of time by "Bill" Shatov, a former Chicago hobo, I. W. W., and Communist, who worked at a dozen different trades in this country and saw the inside of numer- ous American prisons. Yet he has successfully commanded an army of 500,000 laborers and 200,000 camels. The road, whose entire equipment from rails to engines has been made in Russia, parallels the Chinese border for 700 miles, unites Siberia with Turkestan, and meets the trans-Siberian at Novosibirsk. As a whole it staggers the imagination. ANOTHER AMERICAN INVASION of Europe! This time it is the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under the leadership of Arturo Toscanini. We have no doubt that the orchestra will win golden laurels and will be acclaimed with that generous appreciation which for- gets national boundaries. Undoubtedly Europe will be amused that there are only two purely Anglo-Saxon names on the roster of the orchestra, but at least 58 per cent are American citizens and the balance have taken out their first papers. They represent well what private American gener- osity can do and is doing for the fine arts. Incidentally, it is interesting to note the remarkable experience that the orches- tra had at a reception given to the players by Mrs. Vincent Astor just before they sailed. She employed a jazz orchestra to entertain them and it is reliably reported that some of the orchestra heard this strange music for the first time and that Toscanini himself looked at the jazz performers with puz- zled curiosity and said: "What is it they are trying to do?" He was deeply impressed when told that one of these per- formers may earn as much in a night as some of his Phil- harmonic musicians do in a week. SCHOLARSHIP SUFFERS a severe loss in the death of Horace H. Furness, Jr., editor, as was his father before him, of the Variorum Shakespeare. Dr. Furness be- gan his career as an instructor in physics, shortly after his graduation from Harvard in 1888. Although his father, with his mother's constant help, was occupied year in and year out with the great dramatist, the son for more than ten years resisted that powerful influence. But in the end he succumbed. In 1901 he gave up his teaching and became coeditor of the series. The first play he edited was the revised edition of "Macbeth" ; subsequently he issued "Rich- ard III," "Julius Caesar," and "King John." Nineteen plays, including two volumes on "Hamlet," have now been issued in this careful, exhaustive, and definitive manner. And what a tribute to a poet and dramatist that for more than fifty years a family of scholars could be busy on half of his work, not forming opinions in a windy way about what he meant when he wrote a certain passage, but collating all the multifarious things that had been written about him since his plays first appeared in print.

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534 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3383 Law the Servant of Life THE strong opposition to the appointment of Mr. (now Chief Justice) Hughes and Judge Parker to the Supreme Court of the United States is highly encouraging. It indicates at once the profound respect that the people have for their highest court and the growing un- derstanding of what it is that this great tribunal actually does. Spokesmen for the property-owning groups that profit by recent decisions of the court have tried to instil in the popular mind a bogus reverence for that body, picturing its members as a race of legal demi-gods that move through an atmosphere of rarefied abstract justice to decisions that are therefore immune from criticism. The present revolt is a measure of the failure of such special pleading. What the American people respect, and respect profoundly, is not this fiction, but the reality of the court — a group of honest and wise old men learned in the law, applying their collective knowledge and wisdom to the settlement of the controversies that arise in a complicated modern industrial state, at the same time that they maintain the continuity of legal develop- ment. Whatever the weaknesses of our government ma- chine, our Supreme Court has served us magnificently. The current opposition to President Hoover's nominations is a tribute to that service. No opponent of the appointment of Mr. Hughes ques- tioned for a moment his eminence as a lawyer, his integrity as a man, or his experience as a public servant. The objec- tion to Judge Parker has not been based primarily on legal grounds, though there is frank and outspoken doubt that he possesses either the intellectual distinction or the legal learn- ing necessary to a great judge. Essentially his critics main- tain that on two great questions of social policy, the Negro question and the labor question, he has taken a stupid and reactionary position, and that he cannot be trusted, therefore, to perform intelligently the exacting duties of a justice of the Supreme Court. Similarly, Mr. Hughes was opposed for his narrowly legalistic defense, during all his recent years, of the giant property interests that rule us today and threaten to ruin us tomorrow. The opposition is thus, to a certain ex- tent, a protest against an undue conservatism on the part of the court, and we trust that President Hoover will heed the warning against a further packing of that tribunal with hard- shell economic and social conservatives. But the real question goes much deeper than that. Since Woodrow Wilson left the White House there have been seven nominations to the Supreme Bench, including Judge Parker. Of these. Justice Stone, no radical in economic theory, is yet a profound student of social life, who may be trusted to weigh wisely and comprehendingly the varied economic, political, and legal considerations that actually enter into the determination of the important questions faced by the court, and to go skilfully through the necessary legal motions of making the decisions and rendering the ac- companying opinions. He is of the stuff of which great Supreme Court justices are made. Of the other six selec- tions of the Harding-Coolidjje-Hoover era it is scarcely too much to say that not one of them has displayed any real understanding of what he is actually doing. We do not say this because we disagree so commonly with the economic and social theories and prejudices of these judges. Those theories and prejudices in themselves are relatively unimportant; what is enormously important is that they be not uncon- sciously and in good faith written into the law, for the politi- cal consequences of such action may be grave in the extreme. The Supreme Court in fact, as opposed to theory, is constantly deciding economic and political questions of the highest moment and is deciding them, to put the thing flatly and extremely, just as other men decide them, on the basis of the best judgment it can form of all the probable conse- quences involved. It uses so-called legal principles as tools in helping it decide these questions, but the principles do not automatically decide the questions, as some uninformed per- sons would have us believe. May a State restrict hours in mines to eight per day ? The court thinks such a restriction good and justifies it on the ground of the State's police power. May a State restrict hours in bakeshops to ten per day? The court thinks such a restriction bad, and invali- dates it on the ground that it interferes with freedom of contract. There is absolutely nothing in the legal principles of police power and freedom of contract that required the cases to be decided as they were. The decisions might equally well have been the opposite, and then the court would simply have reversed its choice of principles in support of its decisions. Take the long list of tax cases, trust cases, railroad and utility valuation and rate cases, labor cases, cases on social protective legislation, cases on the civil rights of Negroes, aliens, Communists, pacifists, what you will. In each case the court is deciding a controversy in such a way as to bring, if possible, a reasonable equilibrium of clash- ing forces, and thus to keep peace and order. As Justice Holmes has repeatedly pointed out, such matters are not to be settled by any debate over abstract legal principles; for they are questions of public policy, on which the court finds guidance, indeed, in the acts of legislatures and other indica- tions of public opinion, but which are not in themselves legal questions. It is to questions like these that the Supreme Court gives the final answer, and its supreme task is to give an answer that fundamentally represents the will of the people, the actual distribution of power in the state. In performing this function the Supreme Court must also insure the continuity and development of the law, and the great judge is he who does his appointed task in full understanding of all his responsibilities and powers. He must possess not only sound legal learning, but also intelli- gence, understanding, broad sympathy with all classes of men, social awareness. It is the possession of these qualities, not the holding of radical theories, that makes of Justice Holmes the great judge he is; in fact he does not hold radical theories. We do not ask for radical judges; we do not need them. We do ask for understanding judges; we need them sorely for the salvation of the court itself and the con tinued performance of its all-important function in our con stitutional scheme. May Mr. Hoover in his further appoint ments seek out judges who understand that law is the serv- ant of life; that the court is the servant of all the people

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May 7, 1930] The Nation 535 Political Discount Rates MR. PAUL M. WARBURG is one of our leading bankers; he is one of the fathers of the Federal Reserve Act, and he served for four years as a member of the Federal Reserve Board. For these reasons alone the recommendations in his new work on the Federal Reserve system* would deserve serious consideration. The most important of these recommendations is that the Secre- tary of the Treasury should cease to be a member ex officio of the Federal Reserve Board, much less its chairman. With great moderation of statement Mr. Warburg offers the a priori reasons which make such a change desirable. Domi- nant political parties, he points out, have always been known to pray and work for "good times" and "prosperity" during the period in which they are in power. The Federal Reserve system, on the other hand, must be willing to check a wave of unhealthy overspeculation threatening to disturb the sta- bility of prices and credit and bound ultimately to inflict severe losses upon the country. The success or failure of the system lies in a timely grasp and in a fearless handling of such dangerous conditions. Yet it is impossible to hope that a party administration would be found willing to under- take the painful and ungrateful task of temporarily checking "prosperity" — even though it were only a sham prosperity — for the purpose of preventing a grave disaster threatening to occur in the future. The reserve board, therefore, should above all be politically independent. Yet the fact that the Secretary of the Treasury is chair- man of the reserve board gives him, in addition to the prestige to which his office entitles him, a dominant position in dis- cussions of the board's affairs, and as the prestige and im- portance of his office increase, that of the governor loses in importance, not only in the estimation of the public, but also in that of his colleagues and the officers and directors of the reserve banks. Further, the President's power to re- appoint or dismiss members of the board, and to make or unmake its governors and vice-governors, is one in the exer- cise of which he is, naturally, largely guided by his Secre- tary of the Treasury, and this makes it doubly difficult for board members to maintain their independence in the face of the Administration's wishes. The influence of the Secre- tary of the Treasury is still further enhanced by the ex officio membership of the Comptroller of the Currency, who administers his own department as an appointee of the Treas- ury and under its control. As a result political leaders have come to consider the reserve system as, in Mr. Warburg's words, "an instru- mentality of the government" : From the beginning, achievements of the reserve system in operation have been hailed as accomplishments of the party in power, or of a secretary of the treasury. Some administrations have even gone so far as to claim credit for the lowering of discount rates, and secretaries of the treas- ury have spoken as if the policy of the board were a con- cern of the President's Cabinet. Mr. Warburg points out that as one of the consequences if this condition it has become difficult to secure men of the * "The Federal Reserve System." By Paul M. Warburg. Company. 2 vols. $12. The Macmillan highest type to serve on the board. Among the changes he suggests are that the Undersecretary of the Treasury, instead of the Secretary, serve as ex officio member of the board ; that the Comptroller of the Currency be either removed en- tirely from the board or that his office, in so far as it deals with the affairs of the member banks, be put under the con- trol of the reserve board ; and that the board itself appoint its governor and vice-governor, preferably by a system of rotation which would allow every appointive member to serve during the last two years of his term. Another sug- gestion is that the reserve banks be given the power to dele- gate four men to the reserve board, each of these to be elected by the combined directorates of a group of three reserve banks. As if to point the need for these or similar changes comes the Federal Reserve Board's latest annual report. It makes official admission of what had already been commonly known — that in the early part of 1929 the board "did not approve the discount-rate advances voted by some of the Federal Reserve banks." Put bluntly, this means that the board, dominated by political timidity, refused to allow the best banking opinion of several districts to apply the one remedy that could possibly check one of the most flagrant orgies of stock speculation in our history. Conservative banking opinion recognizes that again and again rediscount rates have been kept artificially low, to encourage, or at least not to discourage, a rising stock market. It is time that the Federal Reserve Board was thought of as something more than a convenient instrument to help win the fall elections. Labor in Travail HAVING himself cut loose from the Independent Labor Party a short time ago, Ramsay Mac- Donald now finds the party trying to cut loose from him. At the Birmingham congress of the party, on April 22, the "rebels," as they are called, drew their gar- ments about them and announced that they could have noth- ing to do with the financial policy of the Government. There was nothing surprising in this, for the revolt had been for some time foreshadowed. The unemployment bill and other Government measures have repeatedly been opposed by In- dependent members of the House of Commons, and on April 15, four days before the Birmingham congress met, the leader of the party, James Maxton, arraigned the Snow- den budget as something which would have been quite re- spectable if the Tories or Liberals had produced it, but which as a Labor Party document was a "flat betrayal" of Socialist principles. Whether this open defection involves any immediate danger to the MacDonald Government is not clear. Nearly 200 of the 289 Labor members of the House are claimed by the Independents, but only 37 candidacies were directly supported financially by the party in the last election, and the Maxton group in the House numbers only 30. As the Lloyd George Liberals are preparing to support the Gov- ernment on the budget, the loss of thirty Independent votes should be more than made good from the fifty-nine Liberals in the House even though some of the Liberals remain in opposition. Moreover, the Maxton following h not entirely — -/

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536 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3383 dependable, as appeared when only eight of the number voted against the recent appropriations for the army and navy notwithstanding the instructions of the party. Nevertheless, the congress sharpened a line of cleavage which Mr. MacDonald cannot safely ignore. The temper of the congress was aggressively radical — more radical, in fact, than that of Mr. Maxton, who is a good deal of a fire- eater. The Government was attacked for not living up to the slogan "Socialism in Our Time," and for aiding capital- ism by inviting bankers and corporations to assist in re- organizing industry. Mr. Maxton and his supporters want socialism here and now, not in some indefinite future, and they believe that it can be had without bloodshed. Insurance and pension benefits four times greater than are now avail- able, heavier taxes on large incomes and confiscatory death duties on certain large estates, and government operation of the Bank of England are among their radical proposals. Such a program is hardly likely to make much headway in the Commons or in the country, but it points to a funda- mental weakness in Mr. MacDonald's position. Mr. Mac- Donald is very much more of a Socialist in theory than he has shown himself to be in practice. A Socialist England may still be his ultimate aim, but he is willing to wait a long time for it. The ease with which the Liberals have made a working peace with the Labor Government sug- gests that labor is not regarded as offering a serious menace to capitalism. If the Government should meet defeat on the budget it will not be, we may be sure, because the budget does not go far enough in extracting money from the rich or near rich, but because its burdens are greater than the Liberals, who must vote for it if it is adopted, will stand. Mr. MacDonald's position on the eve of the budget debate is one of mingled weakness and strength. He will profit a little from the dissensions in the Independent Labor Party, and from the inability of that party to go much farther in the direction of radicalism without identifying itself, in public opinion, with communism and revolution. The fact that the naval conference did not actually go to pieces, that a British guaranty of French security has been avoided, and that the financial burden of naval armament for the next few years will not be any greater and may be somewhat less, is all to the good as far as the MacDonald Government is concerned. The recent commercial agree- ment with Russia will please some of the Labor Party sup- porters and some sections of the British public, and the negotiations with Egypt may turn out happily. None of these props, however, will bear much strain. The uprising in India is a heavy and sorrowful load for the Government to carry, especially with a pacifist Prime Minister who knows that India can be kept down only by using force. The naval treaty at its best offers only poor pickings for an optimist, and the so-called safeguarding provision opens the way to sending to the scrap-heap at any moment the whole arrangement of parity, reduction, limitation, and the like if Italy or France raises the cry that its security is threatened and starts building. One would indeed be venturesome who asserted that the recent unemployment legislation will banish the unemployment nightmare or that the coal bill carries an assured solution of the problems of mine workers or mine owners. It is an uneasy situation, and one that will test Mr. MacDonald's leadership more severely than it has been tested hitherto. Poetry and Laurel WE do not envy the man or men whose duty it will shortly be to name the successor of Robert Bridges as poet laureate of England. If the office is taken at all seriously, as perhaps it should not be, the difficulty of filling it should be taken seriously, too. For the incumbent needs to be something else besides a good poet; he needs to be an equivalent of what in the old days before Elizabeth was called a court poet — a poet attached to the royal house- hold and suitable in every way to its temper. Now that the English court is less important than it used to be, he should be at least a poet understandable by the people upon whose sentiments the sun never sets. He should be, shall we say, an empire poet — or at any rate some very good sort of Englishman whose behavior in his books, not to speak of his life, will cause no discomfort in the high places of the national heart. But good poets are likely not to be conforming men, though of course they may be. Poetry and laurel do not al- ways mix, especially when by some mischance a branch has been broken from that kind of laurel whose leaves give off a bitter odor when bruised, and exude a deadly poison. One horn of the dilemma is a brilliant poet whose ideas would be offensive to respectable persons; the other horn is a re- spectable poet whose work would be called contemptible by the knowing few. How to choose, or rather how to avoid the necessity of such a choice? Wordsworth and Tennyson were both good poets and blameless men at the time of their appointment. Is England so lucky now? At least there are plausible candidates. The suggestion will probably not be made, as it was made after the deaths of Thomas Warton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, to abolish the office as a compliment to the laureate late deceased. Robert Bridges was not that great; and besides there are worthy men in sight. Ruling out T. S. Eliot, who is in all likelihood the best poet living in England today but who is an American, and passing over Robert Graves, who is an especially gifted Englishman but who would certainly prove embarrassing through his indifference to decorum, there is first of all Mr. Kipling. There may be reasonable doubts of his importance to poetry, yet he has an importance of a kind, and he has the advantage of being universally known. There is the practical advantage also of his being patriotic — this in spite of certain indiscretions which are said to have prevented him from appointment after Alfred Austin's death, and which he may have managed to live down. Certainly he would be preferable to Sir Henry New- bolt, another patriotic poet who has been suggested. There is A. E. Housman, of course, who perfectly fills the narrow niche of elegy. There is Alfred Noyes, who in his youth was promising and who of late years has been talking like a laureate in his lectures and his essays. And there is John Masefield. It would not surprise us to see Mr. Masefield crowned, for although he has passed his prime he has passed it with honor, and his sentiments are unex- ceptionable. But we shall make no predictions. We shall only rest in the assurance that the laureateship need not sink this time to the level to which it sank with Nahum Tate, William Whitehead, H. J. Pye, and Alfred Austin.

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May 7, 1930] The Nation 537 It Seems to Heywood Broun A LABOR controversy of great interest is simmering at the moment and yet you will find it but meagerly reported in the columns of the newspapers. Mention is slight because this dispute happens to concern the pub- lishers and the printers. Journalism has not yet quite grown up to the realization of the fact that even things which happen within the shop deserve to be classified as news and treated as such. The controversy has elements not usual in the clashes between capital and labor. For instance, this time it is the employers who are offering an advance in wages while the workers, refusing that, are endeavoring to gain something a little different. The fight centers around the demand for the five-day week. This would include the pro- vision for the six-day wage scale to be paid for the shorter period, so in a sense it does represent a request for higher pay. It is quite true that the new arrangement would add something like 15 per cent to the costs which the publishers would have to shoulder. There need be no question that the typographical union is in earnest. Among the oldest of the organized trades, it has become within the last twenty years one of the most conservative. Indeed, it would not be unjust to say that the printers have been a trifle timid. At one time this body num- bered in its ranks the intellectuals of the labor movement and it contributed many of the aggressive leaders of trade unionism. Of late years it has lost prestige. Somehow or other the practice of setting up fine, whacking stand-pat edi- torials had a subtle effect upon the compositors themselves. The ink of let-well-enough-alone seeped into the pores and finger tips of employees. But things are no longer well enough in the printing trades. I am not in a position to predict whether the mem- bers of the union will vote for a strike if and when they receive permission from their international officials to take such action. I think that such a contingency is likely. In that event New York, and possibly Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia, will be reduced to the necessity of getting along with small-sized leaflets representing the enforced coopera- tive effort of all the publishers in each city. If the issue is not drawn now it must be soon, because the printers are increasingly being forced into a position where they must fight for existence. What was one of the strongest unions in the country now finds a vast number of its members out of work. They are the victims of efficiency. Did you ever stop to think what became of the printers as a result of the merger movement among American newspapers? Nor is the end of this policy of large-scale production in sight. When two papers merge, the combined mechanical staff can be cut almost 50 per cent. In every shop today hundreds of subs are hanging about eager to pick up part- time employment. Moreover, one or two labor-saving de- vices are close to practicability which would still further cut down the jobs open to typographers. Accordingly, the union must face the necessity of creating more jobs. Already it has tried to do that by urging its members to avail them- selves freely of the privilege of taking a night off in order to make work for the men upon the fringe. But such volun- tary effort cannot take up the slack. It is well to remember that if the five-day week is put into effect it will not merely be a proposition of the printer's working on the sixth day and collecting overtime. Even now the practice of working seven days for the sake of the extra stipend is rigorously for- bidden and you can depend upon it that the five-day week will mean just that. The extra day will mean extra em- ployment for men now working with great irregularity. Some of the publishers are willing to admit that condi- tions justify the logic of the union. Many are willing to concede the possible utility of the five-day week, but the argu- ment of the employers runs: This still remains an economic experiment. Why should it be made at our expense? The public has been informed through the medium of the official statement of the publishers that arbitration was offered and refused by the union. This is a somewhat misleading state- ment. Certain rights already won and certain organic laws of the typographers would come into the scope of such arbi- tration and the union is loath to expose privileges already gained to new decision. Nor is there any acute willingness to arbitrate the five-day week itself, which is the crux of the argument. It is well to remember that this demand is by no means brand-new. As far back as 1922 the demand was first introduced and again, somewhat more emphatically, in 1925. Nor is the five-day week wholly within the experimental stage. The needle trades and the building industry have already ceded the principle and Henry Ford, whose shops are not organized, has also recognized its utility. In the long run I feel certain that the wide introduction of the five-day week would be a very vital tonic for the restoration of national prosperity. Newspapers are peculiarly sensitive to business conditions in general, and though the original cost of the new arrangement might be high the final and very speedy result would be increased profits for the count- ing-rooms. Sooner or later, and much better sooner, industrial lead- ers must recognize the fact that our present unemployment situation is not going to get better over night. The original belief that the whole thing might be cleared up by a few cheerful words from Washington is no longer tenable. We have begun to deal with technological unemployment. Mer- gers and new inventions have done their work. They are useful only if the labor saved goes directly into a shortening of working time all along the line. As a matter of fact, news- paper publishers are not without opportunity to compromise. I have reason to believe that the printing trades might be induced to accept a three-year delay in the granting of the five-day week if only the promise is definitely made that it shall become effective at the end of that time. Also the union would probably accept some slight reduction in the wage scale if the five-day week were granted. Publishers should not think of themselves as the "goats" in the matter. It would be better to accept the opportunity to assume lead- ership and adopt a new standard of working time which is actually vital to the welfare of the country. Heywood Broun

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538 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3383 Washington Grinds On By PAUL Y. Washington, April 26 DAY and night a dread specter haunts the White House, deepening the fears and forebodings which in recent months have transformed a naturally sunny and scientific nature into one pervaded by gloom and disillu- sionment. The specter is the memory of what happened to the Taft Administration. If there was a rift in the clouds when the Sage of Northampton announced himself as being definitely out of the picture, it was but momentary, because the present disposition in Presidential circles is to trust nobody, and especially to trust no professional politician — such as Calvin certainly will be until the inevitable day when God calls him home. Hoover realizes definitely, and at last, that he is "in bad" with the country. He has lost, to a very large extent, the confidence of the business community to which he always made a special appeal for support, and, what is more alarming, he has lost the confidence of local Republican leaders throughout the country. Among the lat- ter the impression is spreading that the President is a poor judge of men, that he is unlearned in the elemental rules of the political game, and that he has no talent for avoiding embarrassing situations and no skill in disentangling himself from them. Among the former there is a growing suspicion that his reputation as an economist is largely founded on bluff and ballyhoo. I should not marvel if there were some truth in these conclusions, and I shall not be surprised if they come to be more widely held. ***** THE Muscle Shoals lobby, defeated in the Senate and discredited before the public, still has powerful friends in the House of Representatives, where men are sheep and representative government is a humorous phrase. There a neat conspiracy is in progress to smother the Norris resolu- tion, recently adopted by the Senate, providing for public operation of that great public property. The well-packed Committee on Military Affairs has laid aside the Norris measure and designated a subcommittee to draft a substitute plan for leasing the plant to private interests. Since every- one knows there is not the faintest prospect of getting such a bill through the Senate, the purpose obviously is to delay a settlement until public indignation subsides sufficiently to permit the power and chemical interests to take another crack at the proposition. It will be interesting to observe the course taken by the Rules Committee, of which the Hon- orable Bertrand H. Snell, himself a power magnate, is chairman, when the question of permitting a vote comes before it. The one man who can upset this scheme of ob- struction and delay is President Hoover. Failure to upset it will be adequate proof that he concurs in its object. ***** THE immensely diverting crusade of Senator Joseph R. Grundy to rescue his beloved Pennsylvania from boss rule and corruption soon will have issue in the form of a Senate investigation of campaign methods and expenditures in the Republican Senatorial primary there. To outsiders it may be explained that boss rule and corruption are repre- ANDERSON sented, in the Grundy dramatization, by the Vare Gang and Secretary of Labor Davis, while purity and democracy are personified by "Holy Joe" himself and Secretary of the Treasury Mellon. Since the ironic gods have elected to have the investigating committee headed by Sena- tor Nye, a "wild jackass" from the extremely "backward State" of North Dakota, the members will have no choice but to don gas-masks and dig in. Horrifying charges of venality and intimidation already have been exchanged be- tween the hosts of "Holy Joe" and the hordes of "Puddler Jim"; investigators are ready to proceed to the scene; and presently the less important sections of the country will have an object lesson in political morals as held and practiced in enlightened Pennsylvania. Incidentally, the committee pos- sesses information of certain curious activities in Nebraska. Somebody out there has taken the unusual trouble of con- ducting a State-wide straw vote to determine who would make the strongest campaign against Senator Norris in the Republican primary. As readers of the Literary Digest know, such polls are expensive, and it is widely reported that $60,000 was made available to defray the cost of that in Nebraska. The Senate committee will want to know who paid for it. My guess is that the money came originally out of the pockets of consumers of electric power, and that it was relayed through the treasuries of interests desiring to elimi- nate the most effective opponent of their far-flung forays on the public water-power domain. ***** MISFORTUNE continues to pursue all the efforts of the Department of Justice to prosecute the radio trust. An "investigation" which had extended over un- counted years was nearing completion several months ago, when the department lawyers in charge of it sud- denly resigned in a body. Under considerable prompting from the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce a new- start was made, and the department was on the verge of filing suits, so it is said, when the trust unexpectedly an- nounced an entirely new set-up, involving an exchange of stock and patents among the Radio Corporation and its parent companies, General Electric and Westinghouse, and now the poor department doesn't know where it stands. Of course, it might appear to a mere layman that the same per- sons and corporations are involved in the new arrangement as in the old. The fine Italian hand of Owen D. Young and the bolder strokes of Dave Sarnoff are quite as discerni- ble as when the notorious "tube clause" was being rammed down the throats of the struggling independents. The per- formers have simply begun the next act without taking the pains to change their false whiskers. But to the great legal minds intrusted with enforcing the federal statutes against monopoly a wholly new situation has been presented — and one that calls for further delav. T TOWEVER. candor, coupled with a distinct sense o , shame, compels me to report that the most cowardly and pusillanimous exhibition which Washington has wit

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May 7, 1930] The Nation 539 nessed lately was staged, not by an official body, but by an organization containing the leading members of a profession to which I have the sometimes doubtful honor of belonging. The American Society of Newspaper Editors, assembled in annual convention here, has just rejected, for the fourth or fifth time, a proposed amendment to its constitution enabling it to censure, suspend, or expel members for disgraceful con- duct or gross violation of ethics. The members of this society are daily engaged in scrutinizing and judging the conduct of persons in every other occupation. They neither hesitate to denounce breaches of ethics by members of other professions nor to demand the infliction of penalties. Yet nine years after adopting a high-sounding code of their own they refuse to adopt the only measure by which that code could be en- forced. "Disgraceful" was the adjective used by one mem- ber to characterize this refusal, and disgraceful it was, with- out a doubt. The unsuccessful fight for adoption of the amendment was led by Willis J. Abbot of the Christian Sci- ence Monitor, and the opposition was championed by the learned Caspar S. Yost of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, long celebrated in his home town as the foremost living sponsor of literary compositions received through the medium of the ouija board. I have read the transcript of the debate which preceded rejection of the amendment, giving particu- lar attention to the speeches in opposition, and I recall no occasion when so many flabby, transparent, shoddy, and spe- cious arguments were uttered in an equal space of time. There were two in chief. The first, and most nonsensical, was that the power to punish unethical conduct on the part of members was equivalent to the power of "censorship" over their newspapers. The second was that such disciplinary action might disrupt the society — although it is practiced by every country club in the United States. It is but fair to say that the proposal was defeated by a minority vote, two-thirds being necessary for adoption. Nevertheless, the humiliating fact remains that among fifty-two of the foremost newspaper editors of the country there were twenty-three who voted against it. Tom Wallace of the Louisville Times prover- bially likened their attitude toward offending members to that of the shiftless farmer toward wild onions: "The only way to get rid of them is to die and leave them." And these are the gentlemen who cannot restrain their professional indignation over the quality of the ethics displayed by Senate investigating committees ! The Press Today III. The United Press By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD IN the history of the Associated Press the year 1929 will surely rank with 1914 as one of the darkest of all. For it was during this period that a dreadful blow descended. Incredible as it seems, the New York Herald Tribune and the Chicago Daily News subscribed to the news service of the United Press. If Mr. Hoover were to hoist the red flag on the White House some morning and Secretary Mellon were to denounce the right to hold private property, the Associated Press would surely not be more startled. The Herald Tribune blazoned forth its treachery in full-page ad- vertisements. And the Chicago heresy must have been par- ticularly distressing, for the Daily News was the organ of the late Victor F. Lawson, one of the men who took the lead in founding the Associated Press, of which he was for years the most powerful director. What is this United Press that is fluttering the dove- cotes of the Associated Press in such an agonizing way? It is a purely mercantile undertaking designed to make money, and it has been doing just that for the past twenty years. By its aggressiveness and enterprise it has built up a clien- tele of 1,250 papers — as large as that of the Associated Press — with this difference, that only 900 are in the United States while 350 are outside our boundaries. The United Press was founded originally to supply news only to evening papers. Ten years ago it enlarged its service to include morning papers, though the bulk of its clients are still evening newspapers. Within the past twelve months it has added no less than sixty-nine dailies to its list, some of them extremely important, such as the Philadelphia Record, the Houston * This is the third in a series of articles on the American press. The fourth, on the chain daily, will appear in our issue of May 21. — Editor The Nation. Post-Dispatch, the Louisville Times, the Wheeling News, the Mobile Press, and the Springfield (Mo.) Press. With two such dailies as the New York Herald Tribune and the Chicago Daily News surrendering to the charms of its ser- vice, the United Press may well look forward to capturing many other Associated Press strongholds. Indeed, one may even ask whether the competition of the Associated Press and the United Press will not eventually be within the pages of all leading dailies, instead of, as at first, between two groups of dailies each taking one service only. The United Press lacks every one of the cooperative features which distinguish its great rival, the A. P. It re- ports news for purposes of sale only. Its members have no more control over it than the subscribers to a circulating library have over its management. In either case, the sub- scribers can give up the service if it is not up to the standard desired ; they have no other direct way of modifying its poli- cies. Whether this is or is not an effective veto every jour- nalist will judge for himself. The members of the United Press are never even called into its councils. Whereas the Associated Press is what its directors and members wish it to be the United Press is today what Robert Paine Scripps, Karl Bickel, Roy Howard, and their immediate associates say it shall be. Mr. Scripps is the controlling owner. In practice the management rests with Mr. Bickel, James H. Furay, Hugh Baillie, Robert J. Bender, James I. Miller, and the other United Press executives, all of them part owners. To them belongs the credit for its good fea- tures and to them the blame for its weaknesses. They say for what and how the $6,000,000 disbursed each year for the gathering and distribution of news shall be expended.

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540 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3383 They do not pretend that theirs is a public-spirited enter- prise; on the contrary, they constantly declare that it is just another commercial, profit-seeking institution. They rarely speak of themselves as journalists, but usually as busi- ness men. With equal frankness they declare that the United Press has no policies of any kind and no desires save "to present to its clients throughout the world a world-wide ser- vice of news, objective and impartial, without prejudice of any kind, national, sectional, economic, social, or religious." Theoretically, then, the organization of the Associated Press is, as I have already pointed out, far superior to that of the privately owned United Press. Yet the latter happens to be the more liberal agency for gathering news, happens to have much more sympathy for the under-dog, happens to be far less sensitive to the great capitalistic press influences which gather around the directors' table of the Associated Press. This is purely accidental, for it was only by chance that the United Press was founded by the late E. W. Scripps, who was opposed to a monopoly in news and faced American problems from the good, old-fashioned liberal point of view. Nor is there any guaranty in the form of its organization that twenty-five or fifty years from now, when the present managers and owners have passed from the scene, the United Press will not be an entirely different affair run with a totally different spirit. For the steady progress of the United Press there are several explanations. In the first place, no one can question the unusual ability of Roy Howard and Karl Bickel. They have been fortunate in having the complete confidence and the unlimited financial backing of the Scripps family with their liberal point of view, which is also the actuating spirit of the twenty-five Scripps-Howard newspapers. They were untrammeled by conventions. The very fact that they were the dictators of the organization made it possible for them to go ahead rapidly without first having to consult the heads of a number of their member dailies. They could snap their fingers at any dissenter. In order to establish their service they had to avail themselves of every new device and to think up new ways of getting their news cheaply and quickly. Thus, they were first to utilize the facilities of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company for telegraphic news transmission. Mr. Bickel boasts that it was the United Press which first developed the use of the telephone for the transmission of a "pony" (i.e., small) news report; this made it possible to provide a larger service than by telegraph and for less money. It was the United Press which first extensively used the printer-telegraph machine, operating extensive circuits without any operator attendant on a one-way basis — some- thing that had been said to be impossible. It was quick to welcome the radio, in which it saw not a competitor, but a valuable ally, and it lays the unction to its soul that its use of a national hook-up on the occasion of the general election in 1924 brought about the final acceptance by its rivals of the radio as a necessary adjunct of any news service. Mr. Bickel himself attributes the remarkable expansion of its world service to the fact that it has not belonged to the so- called "official-agency" group, and that it has always been free from nationalistic bias. This may have been accidental ; that is, if the Associated Press had not already been linked up with Reuter, Havas, and the other official or semi-official foreign agencies, the United Press might have been happy to make use of their services. But undoubtedly it was a blessing both for the United Press and for the general public that it had to be independent. There are only a couple of excep- tions to this rule. It has a connection with the Nippon Dempo Tsushin Sha, the largest agency in Japan, and a slight one with the Australian Press Association. It covers Japan, however, with its own separate correspondents as well. There is a widely held belief that in South and Cen- tral America the United Press has done much to improve our relations with our southern neighbors and has gone out of its way to do so. At home the United Press collects its news not from member newspapers, as does the Associated Press, but by means of correspondents appointed in various localities. Its officers, of course, believe that this is a better system; that it does not place them at the mercy of the news standards and facilities of their members. On the other hand, it places upon the United Press a very heavy responsibility in picking its representatives. Most of them are paid only for what they send in. In the South, for example, their representatives are just as much subject to local prejudices as are the representa- tives of the Associated Press. The United Press, however, can change its correspondents as rapidly as it pleases, and its officers are bound to realize that the quality and reliability of their service depend upon the care taken in the selection of their local representatives. In Haiti, by the way, the United Press also chose an American officer as its corre- spondent but mitigated the offense by using a Haitian too. It would be ridiculous, of course, to assert that the United Press service has been all that it ought to be. It has suffered from growing pains, from the errors made in the building up of a new organization, and there have been big gaps in the territory it has tried to cover. One who was for years a trusted United Press representative abroad is of the opinion that its sense of values has not always been of the best, for the reason that it is an attacking organization, whereas the Associated Press has been intrenched in its posi- tion. He adds this in explanation: The A. P. can take aim before firing, but the U. P. must be quick on the trigger and must sometimes fire from the hip. I think this explains why the U. P. occasionally fires a whole broadside at a fleeting target and lays down a barrage on subjects not worth a pot shot. It is apt to be more interested in providing entertainment than instruc- tion, in surprising rather than in being profound. I sus- pect that sometimes it chooses not to verify a good story too exactly, lest it [the story] should blow up and disappear. It is interesting to note his belief that since it is the more commercially minded the U. P. feels more responsibility to- ward its client newspapers than toward the ultimate public. He adds that if he were a publisher he would prefer the U. P. service, but if he were a careful and thoughtful reader of newspapers he would prefer the Associated Press because its news, though sometimes slower, would probably be more thoughtfully prepared. These, he declares, are not un- friendly observations: "I got a great kick out of working for the U. P. I am enthusiastic about it, its people, and its purposes, and I think it is a most necessary and precious stimulant to the A. P." It seems as if the case could hardly be stated better. I find, however, other criticisms from worth-while

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May 7, 1930] The Nation 541 sources. One is that the United Press does not pay its cor- respondents enough.* This charge is emphatically denied by the United Press. The belief is probably due to the policy of the whole Scripps group of organizations of paying low salaries to those at the bottom and rewarding the execu- tives and key men with stock as well as large salaries, which makes them interested in keeping expenses down and profits up. Otherwise they might be more interested in building for the future, for the day when they will be established beyond injury by competition and can set themselves pri- marily to making their news service as authoritative as that of their chief rival. It is an interesting fact that while the A. P. has been letting down its standards the U. P. is being compelled by the logic of events to move in the opposite direction. Evidence of the way the United Press has been drifting in the direction of the Associated Press is the fact that its executives have been for two years working on the question of broadening its contractual relations with its clien- tele to give "due recognition of the values that a client con- fers on the United Press locally as a result of long-time rela- tionship." This means that although founded for the ex- press purpose of preventing a monopoly in news, and as a protest against the Associated Press policy of permitting a member newspaper to prevent others in its immediate terri- tory, under given conditions, from obtaining the Associated Press service, the United Press is now trying to find some way of protecting a client without at the same time violat- ing its policy of "non-exclusivity" — to use its own awkward word. In Washington the United Pipss at times seems weak. Sometimes inexperienced men are found in foreign positions of great importance — good men who have to learn their jobs at the cost of the service. Sometimes, as it would be easy to prove, these men "force" their stories be- cause of their desire to get in the human-interest note. It certainly seems hardly worth while to thrill the world with the following dispatch here printed entire : Predicts War in Far East BERLIN. April 12 (UP).— A war in the Far East, a new European political fierure whose name contains the letter Z, and an exciting turmoil of European politics have been pre- dicted by Madame Sylvia. In its Washington service, also, there is too much hitting of the high spots, just as there is too much banality throughout its news reporting, though that is more excusable in a new service than in the Associated Press, which under Melville E. Stone denounced that sort of thing and at all times has boasted of its high standards, its superior virtues, and its shining rectitude. Like the Associated Press the United Press has stooped to conquer. It was the pioneer in adding to its service such features as sports, women's-page matter, car- toons, comic strips, and "human-interest" stories. It gave, in fact, the poor example which the Associated Press followed in this field. It, too, has found it necessary to cater to that recent development in accordance with which the daily news- paper is getting away more and more from the original con- ception that it was solely a purveyor of news and opinion •Edna Ferber after being, as she felt, poorly paid by the U. P. receiv^d a bunch of flowers from one of its executives. At once she wrote that he was living up to what she felt was the U. P. motto: Pay it with flowers. and is entering the amusement field in competition with the movie and the radio. Cross-word puzzles, children's corners, bedtime stories, advice to the lovelorn, news pictures, and sport pictures — these are all part of the effort to meet the new and threatening competition from outside the business and the never-halting demand for larger and larger circulation. It was the ill fate of the United Press to perpetrate the greatest hoax in modern press reporting — the fake armistice announcement of November 7, 1918. The world literally went mad with joy when the premature news was flashed that hostilities had ended. In a sense the false report served a useful purpose in that it made officials everywhere realize how deeply the people desired a cessation of bloodshed. Nat- urally the Associated Press made full use of this bad break of its rival. A careful examination of the evidence in the case plainly proves that the United Press, in the person of Roy Howard himself, was the victim of an error of the naval attache of our Embassy in Paris who telegraphed to Admiral Henry B. Wilson at Brest as follows: "Armistice signed this morning at eleven. All hostilities ceased at 2 p. m. today." When Roy Howard called upon the Ad- miral on November 7 the latter casually showed him the telegram. Not unnaturally Howard made immediate use of it. It seemed as if the biggest news scoop in history had fallen into his hands by accident, for he was then at Brest not to obtain news but to take ship to the United States. Had the Paris dispatch been a truthful one, Howard's fame as a journalist would be supreme. As it was, there came down upon his head and upon the United Press an avalanche of abuse and denunciation enough almost to wreck them both. It took a long while for the United Press to work out from under the shadow of this victimization. Since then Mr. Howard has gone on to the active head- ship of the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate, with Karl Bickel taking his place as head of the United Press. Both are still comparatively young men, respectively forty-seven and forty-eight years old. They have already made their mark upon the journalism of this country and of the world and they may continue to do so for years to come. As long as they are at the head of their respective organizations the United Press service will be the one to which reformers and all interested in liberal causes and better human relations will turn first in the belief that they will be received with sympathy and understanding. There are those who think that this liberal attitude is in part inspired by recognition of the fact that it is good business for the United Press to be liberal in contradistinction to the Associated Press. I prefer to believe that the main motive lies in their own convictions and their attitude toward the problems of mankind. What- ever their motives, the fact that the United Press under their leadership is what it is is of enormous importance to all who believe that the America of the future should be something different from the self-satisfied and socially and politically reactionary country in which we live today. [Mr. Louis Wiley of the New York Times has tele- phoned to me since the appearance of my second article on the Associated Press that Mr. Adolph S. Ochs has no recol- lection of the incident, related by me in that article, according to which Mr. Ochs had contemplated placing his editorial page in charge of a national committee, negotiations breaking

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542 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3383 down because of his unwillingness to give assurances that the committee might feel free to criticize even the President of the United States. I can only say that the information came to me from a source as distinguished and trustworthy as the words of Mr. Wiley and Mr. Ochs. Mr. Wiley also assures me that Mr. Ochs does not approve of the lowering of the standards of the Associated Press in printing banal and vulgar human-interest stories and comic strips, and has always voted against it. This is valuable testimony that in his estimation the service has gone down, and I am the more happy to have it because it is entirely consistent with Mr. Ochs's admirable policy in keeping the Times free from that sort of thing, especially from comic strips and cheap Sunday supplements. As I have said before in writing, there is noth- ing in Mr. Ochs's remarkable journalistic achievements more praiseworthy than this. — O. G. V.] France Wins at London By ROBERT DELL Paris, April 15 BRIAND returned from London last night, covered with flowers by the French semi-official press. The French have got what they wanted and prevented what they wished to prevent. As Paul-Boncour said in the Chamber some months ago, they accepted the invitation to the naval conference most unwillingly, because in the cir- cumstances they could not do otherwise, and the French delegates went to London with the firm intention of pre- venting, if possible, any final agreement for the reduction or limitation of naval armaments. The French official view, openly stated again and again by the Temps, was that the conference should merely lay down principles for the guid- ance of the preparatory disarmament commission at Geneva. As the Temps said again only three days ago, the French viewed with uneasiness the possibility that the question of naval disarmament might be settled separately from those of land and air disarmament. One reason was that there is more room for bargaining when armies and navies are being discussed together. The other, frankly avowed by Paul- Boncour, that strange militarist excrescence on the French Socialist Party, was that in London they would be alone, whereas at Geneva they have behind them what Paul- Boncour called their "retinue" of allies. The French have succeeded in their chief aim, thanks to the Italian demand for parity with France, which enabled the French delegation to refuse the smallest reduction in the French naval program. The French were just as much justified in refusing to consent to the Italian demand, which would mean Italian superiority in the Mediterranean, as were the Americans in refusing to grant Japan parity with the United States, and much more justified than was the British Labor Government in insisting on a two-power stand- ard for the British fleet in European waters. That insist- ence, which shows how completely MacDonald and Alex- ander are under the thumb of the Admiralty, implies the crazy hypothesis that there is a danger of a Franco-Italian alliance against England. Thus Tardieu and Briand come out of the conference with a perfectly free hand. France has not yielded a single ton of her naval program and need not slacken her naval building for a single week. Official France has had her way about submarines, and indeed on every point, and as a naval disarmament conference the conference is an utter failure, as official France wished it to be. The diplomatic victory of France, however, is due more to luck than to skill, for it is not the fault of France alone, nor even of France and Italy together, that the conference is a failure. It has been run on wrong lines from the very beginning. It has never been a naval disarmament conference, but a competition be- tween the Powers represented at it to maintain respectively their present naval strength relatively to the other Powers, at the smallest possible cost. It is plain now that both the American and the British governments were actuated solely by financial considerations. The French delegation went to London in fear and trembling, expecting to be met by a sweeping program of naval reduction. When they found that Hoover and MacDonald, having summoned a con- ference, had no concrete proposals of any kind to put before it, their surprise was equaled only by their joy. Jacques Kayser, the young secretary of the French Radical Party, is quite right: the real cause of the failure of the conference has been a lack of sincerity on the part of all the govern- ments represented. Logically, it would seem, the failure of the conference should have greatly strengthened the position of the Tardieu Cabinet, for the policy of the French delegation at London was even more Tardieu's policy than that of Briand, who has made himself the prisoner of the nationalists. His con- duct in London, which has won him the admiration even of "Pertinax," has justified what Leon Blum wrote in the Populaire when Briand joined the Tardieu Cabinet: "He cannot continue his policy without us. We can continue it without him." MacDonald's blunder in embarking on the abortive negotiations about "security" is another feather in the cap of Tardieu and Briand and the opponents of disarmament generally. As Leon Blum said the other day, the negotiations will be exploited in favor of the thesis that the present guaranties of security are insufficient to justify any reduction of armaments, and it will be said that the British government has implicitly admitted this. Here again Briand was taken by surprise. There can be no doubt that he went back to London with his demand for further guaranties of "security" — in other words, the revival of the Geneva Protocol — expecting that it would be at once re- fused and that the refusal would give him an excuse for declining any further discussion about the reduction of the French naval program. MacDonald's consent to negotiate about a formula defining the obligations of Great Britain under Article XVI of the League Covenant perhaps dis- concerted Briand for a moment, for neither he nor Tardieu intended to make any concessions in return for such a formula, but Italy came to the rescue by insisting on parity. Then the French delegation declared that France must have

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May 7, 1930] The Nation 543 240,000 tons more than Italy, and MacDonald withdrew his formula. Nevertheless, the Tardieu Cabinet is in as unstable a position as ever for reasons of internal politics. Now that the Young Plan is ratified by France and the naval con- ference is over, the days of the Cabinet are numbered. Tardieu has no majority in the Chamber without the sup- port of the Left Center and that support is dependent on his pursuing a policy more or less to the Left on questions of internal politics, by which he inevitably indisposes the bulk of his supporters, who belong to the Right and the Right Center. He has avoided a fall hitherto by abstaining from putting the question of confidence and accepting hos- tile votes even on matters of importance. Any day an acci- dent may happen. A ministerial crisis would not, however, change the situation for the better. The only alternative to the present government is a so-called Government of Concentration, that is, a coalition of the Radicals with all the groups of the Right and Left Center, excluding the Right on the one hand and the Socialists on the other. Such a government would have a small majority on paper, but its existence would be as precarious as that of any other gov- ernment with the present impossible Chamber. Moreover, it would compromise the Radicals, whose real interest it is to remain in opposition with the Socialists until the next general election, although they do not all recognize it. The only solution is a dissolution of the Chamber, for which the constitution provides with the consent of the Senate, but although many of the Radicals and Socialists are now in favor of it they do not yet carry their parties with them. Circumstances may, however, compel a resort to a dissolu- tion before 1932, when the general election will be held in the ordinary course. All the reports from the provinces suggest that a general election now would result in a vic- tory for the parties of the Left and the results of the recent by-elections point to the same conclusion, but there is an ancient prejudice against a dissolution, and the Radical and Socialist Parties as a whole cannot make up their minds to defy tradition and take the plunge. There can be no change for the better in French policy so long as the present Chamber lasts. The London con- ference has made still worse the prospects of any real prog- ress toward disarmament, bad as they were already. No conference at Geneva can have any better result as things are at present, and a window-dressing agreement like that of London will still further damage the reputation of the League of Nations, already badly compromised. It is a deplorable fact that faith in the League as a means of get- ting rid of war is steadily declining, especially among the young, but the high priests and apostles of the League do not seem to recognize it, still less to recognize their own responsibility for it. Perhaps it is hardly too much to say that nothing has done more harm to the League of Nations than the League of Nations unions with their dogma of Geneva's infallibility, their denunciation of all criticism of the League as due to ignorance or prejudice, and their fond- ness for the policy of evading problems by window-dressing solutions, which has been and is the curse of Geneva. Some of the energetic propagandists in the League secretariat have also much to answer for. Far better to admit frankly that one cannot solve a problem in existing conditions than to try to deceive the world with a fake solution. It is useless to go on with disarmament discussions in present conditions, and the meeting of the preparatory disarmament commission at Geneva ought to be adjourned sine die. Nothing can be done until there is a fundamental change in French policy, and such a change can be possible only after a French gen- eral election that has resulted in the formation of a gov- ernment of the Left in which the Socialists predominate. That is to say, barring a dissolution, there is no chance of it before 1932. The chance of it then depends to a very great extent on the policy of the British government. Offi- cial France, as it is at present, is hopeless, but the French people are not at all hopeless. They need to be enlightened and to be given a lead. The business of English Laborites and Liberals is to give a lead to the elements in France that sincerely desire peace and disarmament, instead of trying to satisfy the demands of the French nationalists for more "security," which means nothing else than security for the peace treaties. Leon Blum has told them that no guaran- ties of security for France will satisfy official France and the French general staff, because, of course, it is not guaran- ties for France that they are after. They know that France is secure enough already. What they want is to stereotype all the existing territorial arrangements in Europe and to induce England — and Germany — to guarantee unjust and impossible frontiers. But the British Labor Government and most of the leading men in the British Labor Party pay no attention to Leon Blum, although he may quite possibly be prime minister of France in a couple of years. It is really deplorable to see men whom we all respect and ad- mire, such as Norman Angell and Brailsford, actually, with the best intentions, playing into the hands of the nationalists and opponents of disarmament in France by pandering to their demand for "security." What Europe needs is a strong and bold leader — some- body with the courage to throw a very big stone into the stag- nant pool of Geneva and make a very big splash. I am afraid that the present British Labor Government have not that courage, although they could be sure of the support of the Liberals if they gave a bold lead. It is time to say publiclv in the Assembly of the League of Nations that England can join in no further guaranties of the status quo unless and until all alliances have been abolished and effective arrange- ments have been made for the peaceful revision of the peace treaties where they are unjust or absurd or both. The Polish frontiers, for example, ought not to be secure and the Poles ought to know that they are insecure. If these and other impossible frontiers are not altered by peace- ful means, they will sooner or later be altered by force, protocol or no protocol. If the French sj'Stem of alliances continues, a rival system will be set up against it sooner or later and the continent of Europe will again be divided into two hostile camps. Briand himself said in the Senate last month that "the conception of the old alliances" inevitably leads to hostile groups of Powers. And France is the fore- most advocate and supporter of that conception ! As regards disarmament there is only one honest and safe course — that the victorious Powers should accept the conditions that they imposed on Germany and the other conquered Powers. The day when a British prime minister declares to the world that England recognizes that moral obligation and proposes disarmament on that basis, there will be a response in France that will astonish him.

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544 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3383 War on the Chain Store By HARRY W. SCHACTER ANEW battle on evolution is raging in the South. This time, however, the issue is not religious but economic ; it has to do with the theory of the economics of dis- tribution. The battle, which is being waged on many fronts, is between the small retailer, taking the fundamentalist posi- tion, against the chain store, an exponent of modernism in distribution. Within the past few months the imme- diate fight has been crystallized by one crusader, W. K. Hen- derson of Shreveport, Louisiana, who has sallied forth through his radio station KWKH to give battle to the chain- store devil and to the "evil hosts in Wall Street." The thing, however, has been a long time in coming and can be traced back to the vast economic revolution that began in this coun- try ten or fifteen years ago. Let me trace it briefly. Shortly before the war the term "mass production" be- gan to be heard, mostly in connection with the name of Henry Ford. Then came the war, with its vast need for goods coupled with a shortage of man power to produce those goods. By the time the war was over "mass production" had become a definite part of our national economy. After the war manufacturers continued to produce tremendous quantities of merchandise only to find the outlet for this pro- duction impeded by the small, incompetent, independent re- tailer. A new means had to be found for increasing distri- bution. The answer was "mass distribution" through the chain stores. In a comparatively short time — within the past five or six years to be exact — the chain store has completely altered the economic life of the American community. Louisville, Kentucky, affords a typical example of what has been hap- pening. I have recently made a survey of the retail establish- ments on the main shopping thoroughfare of Louisville. I have found that from 85 to 90 per cent of the retail business done on this thoroughfare is done by chain stores. Five years ago the condition was exactly the opposite, with 85 to 90 per cent of the business carried on by locally owned establish- ments. The picture of Louisville can be duplicated in every fair-sized city or town in the United States. In many sec- tions of the country this revolution has been accepted and its benefits recognized without much thought as to consequences. In the South local sentiment persists, and resentment against chain stores has risen with much greater force. This feeling had been smoldering for a long time and needed only some forceful leadership to make it blaze forth. This leadership was provided by W. K. Henderson. Mr. Henderson, who owned an iron foundry in Shreveport, Louisiana, thought it might be a good idea to build himself a radio station as an adjunct to his business. He disported himself by broadcasting nightly on various subjects, and either because he was very uncouth or because he was a good showman or both, he decided that a little profanity and ob- scenity added to his remarks would give him plenty of pub- licity. Mr. Henderson happened one day to hear a local re- tailer making a speech before the Shreveport Chamber of Commerce in which the speaker told how the chains were cutting in on the local dealers. Henderson liked the speech and invited the man to repeat it that night over KWKH. After it was finished Mr. Henderson himself spoke as follows: I am going to tell you what that address means. It means that these dirty, sneaking chain stores are coming into your home town and taking your money and sending it out to a bunch of crooked, no-account loafers in Wall Street! That's what it means. That night and the next day Mr. Henderson received hun- dreds of telegrams and in a few days several thousand letters from all parts of the country. The comments struck every note from commendation to abuse. For several hours each night Henderson read these comments to his radio audience and briefly sermonized upon each in a very entertaining way, mixing wisdom with profanity and abuse, and greeting his audience with the now well-known cry: "Hello, World, don't go away, doggone your buttons!" The more he spoke, the greater the interest he aroused. So widely did his name and influence spread that when Sena- tor Dill of Washington suggested that his broadcasting license be revoked thousands on thousands of letters and tele- grams of protest poured in on the Radio Commission, with the result that Mr. Henderson was permitted to continue after he had promised to curb his obscenity. Throughout the South the name of Henderson was on everyone's lips, and the question of the chain-store menace was, and is today, the question most talked of below the Ohio. Mr. Henderson now began to send out organizers to small towns through the South. Independent merchants were urged to band themselves together under the title of Merchants' Minute Men. The sole requisite for member- ship was the payment of $12 a year to Mr. Henderson. It is estimated that there are today from ten to twenty thou- sand members of this organization, and in the smaller towns women who trade at chain stores are becoming unpopular. While Mr. Henderson's attacks have been centered on chain stores in general they have been particularly directed against chain grocery stores, because in that field the chains have made their greatest progress. It is estimated that the total retail sales in this country amounted to approximately eighty billion dollars in 1929. About fifteen billion dollars' worth of this business was transacted by chains; and half of the chain-store total was done by the grocery chains. Mr. Henderson's attacks are having some very concrete results. In Birmingham, Alabama, it is estimated that a large chain grocery concern has lost about one-third of its business directly because of his crusade. Everywhere through the South the sales volume of the chains, particularly the groceries, has fallen off to a greater or less degree. The in- fluence of Mr. Henderson has even made itself felt on a number of legislatures in the South. In Kentucky, for in- stance, the House of Representatives not long ago passed a sales-tax bill directly aimed at the chain stores. The bill provides for a sales tax on every retail establishment. It would be unconstitutional otherwise. The difference, how- ever, is this: on up to $400,000 of annual sales volume the merchant pays only one-twentieth of 1 per cent; on sales

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May 7, 1930] The Nation 545 above this figure the tax is graduated so steeply that by the time the sales volume reaches a million dollars the rate of tax is twenty times as high. It is specifically stated in the bill that any holding company for a number of stores pays on the combined sales volume of all stores in the State of Kentucky. Thus, the Atlantic and Pacific grocery chain, which has a sales volume in Kentucky of approximately sixteen million dollars, and the Kroger stores, which have a sales volume of approximately fourteen million dollars, must pay a tax proportionately about twenty times as large as the small grocer. Just before the vote was called in the House one legislator gave Mr. Henderson's war cry, "Hello, World, don't go away," and amid uproarious laughter the bill passed by a vote of 85 to 4. On February 27 I was present at a hearing on this bill before the Senate Committee on Revenue and Taxation at Frankfort. There were present more than a thousand people, who jammed the Senate Chamber to its very doors. A Louisville attorney representing the Retail Merchants' Association of Kentucky presented the argument opposing the bill, while the secretary of the Louisville Retail Grocery Association defended it. It was evident from the beginning that a number of the Senators on the committee had made up their minds in advance. The most interesting element in the hearing was the temper of that portion of the crowd, about six hundred strong, who represented the independent retailer. The appeal of the representative of the small mer- chant was highly emotional; and it aroused such fervor among his adherents that at times the gathering took on the appearance of a religious revival. When the speaker was in the midst of calling the chains all the names in the category a small merchant standing next to me kept yelling at the top of his lungs: "Get at 'em, boy, hit 'em hard, Glory Hallelujah!" Needless to say, the bill was reported favorably by the Senate committee and passed by the Senate by a vote of 27 to 11. One of the more amusing skirmishes in the war on the chain store began only recently and is still going strong. Mr. Henderson has been particularly uncomplimentary in his attacks upon Clarence Saunders, the founder of the Piggly Wiggly grocery stores. Saunders, it will be recalled, went down to inglorious defeat at the hands of Wall Street several years ago and is now operating a chain of grocery stores under his own name in a number of cities in the South. Mr. Saunders, who is apparently as outspoken as Mr. Hen- derson and as picturesque, has taken it upon himself to answer Mr. Henderson's attacks in half-page and full-page advertisements in various newspapers. In one advertisement headed "Eat Your Cotton — Don't Sell It to a Foreigner," Mr. Saunders advanced the argument that if nothing should be purchased from any except strictly "home" merchants then nothing should be sold to any person outside the com- munity. Another paragraph began as follows: "Ole Man Henderson's racket of arousing prejudice is as old as the first man who undertook to capitalize the ignorance of his fellow-men for his own personal end" ; and ended thus : ! "So that there would be no mistake as to who wrote this article, I, Clarence Saunders, wrote every word of it . . ." Mr. Henderson undertook to answer over the radio. Ap- parently a number of people were gathered at his side as he spoke over the microphone. His answer went something like this: "Clarence, you bankrupt, you try to tell me what to do? Ha, ha, ha!" In the laughter Mr. Henderson was joined by his chorus. Henderson's entire answer to Mr. Saunders consisted of calling him names. Mr. Saunders has just fired the second shot in the form of a full-page advertisement. It is headed "A Shiny-Eyed Rat," and Mr. Saunders refers to his op- ponent throughout as Rat Henderson of radio station KWKH. He points out that Mr. Henderson is urging all the home folks to purchase from the home-town mer- chant and at the same time is selling them coffee over the radio at one dollar a pound, which yields Mr. Henderson the handsome profit of sixty cents a pound. Incidentally, it is estimated that Mr. Henderson receives orders for about 1,500 pounds of coffee a day. Mr. Saunders goes on to point out that while Mr. Henderson is claiming to be the champion of the poor and downtrodden, he does not permit union men to work in his iron foundry. He further calls to mind the time when Mr. Henderson personally under- took to operate a street car in Shreveport while the street- car employees were on strike. Some of the language is extremely picturesque, as for example: You said that if I were near you'd spit in my face. Now, listen to me, Rat Henderson, whenever you think you are skunk enough to try this let your spit spew on my face and there'll be a skunk hide that will know that something has happened to it. Mr. Saunders goes on to call Mr. Henderson a hypocrite and a liar. There is a great deal to be said for Mr. Hender- son's sympathy for the small merchant, who is faced with slow extinction. There is also considerable to be said against Mr. Henderson. In addition to his coffee sales at one dollar a pound, he is utilizing this crusade to sell insurance, trips to Mexico, and grapefruit, not to mention memberships in the Merchants' Minute Men. That the independent retailers are sorely beset by the chain is without question true. The United States gov- ernment through its Department of Commerce has been making a survey of the grocery situation in the city of Louisville, known as the Louisville Grocery Survey. It has been found that no fewer than thirty small grocery stores are going out of business in Louisville every month. In other words, every day one grocer is falling by the wayside in Louisville because he is unable to cope with this economic tide ! The chain store is strong because it has made a definite contribution toward lowering the costs of distribution. So long as it does its job well and renders this economic service to the people no amount of abuse and no reasonable amount of taxation can curb it. Hope for the independent does not lie in calling names and trying to prevent housewives from trading in the chain stores. It does not lie in levying upon the independent a tax of $1 while the chain pays a tax of $20. The answer lies rather in the direction of organization. The small inefficient independent must perform his job of distribution both with the efficiency and with the low costs of the chain. If the independent can do this by aligning himself with other independents, he can beat the chains. If not, there will be a great to-do for a while with much calling of names and slinging of mud, but in the long run the house- wife, who is finally to decide this battle by her patronage, will go where the prices are cheaper and the service better.

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546 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3383 In the Driftway ONE could hardly live in New Orleans three days, even if one fasted all that time, without knowing that the city rejoices in good cooking. Rejoices is the right word, because New Orleanians take justifiable pleasure in their cooking — and say so out loud. The law of supply and demand rules in food as in other matters. In order to have good cooking there must be a sizable public which knows good cooking from bad and insists upon having it. New Orleans has such a public. The visitor is made aware at once that he is among people who take cooking seriously. He is asked if he likes this or has ever tried that; he is admonished to go to a certain restaurant on a certain day for a certain dish. "Oh, you must stay to lunch," his host at the club says ; "this is our day for chicken Creole." Even for a modest Sunday night supper his hostess will consult him in advance as to what he likes, and he is not expected to eat what is set before him in silence. ***** AS an illustration of the serious attitude toward food which one encounters, the Drifter recalls inviting a lady in New Orleans to lunch and asking her to suggest a restaurant. At the appointed hour she appeared and pro- ceeded to recite the entire menu of the table d'hote lunch at two places. She had called up both by telephone that morning so that the Drifter, with full information before him, might make a choice. Of course, that might happen outside New Orleans, but the Drifter doubts it. ***** ONE cannot even read the newspapers without realizing the preoccupation of New Orleans with good cookery. Within a period of only two weeks, recently, the Drifter noted prominent accounts of the death and burial of two chefs. In New York City, with ten times as large a popu- lation, it is doubtful if there are half a dozen chefs whose death would occasion more than a paragraph, if that. Of the two New Orleans chefs whose deaths were chronicled, one was a Negro. As a rule the names of Negroes do not get into Southern newspapers except when the bearers of them get into the calaboose charged with crime. But the Negro who can cook — and hundreds of them still can — is honored as well as the white man. Neville Jarreau had been at one time the chef of the Boston Club, the oldest organization of its kind in New Orleans, and back in the eighties he had prepared a dinner for President Grant when the latter made a visit to the city. Jarreau's skin was black, but his cooking made the mouths of white men water, and the New Orleans press did not neglect his memory when he passed. The other chef to whose death the newspapers gave prominence was eighty-six years old and had retired from the kitchen twenty-five years previous to his end. Yet Pierre Marais was recalled as having been the chef at the famous Spanish Fort Hotel in the days of its glory, and the Times-Picayune said that in 1882 when a reporter was sent to write up the debut of a cornet player he almost forgot to mention the musician in the unrestrained eulogy he wrote of Pierre's cooking. The Drifter Correspondence "Our Country,—" To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Here is the examination of a candidate for naturali- zation by a judge in Louisiana. For the name and address of the authenticating witness see the Christian Century for April 9. The speakers are the judge and the candidate. Judge. What did you do during the World War? Candidate. I served for three years in the British army and spent about fifteen months overseas in Salonika. (Exhibits correct discharge papers certifying record.) J. Supposing the United States engaged in a war that you considered was wrong, what would be your attitude? C. I would consider it my duty to protect and defend democracy. J. But supposing, to take a concrete case, California wanted more territory and decided to seize some in Mexico, and every man was drafted for some form of service, would you object or be loyal? C. I do not believe the United States would engage in such a war. J. I do not want any conditions. Under such circum- stances, a war of aggression, would you object? C. In all probability I would. I would first have to consider my duty to God and to humanity. J. In other words, you cannot subscribe under any and every condition to the doctrine, My country right or wrong, my country? C. No. J. Then you cannot be admitted. What we want are citizens who are prepared to say, My country right or wrong, but my country. This seems to beat anything yet published. Ballard Vale, Mass., April 11 Steven T. Byington The Ancients Knew To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: It is generally supposed that distilled liquors were not known to the ancients. Let me cite the following passage from the Old Testament (Deut. 14:26) : And thou shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for whatsoever thy soul desireth. . . . In this passage the Hebrew word for wine (yayin) is con- trasted with the word for strong drink (shechar). I am con- vinced that the "strong drink" referred to in this passage was a distilled liquor. If it had been merely a strong kind of wine it would hardly have been sharply contrasted with wine. It is also supposed that anaesthesia is a modern discovery; but I once came across this passage in the "De Trinitate" of Hilary of Poitiers, a writer of the fourth century, a.d. : Also when through some grave necessity part of the body must be cut away, the soul can be lulled to sleep by drugs, which overcome the pain and produce in the mind a deathlike forgetfulness of its power of sense. Then limbs can be cut off without pain: the flesh is dead to all feeling, and does not heed the deep thrust of the knife, because the soul within it is asleep. — "De Trinitate," Book X, par. 14. This passage shows unmistakably that the ancients were acquainted with anaesthesia. Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, April 1 CHARLES HoOPBR ,

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May 7, 1930] The Nation 547 Judge Parker and the Negro To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The editorial in The Nation of April 29 opposing the confirmation of Judge Parker and appealing to the race prejudice of colored people is indefensible. You say that Judge Parker should not sit on the Supreme Court bench because cases affecting the rights of colored people will come before that court; and you specifically cite a case involving the Richmond, Virginia, segregation ordinance. You must have known that Judge Parker, presiding in the Circuit Court of Appeals at Richmond, rendered the decision holding that ordinance void because it was violative of the Fourteenth Amendment. As counsel for the colored complainant in that case, I protest against your unfair attack upon an upright, courageous judge. Richmond, April 27 Alfred E. Cohen Russian "C. 0.'s" To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: In Soviet Russia, as in other countries with compul- sory military service, conscientious objectors receive scant con- sideration. The Russian government, unlike many others, rec- ognizes them and provides alternative civil service for the mem- bers of religious sects historically opposed to war. They serve in what is known as the "Civil Battalion," doing public work. But those who refuse this civil service and those who are out- side the historical anti-war sects go to prison. We have recently heard from Tolstoyan friends in Mos- cow of the hardships which these men are enduring in prison. They are in need of relief, which the Russian government per- mits through one agency in Moscow headed by Catharine Petch- koff, first wife of Maxim Gorki. In all Russian prisons — and these men serve their sentences in the regular prisons with :riminals — prisoners are allowed to have their own clothes, to purchase food from the cooperative prison store to supplement the coarse diet, and to have books sent in from outside. In making this appeal we are not contributing to any propa- ganda for or against the Soviet regime. Gifts and contribu- tions may be so designated, but made payable and sent to the Fellowship of Reconciliation, 383 Bible House, Astor Place, New York. New York, February 27 Roger Baldwin Contributors to This Issue Paul Y. Anderson is the national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Robert Dell is The Nation's correspondent in France. Harry W. Schacter, who is general manager of a de- partment store in Louisville, has made a special study of retailing methods. Leslie Nelson Jennings contributes verse to various periodicals. Robert Livincston Schuyler is professor of history at Columbia University. H. L. Mencken is editor of the American Mercury and a contributing editor of The Nation. Pierre Loving, long resident in France, is now living in New York. Broadus Mitchell is associate professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University. My Life An Attempt at an Autobiography by Leon Trotsky Emil Ludwig says of this astounding book — "A great writer has here set forth his fantastic life in such a way as to make me wonder why people still read novels, or even write them. The book begins like Hamsun, and closes like a third act " 600 pages. $5.00 The Unknown Washington by John Corbin Author of "The Return of the Middle Class" " In the immense literature upon Washington Mr. Corbin's book will take a position quite its own. It is the first thorough ex- amination of Washington's posi- tion in our constitutional history." — Allan Nevins in the N. Y. Timej. 454 pages. $4.00 At your Brawny Wycherley Courtier, Wit and Playwright by Willard Connely "His life makes fascinating and enriching biography.... A vivid picture of the playwright and his time." — Philadelphia Public Ledger. 352 pages. $3.00 XenOphon : Fortune0 by Leo V. Jacks A vivid biography of the Greek who matched wits with Socrates and swords with the Persians with equal assurance. $2.00 bookstore Charles Scribner's Sons New York When uniting to advertisers please mention The Nation "YELLOW DOG" Contracts and labor cases involved in Judge Parker's appointment are fully covered in THE LABOR INJUNCTION By FELIX FRANKFURTER and NATHAN GREENE "The Red Jacket" case and the "yellow dog" contracts which have caused the opposition to confirmation of Judge Parker's appoint- ment to the Supreme Court are discussed in this new book by two legal authorities. It will give you a clear understanding of the situation, in addition to a complete knowledge of the use and abuse of the in- junction in labor disputes. Every phase of this important subject is covered and the authors present recommendations which should be of interest to everyone concerned with industrial relations. At bookstores $5.00 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK

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Books, Music, Drama Migrant By LESLIE NELSON JENNINGS I Here is a name that anyone might sign, A City which has covered up the track Of anonymity more sure than mine And given of reminiscence nothing back. No letters are expected and no calls. The elevator is a gilded trip To ordered Heavens of softly padded halls, And the glib welcome of a quarter tip. Twenty-one stories, and the muffled click Of a door closing. What a precious boon Is privacy where concrete walls are thick. The Silver Grill serves breakfast until noon. "To sleep, perchance to dream . . ." of space not bound By any cable anchored underground. II Let us prepare tomorrow. Men are flies Whose wings have been plucked out with patient skill. Tower upon tower these refutations rise To prove the dream inviolable still. One more light scaffolding, a scantling based On one more promise cunningly defined ; A single step — there is no need for haste — Night has a thousand eyes, but they are blind. Moons look astonished at the glittering plume Of a small comet plunging to some dark Wedding of sun-dust with primordial doom; Yet the sky closes over the dying spark. This window is an eye whose yellow square Faces the City blankly . . . Let it stare! A Great Trilogy The Way Home. By Henry Handel Richardson. W. W. Norton and Company. $2.50. WITH the appearance of this second novel, the full trilogy of Mary and Richard Mahony is now avail- able to American readers. If we can consider the three novels separately, "The Way Home" is perhaps the least important, for it gives us neither the magnificent picture of pioneer Australia in the first volume nor the absorbing tragedy of "Ultima Thule." Yet "The Way Home" is much more than a mere connecting link; it is a solid and brilliant work in itself. The trilogy of which it is a part is probably the most important single piece of literature ever to come out of Australia; it takes its place among the handful of fiction mas- terpieces in English that have so far appeared in this century. The title of "The Way Home" remains ambiguous, and is perhaps intentionally ironic. For Richard, dissatisfied with the raw and crude life of the colonies, has gone "home" to England. But he finds that he has been idealizing the mother country, and that he has become even more ill-adjusted to Eng- lish ways than he was to colonial. In the charming little vil- lage of Buddlecombe, where he attempts to resume his practice, Mary and he encounter an almost incredible narrowness and snobbery, a wasps' nest of caste and prejudice, with social life divided into innumerable grades, a series of cliques, rising one above the other, and fitting as exactly as a set of Japanese boxes. The lower classes are as fawning as the higher are arrogant. The slightest breaches of etiquette — such as serv- ing guests with somewhat too generous a supper — are not for- given. It at length dawns upon Mahony that the very fact that he and Mary have lived in Australia has made them, in the eyes of these provincials, socially dubious, and the very fact that he has practiced in Australia has made his professional competence suspect. So once more he pulls up stakes and takes Mary back to the colonies, "home." Arrived there, they learn that Richard's mining shares have enormously increased in value; he has become rich, is welcomed everywhere. He gives up his practice, only to become absorbed in his books, particularly in those on spiritualism, and to be- come, in time, more and more of a recluse. Their three chil- dren are born. Richard, growing restless again, takes Mary to England once more, and then traveling on the Continent. It is when they are at Venice that the blow falls which wipes out their fortune and compels Richard to leave again for Australia, this time alone. The story seems commonplace enough when reduced to any blunt summary; but the importance of this trilogy does not rest on any originality of plot. It is a memorable picture, just, full, and unsparing, of pioneer Australia, its easy democracy, its en- ergy, restlessness, vulgarity, its concern with the one aim of getting rich; and with the same impartiality it presents the con- trasting picture of small-town English life. The character por- trayal, particularly of Mary and Richard, but of many of the minor figures as well, is masterly. In "The Way Home," as in "Ultima Thule," we find Mary and Richard, after years of married life, still making discoveries about each other, subtly altering their relationship, slowly changing themselves, drifting apart in interests and attitudes. Their irritations, quarrels, reconciliations are handled with superb skill. Yet there are here virtually none of the ingredients that the average novelist thinks most essential for keeping his reader's interest alive, without which, in fact, he can hardly imagine a story at all — romance, adultery, or some variation of the everlasting triangle. Never once is Mary interested in another man, nor does she even toy with the idea of a flirtation; Richard indeed, at one moment, finds a woman who he imagines understands him better than Mary does, but the affair never drifts beyond the faintest platonic level. Despite the absence of this sexual ele- ment, despite an atmosphere of Victorianism that hangs over the novel, partly the result of its style and structure, partly because it is actually laid in the Victorian period, I can think of few English novels of our time which give so full and rich a picture of life. There is selection of incident and thought, of course, as there must be in all fiction, but it is a selection that reveals the two chief characters at last on all sides — their aversions, attachments, cultural interests, their most petty monetary worries and social anxieties, their daily routine, their friends and relationships — everything, in fact, that we know about our closest acquaintances, or that absorbs, fritters, di- rects, or inspires our own energies. Emerging from this work, we not only feel that we have almost lived the lives of these two people, but something more than that. Mahony, in the eyes of the world, never becomes distinguished; he dies a fail- ure, even a madman; yet we never lose sight of his inner no- bility and latent powers, and when we rise from this chronicle, life itself seems to have gained something in significance. Henry Hazlitt

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May 7, 1930] The Nation 549 r~r\ The British State English Government and Politics. By Frederic Austin Ogg. The Macmillan Company. $4.25. r~T"% HE English constitution," says Sir William Anson, is "a somewhat rambling structure and, like a house which many successive owners have altered just so far as suited their immediate wants or the fashion of the time, it bears the marks of many hands, and is convenient rather than sym- metrical." His simile remains apt, but since he wrote, in the eighties of the last century, and especially during and since the war, the owners of the house have been proceeding with alter- ations so rapidly that all descriptions of it, including his own, are badly in need of revision. A new edition of the first vol- ume of his "Law and Custom of the Constitution" was pub- lished in 1922, but the other two volumes have not been re- vised for more than twenty years. The latest edition of Presi- dent Lowell's monumental "Government of England" takes no account of any developments subsequent to 1911. Professor Ogg is surely justified in saying that a new book on English government is warranted by "the remarkable changes in mecha- nism, function, and method which recent years have witnessed, and particularly by the fluidity of political arrangements in Britain today and the probability of further significant experi- ments and reconstructions in times immediately ahead." Mr. Ogg's textbooks and other writings on European and American government and history are well known to students and have given him high standing among the political scientists of the country. But his latest work is drawn on a larger scale. If I am not mistaken, it is decidedly the most important as well as the most comprehensive book that he has written, and even if it were not strictly up to date, as it is, it would still be easily the best one-volume treatise on its subject. In the la- borious business of gathering material he has been systematic as well as tireless, and a clear and organizing mind has enabled him to present the results of his study in orderly and readable fashion. He has successfully accomplished his purpose, which is to give an account of the English political system "on lines which will render it not only a reservoir of data on principles and processes but a living reality as a going concern." His primary aim is to describe existing political institutions and practices, but he gives considerable attention to problems and tendencies. Such chapters as those on Civil Service Methods and Problems, Second Chamber Reform, and Parliamentary Tendencies and Problems remind us that the constitution we are reading about is very much alive. The author exemplifies throughout and in high degree the quality of disinterestedness. He is never opinionated and ap- pears to have no axes to grind. He devotes several chapters to the English party system, but they give us no hint of how he would vote if he were an Englishman. Even in his refer- ences to the general strike he betrays no emotion. And his at- titude toward that unhappy hunting-ground of embittered con- troversy, the Irish question, is fairly represented in this sen- tence: "All in all, the system of government [under the Union] was neither so bad as it was generally painted by Irishmen nor so good as complacent Britishers were wont to regard it." Important currents of opinion concerning political questions are brought into view, but when the author presents adverse criti- cism of political conditions and institutions it is usually the criticism of others, not his own. In a work of this scope it is almost inevitable that there should be some errors of fact and some statements that call for reconsideration. Such corrigenda and exploranda as have been noted can easily be rectified when the book goes to a sec- ond edition; they are submitted here with that object in view. What Sir Thomas Smith said about the supremacy of Parlia- ment required no special boldness on his part (page 35) ; for him Parliament was not an institution distinct from and po- tentially opposed to the sovereign. James II was not "obsti- nate and intolerant" (page 40) ; it would be nearer the truth to say that he was obstinately tolerant. The name that George III gloried in was that of "Briton," not "Englishman" (page 46). The concept of fundamental law, superior to the ordinary law, is much older than the sixteenth century (page 62). The first Labor Government was not in office for "up- wards of a year" (pages 70 and 528). It was not an "English publicist," but De Lolme, who made the humorous remark about Parliament paraphrased on page 78. The reign of Edward I was not reckoned as dating from the death of his predecessor, nor did he remain uncrowned for four years (page 84). Accurately speaking, the prerogative power of the Crown to create life peerages has not disappeared (page 87) ; in the Wensleydale case, to which the author refers, the right was admitted, but it was denied that life peers were entitled to sit in the House of Lords. The Lord Privy Seal is not required by "inflexible custom" to be a member of the House of Lords (page 138) ; the office has been held several times by com- moners and is held by one today. Coke, having died in 1634, could not have "testified" to anything in 1648 (page 381). Dicey did not maintain that Parliament was actually omnipo- tent, as the reader would be likely to infer from page 448. In view of the present state of parties in the House of Com- mons it seems strange to say that the chances of a Ministry being ousted by the House "have of late been steadily diminish- ing" (Page 460). The Liberals were not defeated in a parlia- mentary election in 1842, nor did they regain office in 1847 (page 487). It is not clear what the author means by saying that the personal union of England and Scotland was able to "withstand" the establishment of the Hanoverian dynasty (page 683). It was not the British Parliament but the Irish Parlia- ment that repealed Poynings's Law (page 690). South Africa should be excepted from the statement that the Dominions have been peopled primarily from the British Isles (page 747). An assertion is made on page 753 regarding British influence over Dominion legislation that is not in accord with the prin- ciples laid down by the Imperial Conference of 1926 and would not be indorsed by any Dominion statesman. Robert Livingston Schuyler Harsh Words An Anthology of Invective and Abuse. Compiled by Hugh Kingsmill. The Dial Press. $2. MR. KINGSMILL has done his work here with great competence. His selections include all the more cele- brated English philippics, his notes set forth adequately the circumstances which brought them forth, and he chooses discreetly when it is necessary to isolate the essential from the nonessential, as in the case, for example, of Robert Buchanan's "The Fleshly School of Poetry." All persons with any trace of malice in them — which is to say, all persons not immersed in Trappist monasteries — will rejoice in this handy compendium. It includes almost everything of a caustic nature composed in England in three and a half centuries, from Francis Bacon's denunciation of the Earl of Essex to Lloyd George's Limehouse speech, and from William Prynne's diatribe against bobbed hair to H. G. Wells's assault upon Napoleon Bonaparte. Unfortunately, it seldom leaves the bounds of the British Isles, and then to small purpose. The American section, for example, is short, and its contents are mainly feeble stuff — Rob- ert G. Ingersoll on the Bible, Whistler on Ruskin, Mark Twain

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550 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3383 on Titian, and a few extracts from the forgotten Lincoln Cate- chism. One looks in vain for Griswold on Poe, Stuart P. Sher- man on Dreiser, Roosevelt on Harriman, Mark Twain on J. Fenimore Cooper, Sumner on Jeff Davis, the old New York Sun on Roosevelt, and Wilson on the little group of wilful men. Is Lloyd George actually a master of invective? Then what of James A. Reed? I recall a dozen speeches by Reed that are more blistering than anything in this volume — more blistering, and altogether better. And in particular I recall his funeral sermon on the Wilson idealism, preached before a packed Sen- ate chamber on the night of March 3, 1921. If England can show anything more devastating, then surely Mr. Kingsmill does not print it here. There is also a complete absence of Continental examples — a very serious lack. Certainly Schopenhauer's attack upon women is far better than Pryrine's, as Zola's "J'accuse" is better than Burke's indictment of Warren Hastings. But most of all I miss the immortal Section 62 of Nietzsche's "Der Anti- christ," unquestionably the grandest and gaudiest abuse ever penned. The words, as Nietzsche himself said, deserve to be chalked on every wall, wherever there is a wall to chalk them on: Ich verurlheile das Christenthum, ich erhebe gegen die christliche Kirche die furchtbarste aller Anklagen, die je ein Anklager in den Mund genommen hat. Sie ist mir die hochste aller denkbaren Corruptionen, sie hat den Willen zur letzten auch nur moglichen Corruption gehabt. Die christliche Kirche liess Nichts mit ihrer Verderbniss unberiihrt, sie hat aus jedem Werth einen Unwerth, aus jeder Wahrheit eine Liige, aus jeder Rechtschaffenheit eine Seelen-Niedertracht gemacht. And so on, and so on. But maybe Mr. Kingsmill will bring out a second volume of his anthology later on. H. L. Mencken Conscience Makes Us Men King Haber. By Alfred Neumann. Alfred H. King. $2.50. A WRITER like Alfred Neumann, who deals almost en- tirely with codes, punctilios, quirks of honor, and the sharp tooth of conscience, strikes us at first glance as somewhat alien to his own times. We are forced, however, . to put aside any suspicion that this author is trying to squeeze more drama than is legitimate out of human situations that are to all intents and purposes dead. His method is penetrating, beautiful, true, even though his kind of inner tribunal has been put to sleep by a generation that, while still perhaps admiring his English style, can make neither head nor tail of the high- minded motives that impel the characters of Joseph Conrad. Neumann bears a surface resemblance — but only a surface re- semblance— to Mr. Thornton Wilder. In Neumann there is, however, less casuistry, and far more poetry and direct contact with people. The present book contains three long short stories, two of which are laid in the beginning of the nineteenth century — one in Russia and the other in a small German ducal state. The third is narrated by a hunchbacked German schoolmaster who sees a sex crime committed by his assistant, a warped soul, and cowers away from the other as though he were (as indeed he is) his own tortured, devilish alter ego. Hounded by the evil within himself, the assistant at last shoots himself. The two significant stories in the book are King Haber and The Patriot, both of which made the author's reputation in Germany, especially the latter, which was published before Neumann won the Kleist Prize for The Devil. King Haber and Conrad's Lord Jim have at least this in common: they are both predestined to follow an impossible ideal, achieving it in ways which they never even guessed at. King Haber is a Jew- ish banker who is ruthless in his purpose to set his son, borne to him by the reigning duchess, on the throne. His shall be the blood of kings. But the nobles rise up and conspire to thwart him. Cornered, hemmed in by a cordon of bloodthirsty enemies, with no possible egress, he causes the death of his own child (who had meanwhile been proclaimed heir apparent by the complaisant duke) and is himself the victim of a revolutionary mob. This form of death is self-chosen. Even the nobles recognize that by his courage, his fervent dream, his fearlessness before death he has become their peer. The Patriot relates the murder of the Czar Paul as a result of a conspiracy headed by Count Pahlen. Pahlen has assured the Czarevitch that his father's death is not sought; only his abdication. He offers his own life as a pledge. The Czar is slain and Pahlen, waiting in an anteroom, kills himself. In objectifying the subtle emotions and complex ideals of his characters Neumann uses a form of dramatic understate- ment that is highly charged with dire events. He is elliptical, but not monotonously so. He uses the sense of impendingness, which elsewhere I have noted in the dialogue of Mr. Heming- way, with the concision of a tragic poet. Pierre Loving -; The Southern Mill Worker)^J Some Southern Cotton Mill Workers and Their Villages. By Jennings J. Rhyne. University of North Carolina Press. Al] $2.50. CAPITALIST industry, when it bursts upon an economy of agriculture and small handicrafts, brings first an astonishing increase in production. Entrepreneurs rise to power and riches. Dislocations in economic life and exploi- tation of workers are forgotten in the swiftness and splendor of the spectacle of the new factories. A second stage is reached when the masters of industry, half sensing the inequi- ties in the development, seek to enshrine their creed of indi- vidualism. Legislators, newspapers, clergymen, and economists agree with them heartily. The harshness of the doctrine is presently softened by acts of kindness toward the workers; when the fish begins to tug, a little more line is paid out to him, so that for the moment he forgets that he still has the hook in his mouth. A third phase is reached in the democratic revolt against the operation of capitalism. This takes on many forms — abor- tive political protest, tardy legislative relief, an awakening charity in the middle class, growing demand for labor union- ism, panaceas of social reform. Industry in the Southern States has unequivocally reached this third stage. The strikes which have occurred in the cotton mills in the last year, followed by the present widespread American Federation of Labor organ- izing campaign, leave no doubt of the arrival of the day of reckoning. This makes Dr. Rhyne's realistic description of the life of the North Carolina cotton-mill workers in their villages im- portant as a basis of judgment of future developments and policies. He has studied 500 families, with a total of 2,362 persons, in four types of mill villages of Gaston County. His sample is statistically adequate, and he has examined the social and economic characteristics of the groups and individuals with accuracy and ingenuity. He seems to establish the fact, long suspected, that the workers are generally indifferent toward welfare work. He believes from his figures that the great majority of children in mill families go to work as soon as they reach fourteen. In

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May 7, 1930] The Nation 551 #!R% The human drama of four centuries THE POWER AND SECRET of the JESUITS By Rene Fuldp-Miller At last a modern-minded scholar has written the true story of one of the greatest secret societies of all times. Catholics and non-Catholics alike are hailing this volume — a history, a biography, and a story of civilization. "Thoroughly scholarly and tremendously interesting." — John B. Watson. "One of the most powerful and interesting and graphic documents pub- lished for many years. To call it a document is accurate, but does not do justice to its thrilling quality simply as reading matter." — Michael Williams. Selma Lagerlof, Bruno Frank, Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Claudel, Jacob Wassermann are among the thousands who have enjoyed and profited by a reading of this world-embracing book. 143 magnificent illustrations. $5.00 "Don't miss this brilliant and eminently readable analysis of the problems that confront every one of us today/' — New York Eve. Post AMERICA LOOKS ABROAD THE NEW ECONOMIC HORIZONS by Paul M. Mazur "I doubt that anyone has made or can make a fairer or clearer analy- sis of our economic situation; cer- tainly no one could present it more vividly or dynamically. American Prosperity showed Mr. Mazur to be one of the keenest economists since Keynes. America Looks Abroad shows him to be also a philosopher and a prophet of the major lank." — Prof. G. B. Hotch- kiss, New York University. $3.00 "A brilliant book, new veri- ties, thrilling perspectives." — New York Herald Tribune THREE MASTERS BALZAC - DICKENS DOSTOEFFSKY by Stefan, Zweig Stefan Zweig has painted the three great literary figures of the 19th Cen- tury in the light of their works and of their lives. Ludwig Lewisohn says : "It is all magnificent. So much knowledge, such close thinking, prose so beautifully wrought. . . . Greatly conceived and nobly executed." Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. $3.00 THE VIKING PRESS 18 East 48th St., New York City #!R% "He takes Arabian Night's characters and makes them living flesh and blood. To me it is the medieval ages r e s u r - reeled." — William Beebe MOGREB-EL-ACKSA A JOURNEY IN MOROCCO by R. B. Cunningham Graham One of the last adventurers in the grand tradition and a great prose artist has told "a picturesque and enchanting tale of a vain attempt to get into a forbidden Moham- medan city in the Atlas mountains, full of vivid and enthralling inci- dent and sparkling with wit." — The Outlook. "A continuous de- light."— Joseph Conrad. A National Travel Club Book. With an intro- duction by Edward Garnett. $3.50 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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552 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3383 Visits to Soviet Russia SCANDINAVIA AND RUSSIA Twenty-nine Days Abroad — Hamburg, Copen- hagen, Stockholm, Helsingfors, Leningrad, Moscow. Two weeks in Russia — Leader: William Clabk Trow, University of Michigan. Sailing from New York S. S. EUROPA— June 18th. Price from New York— $756. From Hamburg, June 26th— $521. Registra- tions open. Thirty-six Days Abroad — Copenhagen, Gotha Canal, Stockholm, Helsingfors, Leningrad, Moscow, Reval, Riga, Berlin. Two weeks in Russia. Leader: Roswell Johnson, University of Pittsburgh. Sailing from New York S. S. EUROPA— June 18th. Price from New York— $935. From Copenhagen, June 25th — $679. Registrations open. Other Itineraries — Leningrad, Moscow, the Volga, Caucasus, Crimea, Ukraine — 5 to 36 days in Russia. Sailings May 14, 30, June 3, 18. 24, 28, July 5, 10, 24, Aug. 14, 21. Parties of eight plus American leader. Registrations open. 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK We Broke the Barriers Four Years Ago And Now — We celebrate our 4th Anniversary by offering an excursion tour which will eclipse all others. May 28th is the date of the 1930 anni- versary tour to SOVIET RUSSIA S.S. AQUITANIA $340 The Special Feature of This Trip is an enchanting cruise through the Kiel Canal and the North Sea on the S.S. Lancastria, cabin class for all our passengers. Illustrated booklets, itineraries and schedules of future sailing dates mailed on request. WORLD TOURISTS, Inc. 175 Fifth Ave. New York Algonquin 6650 85.6 per cent of the families there were no dependent chil- dren over fourteen, and in only 0.2 per cent of the cases were there two or more dependent children over fourteen. This may be taken to put a definite limit to mental and economic de- velopment. He shows that there are fewer wage-earners to each family than has been supposed ; practically half the families had only one wage-earner, slightly over one-fourth had two, while 23.8 per cent had three or more. The male head of the family was gainfully employed in 96.7 per cent of the families where the father was still living. The cotton mills of North Carolina employ a larger per- centage of workers below the ages of 25 to 44 than do industries as a whole in that State, in Massachusetts, or in the United States. The wage data, liable to error because supplied by the workers themselves, showed an average weekly income per family of $28.65, a median of $25.43, and the modal $16.07. Families moving from village to village oftener than once a year comprised 21.6 per cent of the total, and 7.6 per cent moved at the rate of more than twice a year. Broadus Mitchell Books in Brief a#-x An American Jezebel. By Helen Augur. Brentano's. $3.50. Unafraid: A Life of Anne Hutchinson. By Winifred King Rugg. Houghton Mifflin Company. $3.50. It is a good thing, every so often, to reexamine the growth of various forms of toleration in America. We are too prone either to fall into the error of believing that intolerance is a result of the World War and did not exist in the old days, or to assert that as far as religious freedom goes it has always existed in the United States, and that we thereby shame every country so backward as to have an established church. Let it be said at once that in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the latter half of the seventeenth century there existed one of the tightest, most unreasoning, and most merciless theocracies that ever flourished anywhere. Thither came Mistress Anne Hutchinson, wife of William Hutchinson, gent., of Lincolnshire, eager to hear again the preaching of her beloved leader, John Cotton. She was full of zeal not only for the performance of every housewifely task, including the bearing and rearing of some ten children, but for God and His son, Jesus Christ. She brought the fresh winds of direct and personal revelation into the Calvinistic rigidities of the colony. Her "Covenant of grace," as opposed to the more regular "Covenant of works" of the church's governors, got her into trouble, and because she was too brilliant an expositor of her doctrines not to be listened to she was finally excommuni- cated with all due infamy. Miss Augur has told Mrs. Hutch- inson's story with great understanding and pity, as well as with appreciation of her gifts as a preacher and as a woman. She has written a stirring book without resorting unduly to Action- izing; she has made of her heroine a thoroughly sympathetic fig- ure, difficult to live with, perhaps, but none the less admirable for that. Miss Rugg's is a much less competent book, spoiled in particular by long, imaginary conversations between Mrs. Hutchinson and her husband, her friends, and her God. This Is My Body. By Margery Latimer. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $2.50. We have had no social revolution; but the sexual revolu- tion has come irresistibly and has been won largely by woman. In "This Is My Body" Miss Latimer, whose early work showed promise and a certain eagerness, has given us in Megan Foster one of the heroines of this more or less perceived, but formida- ble, transition. Megan from the very beginning is simply and naturally imbued with the joyous principles of the irrepressible When writing to advertisers pleas* mention The Nation

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May 7, 1930] The Nation 553 Dr. Samuel Schmalhausen. She revolts against her family. She is a rebel at college. She says: "I love life — I want life. . . . Oh, oh, I have to know a man." And to the first man she meets: "I want to know about life . . . reality." At page 74 she has advanced to: "I feel white, I feel empty." And not long after: "Oh Gerald, I'm burning — I'm burning!" In her search for reality (life?), little Megan moves forward always in a straight line until she finds it; and then, obviously, the emptiness within her is filled. Testamento Literario. Por Armando Palacio Valdes. Madrid: Victoriano Suarez. 4 pesetas. Armando Palacio Valdes is a contemporary of Perez Galdos, Jose Maria de Pereda, Emilia Pardon Bazan, Leopoldo Alas — the noble group which had made Spanish letters at the beginning of the century the peer of any in the world. All these other authors are gone, but the creator of "Jose" and "La Hermana San Sulpicio" has lived on to a hale old age, and still writes readable stories in his gentle nineteenth-century manner. His "Literary Testament" is a collection of essays on the writer's vocation, the attitude he should take toward such matters as family, friends, politics, hygiene, reputation, money, and the like, on Catholic orthodoxy, morality, optimism — all sweetened with naive humor and phrased in a calm and beau- tiful Spanish which is a welcome relief from the gallicized lingo of a large part of the younger writing generation in Spain. Valdes has a delightful gift of apposite allusion which is not seriously marred by his habit of inaccurate quotation. Music A "Spiritual" Concerto THE Schola Cantorum ended its season with a noble dis- play of new works. Although, like matrimonial adver- tisements, its concert was better on paper than face to face, it contained three exquisite madrigals of Monteverde ex- cellently done, a folk song of Joaquin Nin for the brilliant voice of Adele Vasa and women's chorus (the most beautiful new piece on the program), and the much-heralded Spiritual Con- certo of the Russian Arthur Lourie. This was scored for piano, barytone solo, brass, contrabassi, and chorus, with a text from the Exultet of the Ambrosian Easter Vigil and part of the Forty-second Psalm. It was called a "vision of mystical pro- gression." It proved exciting and baffling. For despite the superb playing of Denyse Molie and the careful direction of Hugh Ross the piece missed fire. It seemed loaded with significance that usually remained obscure. One felt it was often on the point of some astonishing revelation, that clouds would open and the God of Abraham, Kant, and Mr. Eddington be dis- covered in an atomic radiance. Indeed, to the text "deep calleth unto deep at the noise of Thy waterspouts" the mixture of terror and joy proclaimed in the program notes certainly took shape as, against shattering piano rhythms, the choral voices rose upon a prolonged and awesome crescendo. There was a sense of sundering dimensions, of the breaking through of strange lights and immense vistas, the swirling disintegration of normal perception attributed to the mystic before he loses himself in cosmic consciousness. Here the music should have stopped. No temple could have adequately crowned those stairs. Unfortunately it continued, and the work ended in throat-splitting and painful bathos. This work is the opposite of Mr. Prokofieff's brilliant and empty concerto, recently mentioned. Mr. Lourie was obviously for unforgettable impressions VISIT SOVIET RUSSIA Continental travel comforts From Leningrad to Moscow and down the picturesque Volga to the Caucasus or the Crimea and Ukraine. Witness, at first hand the powerful drama of Communism on trial. Interesting itineraries. Frequent sailings. Write for Booklet "N" Amalgamated Bank "eft.1 11-15 Union Square, New York City or Amalgamated Trust & Savings Bank 111 West Jackson Blvd., Chicago, III. :^m.^s^:cmv.^K^^^^:cS^^^K<^^,^r^i^^v^^f^mr^s^i-.s^ INTEGRATING JEWISH AND AMERICAN LIFE The integration of the Jewish cultural back- ground with American ideals and institutions is one of the aims of modern Jewish communities. This movement requires special knowledge and skill. The Training School for Jewish Social Work aims to supply both. May 9 is the last date for filing application for fellowships of $750 and $1000 For full information apply to M. J. Karpf, Director The Training School For Jewish Social Work A graduate school 67-71 W. 47th St., New York City When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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554 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3383 DISCUSSION GUILD EVENTS ARE CONSISTENT "SELL OUTS." TO AVOID INCONVENIENCE SECURE TICKETS WELL IN ADVANCE WILLI! SUCCEED? IRVINGr BABBITT HUMAMST SPOKESMAN MfYES" HENRY SEIDEL CANBY ENTOft SATDWVtf REflEW m'V*S.BUT- WWAT BRAND?" CARL VANDOPEN EDITOR LITERARY CHILD war "MO" UAItltY HANSEN "^SoSd™1 CHAIRMAN CARNEGIE HALL, RSI. EVE., MAY 9 57th St. & 7th Ave. at 8:45 TICKETS $l-$1.50-$2-$2.75 (Boxes on Application) For Sale at Box Office, Kand School Book Store, 7 Bast 15th St. Columbia Hook Store (Journalism Bidjf.) ON FRIDAY EVE., MAY 2 AT 8:30, HEYWOOD t>TT»>r tickets to both events. Open Eves, to 8:30. WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See fA Month in the Country — Guild — 52nd St., W. of B'dway. tApple Cart — Alvin — 52nd St., W. of B'dway. *Civic Repertory — 14th St., W. of Sixth Ave. — See Advertisement. Ruth Draper — Comedy — 4-lst St., E. of B'dway. ^Flying High— Apollo— W. 42nd St. ♦Hotel Universe — Beck — 45th St., E. of Eighth Ave. JJonica— Craig— 54th St., E. of B'dway. •The Green Pastures— Mansfield — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •The Last Mile— Sam H. Harris — *2nd St., W. of B'dway. tTopaze — Music Box — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •Uncle Vanya— Cort— W. 48th St. Films Journey's End — Gaiety — 46th St. and B'dway. All Quiet on the Western Front — Central — 47th St. and B'dway. Old and New — Cameo — 42nd St. and B'dway. Asphalt — 55th St. Playhouse — E. of 7th Ave. Bishop Murder Case and Two Arabian Knights — Beg. May 4 — Fifth Ave. Playhouse — 66 Fifth Ave. The Last of Mrs. Cheney — Beg. May 2; Slightly Scarlet — Beg. May 6 — Little Picture House — 50th St.. E. of Lexington Ave. Christina — Beg. Apr. 30; Hearts in Dixie and South Sea Rose — Beg. May 3— Film Guild— 52 W. Eighth St. Anna Christie — Beg. May 3 — Little Carnegie Playhouse — 146 W. 57th St. Lectures This Cockeyed World — Community Church — 34th St. and Park Ave., Fri. Eve., May 2 — Under auspices of Discussion Guild. Love in the Machine Age — The Group — 150 W. 85th St. — Tues. Eve., May 6th. Symposium "The New Generation" — Town Hall — Mon. Eve., May 5th. 'Drama. tComedy. {Musical. When writing to advertisers moved by what he had to say. Why then did he fail — save once — to move his hearers? Perhaps for one of two reasons. An artist's medium is the common denominator between his own emotional conviction and that of his audience. As he works over his subject, seeking to reduce its material to the simplest means that can support its content, he may pass the point of balance between creator and perceiver and go on to an exag- gerated simplification. The medium becomes increasingly ade- quate to him through familiarity, and he pares it down until it is no longer rich enough to carry his ideas and emotions to the spectator. The result is understatement — a sufficiently rare vice to make us hope that if this is the concerto's fault, Mr. Lourie's future works will correct it. One hopes, too, that Mr. Lourie will not fall into the error of loading his music with arbitrary meanings, or push esotericism too far, for his sin- cerity is undoubted. It is too rare a quality to be shut away in specialized chambers for the mystically elect. Hubbard Hutchinson Drama Lillian Gish Keeps a Secret THE audience which gathered to see "Uncle Vanya" pro- duced at the Cort Theater could probably be divided without great difficulty into two groups, the first being composed of those who came to see Chekhov's play and the sec- ond of those who were curious to learn if Miss Lillian Gish is really an actress or merely a puppet which happened to acquire renown in one of the various mysterious ways associated with the movies. The first of these groups was certainly rewarded, for "Uncle Vanya" is a play no less rich than the others which came from the same pen, but those who were anxious to answer the question about Miss Gish must have come away nearly as puzzled as they were when they went. It is not, be it understood, that the performance is bad, for if it were then our doubts would at least be resolved. The fact of the matter is, however, that she manages most adroitly to sidestep the question, that the role which has been assigned her and the interpretation which she has been allowed to give to it are such that we are no more sure than we were in the days when she was the particular star of the great Mr. Griffith whether she has real talents or merely certain odd deficiencies which a skilful director can utilize after the fashion of the marionette master and the character doll. There was always something negative about her, and Helena, as Miss Gish plays her, fits all too well the personality of the actress as it has been hitherto revealed, for she is little except an enigma. No one knows why she married the aging and tedious professor, no one knows why she remains faithful to him, and no one knows what kind of character, if any, she has. She is beautiful in a quaint, angular, and anemic sort of way. She confesses gently that she has no intelligence to speak of and no particular interest in anything whatsoever. And though she is, to be sure, kindly enough, it is hard to say whether or not that kindliness is due to more than an absence of passion so complete that not even malice is possible. Helena, in a word, remains merely a shell, and so does the actress who portrays her. Chekhov never tells us whether or not there is anything positive behind the mysteri- ous reserve of his character, and Miss Gish never allows us to see whether she is acting a role or merely behaving in her accustomed fashion — which is all very well so far as this par- ticular performance is concerned, but which leaves the question of her ability as an actress exactly where it was before she made her first appearance upon the legitimate stage. One is please mention The Nation

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May 7, 1930] The Nation 555 □ FILMS □ PLAYS D LECTURES □ CIVIC REPERTORY 'IMsttSr 50c, $1, $1.50. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2 :30 EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Fri. Eve., May 2. "Would-Be-Gentleman f Sat. Mat., May 3, "Peter Pan ;" Sat. Eve., "Romeo and Juliet ;" Mon. Eve., May 6, "Romeo and Juliet ;" Tues. Eve., May 6, "Sea Gull ;" Wed. Eve., May 7, "Open Door" and "Women Have Their Way;" Thurs. Mat., May 8. "Romeo and Juliet;" Thurs. Eve., "The Living Corpse." Seats 4 weeks in advance at Box Office & Town Hall, 113 W. 43rd St. LAST WEEK! in her ORIGINAL CHARACTER SKETCHES RUTH DRAPER Evenings : Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, 8 :50. CC\ A/I I? Fk V THEATRE, 41st East of Broadway. Mats. Thurs. VjKJLWEjU 1 and Sat. 2:30. VERY GOOD SEATS at $1.00 Popnlar Price ($2.50) Matinee Saturday HERMAN SHl'MLIN presents THE LAST MILE "Most exciting production Watts, Jr., Herald Tribune. New York this season." — Richard C A TVT tl H i RDIC Theatre 42nd St., West of Broadway. ■3/\iTl XI. n/VIXI\10 i£ves. 8:50. Matinees Wed. & Sat. 2:80. The Theatre Guild Presents HOTEL UNIVERSE A NEW PliAY By PHILIP BARRY MARTINfBECK Theatre. 45th St., W. of Eighth Ave. Evgs., 8 :50. Mats., Thurs. & Sat., 2 :50 A MONTH th^e COUNTRY By IVAN TTTRGENEV f~*i i 5 1 iA THEATRE, 52nd St., W. of Broadway VjllllU Evgs. 8:30. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:30. The Apple Cart Bernard Shaw's Political Extravaganza A ¥ X/TTVT Theatre, 52nd St., W. of Broadway >\jLiVi.rN Evgs.. 8:30. Mats., Wed. & Sat, 2:30 TIFFANY presents (( JOURNEY'S END" The all-talking screen version of R. C. Sherrlff's World-Famed Play with a powerful cast headed by COLIN CL1VE, creator of the stage role of Captain Stanhope. f~* AICTV THEATRE. B'way & 46th St. Vi^VIHi 1 X Twice Dally. 2:45-8:45. 3 times Sat., Sun. & Holidays 2:45—5:45—8:45. Midnight Show Every Saturday Night. Seats selling 4 weeks ahead. Eugene O'Neill's GRETA garboin "ANNA CHRISTIE" With Charles Bickford, Geo. Marion, Marie Dressier PLAZA THEATRE LITTLE CARNEGIE PL4YH0USE 58th St., Kast of Madison A Wed. to Fri.. April 30 to Me 146 West 57th Street Sat. to Toes., May 3 to 0 55 TH ST. PLATHOCSE. 55th St., E. of 7th Ave. Circle 0139. Continuous 1:30 until Midnite. NOW PLAYING Die Erich Pommer UFA Production ASPHALT A drama of modern street life in the German capital. Produced by the creators of "Homecoming" and "Hungarian Rhapsody." THE THEATRE OF THE DANCE 116 West 66th Street, Studio 220 — SUS. 0855. DORSH A Presents an unueual program of interest to the discerning every Saturday evening. Subscription $1.00 CANDY HONEY-MAID CHOCOLATES Less-Fattening How delicious you will say 1 What a real relief to forget the calories and enjoy all the candy one really desires. There are many pleasant discoveries in the New Yorker package. A realistic copy of a honey- comb. One pound De Luxe gift box at $2.50. Mail orders promptly filled. THE ALBERT N. DUKER ORGANIZATION 140 William St. N. Y. C. LECTURES AND FILMS To The Group: "What, no swimming pool, billiard room, tennis courts — instead a theater, chamber music, discussion groups, what, at last, a civilized club, in an uncivilized country, they tell me, prodigious!"— GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. THE GROUP A Clearing House of Opinion For The Intellectually Adult meets every Tuesday evening at AUDITORIUM 150 West 85th St. (One block East of Broadway.) Tuesday evening, May fith, at 8:S0 P. M. FLOYD DELL (Distinguished Author and Critic) will speak on : "LOVE IN THE MACHINE AGE" MAY 13th. SPRING FESTIVAL Entertainment and Dance Admission Members 50c Non-Members 75c (Membership dues for year $1.00) Weekly notices mailed on request. 6 Splendid Speakers in One Splendid Evening Symposium: THE NEW GENERATION TOWN HALL— MONDAY, 8:30, MAY 5th John Watson Harry Elmer Barnes Sidonie Gruenberg Fritz Wittels Samuel Schmalhausen Victor Calverton Tickets: $1, tt, $3 — at Town Hall Box Office or Roxanna Wells Lecture Bureau, 393 7th Ave., N. Y. ^*- S- the most exciting and significant problem now facing SOVIET RUSSIA explained in ,o° ,*' S? "OLD S NEW »» SOVKINO FILM DEPICTING THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE DIRECTED BY THE CREATOR OF "PO- TEMKIN" AND "TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD" . - . S. M. Eisenstein iSZSZiS, FRIDAY, MAY 2nd =s; CAMEO T.Z E A T R E 2nd St. & B'way Popular Prices When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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556 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3383 SUMMER THURSDAY FRIDAY SATURDAY SUNDAY glorious $<m*t FUN DAYS «PV NO EXTRAS. EVERYTHING INCLUDED. 1. Round Trip Fare 3. All Meals, coming and going 2. Camp Transportation 4. Stay at Camp VIA SPECIALLY CHARTERED "NON-STOP" TRAIN Leaves Thursday, 6 P. M. ACCOMMODATIONS LIMITED EARLY RESERVATION URGED You wouldn't know the old place, nowl . . . the same old friendly spirit . . . but what improvements . . . what facilitiea . . . e'en the g-olf course nearing completion! Special June Rates $25 Weekly ECHO LAKE TAVERN 475 FTFTH AVE. Phone: LEX 8879 B. B. NODELL M. NCDELL E^IHQ LASUr TAVERN] A Camp for Adults ADIRONDACK | WARRENSBURG GREEN MANSIONS Warrensburg, N. Y. decoration day week- end excursion in the green mansion manner Won't You Join Us? Reservations limited. For particulars <write or telephone GREEN MANSIONS, 11 West 42nd Street SPECIAL JUNE RATES Lena Barish Sam Garlen Longacre 2688 TlMBERLAND WHERE CONGENIAL FOLK GATHER In the Heart oj the Adirondacks DECORATION DAY WEEK-END By our Special through Express leaving Grand Central Thursday 6:25 P.M. Dinner on train. ALL CAMP SPORTS MODERN COMFORTABLE ACCOMMODATIONS EXCELLENT MKALS Total charge of $29 includes round trip R. R. fare N. Y. C. Address Directors S3 West 42nd St. Esther R. Kessler Pennsylvania 7663 Morris Harkavy (Booklet on Request) TWEEDS I REAL HARRIS TWEED Direct from the Makers. Suii-1, iitihs by Mall. Postage Paid. Samples free on statins; shades desired, and if for Gents or Ladies wear. NEWALL, ISO Stornoway, Scotland. merely reminded of the fact that some sphinxes have secrets and some have not. As to the play itself, no one familiar with Chekhov's other work needs to have described again either his charm or his peculiar melancholy humor. This particular piece is called a comedy, and if by comedy one means a tale which ends in gen- eral happiness or lovers' meetings then the title is hardly de- served. But if, on the other hand, one means by the term a work which accepts human weakness as the basis of its effect and its philosophy then the right to the description is richly earned. "Uncle Vanya" exists in order that full-length portraits may be drawn of certain delightful but absurd eccentrics such as only Chekhov's tolerant but unrelenting analysis could make real — of the pompous professor who has spent twenty-five years lecturing about things which "the intelligent knew already and the stupid weren't interested in" and of the pockmarked de- pendent, Waffles, who boasts that he is happy only to be told that he lies, that, as a matter of fact, the reason everybody loves him is simply that he is unhappier than everybody else. Such company is neither brilliant nor exciting, but when seen through the keen, gentle, and almost passionless eyes of Chekhov it is as interesting as any company could be. He neither admires, nor lectures, nor despises them. He is neither sentimentalist, nor satirist, nor cynic. And yet there is something which in- spires in him both a profound interest and a complete under- standing. Is that something, perhaps, the fact that he was so much a part of the generation he described that he heard always in his ear a whisper which said, "There but for the grace of God go I"? In a generally excellent production the work of Walter Connolly as Uncle Vanya and of Osgood Perkins as the doctor stands out — which is odd enough in view of the fact that the first has been associated chiefly with popular farces and the second with "hard-boiled" melodramas. "Lady Clara" (Booth Theater) is a mild but amusing comedy about a cockney girl who discovers herself to be the daughter of an earl. For a time the audience is kept in pleasant doubt whether the plot is going to take its cue from "Pyg- malion" or "Peg o' My Heart," but the girl not unwisely de- cides that a humble station is preferable to the course of dis- cipline required to make a lady of her. Florence Nash plays the heroine with much humor. "Penal Law 2010" (Biltmore Theater) is as unspeakably bad as plays produced by the author generally are, while as for "Room 349" (National Theater) it must try to get along with- out comment from me. A last-minute postponement on the part of the management made it impossible for me to attend. From the reports, however, I judge that the apparently un- fortunate combination of events was a blessing in disguise. Joseph Wood Krutch THE MAN WHO WAS THERE By N. A. Temple-Ellis 660N THE mN1NG-FLOOB of the little bungalow v-J lay a man with a bullet through his heart, and on the veranda outsit" "nother man sat In a deck chair, placidly read;:. Palgrave's 'GOLDEN TREASURY.' " That's the beginning of "The Man Who Was There." And the whole story speeds along at that thrilling pace. Here's the new puzzler by the author of "The Inconsistent Villains," winner of the $2,500 Dutton Mystery Prize. $2.50. [E DUTTON PRIZE MYSTERY FOR MAY When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. cxxx NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MAY 14, 1930 No. 3384 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 557 EDITORIALS: Ballyhoover 560 Let India Go! 561 The Five- Year Plan 561 Antique or Golden Oak 562 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 563 PENNSYLVANIA'S BATTLE ROYAL. By Richard J. Beamish... 564 SAFETY LAST: I. HOW SAFE IS THE SUBWAY? By Louis Resnick 566 DETROIT'S CRIME CLINIC. By J. A. Fellows 568 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 570 CORRESPONDENCE 570 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 571 BOOKS, FILMS, DRAMA: De Libris. By Robert Liddell Lowe 572 Fake Culture tor Real. By Henry Hazlitt 572 Souls in Business. By Clinton Simpson 573 Whitewash for Pope. By Joseph Wood Krutch 573 Misgovernment by Injunction. By William Seagle 574 Beethoven as Fiction Hero. By Ray C. B. Brown 575 The Inward Vision. By Oswald Garrison Villard 576 Books in Brief 576 Films: Eisenstein's Latest. By Alexander Bakshy 577 Drama: Miss Le Gallienne's Juliet. By Joseph Wood Krutch 578 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Health Insurance in Austria. By Dr. Ernst Kulka 582 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY. Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. A MORE BITTER FIGHT than that which has arisen over the nomination of Judge Parker to the Supreme Court has rarely been seen in the Senate. It reached its climax, perhaps, with the specific charge, by Sena- tor Ashurst, that "judgeships, federal, are being offered, I will not say to Senators, but to a Senator, if he will vote for confirmation." "I stand on that statement," declared the Arizona Senator, "and challenge you to call the lobby com- mittee on that statement." At the same session Senator McKellar charged that his office had been rifled, and sug- \ gested that Secret Service agents might be responsible. Two : other Senators also declared that their offices had been en- « tered. When things reach such a pitch as this President » Hoover may well begin to wonder whether the nomination was after all the "master political stroke" that it was ex- , pected to be. Certainly the debate has failed to reveal one good reason for Judge Parker's appointment. His nomina- j tion by the President stands revealed to the country in all its nakedness as a bare political move. The Supreme Court is deserving of more respect. NO FEWER THAN 1,028 MEMBERS of the Ameri- can Economic Association, comprising the leading teachers of economics in the colleges and universities and . economic experts the country over, persons who have no direct interest whatsoever in the tariff schedules, have signed a petition to President Hoover demanding that he veto the pending tariff bill. The statements they make are unanswer- able: (1) that the bill would increase prices to domestic consumers; (2) that only a few wage-earners can hope to profit by the tariff bill; (3) that our export trade in general would suffer; (4) that American manufacturers as a whole do not need higher tariffs; (5) that our farmers will in no wise benefit by the legislation; (6) that the higher tariffs will not decrease unemployment; (7) that the new bill will tremendously increase foreign hostility to us; and (8) that "a tariff war does not furnish good soil for the growth of world peace." The signers might well have added that Presi- dent Hoover cannot sign this bill without stultifying himself, since it does not do those things which he asked of Congress when he called the special session and does those things, notably a general revision of the tariff, which he specifically stated that he did not want. President Hoover may spend another seven years in the White House, but he will never have a more direct and searching test than will be afforded by this tariff bill when it is presented to him. How will his moral fiber react to it? SPEED RECORDS for tariff-making appear to have been broken by the Canadian Government which on May 1, without taking the trouble to broadcast to the world that far-reaching tariff changes were in process, announced that the new duties would go into effect at nine o'clock the following morning. All this, be it noted, before the budget bill, in which the tariff changes are incorporated, had ever been acted upon by the Dominion Parliament. Pending the adoption of the budget, all customs duties will be collected subject to changes necessitated by the new rates. The new tariff, described in a Canadian press dispatch as "the most drastic and far-reaching customs revision of this century," will affect, it is estimated, some $300,000,000 of imports from the United States, while changes in the British prefer- ence duties will touch about $200,000,000 of imports from the mother country. Whether the new duties are expected to have any effect in mitigating the excesses and irrationali- ties of the Smoot-Hawley gouge is not, of course, divulged, but if Mr. Mackenzie King and his associates had been con- tent to twirl their thumbs while the American Congress boosted the levies upon one of America's best customers, the outlook for a Liberal victory in the election that will almost certainly be held within a year would have been appreciably dimmed. THE FARM DEBENTURE menace is not yet out of the way, although the House of Representatives has taken the commendable step of striking out, by a substantial majority of 231 to 161, the debenture provision from the tariff bill which it is considering. Whether the vote actually represents the majority opinion of the House is not certain, because the rejection was achieved under threat of a veto. Mr. Hoover, to be sure, in his letter to Mr. Tilson, the Republican leader, did not say that he would veto the bill if

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558 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3384 it retained the debenture feature ; all he said was that he was still opposed to the debenture plan ; but Mr. Tilson declared that he could not imagine that anything else than a veto was foreshadowed, the majority of the House accepted his inter- pretation, and the debenture monstrosity went overboard. It may still be saved, however, by the Senate, which put it into the bill and which has yet to act upon the House com- promise. There is a fly in the ointment, too, because the same House yielded further to Mr. Hoover and retained the flexible-tariff provision which the Senate had stricken out. The warning of Representative Summers of Texas that "every single attempt in the history of government to dele- gate revenue powers to the executive has proved disastrous,' that "it is as certain as human nature that a President will sooner or later violate such authority," and that "it is only a question of which one it will be," apparently went un- heeded by the House. As Mr. Hoover wants the power which the flexible-tariff provision would give him, the Sen- ate, which does not want it but adores debentures, will have a fine chance to play some more politics with the bill. NAVAL LIMITATION, Italian style, has just been given an illustration which ought to disturb even Mr. Hoover's complacency. On April 27, five days after the signing of the London treaty, there were launched from Italian shipyards more than 30,000 tons of fighting craft — two 10,000-ton cruisers, two 5,000-ton cruisers, and one 800-ton submarine. These vessels, it was explained, were all begun one or two years ago and took the water now with no reference, of course, to anything talked about at London. Three days later the Cabinet approved plans for a further 42,900 tons — one 10,000-ton cruiser, two flotilla leaders of 5,000 tons each, four 1,240-ton destroyers, and twenty-two submarines, of which four displace 1,390 tons each, six 810 tons, and twelve 610 tons; altogether twenty-nine vessels. This is Italy's reply to what the Lavoro Fascista, referring to the London conference, calls "the intention of some to relegate us to the lowest rank of the world Powers." The new construction, the same paper remarks, "constitutes the best proof that, far from wishing to engage in a race for armaments, Italy will maintain and have recognized her incontrovertible right as a great sea Power." France, natur- ally, is a good deal perturbed, and some unholy critics of the London treaty have begun to ask how long it will be before Great Britain, with its long tradition of a two-Power stand- ard, will feel compelled to invoke the safeguarding clause which allows any signatory to increase its fleet if it deems its own security threatened. At any rate, the outlook for an agreement about Franco-Italian parity seems somewhat dim. PROSPERITY TOMORROW, still says President Hoover. We hope so. As for yesterday and today, that's a different matter, unhappily. Railroad gross earnings in February were 10.1 per cent less than in February, 1929, while March earnings were 12.5 per cent less than those of last year. Net earnings were off 29.8 per cent in February and 37.3 per cent in March. The Bureau of Business Con- ditions of the Alexander Hamilton Institute in its current summary points out that car loadings for the week ending April 19 totaled 893,000, against 1,004,000 a year ago, a decline of 11.6 per cent, "the most unfavorable comparison which has occurred in 1930." Orders for new freight cars in April totaled 1,843, against 6,983 a year ago. The steel industry during the past week has reduced its production from 80 to 78 per cent of capacity, against 97 per cent last year, and there is talk of further price-cutting. In the con- struction industry the F. W. Dodge Corporation reports contracts awarded during the first three weeks of April as 26.7 per cent below the figures of 1929. April figures this year were 3.4 per cent above March ; last year they were 32.5 per cent higher than in March. Governor Roosevelt in a telegram to Secretary Lamont states that preliminary tabulations of factory employment in New York indicate a further decrease in April as compared with March and de- clares that the index of such employment, steadily declining since October last, now stands at the lowest point in its six- teen years' history. It will take a good deal of lung power to talk away figures like these. CITIZENSHIP in the United States is becoming more difficult of access every day. Miss Averil Bland, a Canadian war nurse who saw service at Brest during the World War, has been reported unfavorably for citizenship because, although she declares herself willing to go to the front and nurse the wounded in the event of war, she will not take an oath to bear arms in defense of her new country. Miss Bland put her refusal on the ground of religion and claimed that the United States guaranteed freedom of re- ligious belief to its citizens. Whereupon the presiding judge uttered the surprising doctrine that there was a difference between the rights of citizens and the "privileges accorded persons desirous of becoming citizens." It is high time that this matter was thoroughly threshed out in the courts and in Congress. In this connection every support should be given to the resolution introduced by Representative Griffin of New York, proposing that "no person mentally, morally, and otherwise qualified shall be debarred from citizenship by reason of his or her religious views or philosophical opin- ions with respect to the lawfulness of war as a means of settling international disputes." No one with such a belief who has yet applied for citizenship has declared himself un- willing to suffer the legal consequences during war time of refusing to bear arms. We cannot much longer continue the spectacle of refusing citizenship to persons in every way qualified except that they will not promise to kill a possible future enemy. MAY DAY PASSED OFF, on the whole, quietly. In New York this was due in part to Mr. Whalen's commendable order to the police to leave their night-sticks at home and to his successful attempt to separate the meetings in Union Square held until 2 p.m. by the Veterans of For- eign Wars and after 3 p.m. by the Communists. It was due also to the considered second judgment of both groups that it would be better to avoid a row. Charges have been made by the American Civil Liberties Union that police kept spectators from attending the Communist meeting, but in spite of this upwards of 30,000 came while the Veterans welcomed no more than 10,000. New York City employees, for some unknown reason, were given the day off with pay. This enabled them to march in the Veterans' parade, run around the block, and come back in time to hear the Com- munist speeches. In other cities, on the whole, police officers maintained an air of amused tolerance and insisted on being

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 559 protective, which, however irritating to the members of the Workers' Party, is far better than a series of broken heads. In all about 300 workers were arrested over the country for offenses committed on or in the week preceding May 1. Considering the previous temper of the police and the degree of general unemployment, this seems very modest. Commis- sioner Whalen's "secret Russian documents" turned out to be a good deal of a dud. Indications that they are the same old forgeries, or others like them, that have been making the rounds for years are widespread. Unfortunately these "docu- ments" do make some impression on the more innocent of our hard-boiled business men, and on certain Congressmen like Hamilton Fish, but this is one of the chances that Soviet Russia must take in trading with America. THE DIFFICULTIES of utility regulation are well illustrated in the ten-year struggle over utility rates n the State of New York. In November, 1929, a federal :ourt allowed the New York Telephone Company a 7 per rent return on the value of its intrastate property. The com- pany filed a new and advanced rate schedule effective Febru- iry 1, 1930. The Public Service Commission, after slicing )ff 20 per cent of the increase, made the rates temporarily effective. On April 18, with the proceedings for permanent -ates still pending, the company suddenly put forward a >rand-new schedule, calculated to bring in $8,000,000 more han the present rates, on the theory that the business depres- ion requires such an advance in order to insure a 7 per cent eturn. In a unanimous decision handed down on May 1 he commission rejected this increase and actually readjusted ates to yield, it figures, $900,000 less than the present return, »ut still $10,000,000 more than last year's rates. It cut rom the valuation claimed by the company the entire amount '>f $35,000,000 in its depreciation reserve, but rejected the laim of counsel for the City of New York that the annual llowance for depreciation should be limited to actual prop- rty requirements for the year in question. The company nnounces that it will comply with the order of the commis- ion, but under protest. The commission appears to be satis- ied with its own success in regulating telephone rates. The ubscriber may not wholly share that satisfaction. ^REAT BRITAIN may outrank France as a colonial ut the celebration, however, is the evidence which it has . jfiforded of Algerian loyalty. The New York Times, which | litorially cannot be accused of lack of friendliness toward t j'reat Britain, pertinently remarks that with the exception of j .me small disturbances in Indo-China the entire colonial em- re of France is at peace. Algeria, in some respects the most nportant of the French possessions, is organized on a de- irtmental as well as a colonial basis, with three senators id nine deputies in Parliament, while in the framing of the budget, which is separate from that of France, the governor- general is assisted by delegations representing the Mussulman natives as well as the French, and by a superior council com- posed in part of elected members. In comparison with Great Britain, which faces today a seething discontent in South Africa, Egypt, and Iraq, as well as in India, France may well feel content with the result of its administrative efforts. BANNING A TEXTBOOK because some parent doesn't like it is pretty poor business for any school authorities anywhere, but exactly that has lately happened in New York. "Modern History," written by Professor Carlton J. H. Hayes and Professor Parker T. Moon, both of Columbia University, and listed for some seven years among the history textbooks which teachers in the New York City schools might use, has been stricken from the list by Acting Superintendent Harold G. Campbell on the ground, as alleged by the Reverend Lefferd M. A. Haughwout, an Episcopal rector, that it is pro-Catholic, radical, and anti- patriotic. Professors Hayes and Moon are Roman Catholics, but their book, as far as appears from the passages cited as objectionable, embodies the views now commonly held by historical scholars about such subjects as the Reformation and democracy. Needless to say, the views are not alto- gether acceptable to thick-and-thin Protestants and embattled hundred-percenters. It seems pretty late in the day, how- ever, to challenge the book on those grounds, and entirely arbitrary to strike it from the list by the fiat of a single official. If at any points the book is erroneous or injudicious its mistakes should be corrected, but we hope that neither authors nor publishers will allow themselves to be coerced into "revising" the book to still patriotic or religious clamor. The country had a dose of such "revision" during the World War, and it does not need another. THERE IS ONE SOUTHERN MAYOR who be- lieves that he is the mayor of all the people in his town and not of one race alone. This phenomenon is twenty-seven years old ; he is mayor of a town in Oklahoma. When he ran for office he promised a square deal to everybody, even to Negroes, and marvelous to say he was elected. The other day when William Pickens, a field agent for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, reached his city to make an address the mayor actually met him at the station and took part in the meeting. He even went so far as to address his Negro audience as "ladies and gentle- men." He declared, in the presence of some white friends and relatives, that he belonged to the new order in the South and that he regarded colored folk as a part of the people of the community having the same rights as all others. As Mr. Pickens tells the story in the Crisis, the mayor publicly joined the association and subscribed for the Crisis. More than that, he told the audience that when an excited elderly white lady had stormed into his office exclaiming "What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it — the niggers — the niggers are taking our section of the town ?" he quietly remarked : "Madam, I am not going to do anything about it. There is law in the land, and they are not violating it. They've a right to do what they are doing." This is, fortunately, one of the many signs that the new generation of whites in the South is not going to be bound by the cant and the prejudices of its seniors.

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560 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3384 Ballyhoover THE Hoover Administration is bankrupt— intellectu- ally, morally, and politically. Lacking sturdy moral principles and a considered plan of action, it has failed to offer to Congress and the country a Sorely needed leadership; and today, at the end of only fourteen months, it finds itself discredited in the eyes of all classes of people. The business men who put up the money to elect Mr. Hoover on the theory that they were getting a great business execu- tive with "an engineering mind" are becoming disgusted with his inability to deliver the goods, though publicly they may place the blame elsewhere. The faithful party workers who run campaigns and win elections are disturbed and con- fused by his lack of political sense. The plain men who voted for him in the comfortable assurance of a continuance of Coolidge prosperity now listen resentfully to the blare of the loud speaker predicting good times just around the cor- ner, while they study the red figures in their little pront- and-loss accounts or tramp the streets looking for a job. The farmers, granted the ineffable boon of the Farm Board, are trading in their dollar wheat for the stone of the Grundy tariff. The prohibitionists, who were going to see the pro- hibition law effectively enforced, see what they see. The peace-lovers and the taxpayers of the country, who looked forward to a Quaker President reducing needless military burdens, see the fiasco of London and the big-navy advocates planning to take advantage of it and build up to parity with Great Britain. There does seem to be a reasonable prospect of our getting out of Haiti if Mr. Hoover does not weaken ; but if there is another substantial achievement to put to the credit of his Administration it is hard to think what it is. What is the explanation of this political bankruptcy? To our mind it is a double one. Partly the situation is due to the defects of Mr. Hoover's own mind and character. Partly it indicates the hollowness of the political system that he represents. During the whole of Mr. Hoover's public life he has shown an incorrigible tendency to substitute words for ac- tion, to become a hero by publicity, not by deeds. The dis- appointed millions who today still worship their image of the Hoover of the far-off days of Belgian relief might well re- member the blistering Words with which Mr. Leffingwell greeted Mr. Hoover's appointment as food controller on our entrance into the war. Never, perhaps, has any other per- son had a personal publicity machine as powerful and ef- fective as the one that made Herbert Hoover President of the United States. Lauded as a great engineer with a broad knowledge of economic facts and a deep understand- ing of economic principles, he has displayed consistently a contempt for facts and an ignorance or indifference in re- spect to principles that would have disgraced a sophomore. When Mr. Hoover entered the White House we were bound head on for a business smash due to insane stock speculation. The facts were notorious; even at that time it was not too late to avoid the worst effects of the specula- tive mania ; the machinery of control was at hand in the Federal Reserve System; informed and conservative men in the banking world itself had been urging its use. No more imperative duty could have confronted an intelligent and economically minded President than to help put backbone into a weak Federal Reserve Board. For eight wild months the President did nothing, and then the catastrophe came. We do not say that President Hoover could have prevented that disaster. We do say that he did not lift a finger to prevent it, though he had, by virtue of his position and reputation, a unique opportunity and responsibility. We are now in the seventh disastrous month of business depression consequent on that smash. What has been the contribution of the Administration during that period? First, a series of spectacular and enormously advertised con- ferences with business leaders out of which was to come an impossible stimulation of construction that would have been economically unsound if it could have been brought about Second, a deliberate suppression of the facts of depression and unemployment, and a deliberate attempt to persuade the country that things were going well. Give the President full credit for believing that that is the way to make the go well, his theory and his action are still those of the pub- licity man, not of the economist and statesman; they bring scant comfort to the embarrassed business man or the des- perate worker out of a job. On May 1 the President an- nounced: "While the crash only took place six months ago I am convinced we have passed the worst and with continuec unity of effort we shall rapidly recover." Two days lat the stock market crashed again. And for the future? A commission, sometime, to study the economic forces behin booms and depressions; but it will not be appointed "unri the present slight disorder has completely subsided and : proper perspective is afforded." What bosh! The same weakness, disregard of facts, neglect of sounc principles, and lack of leadership, combined with the sami blatant and hollow publicity that have marked the Presi dent's handling of the business situation, have characterize* also his treatment of disarmament, farm relief, the tariff taxation, prohibition, and all the other issues he has touched But then to crown the story he appoints as chairman of th. national committee of his party his personal friend, a powe lobbyist who speculates with lobby funds, and when it i all made public the President, for some mysterious reason does not dare to kick him out. It is not pleasant thus to criticize the Chief Executive but it is necessary; for President Hoover is only the perfec example of a bad system of government that the America) people ought no longer to tolerate. It is a system of gov ernment by publicity and bluff, not by reasoned policie grounded in an honest study of facts. It is a system o expedients and compromises based on no moral, politica or economic principles. It creates no genuine political issues it carries on no real process of public education. Both ol parties alike are a part of that system, and both alike ar bankrupt. We need today a new political group, respectfi of facts, brought together on real issues, holding real prir ciples, ready to go out and fight for them and to suffe defeat for them if necessary. It is our only alternativ to government by ballyhoo. ,

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 561 Let India Go! ~^ ANDHI has been arrested under an ordinance of 1827 under which he will be held without trial. The G results of this action cannot be recorded as we go to press, but the situation will certainly not grow less acute. Censorship on press messages to and from India was put into effect shortly after the Mahatma's arrest. According to one of the followers of Gandhi writing in an Indian journal, passive resistance, or satyagraha (lit- erally, insistence on truth), will "succeed" in one of three ways. Gandhi and his associates may die in the attempt to stand by truth, but their deaths would be instrumental in the spread of the truth for which they died; forces of violence may be released which will sweep the British out of India; 3r the Mahatma will "convert" Great Britain, presumably to the point of giving India her independence. Another re- sult which seems all too likely in view of Gandhi's arrest Is that forces of Nationalist and other violence will be re- leased; these in turn will be met with British violence; rhousands of Indians will be killed and a few Britishers; India will be subdued. But will it? The urge to govern one's self or at least :o cease to be governed by someone else grows from a stub- >orn and deep seed. That urge cannot be killed, though t may be retarded, either by suppression and bloodshed or >y kindness and sweet reasonableness. The Englishman, al- : nost any Englishman, says: "If we withdraw from India ! here will be chaos. The peasants will suffer most." The Englishman also says: "The Nationalist forces in India are legligible. The masses do not care about self-government. : 3esides, there is no unity in India." And behind all these vords is the economic fact — of which the Englishman may ir may not be conscious as he speaks in favor of holding on : o India — that England needs India; and the further fact : hat at several vital economic points what is good for India - s not good for England. There seems little doubt that if England should with- Iraw from India there would be chaos. But the Nationalist ays, "We would rather have chaos under our own rule han have order imposed by someone else." And the Na- ionalist cannot be ignored. The argument that National- sts are only a handful means nothing. There have never >een more than a handful of revolutionaries in any revo- ution yet recorded. As for the masses, the "dumb millions" s Gandhi calls them, of what real relevance is their atti- ude if they have any? If it were relevant, who could claim heir allegiance with more confidence, Lord Irwin or Mahatma Gandhi? Finally, with regard to the economic r real reason for withholding self-government, whether it e called dominion status or independence — and Gandhi has lade it clear that the terms are interchangeable in his mind -England cannot forever weigh the scales in her favor ith the artificial weights of regiments and cruisers. ftThe idea of national liberty is abroad in India for er or for worse. Censorship of newspapers will not ct it. Neither will the arrest of Gandhi. If England is nse and farseeing the Simon Commission, whose report is lomentarily expected, will find that India is ready for ominion status. The Five- Year Plan THE daily press reports that the opening, three months ahead of time, of the new 1,700-mile Russian rail- road, the "Turksib" road from Turkestan to Siberia, has led to increased confidence in the success of Moscow's proposal to compress the Five- Year Plan into four years. To us this proposal seems a great mistake. Even five years is too short a period in which to achieve as much as is planned without the heavy toll exacted by the inevitable waste of such extraordinary speed. That colossal blunders are being made at a great cost the Communists themselves do not deny ; they declare, however, that speed is absolutely essential and the extra price thereof a secondary consideration. This is not a complete answer. The very immensity of the plan creates a tremendous burden for inexperienced executives called upon suddenly to coordinate the elements essential to success. Those familiar with large industrial undertakings know that the real strain does not come during the period when plans are being made. This is largely the stage in which the Soviets find themselves today. Thus, the government recently signed a contract with Albert Kahn, Inc., of Detroit, to supervise the construction of plants upon which, if we may trust the all but unbelievable report of the New York Times, $1,900,000,000 are to be spent in 1930 alone. It remains, of course, to be seen how rapidly the 552 plants and factories to be started in this year under Kahn's supervision will actually progress. It seems impossi- ble that the manufacturing facilities of the Soviets will be able to meet all the tremendous demand for steel, cement, lumber, power, and the hundreds of various kinds of ma- terial required for the Kahn program alone. Today we hear that, with relatively little of this work under way, the Soviets are not able to supply the necessary building materials on schedule time. If this should necessitate a sudden turning to foreign countries for additional materials, that would in itself disarrange the Five- Year Plan, its budget not being prepared for any such contingency. That certain industries, such as tractor and automobile plants, can be expanded rapidly is perfectly true. The great basic industries, however, such as coal and ore mining, re- spond but slowly to new development. It usually takes from three to five years to develop mines to the point where they can achieve production. It is obvious that the new shafts ought to be driven with great speed, but it is a fact that production of iron ores and the non-ferrous metals is far behind schedule. There is a difference of opinion as to how much new construction has actually taken place in the steel industry, about which after all the whole industrial plan revolves. Statistics showing increased production in this and all other lines are impressive, but they start from a base seventeen years old. Similarly impressive figures could be shown in comparable lines in most countries. In Russia, so far, increased production has come essentially from more efficient use of hitherto existing equipment and man power. Future increases must come from new construction. If it is, however, assumed that all the projected con- struction can be accomplished with enormous effort within the time-limit set, the fact remains that when plants and equipment are ready they cannot be operated unless there

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562 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3384 are enough trained executives and skilled workmen on hand. Can the Soviets obtain sufficient engineers and executives to run efficiently all their industrial plants as they are today, to say nothing about the 552 plants of the Kahn program alone ? Yet it is on the operation of the plants that the Soviets will stand or fall. The Russian people will not complain if the Five- Year Plan is not finished on time provided they are getting some proof that mass production of the necessities they so sorely need is under way. The outer world will have no reason to sneer, for even if the Five-Year Plan should be lengthened to ten the achievement would still be nothing short of miraculous. Unfortunately, workmen can- not be trained over night to make accurate machine tools and to work with the precision that modern industry de- mands. The Russians will therefore have to rely more and more upon foreign engineering aid. But here the critical situation in foreign exchange has caused the Soviets to reduce the pay offered to foreigners for engineering services to 60 per cent of the former figures. This will compel American firms seeking to maintain their normal profit ratio to sub- stitute cheaper engineers, or else reputable firms will find the lure of a high profit ratio in Russia disappearing and will turn their attention elsewhere. As a final example of the dangers of the Five-Year Plan, when lately a huge electric project was started where it was impossible to market more than 30 per cent of its output, there was a tremendous strain on the finances of the govern- ment, which found itself compelled to create plants in cities to absorb the surplus power. All of these considerations will count heavily in the decision, not only as to whether or not Russia can instal mass production, but also whether or not it can deliver goods in mass of sufficient cheapness to bring the cost of living within the reach of Russian working men and women. If this can actually be achieved with such speed it will constitute a miracle. Antique or Golden Oak THE April number of the Theatre Guild Magazine contains an interesting article entitled Siam Prefers the Movies. It seems that on the occasion of a re- cent royal celebration the author, L. L. Robbins, had an opportunity of witnessing the traditional dramatic enter- tainments of the country, but he reports that the spectators were neither very numerous nor very enthusiastic. The ballet, the acrobatic pantomime, and the shadow picture were re- garded for a few minutes with languid interest and then the crowd drifted away toward the cinema where Tom Mix was being lustily cheered as he galloped across the screen in the general direction of distressed virtue. Siam is westernized. The royal garage is now far more important than the stables where the royal elephants are kept and westernization means more than improved sanitation and new means of transportation, for it does something to the psychology of the population. Formerly the people had delighted in the traditional representation of the familiar tale; now, like the westerner, they demand the surprise in- herent in the new story and they find it in the products of Hollywood. In Bangkok today there is not, says Mr. Rob- bins, a single theater where the native drama is regularly performed, but there are half a dozen large picture houses. What is happening there is, of course, happening in every out-of-the-way corner of the earth. Whenever primitive people are supplied with the products of the machine civilization they accept them with uncritical en- thusiasm, and they value our vulgarities quite as highly as the benefits of our labor-saving devices. It is said, for in- stance, that the Japanese peasants now throw away the color prints so much sought after by collectors and replace them with gaudy lithographs supplied by the Sirrger Sewing Ma- chine Company. But we do not, of course, need to go so far afield for illustrations of the same sort. Many a Park Avenue apartment is now furnished with the early Ameri- can furniture which was thrown out of New England farm- houses to make way for the golden oak of Grand Rapids. The student of balladry who goes to the North Carolina j mountains in search of the art which was kept alive from | the seventeenth century down to the time when the railroad j came will find in the cabin a phonograph blaring forth the j ditties of tin-pan alley, while only the octogenarian dozing 5 in the corner can be persuaded to recall a few fragments of the all-but-forgotten songs of his youth. This process of vulgarization involves certain problems of psychology and of aesthetics which have never been sat- isfactorily solved. It is all very well to say cynically that it is in the nature of man to choose the worst and that, for ex- ample, a dignified table of maple was never accepted except faute de mieux, in the absence of golden oak. But the ex- planation will not hold water. It is far too obvious that the makers of even primitive furniture were artists with an instinctive sense of style and that the beauty of their work is not — at least entirely — either something imposed upon them by the limitations of their material or something merely imagined by us because we find the work "quaint." Yet it is not easy to reconcile the gift of the primitive cabinet- maker or the primitive minstrel with his willingness to ac- cept, in the course of one generation at most, the wretched substitutes which he so readily comes to admire. Doubtless it is easier, and perhaps it is cheaper, to send to Grand Rapids; but there is no doubt that he actually prefers the uglier thing. And thus it seems impossible to explain away either the reality of his native capacities or the ease with which they are corrupted. Various explanations have been offered. In the case of the Japanese and his pictures, it has, for example, been suggested that the lithograph does possess certain artistic virtues — a highly developed perspective, for instance — which the color prints do not and that these virtues, now banal to us, strike fresh on the eye of the peasant. Moreover, this type of explanation has been extended. There are, it is said, merits in jazz and movies and golden oak so familiar that we do not see them, but very real to the remote people who get them for the first time. But though there is doubt- less something in the explanation it is hardly sufficient. The mystery remains and we must rest content with the con- clusion that taste, though it may be a relatively feeble thing, is rarer than creative genius. It is lost on the first contact with the flashiness and variety of complicated civ- ilizations, and it is only through long cultivation that the sophisticated man gets back as much of it as the simple man had before he was bewildered by the strangeness products dumped upon him from the factories. of the

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 563 It Seems to Heywood Broun THE next time that Mr. Hoover has an impulse to talk about national prosperity and the financial state of the country I trust that he will count ten before saying a word and then appoint a commission. Every time the President makes an optimistic speech the stock market breaks wildly. And that is no accident but a definite and tangible criticism of one of Herbert Hoover's cardinal faults. Wail Street has its own peculiar defects but in the main the stock manipulators are realistic men. The general public is romantic and can be moved to enthusiasm even in harsh times. But the bigger plungers have no illusions. They are not much moved by rosy dreams. Earnings statements are more important to them than epigrams of good cheer. And it seems to be their concerted decision that President Hoover is not a frank person. Indeed, according to their interpretation his words are useful only when construed in direct reverse. When words af cheer come out of Washington they know that the Chief Executive is worried. His statement that the crisis is over means to them that stormy days are still ahead. It is not necessary, of course, that any President should mold his con- ; duct in such a way as to please the gambling fraternity of the stock market, but it is hardly praiseworthy for the nation's leader to cloak himself in the folds of indirection. Nobody can say that President Hoover has faced the present economic situation with complete clarity and courage. To be sure, he did not start from scratch. Like all his Republican predecessors he was elected to a large extent upon the potency of a lie. The voter, who sometimes seems a .ittle less than bright, has swallowed the familiar fallacy that :here is some peculiar magic in protection which makes for orosperity. So strong and widespread is this belief that a lumber of Democrats have been all but persuaded. Even Al Smith was a partial convert and tried to take the tariff but of politics by insisting that he had no desire to do more :han maybe snip an inch or so away in certain of the most nountainous places. His decision to stoop a little in the louse of Rimmon was among his most fatal flaws in tactics. He lost his home State of New York because even friendly followers felt that a Republican Administration would be setter for business. So faithful are the people of America to tradition that :ven now they cannot be convinced that there is something undamentally wrong in the notion of prospering at the ex- >ense of the other fellow. Three-card-monte men continue to lourish at fairs in rural communities because they trick the armers into believing that the player can put something >ver on the entrepreneur. It is a common custom for some iccomplice of the professional gambler to turn the corner of 1 card when the principal is not looking. The eager farmer hen rushes in to bet and finds that he has been deceived. But he never seems to get wise to the catch in the Republican ugh tariff. Even though he pays prodigious royalties on all le buys he still sits back content in the belief that he is >eing protected against the pauper labor of Europe. The trength of the whole protectionist cause lies in this assump- ion that we are putting something over on somebody. Ac- cording to the theory we are to sell high to Europe and buy cheap. Never a tick of sympathy is aroused for this same so-called pauper labor in foreign lands. The poor peasant is to work for us. The Republican Party is still acting as if we lived in the days of clipper ships and supported ourselves by the process of taking in each other's rum and homespun. Those same Republicans who argue against entangling alliances have the belief that isolationism may also be practiced in our business life. Or at least a one-sided isolation. We are to sell our surplus for a good round sum to the rest of the world and take in return no goods of any consequence. Possibly it is unfair to Mr. Hoover to make even a passing reference to rum. In all his public utterances he has been stalwart enough in preaching the creed of abstinence and strict en- forcement. He does not seem conscious of the reproach inherent in his recent demand for more federal prisons and bigger ones. Apparently his conscience troubles him not at all over the fact that he is lord of the largest convict popu- lation ever known in these United States. The idea that it might be better to have fewer crimes and fewer criminals has not entered his head. As an ardent Al Smith man, I may be unduly partisan in my feeling toward President Hoover. It would be foolish to deny him credit for certain considerable achievements. He performed excellent work in regard to the distressed con- ditions in Haiti. His efforts toward limitation of armaments, although indecisive, have been valuable and his espousal of the World Court has been far warmer than that of his pred- ecessors. Nor would I deny for a moment that Herbert Clark Hoover is a man of far greater intellectual grasp than, let us say, Calvin Coolidge. There is no point in drawing the memory of poor Warren Harding into the discussion. But Coolidge never made any claims for himself as a great liberal leader. And none were made for him. Mr. Hoover, on the other hand, was distinctly identified by him- self and others as the white hope of a new social order. The World, at a time when its liberalism seemed more rampant than at the moment, seriously urged his candidacy upon either Democrats or Republicans. The Scripps-Howard papers, which supported La Follette for President and Norman Thomas for Mayor of New York, swallowed Mr. Hoover almost whole in the 1928 campaign. To the credit of this liberal chain of journals it is only fair to say that their serious digestive disturbances since the election have not been kept a secret from their readers. And by what possible test can Herbert Hoover be con- sidered a liberal now? Surely few Republican Presidents have used the power of nominating the members of the Supreme Court for political purposes in any way more brazen than President Hoover. Even a Tammany leader might have hesitated before sending in the name of John J. Parker. Nobody expects a man elected by Republican votes to act as a pure Marxian Socialist upon assuming office, but the time has come for every liberal who supported Hoover in the last campaign to rise to his feet and disown him. Heywood Broun

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564 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3384 Pennsylvania's Battle Royal By RICHARD J. BEAMISH THE protective tariff is a vital issue in the amazing Republican primary campaign in Pennsylvania. Let not those who hope for lower tariffs with increasing regard for international relations hurrah prematurely upon reading that statement. The battle is not for decreased schedules. The issue is Smoot-Hawley high tariff versus Grundy higher tariff. James John Davis came from Washington into the sacred precincts of the Union League of Philadelphia for a luncheon rally on April 24 bearing this message: The tariff about to be enacted is absolutely satis- factory. A few schedules might have been raised a little but upon the whole the job is mighty fine. Prosperity will come immediately after its signing by the President. Unemployment will disappear from the land. It is the ideal Republican tariff. I sat in with the Joint Confer- ence Committee of Congress during its final stages pinch- hitting for Senator Reed, who is in London, and aided in shaping the pig-iron and cement adjustments. I favor a tariff upon the products of all foreign industries competing with American industries. Former Mayor J. Hampton Moore of Philadelphia, Justice John W. Kephart of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Samuel M. Vauclain, chairman of the board of directors of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, and fifty other assorted capitalists applauded the last declaration rapturously. Joseph R. Grundy read the Davis declaration half an hour later. He reasoned, as did everybody politically wise in Philadelphia, that the Secretary of Labor made his speech with the full knowledge and approval of President Hoover. That deduction gave significance to the comment of Penn- sylvania's junior Senator: That talk by Davis [he said] is nonsense. The tariff bill we are about to pass is the worst in the history of the country. For the most part it is the work of mere theorists and half-baked economists. The expert who was the biggest factor in writing it is a Democrat and doesn't believe in the protective-tariff theory. No Republican who is a student of industrial condi- tions today is satisfied with the measure so sonorously praised by Secretary Davis. Immediately after it becomes a law I will set out to wipe it off the statute books. I will embark upon a campaign to elect delegates to the next national convention who will insist upon the adoption of a platform which will enunciate Republican demands for a real protective tariff and the nomination of a ticket that will square itself with that declaration. The immediate effect of these pronouncements was the alignment of Pennsylvania Republicans into Hoover high tariffites on one side and Grundy higher tariffites on the other. The defiant Grundy statement is generally taken to be directed toward the White House. It is notice to the President that he need expect no Pennsylvania support for renomination if he continues to urge tariff schedules lower than the Grundy standards. The Davis statement was modi- fied the following day when, after a Cabinet session, the Secretary of Labor was hustled back to Philadelphia by air- plane to tell an amazed crowd at a meeting of the League of Women Voters that all the newspapers were wrong in quoting him to the effect that the Hawley-Smoot tariff is a good measure. "What I did say," he shouted, "was that the bill will be passed and that it will bring prosperity and remove unemployment" — which amounts to what he said the preceding day. John M. Hemphill, Democratic candidate for Governor, defined the tariff stand of Pennsylvania Democrats at the same meeting to be adherence to protection that will care for the working people and will not be used to reward the friends and punish the foes of the Republicans who make the tariff. His pronouncement developed no applause. From no quarter comes any voice for lowering of tariff schedules. Sedgwick Kistler, Democratic candidate for Senator, is silent and Francis H. Bohlen, wet candidate for the same high office, makes the old-fashioned Republican declaration for a high tariff. The Broadway Athletic Club a decade ago gave its patrons a battle royal every Saturday night. Ten husky Negroes fought for a ten-dollar bill offered by Diamond Lew Bailey, the generous promoter of the Broadway, the survivor receiving the total purse. It was gaudy and gory entertain- ment. Often the money went to some wily little fellow who did most of his execution by sneaking behind the more robust boxers engaged in trading punch for punch, and clipping each behind the ear with a boxing glove in which the hand had been reinforced by a bit of lead. The Pennsylvania Republican primary brings Diamond Lew Bailey's idea into politics. The organization slate in- cludes Francis Shunk Brown for Governor, James J. Davis for Senator, Philip H. Dewey for Secretary of Internal Affairs, George W. Maxey for the Supreme Court, and James Drew for the Superior Court. Deals are being made by which each of these will be traded off in various com- munities and by various interests in return for votes to be cast for anti-slate candidates. Opposed to Davis is Joseph R. Grundy, sitting Senator through appointment by Governor Fisher. He is running alone. His running mate was to have been former State Treasurer Samuel S. Lewis of York County — but that's another story. Former Governor Gifford Pinchot is also fighting the organi- zation slate in his campaign for the gubernatorial nomination. Charles Armstrong of Armstrong County is running with him for Lieutenant Governor. The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment has put a wet ticket in the field. Francis H. Bohlen, professor in the law school of the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania, is its candidate for the Senate, Thomas W. Phillips for Governor, and Charles Dorrance for Lieutenant Governor. Judge Drew and Judge Maxey, the candidates slated for the Superior and the Supreme Courts, are opposed by Judge Graff and Judge McDade, while James F. Woodward and F. A. Godcharles are battling against Philip H. Dewey, former master of the State Grange, who is the slated candidate for Secretary of Internal Affairs. To understand the tangle and its unlimited possibilities

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 565 for throat-cutting, trading, and skullduggery generally, it is necessary to turn back to February, when Bill Vare was in the field as a Senatorial candidate demanding vindication and an indorsement by the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh machines. He was at St. Lucie, Florida, wintering luxuri- ously in the big house where Quay, McNichol, and lesser men had framed Pennsylvania tickets. (Incidentally, organi- zation men are saying that neither Quay nor Penrose would have permitted the toils and broils in which the machine finds itself today.) The war board of the Philadelphia organi- zation— Big Tom Cunningham, Councilman Charlie Hall, and State Senator Sam Salus — went down from Philadelphia with a demand that Vare withdraw his candidacy because the war board wanted to get behind another Philadelphian, Francis Shunk Brown, for Governor. Vare bluntly refused. Two weeks later he was summoned to Philadelphia and given "the works." The Vare Construction Company has a large and profitable contract with the Pennsylvania Rail- road. W. W. Atterbury, president of the Pennsylvania, is the Pennsylvania member of the Republican National Com- mittee and is overlord of the Philadelphia war board. Besides his contract with the Pennsylvania Railroad Vare has other jobs with the Bell Telephone Company and other public- utility corporations. The pressure applied to the partially paralyzed former boss of the Quaker City was too great to be resisted. He withdrew, Brown was slated, and James J. Davis, who had previously been a candidate for the gubernatorial nomination, was selected for Senator. Here arose a complication. Pittsburgh, which Davis claims as his residence, is also the home of Senior Senator Dave Reed. Davis's election would leave eastern Pennsyl- vania without a Senator. So the busy little press clique that gathers around Davis in Washington circulated a story to the effect that he would resign the Senatorship at the end of two years if elected, to make way for a man from Philadelphia. Another problem facing the war board and Atterbury was the candidacy of Samuel S. Lewis for Governor. To remove it, they argued, would be to assure Brown's nomina- tion. A minor concern was the candidacy of Thomas W. Phillips for the same office on a wet platform. The fear and hatred of the Mellons for Gifford Pinchot were invoked to bring about the removal of Lewis, and Andrew W. Mellon 's birthday dinner in Pittsburgh was the occasion for the an- nouncement of his death sentence. Governor Fisher, who has occasionally been loyal to Grundy but always super- serviceable to Mellon, then told Grundy that he would oppose Lewis, and the Mellons made the same declaration. Lewis withdrew from the race and Grundy left in a rage. For twenty-four hours it was believed that Grundy also would withdraw his Senatorial candidacy. That expecta- tion was shattered when in an explosive formal statement he denounced Atterbury as the head of the Philadelphia gang. said that he would remain in the battle to the finish, and named as the outstanding issue of the campaign the plot of the corrupt Philadelphia machine to take over the State administration. Immediately afterward came a declaration by Lieutenant Governor Arthur James that he was remain- ing in the fight as an anti-organization candidate for the Supreme Court against Maxey, who was generally said to be the hand-picked candidate of Atterbury. Vare was for James, but the pressure that had removed his own candidacy operated to blot out his advocacy of James and the latter finally withdrew from the field, nursing his grievance. The minor problem of a wet ticket assumed major importance when the Philadelphia Record printed a story telling of im- mense pressure upon seven wet leaders to bring them into line for the ticket headed by Davis and Brown. One wing of the wets said it would be satisfied if Brown would say he was for a State-wide referendum upon Pennsylvania's pro- hibition-enforcement measure, the Snyder Act. Others, led by Raymond Pitcairn, musician, poet, and multimillionaire, said that nothing short of a statement by Brown flatly oppos- ing the Eighteenth Amendment would be satisfactory. Con- gressman James M. Beck, Charles B. Hall, and Brown himself mulled over this proposition for a day, and Brown finally made a declaration for a referendum. The reply of Phillips, Pitcairn, Bohlen, and Robert Kelso Cassatt to the Brown statement was withering. The candidate was called a straddler, and the wets went into the battle with a vengeance. Misfortune after misfortune now came to the be- leaguered Davis-Brown outfit. Gifford Pinchot declared that 100,000 of the 500,000 names on the registration lists of Philadelphia were illegally there and demanded their re- moval. The Committee of Seventy made a test canvass of 1,000 registrations and verified Pinchot's charge by conclu- sive proof that in some gang-controlled divisions the illegal enrolment exceeded 25 per cent. The registration commis- sion got to work and more than 30,000 names were removed from the rolls. Pinchot served notice upon public-utility companies and corporations generally that contributions either openly or by indirection to the gang's war chest for this campaign would be followed closely and punished relent- lessly. The effect of this was unprecedented drought and the dreadful prospect before the gang leaders that they would be compelled for the first time in their lives to operate with some of their own money. O.P.M. — other people's money — has been the motto of these gentlemen hitherto. But a greater woe was to come. Grundy repeated be- fore a Senate committee his charges that Atterbury is the real head of the Philadelphia gang and that leaders of that crowd have secret and corrupt arrangements by which they receive juicy contracts and shares in profitable secret deals. A special investigating committee of the Senate, with Gerald P. Nye as its chairman, was named to probe these allegations and others that poured in upon the committee. Three undercover agents of the committee are working in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh upon these charges. The situation of the Davis-Brown ticket, the only com- plete slate in the field, is that of an army attacked from three sides. Pinchot, its principal opponent, appears to have the virtually solid support of the drys everywhere and the confidence of all who have noted impartially his administra- tion of the governor's office from 1922 to 1926. Grundy is opposing Brown and the Philadelphia gang even more viciously and effectively than in his onslaught upon Davis. To the Philadelphia organization the success of Grundy in his battle means the dismemberment of their city committee with its "Band of Brothers," the loss of thousands of places now held by their followers, and the greater loss of millions of dollars in contracts and pickings by themselves. Grundy has some followers among Philadelphia ward leaders now, and others will come as his prospects for victory increase. The wets are making a stirring battle. They are led

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566 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3384 by wealthy amateurs who are battling unconventionally. Charles Denby, Jr., son-in-law of Senator David A. Reed — who, incidentally, is remaining in Europe far from the primary snarl — and nephew of the former Secretary of the Navy, is chairman of the Philadelphia city committee of the wets. They are making their principal drive against Brown and what they call his "straddle referendum." Indications are that Phillips will receive 100,000 votes in Philadelphia, virtually all of which would naturally have gone to Brown. When Gifford Pinchot announced his candidacy in February his chances appeared hopeless. Now he has better than an even chance to win. Besides the drys he will get the votes of thousands of miners and of other unionized workers. The tumultuous greeting when he arose in the meeting of the League of Women Voters was audible evi- dence of the support he will get from women throughout the State. Grundy's fierce opposition to Brown plus the inroads upon the Brown strength by the wets gives to Pinchot advo- cates basis for their prediction that he will be nominated. The battle between Grundy and Davis is more even, with Davis apparently the stronger just now. Indications are that the surprise of the election will be the wet vote. Combinations are encountered everywhere. In South Philadelphia, where voters of Italian and Russian birth and descent abound, the opposition to the immigration policy of Davis and the wet tendency of the voters have produced a number of Grundy and Phillips clubs. The Pittsburgh Press of the Scripps-Howard chain has declared for Pinchot and Bohlen. The Committee of Seventy, Philadelphia's veteran reform organization, is generally following the lead of its chairman, Thomas Raeburn White, who declared for Pinchot and Grundy. In the anthracite region, there are Bohlen-Pinchot clubs, Davis-Pinchot labor committees, and Grundy-Pinchot groups. Organization wards in Philadel- phia and Pittsburgh have Grundy-Brown and Davis-Phillips drives. The battle royal is on. Safety Last I. How Safe Is the Subway? By LOUIS I HAVE before me a letter from the vice-president of one of the largest publishing houses in America urging me to buy a book on accident prevention, which says: "The Union Pacific System cut its casualty losses almost 600 per cent" and "E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company reduced its accident rate 175 per cent." I have before me also an invitation to visit the Interborough (New York City) Rapid Transit Company's safety exhibit, which says: "In spite of necessary overloading, the subway has killed in twelve years only twenty-seven passengers; making it not only the safest railroad in the world, but the safest place to be except home in bed." And there is on my desk a "Manual for Speakers," published by the National Safety Council, which advises the four-minute men of the safety movement to tell the world that "every two years — despite the automobile — we save enough lives, as compared with the 1907 rate, to replace our sacrifices in France." In the face of these and other widely circulated claims concerning accident-reduction records, one should, perhaps, hesitate to ask: Has the safety movement failed? And one would hesitate if there didn't happen to come across one's desk, month after month and year after year, other records — less advertised, but more authentic — showing steady in- creases in the numbers of men, women, and children killed or injured by preventable accidents. The fact of the matter is that more people are being killed and mutilated by acci- dents in the United States now than at any time since the beginning of the safety movement twenty years ago. This will be shown presently from the records of government bureaus, employers' associations, insurance companies, and the several safety associations themselves. It is true that the Union Pacific System, the United • This is the first in a scries of three articles on the safety movement. The second and third will appear in the issues of May 21 and 28. — Editor Tbi Natiow. RESNICK States Steel Corporation, the Pullman Company, and some other big industrial organizations have made accident pre- vention as important a factor as production or sales and so have brought about striking permanent reductions in their accident rates. It is equally true, however, that the bulk of American industry is made up of small plants (there are more than 100,000) and that the vast majority of these — more than 90 per cent, in the opinion of close students of the safety movement — pay little or no attention to accident prevention. The good records of a few big companies are given the most widespread and repeated publicity; the poor records of a hundred thousand little companies and of many of the big corporations are rarely mentioned. The same is true of accidents outside of industry, in our homes, on our streets, and in other public places. And so most of us are lulled into the belief that great progress is being made in the safety movement — if the day of no accidents isn't actually just around the corner. Examination of the records brings to light a different pic- ture. Let us see, for instance, how the Interborough's state- ment that the subways of New York City killed only twenty seven passengers in twelve years compares with the facts. There is in New York a Transit Commission, appointed by the governor, which records data concerning subway acci- dents from sworn records submitted by the transportation companies. The records of this commission show that in 1928 alone 92 passengers were killed on the combined sub- way and elevated lines of New York City. In the same year 14,591 passengers were injured on these lines. The year before 103 passengers were killed and 13,386 passengers were injured. The 1928 total included 18 I. R. T. passen- gers who were killed and 100 who were injured in one acci- dent in "the safest place to be, except home in bed." Records of the Transit Commission show that during

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 567 Persons Killed or Injured in New York Subways and Elevated — 1917-28 All I.R.T. All I.R.T. All All Year Passengers Passengers Passengers Passengers Persons Persons Killed Killed Injured Injured Killed Injured 1917 46 31 13,220 11,657 71 15,092 1918 37 23 9,443 7,912 177 12,692 1919 141 36 9,450 8,504 94 13,067 1920 45 30 10,141 9,350 61 12,672 1921 49 35 11,811 10,588 72 14,796 1922 62 45 11,299 10,100 72 14,596 1923 58 41 10,902 9,675 100 15,221 1924 91 66 10,435 9,283 111 15,021 1925 75 46 11,781 9,858 88 16,579 1926 94 49 12,464 9,481 108 19,296 1927 103 75 13,386 9,901 130 20,934 1928 92 65 14,591 10,780 131 22,609 Total 893 542 138,523 117,089 1,215 192,575 1929* 130 102 16,693 12,297 135 24,542 The figures given in this table are a matter of public record, being taken directly from the annual reports of the Transit Commission. The figures in the text, based on the first five columns of this table, apply to pas- sengers only. The last two columns given above, showing all persons killed and injured, include not only pas- sengers, but also employees and "others" — mostly employees, "others" probably being trespassers. the twelve years from 1917 to 1928, inclusive, the subways of New York (including their elevated subsidiaries) killed not 27, but 870 passengers — counting only those who were killed instantly or who died within ten days of the accident — and injured 138,000 more. On the I. R. T. system alone, according to Transit Commission records, 542 passengers were killed and 117,089 injured in these twelve years. The commission's records bulk subway and elevated accidents, as both lines are operated by one company and what is subway in one part of New York becomes elevated line in another part of the city. Analysis of the company's operating costs, however, discloses that 30 per cent of the expense on account of in- juries is incurred on the elevated division and 70 per cent on the subway division. Applying this ratio to the casualty list of the combined system, we find that 379 passengers {not 27) were killed and 82,000 injured on the subway division of the I. R. T. alone during the twelve years from 1917 to 1928. Incidentally, the Transit Commission reports show7 that "expenses on account of injuries and damages" among the New York City passenger-transportation companies have risen steadily from $3,202,000 in 1921 to $5,469,000 in 1928. In eight years these companies (or shall we say their passengers?) have spent $38,000,000 "on account of injury and damage." This went for such items as claim-depart- ment expenses, claims for injuries to employees, "other in- juries and damages," salaries of attorneys, "court costs and expenses," and "other expenses." The mathematical genius who decided that the Union Pacific System had reduced its accidents to 500 per cent less than nothing and that the Du Pont Company went 75 per cent beyond perfection in accident prevention is a piker when compared to the author of "Subway Safety," a booklet of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, issued on October 5, 1928. This booklet says: To ride in the Interborough Subway is 22 times safer than to be on the streets of New York City. It is 28 times safer than riding in an automobile. It is about 400 times safer than going in swimming. Believe it or not, a subway ride is even 6 times safer than to stay at home and 14 times safer than merely to live in the United States. These are not guesses ; they are comparisons of official records. The vividest way to express the hazards that accom- pany any human act is by the number of years needed by that mathematical window dummy, labeled the average man, to kill himself doing it. If no one died except by accident life in the United States would last 1,255 j'ears, which figure is the present death-rate by accident divided into the population. ... At present death-rates the aver- age person using the New York City streets will die by accident after 1,600 years of spending eight hours a day on them. The average autoist will last only 1,200 years. Even the person who stays all day at home cannot escape a fatal accident for longer than about 2,000 years. But the average passenger in the Interborough sub- way, as is proved by comparing records of deaths, passen- gers, and minutes of average ride for the past ten years, could ride for twenty-four hours each day and three hun- dred and sixty-five days each year for 11,728 years before he would be killed in any kind of accident. The Inter- borough is not only the safest railroad in the world; it is the safest place in New York City except to be in bed asleep. It is even safer, statistics of home accidents show, than getting in or out of bed. What more could one ask for a nickel ? This juggling of figures to give the appearance of great progress in accident prevention is not exactly characteristic of the entire safety movement; but it is not a rare instance. It is illustrative of a widespread tendency in the safety move- ment to be content with publicity rather than perform- ance. * The figures for 1929 became available only after this article was in type.— Editor The Nation. [A proof of Mr. Resnick's article was sent to the Inter- borough Rapid Transit Company. The company's comments

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568 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3584 on the article were forwarded to Mr. Resnick. We print herewith the reply of the I. R. T., together with a brief rejoinder by Mr. Resnick. — Editor The Nation. The figures in the booklet "Subway Safety" of October 5, 1928, issued by this company are correct. The 542 pas- sengers killed, referred to in your statement, are divided as follows: 27 were subway passengers who boarded the trains; 7 were elevated passengers who boarded the trains; 226 were suicides; 282 were trespassers and persons falling down stairs. You have properly stated that most of the deaths to passengers who actually boarded the trains were due to the serious accident in 1928. Of course, the tremendous increase in the number of passengers carried should also be taken into consideration. Frank Hedley, President and General Manager Mr. Resnick's reply to the statement of President Hedley is as follows: According to the reports of the Transit Commission, prepared on the basis of sworn statements submitted by the transportation companies themselves, during the years 1917 to 1928, inclusive, 542 passengers were killed on the I. R. T. system. During the twelve years, 1918 to 1929, inclusive, 613 passengers were killed. These totals do not include "employees killed" and "others killed," both of which groups are listed separately. Instead of reporting that 226 persons killed were suicides and 282, trespassers or persons falling downstairs, the commission simply re- ports 542 passengers killed. Mr. Freeman, of the Acci- dent Bureau of the Transit Commission, has just con- firmed by telephone what is apparent in the Transit Com- mission's annual report — namely, that fatalities to tres- passers are included under the classification of "others," not under the classification of passengers. Louis Rbsnick Detroit's Crime Clinic By J. A. FELLOWS JUDGE FRANK MURPHY, of the Recorder's Court, since January first of this year has employed a new technique in handling all felony cases. In order that all factors bearing on the life or crime of the prisoner may be known, Judge Murphy refers every case to the Probation Department and the psychiatric clinic for complete exami- nation and research. To minimize the effect of judicial temperament in passing sentence and to introduce more than one point of view into the judgment of the cases, he has established a sentencing board consisting of himself, the head of the Probation Department, and the chief of the psychiatric staff. These three meet in conference and de- cide on the sentence that will benefit most not only society,. but the prisoner as well. At least one week is allowed for the tests and examinations and securing of information by the Probation Department. All significant data on the mental, physical, social, and economic status of the patient are included. The personality type and the presence or ab- sence of criminal tendencies are established. When the in- vestigation has been completed the sentencing board meets with the prisoner. At the end of this conference the prisoner is excused and the three members of the board decide what the sentence shall be. The sentence is later pronounced by the judge in open court in the regular way. For the easy and accurate presentation of these case histories a most ingenious chart has been devised by Judge Murphy. It shows at a glance the hereditary and environ- mental influences at work on the individual and the frequent striking correlations between them. The general physical condition of the prisoner, past diseases, and diseases of an- cestors which might have a bearing on the case are indicated on the chart. The mental age of the prisoner and all ten- dencies to insanity either in the prisoner or in his fore- bears are noted. His standing in society, his job or his lack of a job, his ability to cooperate, his economic con- dition— all are tabulated. One can learn instantly from the chart all the important influences in his life, from divorce to alcohol. The aid of such detailed and pertinent information in making a decision as to the probable future conduct of the subject cannot be overestimated. In fact, only with the help of such data, intelligently interpreted, can a fair, constructive sentence be passed. In the event of probation, the chart helps to solve the problem of environment. When a case is studied thus impartially and with a view to under- standing all factors involved in the commission of crime, the harsh, punitive, and harmful element is automatically removed from the sentence. The prisoner feels that he has been fairly dealt with and is inclined to cooperate in bring- ing about his own rehabilitation. The resentment and hatred for society which most prisoners show are eliminated. The endless, destructive, and expensive chain of vengeance against the criminal and retaliatory vengeance on the part of the criminal against society is broken. Judge Murphy's procedure of calm and unprejudiced inquiry is the only sure method of revealing the mentally sick and those unfortunate victims of circumstances who really have no criminal tendencies. The aim is scientific treatment of the former during their detention and probation for the latter wherever possible. X was placed on probation after pleading guilty to the charge of Uttering and Publishing, one check for $74.25 furnishing the specific charge. Three checks in all had been written and the provision of his probation was restitu- tion of the money. The case went through court in 1929. In February of this year X was arrested for violation of his probation, having failed to make his weekly pay- ments. Commitment was recommended by the Probation Department on the ground that he was uncooperative and anti-social. The regular routine that has been established in Judge Murphy's court was carried out and the completed reports showed a very different situation. They revealed a real desire to cooperate, a valiant effort to care for his family during the hard times of the past winter, inability to obtain the necessary money for payments, and a lack of

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 569 docket no NAM! CHARGE OATE CONVICTCO PLEA WAiVEO JURY TRIAL PREVIOUS OFFENSES sex AGE COLOR MARITAL STATUS NATIVITY C'TIIEN OF LEGAL RCSiDCNCC EDUCATION RELIGION JUVENILE ARRES'S SENTENCES LO.OTM TIMt IX DETROIT REGULAR 1 IRREGULAR RECORO PROR S.S. PINK PRISON CHILDREN ECONOMIC STATUS OCCUPATION GRADE WAGE EARNINGS SAVINGS ECONOMIC RESPONSIBILITY OWNS NUMBER AGE RANOC DC REN OC NT MARC 'HAL COMFORTABLE PROPXSStONAL SKILLED SEMI SKILLEO LABOR •RRCGULAR ADEOUATC INADEQUATE PROPERTY INSURANCE OCSTS GOOD FAIR POOR \ HEREDITY PHYSICAL CONDITION ENVIROI 4MEN1 AL FACTORS SPECIAL INSTITUTIONALIZATION PHYSICAL RELATION TO PRISONER IMPRESSION OP PHYSICAL CONDITION GOOD FAMILY SITUATION (JUVENILE) PRESENT DOMESTIC SITUATION I OWN HOME ■ OWN HOME mm LIVING CONDITIONS | RENT LIVING CONDITIONS ( RENT POOR 1 ROOMING ' ROOMING TYRE OP NEIGHBORHOOD TYPE OP HOME CONO FAVORABLE TYPE OF NEIGHBORHOOD TTPE Of KOKEC0N0 FAVORABLE HOSPTTAL'ZATfOR FACTORY RES' DEN. TIAL FACTORY RESIDENT BUSINESS OUT. LYING FAIR BUSINESS OUT. LYING FAIR PSYCHIATRIC FACTORS RURAL POOR RURAL POOR INTELLIGENCE DEFECTIVE SPECIAL DISABILITIES ASSOCIATES ASSOCIATES AGE OP MARRIAGE INFERIOR ( LAX (u« ) SEVERE ) AVERAGE * SEVERE OISCPL'NC IN HOME 1 i AVERAGE AVERAGE \ NONE PARENT PftMNM ' NONE SUPERIOR DEATH MINTAL OENITO URINARY BROKEN HOME O'VORCE SEPARATION OESERTiON disturbing factors in marital s'tuatlon infidelity interference relatives non Support MENTAL STATUS: PSYCHOTIC NON SUPPORT ALCOHOL>SM HABITS OTHER PHYSICAL PATHOLOGY ALCOHOLISM ORUO ADDICTION REOOIVlSM 1 CONSTRUCTIVE ALCOHOLISM SEPARATION DESERTION NON PSYCHOTIC SPECIAL FACTORS TREATMENT RECOMMENDATIONS i OAM8A.INO TYPE OF RECREATION UNDUE FRICTION IN HOME RECIDIVISM j CONSTRUCTIVE USE OF LEISURE I NEGATIVE 1 HARMFUL - The Chart on Which Case Histories Are Recorded in Judge Murphy's Court knowledge of the regulations of the Probation Department that required him to report when a payment was due, whether he had the money or not. As a result of the report of the psychiatrist and after a conference of the sentencing board probation was extended and X was allowed to con- tinue to care for his family. Y was tried for statutory rape with a count for indecent liberties. There was a disagreement of the jury the first time; the second time he was found guilty. His psychiatric examination brought out certain instabilities of character in connection with the use of alcohol. He has a family dependent on him. He was placed on probation with the provision that he cannot take a drink. The scientific handling of criminal cases does not neces- sarily mean shorter sentences for those found guilty of felonies. Conditions that warrant longer periods of isolation from society than would otherwise occur are sometimes brought to light. A case tried recently before Judge Murphy illustrates this point. Z, about fifty years old, was found guilty of statutory rape on his seven-year-old step- daughter, the case having been brought to the attention of the prosecutor by the school nurse. When the completed chart was examined several significant findings indicated a progressive sexual disturbance that would become more and more dangerous to society if the subject were at large. The chart showed a mentality of seven years, a history of past sex offenses gradually increasing in their seriousness, psychopathic traits, progressive mental disorder. He was given an inde- terminate sentence of from five to twenty years with recom- mendation that he be detained as long as he showed the present dangerous symptoms. This may mean permanent isolation. Judge Murphy's charts are probably the most com- plete histories of criminal cases ever compiled. The sta- tistics available in a year or so may establish some very interesting and instructive correlations between factors that have not been recognized as of particular significance. Glanc- ing over the charts of the one hundred cases of convicted felons that have passed through Judge Murphy's court this year one is struck by the large number of those who were left orphans at an early age, whose homes were broken up, or whose homes were listed as very poor. Preventive meas- ures will be largely guided in the future by such statistics as these. Moreover, the scientific classification of criminals, which is one of the results of such a careful procedure, must inevitably lead to different methods of handling prisoners. Psychopathic cases, sex cases, and normal but weak first offenders will not be herded indiscriminately together once these types are clearly defined and recognized. The very vagueness and lack of concise information concerning types of criminals has been mainly responsible for their common treatment and association under the same discipline and conditions. Already Judge Murphy has been approached by prison wardens who wish to apply his methods. This brief review of a practical step toward better understanding and handling of criminal cases shows how carefully Judge Murphy steers his course between the two dangers of a coldly scientific attitude on the one hand and too great sympathy on the other. The conference of the board with the prisoner, and with his nearest of kin when desirable, cannot fail to introduce the human element. The

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570 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3384 presence of three experts with different professional points of view, each accustomed to dealing with criminals, pre- cludes any possibility of sentimentality. It is too early to prophesy the results of the reforms introduced by Judge Murphy. But it has been so difficult to get any practical trial of the constructive, progressive theories of crime that these innovations are bound to have far-reaching influence. In the Driftway THE Drifter had to go to Louisiana to find out what a bayou is. He had always supposed it to be a narrow, sluggish watercourse, reaching only a few miles back from some river or bay and going nowhere in particular. He had thought that one could use rowboats and perhaps small motor craft on it, but had never supposed it to be navigable in the commercial sense. A bayou, the Drifter had imagined, was necessarily overhung with branches of trees and wreaths of drooping moss. Above all, a bayou was a dreamy, out-of- the-way stream, away from habitations and of no practical importance. It is true that a bayou is sluggish and generally narrow; also a bayou is likely to be lined with trees. But the larger bayous, though dreamy enough, are anything but unsettled and of no practical importance. Nor are they short streams going nowhere in particular. On the contrary, they are lined with settlements for which they were once the great, if not the sole, highways, and even today steam- boats and barges ply them in important numbers. THE ordinary map gives us no idea of these bayous. In general, modern maps are of two kinds — automobile maps and what are called "political" maps. Automobile maps show the highways and towns but not the railroads. "Political" maps show the railroads and towns but not the highways. Neither kind of map shows the waterways in an adequate way, least of all the bayous. Perhaps the Coast and Geodetic Survey does better; the Drifter has not examined its maps. He knows, though, that steamboat pilots do not use them. They learn the bayous through years of wandering through their long, tortuous courses. Bayous extend all over the State. Some connect two other bayous; some connect two rivers ; some are extra outlets for rivers. ***** OWING to the inadequate delineation of the bayous on the maps one gets strange surprises upon inquiring about the possibilities of steamboat travel out of New Orleans. One learns that there are more steamboats on the bayous and small tributaries of the Mississippi River than on the Father of Waters itself. One learns that it is possible to reach the Gulf of Mexico by boat from New Orleans by going almost due south through a series of canals and bayous, the total distance amounting to about half of that by way of the Mississippi River. Stranger still, one learns that he can reach by steamboat towns 100 miles west of New Orleans, which, to look at the maps, would seem to be accessible only by a vessel propelled over dry land on stilts. New Iberia, in the midst of the "Evangeline country" — half- way across the State on an east-west line — is served by two regular steamboats from New Orleans. The Drifter Correspondence Revolutionary Tactics To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: A discussion of revolutionary tactics, on which Heywood Broun seeks enlightenment in your issue of April 23, is not necessary when Lenin and others have written so fully on the subject. But if at this date, after watching the MacDonald Government in Great Britain, Mr. Broun still believes we can sit comfortably by the fireside and vote in a revolutionary change his faith is so touching perhaps it should not be disturbed. No doubt it is this same tendency to faith rather than action which leads to his belief that the Soviet Union is in no danger of being attacked. Yet the very recent noisy campaign against the Soviet's religious policies ought to be warning enough that a full crop of enemies lies in wait ready to spring if attention is diverted from them for one minute. When he comes to comment on the Union Square unem- ployment demonstrations of March 6 Mr. Broun lines up with the press of the city, which says, "If the police said those unemployed workers could not parade they should not have tried to parade. It was just baiting the cops to go ahead." Yet according to the law, workers have the right not only to assemble, but to parade through the streets and to petition the government. Not even the whim of a police commissioner changes that. Eyewitnesses of the breaking up of the Union Square meeting, as well as motion pictures and photographs, testify to the fact that the police were not "baited," but indulged in an orgy of brutality against a crowd that was moving in an orderly manner. Such lawlessness has been developed in the police force of this city not only by orders from "higher up," but by a type of spineless citizen who, when driving an auto, lets a snarling traffic cop yell in his face, insult him, threaten him if he is so bold as to venture a remark, and who accepts this passively because to assert his rights would mean trouble. Fortunately the workers of the city are made of different stuff. And there are Communist leaders willing to risk clubbing and jail terms to let the police know they have an exaggerated idea of their functions. New York, April 25 Helen Black D. H. Lawrence To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Aldous Huxley, who is said to have been a personal friend and admirer of D. H. Lawrence, used him under a thin disguise in a story, "Two or Three Graces," which by chance I was reading on the very day of Lawrence's death. The picture is fuller and more convincing than the one in "Point Counter Point." It shows a character temperamentally rather cold who admired above everything the expression of feeling. He was always whipping his emotions into a violent rage or infatuation and using the mood as material for fiction. His favorite word was "passional." If this is a true picture of D. H. Lawrence it may offer the clue Mr. Krutch was calling for in his article of March 19. Suppose that Lawrence, that great connoisseur of emotional ex- perience, had to make his material as it were synthetically. Could any deaf musician or astigmatic painter be a neater example of the law of compensation? St. Petersburg, Fla., March 30 Marian Tyler

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 571 In Defense of England To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I am an Englishwoman who has had intimate experi- ence of working-class life in England during the past sixteen years. May I be allowed to comment on the gloomy picture of my country which is drawn in The Nation of April 23? It is true that the value of our exports has gone down since the war and that there has been much unemployment, but against this should be set the astonishing progress in culture, in civilization, and in all that makes for real democracy among our people. The advance has been so persistent and steady, so natural and spontaneous, that most of the upper class and all foreigners seem to have missed it. To begin at the bottom, take the astounding decrease in crime, in spite of the war and in spite of the prevalence of unemployment. No less than twenty-four prisons have been closed in the past few years. An adult-educa- tion scheme on very liberal lines has been set up in all the prisons. Take also the spontaneous and voluntary decrease in drinking. During the past eight years I have seen no drunk- enness in the town where I work. But these are only by-products of a marked and increasing rise in standards of living, not so much material as educational and political. There has been, for instance, an immense in- crease of university tutorial three-year classes since the war, and the movement is continually developing new forms of service. These classes not only raise the general level of thought but train men to play a more intelligent part in trade- union locals, in town councils, and in cooperative guilds. The awakening in the villages has been revolutionary of late years. The writer has found that the proposal for a course of lectures of a radical type on China, Russia, or Africa has been greeted with enthusiasm in remote villages by shepherds and agricul- tural laborers. All this since the war. The last general election was symptomatic of the new England. In the city of Lincoln (70,000) 86 per cent of the population voted, and of the working class the proportion was even higher. In Peterborough it was 90 per cent, and these cases were not exceptional. There was no noisy enthusiasm, rowdiness, or crowd behavior, but the interest and discussion were more intelligent than they have ever been. The increas- ing part taken by the wives of artisans and laborers, who prac- tically manage the Labor Party organization during the daytime, was marked. Everywhere the readiness to undertake unpaid service is the secret of working-class progress. Again, there is no doubt that the standard of taste in dress, in house furnish- ing, and in personal habits has been steadily rising. I have not space to mention the improvements in all grades of education. To sum up, a continual rise in civilization is now expected and taken as a matter of course by the workers — i.e., a class improvement, not a merely individual one. I believe that while in England the upper class made the civilization of the eight- eenth century and the middle class that of the nineteenth, the working class will mold a civilization in the twentieth century with no less distinctive a quality. All this sounds like boasting, but when I find such an enlightened paper as The Nation, which values democracy, working-class progress, education, and the part of women in public life, actually pitying England for her "deterioration" since the war I feel that the report of our death has been very much exaggerated. We are all too much obsessed with money standards. If I had to choose between the progress of the English workers since the war, which I have described, and a greater financial turnover, with the standards of before the war, I should choose to have things as they are. New York, April 24 Alice M. Cameron Christian Social Ethics To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: Your readers may be interested in a school of Chris- tian Social Ethics to be opened this June in connection with the Conference for Church Work at Wellesley College. Those planning the school are all seeking to learn what the acceptance of Christian ideals without compromise would mean in political, social, and industrial life. Three lines of study are to be followed: Christian Social Theory, History, and Practice. Dr. Gavin, professor in the General Theological Seminary, New York, is to give a course under the first head; Dr. Niles Carpenter, of the University of Buffalo, under the second; while the course in practical appli- cations is to be given by the Reverend Auguste Demant of the Christian Social Council, England. Students of any or no church are welcome. It would be particularly stimulating if some would register who agree with the Soviet government that the church is inevitably an obstacle to social advance. Leaflets with fifll information may be obtained from Miss Marjorie Martin, 21 East Sixteenth Street, Brooklyn. Wellesley, Mass., April 25 Vida D. Scudder The Folly of Work To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The League for Industrial Democracy has chosen as the subject for its June conference this year "Racketeering High and Low — The Folly of Work," and has asked me to serve as collector of material with a view to publishing a rather ambitious book that would summarize the worst abuses of our industrial system. We are looking for important facts about racketeering in the power industry, real estate, financial organi- zation, marketing, advertising, insurance, manufacture, and labor unionism. Our plan is to get progressives in all parts of the United States to send in information concerning instances in which persons or corporations have captured part of our economic resources and machinery and are using their position of vantage to extract personal gain without commensurate service. Readers of The Nation who have knowledge of specific rackets or who are willing to do some research in this field are asked to write me at 112 East Nineteenth Street, New York. New York, April 17 Paul Blanshard Contributors to This Issue Richard J. Beamish, political staff correspondent of the Philadelphia Record, is considered one of the most competent of commentators on political affairs in the State of Pennsylvania. Louis Resnick, coauthor of "Eye Hazards in Indus- trial Occupations," was formerly connected with the National Safety Council. J. A. Fellows is the pseudonym of an observer who is in intimate touch with conditions in the courts of Detroit. William Seagle is the author of "Cato, or the Future of Censorship." Ray C. B. Brown was for many years managing editor of Musical America. Ernst Kulka is a gynecologist at the University Women's Clinic in Vienna.

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Books, Films, Drama De Libris By ROBERT LIDDELL LOWE Let it suffice that I have heard And never read of how a maiden Lay with a bright betraying bird Who loved and left her heavy-laden; Or how a king, unbonneted, Without a kingdom or a bed, Strode through a storm, while tempests far More furious raged within his head. It is enough that I have heard, Though no book told me, how at night A tiger trod the forest's floor, Burning terrible and bright. There will be time for books when I Have grown too weary pondering, Too tired of reading once again The pale white syllables of spring. Fake Culture for Real King Mob. By Frank K. Notch. Harcourt, Brace and Com- pany. $2. THIS is a curious book, revealing an odd mixture of merits and defects. The author, writing under the pseudonym of Frank K. Notch, is a man with a genuine literary gift. Much that he has to say is shrewd and dis- cerning, and all of it is set forth with an exhilarating passion. But his arguments are sometimes more distinguished for animus than for plausibility, and when he attempts metaphysics the results are deplorable. The book, moreover, is badly organized: Mr. Notch constantly loses sight of his goal, and reminds one of nothing so much as the man who leapt on his horse and rode off furiously in every direction. The dominant thesis from which Mr. Notch so often wanders is the destructive effect of the "mob" on cultural values. A mob is made up of a group of persons unable to think straight because they are affected by the conscious- ness of their own numbers. The group may be small and contained in a meeting-hall or a public square; it may be large, extending through a city or an entire country. It may even be international; but before it can be a Mob it must be touched with the thrilling awareness of number, and unable to examine the intrinsic value of an idea be- cause its simultaneous presence in so many minds gives it another kind of value. The subject matter of the idea may be almost any- thing: an insult to the flag; a catchword like "or what have you"; bobbed hair; a fashion in clothes, pronuncia- tion, or philosophy; a baseball player, an actor, a book, a shade of color, a political or religious leader; Negro sculp- ture, Chinese drawing, the assassination of the Czar, or a flight across the Atlantic. The mob expresses its intolerance by trying to drag larger numbers into its mood. The fashion Mob (in dress, books, culture, science, etc.) uses derision, a bitter, cutting derision which makes the outsider wince. The patriotic Mob uses rage, which makes the outsider tremble. . . . Persons are drawn into the Mob, and remain in it, because of panic, the terror of being left outside. The author then takes up in successive chapters various manifestations of the mob spirit in contemporary life — in litera- ture, advertising, politics, science, nationalism. In the field of letters he finds the mob spirit becoming more rampant month by month. Its symptoms are the book clubs, the army of popular- izers, and the new methods of advertising, which no longer em- phasize the merits of a volume, but its sales. "The public must be 'panicked' (as good vaudevillians are said to 'panic' the audience) into the buying of a book." And what kind of volume is it being "panicked" into buying? For one thing, the works of the popularizers. The word "popu- larizer," the author reminds us, comes from the old Latin popa, a butcher. "It does not seem to be understood that certain subjects cannot be simplified beyond a given point with- out losing their substance and character." The Will Durants, van Loons, Lewis Brownes, and Brisbanes cheapen and de- grade their subjects. Their popularizations are not merely harmless. They constitute "an assault upon the world's cul- tural values," for by his misrepresentations the average popu- larizer seeks to hide the disciplinary character of intellectual effort; he encourages intellectual laziness in the few who might ultimately have been initiated. "The truth is that the millions who read Durant, van Loon, and their kind do not want philosophy or history. They want the painless removal of a vague inferiority complex." The mob, in brief, "destroys spiritual values by accepting them." When the low cannot reach the high it pulls down the high to its own level. There is a Gresham's law in spiritual values too: a debased currency thrusts a good currency out of circulation. The rewards offered by the Mob in money and adulation in exchange for fake culture values are enormous; young talents are tempted and corrupted. The march of invention, again, particularly of all inven- tion that increases the rapidity of communication, has reached the point where it is becoming more and more anti-cultural in effect by increasing the dominance of the mob, particularly through the growth of newspapers and movies. "The restless run of ideas and pictures, disconnected information, turns life into a jumble of items, fragmented newspaper paragraphs." Mankind becomes a Coney Island mob, which can be kept going only by not being too interested in anything. With the invention of movable type and the advent of cheaper printing the Mob took a forward move. The National Mobs began to form, enfolding millions at a time. With the coming of the railroad and the telegraph the National Mobs began to coalesce; and now, with radio and television, the World Mob is at hand, an organized, international, self-perpetuating Mob, the first phenomenon of its kind in human history. There is a great deal of irrelevant matter in the book, chiefly on the alleged antagonism between nature and the spirit, and on the latest conclusions of science. These sections consist for the most part of ill-digested Eddington, and their argument is hopelessly garbled. Mr. Notch is more plausible when he sticks to his main contention — that the world is be- coming increasingly mob-minded, and that the mob is always and everywhere the enemy of culture. But even here one is compelled to eye many of his specific arguments dubiously. A "mob" brought into being by cheaper printing, for example,

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 573 hardly seems an unrelieved menace. And are the book clubs, to come to our own day, really enemies of culture? Mr. Notch's arguments against them, at least, are not very convincing. When he declares, for example, that "month by month the Mob of 100,000 [book-club subscribers] switches its hysteria from book to book," one wonders whether the mob or Mr. Notch is the more hysterical. For a problem that has long puzzled me is this: Why do Mr. Notch and people like him become so angry or alarmed because a fairly good book (I am not talking in terms of eternity, but in terms of contemporary life) is taken by 100,000 subscribers a month, and yet remain com- paratively calm when a magazine like the Saturday Evening Post — with much lower average standards than the leading book clubs — circulates to twenty times as many persons a week? Or when a paper of the level of the Daily News is bought by ten times as many persons a day? What is the vital difference in principle between subscribing to a book club and subscribing to a magazine? I do not wish to be understood as offering any blanket defense of the book clubs. It is true that the very fact that a book club has 100,000 subscribers limits its range of choice. But it still seems extremely probable to me (and the actual record of the book clubs strengthens this opinion) that the choices of even the least intelligent book club are much less foolish on the average than those the subscribers would have made for themselves. Meanwhile there is nothing to pre- vent Mr. Notch or any other independent spirit from making his own wise selections from the 800 books published each month. In brief, it seems to me that in spite of the truth and im- portance of much that Mr. Notch has to say, he has often allowed his indignation and his eloquence to run away with his common sense. The outlook for culture today is surely not a brilliant one, but I do not see that it is appreciably worse than it has ever been. The problem is immemorial, and perhaps irresolvable. For culture, as Santayana has pointed out, "is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean." Henry Hazlitt Souls in Business The Company. By Edwin Seaver. The Macmillan Company. $2. THIS book is one of the most significant volumes of fiction by an American writer to appear in recent years. Other writers will perhaps work out some of the implications of "The Company" more fully than Seaver has done; but whether they do or not the book will stand as an original con- tribution to recent writing. Seaver has attempted, and I believe altogether success- fully, a new realistic interpretation of our industrial era. He is concerned not with machines, but with human values; he conceives the "mechanization" and "standardization" of our lives as due not so much to domination by our tools as to broken faith with the high purposes and responsibilities that we con- ceive for ourselves and for human life in general. Always in his stories there is the instant's weakness and the eventual fail- ure, leading to frustration of the individual. But this frus- tration is not conceived as inherent, and the weakness leading to it is always pointed out. Seaver's treatment of his material is objective; he writes of the boss, of stenographers and clerks and vice-presidents, in stories by turns humorous, satiric, straightforwardly realistic, and occasionally farcical. He treats his characters first of all as individuals, but one is not long in recognizing that they are also types and are, within their limi- tations, universal. The Company itself, far from being the personalized force it sometimes becomes, is here no more than an abstraction. I am impressed with the forms of these stories and with the lasting freshness and vitality of the writing. Seaver uses common words — almost a monosyllabic style — yet with them obtains a lyrical expression that is remarkably varied and effec- tive. The suggestion of his work is musical both in its rhythmic flow and in the presence of certain constant sensuous and emo- tional values. The forms are also musical — All Talking, an overture; Idyll, a scherzo; The Kiss, a theme and development; and Smoke, a full sonata. Clinton Simpson Whitewash for Pope Alexander Pope. By Edith Sitwell. Cosmopolitan Book Cor- poration. $4. CRITICS have generally felt strongly — one way or an- other— about Alexander Pope, but no one, I think, ever felt about him before with the almost maudlin tender- ness exhibited by Miss Sitwell. She has taken him under her protection, gone forth to fight his battles, and, apparently, con- ceived for him that sort of romantic attachment which is gen- erally reserved for poets of a softer kind. Indeed, one can ex- plain her excitement only on the assumption that she has made some sort of identification between herself and him, and the result is a study with all the interest and all the defects in- evitable under the circumstances. It says in favor of Pope many of the things which have never been said before, but it is also almost ludicrously intemperate, biased, and blind to all the things it would not see. Pope is, she says, "in his two finest poems perhaps the most flawless artist our race has produced." Much could be said in defense of that statement, but Miss Sitwell almost forgets to. say any of it in her passionate determination to demonstrate more dubious and less important theses. She denounces those who assume that poetry has anything to do with goodness, and then, with an inconsistency all too characteristic of her method, she devotes the greater part of her book to an attempt to demon- strate that Pope was "a good and exceedingly lovable man." She finds the key to his character in the shame which he felt when reminded of his physical deformity, and she maintains that friendship was the thing he longed for most, but her method is to retell with most evident bias all the stories of his intrigues while judging him by one standard and his enemies, by another. When Pope succeeds in getting his ironical review of Ambrose Philips accepted at its face value by Steele, it is only a clever device, and when he slyly administers an emetic to the publisher Curll, it is no more than a publisher deserves; but when Pope himself becomes the victim of a hoax, then no con- demnation is too strong for those who would stoop to such an underhanded revenge. Pope was, of course, the subject of vile slanders, but so was every other person of prominence who happened to live in the days of Queen Anne, and it would be hard indeed to dem- onstrate that he was less ready than his fellows to use the weapons of the time. He fought fiercely with his lesser con- temporaries, and it matters little how the fights started. The fact remains that he was mercilessly cruel to those much weaker than himself, and that he delighted in breaking gnats and fleas (if not butterflies) upon the mighty wheel of his satire. Perhaps we need not pity them, but surely we need not, like Miss Sitwell, tremble with rage at the thought of the "thousand venomous little scribblers who attack him" if we but pause to remember how much more than a match he was for them all. When Dennis mocked his deformity he was not above re- torting, in lines whose brilliancy made them immortal, that

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574 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3384 Dennis was poor. // Lady Mary laughed at his declaration of love and if his retort was the couplet: "From furious Sappho scarce a kinder fate, Poxed by her love or libeled by her hate," then at least they were quits, and there is hardly occasion to moon pityingly over the man who could defend himself thus. If any favor is to be shown in judging between him and his enemies, then surely it must be said that his strength obligated him to a certain consideration which he did not show. In his battles with Grub Street he had genius, fame, social position, and financial security on his side. He did not spare the weak- nesses of others and there is no reason why posterity should spare his. The attitude of protective tenderness which Miss Sitwell takes toward him seems, indeed, singularly inappropriate. He chose not to ask for the world's pity, and he consented to use certain weapons — intrigue and boundless prevarication — which may possibly be justified by success but which certainly deprive him of the right to sentimental commiseration in his failures. Though it is difficult to praise his art too highly, it is easy to be absurd in the effort to make a knight sans reproche out of a man too great to need a spotless reputation. To treat him as one would treat the merely innocent, to pity him as one would pity one of "God's fools" is, indeed, to be more than absurd, for it is to wrong Pope himself by failing to recognize the kind of character which he so triumphantly represents. A Pope who can be yearned over is merely so much the less Pope. Those critics who think they are praising his poetry when they grant it as much of romantic feeling as could well be ex- pected in so benighted an age have but little sense of the quali- ties which make that poetry great, but the effort to make him a "forerunner of romanticism" is hardly less ill advised than the effort to prove him a kindly and sentimental man. A certain hard competence, a certain willingness to depend upon wit alone, a certain preference for the world of ferocious give-and-take — all these are parts of the idea of the man no less essential to that idea than a confidence in the sufficiency of point, and skill, and clarity is essential to the idea of his poetry. I would not willingly trade Pope the complete Augustan for any version which represented him as a Keats manque, and I am hardly less willing to trade Pope the malicious wit for Miss Sitwell's sentimental hunchback. The most interesting thing about a wasp is that he stings uncommonly well. Joseph Wood Krutch Misgovernment by Injunction The Labor Injunction. By Felix Frankfurter and Nathan Greene. The Macmillan Company. $5. THE lack of an authoritative book on the labor injunction has often been deplored by public-spirited Americans in- terested in civil liberty. But the origin of the present book seems curiously remote. Apparently the first impulse toward it came from an English law-journal editor who wished to inform his readers of the strange practices of their Ameri- can cousins. Like many another legal invention the injunction had originated in England but had fallen into desuetude there with the rise of British labor to political power. In this country the labor injunction has now been an issue in national and State politics for several decades. "Govern- intnt by injunction" has been a familiar catchword, and con- sidering the provocation it is a wonder that the talk has not been of "misgovernment by injunction." Naturally, during all this time a great deal has been written by labor leaders, lawyers, and editors upon the injunction. There was, for in- stance, the little book on the subject published several years ago by Mr. John P. Frey, presenting labor's point of view. It was apparent to all who thought on the subject that the labor injunction had become an abuse of an otherwise benefi- cent legal process. Originally a preventive writ to protect tangible private property from threatened irreparable injury, it had been transformed into an instrument of police in labor struggles. A large area of dispute has, however, remained as to the extent of its abuse through the issue of blanket injunc- tions, temporary ex parte orders, summary punishment for contempt without jury trial, and the like. What do Professor Frankfurter and Mr. Nathan Greene now contribute toward a better comprehension and solution of the vexing problem? The labor injunction has usually been discussed with a great deal of passion. The great merit of the present work is that the subject is discussed with objectivity and restraint. If there is little in the material that is unfamiliar, it is at least presented with great order and clarity. The book is of the type called by scholars a systematization. It deals with the law of the injunction in the federal courts, and in New York and Massachusetts, selected as the two most im- portant industrial States. It is particularly excellent as a legal case book. But in view of the highly controversial nature and the wide social and economic bearings of the problem of the injunction, it is very much to be doubted if that is enough. Of the two authors, Professor Frankfurter in particular would have led us to expect more. He is generally accounted a so- ciological jurist, but it would be more correct to regard him rather as one of the notable masters of the case method. It is his great public spirit and social interest that have made it difficult to detect the difference. The weakness of the present work lies in its neglect of the sociology of the injunction. It has not a sufficiently wide orientation with the whole problem of law and labor. Con- sidering that the injunction is usually discussed in a highly charged atmosphere, more exact analysis of many problems than the authors pursue would have been highly desirable. I say this '. although I am more than inclined to agree that their intuitions are in most respects not wide of the mark. But, after all, they do not have to convince those who have had no use for the injunction. Upon their own premises, they cannot expect ' much progress to be made against the injunction until more exact facts than are now available are substituted for con- jectures, no matter how well founded. For instance, a very interesting question is the extent to which injunctions really are effective in curbing strike activities. It is often asserted that labor exaggerates the harshness of the injunction's effects. Are injunctive decrees obeyed when a labor union is powerful? The only light supplied is that which may be derived from the in- conclusive statistics on the number of contempt proceedings in the federal courts and a scant few pages of opinion from variously qualified persons contained in two of the appendixes. Many similar questions press for better answers than they receive. What has been the history of industrial relations fol- lowing the granting of injunctions? What is the correlation between the use of the injunction and yellow-dog contracts? Are injunctions used by employers as part of a planned and consistent program to disrupt union organizations by securing a series of interpretations of the laws unfavorable to labor? To what extent have the abuses of the injunction been due to the lack of skill of labor lawyers? The data relating to injunctions in the federal courts have been examined with some degree of thoroughness and exactness. But similar data for New York and Massachusetts are not supplied, although it would have made possible a very important comparison between the incidence of the injunction in the State and federal courts. That the task was not an impossible one is proved, for instance, by the appearance of a

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 3/0 study for New York in the Political Science Quarterly while the present work presumably was going through the press. It is called The Use of the Injunction in the New York Needle Trades and is by P. F. Brissenden and P. O. Swayzee. It appears therefrom that no less than 250 applications for in- junctions have been made in the State courts in New York City alone since 1894 and that almost one-third of these were in the needle trades. Contrary to expectation, the figures for the number of temporary and permanent, ex parte and non- ex parte injunctions show that the State courts were no more moderate than the federal courts in their grants of injunctions, although presumably more subject to local labor influence. But whereas there were 104 motions for contempt in the 118 fed- eral cases in the Frankfurter-Greene study, there were only 3 motions for contempt in 48 of the needle-trade cases. Was there greater obedience to the State injunctions, or did the local labor influence first make itself felt in preventing pro- ceedings for contempt? When it comes to proposing a remedial program the State courts are even more completely neglected. Professor Frankfurter and Mr. Greene occupy themselves exclusively in arguing in support of the pending Shipstead bill, which seeks to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts in labor disputes. The bill has only now been reported out of a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee after lingering there for over two years. This sudden action is to be understood as an added protest against the confirmation of Judge Parker. One of the leading objects of the Shipstead bill is to declare yellow-dog contracts unenforcible in the federal courts although not illegal and void in themselves. This strange piece of casuistry is due to the fact that federal and State courts have declared legislation directly invalidating yellow-dog contracts unconstitutional. But it is fairly certain that the same fate awaits the measure now pending in Congress. Such other provisions of the Shipstead bill as have a better chance of surviving the perils of unconstitutionality have too many loopholes. They constitute simply pious exhortations to the federal courts to grant injunctions upon less liberal terms than at present. The provisions aimed at curing the procedural abuses of the injunction are worth as little enthusiasm. There has grown up at Harvard in recent years what almost amounts to a school of proceduralists who have come to put more em- phasis upon procedure than upon substantive law. It is true that it is idle to grant rights for which no adequate procedure of enforcement is provided. But where the situation funda- mentally is one of no rights, procedural devices are not a great help. They only tend to perpetuate vicious substantive law by making it seemingly easier to bear. I have always, for instance, thought that the value of jury trials in injunctive contempt cases was greatly exaggerated. Juries, particularly in times of excitement, are no less ready to convict than judges whose economic bias they share. In any event, the record of the courts is unfortunately not such as to lead to the expectation that they would not treat the procedural safeguards of the Shipstead bill in the same way as those of the Clayton Act. Certainly this is true if we are to have more judges like Hughes and Parker. In fact, my guess is that neither Professor Frankfurter nor Mr. Greene privately entertains any great illusions on this score but for reasons of policy is publicly hoping against hope. Otherwise, their faith in the Shipstead bill, considering their knowledge of the history of the Clayton Act, would be quite amazing. Moreover, even if the law were obeyed the pressure for injunctions would simply be transferred to the State courts, and the Brissenden-Swayzee study indicates certainly the ease with which they have been granted in one set of them. If the courts were ready to change their attitude they could even now remedy the procedural abuses of the injunction of their own motion, through their rule-making powers, without any ne- cessity for legislation. The advantage of such internal reform would be that it could not be upset like legislation. If our plutocracy ever weakens sufficiently in this country and labor achieves some real degree of political and economic power, the courts will begin to take heed, although even then our strait-jacket constitutionalism will prove a great obstacle. At present it is as hard to get rid of the injunction as it is to do away with prohibition. I am afraid that perhaps, after all, a fable for our English cousins is all that present realities make profitable. The injunction is America's great contribution to police history, having no counterpart in more realistic Euro- pean countries, which are reduced to treating their workers with a direct and unpleasant brutality. Ours is the great country of mass production. It is natural that it should have given to the world an instrument of mass policing. William Seagle Beethoven as Fiction Hero Eroica: A Novel Based on the Life of Ludwig Van Beethoven. By Samuel Chotzinoff. Simon and Schuster. $2.50. MR. CHOTZINOFF has contributed nothing to our understanding of Beethoven, which in view of the enormous literature on the man is not surprising. Yet the style alone of this spiritless novel would dampen any enthusiasm one might otherwise bring to it. Few indeed are the cliches, the stilted adjectives, and the periphrastic expres- sions that Mr. Chotzinoff has overlooked. Even the theory that he tried to adapt his manner to the period of the story does not account for the stiff and graceless prose. Beethoven lived in the radiant morning of romanticism, and this, we are told, is the way his musings ran: Though he was fully aware of the artificial gap be- tween himself and the great ladies who circled so tan- talizingly around him, he could not conceal from himself that their proximity afforded him a superior pleasure. In spite of his reason, which told him that he was in every way their equal, and in spite of his pride, which com- manded him to spurn them as the pusillanimous creatures of a senseless tradition, he could not gainsay a secret long- ing for those whose nurtured beauty and perfumed re- finement so violently contrasted with his own ungainly person. There are many pages of this indirect discourse, tedious and insipid transcriptions of what Mr. Chotzinoff imagines Beethoven thought. Everyone knows that Beethoven was in- articulate in words — no man of his mentality ever wrote such disappointing letters — but he was surely not so fatuous a figure as this. When it comes to descriptions of music, wherein Mr. Chotzinoff should feel at home, one encounters some odd ex- amples of unintended humor — the only kind in the book. The long passage in which the composer ruminates as he labors at the Eroica symphony has to be read to be believed. Of the novelist's license to alter data Mr. Chotzinoff avails himself sparingly. For the most part, he keeps close to authenticated facts. Occasionally he ventures into fiction, as when he positively identifies the "immortal Beloved" as Giu- lietta Guicciardi, and when he insinuates that Beethoven's deafness had a luetic origin; both are hypotheses as yet un- proved and probably unprovable. By omitting a mass of sig- nificant details with which the records supply him and relying instead upon a feeble fancy, he has failed to paint a lifelike character. He has not conveyed any perception of the ele- mental energy, the titanic quality of the man. Ray C. B. Brown

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576 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3384 Simple Trail* About tke Tariff This last and highest Protective Tariff Bill may soon be law, imposing higher costs of living on all of us. Protection is necessary and good for us. That's the theory. But what are the facts — the God's truth, ahout it? Between certain manufac- turers who say Protection is needed to make and keep the country prosperous, and those who say a Protective Tariff is just a robbery and a fraud upon the masses for the benefit of privileged interests — which are right? Somewhere there must be an honest and searching examination of the matter and a conclusive answer: — THERE IS. You will find a surprisingly lucid exposition of the whole subject in the great book PROTECTION or FREE TRADE By Henry George Recent Printing Cloth Bound One Dollar ROBERT SCHALKENBACH FOUNDATION 13 Park Place, New York City for unforgettable impressions VISIT SOVIET RUSSIA Continental travel comforts From Leningrad to Moscow and down the picturesque Volga to the Caucasus or the Crimea and Ukraine. Witness, at first hand the powerful drama of Communism on trial. Interesting itineraries. Frequent sailings. Write for Booklet "N" Amalgamated Bank tSeptl 11-15 Union Square, New York City or Amalgamated Trust & Savings Bank 111 West Jackson Blvd., Chicago, III. The Inward Vision Midstream. By Helen Keller. Doubleday, Doran and Com- pany. $3. TO her two autobiographical works, "The Story of My Life" and "The World I Live In," Helen Keller has now added "Midstream." It was, of course, impossible to expect that this volume would have the extraordinarily mov- ing quality of the first revelation of this remarkable spirit. It was not possible to add much to the thrilling story of her conquest of the apparently insurmountable obstacles placed in her way by an unkind nature. But through this volume, too, there shines the unconquerable spirit, and the unquenchable de- termination to enjoy life and to utilize it as much as any normal person. Indeed, she has achieved far more than probably would have been her fate had she not been handicapped. Perhaps the best thing about it all is that Miss Keller has come through to middle age a liberal in spirit. With the beauty of the outward world denied to her, she is not only free from bitterness and melancholy, but is most eager that the lot of all other human beings, advantaged or disadvantaged, should be more and more freed from the restraints of narrow conventionality and the heavy chains of our industrial civiliza- tion. The injustices of our society weigh heavily upon her. Where others in her situation might well feel free to think only of themselves, Miss Keller is ready by word and purse to serve at all times, to bear witness to the breadth and the wisdom of that inward vision of a better world than the one she has faced with such superb courage. In this volume she is generous to the many who have consciously and unconsciously been able to help her. But the best part is the renewed revela- tion of the completeness with which she has risen above self when every aspect of her situation might so easily have led her to center all her thinking upon herself and her own immediate interests. Among the books that tell of the victory of the human spirit over incredible odds this volume will have its place. Oswald Garrison Villard Books in Brief Machine Made Man. By Silas Bent. Farrar and Rine- hart. $3. Nowhere outside "The World Almanac" has a more numer- ous aggregation of facts on a wider variety of subjects directly and indirectly connected with the machine been brought together under one tent than Mr. Bent has assembled in this book. A good many of these facts, the reader will note, are so, though his confidence in the dependability of that vast number about which he knows nothing is likely to be a trifle shaken on dis- covering within seven pages of each other the fact that Walter R. Ingalls is "now recognized as the best authority" on wealth and income in the United States (a superlative distinction that Mr. Ingalls would certainly be too modest to claim) and the fact that Nicaragua is an island (the latter statement being doubtless a pure inadvertence). When he finds "Senator" Frear of Wisconsin hobnobbing with "President Hoover's Na- tional Bureau of Economic Research," however, and discovers on the same page that the reason we can't compute national income accurately from income-tax returns is because huge sums are invested in tax-exempt securities (rather than because only one-tenth of our income receivers are required under the law to report) he is too likely to begin wondering whether even omniscience itself may not sometimes be liable to error. What the facts, whatever they may be, mean, he will get not When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 577 the slightest idea, though he will perhaps gather from the con- clusion that Mr. Bent is inclined to guess that maybe the ma- chine may be all right, after all. Those who do not like the book may perhaps like Glintenkamp's woodcut illustrations. Claude Monet: The Water Lilies. By Georges Clemenceau. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $3. Clemenceau was undoubtedly prompted by a genuine feeling of friendship and admiration for Claude Monet when in his "last heavily burdened hours" he conceived the idea of writing a book about him. Unfortunately there is a wide gap between good intentions and ability to carry them out. The present vol- ume is neither a biography nor an aesthetic treatise on impres- sionism. It is not even a collection of amusing anecdotes like Brousson's "Anatole France en pantoufles." Its few chapters, thrown together without order, teem with platitudinous opinions on genius, art, time, retinal sensitivity — opinions pronounced with the authority of a general or a commander-in-chief. Amid an annoying profusion of martial metaphors, Monet is treated incidentally, episodically. Barring irrelevancies, this is all we learn about him: he had a garden with a lily pond; he was a sedentary; he was scrupulously conscientious; he loved the fields, the flowers, the woods; and the idea of the Water Lilies ob- sessed him for years. Infidels and Heretics. An Agnostic's.. Anthology. Edited by Clarence Darrow and Wallace Rice. The Stratford Company. $3. Considering its avowedly unconventional purpose, this anthology turns out to be surprisingly like most other antholo- gies. It has a large proportion of pieces of prose and verse not to be found in other collections, but it also has a goodly number of old stand-bys. It contains some excellent things, and it also contains some extremely shoddy writing. Many agnostics will be pained by some of the selections, and good Christians will be horrified at finding some of their favorite writers represented. M. C. Otto is consistently referred to as M. C. Ott. Films Eisenstein's Latest IF I tried to list the scenes that impressed me most in "Old and New" (Cameo), Eisenstein's remarkable ser- mon on the advantages of collective farming, I should be inclined to select these: the pathetic figures of a man and a woman pulling a harrow for lack of a horse; the enor- mous mass of smooth and glistening human flesh displayed by the kulak couple ; the "juicy" portraits of priests praying for rain, interspersed for sardonic contrast with close-ups of a bleating sheep; the wheat fields swept by wind; the gorgeous stud bulls with their quivering bulk. All these may be described as portrait studies, here and there reminiscent of such Russian painters as Ryepin, Kustodiyev, and Perov, but conceived dynamically and not as "still" pictures, and brimful of characteristic detail. Perhaps it will be even no exaggera- tion to say that "Old and New" resolves itself largely into a series of marvelously executed cinematic portraits of men, beasts, and machines, portraits observed with a revealing penetration and the precision of a master, but strung together on a thread of narrative that carries with it no particular appeal either to the mind or to the heart. The picture was of course made primarily for the Russian peasant, as part of the campaign to carry the "general line" of the Communist When writing to advertisers "A Most Notable American" JOHNSON OF THE MOHAWKS A Biography by Arthur Pound In Collaboration with Richard E. Day Among pre-Revolutionary figures Sir William John- son stands out as one of the remarkable men of his day. Coming to America as an Irish immigrant, he became a frontier trader, bought his first wife and later married two Indian maids, became a Mohawk war chief, was made a baronet, and amassed the largest fortune of his time. He was an empire builder and his work in opening the way to the west was vital to the spread of colonization along the Mohawk trail. His curious and exciting life is spread on these pages with unusual distinction. Illustrated $5.00 THE MACrVULLAN COMPANY ^- NEW YORK . . . do Communist strikes increase workers' wages? REDS AND LOST WAGES By Charles G. Wood Commissioner of Conciliation, U. S. Department of Labor The first inside, close-up story of what "red" labor activities have meant to labor, of how the Communists work in industry, of the activities that have fostered their influence, and of how progressive employers are fostering strikes and unrest. The author from intimate knowledge of hundreds of strikes — in Brooklyn, Gastonia, Passaic, Brockton, etc. — gives the most vivid, readable account of actual labor conditions today which has yet appeared. "An absorbing first-hand account of the evil influence of Communist groups in labor agitation during recent years." — Boston Herald. Price $4.00 FREE EXAMINATION COUPON NS Harper & Brothers, 49 E. 33rd St., New York. Send me a copy of Reds and Lost Wages— ti.00 □ I will remit $4 in 10 days or return book. □ Check for $4 is enclosed. □ Send C. O. D. Name . . Address Business Connection (Please fill in) Sent on approval only in U.S. and Canada. please mention The Nation

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578 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3384 The First Volume of a group of lives of Amer- ican Political Leaders, edited by ALLAN NEVINS. RUTHERFORD B. HAYES STATESMAN OF REUNION By H. J. ECKENRODE "A fascinating biography, scholarly, and brilliant, illuminating." - - CLAUDE entertaining BOWERS. "An excellent book, interesting and convincing, sane and balanced." — JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS. Illustrated. $5.00 LOOK TO THE EAST By FREDERICK PAliMER A provocative book on the situation in the Far East today with a forecast of coming events. Illustrated. $3.00 A HISTORY OF MUSIC By GRACE GRIDLEY WILM A complete survey, with especial evaluation of modern music and composers. Significant works of many composers interpreted. $3.00 THE THING: Why I Am a Catholic By G. K. CHESTERTON A spirited discussion of present day philoso- phies and religions, with nimble counter thrusts at Dean Inge's Protestantism, Clarence Darrow's cynicism and the creed of Mencken. 2nd printing. $2.50 DODD, MEAD & COMPANY, NEW YORK THE MEMOIRS OF THE COMTE DEGRAMONT By Anthony Hamilton The Comte De Gramont was the Casanova of King Charles I I's court — an eminent distinction in a circle of rakes like Buckingham and Rochester. His memoirs read like a novel; are ten times more entertaining — and true in the bargain. He gives a brilliant picture of the gay life at the Court of King Charles, where good taste and good manners were more important than good morals. $5.00 E. P. DUTTON & CO., Inc., 300 Fourth Ave., N. Y. C. SUMMER Are Your Plans Completed? Iluve you found u Summer Home? Do you want to Kent your Town Home? See pages 584 and Hi If there isn't anything there to help you Send us your Requirements— There is no time to Lose. SO words - $3.08 60 words - 6.16 The Nation 20 Vesey Street FITzroy 9074 policy into the village. It is therefore not to be expected that the demonstration, however ingeniously conceived, of a cream separator or a tractor would be found equally impressive by an American audience. But with all due allowance for this difference, it is still doubtful whether "Old and New" is capable of converting anybody to its message; and the fault, I think, does not lie with the message. Regarded merely as an argument for collective farming, the picture quite obviously takes too many things for granted. On the other hand, as a story of a successful struggle for such a collective farm, it is too tame and schematic in its dramatic development to make one thrill in sympathetic response. This is not to say that the picture does not contain a number of highly effective and original scenes. The episode of the "wedding" between a stud bull and a common cow as the village bride is extremely amusing, not to say exciting; so, too, is the race between the tractor and the village carts, with the delightful interlude when the driver of the tractor, to mend his engine, helps himself to the proffered skirt of a woman enthusiast. But it does seem to me that Eisenstein's preoccupation with conveying ideas by means of a specially developed "cinematic language" is inevitably leading him into a blind alley, for it excludes the purely sensual and emotional appeal of the structural foundation of the motion picture — its rhythmic and dramatic progression. His "Potemkin" un- doubtedly gained its success because of the stress laid on its dramatic and dynamic structure, elementary as this still was in its case. But "Ten Days That Shook the World" was a step away from synthesis to analysis, from a unified dynamic pattern to a series of loosely related descriptive episodes. And "Old and New" is a still further and even more disintegrating step in the same direction. Commendable intelligence, inventiveness, and taste mark "Paramount on Parade" (Rialto), unquestionably the best screen revue that has been seen on Broadway. And having taken two years to overcome sheer ignorance and cretinism, it is to be hoped that in another two years Hollywood will show us a real cinematic revue which will use to the full extent the powers of expression inherent in the camera, the microphone, the film record, and the screen — in other words, to cite a contrary example, a screen musical play totally unlike "Hold Everything" (Hollywood), which has amusing gags but very little else. Alexander Bakshy Drama Miss Le Gallienne's Juliet SEVERAL months ago I expressed the wish that Miss Le Gallienne would add to her repertory some play written in a major key. She had given us much pathos and not a little sentiment, but the more familiar one became with her enterprise the more conspicuous was the absence of both genuine tragedy and genuine comedy. Her most striking successes as well as her relative failures had been all too much of a kind. A certain languishing, elegiac mood seemed to brood over the auditorium, and served to make one realize that her theater must succeed in breaking that spell if it were to become what it obviously aspired to be — a place where one might have an opportunity to see representative examples of all the kinds of excellence which dramatic literature affords. Apparently Miss Le Gallienne herself recognized the danger, for she has just added to her repertory a production of "Romeo and Juliet," and that production turns out to be a triumphantly successful gesture in exactly the right direction. When writing to odvrrtijtri pUau mtntion The Nation

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 579 □ FILMS D PLAYS □ CIVIC REPERTORY ^U*^ 50c, $1, $1.60. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2 :30. EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Thurs. Mat., May 8, "Romeo and Juliet ;" Thurs. Eve., May 8, "The Living Corpse ;" Fri. Eve., May 9, "Romeo and Juliet;" Sat. Mat., May 10, "Peter Pan;" Sat. Eve., May 10, "The Living Corpse ;" Mon. Eve., May 12, "Romeo and Juliet ;" Tues. Eve., May 13, "The Living Corpse ;" Wed. Eve., May 14, "Romeo and Juliet." Seats 4 weeks in advance at Box Office & Town Hall, 113 W. 43rd St. HERMAN SHUMLIX presents THE LAST MILE "Must remain the last word in drama for a long time to come." — Benchley, New Yorker. S4 TVT W UiiDPK Theatre, 42nd St., West of Broadway. .AiYl II. rXi\I\I\IO Eves. 8:50. Matinees Wed. & Sat. 2:30. The Theatre Guild Presents HOTEL UNIVERSE A NEW PLAY By PHILIP BARRY MARTIN BECK Theatre, 45th St., W. of Eighth Ave. Evgs., 8 :50. Mats., Thurs. & Sat., 2 :50 A MONTH the COUNTRY By IVAN TURGENEV p.-^J THEATRE, 52nd St., W. of Broadway OU11U Evgs. 8:30. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:30. The Apple Cart Bernard Shaw's Political Extravaganza LAST WEEK A W \/WT\J THEATRE, 52nd St., W. of Broadway. J\.Lt V llH Evgs., 8:30. Mats., Wed. & Sat, 2:30 REVEALING THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW LIFE IN SOVIET RUSSIA "GUI . New" (THE STRUGGLE FOR SOIL) DIRECTED BY Now Playing EISENSTEIN I CAMEO CREATOR OF "POTEMKIN" and "TEN DATS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD" 42d St. & B'way. POPULAR PRICES SEEK "JOURNEY'S END" The all-talking screen version of R. C. Sherrlff's World-Famed Play with a powerful cast headed by COLIN CLIVE, creator of the stage role of Captain Stanhope. g~* A IPTV THEATRE, B'way & 46th St Uftltl I Twice Daily, 2:45—8:45. 3 times Sat., Sun. & Holidays 2:45—5:45—8:45. Midnight Show Every Saturday Night. Seats selling 4 weeks ahead. WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See tA Month in the Country — Guild — 52nd St., W. of B'dway. tApple Cart— Alvin— 52nd St., W. of B'dway. •Civic Repertory — 14th St., W. of Sixth Ave. — See Advertisement. JFIying High— Apollo — W. 42nd St. •Hotel Universe— Beck — 45th St., E. of Eighth Ave. £Jonica — Craig — 54th St., E. of B'dway. •The Green Pastures— Mansfield — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •The Last Mile— Sam H. Harris — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. tTopaze— Music Box — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •Uncle Vanya— Cort— W. 48th St. Films All Quiet on the Western Front — Central — 47th St. and B'dway. Bishop Murder Case — Beg. May 9; Mary Ann — Beg. May 13 — Little Picture House — 50th St., E. of Lexington Ave. Dark Red Roses— Beg. May 10— Film Guild— 52 W. Eighth St. Journey's End — Gaiety — 46th St. and B'dway. Love Parade — Beg. May 10; Song of the West — Beg. May 14 — Plaza — 58th St., E. of Madison Ave. Old and New — Cameo — 42nd St. and B'dway. Song of the Flame — Warner — B'dway and 52nd St. Such Men Are Dangerous — Beg. May 10; Sally — Beg. May 14 — Little Carnegie— 146 W. 57th St. Lectures "Humanism" — Harry Hansen, Chairman, Irving Babbitt, Henry Seidel Canby, Carl Van Doren — Carnegie Hall — Fri. Eve., May 9 — Auspices, Discussion Guild. "Drama. -(-Comedy. {Musical. "MIGHTIEST WAR DRAMA EVER SEEN" — N. Y. American. All Quiet Western Front" A Universal Picture presented by Carl Laemmle Directed by Lewis Milestone on the "A notable achievement, sincere, earnest, vivid and graphic. Better than anything so f?r done." — Mor- daunt Hall, N. Y. Times. "Enormously compelling talking motion picture. As a show some- thing to get definitely excited about I A very fine motion picture." — How- ard Barnes, Herald Tribune. CENTRAL THEATRE, B'dway and 47th Street Twice Daily: 2:45—8:45. 3 times Sat. & Sun., 2:45 — 5:45 — 8:45. Irving Henry Seidel Carl BABBITT-CANBY-VAN DOREN says YES says YES! BUT says NO In the controversy over HUMANISM, will it succeed? CARNEGIE HALL this Fri. Eve., May 9, at 8:45. Tickets: box office— Rand School— Columbia TJ Book Store. Discussion Guild— R 1002, 15 E. 40th St. Lex. 7483. Open to 8:30 Honey- Maid Chocolates Made from Pure Clover Honey and are Less-Fattening. THE NEW STRATTOX PACKAGE — $1.50 Wide variety of tempting delicacies. Mail ordert filled promptly THE ALBERT N. 1)1 KER ORGANIZATION 140 William St. New York I When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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580 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3384 Social Forces in Social Work The trained social worker regards the individual, family and community he serves as centers of con- vergence of racial, religious, economic and other social forces which hark back to the past and must be utilized to fashion the future. This view is especially important if the worker's field lies in such a highly distinctive group as the Jews. College graduates should examine care- fully the advantages, both tangible and intangible, of Jewish Social Work as a Profession May 9 is the last date for filing application for fellowships of $750 and $1000 For full information write to M. J. Karpf, Director The Training School For Jewish Social Work UP? A Graduate School 67-71 W. 47th St., New York City LABOR'S NEWS He is a college instructor. He wrote Federated Press, labor's news service, and we take the liberty of quoting from his letter: "I want a news magazine about the labor movement. A paper that surveys, condenses and makes readable the news about the trade unions, the A. F. of L., the Communists, Socialists, progressives, farmers, that I can't get in the other magazines or newspapers. You can't afford in these days not to know of the social ferment among America's 30,000,000 workers. "I take several labor papers but each one is devoted to grinding its own ax. I don't object to that; but I find it impossible to get a clear, authoritative, unbiased picture of what labor is doing and planning. Federated Press, as labor's news service, is in a position to publish such a news magazine. Why don't you?" That was a year ago. LABOR'S NEWS was the answer to this intelligent American, as it has been to thousands of others. Written by 60 correspondents in every industrial center of the land, LABOR'S NEWS brings you each week in eight concise pages the news of America's 30,000,000, otherwise unreported. No long articles, no windy disserta- tions, no airing of theories and dogmas! Just news — the news of all groups in the labor movement — authoritative, comprehensive, yet condensed to the marrow and vividly written. THK I i:1)I:k.\T1'.I) PRESS □ $2 for 1 year II! B. tilth St. □ $1 for 6 months Now York, N. Y. □ Send mc a sample copy free Here"s ■ dollar bill for six months of LABOR'S NEWS. Name Street City Much thought has evidently gone into it and, in all probability, not a little trepidation as well; but the question which must have troubled her other admirers as much as it troubled me is answered. Miss Le Gallienne's talents as actor and director are not limited by the circle within which she has hitherto chosen to move. Her "Romeo and Juliet" is conspicuously fine and satisfying. It is, indeed, one of the best things achieved at her theater, as well as one of the best performances of that particular tragedy seen in New York for many years. In the first place, the pace of the play is swift and right. It begins with the briskly staged scene of the street brawl between Capulets and Montagues, and it takes its spirit from the spirit of that scene — conceiving the whole story to be one which grows out of the quick tempers and the hot blood of these citizens of Verona. Over all too many versions of the tragedy hangs the cloud of a sentimental misconception of Shakespeare. Juliet is made languishing, merely romantic, and not a little syrupy. But Miss Le Gallienne has had the good sense to realize that this heroine is not "cute" and that the love between her and Romeo, however lyrical it may be, is no Schwarmerei. The blood that runs in Tybalt's veins runs in Juliet's too. She is quick, resolute, and, in her own way, fierce as well. Being a woman she is not supposed to revel and stab, but she is ready in an instant to throw caution and propriety to the winds, defying her father and meeting Romeo in the moonlight. Obviously she is no model maiden, and obviously the story of her love for Romeo is no story to put alongside the more edifying tales of ladies who, for love, pined meekly away. She is even more conspicuously great than she is good ; she dies defiant and protesting, as a really tragic heroine should. Perhaps there is little reason in the passion which springs up between her and Romeo, but there is a good deal more than sentiment. Their story is the story of a flame kindled amidst tinder, burning fiercely for a brief time and then extinguished. And it is in the spirit of such a story that Miss Le Gallienne and her company play it. Her Juliet is young in experience but mature in feeling. She is, to be sure, no Cleo- patra; but she is no less far from being a Miranda, a Perdita, or an Ophelia. The whole production is, moreover, almost as satisfactory in detail as it is sound in fundamental con- ception. The first scene particularly, with its blank blue wall penetrated by a single flight of stairs, is admirable in its sug- gestion of a painting by one of the primitives; and if Donald Cameron's Romeo is not so good as Miss Le Gallienne's Juliet, it is at least extremely creditable, while J. Edward Bromberg is not less than superb in the death of Mercutio. "Romeo and Juliet" belongs, no doubt, in a different category from that in which the other great tragedies of Shakespeare are placed. It broods over no philosophical prob- lem and it has, properly speaking, no villain. Calamity comes to its chief characters largely as the result of unfortunate chance, and their catastrophe does not, like the catastrophe which overtakes Lear or Othello, imply any great malignant or evil principle in the universe at large. In part because of that fact, and in part because its heroes are allowed to achieve their destiny — to love as fully as they would ever be able to love — the play might almost be called a happy, as it is certainly a joyous, thing. It has only one purpose: to exhibit love as love seems to lovers, and it is odd that the only other play of Shakespeare's which is believed to have been written in the same year should be that "Midsummer-Night's Dream" in which the same passion is viewed with the mockery of a philosopher. Is it possible that he had both works in mind when he put into the mouth of Friar Laurence a strange but profound observation: "For Nature's tears are Reason's merriment"? Was the one play intended to move "Nature's tears" and the other to evoke "Reason's merriment"? Joseph Wood Krutch When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 581 A New Uncle Remus lor Grown-ups "There can be no doubt," says Du Bose Heyward, author of Porgy, "that these stories of the South Carolina coast negroes will take their place beside the Georgia legends of Joel Chandler Harris, for they possess to an extraordinary degree the inimitable and imaginative character of the race." Here is a new Uncle Remus for grown-ups which will bring you delight. Fetchingly Illustrated $3.50 BLACK GENESIS By SAMUEL GAILLARD STONEY and GERTRUDE MATHEWS SHELBY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY «~ NEW YORK "The finest study of life under the Soviets that has yet been published." — New York World SOVIET RUSSIA: A Living Record and A History By WILLIAM HENRY GHAMBERLIN Correspondent in Russia for the Christian Science Monitor "An intelligent, balanced under- standing of what is going on, sup- ported by the historical background of the Revolution and the Com- munist movement. One of the best reference books on the achievements of the Soviets." — Oswald Garrison Villard in The Nation. An Atlantic Book With 16 illustrations $5.00 at all Booksellers LITTLE, BROWN & CO. Publishers, Boston 175 Fifth Avenue ALGonquin 6656 tihyniilliltllllllninllilllhi>n^8l'!l)!tl>..i(ldllll THE WORLD TOURISTS, Inc., announces the 2nd Cultural Tour to Soviet Russia under the leadership of Dr. Joshua M. Kunitz, Lecturer on Russian Literature and Culture in the College of the City of New York, and author of a number of widely read studies on Soviet Russia. Professor Kunitz' record in this field of activity marks him eminently qualified to conduct a tour through the U.S.S.R. ' In 1929 Dr. Kunitz conducted the cultural tour for the World Tourists, Inc., to the complete satisfaction of every member of the Group. In 1928 he was a member of the now historic Professor John Dewey Delegation of American Educa- tors. Every member of that delegation will subscribe to the statement that his exceptional appreciation of what was taking place in the New Russia, plus his understanding of the historic background, and the tem- perament of the people, was an important factor for the success of the delegation. The tour can be taken for 12, 24, or 35 days. Special attractive booklet containing rates, itineraries, etc., will be gladly mailed. An early reservation is earnestly suggested as the group will of necessity be limited. WORLD TOURISTS, Inc. I 1 1 u I ll Visits to Soviet Russia Two Weeks— Moscow, Leningrad. Sailings from New York— June 3, July 24, August 14. Price from New York— $533; from German port— $332; from Hclsingfors— $299. Registrations open. Twentj- Days in the Soviet Union— Leningrad, the Yolga. Sailing from New York June 18, July 5. Price from New York— $635; from German port— $432 ; from Helsingf ors— $401. Registrations open. Twenty-three Days in the Soviet Union — Lenin- grad, Moscow, the Crimea, Ukraine. Sailing front New York June 18. Price from New York — $665; from German port— $462; from Helsingfors— $431. Registrations open. Thirty-six Days in the Soviet Union — Leningrad, 3Ioscow, the Yolga, Caucasus, Crimea, the Ukraine. Sailing from New York June 24. Price from New York— $895; from German port— $694 ; from Helsing- fors— $601. Registrations open. Additional itineraries and sailings. Parties of eight plus American leader. Special student par- lies at low rates. 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK ZUE^O P, EN^R -QAP< When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Health Insurance in Austria IN the years following the war a series of laws were passed under the influence of the rising power of the Socialists requiring that every salaried worker be in- sured for medical treatment by what was known here as a By Dr. ERNST KULKA Vienna, April 24 Krankenkasse in Austria has a more peculiar function : the provision of all the medical needs of its members. It may do this in two ways. The less frequent way, practiced by a few benefit associations, is to allow each member a. fixed sum depending on the disease he has and the attention he needs. Krankenkasse. Employer and employee were to share the With this sum he can do as he likes, paying the difference expense; there were no exceptions: every servant girl, bell- hop, government official, or bank director who received a salary was to be provided for. Up to that time there had been movements in that direction, especially among the la- boring classes, and white-collar workers had made some pro- vision for themselves in the form of benefit associations organized by private initiative. There had also been a if he has expensive tastes. Only about 5 per cent of the insurance comes in this class. The other and more general procedure is to provide directly for the patient's needs, paying the doctor and druggist from the treasury of the Krankenkasse, but at the same time to limit the patient's free- dom of choice. The companies with geographic distribution have their own physicians distributed over separate districts workmen's compensation law, and in 1920 an unemployment and each patient must be treated by the physician in his neigh- insurance act. These various insurances were now incor- borhood. The physician, for his part, may prescribe drugs porated into a special body of laws, and comprised the first only from the official Krankenkasse formulary and the experiment in health insurance on a grand scale. The original purpose was to protect the working classes from disease, but modifications subsequently ensued, so that lately every manufacturer and storekeeper is insured as well. At present in Vienna 78 per cent of the population is insured. No provision has yet been made for independent peasant farmers. In all Austria somewhat more than 60 per cent of the poulation belongs to a Krankenkasse. All forms of insurance are paid for together in one pre- mium amounting to 15 per cent of the total salary (though a maximum is fixed). Of this, employer and employee each pays 7^ per cent. The sum is divided among the different benefits as follows: pension and accident insurance, 6 per cent; unemployment, 4^2 per cent; and health insurance, Al/i per cent. The average worker's salary in Vienna at present runs from four to ten dollars a week. A visit to a doctor would cost about seventy-five cents, a day at a hos- pital about a dollar and a half. The average worker pays then about fifteen dollars a year, or enough for twenty con- sultations with a physician or ten days at a hospital. The insurance companies are private but under govern- mental control. Before the war there were more insurance companies than there are now. The collapse of the mon- archy brought almost all of them to ruin and they were consolidated into a few large organizations. The latest law with regard to these companies (1926) distinguishes only two types: those with a purely geographical distribution, comprising a single system of forty-five units divided over as many sections; and those with an industrial distribution in the separate trade organizations. The geographical group is the original Krankenkasse as pictured by the originators of the system, and is socialistic in its political affiliations. The industrial companies are politically conservative and represent the conservative answer to the Socialists. The few surviving small benefit associations are doomed to disappear, and no new ones may be created. There are thus two large companies or systems, both private in the eyes of the law, but actually in interlocking contact with the two main parties. Aside from accident, invalid, and old-age insurance, the druggist is compensated at fixed rates arranged by contract in advance. Under this system each district physician re- ceives a fixed salary (at present about fifteen dollars a week) and has the right to private practice in addition. The physicians are, however, much overworked and sometimes meet fifty or more patients a day in addition to their private practice. The patients often feel neglected, and balk at being compelled to visit this one doctor. As a result, there is often neither sympathy nor trust in the relation. The trade-union insurance companies permit their members to choose their own physician from a long list of doctors under contract. These physicians are given no fixed salary but are paid by the visit ; any physician who agrees to the stipulations may register. The remuneration is small, but economic stress has obliged the majority of physicians to enrol. The patient has the right to treatment by a specialist if necessary and to operation or hospital treatment, all bills being paid by the Kasse. This last system is an improve- ment on the other in so far as it permits the patient to be treated by a physician he trusts, while the doctor for his part does all he can for his patient if only for his own material ends. But it is precisely this that endangers the entire sys- tem. Under the district-physician system the doctor had every incentive to cure his case as soon as possible. He was further- more totally objective in his advice and recommended drugs, pensions, and vacations only when they were necessary. From the point of view of the Krankenkasse this was ideal, and the same conscientious deportment was expected from physicians under the other system. And in fact most doctors were trustworthy. The result was that certain patients went from doctor to doctor until they finally found one who would give them what they wanted. What resulted was a sort of conspiracy between a certain doctor and a certain patient that cost the Kasse a fortune but gave the doctor a fat income and the patient a pension or a vacation. The honest doctor conse- quently lost clients, the Kasse grew poorer, and honest pa- tients suffered indirectly from lack of funds. If one examines the question impartially one cannot help feeling that under this system, because of the elaborate

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May 14, 1930] The Nation 583 machinery of operation, too small a proportion of the money goes for health. A new plan of health saving is therefore being proposed. Under this plan a part of the salary would be put aside. It would remain the property of the original owner, but only in case of sickness could the money be with- drawn. When a certain fixed sum had been reached and when a person had attained a certain age (to be statistically adjusted) the money would be returned as a pension. In case of death the residue would go in part to the legal heirs and in part to a general sinking fund. This sinking fund would be employed for use as loans without interest for cases of lengthy disability and operations. In case of perma- nent disability a regular pension would be awarded ; in all other cases the loan would be slowly repaid. A RARE COMBINATION !n food Is Tastiness, Purity, Wholesomeness and full- balanced Nourishment. This rare combination you find at our up-to-date and cozy Health Foods Luncheonette, where appetizing and amply satisfying- meals of freshest and unprocessed foodstuffs are sold and served at all hours and every day of the week, including Sundays — and at most mod- erate prices. Try us once, and you will be certain to bring your friends to our place to dine abundantly. HEALTH FOODS DISTRIBUTORS 45-N East 34th St., N. T. City (Between Park and Madison Aves.) Phones: Lexington 6926 — Ashland 6366 NORMAN THOMAS In The New Leader Every Week on ' Timely Topics" Other Regular Contributors Include McAlister Coleman Morris Hillquit James Oneal Emil Vandervelde Louis Stanley A. J. Muste Harry W. Laidler H. N. Brailsford Art Young THE NEW LEADER The Journal of Socialism and Labor 7 East 15th St., New York City {Sample Copies Free on Request) $2 for a year $1 for 6 months D LECTURE INGERSOLL FORUM Sundays, 8 P. M. Pythian Temple 135 W. 70th St. Admission, 25c. May 11th : Dr. George B. Vetter "The Psychological Origins of Religion." For FREE book catalogue and Atheist tracts, write : Am. Assn. for the Adv. of Atheism, 307 E. 14th St., New York, N. Y. DISCUSSION THE GROUP Invites You To Attend Its SPRING FESTIVAL Entertainment and Dance On Tuesday Evening, May 13th at 8 :30 P.M. At Ball Room— 150 West 85th St. Dancing until 1 A.M. Admission $1.00 Weekly notices mailed on request. BALL ^ZzWhoops my dear! NEW YORK'S WILDEST AND FUNNIEST PARTY CONTINENTAL COSTUME BALL MADISON SQUARE GARDEN Saturday Night, May 17th Music RUDY VALLEE'S By VAGABONDS Tickets at Garden box office and agencies ■Whoops my dear!:^^ POSITIONS WANTED wc rOMAN, thirty, by profession a teacher of art. creative writing, desires entertaining and lucrative summer position. Box 2382, % Tht Nation. "DARNARD College senior, planning trip abroad early June, wishes to earn passage, as chaperon, companion — adult or child ; excellent sailor ; references. Box 2379, % The Nation. YOUNG LADY — 23 ; secretary-companion to European traveler this summer ; college graduate, expert stenographer, bookkeeper, typist, teacher ; intelligent, capable, alert ; ser- vices exchanged for traveling expenses. P. O. Box 367, Waterbury, Conn. YOUNG LADY, British University graduate, desires position as tutor or companion ; had long residence in France and Germany ; inter- ested in art and literary movements ; degrees recognized in America. Phone Sterling 4553, or Box 2416, % The Nation. GERMAN WOODWORKER — 65 ; strong, ac- tive, also handy in garden or farm, desires work in country or city at moderate pay. A. Horn, 421 Buffalo Ave., Paterson. N. J. COLLEGE graduate, newspaper and publicity experience ; expert stenographer, typist, seeks part time position. Box 2410, % The Nation. ATTORNEY — 31 ; enterprising ; able ; intelli- gent, in private practice ; seeks part-time employment. Box 2411, % The Nation. YOUNG LADY — Intelligent ; wishes work two or three evenings during week ; even usher- ing. Box 2413, % The Nation. COLLEGE Instructor in English, male, 27, M.A., small New England college, wants summer work. Tutoring and secretarial ex- perience. Willing to go anywhere. Box 2418, % The Nation. TNTELLIGENT young man, well educated, -^ seeks connection interesting form of work. Five years' secretarial experience. Especially equipped for meeting people, directing group work and speaking. Have and will travel ex- tensively. Any offer acceptable. Box 2420, % The Nation. □ EDUCATIONAL □ pLAYWRITING * AT N.U. NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Classes in playwriting, playshop production for promising mss., walk- ing rehearsals, etc. Competitive scholarships avail- able. For catalog write: THE DEAN, School of Speech and Theatre Arts, Evanston, Illinois. FIVE LANGUAGES IN ONE French-Spanish-German-Italian-English. Contain- ing 5,000 practical words attractively arranged. Limited supply. $1.50. Order today. Universal Institute, 1263 Lexington Ave., New York. LANGUAGES FRENCH, SPANISH, ITALIAN. GERMAN, ENGLISH Conversational method. Native teacher*. Private !«eaoa», 75c, short course, 9 to f daily, llti y*ej. FISHER'S SCHOOL OF LANGUAGI3 1864 Lexington Avenue, N. W. Cor. 85th Street FRENCH - SPANISH -ITALIAN GERMAN. Private lessons 75e (Daily »-»). Na- tive teachers. Interesting conversational method. 19th year. Also neglected English education. UNIVERSAL SCHOOL OF LANG T AUKS 1265 Lexington Ave., Northeast Cor. 85th St. HELP WANTED YXyANTED, a man to give some time evenings * * and week ends to children in exchange for room and board. Opportunity to do student teaching if desired or to have experience in shop and craft work. Box 2417, % The Nation. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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584 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3384 D FOR RENT □ FURNISHED APARTMENTS GRAMERCY PARK— Studio apartment; two rooms, bath, kitchenette ; completely fur- nished ; grand piano. Sublet June 1 to October 1, $100. Telephone Gramercy 3168. BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — Beautiful 3-room apartment ; kitchen ; Northern and Southern exposure ; spacious and airy rooms ; 2 fireplaces ; books, phone, bath, shower. Reasonable. June to October. Rheingold, 118 Pierrepont Street. Main 7388. ATTRACTIVELY furnished 4-room apartment to sublease for summer ; light, cool, every modern convenience ; radio ; fully equipped kitchen ; large double bedroom ; good closets ; one small bedroom ; large living room. Reasonable. Mrs. M. C. Hubbard, 567 West End Ave. Schuy- ler 7916. SUBLET, furnished, 5 rooms, 2 baths, modern, elevator, piano ; one-half block Museum, Prospect Park ; all subways. No reasonable offer refused. 284 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, N. Y., Apt. 5D. Nevins 2335. '"PO SUB-LEASE — Artistically furnished, large ■*■ studio living room ; Gramercy section ; three windows facing street ; unusually high ceiling ; fireplace, kitchenette, bathroom, glass enclosed shower. Immediate occupancy. Reasonable rental. Spring 7228. SUBLET, summer rate, two or three well- furnished rooms, large, quiet, cool, real kitchen, bath. Piano, radio. Convenient for travel. Mrs. Mailly, 110 East 16th St. Stuy- veaant 1651. Call after five. UNFURNISHED APTS. UNFURNISHED APARTMENT — Brooklyn Heights — Entire top floor ; four rooms, bath, fireplace; $65. Cook, 174 State St, Main 6821. PTH AVE. AND 13TH ST.— Apartments 1 and J 2 rooms ; some sleeping balconies and wood-burning open fireplaces : large airy sunny rooms ; low rentals for choice tenants. Adart Realty Corp., 1 E. 28th St. Ashland 5992. FURNISHED OR UNFURNISHED •7/VTH St. East. (962 Lexington Ave.)— 2 / \J rooms with outside windows, bath, small kitchen. Right near the Park. Furnished or unfurnished. $65. June to October, or longer. Butterfield 7585 evenings. SHARE APARTMENT rlSH TO SHARE MY CHARMINGLY FURNISHED 3-ROOM APARTMENT, WITH ANOTHER YOUNG LADY: ALL PRIVILEGES; THIRTY DOLLARS MONTH- LY. ANNE GOODWIN. 1701 EASTBURN AVE.. BRONX, MT. EDEN STATION. W1 ATTENTION! — WANTED OWNERS of adult or children's camps, or owners of acreage adjoining lake, located within 40 miles of N. Y. C with land for im- provement ; communicate with writer for ex- cellent proposition. Box 2415, % The Nation. w ANTED— Oct. to June, 1931, furnished small house or terraced apartment. Essen- tials— charm, large living room, fireplace, 3 bed- rooms, 2 baths, kitchen. Gramercy Park to the 70's, East. Gramercy 0019. Another Advertiser Writes in — Advertising Manager, The Nation. Dear Sir: I have had an excellent response from my ad. Will you please cancel it, as I have rented mv place. G. L. C. 9 SUMMER 1 CHILDREN'S CAMPS AND GROUPS LILLIPUT A successful new idea— t camp for 4 to 10 year olds A loTfcly Couse in ideal surroundings, ac- ce«jib!e froaj New York. The entire *fafl is trained and experienced in the guid- ance cf small children. Resident physician; trained nurse. Highly endorsed by edu- cators and parents. Group limited to 40. Booklet. Anne Joscphson, 1880 I'nl- Yersity Ave., N. Y. (Raymond 4145). Combines advantages of home-, camp and school. Unusual Opportunity CAMP MURMIN Peekskill, N. Y. Limited to 12 flve-to-ten year olds ; under di- rection of teacher-mother-dietician ; compe- tent councillors ; individual attention ; nc overstimulation ; real house. Write for booklet. Mr. and Mrs. Murray E. Levins 2121 Andrews Avenue New York City Phone: SEDgwick 9563 /"'AMP ALADDIN, Blackhall, Conn. Parents ^ engaged in arts and professions can place their young children in a charming environ- ment and assure them of the companionship of people who stress educational ideals rather than a profit making scheme. $200 for the summer. Rook McCulloch, Director, 407 Washington Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y. /~*HILD Psychologist of rare tact and under- ^ standing ; highly trained in this country and Vienna ; will take a few girls to the country for the summer. Scientific and medical attention and care. Reports and recommendations. Box 2414, % The Nation. SCHOOLS HESSIAN HILLS SCHOOL A modern count?, school fer beys and airls, nursery through first year high school, day and bearding. CROTON ON HUDSON NKW YORK SONAQUA CLUB Lake Mohegan, N. T. The Haven for Sport Lovers. Ideal for recrea- tion and relaxation. Convenient for week-ends. Only 45 miles from New York. Sports Special feature program Tennis, Boating, for Decoration Day Swimming, Dancing. Weekend. For reservations call Peekskill 1276 Ricber's Cottage, Belle Harbor, L. I. 50 feet from Beach and Boardwalk. For com- plete relaxation, invigorating sea air. Modern accommodations ; excellent home cooking. Forty minutes from city. $25 per week until July 1st. Call Belle Harbor 0089. CPEND delightful summer in Virginia. Off *^ tourist route. Large colonial estate in Shenandoah Valley. Privacy. Best of Southern cooking. Seven hours to City. Free golf. $10 to $15 weekly. Major Marshall MacDonald, Media Farm, CHARLES TOWN, W. Va. "pOR relaxation, beautiful country and pleas- -*■ ant companionship : phone to The HIL-BERT HOUSE Lake Mahopac. N. Y. Hn. Friedrbro, Prop. Tel. Mahopac S6S ZINDOREST PARK, Monroe, N. Y. CPEND your vacation or week-end at our *^ wonderful 150 acre estate. It must be seen to be appreciated. 1% hours on the Erie or Route 17. Phone 122-F-3. SUMMER HOME FOR SALE OR RENT (~\N shore beautiful Lake Oscawana, 22 min- ^-' utes from Peekskill Station, large 8 room house with big porch, garden, garage, all com- pletely furnished including boat and outboard motor. Electricity, phone, cooking-gas and run- ning water. Foodstuffs and ice delivered to door. Will lease to responsible party or sell on reason- able down payment with fair mortgage. Can be seen during weekends by appointment. Phone Mr. Sherover, Canal 3045, or Susquehanna 2959. BOARD WANTED "DOARD for season — two adults and two children. On farm, or with private family. About 2 hours from c/c The Nation. city. Box 2419, D D BUNGALOWS AND HOUSES FOR RENT D D LINCOLN BUNGALOWS For Families with Children 4 rooms and large inclosed porch. Also beau- tiful farmhouses with gardens, riding horses and chickens. All modern facilities. 64 miles from N. Y. C. One hour and a quarter by train. 1,000 ft. Berkshire Mt. elevation. 560 acres, with private lake. Absolute country quiet with most gorgeous views. Office, TRAfalgar 77-10. Home, MONument 4639. CUMMER RESTFULNESS, in unspoiled eoun- •^ try, forty miles from New York. Furnished camps, some roomy old barns, rebuilt, som» new bungalows, with screened sleeping porch**. Swimming pool. Address C. C. Crawford, Ama- walk, N. Y. '"ITHE QUAKER LADY," Remodeled Colonial •^ farmhouse. Superb view Adirondacks. Beautifully furnished. Own spring. Barn. Orchard. 5 bedrooms and bath. Near Hurri- cane Lodge and Keens Valley. $500. Address : Mi.- John Martin, Grymes Hills, Staten Island, N. Y. FOR RENT: In beautiful Delaware Valley, 2 hours from New York, wing of private house attractively furnished, living room, 2 bed- rooms, kitchen, bath. Complete privacy. Rates reasonable by month or season. Boating, swim- ming available. Write E. J. Van Arsdale. Upper Illack Eddy, Pa., or telephone Billings 8284 evenings. Mj AY TO OCTOBER— Remodelled farmhouse, furnished ; 6 chambers, bath, continuous hot water, electricity, gas, set tub, telephone, fireplace; garage; acreage; brook; 15 minutes to Harmon, 60 minutes express to Grand Central. Also 4-room modern bungalow ; screened porch, fireplaces. Tel. Lack. 9420, or Yorktown 272 J. CTUDIO Cottage; all improvements; garage; *-^ quiet retreat ; $600 for season or year ; 50 miles north of city. Write owner, 918 Caldwell Ave., City. 3-ROOM bungalow ; all improvements ; $300 for the summer : 50 miles north of city. V/rite advertiser, 918 Caldwell Ave.. City. "JV/TT. KISCO— Nicely furnished 7-room house: ■"■*■ modern improvements ; Westchester hills ; hour New York ; perfect quiet. Appreciated by cultured people, writer, painter. Will give op- tion for buying. Box 2412, c/c The Nation. "DUNGALOW— Cold Spring-on-Hudson, % mile ■*-' off Albany Post Road: easy commuting to Grand Central ; modern improvements ; taste- fully furnished: swimming pool; private grounds. Car needed to go to station. Phone Navarre 9484. T^URNISHED bungalows. Four rooms and -*- bath. All modern conveniences. Hills, woods, sea-bathing, fishing, boating. No mosquitoes. Easy commuting. May 1st — October 1st. $400 upward. Maxon. Sea Cliff, N. Y. W hen writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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The Nation FOUNDED 186S Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MAY 21, 1930 No. 3385 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 585 EDITORIALS: The Terrible Meek 588 Billions to "Reduce" 589 Sowing the Wind 589 For a Greater Library 590 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 591 THE NATION'S TARIFF POLL 592 SAFETY LAST: II. SAVING AND WASTING LIVES. By Louis Resnick 593 THE PRESS TODAY: IV. THE CHAIN DAILY. By Oswald Garrison Villard 595 THE SUPREME COURT VICTORY. By Paul Y. Anderson 598 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 599 CORRESPONDENCE 600 BOOKS, MUSIC, DRAMA: Invocation to the Phoenix. By Stanley J. Kunitz 601 Style and Thought. By Henry Hazlitt 601 "O Bright Young People!" By Dudley "Fitts 602 The Federal Reserve System. By Henry Raymond Mussey 602 Iraagist Poetry. By Eda Lou Walton 603 One Side of a Debate. By B. H. Haggin 603 Lincoln in Cartoons. By Oswald Garrison Villard 604 Novels in Brief 604 Music: The Composer's League Presents. By Hubbard Hutchinson 605 Drama: Lewdness and Laughter. By Joseph Wood Krutch 606 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 607 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Gandhi the Non-Resistant. By Henry Raymond Mussey 608 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation. New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. SECRETARY STIMSON dealt a deadly blow to Presi- dent Hoover's fictitious reputation for sagacity or states- manship in handling our foreign affairs when, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he said : We went over to London without any specific in- structions from the President, either written or verbal. Of course, we knew his general views. We had had the priv- ilege of several talks with him; but he abstained from giving us any instructions of a specific character whatever, preferring to trust the delegation to use its own discretion in the methods of negotiations. He continued that course throughout. There was no time when he intervened with any instructions to us as to what we should or should not do. This seems to Mr. Stimson altogether admirable and pleas- antly "in contrast to the attitude of very many of our fellow- countrymen throughout the country who felt quite free to tell us by cable and otherwise what we should or should not do." There you have, first, the bureaucrat's resentment that his employers, the people, should dare to tell him in what manner he should serve them; and, second, a total failure to understand that what he praises in Mr. Hoover must appear to any intelligent American as a complete in- dictment of his chief. It is entirely characteristic of the President and of his philosophy that he calmly turned over his own responsibility to his appointees and refused to advise them in any way despite the fact that this was one of the momentous conferences of our history. The American people hire a President to lead, and they certainly did not expect that he would send his delegates to London without any plan or prearranged program, to drift as best they could. Mr. Stimson has indicted damnably all connected with the venture. THE NOMINATION of Owen J. Roberts of Phila- delphia as an associate justice of the Supreme Court is entirely commendable as far as the qualifications and per- sonal character of the nominee are concerned. Mr. Roberts is an able lawyer who has devoted a large part of his time for the past six years to the prosecution, on behalf of the United States, of the suits against Harry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny for the recovery of naval oil lands ille- gally leased to them under the Harding Administration. During the World War he was a Special Deputy Attorney General for the prosecution of espionage cases in Pennsyl- vania. He is accounted a moderate liberal in his general views notwithstanding his professional connection with large corporations, and in regard to prohibition is thought to be more wet than dry. There is no reason why Mr. Hoover should be praised for nominating Mr. Roberts, however. Mr. Hoover did his best to put upon the Supreme Bench the ill-qualified Judge Parker, for no other reason than to curry political favor with the South. In that attempt he was beaten by the Senate after a fight which had left Mr. Hoover and Judge Parker a sorry-looking pair. Now, having been trounced for one piece of misconduct, Mr. Hoover does per- force a decent thing in nominating Mr. Roberts. THE BRITISH RAJ steadily sends forth optimistic messages that it has India well in hand; that thanks to its vigorous attitude Moslem Day and the anniversary of the Sepoy Rebellion passed off without serious disturbance. Unfortunately there are certain events to be recorded. Thus the Sikh League, composed of the best fighting men in all India, has voted to go along with Mahatma Gandhi, and the Government has brutally bombed by airplanes the forces of the Haji of Turangzai, the Afghan leader who has been threatening an invasion of the northwest frontier province. Meanwhile fourteen responsible commercial organizations of Bombay on May 7 presented a resolution to the Government protesting against the "extraordinary arrest" of Gandhi, which they said "had begun to undermine such confidence as the Indian commercial community had in the Government's sense of justice." As a whole, the cotton in- dustry is paralyzed. A more conservative native leader, Ratanso Moraji, member of the Bombay Council of State, has resigned, as a protest against "the arbitrary internment of Mahatma Gandhi" ; and the threats of V. J. Patel, lately speaker of the legislature, to intensify the boycott on foreign, especially British, goods has caused among the foreign im- porters "fears that the threat will be made good with disas-

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586 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3385 trous effects on business in India and England." The native press is disappearing, the censorship tightens, in consequence of which the wildest and most baseless rumors fill the coun- try. Never was censorship so foolish, for nowhere else, save in our Southern States among the Negroes, is there such a "grapevine telegraph," which carries news like wildfire all through India. HOW MUCH should a candidate for the Senate be allowed to spend on his nomination and election ? A succession of inquiries has fixed no definite standard, and until this problem is tackled there is a vagueness in all ar- guments over the propriety of this or that expense account. In 1922, after a heated debate, the Senate allowed Truman H. Newberry of Michigan to take his seat, but censured his expenditure of $195,000 in the primary campaign as "much larger than ought to have been expended." In the 1926 cam- paigns Frank L. Smith of Illinois was credited with a pri- mary expenditure of $450,000, and William S. Vare with one of $800,000. The sequel is familiar. And now comes Ruth Hanna McCormick who has laid before the present Senate Elections Committee an expense account of $252,572 for the campaign just closed in Illinois, though Illinois rumor has it that an additional $750,000 was spent in her behalf. However, the important task before the committee is not simply to determine how much Mrs. McCormick and others have spent or will spend in this year's campaigns, but to formulate some workable limitation for the future. To those who doubt the possibility of ever achieving this object we recommend a study of the strict limitation of expenditure which characterizes present-day electioneering in England. WE STILL WAIT for action on Senator Wheeler's bill (S. 2767) repealing the act of May 19, 1926, which authorizes the President "to detail officers and enlisted men of the United States Army, Navy, and Marine Corps to assist the governments of the Latin-American republics in military matters." The President has been appealed to by a group of peace organizations to support the measure, but without result so far as we can learn. The mischievous practice of sending our professional war-makers to help our southern neighbors put their forces on a better fighting basis gives us a stronger grip on them and helps sell American war materials; incidentally it gives jobs to a few super- numerary military and naval officers. No wonder that the War and Navy Departments favor it. According to the former, the practice "tends to promote a correct understand- ing among our neighbor republics of our peaceful policies and of the good-will the officers of our army bear toward them." The War Department has truly extraordinary perspicacity. We, in our simplicity, had supposed that Senator Wheeler's bill was dictated by friendliness to our neighbors. MEN OF GOD IN POLITICS are rather more likely than not to raise the devil, and the Right Reverend James Cannon, Jr., of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and his dear friend and Presbyterian brother the Reverend Dr. F. Scott McBride, general superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League, are certainly doing their bit to make the godless jeer. The good Bishop, it appears, ex- tracted $65,300 in cash and checks from one E. C. Jameson of New York, ostensibly for the purpose of defeating Gov- ernor Smith in the recent Presidential campaign in Virginia. Unfortunately, he failed to report some $48,000 of this amount as required by the Corrupt Practices Act, and also induced Mr. Jameson to alter his own record of the payments so as to conform to the Bishop's telegraphic indications of what the record ought to be. For this and other political activities the Shepherd of the Flock is in the way of being called to account by his ecclesiastical associates, and possibly by the courts. Dr. McBride, who appears to have been a little vague about the political operations of his Holy League, has assured the Senate Lobby Committee that the league "was born of God, it has been led by Him, and we will fight on while He leads." The divine character of the birth, he explained in answer to a question, was clear to him because the delivery room was a prayer-meeting. The country has long felt that there was something mysterious about the league, but now that we know it to be blessed of heaven, with McBride's prayers ascending while Cannon jingles the cash, everything is perfectly clear. A MACHINE-GUN, accidentally fired by one of the national guardsmen set to guard the walls of the Ohio State Penitentiary, killed two convicts as they slept in the tents which are the only shelters provided for them by the Sovereign State of Ohio while the cell blocks destroyed by fire are being reconstructed. It is worth while repeating certain of these facts: a machine-gun . . . accidentally fired . . . killed two sleeping convicts! It is thus that the State of Ohio, population nearly seven millions, wealth eighteen and a half billions, houses and protects its prison population. Or to be more explicit, first the State of Ohio crowds 4,300 prisoners into a prison built for 1,500; the prison is a fire- trap ; when it catches fire guards refuse to open the cell doors and free the prisoners; 320 of them are burned or suffocated to death ; the warden whose ineptitude is largely responsible (after the Sovereign State of Ohio) for the mismanagement and lack of discipline at the prison is not removed, and as a latest, but perhaps not final, bitter stroke, a machine-gun . . . accidentally fired . . . kills two sleeping convicts. Colonel Robert S. Haubrich, ranking guard officer at the prison, detailed an officer to investigate the shooting, who reported that the "guard concerned regretted the shooting very much, but that such accidents 'cannot be helped.' ' More pertinent was the comment on the prison furnished by Will Rogers in noting that the mother of twelve children the other day, in poverty and desperation, shot and killed seven of them and then tried to kill herself. We celebrate, Mr. Rogers said, and even send to Europe at the govern- ment's expense, Gold Star mothers whose sons died in France. "This poor soul had done her bit for Ohio," he added tersely. "She had contributed a husband to its won- derful jail." WITH THE UNENVIABLE RECORD of three lynchings in 1929, Texas now steps to the fore with the most outrageous exhibition of mob fury unchecked by the forces of the law that has been seen for a long time. A mob of some two thousand persons in Sherman, Texas, on May 9 stormed the courthouse (regretfully referred to in the news dispatches as the "new $60,000 courthouse") and burned it, incinerating in one of its vaults a Negro accused of an attack on a white woman, who had been put there for

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Mav21, 1930] The Nation 587 safe-keeping. In spite of the efforts of about seventy of the National Guard the mob ran amok through the town, de- stroying by fire much of the Negro section and literally tear- ing to pieces everything that was distasteful to it. Martial law was declared on Sunday, May 11, after the damage was thoroughly done. Governor Moody explained that he had not given orders, as alleged, to the guardsmen to "protect the Negro if possible but not to shoot anybody," but did not explain why only one attempt was made to stop the mob with bullets, that by firing at the legs of one of the leaders. He announced that every effort would be made to apprehend and punish to the full extent of the law the guilty persons. So far sixteen men have been arrested and five of them are in the county jail. If any attempt was made by the sheriff or other local officials to check the first of the mob's advances there is to date no record of it. Instead of dying if necessary in the performance of his duty to protect his prisoner the sheriff pondered the wisdom of resigning. There is little else to record as we go to press except that Sherman is called the "Athens of Texas." CIVIL WAR IN CHINA has broken out again, this time between the Nanking Government and a coalition in the north headed by General Yen Hsi-shan and Marshal Feng, and supported, it is said, by the shifty General Sun Liang-chang, at one time a follower of Marshal Feng and later a supporter of the Nanking regime. Hostilities, the exact outcome of which is still uncertain, but which have resulted, according to reports, in as many as 10,000 killed, appear to have spread over a front variously reported at from 100 to 170 miles, with the Lunghai Railway, extending from Suchowfu on the east to Chengchow, in Honan Prov- nce, on the west, as in general the line of demarcation be- tween the rival armies. On the other hand, to the south of banking, and even in Kiangsu Province in which Nanking s situated, the authority of the Nationalist Government has or some time been challenged by widespread and serious lutbreaks of banditry. The Nationalist Government thus inds itself beset behind and before. Moreover, while the Nationalist forces are admittedly superior in training and quipment they are greatly inferior in numbers. Another mbarrassment has arisen from the proposed seizure by Gen- ral Yen Hsi-shan of the salt and customs receipts through- ut the northern provinces, thereby jeopardizing the credit f the Nanking Government which has pledged these reve- ues as security for foreign loans. rHE ERGOT CONTROVERSY, which has been go- ing on for two years, has reached a new stage. Ergot generally used for the control of post-partum hemorrhage, nd in September last the American Association of Obstetri- ans, Gynecologists, and Abdominal Surgeons appointed a Istinguished committee to examine into the alleged deteriora- on of the drug. The committee has just reported. Studi- isly abstaining from taking sides in the acrimonious per- >nal controversy between the Food, Drug, and Insecticide dministration and its critics, the committee flatly declares lat "there has been a notable deterioration in the quality the fluidextract of ergot on the American market in cent years," due, in its judgment, to defects in the charac- r of the ergot imported. These defects, it believes, to be le to practices "in violation of the requirements of the pharmacopoeia and of common prudence." As regards ergot quality and methods of preparation the report essen- tially confirms the position of Dr. H. H. Rusby, dean of the College of Pharmacy of Columbia University, the leading scientific critic of the Food and Drug Administration. In the matter of protecting the life of mothers it would appear from this report that either the existing law or its admin- istration is sadly defective. The administration has already expressed its willingness to have its methods of carrying out the law looked into, and we believe that Senator Mc- Nary should now promptly proceed with the further hearings that he promised last February to conduct if they were requested by the physicians of the country. TJULL HOUSE, with Jane Addams still its devoted A A and noble head, has been celebrating the fortieth anni- versary of its founding with many of its former workers and students returning to lay their homage at the feet of the woman, who, with Ellen Gates Starr, in 1889-90 took over the old-fashioned residence of Charles Hull, a wealthy busi- ness man of Chicago, for a social settlement. A direct off- shoot of Toynbee Hall, Hull House has stood like a rock as wave after wave of immigration has dashed up against it and rippled on. The oharacter of each wave has been dif- ferent, the nationalities changing; but the human problems have remained the same though the needs have varied. Al- ways the newcomers have found leadership, warm and genu- ine friendship, helpful cooperation, a hearty welcome at the hands of Miss Addams and her cohorts of workers, less well known but equally devoted — some of them, like Grace Abbott, Julia Lathrop, Alice Hamilton, Sophronisba Breckinridge, rising high in their special fields, to say noth- ing of the men who have graced the Hull House commons. Deeply imbued with that true Americanism which is the very reverse of what our patrioteers profess, Hull House is a great American institution. JOHN MASEFIELD, the newly chosen Poet Laureate of England, departs from the cloistered elegance which has clung around incumbents of that office, at least during the last century or so. Mr. Masefield knows the docks, the farms, the country store, the life of ships and the sea, the smells of tenements, even the public house. He is the first Laureate who ever came to New York, certainly the first who ever lived in Yonkers and once polished the bar in a Christopher Street saloon. But he is a most excellent poet for all that, and wears with no unseemliness the mantle of Southey and Wordsworth and Tennyson. He is now fifty- five years of age and eleven years ago published "Reynard the Fox," often regarded as his finest poem. Since then he has been as prolific as ever, issuing novels, poems, and plays, together with a collected edition of his works. But if his poetry culminated in a magnificent stroke with "Reynard" it has since attained to nothing like that high point. Words- worth had written his finest poems years before the honor of the Laureateship came to him; the same was true of Tennyson. It may be that a poet in the full flower of his genius is thought, even by a Labor Prime Minister, too dynamic, too dangerous a candidate for so worthy and dig- nified an office. At any rate, the new Laureate has done enough to be well deserving of the honor, and it is not im- possible that years of high achievement still lie ahead.

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588 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3385 The Terrible Meek WHAT Gandhi has started in India profoundly con- cerns the whole world. The technique of non-re- sistance, to which he has already resorted nine times, challenges the entire social order based on force. Only a few years ago an American diplomat leaving for his post in China declared that his was a hopeless mission ; the cause of the Allies and the United States as to extraterritoriality and other matters was lost because the Chinese were using in this case the "most dangerous weapon in the world, non- resistance." Nothing makes your modern diplomat so wild as to tell him that if he attacks you, you will not shoot back ; he knows that that strikes his weapons to the ground. He has built up a preposterous world of armaments and ships and colonies, extraterritorial rights and spheres of influence, all based upon his ability to impose his will by his own troops or natives in his pay. He seeks to subdue the blacks in South Africa, the Moroccans, the Algerians. He has been getting away with it for centuries — always in the name of Christ Jesus and the Holy Word. Now the whole miserable business of governing "in- ferior" races and exploiting them for "their own good" is rudely defied by an unhandsome, undersized man, naked but for a loin-cloth, who seeks nothing for himself, no material power, no office, no wealth ; who dares to defy the greatest of colonial empires and is actually stirring it upon its founda- tions. They have ventured to arrest him at last. But they tremble lest anything happen to the Terrible Meek who sits within their jail. Here is the dispatch which tells of the treatment of this state criminal : A fully furnished wing in the Yeravda prison, where he can meditate, spin, take exercise, and read without dis- turbance, has been allotted to him. A special cook has been provided for him and he will receive ten dollars a week from the government for his personal expenses. In addition a special board of three English physicians has been appointed to watch his health daily. His jailers know full well that if anything happens to him while he is in their custody all India will rise. They do not even dare to charge him with a crime, but are holding him under a statute 103 years old which permits them to intern in prison any- body whose activities seem to threaten the state. A nice business for an Anglo-Saxon democracy which is only an intruder in India to engage in? An especially nice business for a Labor Government whose head was him- self an execrated pacifist during the World War, with the conduct of which" he refused to ally himself in any way? Yes, from this aspect the plight of Ramsay MacDonald is nothing less than tragic. This, like the failure of the naval conference, was the risk he ran when he took office and made himself responsible for the conduct of Indian affairs and the management of England's army and navy. We agree with the criticism that it would have been far better if Mr. Mac- Donald had worked out a solution for India's problems be- fore plunging into the disarmament conference; at the very time he was most needed in the India Office, Wedgewood Benn, its Cabinet head, was drawn off for the endless bick- erings of the naval discussions. We are sincerely sorry for Mr. MacDonald. His is now an almost hopeless position. He has had to yield in the arrest of Gandhi ; how long will it be before he is sanctioning the dispatch of more British troops to India, he who brought about the return of some of the British troops sent to China? If he yields dominion status now, his political foes at home will accuse him of weakening before conditions which "call for a stern hand." If he does not grant dominion status, he faces years of un- rest, of bloodshed and rebellion. For this issue will not down until, like American slavery, it is settled aright, with the peoples of India in control of their own land — for better or worse. There is only one thing Mr. MacDonald should do: move at once for dominion status, accept Parliamentary defeat, and rely upon the justice of the British people and the progress of events to bring him back to office as the pro- Boers came back triumphantly in 1906. Instead we have the postponement until October 20 of the proposed conference on dominion status. What in this hour shall be the attitude of American liberals? With all sympathy for MacDonald and his Gov- ernment they must continue to urge that the natives of India be given back their country, to rise or fall as they decide. Let it be known whether the Simon Commission has found for dominion status or not. The report appears to have been finished for a month; it is still being printed. Dominion status for India is but another test of our faith in democracy; whether we believe in autocratic good government — though we deny that the British government in India has always been good — or bad self-government. We cannot see how anybody who believes in American institutions and the prin- I ciples underling them can hesitate. India has just as much i right to take over its own government today as the Ameri- cans had in 1776. It is not for us, nor for the British either, ' to sit in judgment upon the fitness of these people to rule themselves, or to prophesy what the future may hold in store for them. Meanwhile, blood flows freely, and there are those who are saying that this is the inevitable outcome of non-re- sistance. Nothing of the kind. But the masses will strike back when sufficiently provoked, as at Sholapur — we take these facts from a press cable of May 8 (italics ours) : A district magistrate was summoned. He warned them to disperse. Instead, the crowd, increasing in num- bers every minute, refused and the police were ordered to open fire. There was here no native act of violence before there were 27 natives killed and 100 wounded. As for the Terrible Meek whose personal power has si all these forces in motion, he is beyond the reach of hi jailers because his spirit soars above theirs; because he is serenely happy to be again behind the bars; because his con- science is clear, his course of life and action open and frank: because his soul is buttressed by a noble, an unconquerable and an imperishable truth. He well knows that if he dies now it will not matter. Liberty is under way. Its progress is irresistible. And whether he is alive or dead, Gandhi's soul will go marching on.

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May 21, 1930] The Nation 589 Billions to "Reduce" NOTHING in the imagination of a Dean Swift could be more cynically ironic than the outburst of big-navy propaganda that has followed imme- diately upon the heels of the London conference. Before the treaty is ratified we have a few striking coincidences. The fleet steams into New York. One hundred and thirty- one airplanes fly over the city in battle formation. The New York Times reports: "What couldn't they do to us if they dumped some bombs and gas?" a policeman wearing World War service stripes said as he gazed upward from Times Square. "Such a fleet could wipe out the city in minutes," Lieutenant Commander A. E. Montgomery, who led the parade in a big Hornet-powered Martin bomber, said in answer to the same question later in the day. The next day front-page reports tell how the 131 planes "destroyed" all of New England, "bombing" Providence, New London, Lowell, and Boston. Nothing is added to :hese reports. The sky-gazers and newspaper readers, how- ever, are no doubt expected to use their imaginations. Their ninds may then be rich soil in which to plant the conclusion : 'We must have a very large fleet in order to make it im- jossible for any other fleet to launch airplanes against our l rities." Granting, however, that such a fleet of planes •eally could wipe out our great cities in minutes, and that io adequate defense could be made, the only logical con- tusion is that another war would be too horrible to con- emplate, and that if it occurred the size of our navy would nake little difference. These naval airplane demonstrations occurred on the ame day that Chairman Britten of the House Naval Com- nittee introduced his bill to authorize, prior to July 1, 936, the construction of 240,200 tons of new naval ves- els. The purpose, of course, is "to give the United States •arity with Great Britain." Mr. Britten estimates that the lew construction will call for an outlay of $498,000,000 y 1940, which, added to requirements for authorizations lready made, will make a total of $937,000,000 to be ex- ended within the next decade. Even so, Mr. Britten is ' 'tot quite sure that "the expenditure of a billion dollars i the next eight years will properly provide for the na- ional defense in an emergency." Senator Reed of Pennsyl- ania, returning from the naval conference, is also quoted l an interview as favoring a seven-year building program ntailing an average annual naval expenditure of $100,- 00,000 a year. Senator Robinson takes a similar stand. Chairman Britten is very sad. He wants to build because it his opinion that the American delegates were "out-traded" t London. But Senator Reed wants to build ships for jKactly the opposite reason. "In substance," he is quoted as I lying, "we have a chance to build up our fleet, while Great ritain and Japan more or less stand still." If there is any possibility of heading off this orgy of sending and building, which must result in more inter- jational distrust and hence more spending and building, it in be realized only by vigorous outspokenness on the part r those who still believe that the naval limitation treaty, nsatisfactory as it is, is at least not a naval enlargement treaty. We recommend to all our readers the course of Mr. Herbert Fordham, who writes to Representative Robert L. Bacon: Thank you for your letter inclosing a copy of an ad- dress on boy scouts. While it is gratifying to learn that you favor boys and boy scouts, it might be more helpful to learn that you favor certain ends which some of us intend to achieve: There follows a list of six of these, of which numbers five and six are: 5. We intend not to "reduce" our navy by spending from half a billion to a billion dollars in building ships that we do not need and do not desire. 6. We intend not to be maneuvered into a war with Great Britain by attempting "parity." To build up our navy to the size of the British navy can have no meaning except preparation for war with Great Britain. With- out war against Great Britain we have no need for "parity." With war against Great Britain we need not parity but superiority. Are you with us? Sowing the Wind WE commented briefly last week upon the new Ca- nadian tariff, whose drastically revised duties will affect some $225,000,000 of imports from the United States. On May 6, four days after the new rates went into effect, Premier Mackenzie King announced a gen- eral election, to be held this year "at the earliest possible moment." Back of that announcement lies a widespread irritation over the weak course of the Liberal Government in the face of the threat to Canadian industry and trade embodied in the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill. Canada has had more than one raw deal at the hands of lordly protec- tionists and political jingoes at Washington. Now, ap- parently, it is nearing the end of its willingness to take rough treatment lying down. It is going to the polls, with the American tariff as a big issue in the campaign. The resentment which is felt in Canada is being shown all about the globe. From nearly thirty countries have come protests of manufacturing or trade groups against the egre- gious duties proposed by the Smoot-Hawley bill. A vigorous protest against the new duties on watches, clocks, and lace has just been lodged by the Swiss government with the American Minister. Producers or exporters in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Austria, Rumania, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Persia, and Ireland have protested against the blows that are being aimed at them; those of Australia, India, and the British West Indies have joined with others from Argentina, Uru- guay, Guatemala, and Honduras in warning the United States of the menace of the Smoot-Hawley bill. There have been unprecedented demonstrations of wage-earners in Eng- land and France, and pledges of a boycott of American goods in Switzerland. All this, of course, points straight toward retaliation if the tariff bill becomes law. What are the tariff-mongers at the Capitol and the Great Engineer at the White House doing to avert the storm? As far as can be seen, nothing

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590 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3385 whatever. The broadside attack of 1,028 American econo- mists seems not to have shaken in the least the seats of the mighty. The Senate wants the farm-debenture scheme and does not want the flexible-tariff provision. The House op- poses debentures but stands by the flexible provision. Mr. Hoover sides with the House on flexibility and opposes the Senate on debentures. So the wrangle goes merrily op in a conference committee, but with no trace of disposition anywhere to do anything that might help to fend off a world-wide retaliation which will hit American industry and trade all along the line. If the tariff bill gets into the statute book and the gath- ering storm breaks, the country will have reason to blame Mr. Hoover at least as much as it blames Congress. Mr. Hoover championed high protection when he was campaign- ing for the Presidency, and demanded a revision of the tariff as the great means of helping the farmers. He has insisted upon the retention of the flexible-tariff authority, although everybody knows that it will be used only to jack up the duties still farther as occasion offers, no matter to what point Congress raises them. He has made no effort to stop the rate-raising debauch in Congress, albeit the evidences of world hostility are matters of common knowledge. As a promoter of international peace, and of the consideration which a powerful nation would seem to be in decency bound to show toward its friendly neighbors and good customers, he is a sorry figure. He contemplates with apparent serenity the prospect of an economic war. The country will have something to say about Congress in the elections next No- vember, but it may also be counted upon not to forget the sage of Rapidan and the lazy play of twiddling thumbs. For a Greater Library A MILLION and a half dollars is the comparatively trifling sum asked of Congress for the purchase, for the Library of Congress, of the Vollbehr collection of incunabula. Nor could this sum, about a tenth of the cost of a new cruiser, be spent in any more worth-while or satisfactory manner. Three thousand books comprise the collection, 40 per cent of the titles not being represented at all in the United States today. There are works on re- ligion, astronomy, medicine, natural science, law, geography, cosmography, chess, cookery, history, matrimony, philosophy, customs, travel, bibliomania, temperance, military and naval science, and many other subjects. In a sense this is a com- pendium of culture before the sixteenth century, in English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, Chinese, Slavonic, German, and Spanish. And the gem of the collection is one of the three perfect copies in existence of the Gutenberg Bible printed on vellum, and the only copy in three volumes. The other two copies, in two volumes, are owned by the British Museum and the Bibliotheque Nationale respec- tively. The Vollbehr Bible has been valued at $1,000,000, and beyond all consideration of price its acquisition by our great national library seems eminently just. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that this unique book has been held, until modern times, by only three owners. It belonged first to Johann Fust, Gutenberg's partner; by him or his heirs it was sold or given to the monastery of St. Blasius in the Black Forest; and during the Napoleonic wars it was trans- ferred by the Benedictines there to the monastery of St. Paul in the valley of Lavant in Carinthia, where Dr. Vollbehr of Berlin bought it in 1926. Only the exigencies of post-war famine could have compelled these German monks to part with perhaps their greatest treasure. There is every reason to believe that Congress will be willing to appropriate money for the purchase of these books. Its policy toward the Library of Congress has been, on the whole, farsighted, generous, and intelligent. The library, started in 1800 with an appropriation of $5,000, re- ceived its first important acquisition by the purchase, for the small sum of $23,950, of Jefferson's admirable library of 6,000 volumes. But this great addition was not received with universal rejoicing. For months Congress haggled over Jefferson's books. The library was characterized as "immoral, indecent, irreligious, and generally revolution- ary"; one of the opponents of the purchase said: It might be inferred from the character of the man who collected it, and France, where the collection was made, that the library contained irreligious and immoral books, works of the French philosophers, who caused and influenced the volcano of the French Revolution, which had desolated Europe and extended to this country. He was opposed to a general dissemination of that infidel philosophy and of the principles of a man (Jefferson) who had inflicted greater injury on our country than any other except Madison. In spite of this derogation of two of the Founding Fathers, the books were bought. The library grew, until at present it has attained to the impressive wealth of some 4,000,000 books and pamphlets, more than 1,000,000 maps, 1,000,000 pieces of music, nearly 500,000 prints, and 70,000 bound volumes of newspapers. In number of books and pamphlets it is surpassed only by the Bibliotheque Nationale. Its collections in American history and poli- tics, in music, in United States documents are almost unique in importance. Credit for this masterly assembling is due in handsome measure to the eight librarians who have pre- sided over the fortunes of the library since its inception, but chiefly to the distinguished present incumbent, Dr. Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress for thirty-one years and one of America's great public servants. In determining appropriations for the library Congress has made several bad slips, which have been regretted ever since by persons aware of their significance. Money was re- fused to buy Washington's library, now housed in the Bos- ton Athenaeum; the original manuscript of Washington's Farewell Address was bought by the Lenox Library of New York for $2,300 after Congress had refused to become inter- ested in it. The most serious loss to the national library, however, was the Bancroft library, the most valuable col- lection of Americana, among other things, ever assembled. It consisted of 14,606 books, 486 volumes of manuscripts, and 4,648 pamphlets, the tools used by the historian George Bancroft in his volumes on the United States. It was offered for $75,000 and Congress would not spend the money. Now it may make up for this unfortunate mistake | by appropriating without delay funds for the purchase of the unique and invaluable Vollbehr collection. When wc consider the vast sums that are discussed for the "limitation of armaments," a mere million and a half seems little indeed

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May 21, 1930] The Nation 591 It Seems to Heywood Broun WHEN the final ten had been counted over the pros- trate form of Judge Parker there still remained much doubt as to just what it was that hit him. The World, for instance, gave its editorial opinion that the organized Negro opposition had nothing to do with it. Mark Sullivan, in the Herald Tribune, allowed the colored faction the balance of power and assigned it ten Senatorial votes. Indeed, it seems to be the consensus that it was the disaffection of conservative Middle Western Republicans which accounted for the defeat of the gentleman from North Carolina. And this has within it a very satisfactory ironic quality. Until near the end Judge Parker remained exceed- ingly scornful of Negro opposition. He refused the Na- tional Association for the Advancement of Colored People the courtesy of a reply when it asked him to pass upon the validity of certain statements attributed to him by the press of his own State. The mills of the gods in grinding hit upon an extremely pretty conceit. Judge Parker had declared himself against Negro participation in politics and as a result the American Negro became politically effective for the first time and barred the way to Mr. Hoover's appointee. And there was drama in the manner of the conflict. The President, as has been pointed out on many occasions, is a great organ- izer. With prestige and patronage at his command he could exert terrific pressure for the confirmation of Judge Parker. In justice to the President it may be said that many promises were made in his name which he had by no means author- ized. But even though he was personally guiltless much in the way of seemingly executive temptation was dangled before the eyes of weak-kneed Senators. And so it is ex- citing to know that the man in the White House was check- mated largely through the efforts of a short and slight mu- latto in a five-room Harlem flat. Walter White did the field work for the National As- sociation and on the strength of his recent triumph he may become one of the most powerful forces in American poli- tics. It is a little ridiculous to refer to Mr. White as a mulatto, since his skin is just as fair as the paper on which these words are printed. His eyes are of a Nordic blue and his hair is decidedly sandy. In other parts of the world Walter White would be ranked as a Caucasian with a slight admixture of Negro blood. Here he is officially Negro be- cause of some minute strain which has been biologically dis- counted. Of course, even here in America, Mr. White is a Negro largely from choice. The community has only his word for the fact that he is Negroid. Had he chosen to call himself white no power on earth could have singled him out from his fellows. And yet this small blond Negro is among the most passionate of propagandists. His waking hours and per- haps his dreams are given over to the question of race rela- tions. Unlike some other Negro intellectuals he is not much jinfused with a contempt and hatred for all things white. At least one does not get that impression from his courteous ind friendly bearing. And he is pleasantly humorous for ul the fire which burns inside. But he is no compromiser. The school of "Know your place" finds no support from him. Often I have envied him his chance to lead a dual existence if he so desires. As agent for the National Asso- ciation he can go into the deepest portions of the Southern Bible belt and inquire about some act of violence or dis- crimination without ever allowing the local citizenry to know that he is a black man investigating happenings for a Negro organization. The phrase "black man" is ridiculous enough in this case but I am for the moment humoring the "one-drop" school of American thought and expression. To be sure, this school is founded upon a fallacy. It is the proud boast of the more militant Nordics that they can't be fooled. "If I pressed your fingernail like this," said a Southern gentleman on a Pullman crossing the State of Mis- sissippi, "I could tell right away if you had so much as one- thousandth of a drop of Negro blood." And having said this the Mississippian did lean forward and press against the fingernail of Walter White. He never knew why the little blond man laughed at the end of the experiment. There is no getting away from the fact that the Negro in America labors under many handicaps. It would seem that any individual possessing the right of choice would inevitably choose to be white instead of colored. I wondered why Walter White chose to identify himself with a race which labors under such hardships when with a word he could cross over, as very many light-colored men and women do each year. In order to settle that point in my mind I finally asked him. "Why didn't you ever decide to become a white man?" I asked. "It must be hard to remain a Negro when you don't have to." He told me this story: I was born in Atlanta and my father, who is darker than I am, was a letter carrier. We had a house right on the edge of the Negro quarter. It was a nice house. One week-end there were rumors of race trouble. We tried to get my mother and sisters to leave town and go to a farm outside the city. They wouldn't go. Early in the evening the trouble broke. I was twelve years old and my father gave me a shotgun and stood me at one of the two front windows on the second floor. He stood at the other window. "You're not to fire," he said, "until they cross the edge of the lawn. When they get that close shoot and go on shooting as long as you can." Two or three hours later the white mob came down our street. The leader stopped in front of our house and said, "Let's get that damn nigger letter carrier." Before they reached the edge of the lawn, some Negroes down the street fired and killed two men in the mob. The crowd swept past our house and went after the men down the block who had fired the shots. Several Negroes were killed. In the morning the soldiers came and martial law was declared. But [said Walter White] I'd stood at that window for two hours with a shotgun waiting for them to cross the edge of the lawn. I was twelve years old. After that night I never wanted to be a white man. I knew which side I was on. And a good many years later John J. Parker was not confirmed for the Supreme Court of the United States. Heywood Broun

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592 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3385 The Nation's Tariff Poll TO find New England newspaper editors opposing a higher tariff by a vote of two to one on the ground of its economic consequences, and well-nigh unani- mously on the basis of its probable effect on international relations, and to find a majority of them going so far in opposition as to think that the President ought to veto the bill is a surprising thing. Yet that is the result of a tele- graphic poll just conducted among them, and the detailed replies are even more unfavorable than the above statement would indicate. The Connecticut editors who answer are almost solid against the bill, and only two out of thirteen papers in Massachusetts favor it without qualification. In an effort to obtain some gauge of public opinion on the pending tariff bill, The Nation has addressed a series of questions to newspapers throughout the country. The first results, covering returns received from New England up to the time of going to press, are presented herewith. The returns from other sections of the country will be published in our next two issues. Four questions were asked of the editors of ninety-two of the leading newspapers of New England. Replies were received from twenty-five, of which seven are listed as Republican in politics, five independent Republican, one Democratic, one independent Democratic, and eleven independent. Here are the results. 1. Will the pending tariff bill, if enacted, raise the cost of living? Sixteen editors, including all but one answering in the States of Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, say yes. The New Bedford (Massachusetts) Times, on the other hand, answers no. The Burlington (Vermont) Free Press believes that the tariff will not raise the cost "appreciably" ; the Rutland (Vermont) Herald thinks that it "should sta- bilize prices"; and the Keene (New Hampshire) Sentinel "does not believe that it will raise cost to the extent that its opponents claim." On the most favorable showing, then, the score against the tariff on this count is sixteen to four. 2. Will it ultimately benefit or injure us economically? Five editors think that it will benefit, thirteen that it will injure us. Two others give qualified economic approval, the New London (Connecticut) Day, for example, holding that it "may be of ultimate benefit if toned down to minimum increases, abandoning inexcusable items like sugar and olive oil" ; and two others are inclined to look for some economic injury from it. On economic grounds the total is thus seven for and fifteen against the bill. 3. Will it improve or injure our international relations? Here there is striking agreement. Seventeen writers, in- cluding even those who favor the measure on economic grounds, believe it likely to make our relations with other countries more difficult; but the Hyde Park (Massachusetts) Gazette-Times says, "What of it? Why should we not consider our own manufacturers first?" The New Bedford Times alone thinks our relations will be bettered. Three papers look for little effect. The Lawrence (Massachusetts) Telegram thinks that any threatened disturbance will be "a flash in the pan." The Springfield Union regards the idea as a historic bogy, yet does not consider "the present bill as better than the existing act, even with the debenture and other fantastic notions left out." Seventeen editors, then, must be recorded against the international political effects of the measure; four, and three of those only negatively, for it. 4. Should the President sign or veto the bill? Six editors flatly favor signing; seven flatly oppose. Four others favor Presidential approval under certain con- ditions ; four others apparently favor a veto. Ten in all are for approval ; eleven against it. The Portland Evening News, holding that the bill will raise the cost of living, injure us economically both immediately and ultimately, and injure our international relations, yet holds it "a grave question whether the President should veto and thus cause great con- fusion and delay." The Boston Transcript, which has re- garded revision as unnecessary, yet believes that if the de- benture is excluded and Presidential flexibility included the President should sign the bill in order to prevent the tariff from coming up in the next Congress. The Worcester Tele- gram, favoring protection, holds the provision for Presiden- tial flexibility "imperatively necessary." The Brockton Enter- prise favors the bill because "only a tariff on shoes can check a flood of importations that will close many American plants." The Hartford Courant, while speaking in guarded terms of any possible benefits, believes that "if the bill goes to the President minus the debenture provision he should sign it and give it a chance to prove the wisdom or unwis- dom of its makers." The Hartford Times is doubtful if the bill "offers sufficient improvement over present conditions to warrant enactment," but hardly expects a veto. On the other hand, the Lewiston (Maine) Evening Journal, declaring that Congress should never again be per- mitted to make a general revision, asserts that "the wool schedules are the worst ever offered to the country and are alone sufficient cause for a Presidential veto." The Quincy (Massachusetts) Patriot-Leader, strongly critical, feels that the bill "may well be allowed to go into the discard." The Mercury and the Standard of New Bedford both condemn the measure on the ground that the cotton duties are un- workable, and the former specifically favors a veto. The Worcester Evening Post and the New Haven Journal Courier both favor a veto if the bill is passed in its present form, while the Stamford (Connecticut) Advocate prefers a veto if it "means definite retention of present rates, but if veto means more uncertainty and continued bickerings we would favor signing the bill even though unsatisfactory." The Waterbury (Connecticut) Republican and American say pointedly: "Pending tariff bill will raise living cost. It menaces economic welfare. It menaces economic relations. Its veto should be considered." The Springfield Republican believes that the bill will injure us economically and politi- cally, and should be vetoed. The Springfield News believes that "Hoover should veto it, but such judgment may hardly be expected of him in view of Parker fiasco and other monu- mental blunders." The Bridgeport (Connecticut) Herald says: "We have had tariff for protection only and tariff for revenue only. The Grundy bill will give us tariff for extor- tion only. President Hoover should veto this pernicious bill.'

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May 21, 1930] The Nation 593 Safety Last II. Saving and Wasting Lives By LOUIS RESNICK I are preventable in the light of our present knowledge. Per- Our Continuing Slaughter sistent, intensive, and properly organized effort in any conv FOR several years after the World War much was munity, Mr. Price says, would avert an even larger per- made of the fact that during our participation the cintage of the so-called public accidents, number of Americans killed or injured by accidents Frances Perkins, Industrial Commissioner for the State at home was greater than the number of American soldiers of New York> on February 26, 1930, told the Greater New killed or wounded at the front. This record was at- York Safety Conference: "Enough has been done to show tributed to the extraordinary industrial activity of the war that no accident need happen.'' A few minutes before she period, to the high pressure under which everybody worked, had saId : ' 20>000 more tin New York State] than in the pre- ployees. It is now twelve years since the armistice, but the vious vear-" And she was referring only to industrial ac- casualty list in peaceful America each year still is longer "dents serious enough to warrant compensation for injuries than the casualty list of the A. E. F. t0 the employee. Each year since 1918 we have killed or injured ac- Walter King, in the president's address at the 1927 cidentally almost twice as many human beings as were killed congress of the National Safety Council, said : or injured among the American military forces during nine- Approximately 7,000 children were killed in automo- teen months of war. In the last twelve years we have killed bile accidents last year and fully 140,000 boys and girls 1,000,000 men, vjomen, and children and seriously injured were injured by motor vehicles. Practically all of these 25,000,000 by preventable accidents in the United States. youngsters were between five and fifteen years of age. In so doing, we have caused an economic loss of at least The deplorable fact is that practically all of these acci- $40,000,000,000. These are conservative estimates based on dentLs m}Zht have been Prevented. We feel almost horrified studies and reports of the United States Bureau of Labor at the >g"orance or indifference which permits it. Statistics, the Hoover Conference on Traffic Accidents, the The National Fire Protection Association is authority National Fire Protection Association, and the National for the statement that an average of forty-one persons are Safety Council. burned to death each day — 15,000 a year — and that prac- Year after year, it is shown in the proceedings of the tically all of these are needless sacrifices. Every year thou- annual safety congresses, the lives of 80,000 to 90,000 per- sands of children are drowned. Thousands fall to their sons have been cut short by accidents in the United States, death from windows, roofs, porches, and fire escapes. Hun- The trend has been steadily upward, and last year 95,000 dreds of children die in the Roman holiday that we make persons were killed by accidents in this country. Those who of the Fourth of July. know most about the accident situation predict that during During the past thirty years more American lives have the present year 100,000 Americans will be killed. been lost in celebrating our independence than were lost in Is such slaughter an inevitable by-product of modern acquiring it. The score follows: civilization? Is it unavoidable? Hardly. H. W. Heinrich, Cost of AcQunuNG American Independence assistant superintendent of the Engineering and Inspection Americans killed in Revolutionary War 4,044 Division of the Travelers Insurance Company, told the Americans injured in Revolutionary War 6,004 Seventeenth Safety Congress in New York City (October, CqU gf Celebrating American Independence 1928) that 98 per cent of all industrial accidents are pre- Americans killed in fireworks accidents (last 30 1 ventable. This was no offhand estimate, but the conclusion years) 4,290 of a recognized authority after careful analysis of 70,000 Americans injured in fireworks accidents (last 30 detailed accident reports. Eighty-eight per cent of all indus- years) 96,000 trial accidents, Mr. Heinrich said, are due to faulty super- „,, c l j >j j- l l . . ,„ . , . , . . , Ihese figures are based on nation-wide studies by the vision ; 10 per cent are due to the material equipment with . . htj-ia • ^ jua • »t .... . , , , _ ., American Medical Association and the American Museum which employees have to deal: only 2 per cent are unavota- rex* tu j • i j *l j l l- l U ° safety, lhey do not include the many deaths which r* «t « • i i t l l xt • i occur long after the Fourth of July as a direct result of C W. Price, formerly general manager of the National c . ., , „ , XT , , . . , c , ~ i, , y r n t j /iir' fireworks accidents on the .Fourth. Nor do they include safety Council, author of the first Mate safetv code (Wis- , , . , ,., , ... ... . . . . , ' ,. , , \. the drownings and automobile fatalities which regularly oc- consin), and now director of the course in accident preven- , „ , , T . , , . , „ ' xr i xt . . • • i l tc nn cur on the fourth of Julv over and above the dailv average, tion at New York University, is convinced that /;> to vU ,,-,, ,, . c , , , „ . , c' . ,. , ., J ' . , . , 1 he Museum of Safety and the National society for per cent of the accidents in any industry can be prevented , t> „ „• f or j • • ..i j i j . , -_ „_ , ,, J . , ' . , , . , the .Prevention of Blindness jointly undertook a study of and that 50 to 75 per cent of all accidents outs.de of industry Founh of Ju,y casualtieSj an(J Afe fc what thfy found jn •The second of three articles on the safety movement. The third will 1027* »ppear in our issue of May 28. — Editor The Nation.

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594 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3385 161 persons were killed in fireworks accidents between June 19 and July 17; 52 of these were children less than 5 years old; 54 burned to death when their clothing was ignited by fireworks or bonfires; 20 children were burned to death by "harmless sparklers"; 21 children died as the result of eating fireworks; 32 persons were shot by "unloaded guns" or stray bullets; 30 persons lost one or both eyes; 300 others suffered eye injuries; 1,900 persons were otherwise injured. All this with ten States not heard from. Approximately 900 cities and towns reported fireworks casualties; only 9 reported prosecutions growing out of these accidents. Penn- sylvania led the States with 23 deaths and 425 injuries as the result of its Fourth of July celebration. Detroit headed the list of cities with 90 accidents and 8 deaths. New York State reported 16 dead and 234 injured. "Why isn't something done to stop this annual slaughter? How about the safety movement we hear so much of?" The answer is simple. Professional safety men and safety organizations have been too busy trying to reduce the kinds of accidents that cost the most money — industrial accidents, which cost industry at least a billion dollars a year in workmen's compensation and lowered production, and motor-vehicle accidents, which cost another billion in insurance protection and traffic delays — they have been too busy doing this job, the job for which they are hired, to make any strenuous effort to save the lives of 100 or 150 children every Fourth of July. No one has to pay for fire- works accidents to children and so no one makes any serious effort to stop them. II The Safety Movement What is the safety movement, anyway, and how did it start? The problem of accident prevention is as old as man. Safety men have found references to their doctrine in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, in Shakespeare, and in the Bible. But the organized effort to prevent accidents began on a certain day in May, 1908, when the late Judge Elbert H. Gary, chairman of the United States Steel Cor- poration, addressing a meeting of the casualty managers of the corporation's subsidiaries, said: We expect our legal department and the gentlemen under their control, direction, and advice [the casualty managers were under control of the legal department at that time] to take such steps as are practicable to ascer- tain anything that can be done at every locality and in every department to add to the safety of our equipment and to prevent accidents. Returning to his office, Judge Gary wrote to the presidents of the subsidiary companies: The United States Steel Corporation expects its sub- sidiary companies to make every effort practicable to pre- vent injury to employees. Much can be done by designing new construction and machinery with all practicable safe- guards. Expenditures necessary for such improvements will be authorized. Nothing which will add to the pro- tection of the workmen should be neglected. The safety and welfare of the workmen is the greatest concern. [Italics mine.] That was an historic statement, and the most vital part of it is the italicized sentence. It started the safety move- ment not only within the properties of the Steel Corporation but in American industry generally. And what little is be- ing done for accident prevention outside of industry in this country today must be credited to the industrial safety move- ment. In the next year steelplant executives learned that accidents could be prevented. Incidentally, they learned that money could be saved — lots of it — through safety work. The records of the Steel Corporation's Bureau of Safety, Sani- tation, and Welfare show that in twenty years more than 59,000 employees have been saved from death or serious in- jury and that more than $20,000,000 has been saved for the stockholders through accident prevention. In the next few years State legislatures began to pass workmen's-compensation laws requiring employers to pay to injured workmen a portion of the wages they would have earned during the period of their disability and to the de- pendents of those killed in industry some compensation — usually about $3,500 — for the loss of their breadwinner. Whether Judge Gary and the other pioneers in safety were impelled primarily by humanitarian motives or by purely economic motives, no one can know. We do know that the economic necessity created by the workmen's-compensation laws drove most other employers to some organized effort at accident prevention and that these laws today provide the principal stimulus for accident prevention. Up to the time of the Steel Corporation's demonstra- tion, accidents in industry were generally regarded as in- herent and unavoidable "hazards of the trade." Their fre- quent occurrence in a plant cast no reflection on the man- agement, nor were they recognized as any serious liability. The situation is described by Arthur Williams, president of the American Museum of Safety, thus: In those days human life was the cheapest thing in this country. Men were treated with less concern than animals in industry, and when we first began to take an interest in accident prevention we were charged with be- ing socialistic. Workmen's-compensation laws, the publicity given to the fine showings of the Steel Corporation, and the zeal of some of the early safety men changed all that. Safety asso- ciations began to spring up: first, the Safety Institute of America, in New York, then the National Safety Council, in Chicago, the American Society of Safety Engineers, with branches in various cities, and numerous local safety coun- cils. A new profession was created, a profession which today numbers some five to ten thousand men in all its vari- ous ranks. The handicap under which most of these men are work- ing was tersely told way back in 1921 by C. P. Tolman, consulting engineer of New York City, who was at that time chief engineer and chairman of the Manufacturing Committee of the National Lead Company and president of the National Safety Council. Speaking before a joint meeting of the Cleveland Engineering Society and the Engineering Section of the National Safety Council, he said: Usually the engineer is required to make the plant as safe as possible, with the following stipulations: he must not interrupt operations; he must do nothing which would decrease output; he must do nothing which would increase cost;

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May 21, 1930] The Nation 595 he must not make changes of a character or in a manner to cause labor troubles; he must not make changes which would affect the char- acter of the product. Otherwise he has free rein. This seems to leave little chance for accomplishment, but hundreds of safety men are doing effective safety work under just such restrictions. Nine years later — just a few days ago — I reminded Mr. Tolman of this statement and asked to what extent it de- scribed conditions in industry today. His answer was: "It is just as true today as it was in 1921 — despite the fact that there is nothing in the safety movement which, if properly done, need interfere with production. In fact the contrary is true." The Press Today IV. The Chain Daily" By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD TO whom the credit belongs for starting the first chain of dailies is a moot question. The pioneer was proba- bly Edward W. Scripps, who in 1875 was associated with his brother in the founding of the Detroit News. Three years later he established the Cleveland Press, which was in turn followed by the Cincinnati Post. These were the leaders in a chain which is now the largest in the country, numbering twenty-five dailies including the New York Telegram, with the Ira C. Copley holdings and the Hearst chain following with twenty-two dailies each. Altogether fifty-five chains are listed by the Editor and Publisher, but as seventeen of these comprise only two dailies each, they ought really to be de- ducted. No one, for example, considers Mr. Ochs the owner of a chain because he possesses the New York Times and the Chattanooga Times; nor can the Pulitzer group, the New York morning and evening World and the St. Louis Post- Dispatch be rightly included. All told there are sixteen major groups comprising five or more dailies each. Besides the Hearst, Copley, and Scripps- Howard chains, the more important are the Macfadden, Paul Block, Booth, Brush-Moore, Cox, Fentress-Marsh, Gannett, Howe, Lee Syndicate, Macy-Forbes, Lindsay-Nunn, Palmer, Stauffer, Thompson, Ridder Brothers, and Scripps-Canfield. Even here, however, it is to be noticed that some of these are entirely within one State and comprise small-town papers only; thus, all but two of the Macy-Forbes newspapers are in Westchester County, New York. The list naturally takes no account of the weekly newspapers which may also belong to the owner of a chain. As this article is written comes the news of the purchase of a group of thirty-five weeklies, semi- weeklies, and small dailies in Ohio by the "Ohio News, Inc.," whose real ownership is not yet revealed. In most cases the desire to own a large string is evident. No one can say just how rapidly a chain may grow. Colonel Copley, for instance, is reported to have bought his eighteen California dailies in a day after having withdrawn nearly all his millions from cer- tain public-utility companies through which he had amassed his fortune. His remaining four dailies are in Illinois and of a distinctly different kind from his small-town California properties. Here we have a characteristic of a number of chains — a lack of balance. The Scripps-Howard dailies seem better coordinated and more wisely distributed than any other ; un- * The fourth of a series of articles on the American press. The fifth, on the standardization of the daily, will appear in our issue of June 4. — Editor Thi Nation. like Mr. Hearst the owners of this chain do not own more than one daily in a town. They are thus represented in twenty-five cities, whereas Mr. Hearst's dark journalistic shadow has happily as yet fallen upon but eighteen. Curi- ously enough, the Fentress-Marsh chain seems not to go into a city until it acquires all the dailies or the only daily in that town. Other chains are curiously put together. For exam- ple, the Ridder brothers, the sons of the late Hermann Ridder of the Staats-Zeitung, have added to that daily such diverse journals as the New York Herold (also German lan- guage) , the New York Journal of Commerce, a business daily, the Jamaica, New York, Long Island Press, the historic St. Paul, Minnesota, Pioneer-Press, the St. Paul Dispatch, the Aberdeen, South Dakota, American and News, and the Pat- erson, New Jersey, Press-Guardian, besides holding a mi- nority interest in the Seattle Times. The most striking rise of a chain is undoubtedly that of the Frank E. Gannett group, now sixteen in number, of which all but two are published in New York State. It in- cludes such important dailies as the Brooklyn Eagle, the Hartford, Connecticut, Times, one of the two or three most influential newspapers in New England, and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and Times-Union. Mr. Gannett's experiment is the more interesting because he has made use of the new technique of selling bonds and preferred stocks to the public and keeping control through the possession of the common stocks, doubtless with the expectation of making such savings in costs by large-scale purchases, by using one Wash- ington office for the entire group, and other economies, as to be able speedily to buy out the public. That, aside from the question of personal power, is the chief lure of the chain. It is still too early to assert that the newspaper chain has finally demonstrated its financial stability. Several of them are suffering a good deal in the present depression, which has severely affected the advertising of practically all Eastern dailies. It is easy to carry a combination of dailies when con- ditions are good throughout the country; it may become a dangerous burden when times are bad. The Hearst chain has a number of very weak links. There is nothing, for in- stance, about his morning dailies in Washington or New York to indicate prosperity, and there is a general belief that if he could find some means of giving away the New York American without too great loss of prestige it would be done. Baltimore is still a weak spot for him, and so are one or two of the up-State New York cities, this despite the fact that his

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596 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3385 business management has been much improved during the past several years. Mr. Gannett has had difficulty with the Brooklyn Eagle, for which he probably paid too much — the prices of dailies have been as much inflated since 1920 as were farm lands in the boom war years. It was to finance the purchase of the Eagle that Mr. Gannett procured a loan of $2,000,000 from the International Paper and Power Com- pany and its "public-spirited" president. When the fact was brought out and the transaction was severely criticized, Mr. Gannett felt it to be his duty to obtain the money elsewhere in order to repay the paper trust. Other reasons also have combined to make the situation of the Eagle a difficult one. Except in the case of Mr. Hearst, who increased his holdings rapidly in the days when he sought to be Governor of New York and President of the United States, I do not feel that political motives have played any great part in this newspaper development, certainly not at all in Mr. Gannett's case. Mr. Gannett was once asked if he had in mind any definite purpose in creating his chain, such as the endeavor to influence public opinion in increasing measure. His reply was in the negative; he merely enjoyed enlarging his personal field of activity. He had no more conscious motive than that which leads a man to buy six more drug-stores if he has made a success of one or two. Undoubtedly the newspaper chain is as much a response to an economic urge or tide as the recent grouping of railroads and the development of the chain cigar or food stores. It is in the air; it is part of the transformation of almost every business which is going on under our eyes, and if it had not been Scripps, Gannett, or Copley, it would have been someone else. The economic drift is what counts — the nation-wide combinations to de- crease competition, to restrain trade, and to deal in larger and larger units. There was at bottom no reason to expect that the newspaper business would be spared by the economic forces which are remodeling our industrial life and making the relationship of government to the staggering combinations of capital the paramount issue of the day. If there is as yet no deliberate planning of newspaper chains to control opinion there is no reason why this could not be undertaken. It is already quite in the power of rich men to buy all the dailies in the smaller States — there are only three in Delaware, six in Wyoming, five in Idaho, twenty-two in Alabama, and thirty-six in Washington. Henry Ford could long ago have purchased the sixty dailies in Michigan with the exception of the very rich Detroit News, with but a portion of one year's income. Since there are forty-eight towns and cities in Michigan which possess only one daily journal apiece, despite the theory that this is a government by two political parties, the opportunity must be pretty obvious to those with political ambitions. The pur- chase of the California chain of Colonel Copley was attrib- uted by some to a desire to control public opinion in southern California in favor of the power interests, but this was denied by his employees. The relative worth of the chain, and whether it is a gain or a menace, will depend upon the per- sonal equation, the character and the aims of the owners. So far it is impossible to say that any one chain has been used for specific anti-social or reactionary propaganda, if we omit the Hearst dailies. The Scripps-Howard newspapers are usually liberal, and most friendly to reform movements. It is a pity that their reporting is sometimes poor, their make- up and typography wretched. They sorely lack high stand- ards in these respects, but their answer is the old one — "We must stoop to get circulations in order to put our ideas over." Even the New York Telegram lacks typographical distinction and is messy; yet the New York Times has made its great success while adhering to typographical dignity and taste, with the Herald Tribune following its example. None of the chains, again excepting Hearst, strive for typographical uniformity. It would be welcome if a format of beauty and distinction were to be adopted by one of them ; but those two qualities have largely disappeared from the American press. By using the new technique of getting the public to ad- vance some of the money while the promoter himself holds control there is no reason whatever why we may not see a chain of one hundred dailies controlled by one man. Theo- retically at least ; whether this would work out well practi- cally is doubted by many. Yet the steady progress of the Scripps-Howard syndicate, despite certain weak members, would seem to prove that it is no more impossible than the creation by one owner of a group of five hundred grocery or five-and-ten-cent stores. I can see no valid reasons why we should not have much larger chains and, I believe, we shall see them when those having great stakes in the present eco- nomic system are sufficiently enriched or sufficiently fright- ened by the specter of radicalism to seek more directly to con- trol public opinion. Here is where the danger lies. In this connection the action of the International Paper and Power Company in buying its way into a number of dailies in 1928 and 1929, and lending much money to newspaper owners, including Mr. Gannett, is highly suggestive. The purpose of this new policy, the president of the company said in his own defense, was simply to assure to the company steady cus- tomers for its paper. But the outcry within the press and the disapproval of the public were so great that he was speedily compelled to change his mind about the advisability of this policy and to get out of the newspaper business. Simi- larly persistent and at times successful efforts by the power lobbyists to get their hooks into daily newspapers are a warn- ing of a tendency that must be guarded against if the press is not to become merely a creature of the great capitalists. It is, heaven knows, today sufficiently in the clutch of the forces which make for reaction and the support of the status quo. Again, the question of absentee ownership sometimes plays a considerable part in the development of the chain. Some of the smaller communities resent the control of their dailies by men living elsewhere. This is not, however, a uni- versal feeling. There might, however, well be dissatisfac- tion in Pittsburgh, where all three of the dailies remaining in a city which had seven morning and evening newspapers only a few years ago are now owned by capitalists residing else- where— the Scripps-Howard Syndicate, Hearst, and Paul Block. At bottom the owners of the Hearst and Block Pittsburgh newspapers have no more direct interest in the city than have the owners of chain cigar stores. It is true that there are always editorial writers to deal with local problems; that the staffs are still largely made up of local men. The owners of the Scripps-Howard papers make every effort to tie up their editors with the local interests of the cities in which their papers are situated. Local autonomy is the watchword and it is generally lived up to, except in national affairs. The local Scripps-Howard editor is given help to buy an interest in the paper and is expected to spend the rest of his life in its service. He is constantly urged to

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May 21, 1930] The Nation 597 "know your town" and "feel its pulse." Scripps-Howard edi- tors are, however, freely transferred from one city to an- other. It still seems impossible that there should be quite the same relationship of the daily to its community that exists when the paper is owned by a local man known to all his fellow-citizens, to be seen at local gatherings, and to be held directly accountable to local opinions and desires. It would seem as though no community of the size of Pittsburgh could rest happy under such conditions. They seem to me intoler- able. On the other hand, defenders of the chain allege that there is a certain advantage in this freedom of a chain editor from local entanglements — social, business, and financial. While it was always Mr. Scripps's idea that his editors might purchase stock in the papers they were serving he rigidly ruled that they should not invest their savings in other enter- prises which would interfere with their complete freedom of opinion and action. He wished them to be exclusively and only newspapermen. Another view is expressed by Eugene A. Howe of the Howe Newspapers (chiefly located in Texas, where the chain idea is being developed most rapidly and suc- cessfully). "I think," he states, "that it doesn't matter who owns a newspaper as long as it is operated vigorously and honestly. The average reader doesn't bother about the paper's masthead. Give him a judicious selection of news and features, give him a good newspaper, and he is satisfied. And the paper usually will be a profitable investment. . . . We are still experimenting in Texas, but we feel we are going a long way in establishing group dailies." There remains, however, the question of the editorial opinions of a chain of newspapers. Here we have three dis- tinct policies. The Scripps-Howard dailies, while free to deal with local issues, all conform to the national editorial opinions formulated by chief editorial writers, or, as in the case of their support of Herbert Hoover for the Presidency (which they are presumed to be repenting in sackcloth and ashes), as a result of an editorial convention and a free vote of all the editors. Mr. Hearst's editors reflect his own con- tradictory and changing views and personal whims. Frank Gannett, however, does not alter the political policies of the papers he purchases. Thus the Hartford, Connecticut, Times remains Democratic, and the Brooklyn Eagle independent Democratic, while most of the others are Republican. Mr. Gannett is a convinced and sincere dry; it will be interest- ing to see if it will be possible for him to allow some of his papers to take the opposite viewpoint if the question of pro- hibition becomes still more acute. His policy seems to me entirely ethical and quite defensible. It is certainly unusual for an owner to grant to his editors the complete freedom of opinion and expression which Mr. Gannett permits. In another situation, that in which the same company controls all the dailies in one city, the question is a bit more difficult. Thus, in Springfield, Massachusetts, all four papers are owned by one company. Two are Republican in politics, one Democratic, and one independent. Where the facts are known and where, as in Springfield, there is an honest and aboveboard endeavor to advocate the policies of the two political parties and no effort is made to hide the real owner- ship, it would seem that no criticism could lie against this procedure. Different is the case, cited by Senator B. K. Wheeler of Montana, of a town in that State in which both the dailies, one Republican and one Democratic, were none the less owned by the same mining company, their respective opposing editorials being written by the same hireling! As for the standardization of the dailies which results from ownership of groups, I shall touch upon that in another article. It is necessary to point out here only that this is the inevitable result — and a specially desired one — of the amalga- mations. Herein lies part of the great opportunity to make savings by supplying the same cartoons, illustrations, roto- gravure sections, and articles. These savings are not always realized, as for example in the case of white paper, for which a standard price has now supposedly been fixed for all pur- chasers, large or small, who do not have their own mills and must buy of the large companies. But in the main it would seem as if enormous economies could be made. It cannot be maintained that the chain development is a healthy one from the point of view of the general public. Any tendency which makes toward restriction, standardiza- tion, or the concentrating of editorial power in one hand is to be watched with concern. For the ideal journalistic state of a republic, especially where the two-party system prevails, is one in which papers may easily be created by single indi- viduals, as Horace Greeley established the Tribune and Alex- ander Hamilton's friends the New York Evening Post, to rise and disappear if need be. If the coordination of the press with the current urge for larger and larger combina- tions is inevitable, it is regrettable if only because this makes it additionally harder for the man of small fortune to start a daily and compete successfully for public support. That this chain development is an international phenomenon does not alter the situation. It has gone farthest in Great Britain, where three groups, those of Rothermere, Beaverbrook, and the Berry Brothers, now dominate the press, and inform or misinform perhaps 80 per cent of the reading public. It is not impossi- ble that within twenty years or less we shall see these three groups owned by a single company or individual. When that comes to pass the government will have to take cogni- zance of the existence of a power to control and inform opin- ion that may prove superior to its own — an impossible situa- tion. No independent daily comes up for sale in England today without the existing three groups bidding for it. The Hugenberg chain in Germany is so large and powerful as to have worried many persons lest it menace the existence of the new republican institutions. Even in South Africa the chain tendency is apparent. Thus, the three leading evening jour- nals, the Star of Johannesburg, the Cape Argus of Cape- town, and the Natal Advertiser of Durban, belong to the same company, which also owns the Diamond Fields Adver- tiser of Kimberley and The Friend of Bloemfontein, besides controlling the two leading dailies of Rhodesia. The formation of a British company in 1928 for the purpose of owning British dailies and buying into newspaper properties in other countries foreshadows the international chain. Its mere organization aroused a storm of protest in Fiance, and led to the immediate threat in Paris of a law to prevent the holding of any shares of a French daily by for- eigners. The heated and, I believe, totally false charges in this country, during and after the war, that a portion of our press is, or was, under British control is proof of the deep feeling which would be aroused if it should appear that for- eigners were seeking to control our American sources of in- formation.

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598 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3385 The Supreme Court Victory By PAUL Y. ANDERSON WHETHER the country has "turned the corner" and is now on its way back to that brummagem prosperity which obviously constitutes Herbert Hoover's sole ideal of the national destiny is open to serious doubt. What does it matter, when profound hopes are springing from other ground? The Senate's act in rejecting the nomination of John J. Parker for the Supreme Court may easily be regarded as the most encouraging event in domestic politics since before the war. It is true that a single victory does not always decide a campaign, and the margin in this case was uncomfortably narrow. Neverthe- less, Parker's defeat definitely suggests that the impenetrable apathy which has characterized the public's attitude toward the public's business during the past ten years is vanishing at last before a revival of the intelligent and progressive interest which the war effectually crushed. The unsuccess- ful fight on Charles Evans Hughes and the successful fight on Parker were inseparable phases of the same event, one leading inevitably to the other. The event itself was nothing less than a general uprising against the national plunderbund which has been operating under the protection of decisions handed down by the reactionary majority of the Supreme Court. All the fatuous revilings of stall-fed editors and all the labored explanations of journalistic boy scouts can- not obscure the fact. Senators found that the attack on Hughes, contrary to what many had dreaded, was immensely popular with the folks at home. They found that public reverence for the former corporation attorneys comprising the court majority was a myth. Once that discovery was made the lid was off. The opposition to Hughes rested largely on resentment against the conditions which enable public-utility corporations to earn enormous profits on ficti- tious property values. Opposition to Parker was inspired largely by knowledge of the atrocious abuse to which the power of injunction has been subjected by class-conscious or corrupt judges in labor disputes. In each instance the evil existed by the authority and with the consent of the Supreme Court majority. In short, this was the same fight that Abraham Lincoln waged after the Dred Scott decision — a fight to reverse the policies of the court, either by im- pressing its members with the necessity of adopting more enlightened views or by replacing them with more enlight- ened men. And, in my humble judgment, it has just begun. ***** THE next step will be a determined effort on the part of Senators Norris, Borah, and Walsh (of Montana) to obtain action on the Shipstead anti-injunction bill, a meas- ure comprehensively designed to end just such abuses as formed the subject of debate in the Parker fight, and many others in addition. Thus the bill — applying, of course, only to federal courts — would prohibit the issuance of injunctions based on the existence of "yellow-dog" contracts, such as Judge Parker upheld in the Red Jacket case; it would pro- hibit injunctions restraining workers from quitting their jobs, or joining unions, or receiving strike benefits; it would forbid the issuance of injunctions in labor disputes until the complainants had made every reasonable effort to settle; it would forbid the issuance of injunctions to preserve order unless local peace officers testified that order could not be maintained by ordinary means; it would forbid the issuance of injunctions in any case unless it were shown that the injury resulting from failure to enjoin would exceed that resulting from issuance of an injunction ; it would insure jury trials in cases of criminal contempt arising from labor disputes, and it would prohibit any judge from hearing a case of contempt alleged to have been committed against his own court unless it were committed in his presence, thus abolishing the disgraceful procedure, so often employed against newspapers, in which the judge acts as complainant, prosecutor, jury, and judge. For ten days Senatorial de- fenders of Judge Parker have been declaiming on the Senate floor that the proper way to end the injunction evil is by legislation. Soon — perhaps before this appears — they will be confronted with precisely such proposed legislation. Re- member their names — Fess of Ohio, Gillett of Massachu- setts, Overman and Simmons of North Carolina, Hebert of Rhode Island, Hastings of Delaware, Waterman of Colo- rado— and watch how they vote on the Shipstead bill ! ***** MEANTIME, consider the pathetic plight of Mr. Hoover. The fact that he suffered a disastrous lick- ing the very first time he elected to stand up and fight has confirmed the opinion so widely held among practical men of his own party that he simply doesn't know the first ele- ments of the game. The fact that he chose to stake his personal prestige on an attempt to elevate a mediocre lawyer- politician to the Supreme Bench, in an effort to strengthen himself politically in North Carolina, vindicates the judg- ment long held by other persons that the Great Engineer is more deeply concerned with political considerations than any man who has been in the White House during the present century — not excluding the cunning little Calvin. In selecting Parker he completely ignored the warning conveyed by the Hughes fight. In refusing subsequently to withdraw him he rejected the advice of the shrewdest leaders of his party, preferring to rely on his own judgment, fortified with the sycophantic assurances of the political "yes men" who surround him. Never did that ardent letter-writer, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Joe Dixon, utter more prophetic words than when he declared that the nomination of Parker would be "a major political stroke." His only failure was to foresee who would be struck. He never dreamed it would be the "Chief" himself, although the probability was ob- vious enough to such ordinary politicians as Jim Watson and Charlie McNary. The White House reaction to the result was such as to leave few dry eyes outside the Senate. Rage gave away to self-pity, and self-pity to despair. By turns the "boy scouts" declared that the Senate had been ac- tuated by envy of a Superior Intellect; that political cow- ardice had produced treachery on the part of such regulars as Vandenberg, Deneen, Glenn, Robinson, and Robsion; that subversive elements were bent on undermining the

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May 21, 1930] The Nation 599 government by destroying public confidence in the President and the courts, but more particularly in the President; that the whole thing was a Democratic plot; that the whole thing was a Norris-Borah plot, and so on, and so on. Woe unto Israel! It never seemed to occur to any of them that Parker might have been rejected because of his patent and almost universally recognized unfitness. ***** APPARENTLY the idea eventually occurred to Mr. Hoover, however. At any rate, he definitely aban- doned the attempt to play politics with the appointment when he gave it to Owen J. Roberts. As one who associated rather intimately with Mr. Roberts throughout six years of litigation over the Teapot Dome and Elk Hills oil leases, I do not hesitate to say that he will be the most valuable addition to the court since Justice Brandeis joined it. If not a liberal in the constructive sense in which Holmes and Brandeis are liberals, he is at least an intelligent conserva- tive, thoroughly honest and utterly independent. His point of view has never been identified with that of the railroads, the power companies, or any other predatory interest. He has taken an active and unselfish interest in the reform of judicial procedure, and he has been fastidious about accept- ing retainers — as, for example, when he refused a very hand- some offer from the power trust to appear before a Senate committee during the time when he was acting as special government counsel in the oil case. His judgments will never be mere echoes of the devious sophistries of Mr. Chief Justice Hughes. For making such a nomination — undoubtedly the best of his entire administration — President Hoover is entitled to whatever credit may properly accrue to an execu- tive who chooses a good man after learning to his sorrow that no other kind will be accepted. ***** IN THESE stirring times in the capital there is much to report, but space in a high-class publication of The Nation's type is necessarily limited, and when the inexorable blue pencil descends my choicest phrases are always the ones to suffer. Hence, to condense : The Department of Justice, fidgeting uneasily before the stern glance of the Senate In- terstate Commerce Committee, mumbles that it expects to do something pretty soon about the Radio Trust. The Lobby Committee discloses that the righteous revolt against Rum and Romanism which Bishop Cannon led in Virginia in 1928 was planned by foxy Bascom Slemp and financed by a New York millionaire who admits that his record of his contributions does not quite tally with the Bishop's re- ports, notwithstanding that holy man's careful instructions to him on how to make them conform. Dr. Scott McBride, head of the Anti-Saloon League, denies that he lobbies in Washington, although I recall one occasion not many years since when the reverend doctor made the round of dry Con- gressmen's offices, beseeching them, in the league's name, to vote against the impeachment of Federal Judge George W. English, who nevertheless was later impeached on charges of corruption and misconduct. The Couzens resolution pro- hibiting further railroad consolidations until Congress shall legislate on the subject appears in a fair way to pass the Senate at this session. But let us pause for breath and reflection. It nearly all boils down to the fact that the ; government is still in the hands of the same combination of political adventurers, party hacks, and agents of big business that has been running the show in Washington for the last ten years. What is really new in the situation is that the public apparently is beginning to understand it, and resent it. In the Driftway ANNOUNCEMENT is made from London that on May 19 Paul Robeson will open in "Othello," with Sybil Thorndike as Emilia. The Drifter is strongly tempted to drop everything and rush across the Atlantic for this momentous event. Othello is one of the finest acting parts in the theater; and Paul Robeson is one of the most moving, dramatic, and powerful of modern actors, with a magnificent voice and physique. Moreover, he is black- skinned. The Moor of Venice was probably lighter in color; but to have the part played by a Negro is eminently right and just. ***** THERE will be fewer persons in London than there would be in America to gasp at sight of a pale white Desdemona being smothered by a black Moor. Indeed, we have probably attained to sufficient sanity on the Negro question even in the United States to be able to witness such a performance without wincing — except in certain sec- tions of the intransigeant South. Robeson will not be the first Negro to play Othello with a white company. About 1835 Ira Aldridge, born in Maryland, played the role with great acclaim in London and throughout Europe. If Aldridge played in this country the Drifter has not heard of it. Indeed, it is inconceivable that, except with a Negro company, a performance of "Othello" would have been per- mitted while slavery was in its heyday; and if Negroes had performed it probably only Negroes would have witnessed it. In the latter respect we have come a long way on the road of race toleration. Even in Atlanta, even in the fast- nesses of Richmond, Roland Hayes sings to an applauding white audience. It is true that he has the greatest diffi- culty in securing decent hotel accommodations, not only in the South but in Northern cities as well. But that, of course, is another matter. ***** THIS difference was made only too plain to another Negro performer while he was in the very act of be- ing honored for his art. Charles Gilpin, who died on May 6, became famous over night for his performance of the Em- peror Jones in Eugene O'Neill's play of that name. He was celebrated as the greatest Negro actor of his time, and in 1921 was selected by the New York Drama League as one of the ten who had contributed most to the art of the theater. A dinner was to be given for the chosen ten. And rumors got about that Gilpin was to be asked not to attend. A heartening protest from other guests was the re- sult. But this, and many things as preposterous, have hap- pened in the battle between black and white. If Paul Robe- son plays Othello in New York, as it is announced he has contracted to do; if Lillian Gish, who has been suggested for the part, plays Desdemona, we shall count it a step for- ward. It will be a great dramatic spectacle. And it will be, in addition, a milestone in the struggle of a race. The Drifter

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600 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3385 "An important document in the history of our times, and . . . amazingly good reading. . . ." MY Life An Attempt at an Autobiography by Leon Trotsky "It seems incredible that one man could have packed into fifty years the enormous drama that packs the 6oo pages of Trotsky's book, 'My Life.' ... It is a fantastic, al- most incredible story, and Trotsky tells it with the dra- matic instinct of the artist that he is." — Lewis Gannett in the New York Herald Tribune. 6oo pages. $5.00 "lae DnIcno>vn Washington author of " The Return of the Middle Class," etc. by Jofsn Corbin "Stroke by stroke a new man emerges. ... A great and generous Washington is here — a titan standing always above the squirm and squall of his times. Mr. Corbin has done a service and a finely tempered piece of research." — New York Evening Post. 454 Pages. $400 at your bookstore Charles Scribner's Sons ■ l\ew York "THE MOST AMAZING BOOK EVER WRITTEN ABOUT THE MOST AMAZINGLY CORRUPT PERIOD OF AMERICAN HISTORY." . . . say« Louis Azrae I BALTIMORE POST The Strange Death of President Harding From the diaries of Gaston B. Means A Department of Justice Investigator As told to MAY DIXON THACKER A breathlessly interesting revelation that is stirring a nation . . . exposing the FACTS about the cloudy Harding regime. . . . — the lid pulled off the Teapot Dome Scandal — the iron rule of Daugherty — The sale of the "government" to the highest bidder — and finally how the First Lady of the Land grappled with "higher forces" to stem the whirlpool of de- struction that almost engulfed the President »■* pa — the answers to hundreds of ques- * tions that form a chronicle more At Booksellers tragic, more moving than the most wildly imaginative fiction! "a narrative that almost frightens. . . ." GUILD PUBLISHING CORP. - 19 West 44th St., N. Y. Correspondence "The Green Pastures" To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: When I read Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch's ecstatic review of "The Green Pastures," in which he commends Mr. Marc Connelly for having achieved "this Negro version of Christian mythology," I felt constrained as one of Negro birth to make this statement concerning the true worth of Mr. Con- nelly's play, not as a play, but as a representation of the Negro's religious belief. "The Green Pastures" no more represents the untutored Negro's conception of God and heaven than it represents a Chinese's idea of Confucianism. Those of us who are bound by ties of blood, who have lived in the South, and who there- fore truly know the Negro, realize that when the Negro whom Mr. Connelly represents visualizes God, he visualizes Him not as a kindly preacher of his own race but as an anemic-looking white gentleman with golden beard and flowing hair, garbed in a long nightshirt with bishop sleeves! In other words, the unlet- tered Negro pictures his Heavenly Father in terms of the cheap chromo representations of God that are hawked by gimlet-eyed white peddlers through the Negro quarters of the South. To such Negroes not only God but the cherubs also are white. I know of a Negro preacher who almost disrupted his congre- gation by ordering for his remodeled church stained-glass win- dows picturing black cherubs! The reason for such a conception on the part of the Negro is simple enough. Has he not spent his life in a country where to be black is to be despised? Is it therefore likely that he will want to take such a handicap with him to heaven? Oh, no! The untutored Negro looks upon death as a great emanci- pator who will usher him into a heaven where he will blossom out in all that this world holds dear — fair faces, golden hair; where the toil of this life will be forgotten in endless hours of ease; where there will be not a "fish fry" but a celestial ban- quet of milk and honey. To him, heaven will be no prosperous Negro lawyer's office with battered roll-top desk, as Mr. Con- nelly would have you believe. It will be to him a place with shining golden streets and crystal seas, walled in with jasper and sapphire and chalcedony and emerald. A holy place that will need no scrubbing. Work will be no more. As one of Negro birth who therefore knows the Negro far better than either Mr. Connelly or Mr. Bradford, I can assure you that the Negro does not interpret the life beyond in terms of his present-day existence. Let the dramatic critics appraise "The Green Pastures" as a white man's conception of the Negro's conception of religion and heaven. Washington, May 1 Mary Burrill "An Admirable Guide" To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I have read with keen interest Mr. Villard's second article on the Associated Press. May I take this opportunity, as a journalist, of saying how much I enjoy reading your paper for its good taste and its scholarship no less than for its fear- less independence, so refreshing in these degenerate days. We find it extremely useful, too, in conducting the Reuter service from this country, as an admirable guide to American liberal opinion on all matters of public interest. New York, May 1 Bernard Rickatson-Hatt, Chief Correspondent for the United States When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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Books, Music, Drama Invocation to the Phoenix By STANLEY J. KUNITZ Soul of my soul, in the Egyptian wood Where all the trees were loosened of their leaves I strayed, uncovering my winter form; Webbed in a dream, stagnating like a worm, Offensive to myself, to the gray bird-drifts Melting from the boughs with rhyming calls; Ancient and hoarse, beslimed, glued to a rock Five hundred years, fainting, struggling with mist Self-woven, issue of death, ghost of my name — Heard then the pods clack hollow blistered skins Where blowzy nest, where musty honeycomb Tipped in the blowing summer of your fame. Now is sweet thunder-clearing; wet leaves gush From buried roots ; gleam of your eyes, by day Harsh solar gold, and night's bleached lunar stone. Fleet iridescent particle, red brain Blue-ruffed with blaze, make me your sanctuary, Your destruction, pyre of your mutable design ; For I have known attrition in the rains, Endured the conjugations of the stars, Yet, Circler, one incendiary vein I have defended, purified, to slake You in the burning, whose demonic beak The clasp of bone about my heart O break ! Style and Thought Between the Lines. By H. M. Tomlinson. Harvard Uni- versity Press. $1.25. WHEN English authors come to our shores to lecture and to make money, there is surely nothing repre- hensible about it, particularly if they happen to have such qualities of mind and heart as Mr. Tomlinson. Nor is there anything but commendable candor in the prefatory announcement to the present little volume: "The address printed in the following pages was delivered at Princeton University, Yale University, DYouville College, Cornell University, and Columbia University; and, in its present form, to members of the Harvard Union." That is efficiency and sound economy. The address, moreover, was worth using more than once. It must have charmed the bodies to which it was delivered, for it is dulcetly written, and it adheres to no single set dogmatic theme, but winds gracefully over some of the major problems of literature and life. Yet a man who speaks before a sea of upturned faces is inevitably tempted to be eloquent, and eloquence is sometimes the enemy of precision. Mr. Tomlinson, I fear, has yielded to this temptation in his discussion of literary style. The result is a series of questionable generalizations. "It is certain," he remarks, "that a great writer never worries about his style." Now I cannot imagine any question about which there could be less certainty. How can we know how much any given writer worried about his style? It is one of those questions on which only positive evidence is possible. We can know, from diaries, corrections of proof or original manuscript, letters or verbal confessions to friends, or printed confessions to the public, whether a writer did worry about his style ; we are never in a position to say with complete confidence that he did not. "The importance of what [the great writer] has to say," continues Mr. Tomlinson, "controls him, and his chief anxiety is that we should clearly understand it. If that does not give him style, then nothing can; and if style is there, then it will be in accord with the importance of his message." Now it may be true that clarity is the primary virtue of prose; yet one cannot help noting that it is a virtue within the grasp of quite commonplace writers. Moreover, it does not seem to be the virtue that most frequently attracts our attention to great styles. It is surely not the most salient characteristic of the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, or of Carlyle, or Pater, or Henry James, or Doughty, or Santayana, or James Joyce. None of these styles convince one that merely making himself understood is the chief anxiety of the great writer. "It is certain that a great writer never worries about his style." But Stevenson, as we know, spent most of his youth worrying about it, and if we deny that Stevenson was a great writer, or even a good writer, we cannot so easily dismiss the Paters and Flauberts. "Only a bad style," concludes Mr. Tomlinson, "can come of artful deliberation, as Oscar Wilde and others have shown." And this seems to me the most dubious of all Mr. Tomlinson's generalizations. For nearly all the prose writers I have just mentioned — Sir Thomas Browne, Pater, Henry James, Doughty, Santayana, Joyce — seem to me to write with "artful deliberation," as do also Jeremy Taylor, Addison, Sterne, Burke, Gibbon, Johnson, Lamb, De Quincey, Newman, Borrow, Emerson, Jowett, Thoreau, Hudson, Beerbohm, Strachey. And all poetry, even the most "natural," is the product of "artful deliberation." Not even Keats thought spontaneously in sonnets, i. e., in fourteen five-foot, iambic lines rhyming. Pope, whom it is once more becoming respectable to admire, would surely not have spoken so disrespectfully of artful deliberation, nor was his chief concern always the importance of what he had to say, but rather the manner in which he said it: True wit is nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed. Or again: True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance. And was even Oscar Wilde's a bad style? Mr. Tomlinson may not like it, but he should not forget that unless it had had some qualities to make it eminent in its generation he would never have heard of it. Without artful deliberation Wilde would scarcely have been Wilde. In any event, the distinction is not so much between artful deliberation and the lack of it as be- tween bad and good artful deliberation. There is a sense in which Mr. Tomlinson is profoundly right when he falls back upon the ancient conclusion that style is not a writer's "dress, but the essential man, the man even his friends may not know." A distinguished style can be written only by a distinguished mind; a great style can come only from a great mind. I can no more imagine a writer with a genuinely admirable style and a commonplace mind than I can imagine a triangular circle. The greater part of the beauty of fine writing

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602 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3385 is the beauty of the thought itself. But the reverse is not neces- sarily true. A distinguished mind does not necessarily write a distinguished prose; we hardly need the Deweys and Dreisers to remind us that a man who has something important to say does not necessarily say it well. Those who make a complete separa- tion of "style" and "matter" are, it is true, as ill-acquainted with the true nature of the art they deal with as the farmer who builds himself a house and then sends to the city for a man to put on the architecture. Style is not a pretty coat of paint that a writer lays on his thought; it is the very form of the thought. But it is not, as Mr. Tomlinson appears to assume, identical with the thought. It is one thing to decry the false separation of style and matter, it is another to announce that they are synonyms. This is simply the fallacy of declaring that whatever is not white must be black; it is the fallacy into which not only Mr. Tomlinson, but writers as different as Arnold Bennett and Croce have recently fallen. When we talk of a writer's style we are talking of that writer from a different aspect than when we talk of his ideas. To destroy this dis- tinction is merely to invite hopeless confusion. Henry Hazlitt "O Bright Young People!' File Bodies. By Evelyn Waugh. Jonathan Cape and Har- rison Smith. $2.50. THIS is the kind of book that assures you, in a desperate sort of way, that it is funny. It is modeled, pretty con- sciously, upon the early Aldous Huxley — the Huxley, that is to say, of "Crome Yellow" and, more noticeably, "Antic Hay"; not the sad Huxley of the moment, whose touch has become so oppressive since he borrowed Mr. Wells's ouija board and achieved intimacy with God. Mr. Waugh, too, has heard the thunder on the usual Sinai: "Vile Bodies" has predi- catory implications, the same hangover tone that spoiled "Point Counter Point," but Mr. Waugh has little of Huxley's wit and none of his substance. While it was possible to forgive the latter's taking himself so seriously by reflecting that after all he had created something to be serious about, it is difficult to excuse Mr. Waugh for wrenching good slapstick into tragi- comedy. As satire the book is no less a failure. First of all, Mr. Waugh displays none of the elan that distinguishes the true satirist from the caricaturist. For all its brilliance the writing lacks vitality. The invention is tired, and effects are too often got by recourse to the devices of slapstick exaggeration. Again, the satire is self-conscious satire, which destroys itself. What made "Crome Yellow" so effective, for example, was its utter lack of apparent purpose. One never felt that Huxley was deliberately meaning anything; least of all was one conscious of him as the imminent critic of his characters. One is constantly aware, however, of the presence of Mr. Waugh: usually he is felt only in casual turns of expression, the occasional lay- ing on of effect upon conscious effect; but sometimes he descends to the whimsical footnote, and at least once to the bombastic apostrophe: "O Bright Young People!" Successful satire must be impersonal (the "I" of "Gulliver" is dissociate from Swift) and either entirely improbable ("Gulliver" again, and "Alice"), qua history, or entirely probable ("Crome Yellow," "Antic Hay"). "Vile Bodies" is none of these. If Mr. Waugh had not tried to do so much, if he had been content to amuse, without attempting to devastate, if he had been content to laugh, without essaying a prophetic sneer at the same time, his book would be diverting in a cockeyed sort of way. It is acceptable comic knowledge that men and women drink to be drunk and sometimes sleep together; that female evangelists are often hypocrites and society editors occasionally unreliable; that movie directors are not invariably sincere art- ists; that many clergymen are smug, many wives adulteresses, many statesmen lechers, and many dowagers boors. And it is always pleasing to know that what used to be called the "lost generation," before it went humanist, is still energetically losing itself. It is a pity that Mr. Waugh felt that more than these ingredients was needed. Because of its weight of satiric and tragic exaggeration, "Vile Bodies" neither amuses nor instructs. It is not of the type of true stories, but of True Stories. Dudley Fitts The Federal Reserve System The Federal Reserve System: Its Origin and Growth. Re- flections and Recollections. By Paul M. Warburg. The Macmillan Company. Two volumes. $12. PAUL M. WARBURG'S two imposing volumes on the Federal Reserve System are at once a historical document of the very first importance, a theoretical treatise of extraordinary interest, and a valuable manual of detailed ad- vice for financiers and statesmen. The essential facts of the origin and early development of the Federal Reserve System are established beyond the possibility of successful question. The theoretical foundations of that system are set forth with extraordinary clarity of thought and elegance of exposition. The dangers threatening the system and the practical methods of avoiding them are pointed out with a directness and simplicity that make unnecessary any parade of the profound knowledge of fact and theory underlying the suggestions. Mr. Warburg, of course, is the spiritual and intellectual father of the Federal Reserve System. When he came to the United States in 1902 we had a so-called banking system that was nothing more than a mob of banks, and we re- garded this disorderly rout as the very palladium of our lib- erties and as distinguishing us from the effete monarchies of Europe. Conditions were ripe for a change, however, and Mr. Warburg, thoroughly trained in the sound banking theory and practice of the Continent, set himself with astonishing boldness, vision, and wisdom to the task of educating the bankers and politicians of his adopted country to overcome their century- old prejudices and utilize the experience of the Old World for the benefit of the New. To most men the undertaking would have appeared hopeless; yet in eleven years the Fed- eral Reserve Act was a law. It is no depreciation of the other workers in the great task, but only a deserved tribute to a too modest man, to say that first credit for that achievement belongs to Paul M. Warburg. His book, now reluctantly given to the public, sets forth with a wealth of documentary evidence the principal steps in the campaign that led up to the Act of December 23, 1913, and certain important events of the years following, during which he served on the Federal Reserve Board. A highly valuable feature of the book con- sists in its assembling of practically all the author's important writings on banking reform. In view of Senator Glass's apparent determination to assert exclusive Democratic, not to say Vitreous, property in the Federal Reserve Act, Mr. Warburg's just and generous observation is worth quoting: When the Democrats took up the fight for currency reform, the idea had already triumphed; but their own party had to be conquered. In this struggle and in the honor of having secured a great piece of financial legisla- tion against the ignorance, prejudice, vagaries, and conceit at work within his own party ranks, Congressman Glass Mood tide by tide and shared honors with the President.

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May 21, 1930] The Nation 603 The deadly parallel columns in which Mr. Warburg sets down the texts of the National Reserve Association Bill (the Aldrich bill) and the Federal Reserve Act show clearly enough the debt that the Democrats in 1913 owed and the country today owes Senator Aldrich. As is repeatedly pointed out in this book, the question of personal credit is unimportant; the important thing is that the fundamental principles of sound banking embodied in the law be clearly recognized and tena- ciously held. It is Mr. Warburg's peculiar distinction that he was the first clearly to enunciate those principles, and he has displayed extraordinary skill and adaptability in helping to secure their acceptance in face of almost insuperable political difficulties. Today our better bankers and politicians, largely as a result of his preaching, have learned that the centralization of reserves and the mobilization of commercial paper are the essential characteristics of an effective central banking system. The Federal Reserve System, as modified during the first five years of its existence, vindicated itself magnificently during the war. It has by no means wholly lived up to its oppor- tunities during the peace, and the disastrous speculative smash of 1929 will forever remain as a monument to the weakness of the Federal Reserve Board, which could have stopped and ought to have stopped the runaway stock market, certainly not later than last spring. Mr. Warburg, in the discussion of this incident, as elsewhere in his book, sedulously refrains from individual criticism ; but the attentive reader will have no difficulty in discovering the Harding Administration weakly yielding to political pressure in making appointments to the board, and the Coolidge Administration in general aiding in the effort, sometimes against the protests of some of the reserve banks, to boost the stock market and help the party of pros- perity. The great present peril of the system Mr. Warburg sees in the ever-present possibility of political, as opposed to disin- terested banking, control. In order to avoid it he suggests cer- tain changes which he has been urging in exactly their present form ever since 1922. The Secretary of the Treasury, it will be recalled, is ex officio chairman of the board. Mr. Warburg would remove him from the board entirely, substituting the Undersecretary, who would have more time for the board and less political prestige. The office of the Comptroller of the Currency he would have administered under control of the board, and the comptroller himself perhaps removed from mem- bership on the board. The board itself should appoint its own governor and vice-governor, who should be chairman and vice- chairman respectively; and a member of the board, once con- firmed by the Senate, ought to be capable of reappointment by the President without renewed confirmation. These and other moderate and sensible suggestions all look in the direction of insuring non-political action on the part of the board and at- tracting to its service the best banking talent of the country. For a quarter of a century Mr. Warburg has been wholly consistent in urging the necessity of a unified banking system under proper government control, but administered non- politically with an eye single to the economic welfare of the whole country. In his introduction to a volume of banking essays pub- lished in 1914 Professor Seligman compared Mr. Warburg's place in our banking history with that of Lord Overstone in England's. Readers of the present work, which will inevitably serve as a guide to those who direct the future destinies of the Federal Reserve System, cannot fail to be struck with Mr. Warburg's resemblance to another well-known Briton; for there is in his writings the same combination of firm grasp on theory, broad and yet detailed knowledge of banking history and practice the world over, and power of clear and lucid exposition that have made of Walter Bagehot's "Lombard Street" and other works classics of economic literature. Mr. Warburg's writings are likely to occupy a similar place in American economics. Many of our best Americans were born abroad. Henry Raymond Mussey Imagist Poetry Imaght Anthology, 1930. Covid-Friede. $3.50. THE imagists as a school have long since ceased to exist. That this movement did much, in its time, to clear away the moldy brush of Victorianism and to make poetry exact, condensed, rather too photographic is well known. That poets very soon discovered the limitations of the imagist creed and came to realize that no conceptual mind could dwell long on mere picture-painting is likewise literary history. Imagism played a brief but beneficial part in the de- velopment of modern poetry, and now we hear little of it. But here (with two apologetic prefaces) is a new "Imagist Anthology," no longer definitive of any school, but a collection of poems from those poets once connected with the creed of imagism. These are D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, and H. D. The volume includes other names not so closely related to the original move- ment: William Carlos Williams and John Cournos and James Joyce. Each poet claims to have developed after his own fashion, nor are the poems included said to be after any school. But old themes and old manners persist: here are D. H. Lawrence and his problems of sex struggle, Richard Aldington in a long disjointed poem on the relationship of the sex instinct to romantic love, John Gould Fletcher attempting irony about the ideals of the modern world, and even H. D., always head and shoulders above these others as a true poet, become in these last poems a bit too inclined to rely for effect on the mere repetition of emotional words. As for James Joyce and his contribution from the Work in Progress — here we have what appears to be a very amusing, punning poem composed of coined words to get at the exact meaning of which the reader will have to be a much better linguist than the present reviewer. This is, I suppose, the piece de resistance in the volume and quite worth looking up. The most beautiful single poem is William Carlos Williams's The Flower, a poem on the American city. Eda Lou Walton One Side of a Debate The History of Music. By Cecil Gray. Alfred A. Knopf. $4.25. MR. GRAY, because he is writing "for the average in- telligent music-lover rather than for the student, and for the general cultured reading public rather than for the professional musician," dispenses with musical illustra- tions. My own understanding of the matter, on the contrary, is that a person who does not know a piece of music will learn nothing from a statement about it; therefore that a book for the lay reader which deals, as Mr. Gray's does, with un- familiar types of music and disputes accepted notions should be adequately illustrated, as a book about painting is usually illustrated. Without illustrations it is not suitable for lay readers and merely provides them with phrases they cannot understand about music they do not know. Mr. Gray aims at "striking a mean between the abstruse and the elementary, the scientific and the educational," but this affects only the text; it does not alter the need for illustrating the text. Where I do not know the music he writes of, Mr. Gray's comments upon it have no real meaning for me;

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604 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3385 and I cannot understand the two sides of the quarrel when he is quarreling with someone, much less decide which is right. On the other hand, where my knowledge permits I find his revaluations of music often extraordinarily penetrating, but at times merely unsympathetic or perverse; and his reason- ing often brilliant, but at times that of a tooth-and-nail debater. Thus, he gives differences between Graeco-Roman music and early church music to demonstrate that the two have nothing in common, and that one was not, therefore, an adaptation of the other. Since he never cites an authority and almost never names an opponent, one must discover for oneself that these differences are the ones given in the standard works on that period, but that he has simply omitted the similarities which (with the differences) cause the authors to conclude that early church music, as might be expected, was an adapta- tion of existing Graeco-Roman means to new ends. Against W. J. Turner's belief that the Greeks must have had a music commensurate with their other arts, he offers the general truth that "a race whose outlook is primarily intellectual and logical, and whose peculiar strength lies in the direction of clarity and definition, must inevitably find its most complete and congenial artistic expression in the formative arts, and more particularly in sculpture" — which means that the Germans picked the wrong art. Again, after he has attacked the belief that Greek music had no harmony, because it is not based on conclusive evidence, he argues the contrary, in the absence of evidence, with "Is it not on the face of it unlikely that . . .?" Nor are Mr. Gray's ends themselves above question. The more naive evolutionist view of musical history that he objects to is wrong — and, one might add, pretty generally discredited by now; but his own attitude is no better. If the evolutionist was "afflicted by a morbid mania for detecting resemblances and influences where none exist," he is afflicted with a mania for denying them even where they do exist, not to speak of detecting some that are as far-fetched. And if the evolutionist had the bad habit of "regarding a whole school or period as leading up to one or two outstanding figures, in whom all the virtues and qualities of their predecessors are presumed to be contained," one often suspects that he, in his desire to dis- credit the evolutionists, does more than justice to some of the composers who have been neglected. B. H. Hagcin Lincoln in Cartoons Abraham Lincoln: His Path to the Presidency. By Albert Shaw. Review of Reviews Corporation. Two volumes. $8. THE veteran editor of the Review of Reviews has given much time to the compilation of this cartoon history of Lincoln and has included in his two volumes many hitherto unpublished cartoons culled both at home and abroad. He has not been content to reprint the familiar English ones, but has found others quite as much worth while, and he has gone to the European cartoonists for examples as well. Nor has he confined his selections to those relating only to the Emancipator. He has included contemporary portraits and cartoons of all the notables of Lincoln's time, both Southern and Northern, those in public life and out, so that we have a loose, running pictorial history of the whole period of Lincoln's activities. Dr. Shaw has even added some modern ones, such as H. T. Webster's priceless cartoon: "A New Baby Down at Tom Lincoln's." Unfortunately the value of this remarkable collection is considerably marred by two things — first, the lack of chronological consequences, and, second, the frequent fail- ure to mark the sources of the cartoon, the date and place of publication, and the method of its appearance. Both these things militate much against the value of the work as a historical document, which is all the more regrettable because of the excellent taste displayed in the choice of the pictorial material that has been used. Some of Dr. Shaw's characterizations of the personalities portrayed are inaccurate. Thus, Wendell Phillips was not brought into the Abolition fight by the mobbing of Garrison in Boston in 1835, but by the murder of Lovejoy two years later. Nor is it fair to say of Henry Ward Beecher that he consid- ered John Brown only "an irresponsible fanatic." He decried him after the Harper's Ferry raid as a bungler, but he approved of the spirit of the raid, apparently thought highly of him while Brown was in Kansas, and egged him and those like- minded on at all times to use "Beecher's Bibles," i.e., Sharp's rifles. None the less the books have their genuine value and will beyond question stimulate the appetite for more informa- tion about Lincoln and his period, in which it is now so diffi- cult to interest the younger generation. To accompany the cartoon history Dr. Shaw has written a running narrative in his usual easy and readable style, inter- preting events from the point of view of his philosophy. He would, of course, be the last to wish that these volumes should be deemed a final and definitive history. But as an outline of the major problems, difficulties, and campaigns, they will have their place among the ever-growing Lincolniana. Oswald Garrison Villard Novels in Brief The Party Dress. By Joseph Hergesheimer. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. Joseph Hergesheimer's first novel in four years harks back to his most popular one — "Cytherea." It is a story of today and is laid in the same complacent little suburb of wealthy commuters, Eastlake, and among the same country-club, cock- tail-drinking smart set from which Lee Randon of "Cytherea" ran away to Cuba with Savina Grove. Oddly enough, Cuba plays a part in this new volume as well, for Chalke Ewing has come from there on a visit to his sister. Chalke is to Nina Henry what Savina was to Lee Randon. This sounds like a mathematical formula, but so do Mr. Hergesheimer's plots when stripped of their embroidery. Chalke, with his mysterious past, his exotic appearance, and his rum swizzles, is the dream figure, the embodiment of the escape theme, the romantic comedian — a well-known ingredient of the Herges- heimer formula. It is usually female, but in this respect "The Party Dress" harks back to "Linda Condon." Nina Henry is the earthly figure, very earthly indeed this time, who is seeking, seeking — something. And it must be admitted that she is exceedingly well portrayed. The party dress serves as a symbol as well as an emotional cocktail for Nina. All those who are familiar with Mr. Hergesheimer's novels have now sufficient material to write the book themselves. But not, of course, with his deftness and skill, for Mr. Herges- heimer is a good craftsman. The new novel, however, will do little to revive a waning reputation. Uncle Sam: In the Eyes of His Family. By John Erskine. The Bobbs-Merrill Company. $2.50. Mr. Erskine says in the brief foreword to his latest comedy of history: "I have long believed that . . . our national tempera- ment . . . might have a biography. Since no one else has attempted it, I here try my hand ... I should like to show Uncle Sam as he is today." The result of his attempt is, first, an allegory that seems bald and oversimplified, and, second, a novel that seems highly fantastic. The allegory, which is not

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May21,1930J The Nation 605 intended to be completely sustained, lends neither profundity nor wit, satire nor charm, to the story, but it does succeed in destroying any hope there might have been for that to stand on its own feet. One cannot escape the impression that Professor Erskine is writing down to his great army of readers in the same way that he gently patronizes all his emasculated char- acters. Certainly he has made no attempt to go beyond the A B C of national and racial characteristics. The Age for Love. By Ernest Pascal. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.50. The heroine of this novel had the courage of her romantic convictions. Believing that there was no justification in the marriage relation except a deep foundation of romantic love, she left her husband for a lover in spite of the fact that she had a child, and when her lover, unsatisfied by the lack of stability in their relationship, dropped himself from a mono- plane into the Atlantic Ocean she refused to resume her life with her husband in spite of his urging, not because she despised him or found him distasteful, but because she "believed in love" and preferred loneliness to a joint life without it. Mr. Pascal has refused to compromise with the current notion of marriage as a contract entered into for social reasons, with love coming to be more or less irrelevant. His heroine, therefore, will not be popular with women's clubs. But she is honest and frank and, in spite of her creator's oversimplification of her difficul- ties, admirable in many ways. And Mr. Pascal has written an honest and thought-provoking book. The Trader's Wife. By Jean Mackenzie. Coward-McCann. $2. This is a scrupulously written novelette about a New England poetess married to an African trader and taken by him to the slave coast, where the sights and sounds and smells of slavery first jerk her out of her placid acceptance of the world and then drive her to her death. Miss Mackenzie has not spared her heroine the compelling dampness of the forest, the monotony, the strangeness, the wailing desolation of black mothers whose children are dying of starvation, all the horrors of the barracoon, all the final irresistible despair. And enough of this despair is communicated to the reader to make of "The Trader's Wife" a memorable novel. In form it is, moreover, a little masterpiece, concise, exact, tempered, elegant. The same style with as dramatic a mise en scene in a novel that was considerably longer and that dealt more completely with its characters would make Miss Mackenzie one of the more important writers of her time. Huntsman in the Sky. By Granville Toogood. Brewer and Warren. $2.50. There are some very good things in this first novel. Grand- father Lloyd, gentleman of the old school, Philadelphia Brahman, with his great house and stables and his reverence for the good things of life, is an excellent portrait of the thor- oughly American aristocrat. The writing is harmonious and polished. But there is something definitely wrong with the book in spite of its fine moments. The story does not advance. Bartram Garrison, the grandson, is Orion, the Huntsman in the Sky. He is presented to us as a thoroughbred gentleman and a musician and composer of great talent, just beginning to find himself through sorrow and self-torture after a failure in Paris. Somehow the gentleman fills the picture, leaving little of the genius or of the man. Bart is too perfect, too tolerant. One would not be surprised to hear that he carried an edition of Marcus Aurelius in his vest pocket. He rules himself by will, not only in his relationship with the beautiful heiress who arouses in him (so we are repeatedly told) all the blind forces of desire and against whom he steels himself for the sake of his art, but also in every other aspect of his life. There is no blossoming of the soul; only a rousing of the will against — not with — his emotions. The bohemian scenes and the gatherings of the "Peripatetic Philosophers," Bart's old drinking cronies, are amateurishly done, as though the mere account of a few rather conventionally stupid young bloods getting tight together were an entertainment in itself. The novel, like its hero, seems to have little of the strength and fire of a great talent. Music The Composer's League Presents "Die Gluckliche Hand." Opera for orchestra, chorus, solo barytone, pantomime, and color-light, by Arnold Schonberg. Written in 1913. First performance in America. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Setting and costumes by Robert Edmond Jones. "Le Sacre du Printemps." Ballet for orchestra, dance chorus, and soloist. Libretto and decor by Nicholas Roe- rich; music by Igor Stravinsky. Written in 1913. Present setting and costume by Roerich; choreography by Leonide Massine. Presented by the League of Composers and the Phila- delphia Symphony under Leopold Stokowski. THIS bald announcement ushered into the Metropolitan Opera House on April 22 such a convocation of talent as has rarely been assembled in this city for one enter- prise. It produced, for a brief hour and a quarter, a brilliant and curious performance of very uneven merit. Schonberg's opera presented, it seems, in a brief abstract form the vicissitudes of the human soul, horror-ridden by its own inadequacy, lifted for a time by hope, betrayed by the emptiness of material ambition to which it led, and finally sunk again under its original despair. These entities of the soul were dramatized as a winged monster, a man, a woman, and a stranger, the dramatis personae of a buried inner self — doubt- less Schonberg's own — tortured almost to insanity by life. One may object that a neurosis is not material for art, and refuse the opera on this ground. But one cannot deny that Schonberg has contrived with appalling success to lead us below the threshold of normal consciousness into the subter- ranean chambers of the under-mind, whose emotional entities fill the score with mutterings of horror, lyric wails of hope, staccato laughter of despair. Although the materials of his sound structure are strange, as for his purpose they must be, its form is clear, economic, and well defined. Pantomime and stage lighting further symbolized the struggle, so that a triple battery of sound, movement, and color carried his intent to the audience. The result, thanks to the work of Jones, Mamoulian, and the pantomimists, frequently approached and at times achieved an absolute unity. Unfortunately this cannot be said for the more important work of the evening — "Le Sacre du Printemps." Hear the composer's avowed purpose: "I have meant to express the sub- lime upward thrust of nature renewing itself. ... In the pre- lude I have intrusted to the orchestra the expression of that awful fear which every sensitive creature feels in the presence of forces at their moment of greatest potency ... a holy terror in the presence of the midday sun, a Pan-like cry." This was Stravinsky's intent, and the now famous score leaves no doubt as to its overwhelming fulfilment. As no other music it evokes the primitive fecundity of nature, the ancient time when man had not so far diverged upon his own path as to be consciously separated from the other growths about him. The great sea- sonal rhythm of fertility, the wave of life that opened buds

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606 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3385 Have You Met Anne Green and The Selbys? They have added immeasurably to the mirth of a nation, too long addicted to gloomy novels and soul- searing writings. "Devoted to each other and dedi- cated to having a good time," The Selbys enjoy Paris knowingly but endearingly. Suddenly their sprightly niece, Barbara, breezed in from Georgia. Then the fun begins — and it doesn't end until the last page of this spirited tale. THE SELBYS by ANNE GREEN Now in its 8th printing, $2.50 DUTTON An Invitation to Critical A merica • Read • A PRIMER of AESTHETICS By LOUIS GRUDIN \COVICl-FRlEDE # $3. At Bookstores* THE GROUP A Clearing House of Opinion meet* at AUDITORIUM— 150 West 85th Street Tuesday, May 20th, at 8:30 P. M. MORRIS HLLLQUIT will speak on : "OUR CHANGING SOCIAL ORDER" Admission, Members 50c Non-Members 75c Weekly notices mailed on request 9 SUMMER THURSDAY FRIDAY —SATURDAY — ^SUND AY Decoration Week-End 4 GLORIOUS $ FUN DAYS 30 =r NO EXTRAS. EVERYTHING INCLUDED. 1. Round Trip Fake S. All Meals, coming and ooino 2. Camp Transportation 4. Stay at Camp VIA SPECIALLY CHARTERED "NON-STOP" TRAIN Leaves Thursday, 6 V. M. ACCOMMODATIONS LIMITED EARLY RESERVATION URGED Ton wouldn't know the old place, now 1 . . . the same old friendly spirit . . . but what improvements . . . what facilities . . . e'en the golf course nearing completion I Special June Rates $25 Weekly ECHO LAKE TAVERN 475 FIFTH AVE. Phone: LEX 887» R. ii n i i>i l l. M. .s i ill. I. ECHO | LAKE* TAVERN A Camfi for jiilults ADIRONDACKS WABRENSBUHO Other Summer Advertising, Pages IV and V and thrust up grass, included him in its sweep, and the rituals which handed down to his successors the rites of Dionysus and Osiris were gradually evolving round the procreative force of his own body into the first of all religions — the impersonal and ecstatic worship of sex. With this ancient, primitive, and powerful evocation pro- ceeding from the orchestra, it was a shock to receive through the eye, from the stage decor, a poster of spring in the Dolomites, all posies and prettiness, with maidens in bright smocks, daisy-garlanded, and sunburnt youths in bearskins out for a vernal holiday. To be sure the choreography did much toward visualizing the external rhythms of the music (although a leisured waltz is not this writer's idea of the slow, awkward, terrifying thrust of the Vernal Dance episode). But, on the whole, sight and sound were utterly at odds. If one closed one's ears and merely looked one inevitably fancied the music of Mendelssohn's "Spring Song." If one closed one's eyes the music created a stark plain, rude monoliths in a circle, and humans moving through a rite hardly beginning to be conscious of its form — at least something very far from the winsome setting and costumes of Mr. Roerich. During the second part of the ballet, however, The Sac- rifice, the impressions of eye and ear drew together. The darkness and quiet of the Pagan Night episode which opened it allowed the eye to forget the setting. The choreography greatly improved in originality and power. Above all the long solo dance of Martha Graham as the virgin offered for sacri- fice, together with the supporting choreography, followed the mounting intensity of the score, and visualized it so well that the mind received music and movement as one entity. Even to give accurate shape to the complex sequence of the music is a remarkable achievement for Miss Graham and Mr. Sto- kowski, to say nothing of the beauty and terror manifest in her dancing. In plan and projection it was an astonishing and intensely moving creation. It concluded the most ambitious evening of music and ballet which has been seen for many a year, sustained throughout — one is tempted to say, "of course" — by the presiding genius of Mr. Stokowski. In his brilliant readings, his mastery of the vastly complicated organism of scores, dancers, soloists, and chorus, he again proved himself a pioneer in a field into which, we hope, he will lead us far. The modern ballet, with its synthesis of color, form, movement, and music, is the logical vehicle for the expression of this complex age of swift fluidity and omnipresent sound. One is grateful to the Composer's League. Hubbard Hutchinson Drama Lewdness and Laughter MY confreres of the daily press seem to have been shocked both aesthetically and morally by the goings on which constitute "Lost Sheep" (Selwyn Theater). The farce details the confusion which arises when the family of a dissent- ing clergyman rents a house formerly occupied by some popular prostitutes, and it is, as the critics point out, of necessity neither particularly subtle nor particularly delicate. One may, indeed, go still farther. One may add, for example, that the complica- tions are something less than probable, and that in real life ex- planations would have been in order somewhat sooner than they occur in the play. But I should consider myself derelict in duty if I did not confess both that I was not offended and that I joined the audience in a good deal of its laughter. Moreover, though the proceedings are certainly enlivened by the work of an When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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May 21, 1930] The Nation 607 excellent cast, which includes Ferdinand Gottschalk, Cecilia Loftus, and a very pretty newcomer appearing under the inap- propriately masculine name of Sidney Fox, I shall not attempt to excuse myself by any pompous reference to "acting which made one forget the disgusting nature of the subject," for "Lost Sheep" was constructed by someone with a sound knowledge of conventional farce technique, and many of the malentendus which arise are genuinely funny. Indeed, I feel myself impelled to go still farther — I do not understand why the thing should be considered morally objec- tionable. From experience I have learned that I am not to be trusted in judging of such matters, but so far as I am able to comprehend what those of more sensitive feelings are talking about it seems to me that their protests are generally based upon one or both of two convictions: (a) that certain words must not under any circumstances be mentioned because, as a seventeenth- century moralist proclaimed, "the sin sticks to the syllables"; (b) that certain treatments of certain situations are likely to arouse what are commonly called "impure thoughts" and to inspire the spectator to go and do likewise. But even if these convictions be admitted to be sound, I fail to see how they can lead to the conclusion that a farce like "Lost Sheep" is damna- ble. In the first place, not one of the mysterious syllables is uttered, and in the second place I fail to perceive how a fable like the present could possibly induce its auditors to rush off to a bawdy house. Indeed, it has always seemed to me that laughter and libidinousness are sworn enemies. A modern poet has something to say about "the imbecile earnestness of lust" and this modern poet is right. "Evil thoughts" are always sol- emn thoughts, and one cannot be genuinely lascivious while thinking of sex as funny. Aristophanes understood the fact well, for moralist though he was he had no hesitation in repre- senting everything up to the embrace itself in "Lysistrata," be- cause he knew well enough that there was something quite the reverse of inflammatory in the spectacle of an eagerness which the audience did not share. The smirk may be compatible with de- sire, but the smile and the guffaw are not, and it is a pity that the moralists do not realize the fact. Indeed, it is just because they do not that they predict the downfall of society as often as they read the funny papers. But then, moralists cannot, I sup- pose, be expected to understand a principle like this. They laugh so seldom. "Courtesan" (President Theater) was supposed to impress the audience because only one character appears on the stage. There are, however, so many off-stage voices and so many con- versations over the telephone that not even the dubious novelty seems very novel. Nothing is left except a dull story about a kept woman who jumped out of the window because a new lover doubted her purity. Joseph Wood Krutch Contributors to This Issue Louis Resnick, coauthor of "Eye Hazards in Industrial Occupations," was formerly connected with the Na- tional Safety Council. Paul Y. Anderson is the national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Stanley J. Kunitz has just published a book of poems, "Intellectual Things." Dudley Fitts is a contributor to Hound and Horn, the Criterion, and other periodicals. Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at Washington Square College, New York University. B. H. Haggin is a New York musician who contributes articles to various periodicals. □ FILMS □ PLA YS CIVIC REPERTORY u&^%%>°- 50c, $1, $1.50. Matinees Thursdays and Saturdays, 2:30 EVA LE GALLIENNE, Director Thure. Mat., May 15, "Cradle Song;" Thurs. Eve., May 16, "Open Door" and "Women Have Their Way ;" Fri. Eve., May 16, "Romeo and Juliet;" Sat. Mat, May 17, "Peter Pan;" Sat. Eve., May 17, "Inheritors;" Mon. Eve., May 19, "Open Door" and "Women Have Their Way ;" Tues. Eve., May 20, "Romeo and Juliet;" Wed. Eve., May 21, "Cradle Song." Seats 4 weeks in advance at Box Office & Town Hall, 118 W. 43rd St. HERMAN SHDMLIN presents THE LAST MILE "The most satisfactory evening in the theatre that any new play has given me this season." — Alexander Wootlcott. QATVf H HARRK Theatre, 42nd St., West of Broadway. 0/*.J.TJ. 11, Al-fVlXIXXO Eves. 8:50. Matinees Wed. & Sat. 2:80. The Theatre Guild Presents HOTEL UNIVERSE A NEW PLAY By PHILIP BARRY 1MARTT\ nrflf Theatre, 45th St., W. of Eighth Ave. iTliVU. 1 1.1 UCiV^XV Evgs., 8:50. Mats., Thurs. & Sat., 2:60 A MONTH Z COUNTRY By IVAN TURGENEV /"* 1*51*4 THEATRE, 52nd St., W. of Broadway VJtUUU Evgs. 8:30. Mats. Thurs. & Sat. 2:30. -AMERICAN PREMIERE- HpHESS PLAYER FILM GUILD CINEMA A FILM AS STRIKINGLY ORIGINAL AS "THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI" 8th St. bet. 6th & 6th Ave. SPR 6090 for week starting Sat. May 17th. 55 th ST. PLAYHOUSE— Just East of 7th Ave. Tel. Circle 0129. Continuous 1 :30 to Midnight &S&" MADY CHRISTIANS A|^in THE GERMAN Ml SICAL FILM ROMANCE "The BURNING HEART" ^fiXr "Das Bremende Herz" Who Made "The Vagabond King," "Waltz Dream" COOLING PLANT NOW IN OPERATION Sunday Afternoon 3:30 P. M. MAY 18th A DEBATE Shall Humanism Take the Place of Religion? YES says Dr. CHARLES FRANCIS POTTER author of "Humanism — the new religion." NO says LEON SAMSON author of "The New Humanism" Chairman Dr. A. A. BRILL foremost psycho-analyst of America auspices of Social Science Forum BOOTH THEATRE „^j£SS» - — — When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Gandhi the Non-Resistant By HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY M AH ATM A GANDHI has joined battle with the British Empire for the soul of India. Against this contemporary Goliath, mightiest empire of our day, armed with the resources of science, organization, wealth, and all the enginery of war, there stands forth the slight figure of one single man clad in a loin-cloth, without arms, without wealth, without any of the accouterments of power. On what does this mystical madman rely as he goes forth to the unequal combat? With what strange weapon does the Mahatma fight? The term "passive resistance" [said Gandhi fifteen years ago, at the end of his long and astonishingly suc- cessful campaigns in South Africa] does not fit into the activity of the Indian community during the past eight years. Its equivalent in the vernacular, rendered into English, means truth-force. I think Tolstoy also called it soul-force, or love-force, and so it is. Carried out to its utmost limit this force is independent of pecuniary or other material assistance. Violence is the negation of this great spiritual force, which can only be cultivated or wielded by those who will entirely eschew violence. . . . It is impossible for those who consider themselves to be weak to apply this force. Only those who realize that there is something in man which is superior to the brute nature in him, and that the latter always yields to it, can effectively be passive resisters. This force is to violence what light is to darkness. In politics its use is based upon the immutable maxim that government of the people is possible only so long as they consent either consciously or unconsciously to be governed. As he puts it in another passage: The pathway of Ahimsa [non-violence] — that is, of love — has often to be trodden all alone. . . . The current (and in my opinion mistaken) view of Ahimsa has drugged our conscience and rendered us in- sensible to a host of other and more insidious forms of violence, like harsh words, harsh judgments, ill-will, anger, spite, and lust of cruelty; it has made us forget that there may be far more violence in the slow torture of men and animals, the starvation and exploitation to which they are subjected out of selfish greed, the wanton humiliation and oppression of the weak, and the killing of their self-respect that we witness all around us today than in the benevolent taking of life. Strange words these in our Western ears, and stranger deeds. "Soul-force," the weapon of the humbly strong. Facing the whole British power, Gandhi declares: My confidence is unshaken that if a single Satyagrahi holds out to the end victory is absolutely certain. That is the beauty of Satyagraha [truth-force, soul-force]. It comes up to us. We have not to go out in search for it. There is a virtue inherent in the principle itself. Clearly enough, we put it negatively, imperfectly, when we call it non-violence, passive resistance, for it has the posi- tive power of truth, of love, impregnable to all attacks because it fears nothing, not even death. We view the operation of this force with wonder, for our progress has been in the control of material things, and our reliance has been on such control. Yet we have not lacked our own prophets and seers. One who is not with- out honor among us has said : "Resist not evil." "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you." Even in our own land Emerson proclaimed the power of non-violence again and again. Most arresting of all to Americans today, because of their strange connection with present events in India, are the words of the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, who, aflame with passion for breaking the chains of the slave, put non-violence at the very basis of his practical activity. Another motto we have chosen [says he] is "Universal Emancipation." . . . Henceforth we shall use it in its widest latitude — the emancipation of our whole race from the dominion of man, from the thraldom of self, from the government of brute force, from the bondage of sin, and the bringing it under the dominion of God, the control of an inward spirit, the government of the law of love. Tolstoy testifies to Garrison's powerful influence on him, coming, as he says, in the spring of his awakening to true life. He says of this great American: The principle of non-resistance to evil by violence, which consists in the substitution of persuasion for brute force, can only be accepted voluntarily, and in whatever measure it is freely accepted by men and applied to life — i.e., according to the measure in which people renounce violence and establish their relations upon rational per- suasion— only in that measure is true progress in the life of men accomplished. . . . Garrison was the first to pro- claim this principle as a rule for the organization of the life of men. . . . Therefore Garrison will forever remain one of the greatest reformers and promoters of true human progress. Thus the great Russian non-resistant, who passed on the torch Garrison had lighted. Gandhi in turn confesses his debt to Tolstoy. "The Kingdom of God Is Within You," he says, gave permanent form to his own ideal. Of his resulting South African cam- paigns, C. F. Andrews says: He was the first to organize corporate moral resist- ance and to obtain at last in South Africa, through rigid discipline, a firmly united community ready to go to any lengths of suffering as a body for the sake of conscience. Perhaps it would be true to say that since the days of the early Christian church no such effective acts of passive resistance have been organized as those which Mahatma Gandhi inspired. That victory won, Gandhi returned to his own country and continued the struggle against oppression and injustice, at first working as a loyal subject of the British Empire, then, after the black horror of Amritsar had convinced him that the Empire in India was an evil thing, throwing his whole life and thought to direct the invincible power of non-violence against that Empire by the dangerous method of non-cooperation. Few Americans there are, perhaps, who

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610 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3385 Does Good Literature Appeal to You? ff^ ^""fe Subscribed now to 8>^i THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, Ltd. I ^^^ will bring you the following: TWELVE YEARS IN A MONASTERY. By Joseph McCabe. HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. By A. W. Benn. (10 portraits.) GIBBON ON CHRISTIANITY. (Chapters IS and 16 of the "Decline and Fall"). THE DESCENT OF MAN (Part 1 and last Chapter of Part 3). By Charles Darwin. EDUCATION: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical. By Herbert Spencer. (All the above clothette bound) THE LITERARY GUIDE (Rationalist monthly: 7 issues), and the RATIONALIST ANNUAL for 1931 (published in October). ALL the above post-free in return for a subscription of $2 (M.O.) sent now to: — The Secretary, R.P.A. Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, London, E.C.4. (England). These sailing dates are important . . . our personal service more so May 28, 8.S. Aquitanla; June 11, S. S. Bremen; June 26, 8.8. Lafayette (con- ducted by Dr. Kimitz) ; June 28, S.S. Rotterdam; June 28, 8.8. July 5, S.S. Europa; July 16, S.S. lierengaria (conducted by Mrs. Markoff). Full information containing rates, itineraries, etc, mailed on request. WORLD TOURISTS, Inc. 175 Fifth Ave. — New York — ALGonquin 6656 Visits to Soviet Russia Two Weeks — Moscow, Leningrad. Sailings from New York— June 3, July 24, August 14. Price from New York— $533; from German port— $332; from Helsingfors— $299. Registrations open. Twenty Days in the Soviet Union — Leningrad, the Volga. Sailing from New York June 18, July 5. Price from New York— $635 ; from German port— $432; from Helsingfors— $401. Registrations open. Twenty-three Days in the Soviet Union— Lenin- grad, Moscow, the Crimea, Ukraine. Sailing from New York June 18. Price from New York — $665; from German port— $462; from Helsingfors— $431. Registrations open. Thirty-six Days In the Soviet Union— Leningrad, Moscow, the Volga, Caucasus, Crimea, the Ukraine. Sailing from New York June 24. Price from New York— $805; from German port— $694; from Helsing- fors—$661. Registrations open. Additional itineraries and sailings. Parties of eight plus American leader. Special student par- ties at low rates. 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK ,TME-QREN-RO,AsD, When writing to advertisers realize that the present conflict, which is likely to be the greatest of all, is the ninth that Gandhi has waged in these fifteen years, and always with the single weapon of non- violence, truth-force. "My non-cooperation has its root," he says, "not in hatred but in love. ... It will be a non- violent fight, it will be clean, it will be truthful." Mistakes he has made a plenty, and none more ready to admit them than he. He tells of the great struggle against the Rowlatt Act: "Therein our inherent shortcomings came to the surface. ... I had to confess my Himalayan blun- der"— he had been ignorant that the masses were certain to become violent if left to themselves! The non-coopera- tion campaign in 1921 was wrecked in its non-resistant aspect by the terrible outbreak of violence among his followers at Bombay and their butchery of the police at Chauri Chaura. Immediately he made a vow to fast till the vio- lence in Bombay should cease, and called off the non-co- operation movement at the height of its power. The drastic reversal of practically the whole of the aggressive program [he said] may be politically unsound and unwise, but there is no doubt that it is religiously sound, and I venture to assure the doubters that the coun- try will have gained by my humiliation and confession of error. What an act of faith to undertake to teach the three hun- dred millions of a veritable continent by personal example the meaning of non-violence, the power of love! Then came that strange, magnificent scene at his trial: I wish to indorse all the blame that the learned Advocate General has thrown on my shoulders in con- nection with the Bombay, Madras, and Chauri Chaura oc- currences. ... It is impossible for me to dissociate my- self from the diabolical crime of Chauri Chaura or the mad outrages of Bombay. ... I knew that I was play- ing with fire. I ran the risk, and if I were set free, I should still do the same. . . . Non-violence is the first article of my faith. . . . But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered had done an irreparable harm to my country or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people breaking forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad. I am deeply sorry for it. . . . But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected to- ward a government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system. . . . I believe that I have rendered a service to India and England by showing in non-cooperation the way out of the unnatural state in which both are living. . . . But in the past non-cooperation has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evil-doer. I am endeavoring to show my countrymen that violent non-cooperation only multiplies evil, and that as evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from violence. Non-violence implies voluntary submission to the penalty for non-cooperation with evil. I am here, there- fore, to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be inflicted on me for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. Such is Gandhi, the non-resistant. Today, after further years of self -discipline, experience, and training of his fol- lowers, he has once more matched forces with the British Empire. Where will the victory rest? please mention The Nation

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The Nation FOUNDED 186S Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 1930 No. 3386 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 611 EDITORIALS: Business and the Law 614 The Briand Plan 615 The Hucksters' Treaty 615 Fridtjof Nansen 616 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 617 VETO THE TARIFF! 618 "MY DEAR SENATOR" IV. By Oswald Garrison Villard 619 LIFT UP THINE EYES. By Sherwood Anderson 620 SAFETY LAST: III. WHY THE SAFETY MOVEMENT FAILS. By Louis Resnick 622 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 624 CORRESPONDENCE 625 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 626 BOOKS, FILMS, DRAMA: The Kneeling Nun. By Eda Lou Walton 627 Artists in Exile. By Henry Hazlitt 627 The Gandhist Creed. By S. K. Ratcliffe 628 Non- Euclidean Criticism. By Clifton P. Fadiman 629 Trotzky's Side of It. By Jerome Davis 629 Stendhal. By C. Hartley Grattan 630 The Death of Harding. By Oswald Garrison Villard 630 The Nation's Trees. By Robert Marshall 631 Films: American Natives and Nature. By Alexander Bakshy 632 Drama: Ibsen's Prentice Hand. By Joseph Wood Krutch 633 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: The Joker in the Naval Treaty. By David W. Wainhouse 634 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN II. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. ONLY by the aid of the Vice-President was it possible to break the deadlock between House and Senate over the debenture and flexible-tariff provisions of the tariff bill. By 43 to 41 the Senate released its conferees from adherence to the debenture plan — and thereby assured the passage of the measure. It will now go to the President without the provision to which he especially objected and he is con- fronted with the severest test of his courage and statesman- ship. If he approves the bill, and the business world is cer- tain that he will in order to end the much-talked-of uncer- tainty, he will put his name to the most scandalous tariff measure ever passed, will strike a grave blow at our export trade just when it is shrinking alarmingly — it fell off 291 millions or 20.4 per cent in the first quarter of this year — and will add to the cost of living of every American. If he vetoes the measure the tariff barons will rage, but as the figures of our poll indicate in this week's Nation, a ma- jority of the newspapers of the country will sustain him and, we believe, the bulk of the people. Meanwhile, the deadly injury the proposed tariff is doing to our international stand- ing is clear. With amazing and unprecedented frankness the Swiss Minister and the Spanish Ambassador in Washington have spoken out publicly against it with a resultant demand in the Senate that the former be sent home. A reliable cable- gram to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom from Switzerland speaks of the "unprecedented re- action, widespread indignation meetings" and declares the proposed tariff "will cause great suffering." So it will in many other countries. THOROUGHLY TEMPERATE and highly coura- geous was the speech made by Dwight W. Morrow in opening his campaign for nomination by the Republican Party as United States Senator from New Jersey. Avoiding the extreme of either wet or dry, Mr. Morrow nevertheless recognized boldly and clearly that the question of prohibition is a vital question before the American people today. Nor did he base his argument on an appeal to the "rights" of per- sonal liberties. In any democracy such rights are always thoroughly relative. There must and should be, said Mr. Morrow, some government control of liquor. The question is whether or not the present system of control by the federal government is practical or desirable. "Is it well," he asks, "that large portions of our people should conceive of the fed- eral government as an alien and even a hostile power? Is it well to have as a result a lawless, unregulated liquor traffic, attended by a shocking corruption?" This is not overstate ment. The remedy advocated by Mr. Morrow is repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution and substitu- tion of a new amendment permitting the several States to impose within the State such control of the liquor traffic- always refusing the return of the saloon — as their voters de- sire. ^ We do not call this an ideal solution ; but it is one solution. And to suggest it is one of the most impressive bits of honest politics that we have seen in a long time. THE FEDERAL POWER COMMISSION will be completely reorganized if the House of Representa- tives takes favorable action on the Couzens bill. The com- mission has highly important duties ; for it makes the leases of all power sites controlled by the federal government, and its valuation work controls the conditions of recapture of such sites by the government fifty years hence. Testimony before the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce dis- closed that the three Cabinet officers (the Secretaries of War, Agriculture, and the Interior) who ex officio constitute the commission have given to its work an average of five hours a year, so that its actual business has been done largely by the executive secretary. Secretary Hyde testified before the House committee that "there has been a grand and glorious fuss on the commission ever since I've known anything about it," and declared it "highly necessary" to set up an inde- pendent commission. The Couzens bill was reported by unanimous recommendation of the Interstate Commerce Committee, according to its chairman, and was passed by the Senate without a roll call. It ought to be promptly passed by the House. jV/TR. W. G. CAMPBELL, chief of the federal Food -ItJ. and Drug Administration, responding to public criti- cism and notably to an article by Senator Wheeler in the

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612 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3386 current issue of Plain Talk, under date of May 13 ad- dressed to Senator McNary a request for an investigation by the Senate Committee on Agriculture of charges of lax administration of the Food and Drugs Act. Mr. Campbell truly says: "If the responsible administration officials are lax or incompetent they should at least be removed. If they are discharging their duty in a conscientious, efficient manner they should be vindicated." He might well have added that if the law is defective it should be strengthened. We trust that Senator McNary's committee will go thoroughly into all the important questions raised in this inquiry, in order that the public may have actual knowledge of the situation concern- ing not only ergot but also digitalis, ether, and any other drugs about whose purity and potency any serious question is responsibly raised. TO SENATOR ROBERT F. WAGNER of New York we offer our congratulations upon the record he has been making in the United States Senate. Mr. Wag- ner's contribution to the debate on the Parker nomination was one of the genuine high lights in that discussion. It was scholarly, well informed, and liberal and it carried the more weight because Mr. Wagner had been for years a jurist in excellent standing whose opposition to Judge Parker could neither be whistled down nor laid to an irresponsible desire to injure the Supreme Court. More valuable still has been the Senator's fight for the unemployed. Others, especially the President, who made such great promises at one time, were content to sit still. Senator Wagner single- handed accomplished his aim of getting three bills through the Senate. They do not get us very far ; they could not, of course, have been radical. But at least they recognize that the evil does exist, and if they are passed by the House they should give us adequate employment statistics and a national employment-bureau system with an annual appropriation of $4,000,000. The Senator's third bill calls for a long-range federal building-construction program. We look to Senator Wagner for greater liberalism in the years to come — even, we hope, in the matter of the tariff, where his record lias by no means commended itself to those who would praise him. EVIDENCE to show that Mr. Whalen's famous red documents were manufactured in a small printshop on East Tenth Street, New York City, was offered to the House of Representatives on May 12 by Representative La Guardia. Mr. Whalen, testifying a few days previously before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, had refused to divulge the source of his documents on the ground that to do so might interfere with an investigation into Com- munist activities now being conducted in New York City. It is difficult to be patient with this sort of official sidestep- ping. But if we are to have investigations of Communist activities, as perhaps we should have in order to permit Mr. Whalen to sleep at night, then let the investigation be public, thorough, unbiased, and receptive of testimony from all sides. And let us not forget that an investigation does not offer an excuse for indiscriminate red hunts or a fresh series of Lusk laws. We have had enough of that sort of hysteria. Let us not forget, also, that as a specific case of what the Com- munists would rightly call class justice, Robert Minor, Wil- liam Z. Foster, Israel Amter, and Harry Raymond are in jail in New York, convicted of a misdemeanor, that they were sentenced to from six months to three years in prison, and that they have been denied bail pending appeal of their case. These men clearly suffer not for their offense, which was slight, but for their opinions. Whatever their opinions, they are entitled to their rights and privileges under the law. SALT DEPOTS NEAR BOMBAY were raided on May 18. By the end of the day several hundred Indians had been arrested, but according to reports not one blow had been struck. The incident is an indication not only of the strength in India of the doctrine of non-violence, but also of what non-violence coupled with the vast numbers of the Indian population could accomplish. Meanwhile, along the strategic northwest border the British are quelling unrest with bombs. At Allahabad the working committe of the All India National Congress called upon all Indian papers to cease publication and another resolution called for non-pay- ment of certain taxes in certain provinces. The Viceroy has announced that the proposed round-table conference will be held on October 20, and V. J. Patel, lately speaker of the Legislative Assembly, states that Gandhi would probably be willing to participate even now if he were assured that no other question except a grant of complete dominion status would be discussed. In view of the importance of accurate and impartial news from India, interviews such as the one given out by L. F. Rushbrook Williams on his arrival in this country recently should be carefully scrutinized. When it is remembered that Professor Williams is envoy at London of the Chamber of Indian Princes, probably the most reaction- ary body in India, it is easy to understand why he calls Gandhi a "fanatical reactionary." Even so, it seems hardly necessary to produce "from among his private state papers" as new and conclusive evidence against Gandhi and his move- ment the "confession" (consisting of Gandhi's strictures on the machine age and modern science generally) which was openly printed in 1909 and which, according to C. F. An- drews, one of Gandhi's closest friends, Gandhi would proba- bly modify if he recast it at this time. Why Professor Wil- liams should be going immediately to Washington to report on the Indian situation to the British Embassy of a Labor Government is hard to understand. EVERY FRIEND OF HAITI will rejoice in the peace- ful transfer of the Presidency on May 15 from Louis Borno, the puppet of the American Occupation, to Eugene Roy, the non-partisan candidate agreed on by all factions in March during the visit of the Forbes Commission. One important step toward American withdrawal is thus taken. That withdrawal should be hastened, for the Haitians know too well the meaning of American occupation. We pass over the threatened renewal of the Rodenberg concession in the Artibonite Valley — a dangerous exception to the Haitian law against alien landownership — to remind our readers of an incident here. A month ago the Navy Department awarded the Navy Cross to Lieutenant John B. Blanchard for "com- mendable courage and forbearance" in shooting down the group of Haitians at Aux Caves whose slaughter led to the appointment of the Forbes Commission. Chief Marine Gun- ner Calvin A. Lloyd received a special letter of commenda- tion "for courage and good judgment in assisting in the dis- persal of the mob" — perhaps for shooting straight. In face of such a revelation of the temper and judgment of our naval

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May 28, 1930] The Nation 613 authorities, it is small wonder that the Haitians would like to hasten the departure of General Russell. EGYPT WILL REMAIN EGYPT, for the present at least, with the same political status as before, now that the London negotiations for a new treaty have broken down. The rock on which the negotiations split, it seems, was the question of the Sudan. The British Government appears to have taken the position that the Sudan issue was not to be discussed at the London parley; the Egyptian delegation, on the other hand, insisted upon taking up the question at Lon- don and settling it then and there. The Egyptian demands included a majority representation in the administrative council of the Sudan, an Egyptian vice-governor, the opening of other important offices to Egyptians, and the return to the Sudan of Egyptian troops. The British Government offered very substantial concessions in the matter of the with- drawal of British troops from other parts of the country and their concentration along the Suez Canal, but it refused to give up the joint control over the Sudan (joint only in name because in fact British) on the ground that the arrangement had not yet been sufficiently tested and that Egyptian capacity for complete self-government had not yet been proved. The outcome was welcomed by the Conservatives, but the Labor Government gains no credit from the failure. FIFTY-FIVE DAYS before the end of his prison term, John Santanella made an attempt at escape from Sing Sing, was caught, and is now in solitary confinement, facing the seven-to-fourteen-year term imposed by the Baumes law for breaking jail. We recommend this story to those persons who object to making our prisons into "country clubs," and who do not approve of pampering of prisoners. For here was a young man, twenty-nine years of age by the way, who in less than two months would have been free ! No country club, no baseball team, no moving-picture show can equal that in the eyes of the prisoner behind bars. On July 11 John Santanella would have been at liberty, and because he found himself totally unable to endure waiting for that immi- nent day he made a mad try at his freedom, one that he must have known was one chance in a thousand, because prison is abominable, unendurable, lacerating to the spirit no matter how much entertainment is provided behind the bars. We can offer our prisoners better food, better beds, more decent living conditions, more recreation — and they will still be in prison. We need not fear that we shall be pampering them while that fact persists. THE PULITZER PRIZE awards will probably pre- cipitate the usual controversy and dissent. While there is likely to be general gratification over the choice of Marc Connelly's "The Green Pastures" as the outstanding play of the year, there will be a great deal of speculation as to why Oliver La Farge's "Laughing Boy" was chosen in preference either to Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" or Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel." The history award, moreover, again raises a larger issue. According to the New York World's report, the Pulitzer jury favored Claude Bowers's "The Tragic Era" by a vote of two to one, but its decision was reversed by the Columbia School of Journalism Advisory Board, which voted for Claude H. Van Tyne's "The War of Independence." Thus the juries of recom- mendation continue to be treated with scant respect. In 1920 the committee, after having voted for "Main Street," was overruled and the prize given to "The Age of Innocence." In 1924 the committee recommended to the Advisory Board that the dramatic prize be awarded to "The Show-Off." The recommendation was disregarded and the prize went to Hatcher Hughes's "Hell-Bent fer Heaven" — with the jurors left to discover that fact through the newspapers. Last year it was rumored that a recommendation of Upton Sinclair's "Boston" was rejected and Julia Peterkin's "Scarlet Sister Mary" chosen instead. With so little value attached to their opinion, how long can first-rate men be expected to serve on the juries of recommendation? THE DEATH OF DEADWOOD DICK will come as a surprise to thousands who never knew that he existed outside the pages of the thrillers of which he was the hero. He was, however, substantial enough to ride the pony express, fight Indians, and, finally, a year or so ago, to come via airplane for a visit to President Coolidge. We shall not undertake even to hazard a guess concerning the amount of fact to be found in the numberless tales written around him by "Ned Buntline" (Edward L. Wheeler), who was ^also responsible for the Buffalo Bill yarns, hut he seems at least to have talked and acted the part. At the time of his death at the age of eighty-four he was still keeping his curls and still explaining the notchless butt of his pistol by declaring that he had never shot a white man or kept track of Indians slain. This has the authentic ring; but "Deadwood," we fear, has just missed the immortality probably assured to Buffalo Bill. An extensive series of novels dealing with the latter is kept continually in print, but "Deadwood" is un- known to a generation which follows the snaky youths now reigning in Hollywood. HERBERT CROLY conducted the New Republic bravely and outspokenly for sixteen years, always with scholarly learning and sincerity. Freed by the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Willard Straight from any anxiety as to the stability of the organ that he conducted, he quickly made it an important influence upon public opinion, notably in the war years. Then it was almost the fashion ; indeed, it was, for a time, supposed to be the mouthpiece of the White House. To one of its editors was attributed the drafting of the Fourteen Points. Under Mr. Croly's leadership the New Republic made the grave mistake of yielding to the belief that if only the United States entered the war it could dictate the peace and thereby assure a much better world. Events speedily showed the faultiness of this philosophy, as they revealed anew that liberalism and war cannot come to- gether without damage to all liberal causes, and the editor of the New Republic later proved that he was not unaware of it. Not originally trained for journalism or naturally well-equipped for it — he wrote at too great length and without adequate clarity — he yet published an extremely valuable periodical. As for his books, one, "The Promise of American Life," had a great deal of effect upon liberal think- ing in the time of Roosevelt and the muck-raking period, though it would hardly bear reexamination today. In Mr. Croly's death American journalism loses one of its foremost exponents, and the editors of The Nation an able and most valued colleague in the field of weekly journalism.

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614 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3386 Business and the Law HARD cases make bad law, the jurists say. Some very bad law is likely to come out of the merger movement, then ; for it certainly is putting some extremely hard cases up to the legal officers of the govern- ment. The Standard-Vacuum Oil merger and the radio trust development are only the two latest conspicuous ex- amples of a widespread and inevitable movement that goes squarely athwart the original theory of the Anti-Trust Act. The Department of Justice is entitled to sympathy in its attempt to enforce that law. So are the great business men who are trying to find some legal way of doing what they find themselves economically bound to do. So are the smaller business men who look anxiously to the strict enforcement of the law as the necessary condition of their being able to continue in business. The Sherman anti-trust law, passed in 1890, con- tented itself with putting into statutory form the common- law doctrine that contracts and combinations in restraint of trade and commerce are unlawful. It left to the courts the task of giving concrete meaning and content to that doctrine as the cases arose. The law was based on the nineteenth- century theory that there is something peculiarly "natural" about a condition in which there are many competitors in an industry; only the natural depravity of certain human beings leads them to interfere with this beatific state of nature. Of course, even in that dim and misty past students recognized that railroads and street-car companies did not fit into this idyllic competitive picture. Still, they were "exceptions," so we just tried to prevent the evil of combination by prohibit- ing it. For twenty years, accordingly, the courts struggled along, interpreting the law as prohibiting all combinations in restraint of trade. It was the theory of a community indus- trially undeveloped. Yet even so the judges tried not to strangle the developing business forces of the country. Their task, no easy one, grew harder as the years passed. For the business men, prohibited by law from combin- ing, yet found themselves driven by well-nigh irresistible eco- nomic forces to unite with other business men. It was not alone the lure of monopoly profits, powerful though that in- centive was. It was also the economies and the efficiency of combination that brought them into more and more effec- tive union, law or no law. It is easy to blame the busi- ness men who sought to get around the law and the great lawyers who devised ways of getting around it. The plain truth is that our economic growth was making it necessary to change the law. The Supreme Court in the Standard Oil case in 1911 accordingly changed it by the simple device of invoking the so-called "rule of reason." The language of the law re- mained unchanged, but during the past twenty years that language has meant that only combinations in "unreason- able" restraint of trade are prohibited. What constitutes unreasonable restraint is a matter for the courts and Con- gress to determine. In that attempt we have clung with one hand to the benefits of competition and chaos ; with the other we have grasped for the gains of combination and order. The result has been a hodgepodge of legislation, administrative regulations, and court decisions in which it is hard to trace any consistent theory. By the Clayton Act and the Trade Commission Act we undertake to prohibit simply certain forms of "unfair" competition. Monopoly, we thus in ef- fect assume, is unobjectionable if not established and main- tained by such methods. By the Transportation Act, on the other hand, we try, just as we have always done under the Interstate Commerce Act, to keep competition alive among the railroads, while at the same time we attempt to bring about a stability of return that implies somewhere a monopo- listic power to fix rates. The Department of Commerce, particularly under the administration of Mr. Hoover and his successor as secretaries, has been active in fostering trade- practice conferences, open-price associations, and other agen- cies for bringing order, unity, and organization into indus- tries that are still actively competitive. The Department of Justice meanwhile has been by turns quiescent and uneasily active in suggesting that such organization violates the law. Where business men themselves took the initiative in or- ganization, as in the oil and radio cases now before the courts, the government's legal department has sometimes been active in prosecution under the Anti-Trust Act; some- times it has displayed a notable lack of zeal in that direc- tion. In the radio case, for example, Mr. Young states that the government has been advised of every step in the de- velopment; yet suit has only now been started, and the At- torney General is careful to state that the department is not initiating any trust-busting campaign. With every desire to see the small business protected against the great one, we venture to suggest that the somewhat hesitant course of the courts and the Department of Justice in some of these great cases may be due at least in part to a recognition of eco- nomic realities. The anti-trust law of 1890 has become more and more hopelessly divorced from the industrial and commercial necessities of our developing industrial life. We need to do some clear thinking. If the Radio Cor- poration or the oil companies have been guilty of concrete violations of law, as charged, by all means let them be prose- cuted. But let us not imagine that the mere fact of bigness or even the growth of monopoly not based on unfair competi- tive practices is ground for hostile legal action or public dis- approval. We live in the day of huge industrial and com- mercial enterprises; law, it has been said, is the crystalliza- tion of economic imperatives. The law, then, must adjust itself to the needs of a society that lives by the activities of trusts and combinations of every kind. That society cannot go back to the days of the itinerant shoemaker, the local grist mill, and the jerkwater railroad ; if it tried to it would starve to death. No less certainly, if it tries to put present- day business into the strait-jacket of the law that fitted the old conditions, business will be hampered for a time but will ultimately burst the strait-jacket after a sufficient amount of iniury has been done to the community. The real task of a modern democracy is not to fight large-scale organization, but to learn to use it for the common welfare. We shall not accomplish that without making large inroads on the present organization of private enterprise.

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May 28, 1930] The Nation 615 The Briand Plan The Hucksters' Treaty MBRIAND'S plan of a United States of Europe turns out to be something quite different in two * important particulars from what was expected. In the general remarks about the scheme which M. Briand made at Geneva in September, he took pains to insist that the proposed union was to be of an economic and not a political character, and that it was not, of course, to dupli- cate any existing organization. In the so-called question- naire which he has now made public, politics stand in the forefront of the proposed union. "All possibility of progress toward economic union," M. Briand declares, "being strictly determined by the question of security," which again is "closely bound up with the question of possible progress in the realm of political union," it is in the political field that the organizers of the projected union are admonished to begin their work. The mention of security is, of course, characteristically French, but the importance which M. Briand assigns to it shows that his United States of Europe, whatever else it may be, will unmistakably be political. The proposed union is also, it now appears, to be tied closely to the League of Nations. It is to be a league within the League. The difference is that while the League of Nations is intended to be universal, the Briand union will embrace only European states. It will apply to Europe the principle of regional security and mutual assurance which the Locarno treaties embody. With the League of Nations, however, the working relations would be very close. The permanent secretariat, it is suggested, should be established at Geneva, and the possibility of using, at least partially or temporarily, the special facilities of the League is to be kept in mind. The proposal that the committee of organiza- tion should address itself to "a study of political, economic, social, and other questions interesting the European com- munity and not yet dealt with by the League of Nations" suggests that the proposed union is expected in practice to be subordinate to the League, and that when the League chooses to broaden its activities those of the union will shrink. In the non-political field, on the other hand, M. Briand holds out some very interesting opportunities. The simplifi- cation of tariff policies naturally has first place, but the tentative program includes also such important matters as industrial unions and cartels, coordination of public works, communication by land, water, and air, telegraphs, tele- phones, and radio, facilitation of credit for states in need of it, a long list of labor issues, public hygiene, and intellectual cooperation in universities, schools, and the press. The main question, of course, is whether any such scheme can actually be made to work. The plan is French, and the danger is that the union will be dominated by France. As long as France sees everything through the red glass of security, he political character of the union would color all its pro- :eedings. A few more speeches such as Mussolini has lately )een making, with their glorification of force and their chinly veiled defiance of France, may well lead Europe to conclude that the time for political or economic union has lot yet come and that Italy, at least, prefers war to peace. M. Briand, however, has made a most interesting and valu- able gesture which may prove epoch-making. TWO things at least the country has learned from the Senate committee hearings on the London naval treaty. The first is that the American delegation had no instructions from the President when it set out for London and received no instructions from him while it was there — incredible as the latter fact appears. Secretary Stim- son, in his first day's testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee, stated categorically that "we went over to London without any specific instructions from the President, either written or verbal. Of course, we knew his general views. We had had the privilege of several talks with him, but he abstained from giving us any instructions of a specific character whatever, preferring to trust the delegation to use its own discretion in the methods of negotiations." For this mark of confidence, he added, the delegation feels "pro- foundly grateful," while as for himself he expressed the belief that that was "the only way in which such a negotiation could be carried out successfully 3,000 miles away from home." No instructions, of course, mean no special preparations. We have Mr. Stimson's word for it that the American dele- gation was sent overseas with no plan to offer, no particular indications of the course it was expected to follow, no clear idea even, it would seem, of the problems to be dealt with. The delegates had had the "privilege" of talking with Mr. Hoover and knew his "general views" ; beyond that they were left in the dark. It would be interesting to know if Mr. Hoover, in the talks which he so graciously accorded, let drop a hint that he and Ramsay MacDonald had actu- ally reached no agreement at all and that the whole matter of parity was up in the air ; or if the Great Engineer inti- mated that there might be difficulty in translating parity into concrete terms of tonnage and gun caliber, or in creating a "yardstick"; or if, having nothing else to do, anybody thought it worth while to study the French program that was made public some weeks before the delegation sailed. Mr. Stimson did not say. He merely voiced profound grati- tude that the delegation was sent off with a glad but empty hand. As far as can be judged from the testimony given at Washington, the negotiations went on in the blundering fashion that was to be expected when the party with the biggest retinue did not know exactly what was to be done and had not a single previously prepared proposal to offer. The American delegation backed and filled, advanced and sidestepped, put on a bold front and knuckled down under pressure, just like any bunch of political hucksters. The amazing suggestion of building another American battleship, we now learn, was only a shady trick to frighten the British into making a concession. When, at last, it appeared that the conference was at the point of going to pieces, the dele- gation hurriedly took what it could get, labeled it parity, emitted another hosanna, and scuttled for home to lay the fruits of a glorious victory at the feet of the Chief. The other thing is that nobody seems to know exactly what the parity provisions of the treaty mean, or whether, assuming that they mean this or that or something else, the bargain is in either case a good one for the United States.

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616 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 338b Secretary Stimson is confident that if anyone will read the treaty as he reads it, parity will be found sticking out all over it; and Secretary Adams, when driven into a corner and compelled to say something definite, appears to agree with his colleague. Admiral Pratt and Rear-Admiral Jones, on the other hand, one of whom is as good a technical au- thority as the other, are not agreed at all either about parity or about the comparative merits of cruisers with eight-inch guns and cruisers with six-inch guns, though, as a letter from Rear-Admiral Jones shows, he held precisely the opposite opinion last year; Rear-Admiral Bristol, chairman of the General Board of the Navy, comes to the support of Rear- Admiral Jones, while the General Board, which was not con- sulted during the negotiations, appears to have different ideas today from those it had a couple of years ago and, it now appears, did violence to its own views a year ago to cheat the British. Putting together the reports from Washington, London, and Tokio, it appears that the United States, Great Britain, and Japan have each got too much or too little, according to the way you look at it. One thing alone is certain. Whatever parity is, it will cost the United States about a billion dollars if it undertakes to attain it. Perhaps Mr. Hoover, who did not think it worth while to instruct the American delegation about any- thing, overlooked this trifling matter, and the national en- thusiasm would certainly have been dampened had he men- tioned it. Now, however, it stares the country in the face, not, indeed, as a certainty, but as an imminent possibility, unless defeated by a popular protest. We hope the Senate committees will go right ahead exposing the scheme. Fridtjof Nansen TO Caesar it was thrice given to refuse the kingly crown. To Fridtjof Nansen once. When he who had worked so hard for the separation of Norway and Sweden shared in the joy of that peaceful achievement his fellow-countrymen looked to him to be their royal leader. In vain. This simple and great zoologist, oceanographer, explorer, and statesman decided without delay. It was not for his own advantage that he had labored for separation. Indeed, there was no time in his life that his noble spirit ever labored for itself. Of him, too, it could truthfully be said that his countrymen were all mankind. The knowledge that he sought at the risk of his life was meant for all the world. And when, in the aftermath of the dreadful carnage of the World War, victors and vanquished alike turned to him for aid and leadership, it was because they recognized his unselfishness, his greatness, his worthiness to wear any crown. The Nobel Prize was rightly his in 1922 for his services to the repatriated prisoners, to the starving Germans and Russians. If there are four men in the world today to be ranked with him in ability, in character, in breadth, in steadfastness, and in statesmanship we know them not. Nature cast Nansen in heroic mold, both physically and mentally. It fitted him out with a daring spirit, but one controlled by a clear reasoning and profound mentality that rejected humbug, despised cant, and gave to his ex- traordinary adventuring not the objective of mere reckless excitement but a direct and scientific aim. Others might vanish into the once awesome silences of the Arctic for personal reasons — to win notoriety or to be able to say that they had stood first at the North Pole. With Nansen, achieving the farthest north of his time was purely inci- dental to the scientific task of plotting currents and assay- ing drifts across the top of the globe. He went with com- plete modesty; and years of isolation in a tiny ship with a handful of comrades merely intensified the innate simplicity and kindliness of this Norseman. Never was there a record of failure here ; never quarrels, nor bickerings, nor jealousies. Amundsen, his rival, was one of his dearest friends, whose magnificent flinging away of his life in the endeavor to aid some unworthy adventurers was worthy of them both. The world of science and of ice seemed to Nansen big enough for all. Nothing of Peary and Cook here — only the desire to serve knowledge. Yet Nansen's spirit was enslaved to the lure of the Arctic. At sixty-eight he was ready to fly across the Pole in the Graf Zeppelin, again for scientific purposes, and mourned the postponement of the venture for another year — as it has turned out, forever. It was impossible to hear him tell of his plans when he was last in America and feel that there was any other motive than to add a substantial amount to our knowledge of Arctic currents, depths, water tem- peratures, and drifts, in order to equip further the science of meteorology. At a period of life when other men would think of rest and retirement, there was about him no sug- gestion of age or slackening vitality, only the same quiet dauntlessness, the same gentle spirit and iron will. But never to the point of being cold or unmoved in the presence of wrongdoing. Within was a soul that could burn to a white heat ; that could speak out in unmeasured terms, for example, as to the follies and blunders of the Treaty of Versailles; that could find no words too strong to censure those who sought to exploit and to degrade a beaten enemy. Here was vision, here humanitarianism in its finest form. Here was a statesman who could really see ahead ; who realized that it was of no avail to destroy given evils if thereby others were created to take their places. When better-known statesmen at Paris — better known be- cause of the blood they caused to be spilled — could only talk of revenge and punishment here was one to keep his head and his judgment clear. So they turned to him, the neutral Norwegian. It was he who was made High Com- missioner to repatriate the prisoners of the World War, especially those in Russia and the Balkans; he who labored for the starving German children; who threw himself into the struggle for life of multitudes of starving Russians as if they were of his own flag; who became the chief of the committee of the League of Nations for the relief of the Armenians and the Greeks. It appeared at once that this man was a great executive, capable of extraordinary achieve- ments in the same modest manner in which he achieved the Polar Seas — that modesty which is always the accompani- ment of the truly great. His was the international mind at its best, free to be itself without compromise because he kept himself apart from mere partisanship or party ofHce- holding. though he served well in the post of minister to Great Britain in the diplomatic service of his country as a special negotiator of treaties. And wherever he went men knew him for what he was — a great man whose soul was never else than free.

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May 28, 1930] The Nation 617 It Seems to Heywood Broun AS a recent recruit to vaudeville and the radio I have learned something which I should have known before. The passion for novelty concerning which much com- motion arises from time to time is exceedingly ill-founded. Such managers and magazine editors as keep crying to their young men and women "Give them something new" are victims of a superficial fad. Few want anything new. The phrase "old stuff" is sometimes hurled as though it consti- tuted a reproach. Instead it can be, and usually is, as warming as burning logs to the heart of the average man. And to better people than that as well. Balboa on that peak saw for the first time the Pacific, and the poet would have us believe that the stout warrior's thrill was mighty. Maybe so, but it was of lesser caliber than others which he had known. I speak not from an inti- mate acquaintance with the Spaniard, but wholly on the theory that generals and O'Gradys are in some way similar. To me no sight or smell or sound or taste is so moving as the one which is somehow touched with familiarity. There is a lack in all first experiences. In this category I would include love at first sight. And it is also true of olives. No emotion in man reaches so deep as recognition. Things remembered, even dimly, are friendly lights assuring the voyager that he still steers his true course. And there remains in the mind from old times the fear of the edges of the world where existence drops off sheerly on to the polished backs of turtles. Beyond that slippery surface there lies nothing. It is better to have under your feet the friendly gritty gravel of some well-remembered path. It is not good that anyone should voyage forever after things which are new. Such journeyings must bring him into lonely places. However, man cannot truly flatten life into straight lines. Fretful courage may swing the circle wide, but it is still a circle. The wheel turns even in the firmest hands. At the end the voyager comes home. There will rise out of the sea a green island or a white cliff which he has seen before. He has sped through strange Sargassos, but all the time the ship was moving back to a remem- bered port. Some may be irked to feel the tug of tether, but I would not. No, even though the orbit cuts this side of the rain- bow's pot of gold, I would willingly turn back. A circle is better. It is more adventurous. It has no end. If I have not made myself clear, I might perhaps be more explicit by turning my philosophy to the question of taste. Is there a man alive who enjoyed his first glass of beer? I refer, of course, to the days when no hint of dev- ilish disobedience lay in this simple act. Before Volstead there was, I can testify, little enjoyment in the original ex- periment with beer. I can remember my surprise and chagrin to find it such bitter stuff. And was this the amber nectar I had read of in poems? How could the peasants and soldiers in the shows swill down this brew with such smack- ing of the lips? Not for a moment was the concoction in any way comparable to a frosted chocolate soda or even a bottle of pop. Had I been a person of weak character the first glass of beer would also have been my last. But out of the deter- mination to make good and fit myself to stand shoulder to shoulder with my fellows I persisted. The copybook maxim that there is no such word as "fail" inspired me to go on. And the maxim justified itself. In course of time I could drink beer even in reasonable quantities without making faces. And so I would celebrate not the first glass, but the nine-hun- dredth, which was the point where aptitude and liking began to develop. First there had to be familiarity. Fondness came later. It is certainly so with tobacco. The comic papers which serve to establish and perpetuate many fallacies are correct in the assumption that the first experience with nicotine is gen- erally wretched. Not one of the cigarette addicts of my acquaintance but had to fight his way through noxious fumes before he was able to set the habit upon a solid basis. And to the list of things which are more fun in later rather than earlier meetings I would include skylines, music, paint- ings, mountains, lakes, and, I believe, loved ones. Surely this is demonstrably true of music. The new opera has a hard time getting a responsive audience because its melodies are strange. The old ones hang on persistently, for in them are passages which set heart and feet to tapping. The case of critics may be quite different, but the ordinary, run-of-the-mill music-lover is not after novel sensations. For him the spell of Verdi and Puccini and Wagner does not stale. I rather think the same thing holds true in the theater. Playwrights do a deal of puzzling and pondering over what Broadway calls "a new twist." And then there comes along some naive dramatist who writes about a young man, a young woman, and a moonlit garden, quite oblivious of the fact that it has been done before. To him, as like as not, the laurels are accorded. Much has been said about the novelty of "The Green Pastures." And it is not inaccurate to say that nothing like it has been seen in the theater of our day. Yet Mr. Connelly himself knows quite well that for his pattern he went back to something as ancient as the old miracle plays. Surely the factor of recognition is not absent in a dramatic piece which wins the laughter and the tears of spectators by telling to them once again the story of Noah, and his ark, and the flood. For many this reaches down to the time when they were smallish and in Sunday school back home. Even in strange circumstances there comes to the ad- venturer the vague misgiving that some time or other he has been by this selfsame door before. Both poets and psycholo- gists have commented on this lurking memory of an ancient swing around the circle. It is an emotion not unknown to columnists. Again and again I get as far as the third para- graph in the treatment of a brand-new, current theme, only to be impeded by the thought "Just when was it that I wrote this column before?" I've learned to put such thoughts away. If it seems to me a good piece that's enough. I almost welcome the suspicion that it may be a twice-told tale. "Per- haps," I say to myself, "they'll like it better on this sec- ond lap." Heywood Broun

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618 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3386 Veto the Tariff! WHO wants this new tariff? Certainly not the news- paper editors of the industrial States. As indicated by The Nation's poll they demand its veto by a majority of more than 3 to 2. By 4 to 1 they believe that it will raise the cost of living. By 2 to 1 they hold that the situation of manufactures does not warrant its enactment. By 7 to 4 they express their belief that it will injure us economically. By 12 to 1 they declare that it will make our relations with other countries more difficult. The bill has been savagely criticized because Congress, it is charged, actu- ally wrote it for the benefit of the manufacturers instead of the farmers. Yet, as we reported last week, a majority of the New England editors answering our questionnaire ask for a veto. This week adds the striking fact that of eight great industrial States stretching from the Hudson to the Mississippi six show a majority for a veto. Even Pennsyl- vania, where protection is more sacred than religion, yields 10 editors who favor vetoing against 11 who favor signing the bill. Illinois shows 6 for signing against 4 for vetoing. The Nation's questionnaire was addressed to 590 editors in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan — a solid block of industrial States. Up to the time of going to press replies had been re- ceived from 117, divided in the proportion of a little more than 2 Republican and a little less than 2 independent papers to 1 Democratic, 1 independent Republican, and 1 inde- pendent Democratic (in addition to the Socialist Milwaukee Leader). There seems to be little connection between the politics of the editors and their opinions on the tariff. The specific questions and answers follow. 1. Will the pending bill, if enacted, raise the cost of living? Yes, 84; no, 22. Three others think the increase will not be appreciable; and 5 just "don't know." 2. // so, does our manufacturing situation warrant the enactment of the pending bill? Yes, 33 ; no, 68. Fifteen of those who expect the new tariff to raise the cost of living believe that the manufactur- ing situation none the less warrants its enactment, some of them basing their opinion on individual industries and special local conditions. 3. Will the new tariff ultimately benefit or injure us economically? Benefit, 38; injure, 69. Five papers are in doubt. 4. Will it improve or injure our international relations? Improve, 6; injure, 75. Nineteen papers expect little or no result. A striking feature of the returns from this section of the country, as from New England, is the widespread con- viction that the Smoot-Hawley tariff is going to make our international relations more difficult. It may be doubted whether an equal uneasiness has attended the enactment of any previous tariff law. 5. Should the President sign or veto the bill? Sign, 40; veto, 66. Five editors are frankly uncertain, or else willing to leave it to the omniscience of the President. Certain interesting results appear in the returns by States. It is astonishing to find 12 Pennsylvania editors who think that the bill is going to injure us economically, as against only 11 who look for benefit; 18 of them think that it will embarrass us in international relations, as against only 2 on the other side; only 10 think that the condition of manu- factures warrants enactment, as against 11 opposed; and 10 out of 21 actually favor vetoing the bill. In Ohio, out of 20 papers, no less than 18, thinking that the bill will do us both economic and political damage, come out flatly for a veto. The New York editors, except for 5 who expect little result, are solid on the political disadvantages of the proposed meas- ure; 12 editors are for vetoing, 10 for signing the bill. No one acquainted with the limitations of an inquiry of this kind will lay too much stress on the results, striking and surprising as they are. The actual number of answers is small, even though it does include, in the States covered, 20 per cent of the dailies with more than 2,500 circulation. The returns are by no means proportioned to the population or the industrial importance of the States covered. They reflect rather the interest of the editors canvassed in the tariff ques- tion. Further, it is probable that those opposed to the bill would be more likely to answer than those in favor of it. Yet when all allowances are made, the results of this poll in the greatest industrial section of the country are distinctly arresting. They gain added interest from the fact that the returns give disproportionate weight, so far as can be judged from a rapid inspection of the replies, to the papers in the smaller towns. These papers, with a few thousand circula- tion each, may not unfairly be considered to reflect local sen- timent even more closely than the press of the great cities. If they are as hostile to this proposed measure as our returns indicate, what is the state of opinion in the large cities, which on the whole are more inclined to trade liberalism ? This summary may well close with a few individual comments, largely from the editors of the smaller papers. The Punxsutawney (Pennsylvania) Spirit expresses a view al- most unique in our returns: The bill is warranted, "only it is not sufficiently protective. The bill should have been passed as originally drawn by Senator Smoot." The Canton (Ohio) News, on the other hand, fears the consequences of enactment: "Production, when above normal, more than supplies United States demand. Our outlet is foreign trade. Wages must go up to meet living increases, and we cannot compete with other countries." The Muncie (Indiana) Evening Press expects no effect on international relations "after a first few squawks from Europe," but the Lafayette (Indiana) Journal of Commerce declares: "Reprisals do not constitute our idea of neighborliness." The Ottawa (Illi- nois) Republican Times, despairing of knowing anything about the matter, would have the tariff "a cut-and-try propo- sition . . . taken out of the hands of Congress and given to a bureau to handle with power to change where and when changes are needed." The Passaic News-Herald declares, however, that "one schedule will mean the reemployment in this city of 5,000 persons, now idle, due to cheap Tyrolean and Chinese orphanage labor. They are handkerchief oper- ators." If there is anywhere in these States a trace of en- thusiasm for the pending bill, our returns do not disclose it.

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May 28, 1930] The Nation 619 "My Dear Senator" IV My dear Senator : You ask me if I really still be- lieve in free trade in view of the fact that the whole trend of the world is toward a protective tariff and the movement in England is becoming stronger and stronger. I do not accept your statement of fact, but that I waive in order to answer your question directly. I can see no reason whatsoever for modifying my belief that free trade is not only the sound and rational policy for any country to adopt, but that it is eminently practicable and workable. As I have written to you before, I do not mean to suggest, nor does any other free-trader, that the present system could be changed over night into complete free trade. There would have to be a gradual approach — first, in the direction of tariffs for revenue only with the protective principle eliminated. There could be no such transition without working some hardship upon government-pap-fed industries, and those which are kept alive in defiance of economic law and in spite of the absence of any economic necessity for them. But, as has been pointed out so often, this fact that there might be very considerable readjust- ments need deter no one from accepting the sound principle of complete freedom of trade, for the fact is that radical and far-reaching readjustments are the order of the day in many lines of industry. You yourself have seen miles and miles of abandoned trolley lines in New England, the values in which have been destroyed by the coming of the motor bus. You have seen in your home town the displacement of the harness-maker, blacksmith, livery-stable keeper, and carriage-maker, all driven into other lines of industry by the arrival of the automobile. Rayon strikes a deadly blow at the silk mills; short skirts cripple woolen and cotton mills ; the radio changes the whole situation as to the phono- graph. Yet in none of these cases has there been an espe- cial appeal to public sympathies, or a demand that Congress reimburse those who have lost their invested capital. The worst thing about the protective tariff, aside from the corruption of our public life, is that it keeps in business numerous incompetents. As I have already pointed out to you, it is impossible for any tariff-making machinery, whether a Congress or a commission, to investigate an entire indus- try in order to ascertain whether the bulk of its members are conducting their enterprises efficiently or inefficiently, honestly or dishonestly, whether the stockholders are being mulcted for the benefit of insiders, and whether its methods are not too antiquated to deserve perpetuation by govern- ment protection. From the point of view of economic waste alone it is immoral of the government to keep alive ineffi- cient businesses. Again, you are of the school that believes that competition is the life of trade. Then why destroy international competition? But the truth is that the history of the United States, Great Britain, and Germany affords the clearest proof that freedom of trade over great stretches of the earth's surface * The fourth of a series of articles on the national political situation and the issues it involves. — Editor The Nation. is practicable and just and the surest means of building up great nations. Russia under the Bolsheviks is now about to prove the same thing again. There are one hundred and sixty-nine ethnographic groups, and heaven knows how many small and large republics, divisions, and subdivisions, in that great country. Would you suggest that they be en- couraged to place tariff walls around their respective areas? If you look at Europe as a whole and can forget the flags of the several nationalities is it not perfectly plain that what they need is the striking down of all the tariff bar- riers to admit freedom of trade between themselves? The leading bankers of the world in their manifesto of 1927 sug- gested this, and the possibilities of such an arrangement are just beginning to dawn upon M. Briand. Is this a time to doubt the workability of the system? Is it correct to say that the whole trend of the world is in the other direction? I must refuse, however, to be drawn into a discussion of individual cases of hardship which might take place. The principle is sound and that is sufficient, precisely as it is a sound principle that men should be free and not enslaved, that people should determine their own fate and not for- eigners who happen to be able to impose their will upon them by force. If one flag flew over the whole world, as some day it will, you would not question the advisability of free trade for everybody. During the World War when the Allies took charge of the greater part of the world, they did their best to expedite freedom of trade between neutrals and the Allied nations. It is true that they did not seek to break down the tariff walls, but the aim of their great communistic experiment was to keep trade moving freely and steadily across the five seas, so that each country might have its share of the raw materials of the world, with the least possible waste and oversupplying. Morally speaking, the case for free trade is unanswer- able. Ethically we have certainly no justification for ruin- ing the lace-makers of Switzerland or France, or the dia- mond-cutters of Belgium. We have no right whatever to carry on a fiscal policy which is the excuse jumped at by employers of labor in other countries to depress the wages of their workers so that they may overcome our new tariff rates. The way to meet foreign competition, by the way, is not to run away from it, but to improve our methods of production. I heard of a very interesting case the other day. Our electric-bulb manufacturers were seriously threat- ened by the Japanese production. Instead of doing the cry- baby act and rushing to Washington, they developed their machinery and their labor to such an extent that Japanese competition is now the least of their worries. The excuse that the other fellow is paying lower wages covers a multi- tude of economic sins and human inefficiencies! But my main point is that protection connotes corrup- tion. You cannot put a political party in a position ot pensing tremendous tariff favors, of regulating the size of the profits of any business or industry, without inviting corruption. It is inevitable and inescapable. So the whole

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620 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3386 system wreaks a terrible punishment upon our country, besides mulcting the great mass of the American people that the few favored may profit. That protection was the hand- maiden of socialism was stated long ago in the days of Horace White, David A. Wells, and Professor William Graham Sumner, of Yale. Nowadays we think differently about socialism — we are all socialists in larger or lesser de- gree— but the fact is that this is an interference by govern- ment which has no economic warrant whatever but is specious and misleading. There can be no compromising with this evil. Give the tariff barons an inch and they will take an ell. Thirty-three of the nations of the world they have now got hy the ears with their latest tariff, and Joe Grundy says he is going to put Herbert Hoover out of office and elect a Republican Congress which will give us a real tariff — one that will keep out every single manu- factured article which can also be produced in the United States. That is the logical position for a protectionist to take. The only way that it can be staved off is for those of us who are not economically crazy to take the other extreme — that we shall refuse to compromise at all, that we shall wage unyielding war upon the proposal that the gov- ernment shall guarantee profits to private businesses for the regulation of which it assumes no responsibility. Yours very truly, Oswald Garrison Villard Lift Up Thine Eyes By SHERWOOD ANDERSON IT is a big assembling plant in a city of the Northwest. They assemble there the Bogel car. It is a car that sells in large numbers and at a low price. The parts are made in one great central plant and shipped to the places where they are to be assembled. There is little or no manu- facturing done in the assembling plant itself. The parts come in. These great companies have learned to use the railroad cars for storage. At the central plant everything is done on schedule. As soon as the parts are made they go into railroad cars. They are on their way to the assembling plants scattered all over the United States and they arrive on schedule. The assembling plant assembles cars for a certain terri- tory. A careful survey has been made. This territory can afford to buy so and so many cars per day. "But suppose the people do not want the cars?" "What has that to do with it?" People, American people, no longer buy cars. They do not buy newspapers, books, foods, pictures, clothes. Things are sold to people now. If a territory can take so and so many Bogel cars, find men who can make them take the cars. That is the way things are done now. In the assembling plant everyone works "on the belt." This is a big steel conveyor, a kind of moving sidewalk, waist-high. It is a great river running down through the plant. Various tributary streams come into the main stream, the main belt. They bring tires, they bring headlights, horns, bumpers for cars. They flow into the main stream. The main stream has its source at the freight cars, where the parts are unloaded, and it flows out to the other end of the factory and into other freight cars. The finished automobiles go into the freight cars at the delivery end of the belt. The assembly plant is a place of peculiar tension. You feel it when you go in. It never lets up. Men here work always on tension. There is no let-up to the tension. If you can't stand it get out. It is the belt. The belt is boss. It moves always for- ward. Now the chassis goes on the belt. A hoist lifts it up and places it just so. There is a man at each corner. The chassis is deposited on the belt and it begins to move. Not too rapidly. There are things to be done. How nicely everything is calculated. Scientific men have done this. They have watched men work. They have stood looking, watch in hand. There is care taken about everything. Look up. Lift up thine eyes. Hoists are bring- ing engines, bodies, wheels, fenders. These come out of side streams flowing into the main stream. They move at a pace very nicely calculated. They will arrive at the main stream at just a certain place at just a certain time. In this shop there is no question of wages to be wrangled about. The men work but eight hours a day and are well paid. They are, almost without exception, young, strong men. It is, however, possible that eight hours a day in this place may be much longer than twelve or even sixteen hours in the old carelessly run plants. They can get better pay here than at any other shop in town. Although I am a man wanting a good many minor comforts in life, I could live well enough on the wages made by the workers in this place. Sixty cents an hour to begin and then, after a probation period of sixty days, if I can stand the pace, seventy cents or more. To stand the pace is the real test. Special skill is not required. It is all perfectly timed, perfectly calculated. If you are a body upholsterer, so many tacks driven per second. Not too many. If a man hurries too much too many tacks drop on the floor. If a man gets too hurried he is not effi- cient. Let an expert take a month, two months, to find out just how many tacks the average good man can drive per second. There must be a certain standard maintained in the finished product. Remember that. It must pass inspection after inspection. Do not crowd too hard. Crowd all you can. Keep crowding. There are fifteen, twenty, thirty, perhaps fifty such assembling plants, all over the country, each serving its own section. Wires pass back and forth daily. The central office — from which all the parts come — at Jointville is the nerve center. Wires come in and go out of Jointville. In so and so many hours Williamsburg, with so and so many men, produced so and so many cars. Now Burkesville is ahead. It stays ahead. What is up at Burkesville? An expert flies there.

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May 28, 1930] The Nation The man at Burkesville was a major in the army. He is the manager there. He is a cold, rather severe, rather formal man. He has found out something. He is a real Bogel man, an ideal Bogel man. There is no foolishness about him. He watches the belt. He does not say fool- ishly to himself, "I am the boss here." He knows the belt is boss. He says there is a lot of foolishness talked about the belt. The experts are too expert, he says. He has found out that the belt can be made to move just a little faster than the experts say. He has tried it. He knows. Go and look for yourself. There are the men out there on the belt, swarming along the belt, each in his place. They are all right, aren't they? Can you see anything wrong? Just a trifle more speed in every man. Shove the pace up just a little, not much. With the same number of men, in the same number of hours, six more cars a day. That's the way a major gets to be a colonel, a colonel a general. Watch that fellow at Burkesville, the man with the military stride, the cold steady voice. He'll go far. Everything is nicely, perfectly calculated in all the Bogel assembling plants. There are white marks on the floor every- where. Everything is immaculately clean. No one smokes, no one chews tobacco, no one spits. There are white bands on the cement floor along which the men walk. As they work, sweepers follow them. Tacks dropped on the floor are at once swept up. You can tell by the sweepings in a plant where there is too much waste, too much carelessness. Sweep everything carefully and frequently. Weigh the sweepings. Have an expert examine the sweepings. Report to Jointville. Jointville says: "Too many upholsterers' tacks wasted in the plant at Port Smith. Belleville produced one hundred and eleven cars a day, with seven hundred and forty-nine men, wasting only nine hundred and six tacks." It is a good thing to go through the plant now and then, select one man from all the others, give him a new and bigger job, just like that, offhand. If he doesn't make good, fire him. It is a good thing to go through the plant occasionally, pick out some man, working apparently just as the others are, fire him. If he asks why, just say to him, "You know." He'll know why all right. He'll imagine why. The thing is to build up Jointville. This country needs a religion. You have got to build up the sense of a mysteri- ous central thing, a thing working outside your knowledge. Let the notion grow and grow that there is something superhuman at the core of all this. Lift up thine eyes, lift up thine eyes. The central office reaches down into your secret thoughts. It knows, it knows. Jointville knows. Do not ask questions of Jointville. Keep up the pace. Get the cars out. Get the cars out. Get the cars out. The pace can he accelerated a little this year. The men have all got tuned into the old pace now. Step it up a little, just a little. They have got a special policeman in all the Bogel assembling plants. They have got a special doctor there. A man hurts his finger a little. It bleeds a little, a mere scratch. The doctor reaches down for him. The finger is fixed. Jointville wants no blood poisonings, no infections. The doctor puts men who want jobs through a physical examination, as in the army. Try his nerve reactions. We want only the best men here, the youngest, the fastest. Why not? We pay the best wages, don't we? The policeman in the plant has a special job. That's queer. It is like this,. Now and then the big boss passes through. He selects a man off the belt. "You're fired." "Why?" "You know." Now and then a man goes off his nut. He goes fan- toed. He howls and shouts. He grabs up a hammer. A stream of crazy profanity comes from his lips. There is Jointville. That is the central thing. That controls the belt. The belt controls me. It moves. It moves. It moves. I've tried to keep up. I tell you I have been keeping up. Jointville is God. Jointville controls the belt. The belt is God. God has rejected me. You're fired. Sometimes a man, fired like that, goes nutty. He gets dangerous. A strong policeman on hand knocks him down, takes him out. You walk within certain definite white lines. It is calculated that a man, rubbing automobile bodies with pumice, makes thirty thousand and twenty-one arm strokes per day. The difference between thirty thousand and twenty-one and twenty-eight thousand and four will tell a vital story of profits or loss at Jointville. Do you think things are settled at Jointville, or at the assembling plants of the Bogel car scattered all over America? Do you think men know how fast the belt can be made to move, what the ultimate, the final pace will be, can be? Certainly not. There are experts studying the nerves of men, the move- ments of men. They are watching, watching. Calculations are always going on. The thing is to produce goods and more goods at less cost. Keep the standard up. Increase the pace a little. Stop waste. Calculate everything. A man walking to and from his work between white lines saves steps. There is a tremendous science of lost motion not perfectly calculated yet. More goods at less cost. Increase the pace. Keep up standards. It is so you advance civilization.

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622 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3386 In the Bogel assembling plants, as at Jointville itself, there isn't any laughter. No one stops work to play. No one fools around or throws things, as they used to do in the old factories. That is why Bogel is able to put the old- fashioned factories, one by one, out of business. It is all a matter of calculation. You feel it when you go in. You feel rigid lines. You feel movement. You feel a strange tension in the air. There is a quiet terrible in- tensity. The belt moves. It keeps moving. The day I was there a number of young boys had come in. They had been sent by a Bogel car dealer, away back somewhere in the country. They had driven in during the night and were to drive Bogel cars back over country roads to some dealer. A good many Bogel cars go out to dealers from the assembling plants, driven out by boys like that. Such boys, driving all night, fooling along the road, get- ting no sleep. They have a place for them to wait for the cars in the Bogel assembling plants. You have been at dog shows and have seen how prize dogs are exhibited, each in his nice clean cage. They have nice clean cages like that for country boys who drive in to Bogel assembling plants to get cars. The boys come in. There is a place to lie down in there. It is clean. After the boy goes into his cage a gate is closed. He is fastened in. If a country boy, sleepy like that, waiting for his car, wandered about in a plant he might get hurt. There might be damage suits, all sorts of things. Better to calculate everything. Be careful. Be exact. Jointville thought of that. Jointville thinks of every- thing. It is the center of power, the new mystery. Every year in America Jointville comes nearer and nearer being the new center. Men nowadays do not look to Washington. They look to Jointville. Lift up thine eyes, lift up thine eyes. Safety Last III. Why the Safety Movement Fails By LOUIS RESNICK THE first ten years of the safety movement show fine records in the reduction of accidents. But what do the last ten years show? Briefly this: while the death-rate from diphtheria has been reduced about 80 per cent, while the mortality from tuberculosis has been cut 60 per cent, while infant mortality has been cut more than 30 per cent, while the general death-rate (from all causes com- bined) has declined, the death-rate from accidents in the United States has gone steadily up. In industry, the American Association for Labor Legis- lation, studying the records of twenty-two States, found an average increase for 1923 of 30 per cent over the previous year. Half the States showed increases of 25 per cent or more. Nearly a quarter of them showed increases of more than 40 per cent. Several showed increases of 50 per cent. Not one State showed a decrease in accidents. Later, Ethelbert Stewart, director of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics at Washington, said: The accidents of 1925 have apparently exceeded those of 1924, as certainly the accidents of 1923 greatly exceeded those of 1922. The trend in the iron and steel industry has been gradually and practically continuously downward. But I do not believe that the present trend in the iron and steel industry is applicable to industry as a whole. My own judgment is that accidents are on the increase. Bureau of Mines records show that between 1916 and 1924 there was a 10 per cent increase in the number of miners killed per million tons of coal mined and an increase of 21 per cent in the number of miners killed per million hours of work. This despite the improvement in produc- tion methods and the introduction of coal-mining machinery. The United States Department of Labor, analyzing the 1925-26 accident experience of 2,200 concerns in twenty- * This is the last of three articles on the safety movement. The first two nii|)e.-ired in the issues of May 14 and 21. — Editor The Nation. six States, employing approximately 1,000,000 men and women, found that six industries had declining accident- severity rates, while eighteen industries had rising severity rates. (Accident-severity rates are arrived at by computing the amount of tim« lost per million man-hours of work.) Since the cost of accidents is influenced by the severity rate of accidents rather than by their number [says the department's report], it is evident that the present tendency in general industry is toward greater cost. One factor in this rising cost may be the fact that all American industry has been much influenced by the effort for increased production. This speeding up has not been accompanied by an equally intense effort toward ac- cident prevention except in the case of certain large organ- izations in which the safety movement first took root and which have been assiduous and successful in maintaining steadily improved conditions. Finally, Dr. Louis I. Dublin, statistician of the Metro- politan Life Insurance Company, chairman of the Statistics Committee of the National Safety Council, and perhaps the best-informed person on vital statistics in America, told the 1927 Safety Congress that his committee found no decrease in the accident death-rate "in spite of the fact that 1927 promises to show the lowest general death-rate in our his- tory." The year 1928, the year 1929, and the first quarter of 1930 show still further increases in accident rates. While progress is being made in almost every other field of life conservation, the much-advertised safety movement is run- ning on a treadmill and is slipping back a bit each year. What are the reasons for this state of affairs? Why is it that although "safety pays in dollars and cents," al- though methods of preventing most accidents have been de- vised and their efficiency thoroughly demonstrated, although there are safety councils by the score and it is always "Safety Week" somewhere in America — why, despite all this, are

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May 28, 1930] The Nation 623 more people killed by accidents in the United States today than ever before? Why has the campaign against accidents been so much less successful than the campaign against tuberculosis, or the campaign against children's diseases, or the whole public-health movement? Why is it that at no time in the history of the safety movement have more than 10 per cent of the industrial con- cerns of America been members of any safety organization? Why is so little being done to check the rising tide of auto- mobile fatalities, and why has so little been done in this direction throughout the past decade — especially since pro- fessional safety men knew ten years ago that for every mil- lion additional automobiles put into use, a thousand more persons would be killed every year? Five thousand safety men know the answers to these questions; the officers of the several safety associations know them; most government officials who have anything to do with accident prevention know them; and, above all, every insurance executive knows them. The answers are not pleas- ant and so they are seldom mentioned, even in private, and never in public. It is high time these men and the country at large looked the facts in the face and tried to do something about it. So here they are — the reasons why the safety movement has failed to make greater progress. There are other reasons, but these are the most fundamental. First, the safety movement lacks real leadership. There are probably 10,000 men engaged solely in the work of saving life and limb through accident prevention. They, more than any other group in industry or public life, know the tragedy of accidents. They see every mangled hand, every broken back. They, most frequently, must carry the news of death to mother, wife, or child. It is they who must then go back into the plant to investigate the cause of the accident and discover how easily it might have been pre- vented. Finally, it is they who must battle with manage- ment on the one hand and with the workmen themselves on the other hand to do what obviously will prevent a re- currence of that kind of accident. They are, for the most part, as fine a lot of men as can be found in medicine, law, or engineering. But the pay of most of them is less than that of plumbers, carpenters, or machinists. Let the reader stop here and name a single great leader of the safety movement. Let him recall the names of all the safety men he has ever heard of. Let him even consult the files of the safety organization and see if he will find a single name comparable to that of Flexner or Mayo in medicine, Goethals and Hoover in engineering, Pupin or Edison in invention, Hughes, Root, or Brandeis in law. Find in the safety movement a single name comparable to Chrys- ler or Sloan in the automotive industries, Sarnoff or Ayles- worth in radio, Warner or Fox in the movies — all fields of endeavor as new as safety. There are not now and there never have been any really great leaders in the movement. Second, the safety movement lacks facilities for the training of its personnel. There is not now and there never has been in America a single school for the training of in- dustrial-safety engineers or public-safety directors. New York University is just now giving one course in this sub- ject, and that in the evening in the extension division. For twenty years safety men have talked about the need of a training school for safety engineers, but they have not in all that time succeeded in persuading a single engineering school or technical college to offer a degree in safety engi- neering or even to give a few courses in the fundamentals of accident prevention. The plant manager who would not think of having any- one but a graduate chemist analyze his raw materials, any- one but a certified public accountant audit his books, anyone but a mechanical engineer calculate the strength of his steel will without hesitation call in an insurance clerk, a shop mechanic, or the chief watchman and say: "John, from now on you're the safety engineer in this plant; now get busy and stop accidents." What the safety movement needs is a high-grade school, or a number of them, for the training of men and women in the science or art of acci- dent prevention. Third, the proponents of the safety movement have thus far tried to sell the idea of accident prevention almost wholly on a "dollar-and-cents" basis, and they have largely failed because most people prefer to buy financial protection against the consequences of accidents, rather than try to pre- vent the accidents. The average employer spends a definite amount — a hundred dollars a year, a thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars, or more, depending on the amount of his pay roll — for workmen's-compensation insurance and then proceeds to "stop worrying about accidents," in the language of the insurance salesman. The average employer would rather do this than hire a safety engineer and undertake a thoroughgoing accident-prevention campaign, because he then knows at the beginning of the year exactly what ac- cidents will cost him; he simply incorporates this amount in the total cost of manufacture and thereby passes the cost of accidents on to the ultimate consumer in the price of his commodity or service. The employer is greatly encouraged to arrive at this de- cision by the argument of the insurance agent that a policy will give him not only financial protection against acci- dents, but actual accident-prevention service. A few of the larger insurance companies do attempt such a service, but in most instances it is only a gesture. Much the same thing is true with respect to motor- vehicle accidents. For $50 to $100 a year one buys finan- cial protection against the accidental killing of two persons. The insured motorist does not then set out to kill, but he drives with just a little more abandon than he would if he did not know that "the insurance company will take care of me in case of accident." That it is a mistake to advocate accident prevention primarily on the strength of its economic values was recog- nized as early as 1919 by R. C. Richards, then president of the National Safety Council, who told the members of this organization : We should all remember that Safety First is not a question of dollars and cents; it is a question of saving human life, the most valuable thing in the world, which once gone can never be brought back; it is trying to save men from losing their arms and legs which never can be put back; it is trying to avert the making of widows and orphans, destitution and misery. Every year two or three of the several hundred speakers at the National Safety Congress say the same thing, but the dollars-and-cents argument continues to dominate the tech- nique of securing new members for safety associations or of inducing individual employers and whole communities to

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624 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3386 start some organized, intensive effort to prevent accidents. Little wonder then that when the employer adds up the cost of a safety man, the cost of machine guards, and all the other incidentals of a safety campaign, and discovers that the total is greater than any possible saving which might result from a reduction in his insurance rates (reductions being granted to plants with low accident records) he is so often ready to wipe out his safety department and be con- tent with insurance protection against accidents. Little wonder that scores of cities, after a few months of a "perma- nent safety campaign," let their safety organizations die when they find that the only immediate financial gain is a slight reduction in automobile accident-insurance rates, and that problematical. Even Westchester County (in which many of the suburbs of New York City are located), one of the richest residential areas in America, which has spent more than $100,000,000 for parkways in the last ten years, could not — or would not — support a safety campaign costing less than $25,000 a year for the thirty or forty towns and vil- lages in the county. This, despite the fact that the first year of the campaign brought about a marked reduction in the number of persons killed or injured. There can be no doubt that safety work, properly con- ducted, is not only economically sound, but highly profitable ; that accident prevention in industry and in public places pays big dividends in dollars and cents; that it is cheaper to pre- vent accidents than to pay for them. All this is true; it has been shown over and over again. But it is high time that safety men and safety organizations added some new strings to their fiddles. It is time the safety movement took account of the moral responsibility for accident prevention, not only in speeches, but in actions. It is time safety men and safety organizations took some interest in legislation as a means of accident prevention. It is time they gave more attention to fundamental research (in which they have done almost noth- ing) and less attention to the production of safety calendars, safety posters, and safety slogans. When the title Safety Engineer ceases to be some- thing any employer feels free to bestow with a wave of the hand and becomes the symbol of four years of training in the fundamentals of engineering, education, psychology, ad- vertising, and industrial management ; when employers' legal responsibility for accident prevention extends beyond the in- stallation of a few mechanical guards and the carrying of workmen's-compensation insurance; when the reckless motor- vehicle driver has more to fear than a few days in jail or a hundred dollars' fine for running down that gradually disappearing species of game known as the "pedestrian" ; when the fight on accidents captures the imagination and the cooperation of the public as has the war on tuberculosis — when all this happens the safety movement will be well on the way to real success. Meanwhile we shall go on killing and injuring men, women, and children by accidents in America twice as fast as our soldiers were killed or wounded in France during the World War. And if you want to know just how fast that is take a look at the clock. In the next hour 1 1 per- sons will be killed by accidents and 275 will be seriously injured; 3 will be killed in industry, 3 by motor vehicles, and 5 in or near their homes. Of those hurt some will be blinded ; some will lose an arm, a leg, an eye, or a hand. And this goes on every hour, day and night, 365 days a year. Who are these people who are going to be hurt or killed while you read this — and while the leading safety organiza- tion is busily engaged selling calendars? Carelessness, reck- lessness, thoughtlessness, and greediness are no respecters of persons. So you may find when you get home that one of the 1 1 or one of the 275 lived next door, or in your own house. In the Driftway THE decline of American bread can no longer be ignored. The Drifter would enlist the aid of all who love their country against that abomination known as the "sandwich loaf." A country cannot escape re- sponsibility for its bread ; in most cases, in fact, the bread of a country seems to partake significantly of the national char- acter. The Italian loaf is squat and wide like the mother of ten Italian children. Because it is made of the whole flour it is fibrous and resistant to the teeth like a kernel of wheat fresh from the field. French bread, though a bit more refined, tastes as if it were made from flour. Spanish bread, the Drifter freely admits, he does not understand. Certainly he cannot join in the praises of Havelock Ellis and Ernest Hemingway, though there is no doubt that Span- ish bread, with its almost impenetrable white crust and dis- appointing stale interior, has character. On the whole the Drifter has the feeling that it was originally good to eat but that most of it came out of the oven when Isabella's jewels spilled out of their casket into the adventurous hands of Columbus. It may be, however, that the mystery lies in some subtle Moorish influence that still haunts the ovens of Spain as it haunts the towers of Alhambra Hill. German bread is inclined toward weight and sourness but it is cer- tainly worth while. As for Austria, the Drifter is hopelessly prejudiced in its favor because his only memory of Austrian bread is in conjunction with wild honey among the upper valleys of the Tyrol. ***** BUT what of America? America's loaf is four inches square and fifteen inches long, and beyond it are ranged a million other loaves exactly like the first in size, in weight, in utter tastelessness. The "whole-wheat" variety differs from the white in that it has been soaked apparently in dark brown medicine. It was not always so. The Drifter can remember when a loaf of fresh bread even in America was a thing to rouse cupidity. A faint smell of potato water foam- ing, not to say fermenting, with "east cake" hovers about even yet whenever the Drifter thinks of his mother's kitchen. Baking day was really Mother's Day then, and if the batch of bread turned out badly distress and shame pervaded the house until they were wiped out by a successful baking. Those were the good old days, too, of bread and milk. To- day it is crackers and milk because the "sandwich loaf," put to the ordeal of milk, disintegrates into a spineless pulp fit only for the blue milk it is broken into. ***** THE Drifter has been told that the inferior quality of baker's bread is due to the fact that healthy flour will not keep. Flour from which all life has been "processed" stays dead, naturally, and keeps forever. It is not difficult to guess which flour the bakers use. Why the American

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May 28, 1930] The Nation 625 public accepts the lifeless bread they get is much more mys- tifying. The Drifter says "accepts" because he is of the opinion that very little of it is eaten, since it is only faintly edible at best, namely, as toast — which explains the great and growing popularity of toast. ***** PERHAPS a little less prosperity — which we seem to be in for — will cause the nation to think more about its bread and less about its automobile, and the bread will be- come as good as the automobile. But the Drifter doubts it. Meanwhile he would clinch his case against American flour by one final bit of testimony. An acquaintance of his went away for a time leaving behind him two bins of flour, one containing whole-wheat flour, the other white. He returned to find that the enterprising whole-wheat flour had populated its bin with whatever it is that whole-wheat flour propagates. The white flour, on the other hand, had preserved its pristine purity and splendid isolation almost intact. Almost, not quite. Unfortunately a few bumptious whole-wheat off- spring had crowded through a crack and fallen into the white flour. It was their corpses that marred the pure Antarctic expanse of the white-flour bin. They had died of starvation. The Drifter Correspondence The Special Correspondent To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I enjoyed very much the articles on the Associated Press. I have one observation to make based on the experi- ence I had during the Havana conference. My impression there was that the Associated Press covered the conference more completely and fairly than did any special correspondent. The Associated Press had reporters with a thorough knowl- edge of the Spanish language who were not interested in ex- ploiting any personal point of view. On the other hand, I feel that the newspapers that had special correspondents at Havana gave a much more mislead- ing picture of the conference than did papers using only the A. P. dispatches. These so-called "trained seals" were obliged to write something different from the A. P. dispatches. They did not have any more thorough knowledge of the problems of the conference. Many of them knew no Spanish. As a result they went off into blind leads and into a sensationalism of which the Associated Press and the United Press were not guilty. New York, April 22 Raymond L. Buell Bayard on Protection To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: To those so-called Democrats who have deserted the high principles and traditions of their party to vote for this worst of tariff bills at Washington, might we not commend the sentiments of an address made at Edinburgh thirty-five years ago by the American Ambassador to Great Britain, Thomas Francis Bayard, once a distinguished ornament of the United States Senate? In that address Mr. Bayard referred to "the insatiable growth of that form of state socialism styled protection," to which — if I may summarize his language — he attributed these social and political evils: Protection fosters class legislation and creates inequality of fortune. It corrupts public life. It banishes men of independent mind and character from the pub- lic councils. It lowers the tone of national representation and blunts the public conscience. It creates false standards in the popular mind by familiarizing the people with state aid and guardianship in public affairs. It divorces ethics from politics and places politics upon the low level of a mercenary scramble. The experience of the years that have passed since this great American Democrat gave utterance to these sentiments has served amply to demonstrate the truth of his indictment of a system that has prostituted the law-making power of our government for selfish and dishonest ends. New York, April 19 Charles O'Connor Hennessy "Ridin' and Talkin'" To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: The article on bank failures in your issue of Feb- ruary 26 contains unfair criticism of country banks. Banking standards in country banks are as high as they are anywhere. Loans on good land have always been sound finance — until now. The cause of agricultural depression is wholly outside of agriculture. The problem cannot be solved by tariff, or co- operation, or commissions. The cause is inflated values and inflated salaries. It cannot be true that a bricklayer can earn fourteen dollars a day when wheat is worth only ninety-five cents a bushel. It is simply not true. A colored friend of mine has analyzed present conditions for me as well as any economist I know. He said: "All the money is spent for ridin' and talkin'." My colored friend is as wise as I am and fully as wise as you. Since the cause of economic distress is ridin' and talkin' then the solution would be less of it. Walk awhile. Economic laws are as sound as they ever were. We sim- ply have an economic problem now which has never confronted us before. And it will be solved when a bricklayer will work for what he can earn — and also the rest of you, or us. Barry, III., April 1 R. H. Main A Name for the New Planet To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Not long ago I noticed a news item to the effect that Italian astronomers have urged that the name Pluto be given to the new planet, which is about the size, in appearance, of a star of the fifteenth magnitude, and is a great deal farther from the sun than is Neptune. It occurred to me that it might be worth while to call attention to a number of reasons why the name Pluto would be very appropriate. Jupiter, of course, being so very prominent an object in the heavens (it looks larger than any star of the first magnitude) and only half as far away as Saturn, which is not so large as Jupiter, was undoubtedly known to the ancients even before they knew Saturn. When they named Saturn, therefore, they seem to have given it that name because Saturn was the father of Jupiter, i.e., more remote. When Uranus, which appears to be the size of a fifth- magnitude star, was accidentally discovered by Sir William Herschel in 1781, it was named by him Georgium Sidus, i.e., George's Star, in honor of his patron, George III of England. Others for a while called it Herschel, but later it came to be called by everyone Uranus, evidently because among the gods of the ancients Uranus was the father of Saturn.

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626 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3386 Among the gods of the ancients the name of the father of Uranus did not exist, either among the Latins or among the Greeks. Thus when Neptune, a star of the eighth magnitude (the sixth magnitude being the smallest-sized star that can be seen with the naked eye), was discovered, apparently the astron- omers did the next best thing and gave to the new planet its name because Neptune, among the gods of the Romans, was the brother of Jupiter. Since Pluto, as well as Neptune, was a brother of Jupiter, it certainly would seem quite in order to adopt the Italian suggestion in naming the new planet. There is another point to be made. If the name Pluto were adopted, it would doubtless be abbreviated to PL; and PL might also be taken to stand for Percival Lowell, the name of the man whose studies over many years resulted in the discovery of the new planet. Minneapolis, April 15 Edward W. Hawley New York Public Utilities To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Your cavalier treatment in your issue of May 7 of the utility measures passed by the New York State Legislature prompts this comment. Analysis of the hearings before the com- mission appointed to investigate the Public Service Commission laws shows that the administration or the authority of the Pub- lic Service Commission should be modified in three major direc- tions, involving (1) the attitude and policies of the commission itself, (2) the control over holding companies, and (3) the handling of valuations and the rate of return. 1. Of these the first overtops all others in importance. If the New York commissioners had looked upon themselves as public defenders endowed with powers of initiation — as they were originally intended to be — rather than as judges on the bench, and if they had used the full measure of their legal authority, it is practically certain that there would have been no such criticism as broke forth in 1929. For instance, they have long had authority over certain relations between the most im- portant holding companies and their affiliates but have practi- cally never used it. They also have a very wide discretion in determining valuations for rate-making purposes, even under Supreme Court decisions, but they have not only failed to develop any policy on this matter but even fought shy of rate cases, depending rather on necessarily one-sided negotiations. Other evidence might be cited to prove that it is not so much the law as its administration that has been ineffective. The remedy for this state of affairs lies in the hands not of the legislature but of the executive who is vested with the appointing power. The legislature can bolster up administration by making appropria- tions for an increased staff. This was done to the amount of $215,000, thereby augmenting the staff by nearly sixty-four positions. 2. One of the outstanding reasons for the appointment of the investigating body was the power and rapid expansion of the holding companies, which, with the exception noted above, have been beyond the commission's control. The holding- company bill is by far the most drastic that has been passed in any State. The opposition of certain utility officials would indi- cate that it is far from innocuous. It may, indeed, prove to be too far-reaching to be workable. This is no "tinkering" legis- lation. In itself it justifies the special attention given to utility matters in the past session. 3. With regard to valuations for rate-making purposes anyone conversant with utility regulation will admit that present methods, as determined by the Supreme Court, are costly and cumbersome from every point of view and must sooner or later be thoroughly revamped. The Republican members of both the investigating commission and the legislature virtually subscribed to this by passing a bill on this subject. But they have been roundly condemned in certain quarters for not adopting the prudent-investment theory, as urged by a limited group of advo- cates. The evidence, as recorded in the hearings before the in- vestigating commission, goes to show that there is no unanimity on this theory among liberal-minded commissioners, engineers, economists, and constitutional lawyers. Although every effort was made to discover competent witnesses favoring prudent in- vestment there was almost no support for it in these hearings. To expect the commissioners to advocate a measure upon which experts cannot agree, for which there is no public demand, and against which the Supreme Court has frequently ruled is, to say the least, naive. To condemn and belittle any other construc- tive action that they may have taken because of their failure on this count is ungenerous and unfair. A new method of valuation is of paramount importance, but let it not be thought that it will come about in any other way than through an educational campaign and a public demand that will make itself felt even within the precincts of the Su- preme Court. If Governor Roosevelt puts his shoulder to this wheel he will be performing a signal public service. Syracuse, N. Y., May 5 W. E. Mosher Wellsiana To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I am writing an account of the life and activities, literary and other, of Mr. H. G. Wells. It will appear this year in America and Europe. In the effort to make it bio- graphically accurate and detailed, I am basing it very largely upon original sources, and I want to appeal to those who can lend me for quotation or other use relevant reminiscences, im- pressions, or letters (or transcripts of letters), especially any referring to Mr. Wells's earlier years or to specific activities. Original letters (or transcripts to be returned) will be treated most carefully, handled only by myself, and returned without delay by registered post. Matter may be sent direct to me at Acacia, Dane Bridge Lane, Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, Eng- land, or in care of my publishers, W. W. Norton and Company, 70 Fifth Avenue, New York City. Mr. Wells of course knows of and has approved this appeal. Much Hadham, England, April 15 Geoffrey West Contributors to This Issue Sherwood Anderson is the author of "Hello Towns." Louis Resnick was formerly connected with the Na- tional Safety Council. Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at Washington Square College, New York University. S. K. Ratcliffe is on the staff of the New Statesman. Clifton P. Fadiman is head of the editorial department of Simon and Schuster. Jerome Davis, Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Practical Philanthropy at the Yale Divinity School, has spent much time in Russia. C. Hartley Grattan is the editor of a forthcoming book, "The Critique of Humanism." Robert Marshall is in the laboratory of plant physiol- ogy at Johns Hopkins University. David W. Wainhouse is assistant director of research of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Books, Films, Drama The Kneeling Nun By EDA LOU WALTON Upon the highest mountain when pale dawn From its dove breast unfolds its luminous wings, Her figure carved in granite kneels alone Beseeching the vast heavens. Turned to stone Before whatever Deity the gray Waters of sunlight hide, here she must pray Stone hands on stony breasts, in iron folds Clad as a nun. She once betrayed These vestments, once emboldened by desire She tore the linen band from off her brow, And bathed her brow in fire. Now without rest and under whirling skies She kneels forever praying in the snow Until the rock which is her breast shall flow Down the bright stream into the valley's dust And her long penance done She sinks to rest under the valley sun. Love was her sin ; she ran away From bells that broke interminable hours Over a walled-in garden. Till that day She was obedient, but that day had broken Too desperately on her heart ; she fled Hearing the bells still ring, hearing vows spoken. She was a child who like a lily planted Had like a lily grown; she had been taken And laid upon an altar, heard iron gates Clang in her heart, nor had she yet been shaken From such wild vows as never touched the hem Of the long garment she was fashioned in. Year after year was ended before fear Beaded her rosary, and she was hungry fed Upon celestial bread. What scarlet cloak Had wrapped her round, what strong untempered hands Bared her bright bosom to the heated air, She would remember down the centuries; While those who judged her flowered in the dust, She would remember. And was she so to blame Who now is but a legend and a name Of warning to frail maidens veiled in white? There she will kneel till neither you nor I Can fix her with a dimmed eye, and she will pray Past the last prayer we utter in dismay; And every sunset, she will rise and burn Like a bright phoenix on the brow of night, With arms spread wide like wings and stony eyes Turned searchingly down Toward the twinkling little town, And lovers in the town will see her shine A dark defiant figure, a strange sign Against the heavens until the fire is out, And night creeps down the valley, while the moon Haloes a nun at prayer ; and lovers soon Turning toward their homes, will gather there Around the supper tables; there struck blind By the wide-branching candles, they will see Their dim companions dimly, but their hands Reached hungrily for bread, these clearly they will see, And try to fill, and see them emptily Reached out again, until like thirsty flowers They fade within the light. Artists in Exile Portrait of the Artist as American. By Matthew Josephson. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $3. FOLLOWING in the footsteps of Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford, Matthew Josephson has produced a study of the fate of the artist in America. The first two names occur inescapably, for without Mr. Brooks's pioneering volumes, particularly the biographies of Mark Twain and Henry James, and without Mr. Mumford's "Golden Day," Mr. Josephson's book, if it had been written at all, would surely have been less penetrating and satisfactory than it is. This debt, I think, Mr. Josephson would freely acknowledge, and its existence in no way reduces the high value of his work. Though he surveys the whole history of the artist in America, Mr. Josephson's attention is focused particularly upon the writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, for it was then that blighted careers were most frequent and appall- ing. The early morning of New England letters had passed, thrust aside by the triumphant march of industrialism, land speculation, and expansion, but undone, also, according to Mr. Josephson, by its own limitations, its failure to provide a philosophy and a relevant program for the new age. The art- ists in the generations which followed the Civil War found no place to fit in; they felt themselves exiled: as Howells said, they were tolerated at best, rather than accepted. Hence their baffled lives — the obscure tragedy of Melville, passing half his existence in silence as a clerk in the customs office of New York; the wholesale flight of others to Europe and the far corners of the world. James Whistler dies in London, Laf- cadio Hearn in Japan, Stephen Crane in Germany, early in life; Henry James seeks to obliterate his origin in his long London life; Henry Adams, in despair of all else, haunts the Gothic cathedrals of France; Emily Dickinson conceals her strange poems, and makes a nunnery of her paternal home and garden. Even the minor figures are driven out: the young American, Henry Harland, goes to London in the nineties to found The Yellow Book; Stuart Merrill discards his own language for the French, and becomes a symbolist poet; middling novelists like Harold Frederic and Marion Crawford vow never, never to return to their native land, from Italy or Chelsea or wher- ever. More than to any other writer, almost as much as to all the others together, Mr. Josephson devotes his attention to Henry James, who best articulates the problem of the Ameri- can artist and the expatriate, "who sleeps with it, walks with it over a long period of years, and answers it." And unlike Van Wyck Brooks, who concluded sternly from the career of James that the artist should not quit his native soil, Mr. Josephson holds that James's expatriation, from the standpoint of his literary development, was a "very successful adventure, despite whatever sum of personal suffering imposed." For if the des- tiny of the exile was not an easy one, the lot of the faithful, Mr. Josephson believes, was "infinitely harder," and he seeks to prove this as he reviews the careers of those who stayed at

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628 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3386 home. Walt Whitman himself was finally betrayed into hailing with joy even the business materialism of his age. Mark Twain, "the most nearly perfect original and model of the local spirit," despised all genuine art and culture, made a "buffoon's tour" of Europe, and learned to write almost solely for com- mercial rewards. Howells, with all his talent, became con- stantly more timid, finally rationalizing his genteel novels with the conclusion that "the more smiling aspects of life are the more American." Ambrose Bierce, stimulated by his five years in London, returned only to enter a tormented struggle for equilibrium; he soon deserted all serious literary effort, scattered his energies and talents in eternal petty polemics, and died in bitterness. As for the pallid Thomas Aldriches, Bayard Tay- lors, and Margaret Delands, they are "mercifully forgotten." What is the lesson of all these careers for our own day? Here I find Mr. Josephson vague, and I am not at all sure that I understand his position. For the implicit moral of his melancholy biographies, as well as of some of his explicit com- mentary, would seem to be that salvation for the American artist has been in a retreat to foreign climes. And this retreat has been necessary, it appears, chiefly because of two things — ■ industrialism, the universal pursuit of material prosperity, and democracy. ("The whole question whether the arts, in their historical character, can survive in democratic societies," says Mr. Josephson, "must be thrown open.") Now as democracy is still as rampant as ever, and as, nationally, we still pursue material prosperity with the same relentlessness, while indus- trialism becomes even more dominant, the logical conclusion for Mr. Josephson would seem to be that the only hope for the American artist is still in flight. But Mr. Josephson does not draw this conclusion. Europe, he believes, is so rapidly becom- ing "Americanized" that the retreat is blocked; meanwhile the T. S. Eliots and Ezra Pounds, with their "hermetical obscur- ity," their "unsocial, personal patterns of flight," are practicing an art that bears the seeds of extinction within itself. What is left? Well, somehow Mr. Josephson hopes that out of our time will come "a kind of moral revolution," and "a growth of humanism, with its system of discipline, proportions, intellec- tual perfection." ^ I do not find myself in agreement with all Mr. Joseph- son's portraits and judgments. His personal taste, I suspect, inclines him to the precious rather than to the robust writer, and his estimates are not unaffected by his thesis. He uses' William James as a mere foil for Henry James, and his por- trait of Mark Twain is one-sided. But he has given us an arresting history of the American artist, admirably written, full of penetrating criticism; a series of brilliant and absorbing biographical sketches. Henry Hazlitt The Gandhist Creed Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas. By C. F. Andrews. The Macmil- lan Company. $3. CF. ANDREWS is widely known as Gandhi's closest ^ European friend. Indeed, it would be true to say that he is the only native of the West who has been ad- mitted to complete intimacy with the Mahatma. In writing, or rather compiling, this book he has performed a necessary task, for it is obvious that someone had to bring together in small compass the religious and ethical beliefs of the most extraordinary Indian of his age. There prevails throughout North America— as the present reviewer should know perhaps as well as anyone— a great eagerness to learn about the Ma- hatma s personality and the faith that has inspired him during the campaign of the past ten years. Americans in the main, as I judge, want to know, first, what it is in the way of essential belief that Gandhi stands for, and secondly, whether that be- lief has any importance for the modern man and woman in the West. Mr. Andrews, in this simple and candid volume, pro- vides them with all that is needed for an estimate of Gandhi as prophet and devotee; and more than that, he tells, in epi- sodes, the story of the two great movements — passive resistance in South Africa and non-cooperation in India. The reader will not complain that the English interpreter has sought to temper the Mahatma's doctrinal extremism. Let us take two or three examples. That which distinguishes Hin- duism from all other religions, says Gandhi, is the adoration of the cow: "Cow protection is the gift of Hinduism to the world, and Hinduism will live so long as there are Hindus to protect the cow." But he is obliged to add that cow protection "has degenerated into a perpetual feud with the Mussulmans" and to make this damaging confession, "I do not know that the condition of the cattle in any other part of the world is so bad as in unhappy India." "A religion that establishes the worship of the cow," he says further, "cannot possibly countenance or warrant a cruel and inhuman boycott of human beings" ; and yet the Mahatma has to recognize that in denouncing, as he does, the oppression of the outcastes by the caste Hindus, the "indelible stain" of Untouchability, he has against him the great majority of his orthodox coreligionists. He accepts the main lines of the Hindu caste system, and will not admit that there is any validity in the reformer's wish to abolish the ban upon eating in common: "If mankind had not, much to its hurt, made of eating a fetish and indulgence we should have performed the operation of eating in private, even as one performs the other necessary functions of life in private." Not for him, that is to say, any of the beauty and fellowship which, in every age and every land, humanity has honored in the meal eaten to- gether in affection and good humor. As for the economic doc- trine upon which Gandhi has striven to base a self-sufficing India: Swadeshi means "the use and service of our immediate surroundings to the exclusion of the more remote." Not only, therefore, he contends, is foreign commerce to be avoided; you are doing wrong when you trade even with your own folk if they happen to live at a distance, except under the drive of utter necessity. The Mahatma, in other words, is a pure anarchist, an immitigable enemy of society. As such he is impelled to touch the limit of nihilism when it comes to the sex relation. The root evil, he insists, is that men and women "continue to enjoy one another." But without that, human life would cease? It would, the Mahatma concedes, yet only on this earthly plane! Now the grave fact of the present terrible situation in India is not that the Indian people, so far as they are socially conscious, have not accepted the Mahatma's domestic and eco- nomic theories. That, manifestly, they could never do. It is that, under the lead of politicians and modernist intellectuals, they have rejected the central doctrine of their Mahatma — Ahimsa, non-violence. In his letter to the Viceroy of last Janu- arj historic because announcing his decision to enter upon a decisive form of civil disobedience — Gandhi stated that he had been forced into action because, if he refrained, Young India would plunge into violence. He was, of course, right. The march to the sea, followed by the ritual act of defiance, was a final desperate move, designed to test the possibility of non- violent revolution in a country torn with religious and racial enmities. It was foredoomed. The control of the nationalist movement had passed out of the hands of the one Indian leader who might conceivably have built a tentative bridge of peace. The vast convulsion with which British authority is grappling in this summer of 1930 has nothing whatever to do with Ma- hatma Gandhi's ideas. That is why Mr. Andrews's exposition bears the look of a visionary gospel, already far away. S. K. Ratcliffh

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May 28, 1930] The Nation 629 Non-Euclidean Criticism Poetry and Mathematics. By Scott Buchanan. The John Day Company. $2.50. ANY intelligent layman who, delving into the lives of such typical mathematicians as Poincare or Karl Pearson, tries to understand not the results of their researches but the paths along which their minds naturally move, will discover that high mathematical ability is aesthetic in its na- ture. A new mathematical structure is only in an inferior sense the outcome of "logic"; it is really what happens when a mathematician perceives a new form, a new style possible in the manipulations of his symbols. The least important part of his activity is that devoted to "proof." The high-school student is led astray by the ordinary teacher's sentimental in- sistence on the "ironclad logic" of algebra and geometry. He assumes that mathematics is an uninspired system of rigid demonstrations summed up in a set of stony-eyed formulae. Actually, in its less elementary realms, as in projective geometry and the theory of functions, rigidity disappears and the struc- tures become a flexible network of shifting relationships. These relationships are not inexorable; they are susceptible (within certain limits) to selection and manipulation under the hand of the individual mathematician. In this sense mathematics is more an art than a science. What Mr. Buchanan in his completely brilliant essay does is to take this truism and make it yield something in the way of illuminating the nature of the poetic faculty. As I under- stand it, he bases his argument upon what might be termed two axioms: (a) "Illustration of mathematics by concrete event, fact, or object is never as effective as illustration by equally abstract analogous ideas" (in this case ideas about imaginative literature) ; and (b) "Poetry and mathematics are two very successful attempts to deal with ideas. Both employ sets of symbols and systems of notation." Neither literature nor mathematics is "true"; they are both symbolic; and their symbols can be made to render up useful comparisons and cor- respondences. It is impossible here to summarize the ingenious trains of thought by which Mr. Buchanan's analogies are estab- lished. Perhaps the most interesting parallels are to be found in his comparison of the development of the action of a novel or play with the process of transformation underlying pro- jective geometry; of ordinal and cardinal numbers with mediate characterization ("Tom Jones") and immediate characteriza- tion ("The Idiot"); of Cartesian geometry with allegory; and, most fundamental of all, of words with functions, a comparison that yields a series of beautiful insights into the nature of style. More interesting, however, than what this book establishes is what it indicates as to the temper of its creator. Both "Poetry and Mathematics" and Mr. Buchanan's earlier, more purely dialectical work "Possibility" are the productions of a mind whose like is very infrequently found among American writers. I express myself inadequately in saying that it is a mind which can play without being frivolous. The great exem- plar of this type of mentality is, of course, Plato; and there are in this book many paragraphs which, in their deep irony, may justly be called Platonic. At times Mr. Buchanan's in- tellectual flexibility leads him into whimsy, into analogies which are far-fetched even though delightful; but his very flights of fancy have an undertone of quiet amusement with himself I which is wholly captivating. But more often behind them lie witty truths, as when he tells us that "in the 'Republic' Plato is exposing the Pythagorean secrets of the Delphic Oracle, which is the Greek analogue of our modern research foundations." This little book is one of the tentative first fruits of a distinguished mind; it already bears the mark of a distinguished prose stylist. From its investigations both poets and mathe- maticians have much to learn, but it will be most interesting, perhaps, to the literary critic. It is no overstatement to say that it will open up to him, in Mr. Buchanan's phrase, a new dimension in literature. Clifton P. Fadiman Trotzky's Side of It My Life. By Leon Trotzky. Charles Scribner's Sons. $5. THERE are few more dramatic records in history than that of Leon Trotzky. His story is far more fascinating than a detective-mystery plot and it has the added merit of being true. He began life in a peasant's mud hut; he leads us through prisons, exiles, escapes — all the drama of revolution- ary struggle. The fight for power is brilliantly described. Then follow the peace negotiations, the fight against world military forces, with the climax of Lenin's death, growing op- position within the Communist Party, exile and deportation. Naturally, Trotzky weaves into the picture a defense of his own position. In it all one can clearly see Lenin's estimate of his one outstanding defect — "an excess of self-confidence." For Trotzky is an able man who does not minimize his own merits in the slightest. He says about his fellow-revolutionists within Russia in 1905: "There was not one from whom I could learn anything. On the contrary, I had to assume the position of teacher myself." It is easy to see other reasons why Trotzky made enemies. As he says, he was so intent on achievement amid counter- revolution and civil war that he could not take time for tact, nor could he avoid stepping on others' toes. At first his name was always ranked next to Lenin's. It was inevitable that older Bolshevik war horses with a cleaner party record should be jealous of his world prestige. Then too he claims to have shared the dictatorship with Lenin, for whenever these two agreed no one dared differ. In spite of the bitter hostility against Stalin which breathes through the book the picture is not entirely unfavorable to the present dictator. Trotzky says that in 1917 Stalin flashed before him "as a barely perceptible shadow." In the heat of the fight he easily forgot his existence. At one time he even obtained Stalin's recall from Tsaritsyn, where the latter was commander. One clearly sees the difficulty Lenin had in keeping these two leaders from pulling in opposite directions. For a time he succeeded, but after his death a split was inevi- table. When one considers the struggle between Roosevelt and Taft, lifelong friends, it is hardly to be wondered at that two such powerful leaders as Stalin and Trotzky, with totally oppo- site dispositions, should fight. Trotzky maintains that Stalin was constantly intriguing against him. This may be true, but the fact remains that at the time of Lenin's death Trotzky had very few close friends among the inner Communist group. This surely could not be solely owing to Stalin. Trotzky can hardly be said to be dispassionate in all he writes. For instance, he describes America as "not only the strongest but also the most terrified country. Hoover recently explained his passion for fishing by pointing out the democratic nature of this pastime. If this be so, although I doubt it, it is the only evidence of one of the few survivals of democracy existing in the United States." Possibly his comments on Russian affairs also are colored. At any rate he nowhere ade- quately explains why he should have been so completely isolated after Lenin's death. To be sure, he says that it was not due to Stalin alone but that he was seriously ill during the cam- paign of 1923. This was the result of an accident. Indeed,

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630 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3386 Trotzky maintains that the historical process is usually a re- fraction of historic law through the accidental. The accident here occurred because Trotzky used to go out hunting while Lenin was lying ill and while Stalin was pulling political wires. On one of these trips he contracted influenza and recurrent fever. His excuse for hunting is that it afforded relaxation, but one suspects that it also provided excitement after the civil war had ended. Had Trotzky been able to work with men as effectively as Lenin, had he not gone off on wild tangents antagonizing others, perhaps had he not spent so much time hunting, he might have remained in power. He was easily the most brilliant orator of the Russian Revolution. He was an able adminis- trator but an extremely bad politician. Trotzky was the type of general who is desperately needed in a period of revolution but who ought to be superseded in a more stable period. In the light of his own story it would have been difficult for the Communists to have made Trotzky the outstanding leader of the Communist Party following Lenin's death. Stalin, just because he did not have such outstanding individuality and originality, made the better leader. There is surprisingly little evidence against Stalin. He may have been disloyal to Trotzky, he may have been grossly unfair in his campaign attacks, but there is no evidence presented of treason to the fundamental ideals of communism. Indeed, some of the actions which Trotzky complains of in Stalin have much to commend them- selves. In opposition to Trotzky, he tried to work with the committee of the British Labor Party. Stalin believes it is possible to make a demonstration of socialism in Russia alone. Trotzky denies this. Trotzky 's life shows once again the many personal factors which play a part in revolution. To some degree it disproves the case for economic materialism. Psychology, individual differences, even psychopathic attitudes play a vital part in suc- cess or failure. Communists have an economic theory, but at heart they are men and women molded by social forces as well as economic. They all desire power and love prestige. These forces are powerful in affecting the course of history. It is perhaps fortunate for history that Trotzky was de- ported. Otherwise no such honest record of revolutionary attitude could ever have been written. Trotzky would not have had the time, nor would the party have permitted it. The flashes describing various Bolshevik leaders and inner party history will be invaluable in piecing together the mosaic of the actualities of the Russian Revolution. No student of contemporary history will want to miss the fascinating and true romance that this life of Trotzky relates. Jerome Davis Stendhal Stendhal: The Life of an Egoist. By Rudolph Kayser. Henry Holt and Company. $3. KAYSER'S book has all the defects of its genre. It is that pernicious thing, a fictionized biography. But it triumphs in a sense because it portrays vividly a man of immense importance, a man to whom one can turn today and learn a great deal. Henri Beyle was what Hugh Fausset would call a complete romantic. He suffered from few of the defects of the type, and it would be difficult for Professor Babbitt to put him out of court. Though he reverenced Rousseau he was not a complete Rousseauist. Indeed, he was the antithesis of Rous- seau on fundamental questions. Above all he differed from Rousseau in emphasizing the intellect. Stendhal was one of the great intellectual novelists, a man of ideas who functioned best in the novel. His great creations, "The Red and the Black" and "The Charterhouse of Parma," are of small interest to those who demand of fiction lush emo- tionalism. But to those of us who take pleasure in a spare and thrilling story grounded in ideas, they are precious. We do not reproach Stendhal for rejecting "spurious methods" of gaining the approval of the reader. He was the novelist of "spiritual energy," says Kayser truly, a man to whom the idea was but a prelude to action. He thought in terms of the individual and he thought psycho- logically. Singularity and intelligence seemed to him the hall- marks of the complete man. But his perception, while true, was not one that the immediate future was to indorse. For between Stendhal and ourselves there lies the age of the triumphant bourgeois to whom money was the supreme value. His acute intelligence foresaw this society, but con- demned it and placed his popularity on the farther side of it. Now that we are emerging from the bourgeois period — into what? — we turn to Stendhal once more for illumination. It is there for all who wish to find it. What we need, however, is not books like Kayser's but critical studies which shall clearly indicate the nature of Stendhal and of his ideas. C. Hartley Grattan The Death of Harding The Strange Death of President Harding. From the Diaries of Gaston B. Means as told to May Dixon Thacher. New York: Guild Publishing Corporation. $3.50. THIS is the third book to deal with the bad side of Presi- dent Harding's Administration and his personal weak- nesses. It is so highly sensational that, if the press is correct, it has already been submitted to a grand jury in the District of Columbia. Were there libel laws to protect the dead in this country as abroad, Mr. Means would have risked more than he did in publishing it. His book has had, and is having, we hear, a tremendous sale despite the fact that there are three prima facie reasons for discrediting it: first, that Mr. Means served a term in Atlanta penitentiary for violations of the prohibition laws; second, that he lays this con- viction to the Harding "Ohio gang" for whom he worked; and third, that in this very volume he admits his complicity in all sorts of wrongdoing, boasting, for instance, that no less than $7,000,000 of prohibition graft passed through his hands — and more, as a result of the blackmailing of corporations or the sale of government favors — and that he lived far beyond his government salary at other people's expense. Naturally these facts call for an attitude of extreme cau- tion toward this book. If it is to be believed, then President Harding was helped to his death much as was Socrates, and so were Jess Smith, General Sawyer, and still others — it is a fact that no less than eight of the Harding crowd died sud- denly or committed suicide. General Sawyer was one of these, and as Means shows by a citation from the New York Times, his death was entirely unexpected and "almost identical with the manner of death of the late Warren G. Harding." All these deaths, and Mrs. Harding's, make it difficult to get at the truth; the dead are not here to refute Means. And the extreme clever- ness with which the book is put together, its skill in insinua- tion rather than in open charges, makes the task of refutation the more difficult. What then should be one's attitude toward this book which, if it is true, paints a picture to make every American hang his head with shame? The disposition of most people would be to ignore it. What, they ask, is the use of stirring up anew these nasty scandals? What good will it do to prove that they are true? They will only besmirch the country still

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May 28, 1930] The Nation 631 more. To my mind there should be an inquiry. There are a number of points in Mr. Means's book whose accuracy can be easily tested. There are still Harry Daugherty and his brother to throw light upon the situation. After all, there is such a thing as establishing the historical truth; if we do not do it now the scandal will spread day by day, and it will be the cause of speculation and misrepresentation in the years to come. Finally, there is the question of Harding himself. If there is anything that can be done to improve the reputation of this President of the United States is it not owing to him? I con- fess to surprise that men like Charles E. Hughes and Herbert Hoover, who sat in his Cabinet and have never yet criticized anything that happened in the Harding Administration, have not undertaken something themselves. Is there too much dyna- mite in the situation? They were of those who contributed, we presume, to the $800,000 memorial to Harding to be erected over his body in Marion. If this enterprise is to be put through as originally planned it would seem as if the least that could be done would be an investigation of the charges that have been made. Until something like this happens Mr. Means and his book will hold the field; he will profit by its phenomenal and unchecked sale ; and the volume will spread throughout the country the belief that his allegations are in the main correct. Oswald Garrisox Villard The Nation's Trees Forestry. By Arthur Bernard Recknagel and Samuel Newton Spring. Alfred A. Knopf. $3. AT the last national meeting of the Society of American Foresters the senior author of this book declared that he had "complete confidence in the ability of the Ameri- can business man to solve any problem whatsoever." For people who indorse this somewhat sweeping panegyric, "Forestry" will prove excellent reading: "The forest industry of America is becoming conscious of its obligations. ... It is fitting that ; American business, in accord with its recognized genius, should • take the lead in matters of public welfare. . . . The genius of - the American business man is addressing itself to the great : problem of timber growing and there is visible the dawning of '. a new era." It seems a shame to carp about mere facts in the : face of such poetry, but unfortunately there are a few profane ; skeptics who will inquire whether there is any reasonable proof .: that the new era will better promote the public welfare than ; has the present era under the guidance of the same American business men. They will observe what has happened in the j- private exploitation of coal, oil, and water power. Especially { they will cite the authors' own figures, which are quite ■i questionably high, that on only 10 per cent of the private tim- , berland is even a faint trace of forestry visible today. They ; may, for such reasons, find it difficult to share the authors' I faith that the omnipotent genius of the American business men i will solve the nation's forest problem. Nevertheless, there are parts of the book which can be | adjudged excellent even in the face of a critical analysis. For ; example, the chapter which tells of the development of forestry j 'in the United States is the best brief account of this history I which I have yet seen. The sections covering forestry re- ; search, the application of forestry, and the role of forestry as an essential of social welfare should prove decidedly in- , itructive. There seems no reason why any person who reads ; | this book should ever again fall into those prevalent miscon- :eptions of the layman that forestry and planting are synony- mous, and that forestry means locking up of timber resources. :^Ag^S'^^.QfeV.^A.gS^: When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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632 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3386 An Invitation to Critical America • Read • A PRIMER of AESTHETICS By LOUIS GRUDIN \COVICI-FRIEDE A $3. At Bookstores! WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See ^Fifty Million Frenchmen — Lyric — W. 42nd St. ^Flying High— Apollo— W. 42nd St. •Hotel Universe— Beck — 45th St., E. of Eighth Ave. tLost Sheep — Selwyn — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. •Michael and Mary— Hopkins— 155 W. 49th St. tStrictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. •The Green Pastures — Mansfield — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •The Last Mile— Sam. H. Harris — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. tTopaze — Music Box — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •Uncle Vanya— Cort— W. 48th St. Films All Quiet on the Western Front — Central — 47th St. and B'dway. Journey's End — Gaiety — 46th St. and B'dway. Turksib— Beg. Sat., May 24 — Eighth St. Playhouse— 52 W. Eighth St. Lady Windmere's Fan — Beg. Sat., May 24; Disraeli — Beg. Wed., May 28— Fifth Ave. Playhouse — 66 Fifth Ave. Be Yourself — Beg. Sat., May 24; Only the Brave — Beg. Wed., May 28 — Little Carnegie Playhouse — 146 W. 57th St. Sky Hawk — Beg. Fri., May 23 ; Anna Christie — Beg. Tues., May 27— Little Picture House— 153 E. 50th St. Charming Sinners — Beg. Sat., May 24; Puttin' on the Ritz — Beg. Wed., May 28— The Plaza— 58th St., E. of Madison. Ave. Cameo— W. 42nd St.— Beg. Fri., May 23, Mr. and Mrs. Gifford Pinchot in Their Cruise to the South Seas. Lectures The Folly of Work, Racketeering High and Low — League for Industrial Democracy — 112 E. 19th St. — Annual Conference — June 26 to 29. Free Speech and the Communists — The Group — 150 W. 85th St. •Drama. tComedy. JMusical. ANNUAL CONFERENCE LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY Juno 26 to 20 GAMP TAMIMENT — near Stroudsburg, Pa. Subject: THE FOLLY OF WORK RACKETEERING HIGH AND LOW PAUL BLANSHARD, Chairman The speakers will include: Hey wood Broun, Stuart Chase, Paul Douglas, Abraham Epstein, John T. Flynn, Leon Henderson, Morris Hillquit, Maynard Krucger, H. S. Raushenbush, Donald Richberg, David Saposs, Benjamin Stolberg, Karl Scholz, Courtenay Terrett, Norman Thomas and Charney Vladeck. Among the subjects are: Gangs and Gangsters. Private Rights in Public Business, the High Cost of Ballyhoo, the Labor Racketeer, Pyramiding Land Values, the Folly of Work. For further information, address LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 112 East 19th Street, New York City. Films American Natives and Nature AFTER innumerable travel pictures in which the less familiar parts of the world are presented in the man- ner of a snapshot album, with the tourist or the big- game hunter conspicuously in the fore, one turns with pleas- ure to a picture like "The Silent Enemy" (Criterion) from which one does learn something about the life of a primitive tribe with the joys and sorrows — particularly sorrows — that are attendant on it. Of course, the genre derives from Flaherty's "Moana" — still unsurpassed for subtle observation and photographic beauty — and his also very interesting "Na- nook." The next important contribution, a few years later, I was made by Cooper and Schoedsack with their "Grass" and "Chang." It is from "Grass" that "The Silent Enemy," like the recently shown British picture "Stampede," derives more directly, all three pictures illustrating the same idea and dif- fering from one another no more than is required by the differ- ing peculiarities of the tribes they describe and the territories in which the episodes take place. In "Grass" we were given a vivid picture of a Persian tribe crossing a formidable moun- tain ridge in search of new pasture lands; "Stampede" described a search for new hunting grounds by a Sudanese tribe; and now "The Silent Enemy," with still greater vividness, tells us of the search for fresh hunting grounds by the Ojibway Indians in the Great Lakes district of Canada. After suffering the great hardships of a long trek through snow-covered wilds, the Indian tribe arrives in time to intercept the migrating herds of caribou. We are shown the overwhelming spectacle of the stampede of the animals — a photographic feat that seems to surpass every- thing of the kind the writer has seen on the screen, even if one assumes that much of the action was "staged." H. P. Carver, who directed the picture, and his assistants deserve every credit for the skill shown in the shooting of this scene as well as of many other marvelously observed incidents in the life of wild animals. Great praise is also due the natives for their "acting," which is extraordinarily expressive while remaining perfectly unforced and natural. On the debit side, however, one must note the conventional treatment of the plot, with heroism, villainy, "love interest" injected in approved fairy-tale fashion. The German silent picture "Asphalt" (Fifty-fifth Street Cinema) is an example of smooth and intelligent competence in acting and direction. It probes no great depths in its story and betrays but occasional touches of originality in its treatment. In the field of the talking picture, and of the screen revue in particular, "King of Jazz" (Roxy), directed by John Mur- ray Anderson, marks another step of progress. Following "Paramount on Parade," which rose above the customary inepti- tudes of Hollywood in the matter of sketches, "King of Jazz" rises above other revues in discarding the stage setting and making a fuller use of the methods of the silent picture, with a stress on the spectacular that is somewhat reminiscent of "In- tolerance." We must now wait for the next step — a revue making cinematic use of speech and music as well as of visual images. The principal thing to be said of "Song of the Flame" (Warner's) is that for sheer idiocy of story it doubtless carries off the palm. The travesty of the Russian Revolution, though heavily weighted with slander, is too mirth-provoking in its operatic absurdities to be taken seriously. The composers must be congratulated, however, on the idea of making Russian mujiks and a prince express their rejoicing in the "Oi, oi, oi" melodies of "Dybbuk." Alexander Bakshy When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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! May 28, 1930] The Nation 633 Drama Ibsen's Prentice Hand ••rriHE Vikings," now rather elaborately produced at the New Yorker Theater, is Ibsen's familiar romantic -*- tragedy "The Warriors of Helgeland." It had to wait four years after it was written before it was seen on any stage, and it has never before been given by a professional company in New York, but it reveals itself now as a drama of considerable intrinsic merit and of very great psychological interest in connection with the development of Ibsen's genius. One needs to know that it was completed some twenty years before the first of the plays in its author's mature manner, but when one bears that fact in mind it becomes a fascinating document for the study of the efforts of a genius to find him- self. If the immature works of a great man generally miss the success achieved by the prentice hands of lesser talents, the fact is neither hard to understand nor entirely attributable to the stupidity of the public, for groping genius can neither find a form appropriate to itself nor rest content with an imitation of one which others have brought to perfection. It must begin with the style and the materials of its predecessors, but it can do nothing except mar them. The thoughts, the moods, and the motifs which are to become characteristically its own seem merely inappropriate in the company of others which belong to a different tradition, and one is aware chiefly of a kind of dis- harmony. Mixture of styles, that worst of all artistic sins, is almost inevitable in the work of the young genius, and it is only after he has detached himself from all that is not part of him that we can perceive why he seemed at first so much less promising than others who had no intentions of their own capable of spoiling the successful self-consistency of an imita- tion. "The Vikings" is said to have displeased Ibsen's contem- poraries because it went back to the sagas for its material in- stead of imitating the conventions of romantic tragedy, and that may very well be, but the thing which strikes a modern auditor is the fact that these Norsemen are also forerunners of the troubled heroes of the problem play, and that they seem at times almost ludicrously like Tesmans and Lovborgs masquer- ading in fancy dress. It was not until some thirty-three years later that Ibsen was to write "Hedda Gabler," but the heroine of this early play is merely Hedda in blond braids and a winged hat, for she is not only a woman who loves destruc- tion, but one whose evil nature is explainable in the terms of Hedda's psychology — the psychology of a creature hating all potency because she herself is impotent. Ibsen could not yet see that no mere modification of tradition was sufficient to furnish a vehicle for the profoundly original things he had to say, and Ibsen's contemporaries could hardly be expected to perceive that this odd sort of romance was the forerunner of something entirely new. "The Vikings" is produced with the aid of some interest- ing lighting effects supplied by the clavilux, and acted by a conscientious company not entirely at home in the poetic lan- guage of the piece. It has one very powerful act — the second — but it trails off to a conventional and rather meaningless ; conclusion. Doubtless it would never have been revived were it not for the fame of its author's later works, and interest- ing as it is in certain respects it can hardly hope to achieve !any considerable popular success. Rightly or wrongly the pub- lic, when it goes to the theater, likes nothing less than a I museum piece. Joseph Wood Krutch FILMS PLAYS HERMAN 8HCMLIN present* THE LAST MILE "The most satisfactory evening in the theatre that any new play has given me this season." — Alexander Woollcott. CAM IT TTARRIC Theatre, 42nd St., Went of Broadway. •3/A.ItJ. **• A1/VJ\I\.10 Eves. 8:50. Matinees Wed. * Sat. 2:30. The Theatre Guild Presents HOTEL UNIVERSE A NEW PLAY By PHILIP BARRY MARTIN BECK Theatre, 45th St.. W. of Eighth Ave. Evgs., 8 :50. Mats.. Thurs. ft Sat., 2 :60 -PREMIERE SHOWING- TW T w-k WW" f» V w-k SOVIET FILM DOCUMENT \J |£ W \J OF THE BUILDING VJ rV IV lJI [J OF THE TURKESTAN SIBERIAN RAILROAD The film rises to great heights. A powerful and stirring .notion picture which is dramatic in the fullest sense of the word." — Manchester Guardian. 8, P II .. 52 W. 8th St., bet. 5th & 6th Avs. th bT. FlAYHCUSE(^mcu,lD) Enure w^§t3os5gMay24 "MIGHTIEST WAR DRAMA EVER SEEN" — N. Y. American. All Quiet Western Front" A Universal Picture presented by Carl Laemmle Directed by Lewis Milestone on the "A notable achievement, sincere, earnest, vivid and graphic. Better than anything so far done." — Mor- daunt Hall, N. Y. Times. "Enormously compelling talking motion picture. As a show some- thing to get definitely excited about 1 A very fine motion picture." — How- ard Barnes, Herald Tribune. CENTRAL THEATRE, B'dway and 47th Street Twice Daily: 2:45 — 8:45. 3 times Sat. & Sun., 2:45—5:45—8:45. THE GROUP A Clearing House of Opinion meets at Auditorium — 150 West 85th St. Tuesday, May 27th, at 8:30 P. M. ROGER N. BALDWIN (Director of: American Civil Liberties Union ) will speak on : "l-'KUE speech AND THE COMMUNISTS" Admission Members 50c. Non-Members 76c. Weekly notices mailed on request. AXT'HEN changing your address for the summer, please be sure to send your old as well as your new address, and allow about two weeks for the change to be made. Circulation Dept., THE NATION, 20 Vesey St., N. Y. C. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section The Joker in the Naval Treaty By DAVID W. WAINHOUSE IF the main object of the London conference was to do away with competition and bring about limitation in naval armaments, the conference must be recorded as a marked failure. It is true that the three signatories to the treaty have agreed to limit their fleets to specified tonnages, but the joker, or what is euphemistically termed the "saving clause" in the treaty, carries with it the not unlikely possi- bility that competition, Anglo-French this time, will soon be with us again, and that limitation of navies will soon become Dead Sea apples. The crux of the London treaty lies in Article XXI, which is worth giving in extensor If during the term of the present treaty the require- ments of the national security of any high contracting party in respect to vessels of war limited by Part 3 of the present treaty are, in the opinion of that party, materially affected by new construction of any Power other than those who have joined Part 3 of this treaty, that high contract- ing party will notify the other parties to Part 3 as to the increase required to be made in its tonnages within one or more of the categories of such vessels of war, specifying particularly the proposed increase and the reasons therefor, and shall be entitled to make such increase. Thereupon the other parties to Part 3 of this treaty shall be entitled to make a proportionate increase in the category or categories specified; and the said other parties shall promptly advise with each other through diplomatic channels as to the situa- tion thus presented. Stripped of its technical language this article means that if England's two-Power standard in Europe is threatened by French and Italian naval building, England will give due notice to the United States and Japan "as to the increase required to be made in its own tonnage," and, like falling dominoes, the United States and Japan shall be entitled to make proportionate increases in order to maintain the ratios of their respective naval strengths. Great Britain must have her two-Power-standard dogma in Europe; the United States must have her parity with Great Britain; and Japan is determined on 70 per cent cruiser strength. The article is so worded that if Great Britain adds to her naval armaments "the others (i.e., the United States and Japan) may then make proportionate in- creases," to use Senator Robinson's words. Thus American parity vis-a-vis Great Britain is to be of the escalator variety, on which Japan is given a place. Set against these dogmas there is the Italian demand for parity with France, and the insistence of France that her navy must be at least 240,000 tons stronger than the Italian. A Fascist Italy could not afford to bring back from London in 1930 less than what the pre-Fascist Government brought back from Washington in 1922. In 1922 Italy was given equality in capital ships with France; at London Italy held out for paper equality with France in the lighter categories. France remained intransigent. After the American and Brit- ish delegations had exhausted themselves for many weeks preaching to the French and Italians, it dawned on them that no progress could be made until Great Britain had settled with France and Italy the basic political problems which were threatening to ruin the conference. Fearing that complete failure would make them the laughing-stock of the world, the three greatest naval Powers signed a three-Power treaty, and this notwithstanding the declaration from Washington of the Acting Secretary of State that there would be a five- Power treaty or none at all. ^A A three-Power treaty with a categorical limitation on the British fleet would have been unbearable to the British Admiralty because it demands a fleet equal to the combined fleets of France and Italy. To allay British fears Mr. Stim- son suggested that a provision similar to that of Article XXI of the Washington treaty be inserted : If during the term of the present treaty the require- ments of national security of any contracting Power in respect of naval defense are, in the opinion of that Power, materially affected by any change of circumstances, the contracting Powers will, at the request of such Power, meet in conference with a view to the reconsideration of the provisions of the treaty and its amendment by mutual agreements [italics mine]. Great Britain refused to subscribe to an article which would merely give her a right to call a conference with no assur- ance that the conference would conclude in her favor. What Great Britain wanted was the expressed right to build with- out consultation beforehand should such a course appear advisable to her. And this is what she got by incorporating her own Article XXI in the London treaty. To have denied Great Britain the desired safeguard would have been tanta- mount to a request that she forget the French navy alto- gether. If there ever was a time when the British could ill afford to forget the French navy, that time is now. Prior to the World War France's naval strategy demanded a con- centration of her entire fleet in the Mediterranean. "The French fleet," said Sir Edward Grey on August 3, 1914, when he was putting before the House of Commons the argu- ments for and against the declaration of war on Germany, "is now in the Mediterranean, and the northern and west- ern coasts of France are absolutely undefended." Twelve years after the destruction of the German fleet we find France planning for the defense of her northern and western coasts. The fact that France is clamoring for a security she never sought when the German navy was less than two days' steam- ing from her Channel ports is a matter of great anxiety to the British Admiralty. French strategy shows a singular, and to the British Admiralty a sinful, forgetfulness of his- tory. What chance is there that Great Britain will invoke Article XXI? The answer to this question obviously lies in the building programs of France and Italy and Great Britain's success or failure in solving the outstanding political differences which have prevented the two Latin Powers from coming into a five-Power treaty. Italy's demand for parity is wholly une affaire de pres- tige, asserted at London for home consumption. If bv parity

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May 28, 1930] The Nation 635 we mean reasonable equality of power it is clear that France will not grant it, for that would drag France down once and for all to the naval rank of Italy. Parity has become a national thesis with the Italians, and surrender of it would be a humiliation which the Duce can ill afford at the present time. The Italian position is that she doesn't need and doesn't want and can ill afford any big naval expenditure. But she doesn't want to be bound by a treaty to accept and maintain in the future naval inferiority. The oft-repeated demand for parity makes it politically impossible for the Italians to agree to anything less. French unwillingness to concede parity is not unlikely to lash Italy into the building of a fleet which she never intended to build. Therefore the hope of solving the Franco-Italian problem of parity in a "prestige-Power" world is not bright. So far as France is concerned her thesis for security, so clearly outlined in the memorandum of December 20, 1929, and stoutly maintained at London, remains a possible ground on which she and Great Britain can agree. A Mediter- ranean Locarno or a tightening of Article XVI of the Cove- nant has been suggested by France as a quid pro quo for reduction. For some ten weeks the discussions at London revolved about the French thesis of security. Mr. Mac- Donald's hands were tied Avith the pledges he had given Par- liament that Great Britain would not enter into any com- mitments beyond those contained in Article XVI of the Covenant. The Foreign Office, on the other hand, was willing to go so far as to agree that the recommendations of the Council for the use of military and naval sanctions under Article XVI would be carried out by the British. In return for the extension of British commitments the Foreign Office expected a considerable reduction in the French fleet. Just how much of a reduction the French would be willing to make was not discussed because Mr. MacDonald's continued public utterances that he could not entangle Great Britain frustrated the political discussions which Mr. Henderson was carrying on with the French. The difference of opinion between the Foreign Office and Mr. MacDonald on the matter of sanctions must be borne in mind when the Anglo- French-Italian conversations get under way. If Mr. Mac- Donald isn't won over to the Foreign Office point of view, and it's not likely that he will be, the whole problem of naval disarmament, so far as France and Italy are concerned, will remain where the London conference left it. France will continue with her program set out in the Naval Statute of 1924; Italy will attempt to turn paper parity into steel parity. At the present time France has a navy of 681,808 tons. The Naval Statute calls for a navy of some 804,000 tons by 1942. Building at the rate of 40,000 tons a year, France will have about 724,000 tons by 1936. "Out of these 240,000 tons 43,200 would represent complementary building and 196,800 tons of replacement," states the French memoran- dum of February 13, 1930. This will give France practi- cally a new and an entirely post-war fleet. Vis-a-vis Eng- land, France will have an 85 per cent fleet, with an enor- mously superior submarine force. The present Italian navy is about 370,000 tons, built and building. The New York Times correspondent reported on April 30 that the Italian government has decided to lay down in 1930 warships totaling 42,900 tons. This about equals the French construction program for the same vear. The Training School for Jewish Social Work invites social workers without professional prepara- tion and others, holders and prospective holders of a bachelor's degree, to whom a career of intrinsic interest and social usefulness is a primary considera- tion, to examine carefully its course of study in preparation for Jewish Social Work as a Profession The School prepares its students for every variety of social work in American Jewish Communities and Institutions. Candidates are now being considered for the next school year, which begins Oct. 1st, 1930. For full information <write to M. J. Karpf. Director The Training School For Jewish Social Work A graduate tchool 67-71 W. 47th Street, New York .■■••■■■.■•■■caa.*..* Twenty-three days in Leningrad, Moscow, Crimea, Ukraine Leader: Clifton Utley, Editor Chicago Council Foreign Relations Bulletin. Sailing from N. Y., S.S. Europa — June 18, price — $665; from Stettin, Germany — June 25, $462; from Helsingfors — June 27, $431. Registrations open. Thirty-six days Leningrad, Moscow, Volga, Caucasus, Crimea, Ukraine Leader: Lucy Textor, Professor of Russian History, Vassar College. Sailing from -V. Y., S.S. Columbus — June 24, price — $895; from Stettin, Germany — July 2nd, $695; from Helsingfors — July 4th, $661. Registrations open. Special Student Group Open to graduates and undergraduates. Traveling third class with Russian students and workers. Twenty-eight days — Leningrad, Moscow, Volga, Caucasus, Crimea, Ukraine. Leader: Wk. Gorham Rice Jr., University of Wisconsin. Sailing from N. Y., S.S. Aquitania — July 30, price — $616; from London — Aug. 6th, $422; from Helsing- fors— Aug. 10th, $360. Registrations open. Additional itineraries from two weeks to thirty days in Russia. Parties of eight plus American leader and interpreter 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK .TME^BEN^-RO-AD* When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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636 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 338e The 2nd Cultural Tour to Soviet Russia under the leadership of Dr. Joshua Kunitz (Lecturer on Russian Literature and Culture in the College of the City of New Tork) sails from New York, June 26th, on the S. S. Lafayette. This tour can be taken for 12, 2 4 or 35 days in the Soviet Union. Other sailings to Soviet Russia: May 28, S.S. Aquitania; June 11, S.S. Bremen; June 28, S.S. Mauretania; July 5, S.S. Europa; July 16, S.S. Beren- garia. (Conducted tours by Mrs. N. Markoff.) Send for itineraries, etc. WORLD TOURISTS, Inc. 175 Fifth Avenue Algonquin 6656 A RARE COMBINATION full- in food is Tastiness, Purity, Wholesomeness and balanced Nourishment. This rare combination you find at our up-to-date and cozy Health Foods Luncheonette, where appetizing and amply satisfying meals of freshest and unprocessed foodstuffs are sold and served at all hours and every day of the week, including Sundays — and at most mod- erate prices. Try us once, and you will be certain to bring your friends to our place to dine abundantly. HEALTH FOODS DISTRIBUTORS 45-N East 84th St., N. Y. City (Between Park and Madison Aves.) Phones: Lexington 6926 — Ashland 6366 A week before this decision, the same correspondent reported the launching of five new units totaling more than 30,00( tons. These activities are bound to have repercussions ir London and Paris, particularly in Paris. The threat to the British two-Power standard is thus well begun. A cool-headed British Admiralty will not wai until 1936 before answering the challenge of the two Latir Powers. Should France and Italy continue this pace for twc years, their total tonnages will outweigh the British. Ther we shall see Article XXI come into play. Mr. MacDonald Mr. Henderson, and Mr. Alexander have all given notice l that the figures arrived at in London are subject to revisior i upward if the two-Power standard is threatened by thV V* o^VV>*' -°\^ s» ,v MISCELLANEOUS "PSYCHOLOGIST making broad study of pres- ent causes of unhappiness, social problems and relationships, will analyze individual prob- lems of any nature for $1 fee ; full confidence, personal attention ; initials, stamped envelope. Box 2440, % The Nation. "Delightful" BLACK GENESIS By SAMUEL G. STONEY and GERTRUDE M. SHELBY William Lyon Phelps says: "I have read it with great enthu- siasm ... An exceedingly inter- esting and diverting book." MACMILLAN S3.SO OPEN SHELF SPECIAL SPRING EXHIBITS Mexican glass in four colors and dozens of lovely shapes. Willow and hide furniture for studio, porch or garden. Navajo rugs and blankets for town or country. Table linens, lovely Mexican embroidered blouses and dresses — sandals. Pueblo pottery. Navajo jewelry. Genuine handcrafts, American and Mexican Indian. THE INDIAN TRADING POST La Fiesta 38 W. 8th St.. N. Y. C. 619 No. Michigan Ave. (open evenings) Chicago, 111. T ET me buy your household furnishings — "^ from grand piano to kitchen utensils, ar auction for a fraction of store prices. 10% com- mission above $100 — 20% below. Box 2436, % The Nation. □ CHILDREN'S CAMPS D IffiiLL LILLIPUT A successful new idea — a camp for 4 to 10 year olds A lovely house in ideal surroundings, ac- cessible from New York. The entire staff is trained and experienced in the guid- ance of small children. Resident physician; trained nurse. Highly endorsed by edu- cators and parents. Group limited to 40. Booklet. Anne Josephson, 1880 Uni- versity Ave., N. Y. (Raymond 414.".). Combines advantages of home, camp and school. SCHOOLS HESSIAN HILLS SCHOOL A modem c o u n t r school for boys an* girls, nursery throng, first year high school day and boarding. CHOTON ON HUDSOJ NEW YOKE LANGUAGES FRENCH, SPANISH, ITALIAN, GERMAN, ENGLISH Conversational method. Native teaehers. Privet I lessons, 75c, short course, i to 9 daily, lltk jtai \ FISHER'S SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES 1264 Lexingtoa Avenue, N. W. Cor. 8Cta Stras I FRENCH-SPANISH-ITALIAr! GERMAN. Private leasoas Tie (Dally t-»). Na- tive teachers. Interesting conversational methec' 18th year. Also neglected English education UNIVERSAL SCHOOL OF LANGUAGE' 1265 Lexington Ave., Northeast Car. «5th 81 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation ,

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•t: \ ir The Nation FOUNDED 1865 M. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4, 1930 No. 3387 Contents :DITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 637 :DITORIALS: Dollar Books 639 Government by Abstention 640 Who Wants the Tariff? 641 How Long, Labor? 641 Obscenity in Court 642 T SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 643 IONISM FINDS ITSELF. By William Zukerman 644 •HE PRESS TODAY: V. STANDARDIZING THE DAILY. By Oswald Garrison Villard 646 VTLL THE PRESIDENT LISTEN? 648 'HE PORCELAIN SOPHIA ANDREYEVNA: A LETTER OF LEO TOLSTOY 649 LOTS AND COUNTERPLOTS. By Paul Y. Anderson 650 N THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 652 ORRESPONDENCE 652 OOKS AND DRAMA: Portent. By Hal Saunders White 654 This Petty Pace. By Henry Hazlitt 654 How to Become President. By Louis M. Hacker 654 A Minor Bard. By Joseph Wood Krutch 655 Amy Lowell as Critic Again. By Eda Lou Walton 656 Biology and the Humanities. By William MacDonald 656 King of the Armament Racket. By Harold Kellock 656 Books in Brief 657 Drama: Finale. By Joseph Wood Krutch 659 STERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Will Gandhi Win? By Richard B. Gregg 661 ONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 663 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor DSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors )HN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN ORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager jbscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States id Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal nion, $6.00. HE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: \tion, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss :rtrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. The curious psychology of the attackers, which per- mitted them to plunge forward and yet, when they were obstructed and in some cases attacked, to offer no de- fense, has created a vexing problem for the police. T XACTLY ! This naive quotation from the New York ~j Times explains just why it is that the Nationalist ovement is steadily making headway with even the Moham- edans beginning to go in. Never in the history of the orld has there been such amazing self-control by great asses of people. Two hundred thousand persons in Bom- ly forced the police to yield and let them into the "fort ea" of the city they were forbidden to enter, merely by eir refusal to attack the police before whom for four mrs they sat down singing their Nationalist songs. On fay 21 the brilliant correspondent of the United Press, ^ebb Miller, reported : I personally saw more than 200 Nationalists in a temporary hospital where they were carried by volunteers. . . . Most of the injuries were head wounds, fractured arms and wrists. The Surat native police lost their tem- pers. I saw them kick volunteers already lying on the ! ground. My clothes were splashed with mud when the I police flung volunteers into the ditches. The spectacle of their beating the unresisting volunteers was so painful I was frequently forced to turn away from the crowd. On that day at Dharasara no less than 630 were injured by blows from the police sticks, yet not one native lost his seli-control and not one policeman was injured. On May 25 at Wadala more than 30,UUU Nationalists ran over the police and successfully raided the salt works there. No wonder the Associated Press reports that news "from all parts of India shows that the unrest is gradually growing," and the London Express hears that "the country faces the gravest situation since the campaign began." lyrUSSOLINI AS FIRE-EATER plays no new role, J- 'A hut he has been playing it of late in a manner that occasions some concern. In speeches at Florence, Leghorn Milan, and elsewhere, delivered before vast crowds who responded with frenzied applause, he has been descanting upon the great achievements of fascism, pointing to the splendid future which he sees awaiting Italy, and glorifying force and arms in a fashion to suggest that if he does not himself exactly intend to provoke a war, he would not be at all averse to see a war actually break out. France in par- ticular is disturbed at the references, thinly veiled but con- temptuous, which Mussolini has several times made to Italy's relations with its western neighbor, and wonders what the Duce meant when he exclaimed at Milan : "We came back from Versailles with a mutilated victory, but victory is still within our grasp." Does he think of ripping open the peace treaties in the hope of getting by force some undescribed satisfaction that Italy failed to get eleven years ago? Prob- ably not. Mussolini is a demagogue, and demagogues must talk. Like the horse of Scripture, their strength is in their mouth. The trouble is that such incendiary harangues are dangerous; they rouse suspicion and fear abroad and nourish an ugly temper at home. WHAT CAN ONE SAY about the case of Senator Clarence C. Dill ? We have already called attention to his extraordinary conduct in connection with the tariff bill. This he capped by casting the vote which made it pos- sible to retain the provision giving the President the power to continue to raise or lower tariffs. He had opposed this principle and voted against it steadily until the last moment. His change of position not only retained the President's tariff-making power, but actually saved the whole tariff bill, although he had voted against it when it passed the Senate. It is an extremely unfortunate coincidence for the Senator that the very next day after he switched Chairman Hawley of the Ways and Means Committee of the House raised the tariff on lumber to one dollar per thousand feet — Senator Dill had been voting steadily in favor of a higher tariff on lumber. When we commented several weeks ago on the Senators who swapped their votes and included Senator Dill in the list he and his friends were indignant. What is one to think now? Since we have Senator Dill's assurance that his motives are of the best we must conclude that there is something radically wrong with his intellectual processes. :-■

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638 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 TO THE LAST HEARING the admirals in Wash- ington continued to make a holy show of themselves in their testimony as to the naval treaty. Senator Reed effectively put Rear-Admiral Jones out of action by produc- ing a letter which showed that eleven months ago he was advocating precisely the opposite of the position which he is now taking, namely, that by the substitution of six-inch guns for eight-inch the American people have been aban- doned and left naked to their enemy, Great Britain. Rear- Admiral Jones explained that the similar twistings of the General Board of the Navy were "camouflage" to deceive the British into yielding what we wished — a nice, honor- able, and kindly attitude toward our recent ally on the fields of Flanders! Rear-Admiral Bristol cuts hardly any better figure. The truth is that admirals the world over are the real enemies of peace and of disarmament. What do we see today? A majority of our American admirals testifying that we were betrayed at London, that the treaty degrades us and does not give us parity. In Japan at the same time an admiral commits suicide in protest against the betrayal of Japan and its naval degradation by the British and Americans. In London the British admirals and the Tories rave because England was taken into camp and tricked by the Americans. We repeat — it is the admirals who are the enemies of peace. OUR DEEPEST SYMPATHY goes out to the Quakers the world over. It is bad enough to have a Quaker President of the United States who goes on peace missions on a battleship and reviews the fleet at the same time that he is contributing money for a new Quaker meeting-house in Washington. But now comes along this same President's brother, who sat on the same Quaker meeting-house benches with him as a boy, to announce the most extraordinary doctrine ever voiced by an adherent of the faith of William Penn, of George Fox and Elias Hicks. Here are the sentiments which Professor Theodore Hoover has been giving to his students in engineering at Leland Stanford : The human race develops by war and succeeds in war in proportion to its use of metals. Races perish in peace. Culture is increased by the invention of new weapons. The pacifist errs in assuming that peace is desirable. Emerson says, "Everything we have must be paid for." We Americans are living in unpaid luxury and must pay in the future by blood and hard work. Professor Hoover protested against the publication of this matter on the ground that it was a breach of the "inviola- bility of the classroom," and he made the following sapient remark: "I believe in all efforts directed toward the achievement of perpetual peace, but at the same time I have a fear that they will all prove ineffectual." He thereby does his best to make them ineffectual by teaching the doctrines of Bernhardi and all the bloody-handed militarists in the history of the world. Professor Hoover ought to apologize to the Kaiser and all his generals and admirals, while admitting that they were entirely right in their teachings. THE FEDERAL POWER COMMISSION, accord- ing to an announcement of May 19, has granted the license at site Number 1 on the Flathead Indian reservation to the Rocky Mountain Power Company, a subsidiary of the Montana Power Company, one of the Electric Bond and Share group. The rental has been fixed on a flat annual basis under which the Indians will receive an average of $140,000 a year during the first twenty years. After that date the rent is subject to readjustment. In the opinion of Assistant Commissioner Scattergood, who has been largely in charge of negotiations, the contract represents the most advanced form of agreement, from the standpoint of the protection of the public interest, of any yet entered into by the commission. He believes that the separate accounting required of the Montana Power Company's subsidiary, together with the provision for a return based essentially on prudent investment, lays the basis for active rate control by the State commission, the federal commission having no con- trol over rates. We have already expressed our conviction that in view of the present unsatisfactory condition in the i Federal Power Commission it is highly undesirable for that body at this time to take final action in a matter of this importance. That question aside, while we realize the. arguments that are urged in behalf of getting the dam started at once, we regret to see this commanding source of ; power passing into the hands of the great concern that dominates so largely the economic and political life of Mon- j tana; for we see little hope under these circumstances for effective State control of rates. Walter H. Wheeler, the rival bidder for the license, on May 20 stated that he would appeal to the Federal Power Commission against the deci- sion, and if beaten there would appeal to the courts. COMMISSIONER WHALEN, with a graceful bow, steps out of the spotlight in New York City, and J plain Mr. Whalen — except for a gardenia and a top hat — resumes his position at Wanamaker's department store and his post as Chief Official Welcomer and Offerer of the Freedom of the City to distinguished visitors. We shall, of course, hear more of Mr. Whalen; no man with a gift for publicity like his can fail to make the news now and then. We shall remember that it was Mr. Whalen who improved New York's traffic problem and did not locate Mr. Rothstein's murderer; who tried to make jaywalking a crime and could not put uniforms on taxi drivers. We shall even recall, perhaps, that Mr. Whalen, with his red documents, was largely instrumental in bringing about the inquiry into Communist activities in the country, passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 210 to 18 Commissioner Mulrooney, Mr. Whalen's successor as head of the New York police force, is a modest, unassuming mar who made his way up from the ranks. He is said to b< thoroughly honest, well-intentioned, and anxious to avoic public notice. The last quality will recommend him to th city's vaudeville mayor, and the former may see hin through to the accomplishment of a good job. Meanwhile certain words of Representative Snell, chairman of thi House Rules Committee, in the debate on the proposec Communist-inquiry resolution are worth recording. Mr Huddleston of Alabama asked: "Is this resolution broac enough to include fascism?" Mr. Snell. Include what? Mr. Huddleston. Fascism, fascism. Mr. Snell. I don't know what that is, but I guess | it is.

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June 4, 1930] The Nation 639 TO GIFFORD PINCHOT go our congratulations upon his winning of the Republican nomination for jovernor of Pennsylvania, even carrying the city of Pitts- burgh although running as a dry. It is perfectly obvious, how- ever, that if it had not been a three-cornered race the Vare ' :andidate would have won. The drys will nevertheless make ronsiderable capital out of the result, for Pinchot ran best n the rural districts where prohibition is strongest. As for he Senatorship, President Hoover is heartily to be felici- ated upon his now having the chance to appoint a new ecretary of Labor in place of the dull and reactionary fames J. Davis, who has defeated the great Grundy him- •elf. From another point of view Mr. Hoover is not so ortunate; Joe Grundy is now free to indulge to the full lis hatred of the President and to work day and night •gainst his renomination. The campaign, be it noted, re- ulted in much loss of prestige for the greatest Secretary of he Treasury since Alexander Hamilton, for his own city vent back on him and Vare successfully challenged his eadership. Senator Reed's days in the Senate now seem ' lumbered. It must not, however, be believed that the de- " eat of Grundy means a protest against the Grundy tariff. [ rar from it; there are multitudes in Pennsylvania who feel hat it is not nearly high enough. In its essence this has >een but another fight between bosses while the public is liverted from the main arena by the prohibition and tariff ideshows. PALESTINE ADDS ITS BIT to the British govern- ment's troubles in India, where it is highly necessary | o conciliate Mohammedan sympathies. An Arab delega- '. ion from Palestine, including the Grand Mufti of erusalem, conferred with the British Colonial Office on the . ubjects, among others, of land, immigration, and a con- titution; and on May 13 Lord Passfield was obliged to eply "that the sweeping constitutional changes demanded " ijr them were wholly unacceptable, since they would have endered it impossible for His Majesty's Government to ^ arry out its obligations under the terms of the mandate." 1 n consequence the Arabs are reported to be leaving London n a bitter frame of mind — a bad thing for India. Six : lays after Lord Passfield's statement the High Commis- .ioner for Palestine, according to an Associated Press dis- 'atch, announced that, effective May 15, all immigration 1 o Palestine was suspended pending the report of Sir John J limpson, who has been sent out from London to report on "and and immigration. This report led to a well-justified ' nd world-wide Jewish protest, backed by a peaceful half- .!ay general strike of all Jews in Palestine. Two days lifter the original announcement Dr. Drummond Shiels, J undersecretary of the Colonial Office, hastily announced in Jihe House of Commons that there had been no general ^toppage of immigration and no final decision as to a ! |chedule covering the period ending September 30. Under 1 he mandate the Jews have the right of immigration and , iind settlement in accordance with the economic possibilities If the country, and they will have the hearty support of air-minded persons in insisting that their rights be respected o the letter by the mandatory Power, no matter what the Exigencies of imperial politics. We believe that it is the urpose of the British government to respect those rights. 'The economic and cultural achievements of Zionism have been a cheering feature of the post-war decade. The further development of this admirable program will un- doubtedly be one of the best ways of settling political differences between Arab and Jew. Dollar Books THE announcement, coming simultaneously from four reputable publishers, that they plan to publish books at half or less than half of the prices now current will probably be welcomed with hosannas by the book-buying public. Doubleday, Doran, Simon and Schuster, and Farrar and Rinehart promise new, full- length, and well-printed novels for $1 each. Coward- McCann will sell first novels for $1.50, thus relieving the alleged prejudice of booksellers against the work of an unknown author. Albert Boni will issue the Boni paper books at fifty cents each. It is, of course, plain that the book publishers, like everyone else engaged in business, have suffered from the trade depression that followed last year's market collapse. They have suffered simultaneously from the widely success- ful sale, mainly in chain drug-stores, of new, popular, and readable books at a dollar. Some publishers, shaking their heads, have called it the worst spring in history. Best sellers have languished ; moderate sellers have gathered dust on the shelves. The public, so the sad story goes, is not buying books. But the public, according to an official of the Doubleday, Doran firm, bought 60,000 copies of Star Dollar Books in one month at one drug-store in New York City. This would seem to indicate very plainly that if people will not, and perhaps cannot, buy books as luxuries at from $2 to $5, they can and will buy them in large quantities as necessaries for $1. Undoubtedly the book clubs, offering new books at bargain prices, have whetted the appetite of book buyers for more of the same. Is there any reason why a cur- rent novel should not be issued in paper covers at a dollar — or less? Is there any reason why persons of moderate means should pay $2.50 for a novel that they do not want to keep on their book shelves, but merely read for an evening's entertainment? In Europe paper books, attractive in format, have been published right along for a small sum. In England there is at least one flourishing sixpenny library. A very pretty price war is evidently to result from the new plan. Ten other publishers, among them Harpers, the Macmillan Company, G. P. Putnam's Sons, and E. P. Dutton and Company, have come out with a vigorous pro- test against the price cut as economically unsound. Books have not been costing too much, they say, and the procedure of issuing cheap reprints after a book's first popularity has waned is better business for publisher, bookseller, and author. The public, in this case, must be the final arbiter. If it buys dollar books in large quantities, unquestionably all publishers will be driven to the necessity of selling books at that price. As for the poor author, whose royalties are cut in half under the new plan, he cannot complain if his sales are doubled. For it is a sad fact that most authors are obliged to write, as Jane Austen said so neatly, "for fame and not for pecuniary emolument."

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640 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 Government by Abstention WE are still unable to recover from our astonish- ment at Secretary Stimson's revelation that Presi- dent Hoover gave no "specific instructions . . . either written or verbal" to those he sent to London to represent the United States at the Naval Dis- armament Conference. From another source, equally reliable, we learn that after the delegation sailed for England Mr. Hoover never communicated with Mr. Stimson and his associates by letter, telephone, or cablegram. He had selected what he considered a highly competent delegation and to them he intrusted the negotiations, so vital to President Hoover's own reputation and, what is vastly more important, so vital to the peace, prosperity, and happi- ness of the United States. Never did he seek to direct their negotiations, to voice his own views, to offer counsel or advice, approval or disapproval. Having appointed the com- mission he washed his hands of the whole matter, made it plain that he would accept whatever they brought back, and apparently even felt that if the delegates returned with empty hands, as appeared for weeks altogether likely, his policy of non-intervention would be entirely justified. This is what we call government by avoidance, or better, abstention. What Secretary Stimson regards as a virtue we, as we have previously set forth, consider as an amazing and an alarming shirking of a most solemn official duty. If this constitutes living up to the responsibilities of the Presidency then we do not know what those responsi- bilities can be. If this constitutes leadership then we have been for decades utterly mistaken in our definition of what constitutes leadership. This may be government after the manner of mining engineers, but by no stretch of imagina- tion can it be called statesmanship. It is well, indeed, to give confidence and freedom of action to one's representa- tives, whether in business or in diplomacy. But to send delegates forth without specific program or policy or pro- posal is as bad business as it is bad diplomacy. We cannot believe that any captain of industry would thus send his representatives to a negotiation for a merger or combination. We cannot see how the President of the United States is morally justified in turning over to others that duty to devote himself to the welfare of this Union to which he is pledged by the most solemn of oaths. Is it surprising that his delegates came back with nothing but a miserable com- promise which may yet cost this country a billion dollars in new warship construction? This attitude of President Hoover is the more extraordi- nary and the less understandable because of the record of this country at the Washington conference of 1921. Mr. Hoover knows that at its very opening Mr. Hughes elec- trified the gathering and insured a highly substantial achieve- ment by offering in his opening address a definite specific proposal, to the naming of the very ships involved. There was nothing left to chance here; there was no trusting to luck that at the eleventh hour something worth while might emerge — if anything came out at all. With this example before him — Mr. Hoover was in the audience when Secretary Hughes made his memorable address — how could he fail to profit by it and pattern after it? Not to do so was to shirk. Not to do so was to forget the statement signed by President Hoover and Prime Minister MacDonald on October 9 last in which they stated that the agreement then reached represented "a substantial contribution to the efforts universally made by all nations to gain securities of peace," and that it gave the unqualified promise that there would be unceasing effort to remove "as many differences as possible before the official and formal negotiations opened." How is this to be reconciled with the dispatching of delegates without a single suggestion of how to carry through the high hopes held out to the American and British people of an epoch-making reduction in the fleets? Against this interpretation of the American Presidency and what occupancy of the White House connotes, w< emphatically protest. That way lies not leadership but ex- : tremely dangerous weakness. If in so vital a matter th« President can give over his responsibilities to some delega- tion of minor officials, what would not Mr. Hoover do ir. a still graver situation involving even more directly th< issues of peace and war? But this policy of government by abstention seems to be inherent in Mr. Hoover's attitud( toward his office. His passion for appointing commission; • and groups to deal with any given problem was manifest it is true, when he was Secretary of Commerce. It was not dreamed that he would act similarly when investec with the highest office in the land. Yet this is precise^ what he has done. Whenever an emergency has arisen h< has appointed a commission and let it go at that. Is then a crash in Wall Street? Then call together the busi ness men, form them into various groups, and leave to then the formulating of measures to be taken and safeguards to : be devised to protect the country from a recurrence of thest dire happenings. Only in the case of the heavy unemploy ment has the President failed to utilize his favorite device I There government by abstention from responsibility has beer complete. Not a finger has the President lifted to deal witl this grave problem. No wonder that the Omaha World Herald declares that "confronted, unfortunately, by a sucl cession of crises, he has seemed to meet them sitting down He has provided no inspiration, sounded no bugle note Apathy has spread to his natural followers and with ill something of discouragement and apprehension." Or tha the Chicago Daily News declares it would be especiall; pleasing to the American people and a cause for rejoicini "should they discover that they had a fighting Quaker ii the White House. That discovery, if made, would be o material assistance to the President in rallying publi opinion. . . ." Or that the Sioux City Journal hopes tha "President Hoover will now emerge from his shell ant commence fighting." Or that that staunch Hooverite, tK Kansas City Star, hopes that the President will "swini around the circle" and explain "to the folks back home' what he has in mind and what he is trying to do. Thes are the plaintive appeals of warm friends. The truth i that government by abstention and avoidance leads only t< defeat and may lead to disaster.

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June 4, 1930] The Nation 641 Who Wants the Tariff? How Long, Labor? WHO wants the new tariff? Not the consumer, who is going to pay higher prices. Not the farmer, who has been buncoed again. Not the wage- ;arner, who will find in it no remedy for unemployment. >Jot the statesman, who finds it imperiling our relations with rther countries. Who, then, does want it? The business man, we are told, for he stands selfishly :o gain by it. But most of our business men will not gain 3y it, and plenty of them are saying so in no uncertain erms. Henry Ford calls on his friend Herbert Hoover to veto it in the interest of manufacturers as well as other :lasses. James D. Mooney, vice-president of the General ;VIotors Corporation, demands its defeat because it imperils pur foreign trade. General Motors sells 15 per cent of its rntire volume abroad, and Mr. Mooney declares that it . aces a drop of 60 per cent in foreign sales this year as corn- ered with last. The result of the New York World's poll Is only another indication that Mr. Mooney speaks for all ,he export manufacturers in attacking the bill. Their present concern is only too well founded. With exports during the first three months of 1930 down by £86,000,000, or more than 20 per cent, from 1929, we .Iready face a new Canadian tariff, put into effect on May 2, hat affects unfavorably $300,000,000 worth of our exports. ,rhe retaliatory French automobile tariff is a sorrowful .•resent fact. No fewer than thirty-three countries have for- earded protests against our new duties, and two representa- ives of foreign countries have recently taken the unusual ,ourse of calling attention in public addresses to the danger ,o trade relations involved in the present bill. Spain sells us ,30,000,000 worth of goods a year and buys twice that value rom us. Ambassador de Padilla puts the case in a nutshell: A small number of people here in the United States might e against the importation of cork, olive oil, and these other roducts, but a much larger number of people are looking forward to an increasing exportation of motor cars, films, otton, machinery, agricultural implements, and novelties.' I witzerland sells one-sixth of all her watches in our market, "he new duties mean a practical embargo on watches and I Jocks, to say nothing of the effect on cheese, embroideries, ,nd other Swiss products. How will Switzerland buy if ne cannot sell? Small wonder that the Manchester Guar- ian reports from Geneva "a violent reaction against Ameri- can goods," or that Minister Peter takes an unusual means •if calling attention to the possible dangers. Isaac F. Mar- osson scarcely exaggerates in calling our present tariff pro- ram "a pact of economic suicide." The business men in ur export industries do not want the new tariff. The demand for it, as far as there is any, comes from articular industries, sometimes particular establishments, diich for one reason or another want to be freed from Dreign competition. There is no evidence of any general iterest to be served by the bill; there is overwhelming evi- ence of general injury. It is only the political power of a Dmbination of special interests, skilfully managed by log- filing, that has carried the bill through to its passage. Even 'ennsylvania has already vetoed its principal author, Mr. irundy. Let Mr. Hoover veto the Grundy tariff. THE resignation of Sir Oswald Mosley from the MacDonald Government is a stiff blow at Mr. MacDonald's prestige — the hardest, on the whole, that the Labor Party has had to take. To be sure, the office of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster which Sir Oswald gave up is of minor political importance, and the refusal of the Labor members of the House of Commons by an overwhelming majority to approve a motion censuring the unemployment policy of the Government leaves Mr. MacDonald still in command. It is also true that the coun- try, with the last general election only a year behind it, is not anxious to have another, and that the Conservatives, the only party that might successfully contest the hold of Labor, are not at all eager to take over the responsibilities of gov- ernment just at this time. The fact remains, however, that there has been a breach in the Cabinet, and that one of Mr. MacDonald's most intimate associates has retired be- cause of a sharp difference with his chief over the question which dominates all other domestic issues. The stone of stumbling is unemployment. The particular proposals whose rejection by the Cabinet led to Sir Oswald's resignation do not seem, on the surface, to be very much more radical than some of the things to which the Labor Government is already committed. They contemplate, for the relief of unemployment, a large loan in aid of indus- trial reconstruction, pensions for workers at the age of sixty, a higher age limit for compulsory school attendance, national plans for road-building, and government control of the im- portation and price of wheat. With the exception of the latter item, the proposals appear to be in principle pretty much in accord with the program of public works, reorgani- zation or "rationalization" of industry, and unemployment benefits which the Commons have been debating for several months, and parts of which have already been put into opera- tion. The obvious inference to be drawn from the rejection of the proposals is that the Government, which has prom- ised much, is a good deal less sure than it once was of the soundness of its procedure, that what it has done has been disappointing, and that it is reluctant to go much farther until it can see more light. The Government may well feel baffled, for the difficul- ties are appalling. The number of unemployed in Great Britain has reached the alarming total of about 1,700,000, with the likelihood that it will reach 2,000,000 by the end of the year. Some 7,500,000 persons, or about one-sixth of the population, it is reported, are receiving direct govern- ment aid, in the form of pensions of various kinds, at an annual cost of about $815,000,000. What makes matters worse is that, notwithstanding this colossal expenditure, there is no relief in sight. Financially, the Government is pour- ing money into what seems like a bottomless pit. Unemployment, however, is not the only embarrass- ment. The Liberals, without whose support Mr. Mac- Donald would have only a narrow plurality in the Housf- of Commons, have virtually given notice that they must not be counted upon further unless they can be assured of reform in the electoral system, at the same time that the Independent Labor following, whose votes are necessary to

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642 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 give the Government a majority over the Conservatives, are arrayed aggressively in opposition. The Snowden budget, the main debate on which is just beginning, has already drawn a violent attack from the Conservatives, and the Senate committee hearings at Washington have furnished some formidable ammunition for the opponents of the Lon- don naval treaty. There are ominous rumblings and explo- sions in various parts of the Empire that are bound to have their repercussions in the Commons: a general election in Canada with tariff retaliation against the United States as a leading issue; resentment in Egypt at the flat refusal of the MacDonald Government to release British hold on the Sudan; a violent controversy in Malta involving British relations with the Vatican ; a startling vote in the South African Assembly declaring that approval of the recom- mendations of the Imperial Conference "must not be taken as derogating from the right of any member of the British Commonwealth to withdraw therefrom" ; and the distressing problem of India. Mr. MacDonald has promised, now that the naval conference is out of the way, to give more personal attention to unemployment. If he can show himself able to cope with that problem his success will count heavily in his favor with every other. If he fails there the days of his continuance in office are numbered. Obscenity in Court JOHN S. SUMNER and his redoubtable society no longer have things all their way — as was demonstrated a short time ago when the case which they had brought against Nathan Asch's novel "Pay Day" was dismissed in a magistrate's court. We were not especially concerned over the fate of that particular novel, but we are very much interested in the general principle involved, and we consider the brief which Morris L. Ernst submitted for the de- fendants to be the most significant summing up which we have ever seen of the law as it now stands. Mr. Ernst makes it clear that several of the recent victories won for freedom of expression have established precedents of great importance, and that the courts are gradually building up a liberal interpretation of the law which promises in time to assure a reasonable attitude on the part of judges toward contemporary literature. Mr. Ernst is, of course, concerned only with New York State, but he begins by saying: In recent years there has not been a single instance where a book generally accepted by the public, the press, literary critics, the reading public, and the community at large, and openly dealt with by the publishers and the book trade, was ultimately condemned by the courts. . . . This statement is fully borne out by such books as Gautier's "Mademoiselle de Maupin," the anonymous "Madeleine," the "Satyricon" of Petronius, Cabell's "Jurgen," "A Young Girl's Diary," Schnitzler's "Casa- nova's Homecoming," Bodenheim's "Replenishing Jessica," Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness," and the Dennett pamphlet. All of these publications were claimed to be obscene by Mr. Sumner. None of them was finally condemned by the courts. Moreover, the opinions which accompanied several of the decisions rendered in favor of these books defined the issue in a way which cannot but be very gratifying to those who hope to see the law aligned with enlightened opinion rather than with fanatics of Mr. Sumner's kind. In the first place, several opinions have established the fact that any work prosecuted in the courts must be considered as a whole. Thus, while Massachusetts permitted the citation of single words or sentences, one of the higher New York courts, in reversing the opinion of a lower tribunal, remarked : No work may be judged from a selection of such paragraphs alone. Printed by themselves they might, as a matter of law, come within the prohibition of the statute. So might a similar selection from Aristophanes, or Chaucer, or Boccaccio, or even from the Bible. The book, however, must be considered broadly as a whole. Nor is this opinion, important as it is, the only one of liberal character which has been established. The decision in favor of the defendants in the case of "Mademoiselle de Maupin" effectively disposes of the argument that a sub- ject matter, even that of sexual perversity, can be considered obscene per se, and still more significant is the tendency ex- hibited in several opinions to recognize the fact that the standard of decency is variable and determined rather by prevalent custom than by dogma. Mr. Ernst cites opinions which indicate an acceptance of this attitude. Thus in the case of the People v. Seltzer the court said: "Moral standards of thought are not of static . . . nature." In that of the United States v. Ken- nerly Judge Learned Hand remarked : If there be no abstract definition, such as I have suggested, should not the word "obscene" be allowed to indicate the present critical point in the compromise be- tween candor and shame at which the community may have arrived here and now? . . . Such words as these do not embalm the precise morals of an age or place; while they presuppose that some things will always be shocking to the public taste, the vague subject matter is left to the gradual development of general notions about what is decent. And in the same opinion Judge Hand, in commenting upon a previous decision given by another court in a different case, remarked further: I hope it is not improper for me to say that the rule laid down (i. e., in Regina v. Hicklin), however consonant . it may be with mid-Victorian morals, does not seem to me to answer to the understanding and morality of the present time, as conveyed by the words "obscene, lewd, or lascivi- ous." I question whether or not in the end men . . . will not believe that truth and beauty are too precious to society at large to be mutilated in the interests of those most likely to pervert them to base uses. Indeed, it seems hardly likely that we are even today so lukewarm in our interest in letters or serious discussion as to be content to reduce our treatment of sex to the standard of a child's library in the supposed interests of a salacious few. Laws against obscene literature will probably always remain on the statute books. Those interested in the free development of adult literature will consider themselves fortunate if such laws are interpreted to mean merely that the law may take action against those books which outrage the sensibilities of the enlightened opinion of the time.

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June 4, 1930] The Nation 643 It Seems to Heywood Broun THIS would be a rather late hour in which to express surprise at the intense bitterness which bigots mani- fest toward heretics. But I am somewhat surprised to find in many cases the same sort of all-embracing and dogmatic hate upon the part of the heretics. It is much more logical for a bigot to be bigoted than for a so-called freethinker. But even the atheists seem to have creeds, by- laws, and a leaning toward at least an intellectual inquisition. It is not unknown for them, too, to cry out, "Crucify him." And to be much more specific, I believe that there is a :ertain unscientific thoughtlessness in such rationalists as hop up and down and utter fierce cries whenever the super- natural is mentioned. In Russia, for instance, the leaders Df the Communist faith, which is the state religion, are in- rent upon stamping out all belief, or even interest, in the supernatural. And if press reports are to be believed (and .cry often they are not) the Russian leaders of education .vould take away all fairy stories from the rising generation. The association of religious myths with secular legends >eems to me sound enough. Both arise from the same instinct n man. Both belong inevitably in the life of man. To .■xtirpate them is to destroy some of the deepest roots of the nind, the very roots which go down far below the surface ind make contact with the living water. For what is a myth >r a miracle? I say that a miracle is something which has lot happened yet, but which will almost assuredly come to >ass within the existence of human kind. What man can :onceive, that man can achieve. Russia, which prides itself upon the manner in which it s bringing the latest and soundest scientific thought to all he masses, has studied rather ineptly the work of Dr. Freud. To be sure, Dr. Freud himself has written anti-religious reatises, but the great physician suffers under one vital landicap. It has never been his privilege to be psycho- nalyzed by Dr. Freud. Possibly he too has missed the sscntial importance of myth content in human thought. Man annot live by bread alone nor can he survive up to the limit f his best potentialities upon the precise information of aboratory science. That is not the whole of science. The requirements . f the scientific method must admit a great deal more. The :ientific process means no more than the close and careful xamination of data before the drawing of deductions. le would be a timid research man indeed who would aban- on all speculation on some phase of life simply because he id not possess apparatus intricate enough and sufficiently ' msitive to make his experiments thoroughgoing. "This I ave reason to believe" is just as much a scientific statement Is "This I can demonstrate." I think there is abundant proof that in man there does ■side the gift of prophecy. Always the dream comes first id after that the actuality. And so, although I would not link of maintaining that the whale swallowed Jonah, I •el quite certain that some day he will. I am not in the ast impressed by those higher critics of the Bible who as- mble excellent evidence to prove that no such person as 1 ?sus Christ ever lived. To me this seems irrelevant in the scheme of universal salvation. My faith is more deeply rooted than that of the fundamentalists. I feel that the mankind which can fashion the concept of an individual without flaw or blemish can, in its own good time, past or future, produce that very person. Never, to the best of my knowledge and belief, has the entire body of living human beings ever ardently desired a happening without that thing coming eventually to pass. "Hold on," you say, "how about heaven? How about that golden city with the pearly gates where joy is everlasting?" That I will admit is one of man's favorite concepts. It is an age-old myth. I have every confidence that it will come to pass. My rule will not break down on this. For, after all, what is the dream and the vision of heaven but the sym- bolic expression of the longing for Utopia? The slums will not be always with us, nor the pain of poverty and sickness. Even the wildest words of Revelation constitute no more than a blueprint of the kingdom, the state, to which man will eventually crawl after deep cogitation and much tribulation. Belief in the supernatural, myths, legends — these are the bootstraps by which man can and will pull himself up. To a surprising extent he has done so already. A realistic Arab in the days of Harun-al-Rashid might have said, "I will not have the mind of my little son distracted by fairy-tale rubbish about magic carpets upon which some prince might fly." That rational Arab would have overreached himself in barring this particular tale, for the first minstrel to tell it had already set his feet upon that road which finally ended in a bicycle shop in a Middle Western town. The myth- maker was the spiritual ancestor of the Wrights. We know now that the carpet can be made to fly if only it is attached to a gasoline motor. Legends and myths are not flimsy things to be blown away by the first puff of rationality, because behind each one there lies an idea. Nobody has ever found a stronger weapon. If I had my way I would remove the inscription v.-hich stands at Concord Bridge. If my memory serves me it says, "Here once the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world." That isn't quite fair to the farmers. It wasn't the shot which was heard round the world. It was the notion. We are told that in the next conflict poison gases can be dropped capable of destroying great cities, but it is always possible to get above the range of a gas or to seek shelter below its scope in underground vaults. You cannot fly above an idea or burrow down be- neath it. An idea will pierce through the walls of the thickest vault. And through the thickest skull. And so I say that it is unscientific to toss aside the aspirations of mankind which find their most eloquent ex- pression in the myths and legends of any people. Possibly William Tell never did shoot an apple from his son's head, but if enough people have heard the tale and been moved by it the thing takes on all the potency of a United Press nrws dispatch hot off the wires. In fact, with no offense to the United Press, rather more. Belief, like wine, is best when it has been mellowed into vintage standing by the processes of time. Heywood Broun

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644 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 Zionism Finds Itself* By WILLIAM ZUKERMAN London, May 12 BY some mysterious operation of the public mind British sympathy with the Jewish experiment in Palestine has increased since officialdom pronounced adverse judgment upon it. There is now, after the ap- pearance of the report of the Palestine Commission, a decidedly more favorable tone in the press, together with a profounder understanding of the Jewish cause, than there was immediately after the tragic events of last August. At that time the entire British press was either openly antagonistic or at best very lukewarm to the Jewish side of the question in Palestine. Britain was admittedly put out by what had happened, and was inclined on the whole to blame the Jews for the difficult position in which it found itself. Not only the Daily Mail, but also the Manchester Guardian and the better-class weeklies were unsympathetic. There was a note of sincerity expressive of the mood of the entire nation in the Rothermere propaganda cry "Get out of Palestine." There is a definite change now. The report of the Palestine Commission was received with an expression of pro-Jewish sympathy greater than anything ever heard be- fore in this country. The reception of the report was, in fact, the exact antithesis to the report itself. In most of the more serious weekly journals it caused an outburst of enthusiasm for Zionism which was nothing short of amazing in view of the previous coldness. Not only the Liberal press, but also the impartial Conservative journals are show- ing an increased appreciation of the Jewish achievements in Palestine and a better understanding of the Jewish point of view. A similar tone of friendliness is heard often now also in the House of Commons at the question period, which of late has come to be the favorite time for tilting between the pro-Jewish and the pro-Arab forces in Parliament. The latter have now organized a parliamentary committee for "justice in Palestine," and with the arrival in London of the delegation of the Palestine Arab Executive, including the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, they have considerably in- creased their activity both in Parliament and outside. For the Arab delegation has committed the unpardonable error of affiliating itself altogether with the most reactionary and imperialistic group in British politics. Its meetings are sponsored by the "National League," broadcast by the Morning Post and the Daily Mail, presided over by Lord Brentford (Joynson-Hicks of Arcos-raid fame), and at- tended by those lords and ladies who see treason in Mr. MacDonald's policy in Egypt and India, socialism in Mr. Snowden's budget, and Russian communism in the work of the Jewish pioneers in Palestine. It has thus destroyed whatever belief there may have existed in liberal quarters in England that the outbreak in Palestine had something to do with real grievances on the part of the Arab people, * This article was mailed before the British Secretary for the Colonies had returned his unfavorable reply to the Arab delegation, and before the Rritish High Commissioner fnr Palestine made the announcement tem- porarily imposing further restrictions on Jewish immigration. The changes noted in the article gain added importance in the light of these develop- ments.— Editor The Nation. I and that the present Arab delegation represents someone besides the effendis of the country. In consequence, the forces in the House of Commons are now so arrayed that on the Jewish side are lined up the liberal and progressive elements in British politics and on the Arab side the conservative. A factor which has largely contributed to molding this present mood toward Palestine is that through some un- known process operating upon social consciousness the country has somehow awakened now to the realization of the practical Jewish achievements in Palestine. What ten years of Jewish effort could not do, the few months which have elapsed since the August outbreak have achieved. Britain — and perhaps the rest of the world — seems suddenly to have realized that, apart from the interminable discus- sions about the Jewish national home and the incessant nagging about the Balfour Declaration, Zionists have in the last decade accomplished also a remarkable piece of con- structive work in Palestine. A hundred thousand men have been transplanted from the arid Ghettos into fruitful soil; a people economically sterile for centuries has become productive on the land as well as in industry; colonies have been built ; new industries developed ; cities established ; an ancient language revived ; and civilization in a derelict country has been furthered in ten years more than in genera- tions before. And all this has been achieved without govern- ment aid or any assistance from outside; merely by the will, persistence, and enthusiasm of a voluntary social movement. The world, it seems, did not expect this, or at least did not know of it. The events of last August and the Arab propa- ganda which followed them have succeeded in drawing the attention of the world to the fact that however much of a failure Zionism may be politically, it has justified itself constructively, economically, and culturally. Politically ! Zionism has failed, but practically it has been successful. From the economic point of view, the Jewish experiment in Palestine is without doubt one of the more hopeful con- structive efforts of the post-war period. This fact could not but awaken interest in England as soon as it became known through the publicity which the August tragedy provided. Anglo-Saxon respect for efficiency and success and for colonial work well done has been called into play, and this is doubtless one of the reasons for the greater de- gree of sympathy which British public opinion is mani festing now for Zionism. But there is yet one other reason, far more potent and of much greater significance, for it lies within Zionism it self. Close observers of the movement and of its leadership in London know that Zionism today is different from what it was last summer at the sixteenth Zionist Congress at Zurich. Internally, the movement has undergone what amounts to a revolution. There have been a break in its ideology and a decided change in its activity. The political aspects of Zionism have been obscured, and the constructive and practical sides strengthened. The intensely chauvinistic men from Poland with their wild talk of a Jewish majority and a Jewish state have been thoroughly discredited. The

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une 4, 1930] The Nation 645 act that even the most friendly non-Jewish liberal opinion hroughout the world could not altogether absolve certain spects of Zionism from partial responsibility for the 'alestine outbreak has had a sobering effect on the majority f Zionists. For the first time in their history, perhaps, ews found themselves at variance to some extent with the est liberal opinion of the world. At first it caused in Zionist quarters only pained surprise and deep resentment, "hat Jews should be even suspected of injustice to another ace! But after the pain and the resentment came a search- lg of heart which has now resulted in a complete discredit- lg of those views and tactics which led up to the un- :>rtunate Jewish demonstration on the eve of the August ragedy. This came out very clearly at the last session of the dministrative committee of the new Jewish Agency and le Zionist General Council held in London recently, "hese two bodies are the highest executive organs of the Zionist movement, and their sessions are almost tantamount ■> a Zionist Congress (they are indeed called the "Little Congress"). They control all Zionist activity in Palestine nd outside it, and they are really indicative of the mood f the movement. At this "Little Congress" politics were Imost completely eschewed, although the present political tuation is undoubtedly the most critical which Zionism has ad to face in the course of its existence. The interminable olitical debates which form the basis of Zionist congresses i ^ere conspicuously absent from the agenda. Instead, the eliberations were all concerned with practical problems of md purchase, land settlement, industrialization, and the Nations with the Arabs. The theory of a Jewish Majority in Palestine was thrown overboard by a resolution enouncing any "domination of Jews by Arabs as well as f Arabs by Jews." Although officially Zionism stands out gainst a parliament in Palestine, and there are no words :rong enough for Zionists to condemn Dr. Magnes's peace Sorts with the Arabs, nevertheless the "Little Congress" lent a good deal of its time in drafting definite plans for : mnicipal and parliamentary representation in Palestine dmittedly leading to the establishment of parliamentary ; ovemment in Palestine and in preparing schemes for bring- ig about closer relations between Jews and Arabs. The lotions introduced by the extremist group calling for the Dnvocation of a new congress and embodying their political emands to the mandatory Power for the delivery of the \ ill pound of political flesh promised by the Balfour Decla- ration were defeated by overwhelming majorities. More nportant still, the entire spirit of the gatherings was thoroughly hostile to the bombastic political talk which has een to the Arabs the most obnoxious part of Zionism. And the most significant feature of this new mood in § 'ionism is that it was not altogether imposed upon the 4'iovement from outside, by reason of the recent events. liese events helped to establish it, but they did not origi- f ate it. The struggle between the so-called "constructive" \ Zionism and "political" Zionism has been going on inside the 1 lionist ranks for over a generation. Whenever the political i utlook of Zionism darkened the "constructionists" gained ie ascendancy, and vice versa. Before the war Zionism 1 Kas definitely settling down into a practical colonization lovement, and the "politicians" were reduced to insignifi- tnce. The Balfour Declaration brought them out of their obscurity and bestowed upon them greater power than they had ever before held in Jewish social life. The more sober Zionists did not even then, in the heyday of political Zionism, give up their plan of the practical upbuilding of the country, for they realized then, too, that a mere government paper cannot transform an Arab country into a Jewish state. This has been the view especially of Jewish labor in Palestine, which has always remained completely indifferent to the political side of the Balfour Declaration. The Jewish middle class, on the other hand, especially those hailing from Poland, based all their hopes on the political concessions of the British government. Fortunately for Zionism, it is labor that has built and is building the Jewish Palestine and that has accomplished everything that the Jews now have to show in the country. The only attempt of the Polish-Jewish middle class to participate in the upbuilding ended in disastrous failure in 1926. So the point of view of the real builders of Palestine has largely prevailed in Zionism. By another stroke of good fortune, the leader of the movement, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, very early adopted the same constructive point of view as Palestine labor, and has stubbornly stuck to his guns in spite of the most bitter and vehement opposition coming from Eastern Europe. It was this point of view also that led to the creation of the new Jewish Agency last summer, which brought Zionism under the domination of the more practical and less politically minded American Jewry. The new body, which was the result of the combined efforts of Dr. Weiz- mann and the late Mr. Louis Marshall, represented the greatest victory of constructive, apolitical Zionism, as op- posed to the Zionism based on the Balfour Declaration. It was an effort to save Zionism from the dangerous morass of Eastern European extremist nationalism and political futility; it was also an attempt to forestall the tragedy which anyone following the trend of events in Palestine could have seen coming. Unfortunately, it did not come in time to avert the August outbreak. The Palestine riots broke out a few days after the formation of the new agency, but the bloodshed shaped the new body and its policy just as it doomed the old. Thus the recent tragedy in Palestine has not been in vain, at least for the Jews. It has helped them to find their balance in Palestine and to rediscover their traditional liberalism, which some of them had lost, probably for the first time in centuries. It has become clear even to the Jewish middle class of Poland that the Balfour Declaration is not an eleventh commandment, and that Jews cannot exchange their old moral law for a political one. Jews have again found their true selves in Palestine. If Zionism were a biangular problem based on an understanding between only the Jews and the British, its knottiest question would have been solved now and its future clear. For both the Jews and the British have now a better understanding of their position and their duties in Palestine and of each other than they ever had before. But Zionism is a triangular problem. The Arabs also are involved, and not before they too have found their balance and have been purged of their extreme nationalism is the future of Zionism secure. The significance of the present moment is that an important step has now been taken in that direction.

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646 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 The Press Today V. Standardizing the Daily By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD VARIOUS causes have contributed to that standardiza- tion of the American daily newspaper which is one of the most discouraging features of the press today. In the first place, your newspaperman is, as I have elsewhere pointed out, what the children call a "copy-cat." He watches his rivals and more distant contemporaries like a hawk. If any one of them hits upon a single new feature, be it comic strip, or picture page, or cross-word puzzle, or advice to the unhappily wed, all the rest of them follow suit. Original ideas are scarce and they are not copyrighted. Hence the rush to imitate. Especially is this true in the case of a suc- cessful daily. Immediately its success is assured everybody else similarly situated hastens to imitate type or make-up. Observe the New York dailies and see how they follow the Times in their first-page "stories." Take the case of the Herald Tribune. It has made great gains since it took over the Herald, affording a rare case of one newspaper really holding the bulk of the circula- tion which it acquired. It has now become an excellent news- paper, for which the credit goes primarily, it is believed, to the present managing editor, Arthur S. Draper, and the willingness of Mr. and Mrs. Reid to abandon the old narrow partisanship of the news pages. But when you come to analyze the Herald Tribune there is not a single original feature of importance. Its "Books" is a copy of — and an improvement upon — the Times' s book supplement ; the maga- zine sections and rotogravure supplements of the two papers are alike, and so are those devoted to athletics. The powers that be on the Herald Tribune decided to go after the Times on its own lines and they have profited thereby because that meant getting out a daily with lots of news in it — even to the printing of long speeches and cabled documents of impor- tance— but it did not involve the slightest originality save for the distinctive types and headlines used. The fact is that few of the present generation of jour- nalists set any store by beauty of type and appearance. That passed with the coming of mass production. Hearst hastened its demise with the screaming whole-page heads six inches deep of his flamboyant period of 1895-1900. That he would become quieter and more conservative was inevitable. But competitors and observers all over the country imitated him in order to increase sales. Today the headlines are everywhere approximately the same save for those fine old Southern dailies which have escaped the economic pressure and the competition which have gone so far to standardize the Northern and Western press. There are still exceptions in the North, like the Baltimore Suns, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Boston Transcript, but in the main the owners of the press have themselves decreed the drift toward standardi- zation. Professor Henry E. Birdsong, who teaches journal- ism in Temple University in Philadelphia, tells me that when his beginning students stumble upon the Enquirer or • This is the fifth in a series of articles on the American press. The sixth, on The Philadelphia Cabbage Patch, will appear in our issue of June 11. — Editor The Natioh. Transcript they are excited by what they consider these new departures. For many years the Philadelphia Record had its special size and typography. Two years ago it was taken over by a new owner and now it is practically impossible at a distance to tell whether one is looking at a copy of the Ledger or the Record. The latter's management sees no sales value in originality of type and make-up. I know of only one case in recent years in which a daily has deliberately chosen an original first-page make-up and attractive new typography — the New York Morning Tele- graph, which, as a sports daily, is out of the ordinary compe- tition. The most outstanding case of a newspaper which has kept its old and original format is the Cincinnati Enquirer, or En-quirer, as they call it out there. Its appearance has not been changed in forty or fifty years; it is the only paper left, as far as I know, which carries its one-column heads, sometimes ten lines deep. In its attention to local, suburban, and nearby communities it is almost unique, and it appears to have an amazing vitality and vigor. It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the standardization of our dailies resulting from the development of our great news services. That speaks for itself. It is the most normal and defensible of all the standardizing tendencies; indeed, it is as justifiable as it was inevitable. The 1,200 members of the Associated Press naturally carry exactly the same news, but as the lesser dailies become more prosperous the drift toward differentiation by means of special cablegrams and telegrams and exclusive correspondents at once sets in. As soon, however, as these special features become costly there is the inevitable temptation to syndicate them in turn. Today, when one travels through the country on a Sunday on a fast train and buys successively the Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, Indianapolis, Toledo, and St. Louis Sunday papers it is hardly possible to tell which city is rep- resented in a given mass of printed pages without carefully scanning the page headings. One finds the same "comics," the same Sunday magazines, the same special "features" in almost all of them and, of course, in most of them precisely the same Associated Press news. I have looked through the Sunday editions of nine big Eastern and Mid-Western papers and I found "Little Orphan Annie" in seven of them, and she doubtless graces hundreds of others. "The Gumps," I am sorry to say, are not so popular, as they appear only five times. I was shocked to find "Mutt and Jeff" in only three of them, and "the Katzenjammer Kids," once the leading American comic, in only two. A cursory examination of the Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, reveals twenty feature that have appeared in the other eight newspapers, and proba bly as many more have appeared in other Sunday issues noi included in this study. The special services of the New York Times, Herald Tribune, American, and the other New York dailies are as widely syndicated as possible. The trutr is that people, in or out of journalism, facing the sanr problems, having great economic stakes in the existing order

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June 4, 1930] The Nation 647 are bound to react in the same way if they do not happen to be infected by the germ of liberalism or radicalism. The newspaper profession has turned out to be a business and as a result there was bound to be a standardization of the men- tality of owners and editors which had its effect upon the editorial pages and the news pages, too. So we have a steady waning of the individualism of the daily, marked first by the disappearance of the great editor whose personality shone through its pages — men such as Watterson, Medill, the Bennetts, Godkin, Dana, Greeley, Raymond, Nelson — and then by the extinction of the typo- graphical originality. You could tell the Tribune of Horace Greeley, the Springfield Republican of the Bowleses, the old Boston Post, the Evening Post of Godkin, as far as you could see the format. They were distinctive institutions bearing the impress of owners and editors. Now they have nearly all yielded to the tremendous pressure every owner is under to increase circulation in order to get more adver- tising at higher rates, in order, in turn, to meet his steadily increasing costs. No wonder he turns to syndicates, to com- binations, or to special services. What more natural, too, than to make up your pages just like one of the New York dailies, with your editorial pages, "opposite-editorial" pages, society and sports pages in the same relative positions? The appearance of the tabloid is, of course, a variation from the old standardized type of daily, but it is significant that the tabloids themselves imitate one another with complete fidelity. In the sports pages above all others the opportunity for standardization is of the best. But here we have the offset that there is a tremendous thirst for the views of the distin- guished commentators on sports who are paid very large sala- ries and are bid for by rival dailies because they carry with them, as they migrate from one daily to another, a following of "fans" whose numbers run into the thousands. Read the leading dailies in the East and see how much alike their financial pages are. As for the editorial pages, standardiza- tion is at work there with a vengeance. The same "columnist" and the same editorial cartoons may appear in a dozen or many more dailies, and the same half-column of medical advice and the same personal gossip from Washing- ton. I have personally received as many as sixty clippings of an editorial commenting upon some words of mine from as many small dailies all over the Union — all of which had re- ceived the editorial from the same source and doubtless accepted its facts and comment, without subjecting them to any critical examination whatever. The Newspaper Enterprise Association, one of the leading syndicates of the country, sends out daily about five editorials. It is the be- lief of the managers that 80 to 90 per cent of the 800 to 900 newspapers they serve use one or more of these "canned" editorials a day. As for the syndicates, they play an ever-increasing role. Thus the Newspaper Enterprise Association, which is a Scripps-Howard organization, spends $2,225,000 annually on its service. Of this, $500,000 goes for pictures only, to obtain which quickly no expense is spared. Thus, to rush to New York a few photographs of the stranded German airplane which was the first to cross the Atlantic from east to west it hired a special train as well as airplanes — the mod- ern press photographer in his daring outranks the special cor- respondents of old. Sometimes it has spent $12,000 for a single picture; sometimes it hires a whole fleet of airplanes to distribute its photographs. This Association offers three kinds of service — the difference being in the quantity of mat- ter offered. It sells, besides editorial matter, foreign corre- spondence of the gossipy, "feature" variety, and letters from Washington, comics, radio, aviation, and other features. On the other hand, the North American Newspaper Alliance is most eager to let one know that its chief aim is to get away from standardization. It serves no chain of newspapers, only independent dailies, and but one in each city. It is not interested in factual, but in interpretative arti- cles. Most of its clients belong to the Associated Press and, like that organization, the Alliance is cooperative and non- profit-making. It is especially strong in financial and busi- ness articles, is distinctly dignified, believes itself "conserva- tively liberal," and also supplies "women matter," news of Hollywood (daily!), and is able to purchase such costly features as articles by H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw. It gives plenty of attention to sports, but offers no "comics." There is, of course, another side to syndication which, in all fairness, must be set forth. Without the syndicate small- town newspapers would be much duller and much less in- formed than they are. They could not print any news pic- tures; they could not broaden their pages; they could not have much — if any — news of New York, Washington, or other centers; their foreign features would probably almost disappear, except in so far as they were brought to them by the news associations. Some of the syndicated Washington and European correspondence is of genuine educational value. Most of the modern manufacturing inventions tend to standardize the dailies. In speaking of the new teletype- setter, which he is developing, Mr. Frank E. Gannett re- cently said: The teletypesetter automatically will make necessary greater care in the preparation of all copy. Our wire services will be compelled to edit their stuff better and will undoubtedly give newspapers a complete, carefully written story instead of bulletins, flashes, leads, subleads, kill-leads, and all the other corrections that now come to the telegraph editor in a jumbled fashion. The teletype- setter will, of course, work toward standardization. It will be necessary for newspapers that intend to go in a circuit to standardize their grammatical style, width of column, and the size of type used. It will also tend to standardize our news services. . . . Moreover a complete newspaper page has already been transmitted by radio from San Francisco to the General Electric Company laboratory in Schenectady. When this process is perfected I cannot see why the great Eastern and Mid-Western dailies cannot reproduce their issues on the Pacific Coast or anywhere else and put them on sale at once. This development, too, will make for standardization and for the further aggrandizement in wealth and influence of our most powerful and prosperous dailies. Indeed, in the Technological Review for December, 1929, John J. Row- lands goes so far as to predict a master newspaper, to be issued in New York and transmitted by wire and air to a thousand newspaper offices for immediate reissuing — which will certainly hasten the day of the control of public opinion by a few men or one master-capitalist. Whether this comes or not, there can be no doubt that standardization of the press will continue to increase as the years pass. :i. zSX.

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648 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 Will the President Listen? FINAL returns from The Nation's tariff poll indicate that the editors of every section of the country over- whelmingly reject the pending measure. As earlier reported, a majority of the New Englanders replying de- mand its veto, and more than three-fifths of the editors in the eight other leading industrial States. More than three- fifths of our answers from the Northern agricultural States, nearly two-thirds of those coming from the West, and more than seven-eighths of the Southern replies flatly call for a veto. More than three-fifths of the Western, two-thirds of the agricultural, and nine-tenths of the Southern editors ex- pect ultimate economic injury; while the proportions fore- seeing resultant international difficulties are even larger. Outside New England and the industrial States, we have divided the rest of the country for report purposes roughly into three great sections: (1) the Northern agri- cultural States, including Wisconsin and the States west of the Mississippi from Minnesota and North Dakota to Missouri and Kansas; (2) the South, covering the whole great area from Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Arkansas south, extending west to Oklahoma and Texas; (3) the West, covering the Mountain and Pacific States. The questions and the answers in these sections follow: 1. Will the pending bill, if enacted, raise the cost of living f Agricultural States : yes, 39 ; no, 8. South : yes, 78 ; no, 7. West: yes, 22; no, 4. 2. // so, does our manufacturing situation warrant the enactment of the pending bill? Agricultural States: yes, 11 ; no, 35. South: yes, 7; no, 78. West: yes, 10; no, 15. 3. Will the new tariff ultimately benefit or injure us economically? Agricultural States: benefit, 14; injure, 28. South: benefit, 8; injure, 79. West: benefit, 9; injure 16. 4. Will it improve or injure our international relations? Agricultural States: improve, 9; injure, 32. South: im- prove, 7; injure, 80. West: improve, 5; injure, 20. 5. Should the President sign or veto the bill? Agricultural States: sign, 18; veto, 29. South: sign, 10; veto, 74. West: sign, 9; veto, 16. The result of the poll in these States is simply to em- phasize the unpopularity of the measure as disclosed in the returns from New England and the industrial States. It is interesting to note that even in the Northern agricultural and Western States, where transatlantic affairs naturally command less attention than in the East, practically four- fifths of the editors answering our questionnaire believe that our international relations are likely to be made more diffi- cult by the new enactment. For purposes of convenient comparison we bring to- gether in the table below the outstanding results of the poll in all sections of the country. As the returns are arranged, the reader will find in the first column between each pair of double lines the number of replies favorable to the new bill, and in the second column the number unfavorable. It may be noted that the New England editors were not asked whether the manufacturing situation warranted enactment. Question will naturally and properly arise as to the representative character of these returns. The reader can judge for himself whether the questions asked were fair ones. The questionnaire was sent to the editors of all daily news- papers in the country having a circulation of more than 2,500. Replies were received from about 20 per cent of them, the proportion answering not varying strikingly in various sections of the country, except that the returns from the West, partly owing, no doubt, to slowness of returns from a greater distance, are proportionately much lower than from other sections. By an interesting coincidence, the num- ber of papers replying from the various sections is very closely proportioned to their population, New England and the Northern agricultural States being slightly overrepre- sented in the returns, the industrial States and the South underrepresented, the West almost exactly represented. As suggested last week, the returns probably give undue weight to the smaller papers, and in our judgment editors opposed to the new bill probably answered in larger proportion to their number than those favoring it. Taking all these considerations into account, the re- sults of this poll seem to us to constitute a repudiation of the Smoot-Hawley bill as surprising as it is overwhelming. The President cannot afford to ignore the warning. Summary of Returns in the Tariff Poll Section Number of returns Raise cost of living? Warranted by manufacturing situation? Economic result International result Sign or velo No Yes Yes No Benefit Injury Benefit Injury Sign Veto 25 117 50 88 26 1 22 8 5 4 16 84 39 81 22 33 11 7 10 68 35 78 15 5 38 14 8 9 13 69 28 79 16 1 6 9 7 5 17 75 32 80 20 6 40 18 10 9 1 Industrial 66 Northern Agricultural 29 South 74 West 16 Total 306 40 242 61 196 74 205 28 224 83 192

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June 4, 1930] The Nation 649 The Porcelain Sophia Andreyevna* A Letter of Leo Tolstoy [The original of this curious document is in the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow. It is here presented in English for the first time so far as is known. The first letter, which is unfinished, is in the handwriting of Sophia Andreyevna, the wife of Tolstoy. Then follows the letter, dated two days later, in Tolstoy's handwriting. Both are addressed to the sister of Tolstoy's wife, Tatiana Andreyevna Kusminskaja. At the time the letters were written Tolstoy and Sophia Andreyevna, who was sixteen years his junior, had been married six months.] (In the handwriting of Sophia Andreyevna Tolstoy) March 21, 1863 ARE you in low spirits, Tania? I have had no letters from you for ever so long and you know how I enjoy them. Neither has Leo had an answer from you to his half-made missive. For my part, I have not understood a word of it. (In the handwriting of Leo Tolstoy) March 23, 1863 She wrote this much and stopped because she could not go on. And do you know why, dear Tania? A very strange and unusual adventure has occurred to Sophia Andreyevna and me. You know yourself that she was always like the rest of us, made of flesh and blood which reacted as any- body else's. She breathed, felt warm, sometimes hot, could blow her nose (and pretty loudly, too). Especially was she able to articulate all her limbs and take different positions with her hands and feet. But to make a long story short, physically she was the same as the rest of us. Suddenly on March 21, 1863, at ten o'clock in the evening, there occurred this unusual event. Tania, I know you always loved her. (What your feeling will be now for her I cannot say.) I know your great interest in all that concerns me, your sound judgment in the serious matters we meet in life, and how tenderly you are attached to your parents. (Take care as you tell this to them.) I am writing to you all that happened that day. I rose early in the morning, took a long walk and a ride. That day we had both breakfast and dinner together and read together (she was still able to read). I was calm and happy. At ten o'clock I said good night to my aunt. Sonia was absolutely as she always was. She said she would follow me and I retired to my room and went to bed. Presently I heard her open the door, heard her breathe as she was un- dressing herself. I heard her come out from behind the screen and approach the bed. I opened my eyes and saw Sonia — not the same Sonia that both of us know, but Sonia in porcelain ! Made from the same porcelain stuff that your parents used to discuss ! Do you know those porcelain dolls with bare, cold shoulders and neck, with hands folded in •This document was first brought to the attention of The Nation by Mrs. Hattie Badanes, who tanslated it from the Russian newspaper Russkoye Sloro. The translation was submitted for verification to the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, which courteously made a second translation from the original letters. — Editor The Nation. front, with black, wavy hair, the paint worn off at the top of the head, and with prominent porcelain eyes also painted in black and rather too thick at the corners? The folds of the nightgown were likewise of stiff porcelain. Such was Sonia. I touched her hand — it was smooth, agreeable to touch, but cold like porcelain. I thought I was dreaming. I shook myself. But she was still standing mo- tionless before me. I said: "Are you made of porcelain?" Without opening her mouth (the mouth, rather pursed, with the lips painted in red, did not move) she answered: "Yes, I am porcelain. I felt a chill in my back." [Chill is added in Sophia Andreyevna's hand.] I looked at her feet. They were of porcelain (you can imagine how terror-stricken I was) attached to a piece of porcelain board, a sort of back- ground painted green like grass. Near her left foot at the back, a little higher than her knee, was a small porcelain column painted brown, meant to be the trunk of a tree, I suppose. All was of one piece. I understood that without that little column she wouldn't be able to stand up. And I felt dreadfully sad, as you may imagine, you who love her so much. And still I could not believe what with my eyes I saw. I uttered her name, called her, but she could not move away from the trunk and what was meant to be ground. She shook gently from side to side together with the piece of ground, as if seeking to lie down by my side. I heard the gentle knocking of the porcelain bottom on the floor. I touched her — she was smooth all over, agreeable, cold like a piece of porcelain. I tried to lift her hand. It was im- possible. I tried to push my finger between her elbow and her ribs, but it was impossible. The obstacle was a mass of porcelain like that made at Auerbach's from which gravy- boats are made. Everything was made only for external view. I examined the nightgown ; it was of one piece with the body. Looking more closely I saw that a fold of the nightgown was broken off. Inside it was brown. At the top of the head the paint was as though rubbed off, and there was a white spot. On one side of the lips the paint had worn off also, and a bit of shoulder was broken. But nevertheless all was so nice and so real that it looked like our former Sonia. The nightgown was the one I knew, trimmed with lace ; so was the knot of black hair at the back of her head, but it was of porcelain, and her dear slim arm"s, and her big eyes, and her lips, all looked real but were made of porcelain. So were the dimple in her chin and the small bones above her shoulders. I was in a dreadful state, not knowing what to do, what to say, what to think. She looked as if she would be glad to help me, but what could a porcelain being do? Her eyes were half-closed, her lashes and eyebrows looked lifelike from a distance. She did not look at me, but at the bed, as if she wished to lie down, and she kept shaking from side to side. I was entirely lost. I grabbed her and wanted to put her in my bed. My fingers did not press into her cold por- celain body and, what struck me more, she became as light

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650 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 as a little glass. And suddenly she became quite small, not bigger than the palm of my hand, yet looking exactly the same as before. I grabbed the pillow and stood it on one of its corners, crushed in with my fist the corner sticking upwards, laid her in it, and folding her nightcap in four, covered her up entirely. There she lay motionless — I put out the candle, placing it near me. Suddenly I heard her voice from the corner of the pillow: "Leva, why have I changed to porcelain?" I did not know what to answer. She spoke again: "Is it not bad that I've become porcelain?" Not wishing to pain her, I said it did not matter. And then in the darkness I touched her. She was still a cold porcelain doll. Her little belly was the same as if she were alive, but it became narrower toward the waist, which was not quite natural for a porcelain doll. I experienced a strange feeling. I felt pleased with her present state and ceased to wonder. It all seemed natural. I took her out of the pillow, passed her from one hand to the other, put her under my head. All this seemed to satisfy her. We both fell asleep. In the morning I woke up and went away, not even glancing at her. I still felt frightened at what had happened the previous night. When I came to lunch she was as she had always been. I did not remind her of the day before, fearing it would pain both her and my aunt. I have mentioned it to no one beside yourself. I thought it had all passed away, but every day, when we are alone, the same thing happens. She suddenly becomes little and like a porcelain doll. But when anyone is present she is her old self. She is not annoyed by it, neither am I, however strange it may seem. To speak frankly, I am glad, and in spite of her being a porcelain doll both of us are perfectly happy. I am writing all this to you, dear Tania, in order that your parents may be carefully informed about it and through your father inquiries may be made among medical men to know what this occurrence means and whether it may do harm to the baby which is expected. At this moment we are alone and she sits close to my shoulder and I feel her sharp little nose cutting into my neck. Yesterday she was alone in the room and when I came in I saw that Dora, our pet dog, had dragged her into the corner, playing with her, and was on the point of break- ing her. I gave the dog a spanking, put Sonia in my vest pocket, and carried her to my study. However, I ordered from Toula, and have received it today, a little box made of morocco leather with a clasp. It is lined inside with red velvet, just the place to put her in with her elbows, head, and back. This will prevent her from breaking. I covered her with a piece of chamois. While I was writing this letter a terrible misfortune occurred. She was standing on the table. Natalia Petrovna, an old woman living with us, pushed her as she passed. She fell off the table, and her leg broke above the little brown trunk it rested upon. Alexey, the clerk, says it may be fixed with white paint in powder and the white of an egg. Don't they know in Moscow of some paste? Send me some, please! Plots and Counterplots Projects of a Great Engineer Bv PAUL Y. ANDERSON Washington, May 24 THE first thing the observing visitor is likely to remark in Washington nowadays is the atmosphere of suspi- cion, distrust, and dread which pervades almost every department of the national government. Among officials of all ranks one encounters the same feeling of being watched and plotted against by secret enemies. The fear which emanates from the White House has spread over the capital. Under a President who sees in nearly every prominent member of his party a secret aspirant for the Presidential nomination in 1932 — and in every hint of opposition to his policies a con- spiracy to wreck his Administration — it is not strange that Cabinet members, Congressmen, chairmen of commissions, bureau chiefs, and secretaries are engaged in suspecting their subordinates and each other of equally dastardly designs. All sense of security has vanished. The air is oppressive with rumors of plots and counterplots. Senators' offices are en- tered at night, and their most intimate correspondence read by a visitor wearing cotton gloves. Important records are reported missing from government archives. Guards are in- creased, and doors that have been unlocked since the Civil War are barred for unexplained reasons. It is like living in a dime novel. When the Chief shivers everyone else shakes. PERHAPS this state of mind is responsible for the un- pleasant accusation of "double-crossing" which has been directed at the White House in connection with the recently announced candidacy of Representative Franklin Fort for the Republican Senatorial nomination in New Jersey. The charge originates with friends and admirers of Dwight Morrow. The gist of it is that Mr. Hoover, fearing that Morrow's fame and popularity were growing too rap- idly, either prompted or permitted Fort to file against him for the purpose of eliminating Morrow as a potential rival for the Presidential nomination two years hence. Certain facts contrive to give plausibility to the suggestion. Morrow enjoys the confidence of the business interests, and, more than any individual except Calvin himself, he personifies the "Coolidge prosperity" for which millions of business men pray night and morning and for the return of which they would gladly exchange a carload of Great Engineers. Added to this is the settled conviction existing among those who have noted the intimacy of Fort and Hoover that the New Jersey Congressman simply would not consider entering the race against Hoover's wishes. Whatever the motive, the event threatens to eliminate Morrow. If he divides the wet vote with ex-Senator Frelinghuysen, and Fort polls the full strength of the New Jersey drys, Fort is almost certain to

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June 4, 19303 The Nation 651 jvin in the primary — and to be defeated in the general elec- fion by the wet Democratic nominee, Alexander Simpson. Neither Fort nor Simpson would add anything to the Senate, whereas Morrow would add vastly to its sum total of in- telligence, courage, and sincerity. ***** ANY such addition to the Republican side of the cham- ber would be especially welcome now that "Puddler Jim" Davis seems assured of a seat from Pennsylvania. "Puddler Jim's" contribution will consist entirely of a bright smile, a hearty handshake, and one thoroughly dependable Old Guard vote. As one who remained uncon- vinced by "Holy Joe's" eleventh-hour crusade for progress and reform, I prefer the Big Moose: he lacks Grundy's power for evil. Assuming that the tariff bill will become a law, the lobbyist-Senator will retire with the distinction of having been the most expensive representative of the public, consid- ering his length of tenure, that ever entered either house of Congress. The greatest losers by his departure are Uncle Andrew Mellon and the Democratic Party. It is not that Uncle Andrew values "Holy Joe" so highly — although, of course, two more congenial souls never sailed under the black flag. The tragedy, from the Mellon standpoint, con- sists in the threatened loss of Senator David A. Reed, per- sonal and Senatorial representative of the Mellon family, the Mellon fortune, and the Mellon political machine. Pennsylvania political tradition and expediency allot one Senatorship to the eastern part of the State and one to the western. Davis and Reed are both from Pittsburgh, and it is almost inevitable that Philadelphia will have a candidate in the field against Reed when the 1932 primaries arrive. That candidate probably will be supported by doughty Bill Vare. The prospect is one which no patriotic multimillion- aire can contemplate without tears. The Democrats will miss Grundy as a political issue in the Congressional elec- tions this fall, but they may take comfort in the presence of Grundyism, which is almost as good, and which promises to remain with us for some time in the form of what historians may designate as the Grundy-Hoover tariff. ***** WHATEVER doubts lingered concerning the Ad- ministration's attitude toward that measure were about all dispelled by the determined methods that were employed in eliminating the debenture and Senate flexible provisions. If Hoover had wanted the bill to die with a minimum of embarrassment to himself he could easily have managed it so that the two provisions remained, thus producing a perpetual deadlock between the Senate and House. Instead, the Administration resorted to drastic meas- ures, reminiscent of those employed in the Parker fight, to round up sufficient votes to eliminate them. The factors which influenced the decision to jam the bill through appear to have been simple enough. It was felt that such an igno- minious conclusion to eighteen months of tariff labor would be "a fatal confession of failure." In the second place, the interests that will benefit from the increased rates are still determined to have them, and these interests, while few in number, remain the heaviest contributors to Republican cam- paign funds. Finally, it was realized that failure of the present bill undoubtedly would result in the introduction of a new one when the next Congress convened, thus prolong- ing the tariff wrangle to the very eve of the next Presidential election. Republican leaders are not blind to the political consequences that will ensue from the enactment of the Grundy rates, but they much prefer to face those conse- quences in 1930 rather than in 1932. The program, there- fore, is to rush the bill through, face the music this fall, and give the dear, absent-minded public two years in which to get accustomed to the higher cost of living. ***** OWEN J. ROBERTS was confirmed as Justice of the Supreme Court without a dissenting voice in the Senate, despite the efforts of certain Administration spokesmen to invite opposition. Day after day, through publicity avenues usually recognized as reflecting White House views, it was dinned into the Senate's ears that Roberts was a corporation lawyer, that his economic and social views were ultra-conservative, that he belonged to the Mellon school of thought, that he was infinitely more reac- tionary than either Hughes or Parker, and that failure of the Senate liberals to oppose his confirmation would consti- tute an abandonment of their principles. Every conceivable misstatement was made to goad them into a fight. This curi- ous campaign against the President's own nominee was ac- tuated by two motives, equally small and transparent. The first was to counteract the widespread (and correct) impres- sion that the Senate finally had compelled the President to name a decidedly liberal man for the court. The second was to torment the Senate Progressives into starting a fight in which they were certain to be beaten and partially discredited. The charming ruse failed because most of the Senate Pro- gressives were personally acquainted with Roberts and his views. Nevertheless, it furnishes an excellent illustration of the plane on which high affairs are being conducted here. ***** THE Senate Lobby Committee, after performing an astounding lot of good, has succeeded in appearing at its worst in its inquiry into organized activities for and against prohibition. Blaine of Wisconsin is the only wet on the committee, and he is not the most adroit cross- examiner in the world. Borah, Walsh, Robinson, and Chair- man Caraway are all bone dry, although, it should be added, Borah hasn't attended a meeting in months. It was bad enough when Walsh and Robinson, after subjecting Henry Curran, of the Association Opposed to the Prohibition Amendment, to the most prolonged and savage grilling, pro- ceeded then to exhibit their tender solicitude for Scott McBride of the Anti-Saloon League, notwithstanding his admission that he lobbied with members of the House when the impeachment of a federal judge was under considera- tion there. What is worse is the committee's refusal, thus far, to produce evidence which is available to them tending to disclose Bishop Cannon's disposition of the $48,000 which he received from E. C. Jameson for the Hoover campaign, and for which he never has accounted. The Senator prin- cipally responsible for this refusal, I regret to say, is the generally admirable Walsh of Montana. His excuse — that the proffered evidence would be irrelevant — is unimpressive, particularly in view of the committee's inquiry into Claudius Huston's financial adventures, in which inquiry Walsh took the leading part. Many a good Christian is hoping he will change his mind. For those who believe in punishment here as well as hereafter, the wily Bishop has been "getting awav with it" much too long.

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652 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 In the Driftway AT best politeness is not a major virtue; at worst it may easily be a minor vice. A good deal of the time ■ it is a kind of fawning ingratiation or strategic pol- icy, and sometimes it becomes downright hypocrisy or cow- ardice. In general any kind of politeness which is not innate or of the heart would better not be at all. That is why the Drifter counts among the lesser annoyances of modern life the parrot politeness which is imposed upon employees by an increasing number of corporate employers. Somebody has said that there is more talk about "service" and less of the thing itself in our day than ever before. And somewhat the same thing is true of politeness. In response to your blunt complaints your telephone company aggravates you doubly by a series of Chesterfieldian notes, none of which reaches the point at issue ; while your street railway accents its miserable service by a lot of blah about its devotion to your welfare. We have gone a step beyond the doctrine that "the customer is always right." Modern business insists that its employees shall efface their personality in dealing with the public and substitute a parrot politeness prescribed from headquarters. ***** THE elevator operator in the department store no longer says "Going up," "Going down," and "Fourth floor — carpets, furniture, upholstery, children's toys, groceries, and sporting goods." He says "Up, please" and "Out, please" and "Fourth floor, please." There is not the slightest reason for lugging in the word "please" in any of those connections, and for one the Drifter finds himself not pleased but mildly annoyed. He would prefer one of the saucy asides with which elevator operators once regaled their passengers. When a stout lady fifty feet down the aisle hails the elevator and then ambles leisurely toward it, stopping to glance at several counters of notions on the way, the modern department-store automaton merely repeats placidly: "Down, please; down, please." Once he would have relieved himself and his rest- less passengers by observing sotto voce: "I wonder if old Mother Widdle-Waddle thinks we're open until midnight. If she don't step along I'll leave her behind in linen goods, draperies, women's cloaks, and misses' underwear." ***** THE hotels, too, are exponents of the jargon of automa- ton politeness. The Drifter has had the experience of stopping in a good many hotels in various parts of the country lately and he has had occasion often to ask over the house telephone that he be called at a certain hour in the morning. With monotonous uniformity the response to his request has been, "Thank you." In some cases it has been "Thank you; good night." The Drifter has enjoyed that "Good night." Even if entirely perfunctory, and the result of immutable orders from the management, the wish has seemed to be kindly and relevant to the situation. But why in the name of Beelzebub should a hotel telephone operator thank a patron for a request to be called in the morning? As well thank him if he called down profanely to complain that the sheets on his bed hadn't been changed. Once the Drifter felt so strongly about it that after that pointless "Thank you" he took the receiver off the hook again and inquired : "Why do you thank me for asking to be called at six o'clock in the morning ? Do you get a commission on everybody you get out of bed at that time?" But of course the girl at the switchboard didn't get the Drifter's point — if there was one. She thought the Drifter had been drinking, and merely re- plied soothingly that he needn't worry; he would be called at six o'clock without fail. But fortunately this parrot phrase of "Thank you" is not quite invariable. It is a pleas- ure to recall that at the Cotton Hotel in Houston a request to be roused at a specified time brought back the response from the girl at the telephone, in the delightful accent of the South : "I sure wi-i-ll." And at the Arizona Hotel in Yuma the Drifter's request for an early-morning call brought back from the night clerk a laconic "You bet." There was something assuring in that. The Drifter dropped off into dreamland confident that he would not be allowed to over- sleep. The Drifter Correspondence Freedom of the Press in Korea [/« February of this year the editor of The Nation sent to Air. D. S. Chang, editor of the Dong Ah Ilbo, a daily news- paper in Seoul, Korea, a letter of greeting and congratulation on the occasion of the newspaper's tenth anniversary. Recently a letter was received from Mr. C. Hugh, president of the Korean Nationalist Weekly, published in New York, dis- closing the subsequent fate of the Dong Ah Ilbo. We print below the letter of congratulation and the letter received from Mr. Hugh.] Dear Mr. Chang: I am happy to send a word of greeting to the Dong Ah Ilbo on its tenth anniversary on the coming April 1. May I also extend to your paper on this tenth anniversary the heartiest greetings of The Nation, which since 1865 has been devoting itself to the liberties of minorities, the right of all peoples to their own way of life, and to opposition to imperialism from whatever source? In view of this I need hardly assure you of our interest in the causes championed by the distinguished newspaper which you represent. We have never faltered in our belief that the Koreans were entitled to their own independent existence, pre- cisely as we have violently opposed the imperialistic moves of our own country in Nicaragua, Haiti, and elsewhere. Fortu- nately for our peace of mind, we are entirely of the opinion that the era of imperialism by the so-called superior races is approaching its end. If India now throws off the shackles of English rule, enslaved people everywhere will be heartened to strike off their own shackles. We are even hopeful that the present American Congress will this year grant unconditional freedom to the Filipinos, something that we of The Nation have been asking for ever since our fleet sailed into Manila harbor on May 1, 1898. We are well aware that a great responsibility rests upon a paper such as yours under the conditions which at present surround it. The very fact that it is placed in a hard position means that it must be as upright as Caesar's wife; that it must be beyond criticism in every way, unselfish, broad-minded, clean, and determined to sacrifice everything for the causes which it champions. If it holds to a policy like this it cannot fail to win lasting fame, and to serve both its people and its causes with a maximum of efficiency. May I offer you a motto? In 1832 my grandfather, William Lloyd Garrison, founded a

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June 4, 1930] The Nation 653 newspaper, the Liberator, to which historians have attributed a large share of the credit for bringing about the freedom of the enslaved Africans in this country. In the very first issue of this paper he used these words which I commend to you : "I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — and I will be heard." In addi- tion he declared: "Our country is the world — our countrymen are mankind." His struggle was harder than yours, for he was poor, little trained, and had hardly a supporter, yet he lived to see the success of his apparently hopeless undertaking within exactly thirty-two years. I send you every good wish for yourself and your dis- tinguished journal. May you march triumphantly forward in your next decade, championing at all times, as you have, the great cause of democracy, peace among nations, and the estab- lishment of the true social democracy within all nations. New York, February 1 Oswald Garrison Villard Dear Mr. Villard: We want to inform you that Dong Ah Ilbo of Seoul, Korea, was suspended indefinitely on April 16, 1930, by the Japanese authorities. The cause of the suspension was the congratulatory message that you were so thoughtful as to send to the paper on its tenth anniversary. The Japanese authorities contend that the message was inciting and for that reason suspension was ordered not only for the issue in which the message had appeared but for an indefinite period. It is exceedingly unfortunate that the Korean people were denied the privilege of reading your message. We have no doubt that your message would have given them the moral sup- port which cannot be expected from other quarters during these times of unspeakable atrocities and inexcusable oppression by the Japanese authorities. New York, May 13 C. Hugh Mr. Carlisle on Government Ownership To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: To show that at least one of our colleges has the courage not to be hypocritical about dispensing public-utility propaganda, let me mention an address my loud speaker assures me was given this morning in the chapel of St. Lawrence Uni- versity at Canton, New York, and broadcast by the university's radio station. Although the speaker, Mr. Floyd L. Carlisle, was introduced simply as an outstanding friend of the "north country," second to none in its development, and founder of a chair of forestry at the college, Mr. Carlisle himself made no secret of being in the electric-power business with a firm whose name, if given, I didn't catch. Against the proposed government development of St. Lawrence and other water power, Mr. Carlisle lengthily cited the State's losses in building the Barge Canal, which he says it is now finding difficult even to give away. Pointing out that universities exist for the fearless dissemination of truth, he proceeded with a statistic or two exposing the unfortunately not-well-known inefficiency of the Ontario power system. If the State of New York, he said, would relieve his company of taxes it would sell power to households at one-half the Ontario price, although he mentioned that only 4r/i per cent of his company's electricity went to households. He also talked about the pity of trees going to ruin in the State's Adirondack Park without benefit of business. After the lecture a questioner asked what bearing the Barge Canal had on developing water power. Mr. Carlisle answered that since the State had thus failed in a proposition no sane business man would ever have undertaken, taxpayers ought to stop, look, and listen, and that the principle that the government should not engage in business is fundamental in Anglo-Saxon organization. If the latitude of this come-back seems to be about forty- three degrees north of the sequitur, don't blame it on a mere "Northern New York," April 24 Reporter Lord Ponsonby on Balfour To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: May I comment on the estimate of Arthur James Balfour, written by Lord Ponsonby for your issue of April 2. Speaking of his work in the field of philosophy, Ponsonby writes that in this "he was no more than an attractive ama- teur." It is interesting to contrast this estimate with another, writ- ten by a man who, I am confident, Lord Ponsonby himself would agree was a far better judge in this field of intellectual activity. When Balfour's "Foundations of Belief" appeared William James, in a letter to his brother Henry (dated April 26, 1895), wrote: I have been reading Balfour's "Foundations of Belief" with immense gusto. ... If I mistake not it will have a profound effect eventually, and it is a pleasure to see old England coming to the fore every time with some big stroke. There is more real philosophy in such a book than in fifty German ones of which the eminence consists in heaping up subtleties and technicalities about the sub- ject. ... B. is a great man. This letter is quoted in "Religion in the Philosophy of William James," by Professor J. S. Bixler, page 86. I call this fact to your readers' attention, because they will then understand that Ponsonby's conclusions in other fields must likewise not be taken too seriously. When he mentions "the Balfour policy for the settlement of Jews in Palestine" as one of those policies which in his judgment "are not achievements of sufficient magnitude long to be remem- bered," I am afraid that he displays the same keen sense of prophecy that he displayed in philosophic judgment. Brooklyn, May 1 Israel Herbert Levinthal Mooney and California To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The comments which occur in The Nation from time to time on the Mooney case make me wonder if there is not more interest in that case outside of California than within. If a poll were to be taken here I believe a large majority of opinions would fall into one of two classes: either (1) Mooney must be guilty, because he was convicted in a court of justice, and anybody who questions the result now is an undesirable citizen, if not actually in the pay of the Soviets; or (2) even if Mooney did not commit the crime for which he was convicted he was an undesirable agitator, and it is just as well to have him out of the way. I do not believe that even labor would make any sacri- fice or take any risk for Mooney. Meanwhile, it is reported that Governor Young is to be a candidate for reelection, which sounds bad for Mooney, for the Governor is certainly aware that the political career of anybody who pardons Mooney is closed. San Francisco, April 10 Irving F. Morrow

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Books and Drama Portent By HAL SAUNDERS WHITE Weeds by the barn grow greener every day. Something is here. Silver field-mice run Panting among the stalks at covering noon Or crouch with quick sides by the purple stems When the broad sun is lifted from the day. At dusk there is no wind to move a leaf. Oh, anything may happen in the world . . . The field-mice know, who see the seedling moon, A youngling, silver-waxen shoot Grow in her garden towards astounding bloom. This Petty Pace Brief Candles. Stories by Aldous Huxley. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. AFTER half a dozen volumes Aldous Huxley has returned to the short story, but he does not bring his old irre- sponsibility with him. He has acquired a Message, and he insists that we shall hear it. It is the same message that raised its head in nearly every one of the essays in "Do What You Will," to wit, that if one tries to be superhuman one ends by being subhuman, that the best way of turning a child into a devil is to try to bring it up as an angel. Against the ideal of superhumanness he pleads for the ideal of perfected humanity. Mr. Huxley's, in other words, is just another brand of humanism. But it is at the farthest pole from Bab- bittean humanism, for instead of moderation Mr. Huxley be- lieves in excess, provided that one excess is counterbalanced by another, and instead of believing in the will to refrain and the middle level he holds (I am here assuming that one of his characters speaks for him) that a human being should "com- pletely and intensely live ... on every plane of existence." There is no need here to examine this philosophy in detail. It is enough to say that Mr. Huxley, in talking of subhuman, human, and superhuman levels, is making as dubious a division as the Babbittean humanists when they talk of man living on three "planes," the natural, human, and religious. For every "plane" on which a human being lives is necessarily a human plane, just as every action he takes is at bottom a nat- ural action. It would not occur to our literary philosophers to divide the actions of a dog into subdoggy, doggy, and super- doggy; it is only when we come to our own race that we con- sider it necessary to have something fancy in the way of meta- physics. The use of the words "human" and "natural" in so many different senses, each sense carrying within itself its pe- culiar shade of approval or disapproval, is bound to produce murky thinking and silly conclusions. It is much wiser to ask simply whether a given action or ideal is desirable or unde- sirable, regardless of what "plane" one may think it on. That three of the present four stories are written at least in part to support a thesis does not in itself make them any the less amusing. Most satire gains its effect through the very fact that it it written to support a thesis, or to ridicule some- one else's thesis, e.g., "Candide." When Mr. Huxley mars his work he does so not by having a thesis, but by illustrating his thesis too often through explicit statement rather than indi- rectly through the story itself. In the present volume he has been content sometimes to allow the story to remain secondary. In The Claxtons, for example, he does little more than deride a certain type of "spirituality" and the products for which it is responsible. How beautifully the Claxtons live, how spiritu- ally! Even the cat is a vegetarian. There is Herbert, "long- legged and knickerbockered, his fair beard like a windy explo- sion round his face," who carries a Rucksack even in London as though he were just about to ascend Mont Blanc. When the street boys yell or the flappers whoop with laughter, Her- bert ignores them, or else smiles through his beard "forgivingly and with a rather studied humorousness." His wife, Martha, is also spiritual; and she too can smile a beautifully Christian — yet superior — smile. The Claxtons is less a story than a portrait or a travesty of a type, but it is magnificently done, a merciless exposure of the self-consciously uplifted. In The Rest Cure, which comes nearest to the orthodox story, a young English woman rents a villa near Florence and enjoys a mild flirtation with a local Italian; her husband, visiting her for a few days, warns her so brutally against the man that in defiance she gives herself to him; he extorts money from her and quickly tires of her, and the story ends ironically when she shoots herself for the wrong reason. The last and most important story, occupying half of the book, After the Fireworks, describes what begins as a charming but ends as a sordid affair between a novelist of fifty and a girl admirer of twenty-one. By once more making his hero a novelist Mr. Huxley finds free scope for that brilliant talk, those little essays and excursions into philosophy, the wit and brilliant description, as well as the cynicism, that have always distinguished his work; and he writes, too, a story of great psychological pene- tration. The diary of the girl, however, leans too heavily in its syntax on "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," while the comments are a little too intelligent to make that style altogether credible. Henry Hazlitt How to Become President Rutherford B. Hayes. By H. J. Eckenrode. Assisted by Pocahontas Wilson Wight. Dodd, Mead and Company. $5. THIS new life of Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States from 1877 to 1881, is the first of a pro- jected series on American Political Leaders. It is a book which all statesmen will want to read. (I suspect that those who are fortunate enough to live their adult lives in Ohio, New York, or New Jersey and who therefore can aspire to be President will also look eagerly forward to the promised biog- raphies of Garfield, Harrison, McKinley, Cleveland, and Taft.) For Hayes's life gives a satisfactory answer to that ever tantaliz- ing query: how can a mediocre man, endowed with no natural talents, small intellect, unable or dreading to possess convictions — how can such a person become President of the United States? Reading Mr. Eckenrode's new book one sees how easy it is. The future President will study law and will practice it. (Not too successfully, however, for the stigma of "corporation lawyer" will be too deep ever to eradicate.) He will, at an early age, become a party worker and hold a succession of small local offices. {Vide Hayes, Cleveland, Roosevelt, Taft, and Coolidge.) He will serve in a war and return with hon- orable wounds, if possible. (Hayes and Harrison were mus- tered out as brigadier generals; McKinley was a major; Roosevelt and Bryan were colonels.) He will espouse a cause that has a well-organized following. (With Hayes it was tem- perance; with Harrison, justice to the Civil War veterans; with Cleveland, reform.) By holding one's mouth or saying only the most obvious things, by being a bitter partisan in elec-

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June 4, 1930] The Nation 655 tion contests, by voting the party program whether it be the tariff or the resumption of specie payments, or a big navy, or imperialism, by swallowing one's words if one has to (as Gar- field did about the tariff or McKinley about silver), by enter- taining no economic heresies, by leading an impeccable private existence, and by the possession of a proper wife, preferably one identified with a philanthropy — thus covered in and out with a hard, shiny varnish, one may attain that final goal. It is simply a matter of time and the breaks. It should be noted that Mr. Eckenrode knows all this and says a good part of it; it is refreshing to record, too, that this initial volume does not inaugurate a new American Statesmen series of pompous stuffed shirts. Mr. Eckenrode is not im- pressed by his hero's intellectual capacities, his early political record, his willingness to play shabby politics. Mr. Eckenrode tells the tales that have to be told: of how Hayes became a temperance worker because political capital could be made out of the association; of how he voted, without a murmur, the shameful Reconstruction program of Stevens when he sat in the Congress of 1865-67; of how he waved the bloody shirt in the Presidential elections of 1868 and 1872; of how he catered to war veterans, protectionists, and the "sound-money" men in the face of appallingly hard times, when the farmers and the workingmen of the nation were bitterly oppressed. Yet I have used the word "hero" advisedly; for Hayes is a hero to his biographer. A single passage from this book will suf- fice to throw into relief Mr. Eckenrode's political philosophy: The life of Hayes should teach us optimism and hope for the future of the Republic ... A plain, shrewd, capa- ble, honest business man did much better [than Grant] — did so well that the country was put in the right path again. That should teach us not to be disheartened by the failures of brilliancy but to put our destiny in coming crises in the hands of other plain men — American busi- ness men who blend practical ability with idealism, just as Hayes did. Hayes was, in a way, an average man, but what an average it was! The future of the nation is safe if it continues to breed men like Rutherford B. Hayes. Thus we extol our politicians for their mediocrity, their cau- tion, their timidity. Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, Cleveland, Mc- Kinley: these are our great men. Under their rules the country's natural resources were exploited, a privileged class was built up behind mighty tariff walls, the farming class of the nation was ruined, industrialists were permitted to flood the factory towns of the land with contract labor to depress farther the already mean standards of living of the American laboring population. Never once in the whole long, bleak period in our political annals from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century do we find enunciated one political principle of the smallest importance: not a single policy de- fined with regard to immigration, agriculture, conservation, the rights of the workingman, imperialism. Timidity in our statescraft is greatness but daring in our industrial life — ah, that is greatness, too. It is astounding to contemplate this contradiction in our American life in the post- Civil War era: Hayes, Garfield, Cleveland, and McKinley moved in the same world, knew of, spoke to, were familiar with Carnegie, Frick, Armour, Rockefeller, Hill, Harriman, and Morgan. The antecedents, education, external habits of both groups were largely the same. The politicians were what they were; the industrialists were imaginative, enterprising, bold individuals who built railroads into wildernesses (as Hill did), who linked coal mines, coke ovens, iron deposits, blast furnaces, and rolling mills together to form a mighty industry (as Carnegie did), who dreamed the dreams and had the visions of empire and of greatness. Some day a future Henry Adams will tell us how two persons like Hayes and Rockefeller could both come out of Ohio in the years that followed 1865. Mr. Eckenrode calls Hayes the "statesman of reunion." He it was who healed the wounds of war, bound North and South together, ushered in our America of today. Might one dissent? I submit that Morgan and Harriman, to take but two examples, accomplished a thousand times as much. Mor- gan, in the nineties, created the Southern Railway Company; Harriman, at the end of the century, joined the Central of Georgia Railway with the Illinois Central system. The South was now united by bands of steel with North, East, and West. When magazines and books published in New York and Phila- delphia reached Southern tables as quickly as they did those of the Middle West, when the clothes and house furnishings of New York, Chicago, and Cleveland adorned the persons and the homes of the inhabitants of Atlanta, Shreveport, and Mo- bile, only then did the South become an integral part of Ameri- can life. Hayes's removal of federal troops from Charleston and New Orleans in 1877 did not do it. In fact, as Mr. Eck- enrode himself points out, white supremacy had been achieved in all the Southern States except Louisiana and South Caro- lina before Hayes's coming to office. But the penetration of Northern capital into the South and the standardization of taste and the ordinary round of daily living — these, and not political gestures, healed the wounds of war. I would respectfully suggest to Mr. Allan Nevins, the editor of this new series, that the stories of half a dozen of the railroad, oil, steel, and financial giants of the period he is covering would help this generation to a full understanding of modern America better than any number of carefully written, completely documented biographies of unimportant and forgot- ten "statesmen." Louis M. Hacker A Minor Bard Thomas Holley Chivers: Friend of Poe. By S. Foster Damon. Harper and Brothers. $5. THE lives of unimportant persons are not infrequently investigated with an insane assiduity by the pure scholar, but it is not often that a litterateur as obscure as Chivers is rewarded with a biography like the present, in which scholarly knowledge is combined with first-rate critical writing. Most of those who remember Chivers at all remem- ber only that he was a friend of Poe, and, perhaps, that Swinburne greeted Bayard Taylor with the ambiguous excla- mation, "Oh, Chivers, Chivers! If you know Chivers give me your hand"; but Mr. Damon has made of him both a notable addition to the company of eccentrics and a symbol of an epi- sode in the development of American culture. Chivers was born near the town of Washington, Georgia, in the annus mirabilis 1809. He took a degree in medicine at a backwoods college, and he spent the rest of his life in wan- dering about the United States while composing poetry most obviously remarkable for the original character of its badness. He was copious, undisciplined, bold, and ardent. He could reach sublime depths of absurdity, as he did in an elegy ad- dressed to his daughter, in which he wrote: As an egg, when broken, never Can be mended, but must ever Be the same crushed egg forever — So shall this dark heart of mine! But occasionally he achieved something which was almost good, and he had a passion for pure sound in which Mr. Damon finds an anticipation of the cult of "pure poetry." Perhaps he influenced Poe (who was accused of plagiarizing from him), and he almost certainly helped Swinburne discover the Swin- burnian rhythm, but the most interesting thing about him is the extent to which his culture typified that of the nascent in-

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656 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 telligentsia of America. He had begun as a Baptist, and he retained to the end a fondness for angels, harps, and the other conventional images of naive Christianity, but he subsequently reinterpreted them in accordance with both spiritualistic and transcendental ideas, and he was so thoroughly a child of his time that he sympathized with all the extravagances which were the product of America's endeavor to find herself. Indeed, the most interesting portions of Mr. Damon's book are those chapters in which he analyzes Olivers in con- nection with the tendencies and tastes of his generation and defines the school to which he as well as Poe belonged, dis- covering in Chivers's verse pure examples both of the rococo which flourished in the days when languid maidens drooped to the music of song birds and of the products of that passion for psychology which extended from Jonathan Edwards through Charles Broclcden Brown to Poe, Hawthorne, and Henry James. The individual genius of the great writers obscures somewhat the significance which they have as illustrations of the Zeitgeist, but Chivers had just talent enough to be typical. Mr. Damon uses him chiefly as a specimen, and he succeeds by that means in illuminating the minds and fancies of a whole generation. No one interested in the history of the American temperament should miss his book. Joseph Wood Krutch Amy Lowell as Critic Again Poetry and Poets. By Amy Lowell. Houghton Mifflin Com- pany. $2.25. WHATEVER one may think of Amy Lowell as a poet, one has to grant her a keen critical mind. She was a propagandist, of course, and she had her favorites among the poets, but no desire to defend schools or persons blinded her to the exact qualities a poet might have. Her criticism is not synthetic nor has it any general theory of aesthetics behind it; it is simply a poet's intuitional grasp of what other poets are attempting, and such penetration is always worth studying. This book of posthumous essays, for the most part long reviews of books published during the months preceding her death, is very interesting. It is a clear indica- tion that Miss Lowell's mind was alert to some of the new developments in poetry just when the tide was sweeping away from her own generation's values and on toward new values. Amy Lowell believed in her own type of free verse, but she saw the faults of much of the free verse being written; she saw that the time had come when the younger poets must take very seriously the technique of their art — when they could no longer sing in any form whatsoever of anything and every- thing. She did not realize probably that such emphasis upon technique would lead to a tightening of form and an emphasis upon pattern which would destroy the free-verse school. She approved of and participated in the imagist school, but she saw how easily it could lead away from human emotion and toward the mere trick of word painting. She did not realize that the younger poets, having learned what they could from the imagists, were developing conceptual imaginations which would never be satisfied with the imagist technique. She was a good fighter, and she upheld D. H. Lawrence against criticism both of his art and of his morality. She pointed out that the Georgian poets were a very sleepy lot and very wearisome to read. She saw Sandburg's danger in his desire to write propaganda, and she noted Robinson's love of the melodramatic, the last trait most critics of that remote poet would have thought to mention, and yet one of his most characteristic. In other words, Amy Lowell was of her genera- tion completely, and yet anyone reading these essays cannot but believe that had she lived she would have begun analyzing and fighting for new causes, would have kept step with the times fairly well, and would have attempted to understand the younger poets and their very different ideals. What she would have made of the trend toward classicism, restraint, simplicity of subject, religious conviction of vision, it is hard to say; but most assuredly she would have had her opinions. Eda Lou Walton Biology and the Humanities Human History. By G. Elliot Smith. W. W. Norton and Company. $5. THIS book, the author tells us, "has been written in a scientific laboratory where the principal device for the Study of Mankind is the process of dissection." The vantage-ground is significant not because Dr. Smith is a dis- tinguished anatomist, but because of his belief that the only true. history of mankind is that which combines biology with the humanities, the physical development of the race with its intellectual and social activities. His book, accordingly, is a study, popular in style but learned in substance, of the physical beginnings of the race and of the early civilizations which were attained in Egypt and Greece. We are shown the "natural man," untouched as yet by culture, chiefly preoccupied with the effort to understand himself as a living being and to pene- trate the mysteries of life and death. Prominent in the picture is the mummy, prepared by a dissector who, with "a much more ambitious aim than the mere preservation of a corpse," had "persuaded himself that in making a mummy he was ac- tually prolonging the existence of the body so that it might be reanimated as a living being." Around the mummy Dr. Smith sees created architecture, sculpture, music, dancing, and other "essential arts and crafts," together with "the deepest aspirations of the human spirit." It was only after hundreds of thousands of years that man "began to devise civilization" and thereby "became entangled in the meshes of the theory of the state," from which entanglement he was rescued by the Greeks, who "cut the Gordian knot" and restored to human reason "the freedom it had lost." Since then "human history has been a conflict between the rationalism of Hellas and the superstition of Egypt." As an attempt to unify biological and cultural history the book is certainly notable. William MacDonald King of the Armament Racket The Mystery Man of Europe: Sir Basil Zaharoff. By Richard Lewinsohn. J. B. Lippincott Company. $3. FOR half a century Sir Basil Zaharoff, to the uninformed public a figure of mysterious splendor, has been known among the war-mongers of Europe as chief bagman of Mars. He has been a master-vendor of armament applying all the tricks of salesmanship on a grand scale, by contact and in- trigue and deft expenditure making ministers and governments armament-minded and war-minded. When his market has been slack his agents have stimulated trade by subtly promoting in- ternational hatreds and fears. The rewards for these eminent social services have been ample. Sir Basil, now an aged gentle- man in a wheel-chair, is said to be one of the richest men in the world. He has received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor and the Grand Cross of the Order of the British Em- pire, and he has many similar trinkets from lesser governments which were also lavish with gratitude and cannon fodder.

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June 4, 1930] The Nation 657 Sir Basil was born in Anatolia of Greek parents and grew up in Constantinople and Athens. His early adult career, at least in the narrative of Dr. Lewinsohn, was obscure and ap- parently dubious. At the age of twenty-eight, in 1877, he was appointed agent for the Balkans for the Anglo-Swedish arma- ment firm of Nordenfeldt. Business prospects were excellent. The Russian Czar was engaged in "liberating" his Slavic brethren in the south from the Turk, and the Balkan peninsula was aflame. From the first young Zaharoff showed a peculiar aptitude for making the most of his opportunity. Though peace was declared in 1878, by 1880 the army of Greece had increased from 40,000 to 100,000 men. Zaharoff got a full share of the business of outfitting this host and won the com- mendation of his employers. In the eighties the advent of the quick-firing gun gave a great fillip to the armament industry. Zaharoff was quick to see the possibilities of the new weapon. He brought Norden- feldt in touch with Hiram Maxim and the two combined forces. When they split a few years later Zaharoff went with Maxim. The Maxim firm was purchased in 1897 by the great British concern of Vickers' Sons and Company, and Zaharoff entered on a much broader field of operations. Members of the British government and of the aristocracy were among the prominent shareholders and directors, and the highly placed gentlemen who enjoyed generous dividends neglected no opportunity for patri- otic propaganda in favor of ample preparedness. In England the armament racketeers and their confederates lied about Ger- man preparedness and in Germany they lied about British plans. Among the little nations bribery was the handmaiden of men- dacity. After some years of this intensive salesmanship, inter- spersed with several fat little wars, the arms-laden governments sprang at each other's throats. The year 1914 arrived and with it the "great time." Zaharoff was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor by the French government on the day that Jean Jaures was assassinated in Paris. "As the representative of Vickers, Zaharoff was the confidant of Lloyd George, the Minister of Munitions, and these personal relations continued when the latter became Prime Minister. In Paris also Zaharoff obtained access to government circles. He came in contact with the Prime Minister, Viviani, with Briand, and Painleve." The international armament-makers won the war from the first gun. The gigantic dog fight was their free-for-all. However, the aftermath of the ill-starred Greek invasion of Asia Minor seems to have been more or less a private venture instigated by Sir Basil and his old comrade Lloyd George. Sir Basil had -started his career by getting Greece into a post- script war after the peace of 1878 and apparently this same' technique was followed forty years later. Dr. Lewinsohn inti- mates that the Greek invasion was only an opening move of an ambitious business plan, that perhaps Sir Basil "was carrying the torch of war to the whole Mohammedan world." Even leaving that out of consideration, in his private war for Ana- tolia Zaharoff played for huge stakes. Had he won he would have controlled great shipyards on the Bosporus and held a rich claim in the Eastern oil fields. The failure of this enter- prise is said to have cost him half his fortune. Dr. Lewinsohn's biography is hardly a complete picture. Mysteries remain about the mystery man and about the curious relations of his business with the rulers of nations. By the thoughtful reader, however, much illumination can be gained from this narrative. One cannot fail to wonder how a society pretending to civilization can permit powerful private organi- zations to maintain a vested interest in war. It seems a too dangerous kind of special privilege to pass without curtailment. Before the war, Dr. Lewinsohn tells us, Armstrong, the great- est British armament firm, had among its most prominent shareholders sixty members of the aristocracy, eight members of Parliament, and five bishops. Possibly that helps to explain the persistent silence of the press, the pulpit, and the forum about the business that draws dividends from mass murder. Per- haps it helps to explain why the League of Nations, which is so voluble on minor pieties, does nothing to face the inter- national shame of the armament racket. Harold Kellock Books in Brief Rogue Herries. By Hugh Walpole. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. Mr. Walpole's latest is a long novel oddly compounded of historical characters and events, various branches of an imagi- nary eighteenth-century English family, and, in greater detail, one offshoot of that family — a rogue. That is to say, he is called a rogue; but he is a sad disappointment. The volume has such a full-bodied look about it that one might well hope for a fine, hearty English novel in the tradition of Fielding and Thackeray with, for a rogue, one of those gentleman rascals that have come down to us from the earliest days of the picaresque novel. But one would be sorely let down. Rogue Herries in spite of his eighteenth-century clothes is a child of the romantic revolution. He is a brooding, Byronic, even Werther-like soul, who in middle life finds salvation through love of a gipsy, red-haired waif, and through his arduous but unsuccessful efforts at tilling the soil with his own hands. Although — to speak in symbols — he wears a scarlet "R" beneath his waistcoat, his title of "rogue" comes to be used more in affection than in derision. Of course, since the setting is eight- eenth century, there are stinks and brawls and broken heads. And Mr. Walpole frequently finds it necessary to interpolate apologies because some of his characters, being after all but creatures of their age, are somewhat free in their language. In spite of all the trappings, however, the dominant note is strangely reminiscent of the Victorian decadence. The fact is that the whole book with its awkwardly displayed parallel narrations, its sentimental heavy-handedness, its bogus eighteenth-century atmosphere is nothing short of prepos- terous. Emily Dickinson, Friend and Neighbor. By MacGregor Jen- kins. Little, Brown and Company. $3. MacGregor Jenkins was one of the children who played about Emily Dickinson's home, ate the gingerbread she roman- tically let down in a basket from an upper window, and received from her mysterious notes and gifts of flowers. His father was an intimate friend of Emily's brother Austin, and both his parents were numbered among the poet's closer ac- quaintances. Mr. Jenkins, writing of the "Miss Emily" he remembers, seeks to counteract the impression that she was an eccentric and melancholy recluse. To preserve her personal life she did, he admits, limit the circle of her friends, but he maintains that within that circle she preserved normal rela- tionships and gave herself richly to those she loved. All this is evident enough from Mrs. Bianchi's "Life and Letters," but it is true that a contrary impression has gained currency, and Mr. Jenkins doubtless does well to make the point clear. His discussions of Miss Dickinson as poet are modest and rather commonplace; it requires no special discernment, for example, to remark that she was "an artist in words." His most impor- tant contribution to the study of her work lies in his emphasis on the individuality of her most casual acts and her most spontaneous sayings. The quality of perception that distin- guishes Emily Dickinson's poetry permeated the whole of her life. Her personality was integrated in a sense that makes the jargon of psychiatry seem feeble.

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658 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 Visits to Soviet Russia Twenty-five days in the Soviet Union Leningrad, Moscow, the Volga, Rostov, the Ukraine . . . agricultural and industrial regions. Leader : Colston E. Warne. Professor of Economics, Univ. of Pittsburgh. Sail- ing from N. Y. — S.S. Bremen — June 28. Price from N. Y. — $696 ; from Lubeck, Germany — July 5 — $495 ; from HeU singfors — July 7 — $462. Registrations open. Special Student Group Open to graduates and undergraduates. Traveling third class with Russian students and workers. Twenty-eight days — Leningrad, Moscow, Volga, Caucasus, Crimea, Ukraine. Leader: Wm. Gorham Rice, Jr., Univ. of Wis- consin. Sailing from N. Y., S.S. Aquitania — July 30. Price from N. Y. $616 ; from London — August 5, $422 ; from Helsingfors — August 10 — $360. Registrations open. Additional itineraries from one week to thirty-six days in Russia Booklet "Land of the SoTiets" available, outlining in full Open Road itineraries and services with information for travelers to the Soviet Union. 20-30 WEST 43rd STREET a NEW YORK ,TMEs>mEfeRQAd Do you want a FREE copy of the Famous MISSOURI UNIVERSITY SEX QUESTIONNAIRE and will you let us send it to you at our expense? THIS questionnaire has at- tracted national and even international comment. Our copyrighted edition is complete. Not a word has been omitted. Not a question has been stricken out. It is absolutely unexpur- gated. This book also contains a discussion of the entire case which resulted In the dismissal of Prof. Max Meyer from the Staff of the university. This analysis of the questionnaire and an explanation of its signifi- cance is from the pen of L. M. Birkhead, famous liberal I'ni- tarian preacher of Kansas City, Mo. We will send you a FKKK copy of this book if you will subscribe for our monthly maga- zine, "The Debunker." This /.ino is printed on a good of book paper, bound in artistic blue covers, size n% x8% inches. Here are a few of the many features scheduled for early publication : "The Shame of Sherman, Texas," by Booth Mooney. "Clarence Darrow Tears Prohibition Apart," bv C. S. Campbell. "How to Avoid Hunk," by L M. Birkhead. "From Sin to Psychiatry," an interview with Dr. Karl A. Men- ninger, author of "The Human Mind." "A Ra- tional View of the Sex l'.sue," by Hari-y Klmer Barnes. "Let V* War on Quackery," by Dr. Morris I'ishbein. "A Negro Looks at Negroes," by George S. Schuyler. And many other articles, including a batch of lively editorials. DSB THIS SUBSCRIPTION BLANK TODAY TIIK DKIilXUKK, l>rpt. 1)1000, Girnrd, Kansas. Enclosed find $1.50 ($2 Canada and foreign), {or which send me The Debunker (or a year and give me a free copy of the famous Missouri Uni- versity Sex Questionnaire as a premium. Name Address. . City. .State. Prize Poems. 1913-1929. Edited by Charles Wagner. Charles Boni. $.75. These "Prize Poems" form an interesting survey of poetry during the twenties. And Mr. Wagner's idea of gathering them together is a very good one. They appear, moreover, in the Boni Paper Books series, an inexpensive and delightful presentation, and with a very charming introduction by Mark Van Doren. The level of the prize poems included is on the whole high. Such outstanding poems as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Malcolm Cowley's Blue Juniata, William Carlos Williams's Paterson, and Wallace Stevens's Pecksniffiana would make any collection interesting. There are few really bad poems, and those are distinctly in the class of occasional verse on patriotic or assigned subjects. Most of the prizes were given by a magazine to the best poems printed in its pages during a year's time and were not for assigned subjects in verse. If the kind of poetry has been dictated in any way at all it is only by some undefined standard, literary or political, on the part of the magazine granting the prize. The Dial poems are the most distinguished, therefore, in literary quality; Poetry, with its many years of granting prizes, presents in this collection a kind of survey of the entire period, beginning with Lindsay's General William Booth Enters Heaven and running through all the well-known names of the renaissance of 1913. Con- temporary Verse, truly conservative, grants its prizes to sweet lyrics. The Nation inclines toward poems on more broadly human subject matter. Altogether this anthology of prize poems is representative and adequate, a book worth having. Dandelion Days. By Henry Williamson. E. P. Dutton and Company. $2.50. "Dandelion Days" standing by itself and not considered in relation to other volumes of Mr. Williamson's spiritual biog- raphy of Willie Maddison is a charming story of English public-school life just before the war. As those who are fa- miliar with Willie's childhood from "The Beautiful Years" or with his early manhood in "The Pathway" know, he is the eternally recurrent lover of nature in all her varied forms. The conflict between forest and school for possession of his time, his fine friendship for Jack Temperley, and his boyhood love-dream for Elsie are the major themes in this melodic novel of an imaginative boy's adolescence. Most of the space in the book is taken up with accounts of the perpetual feuds carried on between the boys and their instructors, many of which are richly humorous or downright and delightfully funny. But even of a good thing — as many a sage has warned us — there can be too much. The chief fault of "Dandelion Days" lies in its relationship with the other novels that belong under the inclusive title "The Flax of Dream." Willie's ado- lescent years are here, one feels, being too lightly dealt with. Those who do not know Mr. Williamson, however, should hasten to make his acquaintance. Potato Face. By Carl Sandburg. Harcourt, Brace and Com- pany. $1.50. Sandburg's new Rootabaga volume contains twelve stories told by the Potato Face Blind Man to some of his little friends. They are all about Yonder the Yinder, Pigeon Foot, Long- arms, Quish and Quee, the Hot Ashes Sisters; and about such extraordinary creatures as "flinyons" and "snooxes" and "spiffs" and "spink bugs." These fancies and fooleries seem, for the most part, intended to be quite meaningless, unmarred by ulterior motives. For certain imaginative children, and also for those adults who have been able to retain a childlike love for preposterous make-believe and funny-sounding cacophony, Potato Face's conversation should prove a delight. And if you have enjoyed the other Rootabaga books you will like this one. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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June 4, 1930] The Nation 659 The Loyalists in the American Revolution. By Claude H. Van Tync. New York: Peter Smith. $4. This work was originally published in 1902 and has long been considered the classic one on the subject. It is time that a new, thoroughgoing study was made of the Loyalists, but the lapse of years has not impaired the value of this one, and both scholar and general reader may well be grateful for a reprint of what has for long been a scarce and almost unob- tainable book. Money. By D. H. Robertson. Introduction by J. M. Keynes. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $1.25. This is a revised and largely rewritten edition of a book with the same title first published in 1922, the reasons for the recasting being the important events in financial history that have occurred in the interval, including six years' experience of the Federal Reserve system and the fact that "the author believes himself to have learnt more of the truth about the theory of money." The volume is the second number of the Cambridge Economic Handbooks, edited by Professor Keynes. Orphan of Eternity, or the Katabasis of the Lord Lucifer Satan. By Carl Heinrich. Louis Carrier and Company. $2.50. In a day when the obviously clever is heralded as ironic subtlety, this genuine satire is likely to receive less than its due. Satan, thrust from hell, victim of a reform movement the pur- pose of which is to provide the inhabitants with a consciousness of guilt that they may have the pleasure of sinning, ascends to earth, where he finds things not quite what they used to be. He continues on the ascent and eventually arrives at the gates of heaven, where the denouement is, to say the least, unusual. Mr. Heinrich has chosen to couch his descriptive passages in Biblical English, which he writes delightfully, and in parts "Orphan of Eternity" rises to splendid utterance, as witness the conversa- tion between Eve and Satan, the speeches of the three wise men (whom most readers should recognize), and the outline of living as practiced on the planet of Paranoia. Throughout most of his book Mr. Heinrich is as mordacious as Swift, but toward the end his admiration and affection for his hero get the better of him, so much so that he has yielded to the temptation of pro- viding a superlatively happy ending. Drama Finale THE season now reaching its end seems to me to have been rather more entertaining than usual. An assidu- ous theatergoer might easily have spent some twenty- five or thirty very agreeable evenings in various playhouses, and he might besides, in the course of his peregrinations, have accumulated a lesser but still considerable number of impres- sions sure to remain in his memory. Neither "The Green Pastures" nor "Strictly Dishonorable" is likely to be soon for- gotten, and neither, for that matter, is "Meteor" — even though this latter play be granted to have been tantalizingly imperfect. Each had a freshness and an originality which bear witness to the fact that the American drama is genuinely alive, and each was produced with a skill equaled only by that displayed in three or four revivals of familiar plays. "The Green Pastures" has been acclaimed with an enthu- siasm surprising to certain wise men of the theater, and its greatness has been so generally recognized by the critical that it seems hardly worth while to insist again that it is almost a miracle, but the excellence of "Strictly Dishonorable" is of Jp,,M|J||||m"i||||||M»M|||||pinnmj||||i.M||J PULITZER PRIZE WINNER THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE By Claude H. Van Tyne of whom Professor Allen S. Will said in the New York Times, " He has brought furrows of care to the brow of the Mayor of Chicago, but he continues unper- turbed at his task of reinterpreting the American Revolution." $5.00 HOUGHTON MIFFUIN CO. llllll)llllldIlIllllilHllllllIhn..l«l!Il!llniMlrfJllhli.ll1lj[ WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See ^Fifty Million Frenchmen — Lyric — W. 42nd St. ^Flying High— Apollo— W. 42nd St. •Hotel Universe — Beck — 45th St., E. of Eighth Ave. tLost Sheep — Selwyn— 42nd St., W. of B'dway. •Michael and Mary — Hopkins — 155 W. 49th St. tStrictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. •The Green Pastures— Mansfield — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •The Last Mile— Sam. H. Harris — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. tTopaze — Music Box — 45th St., W. of B'dway. •Uncle Vanya— Cort— W. 48th St. Films All Quiet on the Western Front — Central — 47th St. and B'dway. Journey's End — Gaiety — 46th St. and B'dway. The Strange Lie— 55th St., E. of Seventh Ave. The Benson Murder Case — Beg. Sat., May 31; Under A Texas Moon — Beg. Wed., June 4 — Little Carnegie Playhouse — 146 W. 57th St. Turksib— Eighth St. Playhouse— 52 W. 8th St. Young Eagles and The Better Ole — Beg. June 1 ; Welcome Danger and Young Man of Manhattan — Beg. June 4 — Fifth Ave. Playhouse — 66 Fifth Ave. Under A Texas Moon — Beg. Sat., May 31; Chasing Rainbows — Beg. June 4 — The Plaza— 58th St., E. of Madison Ave. Lectures India In Revolt— The Group — 150 W. 85th St. Theatres Milestones and The Little Father of the Wilderness — Empi B'dway and 40th St. Revival for one week. * Drama. t Comedy, t Musical. When writing to advertisers pleas* mention The Nation

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660 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 FILMS PLA YS □ HERMAN SHl'MLIN presents THE LAST MILE "Sheer, straightforward, smashing and enormously effective."— George Jean Nathan, Judge. O A Tl/T TT TJT A T>T> TO Theatre, 42nd St., West of Broadway. oAiVl Jtl. XlAJtVlxlO Kves. 8:50. Matinees Wed. & Sat. 3:30. The Theatre Guild Presents HOTEL UNIVERSE A NEW PLAY By PHILIP BARRY TLf A T> 'TTM HUT* if Theatre, 45th St., W. of Eighth Ave. ITl Alt 1 IlN OHil-iIlk Evgs.. 8:B0. Mats., Thurs. & Sat., 2:50 T SECOND BIG WEEK! URKSIB SOVIET FtLM DOCUMENT OF THE BUILDING OF THE TURKESTAN SIBERIAN RAILROAD Is one of the most interesting films that has come out of Russia."— Hall, N. Y. Times. 8n r. 52 W. 8th St., bet. 5th & 6th Avs. I \t P[ AYH0IKF/nLMCUILD\ Sprin85«95. Cent. 1 P. M. toMidnil. [ KJ1.* LHIUVUJCI^ C,MENA ) Dir Jog R Fliesler a MIGHTIEST WAR DRAMA EVER SEEN" — N. Y. American. a ON THE ALL QUIET WESTERN FRONT A Universal Picture presented by Carl Laemmle Directed by Lewis Milestone yy "A notable achievement, sincere, earnest, vivid and graphic. Better than anything so far done." — Mor- daunt Hall, N. Y. Times. "Enormously compelling talking motion picture. As a show some- thing to get definitely excited about I A very fine motion picture." — How- ard Barnes, Herald Tribune. f> 17 XT HP ¥"> A f THEATRE, B'dway and 47th Street CLIN 1 KAL Twice Daily: 2:45- 3 times Sat. & Sun., 2:45—5:45—8:45. □ DISCUSSION □ THE GROUP A Clearing House of Opinion meets at AUDITORIUM— 150 West 86th St Tuesday evening, June 3rd, at 8:30 P. M. INDIA IN REVOLT Speakers T. H. K. REZMTJE will speak on "REVOLUTIONARY INDIA" HARI G. GOVTL MANUAL PAREKH will speak on will .peak on "INDIA IN ECONOMIC BONDAGE"— HINDU CULTURE Discussion will follow. Admission, Members 60c Non-Members, 76c Weekly notices mailed on request. When writing to advertisers so light and fragile a kind that it may once more be defended against those who can never associate excellence with fragility. Mr. Sturges, its author, failed lamentably with his next play, and I do not know how far he was conscious of the qualities which lifted "Strictly Dishonorable" high above other comedies which it superficially resembles; but the secret, I think, lies in the fact that it gives a local habitation to a timeless spirit. It is comedy as comedy has always been written; it deals, as such comedy always does, with the triumph of gaiety and wit and insouciance over prudence and respectability and decorum. But conventional as, in this best sense of the word, it is, it is also completely of today. Any great comedy writer of any nation or time would recognize its spirit, and yet only an American of 1930 could get the full flavor of its allusions or guess how neatly it catches the accent of the moment. Thus it accom- plishes what every such comedy should accomplish. It takes the material afforded by contemporary life and gives it the form consecrated by the intelligence of generations, showing how our own doings can be interpreted after the same fashion as those which furnish the material for the great comedies of the past. To be sure, "Strictly Dishonorable" will not last long. It has few elements of permanence. And yet it might be called eternal, in a sense which has nothing to do with dura- tion, because its spirit is part of an eternal spirit. These two plays — the one so completely mondaine, the other achieving spirituality by a curiously oblique route — are the two most significant new plays seen during the year, but the record of the season would be very incomplete if it did not mention three productions remarkably fine: the Theater Guild's "A Month in the Country," Jed Harris's "Uncle Vanya," and Eva Le Gallienne's "Romeo and Juliet." Miss Le Gallienne gives us one of the most satisfactory productions of Shake- speare seen here in a long time, and the two plays from the Russian are interesting illustrations of an understanding of a certain kind of art for which America seems suddenly to have developed a comprehension and a taste. And if I may, to conclude, suggest candidates for the non-existent prize for the best individual performance given by any actor during the sea- son I should like to add to the names which I mentioned at mid-season those of Richard B. Harrison ("The Green Pastures"), Alia Nazimova ("A Month in the Country"), Leslie Howard ("Berkeley Square"), and Eva Le Gallienne ("Romeo and Juliet"). At the Fulton Theater George M. Cohan is reviving the hilarious burlesque melodrama "The Tavern," which many will remember as the source of that useful question "What's all the shootin' for?" It is a perfect actor's play. The heroine has an opportunity to denounce three men as the villains re- sponsible for her ruin, and though there is no sense to any of the action every one of the cast is given an opportunity for continual acting of the most "juicy" kind. The pity is only that a number of our more actory actors are not permitted to play the chief roles in turn. They might thus work a good deal of the congenital bad theater out of their systems and perhaps be in a position to perform with more restraint in plays not intended as burlesque. "Ada Beats the Drum" (John Golden Theater) is a more than usually amusing farce based upon the adventures of some innocents abroad. Mama, anxious to become "Continental," has dragged her husband and daughter to Europe in the hope that they can be made to absorb some culture and some savoir- v'wre. But father resists all the efforts which are made to teach him to "sip an aperitif," and even in Venice, where every- body else floats here and there in a gondola, daughter is obvi- ously only riding around in a boat. Needless to say, the ways of the Middle West are finally vindicated, but the satire is both pointed and moderately subtle. Joseph Wood Krutch please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Will Gandhi Win? By RICHARD B. GREGG T HE present upheaval in India is so vast and complex that it is very difficult to foresee the probable out- come. For Americans the difficulty is increased by the fragmentariness of all the reports which we get. Having left India as recently as April 17 I should like to describe certain elements of the movement for whatever such facts and opinions may be worth. First of all, in regard to the Hindu-Moslem quarrels, so strongly stressed in all the British discussions: It is to be remembered that these quarrels occur almost entirely in the cities and but rarely in the villages. As nearly 90 per cent of the Indian population lives in villages, the city dis- putes are not so all-important as some reports would indi- cate. While the occasions of these disputes are various, the real cause is the desire of the Moslems for more power. At present many of their leaders believe that they can get power by siding with the government. But the Moslem leaders do not wholly trust the Brit- ish. Dr. Abdullah Suhrawady, in a recent supplementary note to the Indian Central Committee, expressed at consid- erable length the doubts and hesitations of the Moslem community. One sentence of it is revealing. He wrote: Can Moslems rely, as in the past, on the pledges, promises, and assurances of British statesmen and adminis- trators, or are pledges and promises wrung during the storm and stress of war and the turmoil and trouble of unrest and discontent to be forgotten during times of peace and tranquillity and to be treated as scraps of paper? As perhaps another indication of this state of mind we may take the following message issued on April 19 by the Moslem leaders Mohammed Ali and Shaukat Ali to the president of the United Provinces Moslem Conference: "Mussulmans must not allow themselves to be made the tools of any party. We want freedom for all, not a change of masters for Mussulmans." It is to be remembered that these two Ali brothers in 1920-21 were fast friends of Mr. Gandhi and worked side by side with him in the non-cooperation campaign. While they and other Moslem leaders are suspi- cious of many Hindus, it would seem that they have not wholly lost faith in Mr. Gandhi. For instance, at the All India Moslem Conference on Palestine Affairs held in Bom- bay on April 19, the president, Maulvi Mohammed Yakub, who is also deputy president of the Indian Legislative As- sembly, strongly opposed the civil-disobedience movement, and yet after the meeting was over, according to the Asso- ciated Press of India,* he said that "as far as satisfying Mos- lem demands was concerned, he was convinced that the final say did not rest with Mr. Gandhi or Pandit Motilal Nehru, who might, perhaps, be actuated by conciliatory motives." In my judgment, however, if Britain by her policy or acts in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, or in relation to Afghanistan or the Indian Northwest Frontier makes a mistake which offends the Moslems of India, or if Mr. Gandhi's movement * The Associated Press of India is a subsidiary of Reuters, the English news service. It has no connection with the Associated Press in this country. — Editok Thi Nation. gains much more momentum, then the Indian Mohammedan leaders will soon swing to Mr. Gandhi. It is possible that the trouble at Peshawar on April 28, reported by wireless, and the sudden imposition of a rigid Indian press censor- ship by the Viceroy on the following day are an indication that some such slip as this occurred, for Peshawar is predom- inantly Mohammedan. The censorship will certainly tend to make the Mohammedans, as well as Hindus and people outside of India, somewhat suspicious of all the official news from the Indian government. If the Mohammedan leaders come to feel that Mr. Gandhi and the National Congress have the greater proba- bility of winning the struggle, then the Hindu-Moslem tension will become quite manageable. As long as the British are in power they are compelled to use the policy of divide et impera, and so the communal quarrels continue. That is not the personal policy of Lord Irwin or of the best Englishmen, but it is the inevitable policy of the bu- reaucracy which controls the practical interpretation and application of all orders from above. If British power wanes, the Moslems will become reconciled with their Hindu neighbors. It happened in 1920 and it can happen again. Indeed, Indian national independence ought to prove a far more unifying force than the exterior aim of the Khilafat was in 1920-21. Lastly, it is to be realized that the Mohammedans are not united in their support of the government and their opposition to Mr. Gandhi. Many prominent Mohamme- dans in all parts of the country are working heartily for civil disobedience. Mr. Gandhi expressly nominated a Mo- hammedan, the Honorable Abbas Tyabji, former judge of the High Court, Baroda State, to succeed him in command of the salt-making volunteers in case Mr. Gandhi was arrested. Although the support from Moslems has been very re- assuring to the British, there is a counterbalancing factor which in my opinion outweighs the Moslem support. That factor is the understanding of Mr. Gandhi's principle of non-violent resistance on the part of all classes and groups of Indians. This understanding, and a willingness to give the principle a trial, is far more widespread that it was in 1920-21. This factor of popular understanding, support, and sympathy with the weapon being used, together with the fact that the actual number of volunteers is greater now, I believe, than it was in 1920-21, looks favorable for the in- dependence party. Another factor of Mr. Gandhi's strength is that a great many more women are taking active part in this struggle than was the case in 1920-21. In Bombay, Ahmedabad, Madras, Delhi, and Allahabad the women were, according to last reports, especially active. Mr. Gandhi's message to the women is inspiring. In his paper Young India during the week of April 8 he wrote of women : In this non-violent warfare their contribution should be much greater than men's.

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662 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 To call women the weaker sex is libel. It is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then indeed is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition? Has she not greater powers of endurance? Has she not greater courage? If non-violence is the law of our being, the fu- ture is with women. They have nursed these thoughts now for years. And to the village women of Navsari he is reported to have said, "If this movement is to succeed, yours will have to be as big a share as man's, if not much bigger." Another point to consider is the attitude of the Indian moderates and liberals. Without their support Britain could not govern India. During the past ten years they have struggled hard to win their goal by cooperating with the government in the legislatures. Now many have become disillusioned and have withdrawn, and some of the leading ones, such as Pandit Malaviya, N. C. Kelkar, and T. Prakasam, have gone over to Mr. Gandhi's camp and are active in promoting foreign-cloth boycott and the manufac- ture of contraband salt. Their state of mind was well ex- pressed by Mr. K. M. Munshi after he resigned from the Bombay Legislative Council on April 14. He wrote to Mr. Gandhi asking to join his forces, saying in part: But after anxious thought I am convinced that the government is determined not to transfer any substantial power to Indians, that the present constitution is a mask to conceal irresponsible despotism of a well-organized official group, that no political progress or economic salva- tion is possible unless by magnitude of our sacrifice we compel, to borrow your inimitable phrase, "a complete change of heart" in those who have constituted them- selves relentless enemies of our aspiration. In 1920 I left the Congress because at Nagpur you changed its creed. Today, in 1930, I rejoin it because I have come to believe that creed. For long I disapproved of your methods; to- day except through them I cannot visualize a free India. It seems now as if the policy of the government would tend to drive more and more moderates and liberals into the independence camp. For instance, the punishments imposed upon the civil-disobedience leaders are extremely and ar- bitrarily different, though the offenses — sedition and viola- tion of the salt laws — are all the same. Before the campaign began Mr. Vallabhbhai Patel, one of Mr. Gandhi's strong- est supporters, was arrested and given three months' "simple" imprisonment and a fine of 500 rupees, not for speaking but simply for telling the constable that he intended to speak. About a month later Mr. Gandhi himself announced that he would go to that same village to speak, went there, and delivered a lengthy seditious speech to a considerable crowd, but he was entirely unmolested by the police. Mr. Gandhi's son Ramdas was given six months' imprisonment for making salt, but when Mr. Gandhi himself went to that village a few days later and himself likewise violated the salt law and delivered a seditious speech to the crowd, he was not interfered with or arrested. His other son, Devdos, in another province was given three months' simple imprison- ment for inciting to violation of the salt laws. Mr. Jam- nalal Bajaj and two others were given two years' "rigorous" imprisonment for making salt, while Mr. Nariman in the same province got only one month's simple imprisonment for exactly the same offense. In the hundreds of other cases the terms of imprisonment imposed range from one month to two years — some simple, some rigorous ; some with money fines, some without. Another leader, Mr. T. Prakasam, in Madras, for the same offense of salt-making was arrested and immediately released. Upon repeating the offense a few days later he was again arrested, fined heavily, and his motor car seized and auctioned by the police to pay the fine, whereupon he was again released. According to latest dis- patches he has again been arrested. The government has followed the plan of arresting chiefly the prominent leaders and not the less-known vol- unteers, "lopping off the tall poppies," as Young India de- scribes it. And in the midst of all the jail sentences and fines, Mr. Gandhi, the fountain head of sedition and in- spirer of the whole movement, was allowed to go scot free until almost two months after his campaign had begun. Such inequalities of law enforcement cannot but make the moderates and liberals feel that law as administered by the British in India has no connection with justice, but is merely an instrument of intimidation and control by the alien Brit- ish minority. The police are not servants of the courts but only puppets of the executive. Other indications of ferment among the moderates are found in the resolutions of the bar associations of Delhi, Mangalore, Meerut, Bhagalpur, and other places that their members must wear khaddar (Indian homespun) for at- tendance at court; and in the strong protests of the bar associations of Bombay, Viramgam, and other towns against the alleged illegality of the arrest of Mr. Vallabhbhai Patel. Mr. Broker, the crown prosecutor of Ahmedabad, resigned his position on April 11 and joined Mr. Gandhi. The press censorship may have a further disillusioning effect upon some of the moderates and drive them into action with Mr. Gandhi as the sole outlet for their repressed feelings and the only way to justify their previous professions of desire for Indian self-government. Even the ruling princes of the In- dian States are showing signs of discontent and have pub- licly notified the Viceroy that they want better treatment. Mr. Nicholson's recent book states some of the grounds for their resentment. If British India gets freedom the Indian States will not lag far behind in requests for a share of the cake. It is said in the pro-British press that the depressed classes are opposed to Mr. Gandhi. So far as I know, only two leaders of untouchables from Poona have spoken thus. On the other hand, Deirukkhar, a leader of untouchables in Bombay, took part in the salt-making on April 12, while thousands of untouchables in Ahmedabad are among Mr. Gandhi's active followers. Mr. Gandhi's years of contin- uous work and achievement for the untouchables assure him ample support from them. Time will tell. The Akali Sikhs are another accession of strength to the independence camp. On April 12 at Amritsar there was a meeting of the Working Committee of the Shromani Akali Dal and Jathedars of the district Akali Jathas. It was, according to the report in the Hindustan Times of Delhi, "resolved that ... to keep aloof from the struggle is not in keeping with the noble traditions of the Sikhs." The meeting fixed the number of volunteers to be furnished by each district and decided that they would join the satya- grahis in twenty days, which allowed time to complete the reaping of the harvest. I

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June 4, 1930] The Nation 663 The Indian business community has thrown its influ- ence to the side of Mr. Gandhi. Mr. G. D. Birla, who re- signed with Pandit Malaviya from the Legislative Assem- bly, is one of the wealthiest Indians, with large cotton- and jute-mill interests, and a member of the Marwari community of merchants. Mr. Jamnalal Bajaj, one of Mr. Gandhi's right-hand men, is also a wealthy member of that com- munity. The wife, the sister, and two of the daughters of the leading cotton manufacturer of Ahmedabad are active in the satyagraha campaign. The foreign-cloth boycott is supported by the Maharastra Chamber of Commerce, the Bombay Shroffs' (Merchants') Association, the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Bombay Bullion Exchange, the cloth merchants' associations of Bombay, Delhi, Amritsar, Cawn- pore, Rawalprindi, and many other cities. A final significant item is that the movement to re- fuse to pay land revenue taxes, which yield a large share of the government's revenue, seems actually to have begun. According to the Associated Press of India, on April 19 at Bardoli Mr. Gandhi told the villagers that if they would use only contraband salt, eradicate the drink evil, spin and wear only homespun cloth, and stop paying land revenue taxes they would gain swaraj (self-government). Bardoli is the district in which the villagers in 1928, by non-vio- lent resistance led by Mr. Vallabhbhai Patel, compelled the Bombay Provincial Government to grant revision of the assessment of land taxes. On April 23, according to the Associated Press of India and the Bombay Chronicle, the villagers of Raas, where Mr. Vallabhbhai Patel was arrested, decided not to pay land revenue taxes. It is fairly likely that this movement will spread. In closing, let me quote from the Indian Social Re- former of Bombay, edited by a fine and able moderate, Mr. K. Natarajan. In its issue of the week of April 20 he re- viewed the steadily accumulating power of Mr. Gandhi's movement and said, among other things: For our own part we do not see why a perfectly peace- ful revolution cannot be achieved by Mahatma Gandhi's method in the absence of appropriate constitutional ma- chinery, and if experience in the religious and social field counts we are sure that it can be so achieved. It is a method requiring infinite endurance, patience, and perse- verance, but it is a sure method whose every failure but makes final success the more certain. Contributors to This Issue William Zukerman is manager of the European bureau of the New York Jewish Morning Journal. Paul Y. Anderson is the national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Hal Saunders White is in the English department at Washington Square College, New York University. Louis M. Hacker is engaged on a work dealing with the recent political and economic history of the United States. Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at Washington Square College, New York University. William MacDonald is a regular contributor of his- torical and political reviews to The Nation. Harold Kellock is an American journalist now con- nected with the Soviet Union Information Bureau. Richard B. Gregg has just returned from India, where he spent several days with Gandhi. The 2n' Cultural Tour to So- viet Russia under the leadership of Dr. Joshua Kunitz (Lecturer on Russian Literature and Culture in the College of the City of New York) sails from New York, June 26th, on the S.S. Lafayette. This tour can be taken for 12, 24 or 35 days in the Soviet Union. Other sailings to Soviet Russia: May 28, S.S. Aquitania; June 11, S.S. Bremen; June 28, S.S. Mauretania; July 5, S.S. Europa; July 16, S.S. Berengaria, Conducted tour by Mrs. N. Markoff. Send for itineraries, etc. WORLD TOURISTS, Inc. 175 Fifth Avenue, New York. Algonquin 6656 See that your classified ads reach us by Friday, together with remittance, to insure their appear- ance the following week. Minimum 80 words $8.08. THE NATION 20 Vesey St., N. T. 6iRe freshing" BLACK GENESIS By SAMUEL G. STONEY and GERTRUDE M. SHELBY "For reading aloud these stories are unsurpassed." — William Soskin in the New York Evening Post MACMILLAN $3.50 D EDUCATIONAL □ FRENCH, SPANISH. ITALIAN, GERMAN, ENGLISH Conversational method. Native teachers. Private lessons, 75c, short course, 9 to 9 daily. 13th year. FISHER'S SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES 1264 Lexington Avenue, N. W. Cor. 85th Street FRENCH-SPANISH-ITALIAN GERMAN. Private lessons 75c (Daily 9-9). Na- tive teachers. Interesting conversational method. 19th year. Also neglected English education. UNIVERSAL SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES 1265 Lexington Ave., Northeast Cor. 85th St. RITQQIAM Dy university graduate, instruc- I\ U O O I rl W tor in Russian at Berlitz School. Private Lessons or Classes. VICTOR RECORDS USED. Michael Jerlitzyn, 25 W. 123rd St. Phone Harlem 0487. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation OPEN SHELF THE BOOKS YOU CAI^T GET ELSEWHERE may be rented for a nominal fee. Members throughout the United States have access to a large collection of rare, scarce, out-of-print, strange and curious books; limited, privately- printed editions, unabridged translations and extraordinary new books. Please state occupa- tion or profession when writing for informa- tion and lists. Esoterika Bitlion Society 45 West 45th Street Dap't N -t New York City RESTAURANT i$lacBougal £§>treet tKabern 179 Macdougal, near 8th St. In the Old Gonfarone House Self-Service Unusual food — Unusual prices. A foreign dish each day for the epicurean. Open from 10 A M. to 9 P. M.

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664 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3387 SUMMER SUMMER D FOR RENT □ FURNISHED APARTMENTS TN garden community, comfortably furnished, duplex apartment, 7 rooms and bath, private roof garden. Use of community garden. Unusually well adapted for cooperative house- keeping by 3 or 4 people wishing to share apartment and maintain independence. $135 per month, June to Oct. Mary Fox, 397 Bleecker St. (Near W. 11). Watkins 7845. ""PO Sublet, June to Sept. 15, attractive 2 room, furnished apartment, right off Central Park. Cool. Steinway piano. $80 monthly. Dinces, 28 W. 85th St. Trafalgar 3838. i TA Ocean Ave., opposite Prospect Park. 10U Sublet till Oct. 1. 3 room apartment, beautifully furnished in the modern manner. Grand piano. All conveniences. Apply Green- blatt, Ingersoll 5826, 8-10 A. M. and evenings. Rental reasonable. '"|\/rODERN 3 rooms and dining alcove; large, light, attractively furnished ; Steinway Grand Piano. West 93rd. Near L and Subway. June to Sept. Reasonable rental. Riverside 10014. SUNNYSIDE, Queens — 6 room, 1 family house, furnished, to rent for summer. 15 minutes subway to city. Beautiful community of nice people. Tennis, art group, etc. Barr, 3937 Caro- lin St. Stillwell 6274. FURNISHED 5 room garden apartment, cross ventilation ; Fifth Ave. Bus : I.R.T. ; B.M.T, 15 minutes Times Square ; $65. Sunny- side, L. I. C. Phone Stillwell 7899 before 10 A. M. ; between 6 and 8 P. M. ■Jl A W. 75th St. Artist's well furnished, Olvy 4 room studio apartment; twin beds, bath, shower, grand piano, radio, view — Drive, June 15 — Oct. 1. Only most responsible need apply. At sacrifice. Endicott 5672. T^OR RENT — Large room, second floor re- -*- modelled old house, attractively furnished, fireplace, complete kitchen, bath adjoining, cool. Use of garden, next door to subway. $40. Mur- ray, 50 King St. UNFURNISHED APARTMENT T ARGE one or two rooms and bath, kitchen privilege, reasonable. 1650 Weeks Ave., near Mt. Eden, Bronx. N. Y. (Foundation .3337.) FURNISHED OR UNFURNISHED APARTMENTS GREENWICH Village, 226 W. 13 St.: Quaintly charming, cool, 2-room, bath, kitchenette apartment. Convenient transporta- tion, fireplace, casements. $55. Very unusual at this price. Miss Harvey, Digby 5410 or Chelsea 7179. HOUSES FOR SALE SUMMER SCHEDULE (TWv^) If your apartment isn't rented for the Summer advertise it now before it's too late. If you haven't found your Sum- mer home, send us your re- quirements immediately. HERE ARE THE RATES SO words $3.08 60 words $6.16 THE NATION 20 Vesey St. Fitz Roy 9074 HOUSE FOR SALE IN RIVERDALE Only 20 minutes from Forty-second Street, but deep in the woods . . . Near 6 schools, 3 churches, Ben Riley's and other neighbor- hood stores . . . yet surrounded entirely by targe estates... A modern house and garden for the busy New Yorker who values outdoor living and the rural scene as much as day and night accessibility to down town . . 9 rooms & 4 baths; terrace and playground/ designed to facilitate good housekeeping . . . Communicate R'm 1713 .... 551 -5th Ave. Vanderbilt 5896 or Kingsbridge 3845. "POR SALE— In Berkshire Hills, Colonial ■*- House, high elevation, extended view. About fifty acres land ; small pond on premises, sev- eral lakes near. Wonderful opportunity for re- modeling into summer home. Restricted. H. P. Spaford, Drawer 2001, Hartford, Conn. SUMMER HOMES FOR SALE OR RENT A TLANTIC HIGHLANDS, bungalow for sale, •**■ unfurnished, or rent furnished. Overlook- ing Shrewsbury River and ocean. Large porch, spacious living room, open fireplace, 4 bed- rooms, bath, kitchen. Commuting Sandy Hook boat. Bargain for quick sale. Tel. Adv. Dept Fitz Roy 9974. GERMANY <<"DOMA" — Beautiful modern rooms, every ■^ comfort, excellent cuisine. Select neigh- borhood, convenient to subway and bus. Ameri- can, European plan. English spoken. Moderate rates. Write for reservations now. Viktoria- Luise Platz 1. Berlin W. BUNGALOW AND HOUSE FOR RENT I" AKE Mohegan, near Peekskill. Scientifically ■*— ' built 7 room summer home, beautifully cultivated one half acre wooded plot ; high loca- tion ; 2 blocks from lake ; private beach. Sleep- ing porch ; sun balcony ; fireplace ; 2 baths : entire house screened. Every room a corner, all rooms one floor. Excellent shopping and com- muting. Price $13,500, or will rent for season. Phone any morning between 9 and 10, Endi- cott 6672. "]\ TAINE-Boothbay Harbor. Furnished cot- tage, shore front, large fir and birch grove, private dock, rowboat. Five rooms, three porches, bath, electricity. $350 season. Thomp- son, 81 Sherwood Place, Greenwich, Conn. TJ»OR RENT, furnished, for July and August, -*- at moderate rental, old house, remodeled, 7 rooms, 2 baths, large plot with lots of flowers, fruit and vegetables. 1 mile Crestwood, N. Y. Sta. Owner: H. W. van Gelder, Cecil Park, Tuckahoe, N. Y. 1 AKE Luzerne — between Saratoga and Lake George, five miles from new Conklingville State dam, with 23 mile lake. Completely fur- nished summer cottages. Baths, electricity, fireplac«s. Mrs. J. M. Berry, 35 Elk Street, Albany, N. Y. A RDEN, DEL. — Bungalow, furnished or un- ■**■ furnished. 3 rooms, bath, fireplace, 2 porches, garage. Modern conveniences. A delightfully lo- cated home, summer or year round. Artistic community. H. Brick, 1921 No. Park Ave., Phila., Pa. "DEAUTIFUL Foreat Hills. Small completely ■^ furnished home, porch, garage, trees, shrubs. Fifteen minutes from New York. Rental two months. July-August, $350.00. Telephone Boule- vard 9271. CHILDREN'S CAMPS LILLIPUT A successful new idea — a camp for 4 to 10 year olds A lovely house in ideal surroundings, ac- cessible from New York. The entire staff is trained and experienced in the guid- ance of small children. Resident physician; trained nurse. Highly endorsed by edu- cators and parents. Group limited to 40. Booklet. Anne Josephson, 1880 Uni- versity Ave., N. Y. (Raymond 4145). Combines advantages of home, camp and school. RESORTS INDIAN HEAD art ideal camp for adults Echo Lake, Warrensburg, N. Y. Dancing Swimming Fishing Rowing Canoeing Tennis Golf Baseball Basket ball Horseback riding All sports and social activites. Only 5 miles from Lake George. Special June rate $25. with free transportation from Albany. Write or phono for illustrated booklet NEW YORK OFFICE 370 E. 149th Street Mott Haven 4703 Rleber's Cottage, Belle Harbor, L. I. 50 feet from Beach and Boardwalk. For com- plete relaxation, invigorating sea air. Modern accommodations ; excellent home cooking. Forty minutes from city. $25 per week until July 1st. Call Belle Harbor 0089. CPEND delightful summer in Virginia. Off '--' tourist route. Large colonial estate In Shenandoah Valley. Privacy. Best of Souther* cooking. Seven hours to City. Free golf. $10 to $15 weekly. Major Marshall MacDonald, Media Farm, CHARLES TOWN, W. Vs.. T^OR relaxation, beautiful country, pleasant J- companionship ; also tennis. Phone to THE HIL-BERT HOUSE, Lake Mahopac, N. Y. Hn, Friedbbrg, Prop. Tel. Mahopac 353 TNUSUAL vacation place for a limited num- ber of grown up people. $25-$35 weekly. Ask for circular. CAMP ARTEMIS, Brewster, N. Y. POSITIONS WANTED CECRETARY, stenographer, extensive experi- ^ ence with prominent writers, part-time only. Manuscripts typed, careful accurate work. Ger- man translations. Highest references. River- side 8966, or Box 2336, '/c The Nation. YOUNG lady, college graduate, teaching, stenographic experience, free to travel, de- sires interesting position, pleasant environment. Box 2446. % Th» Nation. CECRETARY, amanuensis to literary or prc- K-' fessional lady or gentleman, receptionist of personality and responsibility. Box 2447, % The Nation. When writing to advertisers flease mention The Nation ,

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11, 1930 No. 3388 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 665 EDITORIALS: Prohibition Flares Up 668 Ramsay MacDonald and India 669 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 670 THE PRESS TODAY: VI. THE PHILADELPHIA CABBAGE PATCH. By Oswald Garrison Villard 671 BIG-BUSINESS BRAINS: AN OPEN LETTER TO SENATOR NORRIS. By J. G. Curtis 673 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 674 CORRESPONDENCE 675 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 675 SUMMER BOOK SECTION: The Economics of Dollar Books. By Henry Hazlitt 676 Dialogue in Kansas — 1850. By Thomas Hornsby Ferril 677 The New American Drama. By Joseph Wood Krutch 678 Hardy's Other Life. By Mark Van Doren 680 Mr. Sinclair's Alger Novel. By V. F. Calverton 680 Credo of the Engineer. By George E. G. Catlin 681 Art Without Chest. By Stanley J. Kunitz 682 A Transcendental Prude. By Lionel Trilling 682 History as Fiction. By Pierre Loving 684 The Mahabharata Blues. By C. Hartley Grattan 684 Notes on Fiction 686 Films: Stark War. By Alexander Bakshy 688 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. NO PRESIDENT in recent years has received rougher treatment at the hands of Congress than was the fate of Herbert Hoover in the overriding of his veto of the Spanish War Veterans' pension bill calling for an additional expenditure of $11,712,000. To us the President's veto seems sound and just; he was not opposed to the principle of the bill but to the looseness of its drafting. He could rightly see, for instance, no reason why we should violate our historic policy of not awarding pensions for disabilities arising from vicious habits, or such causes as venereal disease, alcoholism, or drugs. No pension has been granted to a Civil War veteran of less than ninety days' service ; this bill reduces the length of necessary service to seventy days. Mr. Hoover thinks, moreover, that the applicant should prove- that he really needs the money. All this was a red flag to Congress. The Senate overrode the veto by 61 votes to 18, the House by 294 to 14. As he contemplates the latter figures, Mr. Hoover may well exclaim, "Et tu, Brute!" For while the Senate has frequently castigated him, this is the first time that the faithful House majority has broken away. This is the measure of the President's in- tense unpopularity both in and out of his party — an unpopu- larity evidenced also by the lack of any applause when he is heard and seen in the movie houses. It bodes ill for the rest of his term. The fault is his own, for until now he has been a leader who will not lead. THE TARIFF BILL again hangs in the balance with a closer vote certain than had been anticipated, for some Senators are literally being deluged with protests. Competent observers even declare that if the bill could be held off three or four weeks longer it would never become law of the land. The mystery as to who wants it continues. Outside of some, relatively few, manufacturers, no one appears openly for it. Some persons are, it is true, begging that it be passed so that business may be put out of the misery of its uncertainty, with the expectation that business will then revive. Nothing could be farther from the fact. If this measure becomes a law the lot of every American citizen will be harder. He will be able to buy less because what he buys will cost him more. As for business itself, it needs export trade more than ever before and no deadlier blow could be struck at that than the passage and signing of this bill. We are well aware that Congress does not wish to see its labors of fourteen months go for nothing. It would, however, be far better for it to swallow its pride and kill the bill rather than to do such damage to American trade and prosperity. But the ignorance and stupidity in regard to economic law of the average Republican legislators are so great that they still have no conception that they are playing with fire. To all foreign complaints they retort: "What business is it of theirs?" MEANWHILE, PROTESTS against the tariff have been piling up with unprecedented speed, and from sources which have never before spoken out in any such manner or with any such unanimity. Thus, all the leading automobile manufacturers, including Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., president of General Motors, are demanding the killing of the bill. The export managers of General Motors de- clare that they are "out at the front where they feel the full force of the bitter resentment stirred up in other countries by the proposal to raise the American tariff walls." Mr. Sloan believes the failure of the bill would serve notice "that the United States recognizes the important principle that it must buy if it is to sell." Experts in attendance at the National Foreign Trade Council held in Los Angeles at the end of May were outspoken against the measure, which they all believed would do great harm to American trade. Thus, Mr. T. M. Haight, secretary of the International General Electric Company, declares that the decrease in trade which will follow the tariff bill will go far to prevent the stabiliza- tion of American industry. Harvey S. Firestone, the great rubber manufacturer, is heretical enough to say that the bill "is a positive detriment to business generally and I hope that it will be defeated." The president of the Pillsbury Flour Corporation in Minneapolis and the head of the National Cash Register Company are both against the bill. France has acted again by increasing the import on wheat from sixty to eighty francs per one hundred kilograms gross. There is a strong movement in Belgium for the renunciation of its commercial treaty with the United States, containing a most-favored-nation clause. Paris reports that this pro- posal has been enthusiastically indorsed in other countries.

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666 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3388 THE SECRET CABLE MESSAGES, paraphrased after the usual roundabout manner of the Department of State, which have been turned over to Senator Borah under an injunction of secrecy are not likely to help very much, we suspect, in convincing either the Foreign Relations Committee or the Senate that the naval treaty ought to be ratified. The messages, it is intimated, go to show that Mr. Hoover and Mr. MacDonald were in complete accord after their talks at Rapidan. If they do, and if this accord was what it was represented to be at the time, these cables will set the treaty in rather dismal colors, for it is clear that the treaty accomplishes no important limitation of naval armaments, that there will actually be a great deal more naval tonnage in 1936 than there is now, and that in- stead of financial savings the United States alone stands to pay out a round billion dollars for the elusive thing known as parity. If the treaty is ratified, it will not be because it possesses the merits which the public had been led to ex- pect, or because it makes war very much less likely, but because Mr. Hoover is determined to jam it through. RAILROAD NET EARNINGS for April, based on the figures of the first seventy roads reporting, show a decrease of 33 per cent from April of last year, comparing with decreases of 28.2, 29.8, and 37.3 per cent for January, February, and March respectively. Gross revenue fell 12 per cent in April, against 12.5 per cent in March, and 10.1 per cent in February. Some comfort may be found in the fact that the progressive decline of the preceding three months appears to be stayed. During the first quarter both gross and net earnings were lower than in any year since 1922. The figures suggest the severity of the present business de- pression, a world-wide phenomenon which the Westminster Bank of London in its monthly letter characterizes as a major cyclical movement. The disagreeable truth is that we are in the trough of a depression, and it behooves us to prepare vigorously for another difficult winter. In this connection the Wagner unemployment bills have been passed by the Senate, and the House Committee on Labor has made a favorable report on the one providing for better employ- ment statistics. The other two measures, providing for a prosperity-reserve fund against just such emergencies as this and for federal aid in extending employment agencies, slumber in the House Judiciary Committee, of which Con- gressman George S. Graham is chairman. How can the Administration leaders afford to let these bills die? A UNANIMOUS DECISION by eight justices of the Supreme Court (Justice McReynolds not sitting), affirming the right of railroad employees to be represented in negotiations with their employer by their national trade union and not by a company union, may be commended to those discouraged souls who are inclined to despair of the court. One of the Southern Pacific subsidiaries refused to treat with its employees through their Brotherhood and in- sisted on negotiating through the company union, the Asso- ciation of Clerical Employees — Southern Pacific Lines. The District Court granted an injunction against the company, which promptly violated it. Judge Hutcheson thereupon sentenced three officials to jail for contempt, and ordered the Association disestablished and the Brotherhood reinstated as the representative of the employees. This injunction was sustained by the Circuit Court of Appeals, and is now upheld by the Supreme Court in a sweeping opinion handed down by Chief Justice Hughes which overrules completely the con- tentions of the company. The case is one in which legal principles are by no means necessarily of controlling force, and it is a fair question whether a decision rendered six months ago would have been unanimously favorable to the contention of the unions. By the very nature of its work the court is in the highest sense a political body. Its mem- bers on the whole are wise men, and it would be strange indeed if the lesson of the Hughes-Parker rebellion had been wholly lost on them. A BLACK MAN in Oklahoma was arrested on the highway two miles from Chickasha, Oklahoma, on the afternoon of Memorial Day, charged with assaulting a white woman who lived in a dugout a mile from town. He denied his guilt, but the woman identified him, according to the story, and he was put in jail. That evening a mob at- tacked the jail bent on a lynching party. At this point the story becomes a little obscure, except that "in the melee [according to the United Press] some one was able to slip unobserved to the cell where the Negro was clawing at the iron bars, and shot him"; except that during a lull in the ' man hunt, when the mob had "apparently dispersed," the 1 wounded Negro, lying in his cell, was stabbed twice by one n of a handful of "curious" persons who were allowed not only I to loiter about the jail but to go to the second floor, where the Negro was kept. The "loiterer" turned out to be the husband of the woman in the dugout! The cell was ap- parently open, for "he paused over the unconscious Negro and suddently thrust a knife into the Negro's chest." It should be added that the National Guard, charged with pro- tecting life and property, was somewhere in the offing armed with machine-guns, that an attempt to burn the jail was unsuccessful — and that the Negro died the next day in a hospital in Oklahoma City fifty miles away. Five men, in- cluding the "loiterer" who stabbed the Negro, were arrested, but were released pending investigation. This is not a par- ticularly forceful beginning for the "immediate and vigor- ous prosecution" which Governor Holloway says he will demand. Meanwhile, in Sherman, Texas, fourteen men who took part in the recent lynching there have been charged with arson, burglary, assault to murder, and inciting a riot, and have been transferred to Dallas for trial. " A RIP-ROARING CYCLONE" is the description -l\~ which a writer in the Portland, Oregon, Telegram gives of the irruption of George W. Joseph into the Oregon gubernatorial campaign. Mr. Joseph, who until a few days ago was a lawyer, attracted State-wide attention some time since by his vigorous but unsuccessful defense of the ■will of one E. Henry Wemme, half of whose fortune was to bene- fit a charitable trust in Portland. More recently he has launched some bold attacks against the Public Service Com- mission and the power companies, and has declared that the State courts, in certain cases which he named, have been in- fluenced by political and financial interests. For this last he has just been permanently disbarred by order of the Supreme Court. Shortly before his disbarment, however, he carried off the Republican nomination for Governor at the primaries by about 5,000 votes, after making the fight

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June 11, 1930] The Nation 667 on the issue of personal vindication, touring the State by airplane, and addressing record-breaking audiences. If he is elected, as seems certain, there may be doings in Oregon, for Mr. Joseph is a hard hitter, his following believes in him enthusiastically, and the courts have played into his hands. THE AMERICAN WAY with Mexico has always been an alternation of kicks and courtesy, but the pending proposal to restrict Mexican immigration into the United States involves a discrimination more glaring than that which has been directed at the Chinese and Japanese. The Harris bill, which has passed the Senate and is now before the House, applies to Mexico, alone among the coun- tries of the Western Hemisphere, the national-origins immi- gration quota, thereby cutting down the number of permitted entries to about 1,900 annually. Why the restriction was not extended to all the Americas was told by that sterling hundred-per-center, Representative Albert Johnson of Wash- ington, in a speech in this city on May 16. The House, Mr. Johnson explained, wanted a blanket restriction, but a sweeping attack of that kind "creates consolidated opposition from too many minorities to be handled just at present," so the "alien-minded" and the "anti-nationalists" are to be circumnavigated by going at the dangerous countries one by one. Quite so; if you can't hand out injustice wholesale for fear of a drubbing, try dispensing it at retail. Mexican opinion, naturally, is up in arms. Thus is the good work of Ambassador Morrow being undone. Mr. Hoover ought to veto the Harris bill if it comes his way. DOES IT PAY TO PRAY? Thus the esteemed American Magazine, in advertising a marvelous article on Dean Shailer Mathews, of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, and his "religious laboratory." The answer to the question evidently is, You bet! Witness the following : "Could a man make more money if now and then he prayed about his business?" asks the enterprising reporter. "I think so — if he is honest and serious," answers the dean. "Could he get a better job?" "I haven't much doubt of it." If further evidence is needed that, in the reporter's homely phrase, God is still on the job, or that, in the dean's more scholarly phrasing, He is not emeritus, listen to the religious leader's account of his forgetful colleague who was loaded down with three man-size jobs involving much detail: ' 'God,' he prayed in all earnestness, 'help me to remember everything instantaneously, the moment it is needed.' Within a week he was master of the jobs, and never thereafter forgot an engagement or an essential detail. Without desire so intense that it became prayer, he might have failed." We have always respected Shailer Mathews as a liberal and intelligent religious teacher; but if he and his colleagues in divinity are willing to assume responsibility for these and other statements attributed to him in this article, we can only say, may God help the state of religious instruction in these United States! It evidently ought to be transferred from the divinity school to the college of business administration. STONE WALLS are all the more a prison when the prisoner listens in on the doings of the world outside. But in spite of painful memories and associations most of the 3,000 prisoners in the Illinois penitentiary at Joliet were thankful for the first radio program made possible by the recent innovation of a tiny radio set in each of the 1,000 cells. The program, which was selected by an official at a central receiving apparatus, was a varied one, including baseball scores, current news, humorous sketches, dance tunes, and a symphony. More than one man "cried out in despair," dispatches record, at the too vivid recollection of his own freedom; and, indeed, throughout the prison, the livelier the music, the more thoughtful the listeners. One white-haired prisoner, who has lived behind the walls for thirty-five years, was bewildered and terrified, like Rip Van Winkle, by this new world, and confessed that more than ever does he dread his approaching parole. One of our most urgent prison problems is the mitigation of this numbing spiritual isolation, and Major Henry C. Hill, warden of the Joliet penitentiary, deserves praise for his innovation. SO THE HISTORIC CENTURY MAGAZINE, a quarterly for the past year, has been joined together with the revitalized Forum. May no man put them asunder ! Under Henry Goddard Leach's editorship the Forum has shown a great deal of life and vigor, has lived up to its title in giving both sides of pending questions, and has displayed gratifying evidence of growth. We hope that the combina- tion will bring so many readers to the Forum as to insure that its rebirth has been followed by a permanence not to be questioned. All our high-grade monthlies work on too narrow margins, whereas those of the type of the Ladies' Home Journal roll in wealth. Meanwhile, we shall not forget the Century's great achievements of the past under Richard Watson Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson and their associates. George Kennan's tremendous exposure of Czarist Russia in the early eighties alone entitles it to immortality, while its extraordinary series "Battles and Lead- ers of the Civil War" is still source material of unsurpassed value. Amalgamations being the order of the day on both sides of the Atlantic, there comes the news from London of the merging of the Daily News and Daily Chronicle, both widely read Liberal dailies. It is hoped that their joint daily circulation will be no less than 2,000,000 copies. The Daily News, whose first editor was Charles Dickens, having already swallowed the Westminster Gazette, is now the dominating Liberal daily in England, with its financial con- trol in the hands of L. J. Cadbury of the well-known family of Quaker chocolate manufacturers. Thus, one by one, dis- appear the journalistic giants of yesteryear. JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH'S REVIEW, printed else- where, of his six years of service as the dramatic critic of The Nation does not mean that the editor has lived up to his agreement to do away with either Mr. Krutch or his services at the end of this period. As it happens, he goes to France for a year on a Guggenheim Fellowship, to devote himself to his forthcoming book, and will take up his work again in the fall of 1931. During his absence The Nation, we are happy to say, will be served by Heywood Broun — in person — as dramatic critic. Let the theater take notice that his humor, his sarcasm, his kindliness and good nature are all to be reckoned with! Today we should like to share with our readers our own belief that in all its history no one connected with The Nation has shown greater promise or more rapidly established himself as a critic of the drama, literature, and life than has Joseph Wood Krutch.

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668 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3388 Prohibition Flares Up THAT the wets are plunging with renewed confidence into their fight to alter the Volstead law, or even to amend the Constitution and do away with pro- hibition, is obvious. The New York World, for example, is every day putting on the first page the latest wet recruits who were formerly drys. Thus, a city magistrate, Judge Jean Norris, Miss Katharine Bement Davis, former com- missioner of correction in the metropolis, Adolph Lewisohn, the philanthropist, together with the head of a social settle- ment and various others, are heralded to fresh fame because they have abandoned the prohibition cause. At the same time the Baltimore Sun scans the heavens in vain for a wet who has gone dry, declaring that such an apostasy would be most important front-page news. And the Supreme Court of the United States has done a remarkable bit by declaring that the buyer of liquor does not violate the law although he knows when he buys it that it is contraband and is quite aware that the man who sells it to him is a criminal. Then when the wet looks to Congress he sees that Senator Jones, author of the proposal to make violation of the prohibition laws a crime punishable by five years in prison and a fine up to $10,000, has declared that if his State, Washington, votes for modification or repeal he will abide by its decision. Senator Walsh of Montana, an equally ardent dry, has announced his willingness to have the voters of his State express their wishes through a referendum, and he declares: "Of course, I would stand by the vote in that referendum" — thus doing violence to his own conscience. But the wet's greatest thrill of late has been, of course, the speech of Dvvight Morrow in New Jersey in which he came out for the old solution of States' rights with the proviso that the power of the federal government shall be invoked in some way to prevent wet States from inundating dry States with their liquor — a situation which in the days prior to prohibition did more than anything else to stimulate the drys to demand national abolition of liquor. It is in- teresting to note in this connection that so good a wet as Senator Bruce has declared that Dwight Morrow's solution will mean the return of the saloon in ten States and thirty- eight varieties of prohibition in others. The Literary Digest poll is also being used to the fullest extent, despite the fact that in the face of its Pennsylvania returns that State was so unkind as to nominate Gifford Pinchot for Governor on a dry ticket. That these are portents we are free to say, and we wel- come them as we welcome anything which will bring the issue to a head. We continue to believe that the present situation is intolerable and continue to urge as a first step a nation-wide referendum on the issue. If Senator Walsh is ready for such a test in his own State he ought to be ready for it in the nation. It would be admirable if he himself should take the lead in the next Congress in demanding a poll of the entire people with a ballot stating each issue clearly, succinctly, and unequivocally. Again, we welcome the appearance in the field of wet candidates running openly as such and seeking public approval. That is the nexNbest way to feel the public pulse and to test its desires. Any- thing which will give that thoroughly obnoxious person, the legislator who "votes dry and drinks wet," the courage to wear his true colors will be a great step forward. Let us see if prohibition can be made a major political issue in this country and, if so, how the bulk of the people stand upon it., The great weakness of the wets remains their inability to offer any definite program. They are unanimous in de- manding the repeal of the amendment or the Volstead Act, and they are profuse in asserting that they are not in favor, of the return of the saloon. But when it comes to specific! proposals they are utterly at sea, for most of them have nothing to suggest. The herd mumbles something about thei Canadian or Swedish system and lets it go at that. Any real knowledge of what those systems connote they have not.: It is amusing to see that some of the richest men who are! backing the Du Pont repeal association and its $25,000-a-' year secretary, Mr. Curran, are apparently quite willing to put the government into the liquor business, although their daily prayer is that the government be taken out of every bit of business that private citizens could carry on. If this asso- ciation really wishes to aid the repeal campaign it could do nothing more valuable for its cause than to call a nation- wide convention to formulate a definite plan for the substi- tute for the saloon that the drys need to agree upon. With' a definite, clear-cut, specific program to offer they could rally many to their standard who would not vote in a Literary Digest poll because they cannot see whither repeal leads. The strongest influence against the drys remains the failure to enforce the law. Mr. Wickersham believes it could be enforced approximately as well as our other laws.i but Mr. Hoover, so far as we can see, makes no especial effort to bring that about. Certainly he is issuing no pas- sionate appeals to the country to help in its enforcement; he has allowed to pass unnoticed the statements that he is drifting toward repeal. In Philadelphia the enforcement unit, we are told by well-informed newspapermen, is pre- venting the sale of liquor in hotels and restaurants, and speakeasies. But no one, they assert, has the slightest diffi- culty in obtaining the names of entirely reliable bootleggers who will deliver anything desired on shortest notice, at house or office. It would seem as if the President might, without waiting for any more reports from Mr. Wicker- sham's commission, make up his own mind as to whether the law can or cannot be enforced and let the country have the benefit of the decision. Meanwhile the argument goes on. We are not of those who believe that the issue will speedily be the dominating one in our public life or that the wets are going to have it all their own way. The wet split in New Jersey prob- ably means the defeat of Dwight Morrow in the primary, and the country will lose the services in the Senate of one who really shows some desire to lead and the courage to take a position, even if that position is no more practical than most of those taken by either side. We are aware, too, that many Americans are heartily sick of the whole business. None the less it seems to us that this is likely to be the country's hair shirt for a long while to come. M

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June 11, 1930] The Nation 669 Ramsay MacDonald and India NEVER has there been a clearer illustration of the taming effect of office-holding upon liberals and radicals than that afforded by the MacDonald Gov- ernment in England on the question of India. Until a couple of years ago the Laborites were in arms against the Indian policy of the Conservatives. Now they are in office and the Nationalist uprising has been testing them as by fire. Although forewarned five months before they took office in June last by the announcement of the All India National Congress that there would be a demand for independence if dominion status were not granted by December 31, 1929, the Labor leaders took no steps toward a radical solution of the problem. In consequence they have the revolution to deal with and their fate in large measure is in the hands of Gandhi and his followers. By that we do not mean the mere question of their retention of office. It is their moral standing before the bar of international judgment which is at stake. Have they or have they not the moral courage to meet the situation in all its most difficult and trying aspects? We must confess to doubt and discouragement when we read the cabled reports of the May 25 speech of Wedgwood Benn, Secretary of State for India. It is adequately charac- terized by a London correspondent of the New York Times: As a matter of fact, the speech of the Secretary of State for India, Wedgwood Benn, differed but little, and that little was in theory, from any statement which might have been made by a Conservative statesman. India needed England and England needed India, he said, and if the newspapers chose to exaggerate the recent troubles that constituted no reason why London should not proceed with the plans for the coming Indian conference. That Ma- hatma Gandhi and some others had been put in jail, it was explained, was not to punish them for their political views, but simply to place them where they could not disturb the good order existing in most parts of India among most of the 300,000,000 population. In so far as Mr. Benn's Second Internationalist theories may have clashed with the interests of the British Empire, the British Empire won. Precisely. The result was that the left wing of the Labor forces was "disgusted," but the speech "satisfied a large majority of the House of Commons." It should not satisfy Ramsay MacDonald. For that Prime Minister is on record not once but several times. For example, as late as October 17, 1927, Mr. MacDonald wrote in the London Daily Herald that further tutelage of India for self-rule was useless, and that India should receive independence at once: The moral justification that has always been made for the existence of our Empire among subject peoples has been that we are training them for self-government. The most typical of that is our Indian Empire. A thousand and one reasons are given for a little more tutelage. . . . Now plain, practical common sense should come to our rescue. Nobody can imagine that any harm will come from independence. Let independence be granted. Ten days later he reiterated this position. Indeed, in the columns of our weekly there appeared on January 4, 1928, an article by him in which he said : "If any party has been conspicuously sympathetic to the growth of nationalism in India and to the satisfaction of that spirit it is the Labor Party. . . ." Nor was he the only Labor leader to speak thus. There is no finer spirit in the party than that of George Lansbury. As far back as 1920 Mr. Lansbury thus echoed some famous words of Richard Cobden : There are more than three hundred million people in India; there are forty million of us English in the British Isles. We claim to know what is good for those people better than they do themselves. Was there ever impudence more colossal? Because our skin happens to be white we claim more brains than those whose skin has been browned by the sun. Whenever I look at Indians I feel ashamed of myself. Now we are well aware of what Mr. MacDonald will face if he attempts to live up to his opinions. Fenner Brock- way, M.P., has stated that if MacDonald should grant Gandhi's request for the release of the many political pris- oners who have been rotting in prison since 1915 eight or nine of the British governors in India would resign at once. This, Wedgwood Benn has not dared to face. The India Office is full of officials who live by British control of that teeming distressed country. Again, Mr. MacDonald is re- ported worn and tired as a result of the long and unhappy naval conference, his anxiety about the unemployment situa- tion, the secession of Sir Oswald Mosley, and all the other difficulties which confront him. None the less we feel that he must meet the test which India offers; that he cannot evade the issue by falling back upon the intransigence of the Anglo-Indian officials. If he would keep his record clear he cannot long approve of Wedgwood Benn's Tory theory that it is right to jail a great leader like Gandhi on the excuse that he is disturbing or may disturb the good order of India. It is not Gandhi who is the disturber, but those countrymen of MacDonald's who insist on keeping India in tutelage. There is no moral salvation for the Prime Minister save to say again : "In all attempts to govern a country by a 'benevo- lent despotism' the governed are crushed down. They be- come subjects who obey, not citizens who act." We cannot conceive of a finer slogan for MacDonald to go down to defeat with than his own "Let independence be granted," for we believe that out of such a defeat would come lasting vic- tory. This question of the effect of office-holding upon the reformer is one of far-reaching moment. There is nothing so dangerous to the character, nothing so benumbing to the moral sense, no other pitfall half so deceptive — witness the fall of Woodrow Wilson. It is not to be disposed of by saying that the taming is inevitable; that the theorist must become the realist when he takes office; that practical con- siderations must take precedence of ideals. Those are moral traps; those are the excuses that men give for not living up to the best that is in them ; for refusing to face defeat ; for breaching principles they have upheld all their lives. That is the way of the politician, the professional office-holder. It can never be that of the true reformer.

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670 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3388 It Seems to Hey wood Broun SEVERAL readers have sent questions about newspaper work. "How does anybody get to be a newspaper columnist?" asks L. T. G. from Montclair, New Jersey, and a few others have sent the same query in various forms. I'm only one columnist, I can't speak for the rest. My answer would be, "It's mostly dumb luck." I don't know why it should be so, but newspaper jobs are very much sought after in America today. Almost every young man and woman fresh from college wants to be a newspaper dramatic critic or a columnist. And editors just brush them away from the doorstep. In some respects I'm glad they do. But just the same I think newspapers are not so smart in the barriers which they erect against the entrance of the newcomer. When somebody comes to a paper asking for a chance to work the editor's first question is, "Have you had any experience?" And when the applicant says "No," the editor shakes his head very sadly and says, "I'm terribly sorry but I can't give you a job until you've had some experience." "Well," says the applicant, "how can I get some experi- ence?" "Get a job," says the editor. I believe that's known as a vicious circle. There was something like that once in a book I read when I was a child — a book called "Davy and the Goblin." One of the char- acters was a butter-scotch man and he used to complain that he couldn't run until he got hot and he couldn't get hot unless he could run. From the point of view of us working newspapermen — maybe I ought to qualify that word "working," since a columnist lives by peculiar hours. If he is employed on an afternoon paper he ought to be up out of bed and on the job by three in the afternoon. If he lingers longer than that he is just plain lazy. Writing his column takes from half an hour to an hour — depending on how many contributions he gets. After his work is done he gets ready for dinner and then he goes to a show and after that a night club perhaps — that's called gathering material and it's very arduous and every columnist has to do it whether he wants to or not. But I'm drifting away from the subject of how to be a columnist. I must repeat that the first injunction is, Be lucky. At least that has been my experience. In the be- ginning, or thereabouts, I was a baseball reporter. And then the dramatic critic died. I was a good baseball reporter and so they said, "Make him the dramatic critic." Something happened at the very beginning that was extremely helpful. I reviewed a show in which Miss Ethel Barrymore appeared, and gave it as my opinion that she was not so good. Just in that show I mean. But Miss Barrymore was annoyed and gave out an interview to a Sunday newspaper in which she said, "All the critics liked me except one who I understand is a baseball reporter." "Of course," she continued, "I like baseball. It's our national game and all that, but there is a good deal of differ- ence between the diamond and the drama, is there not?" That helped me a lot. It irritated sporting editors all over the country and they began to write pieces saying it was much more important to be a baseball writer than to be a dramatic critic. They said that baseball reporters were much better writers than dramatic critics. Collier's Weekly took it up and I began to get national publicity. Fate was cer- tainly with me. Six months after I became dramatic critic the book reviewer of the paper took sick. He didn't die but he was very ill and had to go away for his health. People around the newspaper office, particularly those that outranked me, began to look at me with suspicion. They thought I had the evil eye. I remember the managing editor got very cross one night when I said: "How are you feeling this evening? You don't look well. I hope it's nothing serious." He thought that I was after his job too. But I wasn't really after any more jobs just then. It was terribly hard work being the combined book and dramatic critic. Particularly being the book critic. I had to write a book review every day and that meant that I had to read a book every day. At least I thought so then. I hadn't learned yet what an excellent review a critic can prepare by reading the blurb on the jacket and skipping through the first fifty pages. Of course, it is a little dangerous to review books you haven't read. A friend of mine was telling me just tonight of what a fearful mess he got into. He used to do his reviewing mostly by the titles and one week he had a long list of novels to do. One of them, according to the slip sent up to him, was called "The Missing Gallon." Naturally he thought it was a story about prohibition and in his review he spoke of the book's being a lively and exciting yarn about rum-runners and revenue men and the coast guard. It turned out that there had been a typographical error on the slip sent to the reviewer — the real title of the book was "The Missing Galleon" and it was about the Spanish armada. The author was very angry at the critic. But nothing like that happened to me. I didn't dare say anything about any book with which I was not familiar. Still a day arrived when I came down to the office without having read anything. It was one of those lazy days when it was a lot too much trouble to read anything. But there was that blank space in the paper that I was supposed to fill, this column which had over it the title Books. I was in a pre- dicament and in desperation I wrote a piece about my dog and my small son, even though I hadn't read either of them. No editor said anything about it to me the next day, and so a couple of days later when I fell down on my homework again I wrote a column about the farm I intended to buy some day when I had enough money. And this time the managing editor did send for me. He said: "That stuff you've been writing about your son and your dog and your farm is much more interesting than your book reviews. Keep it up." I was getting praise for being lazy. After that they changed the title of my newspaper department from Books to Books and Things and pretty soon it was all Things. I didn't read any books any more. I had become, quite by accident, a newspaper columnist. Finally, on account of there not being any books in it at all they had to drop that out and call the whole business It Seems to Me. And that's how I became a newspaper columnist. Heywood Broun

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June 11, 1930] The Nation 671 The Press Today VI. The Philadelphia Cabbage Patch* By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD LIKE Pittsburgh and Chicago, Philadelphia shows clearly the devastating effects of the drift toward consolidations and disappearances in the newspaper field. Since I served on the Philadelphia Press in 1897 there have perished the following dailies: the Press, the North American, and the News, in the morning field, and the evening Times, Item, Star, Call, and Telegraph. There remain the Inquirer and Public Ledger, the Record, the Evening Ledger, the Bulletin, and the tabloid Daily News. There are, however, only four owners left : Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis, who owns the two Ledgers and has just purchased the Inquirer; J. David Stern, an able publisher, who two years ago bought the Record; the McLean family, owners of the Bulletin; and Bernarr Macfadden, proprietor of the Daily News. Only one of these, the Record, offers any real liberal- ism. Founded just sixty years ago, it prides itself upon expressing "the opinions and aspirations of enlightened men and women." It has certainly fought consistently for clean elections and better government, against debauchers of the ballot, and on behalf of exploited labor, and believes that it was chiefly responsible for the defeat of an outrageous $149,- 000,000 traction grab. Until recently it was a Democratic newspaper, highly individualistic in make-up, with an espe- cially strong following in the rural territory adjacent to Philadelphia, notably in New Jersey. The Record is today conventional in make-up and independent in politics. The Democratic Party in Pennsylvania has dropped out from under it, and so it is reported ready for a new political line- up, leaning occasionally in the Republican direction. Not as to the city, however. There it refuses to go along with any of the bosses. In the national field it is distinctly opposed to reactionary Republicanism and is outspoken against the new tariff. Its editorials induced Gifford Pinchot to run for Governor again, but in the primary just ended it supported the wet ticket, Bohlen for Senator and Phillips for Governor. It is of enormous importance to Philadelphia that the Record should succeed under its new ownership. Without it the city would be reduced almost to the pitiful level of Chicago, where there is no choice in the morning field save between Hearst and the McCormick's Tribune. For a city like Philadelphia to be dependent upon the McLean and Curtis dailies would be little short of a calamity. Hence it is encouraging to learn that this flower in Philadelphia's cabbage patch has been steadily growing under Mr. Stern's leadership — at least until the recent shrinkage in business, which has profoundly affected even the most prosperous dailies. Thus, its circulation rose from 113,300 readers in 1928 to 129,959 in 1929, and has been averaging around 140,000 of late, in 1929 catching up with the morning Ledger on weeks days. On Sundays the showing has not been * This is the sixth in a series of articles on the American press. The seventh. What's Wrong with the World?, will appear in our issue of June 25. — Editor The Nation. quite so favorable. During the last quarter of 1929 the Sunday Record sold 122,347 papers, a gain of 23.2 per cent over 1928, while the Sunday Ledger disposed of 483,567 copies, and the Sunday Inquirer of 503,237. None the less it appears certain to succeed. The kind of competition which Mr. Stern has had to fight can be understood from the fact that the Curtis papers sent out in April the following notice to newsboys: "If you persist in selling Sunday Records you will not be per- mitted to sell Sunday Inquirers or Sunday Ledgers." The Record met this attack successfully and with entire good humor, saying that "it is the first time in Philadelphia jour- nalistic history that one newspaper has been singled out as so important that its competitors decided to combine against it." About the same time the Record printed an editorial denouncing the Ledger for instigating through a Hearst news agency a false statement that the Record was for sale. From the same source, doubtless, have come the constant reports that the Record is not worth buying by the Curtis interests and is likely to "die of its own volition." That does not appear to me to be so certain, for Mr. Stern has had extraor- dinary success with his Camden papers, the Courier and Post, small-town dailies which he has built up to a joint circulation of more than 70,000. He is a man to be reck- oned with, though it is plainly a most difficult furrow which he has now chosen to plow. Philadelphia is notoriously unreceptive to anything independent. He who undertakes to go counter to the political contractor-gang which controls the city, and to the sodden selfishness and contentment of the middle class as well as of the very prosperous, has a man- sized job on his hands. But Mr. Stern knows how to fight. Single-handed he thrice defeated the Baird machine in Cam- den— more strongly intrenched than Vare's in Philadelphia. Its fight upon him was most bitter and personal — in one month it had him arrested three times in the effort to drive this "carpet-bagger" out of town. He has owned six news- papers, all successful, all liberal, anti-machine, and fearless. When we come to the Bulletin with its tremendous cir- culation of 550,000 copies we find one of the cleanest, dullest, most bourgeois of American dailies; one of the most con- ventional as well as one of the most prosperous, but quite courageous enough to hold even the greatest advertisers at bay. One turns over page after page of advertising fringed with reading matter, and sees how it is that the Bulletin has found its way into almost every Philadelphia home. It is kindly and decent, though cheap in appearance, has the necessary amount of jokes and comic strips and news photo- graphs, calls itself independent Republican, is always against Vare, and has fought the traction ring. But it cannot be- come deeply interested in such a primary contest as has recently been ended in Pennsylvania, though it will take sides sharply when the election occurs. As a whole, how- ever, in its eyes all is extremely well with the Republic in this best of all possible worlds, and there is no reason why

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672 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3388 any and every patriot should not sleep soundly provided the tariff is very high and the Communists are properly squelched. This newspaper represents its owners' viewpoint to a T; one must know it and them really to understand democracy in Philadelphia. As for Bernarr Macfadden's Daily News, with its 200,- 000 circulation, it is not sufficient to say that it is like the general run of tabloids. There is a complication here in that ex-Senator William S. Vare, the boss of Philadelphia, owns 49 per cent of the stock — no doubt an extremely ad- vantageous business arrangement, which can, however, hardly be said to leave the Daily News free to serve the cause of good government. The rise of the Daily News has been remarkable in its rapidity; its advertising is increasing while the other dailies are losing — Mr. Vare is, of course, able to influence the insertion of a good many advertisements, espe- cially legal ones. Three years ago when it was losing $350,000 a year it was offered for sale. Today it is believed to be earning $250,000 or more annually. There remain in this cabbage patch the three Cyrus H. K. Curtis dailies, and when we come to them we reach the nub of the Philadelphia situation and its most serious aspect. At the beginning of last March Mr. Curtis sud- denly purchased the one-hundred-and-three-year-old Inquirer, together with land and buildings, from the Elverson heirs, for a sum variously put at $18,000,000 and $20,000,000. It is an open secret that the deal was engineered by John C. Martin, the husband of Mrs. Curtis's daughter by her first husband, who is now the real executive of the four dailies Mr. Curtis owns (the fourth being the New York Evening Post). Mr. Curtis had been in Florida; he was informed of the deal on his return, made an immediate inspection of the property, and the transaction was completed. The Inquirer has, however, been allowed to live — when Mr. Curtis purchased the Press and the North American he immediately destroyed those dailies and with ruthless cruelty turned their staffs out into the street with only a day or two's notice. Curiously enough, however, the policy has been to conceal the change as much as possible — the April 1 statement of ownership and circulation of the Inquirer being "buried" so far back in the paper that it even escaped the notice of some of the editors. The masthead of the daily is also not indica- tive of the Curtis ownership. , The Inquirer, which in 1840 startled the newspaper world by an entirely new departure in journalism, the pur- chase of the American rights for exclusive publication of "Barnaby Rudge" and "Master Humphrey's Clock" by a then rising young English author, Charles Dickens, had long been the Philadelphia Republican's Bible, aggressive in its attacks upon all who refused to worship at the Republican shrine. It was naturally extremely useful to the machine, over which it exercised a great influence ; the machine had to be pretty rotten to come in for criticism at the hands of the Inquirer. As a hidebound party organ it had, in other words, no superior, and when it came to the tariff it gladly did the bidding of the membership of the Republican Club and the Manufacturers' Association. In brief, the Inquirer has stood for all the economic and imperialistic policies of the Republicans and is the most ardent advocate of the status quo that the most reactionary conservative could possibly desire. None the less, its passage into the hands of Mr. Martin — for that is what it comes down to — is ominous. Should anything happen to the Record that gentleman will dominate the morning field of Philadelphia; as it is he reaches approxi- mately 600,000 purchasers every week day and about one million on Sundays. This already so closely approximates a monopoly as to make it well worth while to get some idea of what Mr. Martin is after. That is not easy to define. It is, however, clear that he is extremely ambitious and that Mr. Curtis, who will be eighty years old on June 15, is more and more leaving matters in his step-son-in-law's hands. It is also apparent that Mr. Martin is by no means hostile to the brood of politicians ; during the recent primary the Curtis papers sat squarely on the fence, refusing to notice editorially one of the most exciting campaigns in the history of the State. But the Inquirer's editorial page had plenty of space for such thrilling subjects as Clean-Up Week, Dandelion Pickers Escape Fines, Lauding the Heroism of Motherhood, and Locust Plague Grows Worse in Egypt — all safe and sane and certain to offend no reader's sensibilities. In newspaper circles it is the belief that Mr. Martin has none of such principles as have guided Mr. Curtis in his journalistic ventures, and there is a great desire for more light upon his relations with the various groups of Philadel- phia politicians. Certain it is that under Mr. Martin there will be nothing done to retrieve Mr. Curtis's own mis- takes. That gentleman has never even approached the success in the daily field which he has achieved with the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal. He has not known how to succeed. He long tried to make a national newspaper out of the Ledger, but entirely failed, probably because he never really visioned what a national daily ought to be. There is nothing about the New York Evening Post, for example, to indicate that either Mr. Martin or Mr. Curtis can build a newspaper capable of making a profound impress upon the metropolis. Their editorial pages are never strong, or brilliant, or given to leadership. They economize in editorial salaries in accordance with the new trend which declares that the daily should not lead or seek to impose its beliefs upon others, but that it should be merely a reflection of our swift, superficial, pleasure-loving jazz age. Their editorial pages will continue to reflect the views of the rich, prosperous, and contented, and of those who profit by special privilege, who believe that the government should go into special tariff partnership with every manufacturer who is too inefficient to make money or is dissatisfied with the rate of his profit. Finally, if the columns of their dailies are clean and carry only worthy advertising, they are not wholly free from domination by the large advertisers. They will continue to be class organs — the mouthpieces of the class with which Mr. Martin and Mr. Curtis come daily into contact. What hope, under these circumstances, can there be for an enlightened, independent, liberal public in Philadel- phia? What hope, outside of the Record, that there will be a sympathetic interpretation of the aspirations and desires of the great mass of Americans? What hope that there will be a determined effort to allay the growing popular discontent by frontal attacks upon the evils of our social and economic life? These men are far too rich to look for any such leadership ; millions roll in on them constantly.

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Tune 11, 1930] The Nation 673 Mr. Curtis himself drugs the people of Philadelphia not merely by the deadly conservatism and intellectual mediocrity of his great magazines and their special appeal to Babbittry, but by the magnitude of his public gifts. Where George W. Childs, the former owner of the Public Ledger, was ac- counted a great philanthropist when he bestowed checks for $1,000 or $5,000, Mr. Curtis's generosity is evidenced by many millions. Business Philadelphia admires him pro- foundly, despite his serious intellectual limitations, because business men everywhere worship material success and Mr. Curtis's material success is surely a wonder of the business world. But to the development of the soul of America he has contributed nothing. Every thoughtful American must look with anxiety upon a situation in which Mr. Curtis's heirs will dominate, or nearly dominate, the mentality of the historic City of Brotherly Love and the sources of its news — and should aid as best he can the fight of the Record against that domination. Big-Business Brains An Open Letter to Senator N orris By J. G. CURTIS MY dear Senator Norris: In the recent discussion of Mr. Hughes's confirmation as Chief Justice you described the conflict between the interests repre- sented by Mr. Hughes and those represented by yourself ; and, according to the news dispatches, you said that you were frightened by the prospect of the America toward which mergers and combinations were hurrying us, an America in which every citizen would be the slave of a captain of monopoly sitting in Wall Street with his feet on a mahog- any desk. Your foreboding and your description interested me intensely. I admired the stand you made, as I have often done. But as one who is in business, who works for such enterprises as you condemn, who believes in their social desirability, and who yet sympathizes with your purposes and admires your leadership, I should like to report, so to speak, from behind your target. I should like to tell you what that target looks like to an observer who is not alien to you in spirit, but who views the enemy from a different mental angle. In the first place, I see nothing essentially personal in the forces you are attacking. Consequently, all that part of vour attack which personifies monopoly with its feet on a mahogany desk misses because there is nothing like that here to be hit. In all my years of business experience, I have never seen a business man with sufficient intelligence to fit, even approximately, the picture you draw. Business men are notably lacking in intelligence of any breadth ; what they do notably possess is either an ingenious alertness or a pon- derous tenacity. And they exercise either the one or the other of these qualities almost exclusively in current emergen- cies, almost never in comprehensive programs covering long periods of time. The evil that they do is therefore to be stopped by an attack on their intellectual deficiencies rather than on their assumed intellectual powers. An illustration of my meaning may be found in a well-known incident in the earlier career of Mr. Justice Brandeis, now one of the members of the liberal minority of the Supreme Court. A number of years ago, as one of the attorneys in the Shippers Case before the Supreme Court, Mr. Brandeis supported his attack on the carriers' rates by showing that the railways were losing a million dollars a day by blindly neglecting improvements which scientific management would make pos- sible. He made the issue not one of malignancy, but of stupidity. He won — and so did the railways, as a matter of fact, for instead of being merely thwarted, they were taught a lesson to the benefit of everyone, themselves included. In the second place, the forces you assail, not being per- sonal, are themselves social. Being social, they transcend all individual wills. You yourself apparently see them at times in this aspect, for you speak as if you sensed something in- evitable in them. I confess that I see them habitually in that aspect. The breakdown of individualism seems to me a perfectly natural and wholesome thing. The needs of a great society, highly specialized as they are, cannot be served by individualistic means. We no longer live sparsely in the wilderness as our fathers did ; the hardiness and versatility they exhibited were not matters of free election with them, but were required of them, on pain of death, by an inexor- able environment. Our environment, on the other hand, re- quires of us, on pain of death, quite different virtues: it requires specialization, functionalization, division of labor, rationalization. A hundred years ago it was a virtue to chop down trees and build your own house ; today to do such a thing would be a luxurious vice. Society cannot tolerate such ill-directed expenditures of individual effort. Neither can it tolerate such ill-directed expenditures of effort as the individual ownership and operation of business. It is quite as anachronistic to have groceries supplied by an inde- pendent grocer as it would be to have your clothes made at home. And I urge this on behalf of the very people in whose interest you are active and valiant — on behalf, that is, of the great masses whose consuming needs are the starting- point and the criterion of every motion of economic activity. They are, as you contend, doing without too much that they should have and paying too much for what they get. The burden is laid on them, however, not by malignancy, but by ignorance. Business men, I repeat, are not characterized by breadth of intelligence. I have worked with them for years, and there are few serious things that could be laid morally to their charge. They are children. They need leadership. They need something besides a shouting of Don't! Our great economic and social confusion is due to the fact that the entrepreneur has been taken at his own rating as a

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674 The Nation [Vol: 130, No. 3388 responsible moral agent. He is not. He is a good techni- cian, a good man at routine, an industrious fellow. Like most specialists, he thinks that everything depends on him, but in reality he has no more notion where he is or where he is going than a bat at noonday. The leadership that he requires is, consequently, of a comprehensive and positive sort that you yourself should supply, a leadership based on a firm sense of the public good. It should be a leadership that looks in the same realistic fashion at a corporation as at a telephone instrument. The corporation is a social agency. It has marvelous potentiali- ties. But it is so new that as yet we don't know what to make of it. It is like Watt's steam engine or Edison's first electric lamp. Its capabilities for social accomplishment on behalf of those masses of people whose interest is yours are incalculable. But those capabilities need to be developed under a comprehensive leadership such as your own with a view to deriving the greatest social good out of the instru- mentalities that our peculiar modern genius has developed — such instrumentalities as the laboratory, the electric motor, the radio, the tractor, the corporation, the large-scale enterprise. Viewed organically, the concentration of commercial and industrial control is a process of socialization. And it is not peculiar to this country, but universal. In England, they are trying to give it leadership, but so belatedly that the case looks pretty hopeless. In Russia, they are going about it much more determinedly. And the significance of what they are doing is probably beyond anything else in modern history. In Russia, as here, there are enormous populations, enormous social potentialities, enormous natural resources. In both countries, things are moving together on an enor- mous scale. But this is the difference. In this country, we try to go forward with our scientific discoveries, but still holding on to an eighteenth-century individualism that is contemporary with phlebotomy and the hanging of sheep thieves; whereas in Russia they see modern culture as a whole, and in one comprehensive plan they sweep together and coordinate farm, school, factory, dwelling, movie, dis- tribution, hygiene, research, invention, and technique. We do misgivingly what they do with a will. Personally, their bloodiness is hateful to me, and I shrink from it. All Amer- icans do. But our squeamishness will not make the Soviets fail. And it should not blind us to the intelligence of their program in its civil aspects. It is not a time for us to quote Oliver Goldsmith's venerable lines in "The Deserted Village," but to grasp the realities of twentieth-century mechanistic civilization and master them. If we don't, the Soviets, without lifting a finger against us, may see us crash some day because we neglected to learn our own job. I trust that the importance of the issue and the sin- cerity of my own concern will excuse the informality and impetuousness of my address. I believe I am not presumptu- ous in declaring that I share your hatred of privilege and selfishness and your desire for a universally diffused welfare. I believe I am in a position within the structure of what you call Big Business to see certain things you do not see. And I feel that I should tell you of them in the respectful hope that I may contribute even in a little way to the effective- ness of your leadership. Very sincerely yours, J. G. Curtis In the Driftway AN unexpected gift, gratifying but alarming, has dis- turbed the Drifter's usual tranquillity. A rash admission to a friend of a mild taste for exotic flora and fauna is responsible. When he said "exotic" the Drifter had in mind nothing more daring than a vague preference for, say, scarlet hibiscus flowers as against gera- niums, a tribe which he has never looked upon with favor. He is not an expert, and has been known to confuse lark- spurs with hollyhocks, but he is quite clear about geraniums. As for hibiscus flowers, he is not sure that he has ever seen any, but they call to mind a South Sea island and a beach and lovely girls who would wear them in their hair. * * * * * NOT long after this admission the Drifter found him- self the perplexed guardian of a Darlingtonia Cali- fornica. The Darlingtonia, though a plant in name, is carnivorous, and has something the appearance of a cobra rearing up to strike. The florist's boy who brought it was coldly superior. "Just give it a bit of raw meat when it's hungry," he said; "steak will do." The implication was that steak would only just do. "Perhaps it prefers human flesh," suggested the Drifter facetiously. "Couldn't say, sir," said the boy, and he left the room, whistling. The Drifter cautiously experimented by putting a scrap of meat into the capacious mouth of the Darlingtonia. There was something a little sinister in the gradual and complete dis- appearance of that meat. Since then the Drifter has felt himself on the horns of a dilemma. Should he, in the interests of his peace of mind, overfeed his charge, or starve it? He has not been able to decide, and has pursued a wavering course. On the one hand, he has a feeling that carnivorous animals, lions, for instance, are rather less savage when not given meat. A lion whose diet is porridge and sprouts is excused from certain of the more formidable conventions of his kind. On the other hand, the Drifter has sometimes an uneasy feeling that, if denied red meat, the creature might make shift with a bit of Drifter, creeping on him in his sleep, perhaps, or hiding behind a door. True, up to now it has remained rooted like any geranium, but he has his doubts, and on the days when these doubts assail him he may be seen ambling into the nearest restaurant, ordering for himself a meal which he may or may not want, and asking the waiter for a bit of raw meat to carry away with him. "For a cat, sir?" said one waiter with a sympa- thetic gleam in his eye. "No. For a plant." "I see, sir," said the waiter coldly. A SOLUTION has at last occurred to the Drifter, a solution not entirely kind, but interesting. He plans to present this jungle hybrid to a vegetarian friend of his. He cannot help wondering how his friend will cope with it. First, of course, he will try to teach it to love string beans or nut bread. But if it proves obstinate, will he go out and round up bits of steak to keep it alive, or will he let it go into a decline and die? And if the latter, will his conscience hurt him? The Drifter would love to know, but unfortunately he has lost his friend's address. The Drifter

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June 11, 1930] The Nation 675 Correspondence Veto the Tariff! To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: I have seen with much pleasure the words in large capitals Veto the Tariff on the front page of The Nation. That subject has been on my mind for some time, and there is a point that, as I think, needs emphasizing. President Hoover won the admiration and the affection of the world for his heroic and beneficent anti-starvation work in Belgium and else- where. The spirit in which the tariff bill has been conceived and formulated is the very opposite of that which expressed itself in the relief work of the war period, and the effects of it, in quarters where near-starvation prevails, will correspond with the unworthy spirit. Happily, the final shaping of the measure is, in some degree, still in our President's hands. New York, May 28 John Bates Clark Has India Rejected Non-Violence1? To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: -It is ironical that, simultaneously with the publication of S. K. Ratcliffe's statement in The Nation of May 28 that Indians have rejected the central doctrine of Gandhi's teaching, non-violence, we should have news from India that, censored though it is, proves beyond doubt that Indians are keeping to this doctrine in an amazing fashion. Casualties (I use the Herald Tribune figures from Webb Miller's admittedly muti- lated account) to the number of 630 on one side, with no men- tion of anyone injured on the opposing side, surely do not indicate any great departure from the non-violence to which the Indian satyagrahis are pledged. Lest anyone set this down to cowardice, I should like to say that Indian publications, which come to me regularly, tell quite a different story. One eye- witness to some of the frightful cruelty — and this against men who are merely offering themselves for arrest — writes, "Never have I seen such bravery . . . the meekness and non-retaliation under attack is nothing short of superhuman." Paying for one's freedom in the "coin of suffering" is not the part of cowards. Courting arrest — to the end that available jails may be filled to overflowing — does not come from any but the most selflessly brave. The type of resistance employed by Gandhi is far more dangerous to the individual than the ordi- nary type of insurrection, as it is harder to combat. What Gandhi calls, for want of a more definite phrase, "indecent assaults" have been the treatment of the satyagrahis right along, as highly reliable reports show; and yet this ex- treme of pain and humiliation is not alone borne, but courted, day after day. When all the facts have come through we shall know that Indians have not rejected their great leader's Ahimsa — doctrine of non-violence — but have, in the acceptance of it, risen to heights of courageous and spiritual achievement. New York, May 23 Grace Gilman To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: Let me enter a protest against the inadequate and lop- sided review of C. F. Andrews's book, "Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas." When George Washington was leading the American Revolution, what would have been the force of a discussion of his ideas that dwelt chiefly on the irrational points in Washing- ton's theology? There are irrational points in Gandhi's, but this extraordinary man, though in prison, is still leading a revo- lution much bigger than ours, and prompted by wrongs infinitely greater. There are two sides to British rule in India. We all know of the good side; we have been hearing about it all our lives. To most Americans, the bad side is as unknown as the dark side of the moon. Those wishing to understand it should read three books: "The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age," by Romesh Dutt (E. P. Dutton and Company) ; "Eng- land's Debt to India," by Lajpat Rai (B. W. Huebsch) ; and "India in Bondage," by J. T Sunderland (Lewis Copeland Company). If they have not time for all, let them read the last. In India it is a penal offense to sell this book or to own it. The British are the best administrators of colonies and dependencies in the world, but even they cannot make a bad system work well. Imperialism is a system inherently vicious. What the British have done in India is not a bit worse in prin- ciple than what we have done in Haiti and elsewhere, but it is on a larger scale, and has had a longer time to work out its bad results. Gandhi's ideas on this subject are as sound as they are strong. Even his emphasis on the spinning-wheel, which seems so strange to Westerners, has a good reason under present con- ditions in India. Many of his ideas show a singular union of saintliness with practical sagacity. His great effort to achieve his country's freedom without bloodshed is worthy of the highest respect. However much vio- lence may develop, there will be less than if the most beloved man in India had not used all his great influence against it. And whatever aspect the struggle may take on, every lover of liberty should wish success to India's cause. Boston, May 30 Alice Stone Blackwell For a Nation Club To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: A few of us in Philadelphia are desirous of meeting other readers of The Nation and would like to form a Nation Club. Any who are interested should address me at 944 North Randolph Street, Philadelphia. Philadelphia, May 14 Leon Stern Contributors to This Issue J. G. Curtis is the pseudonym of a careful student of present-day financial and industrial developments. Thomas Hornsby Ferril was the winner of The Nations poetry contest in 1927. Mark Van Doren is editor of "An Autobiography of America." V. F. Calverton is editor of the Modern Quarterly and author of "Three Strange Lovers." George E. G. Catlin is a member of the boards of directors and of editors of the Realist. Stanley J. Kunitz has just published a book of poems, "Intellectual Things." Lionel Trilling is on the editorial staff of the Menorah Journal. Pierre Loving, long resident in France, is now living in New York. C. Hartley Grattan is the editor of "The Critique of Humanism."

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Summer Book Section The Economics of Dollar Books By HENRY IT is too early to make any facile predictions regarding the ultimate effect of the announcement by a group of publishers that they are cutting their prices of new novels from the present level of two dollars and two dollars and a half to a dollar, the "most sweeping revision in new book prices in the history of modern publishing." The most one can confidently do at the moment is to indicate certain possibilities. The question must first of all be considered in its eco- nomic, even in its bookkeeping, aspects. How is such a radical slash possible? If publishers can sell novels at a dollar and still make a profit, most laymen will want to know, haven't they been making an inordinate profit with books at two and two and a half dollars? The answer lies in the fact that the publisher's unit cost of production on any book decreases with the number of copies he pro- duces of that book. If the lowering of price increases sales sufficiently, then a publisher who makes only a moderate profit with a novel selling at two dollars may still make a moderate profit when he cuts the price of that novel to a dollar. Let us see how this works out for a typical novel. We shall assume that two thousand copies of this novel are printed to retail at two dollars a copy and that (publisher's paradise!) every copy is sold. Costs and profits will then run something like this (the following calculations are based on actual figures supplied to the writer by publishers) : Cost of plates $700 " " printing 100 " " paper 80 " " binding 240 Author's royalty 400 Publisher's overhead 240 Advertising 160 Total cost of production $1,920 Income from sales 2,320 Publisher's net profit $ 400 In this account it has been assumed that the author's royalty is 10 per cent of the retail price of the book, that the publisher's overhead expenses average 12 per cent of the retail price of each book, and that the book has been sold to booksellers, jobbers, and others at an average discount of 42 per cent, i. e., that the publisher gets $1.16 for a book that retails for $2. Now if the publisher were to cut the price of such a book to $1, and if this reduction did not result in any increase in his sales, it is quite obvious that his net profit would be transformed into a heavy loss. Still selling to the "trade" at a discount of 42 per cent, he would receive only 58 cents a copy for his books, or a total of $1,160. When we allow for the fact that the author's 10 per cent royalty would automatically be reduced by $200, and even if we assume that the publisher might save $100 on a HAZLITT cheaper binding, he would still confront a deficit of $460 in place of a profit of $400. But what the price-cutting publishers are counting on is their belief that books at half their former prices will meet a very substantial increase in sales. Suppose that the publisher is able to sell ten thousand copies of the book at a dollar. His cost sheet (assuming that he uses a cheaper binding, and assuming, also, that he can still keep his overhead ex- penses down to an average of 12 per cent of the retail price) will run like this: Plates $700 Printing 300 Paper 400 Binding 700 Royalty 1,000 Overhead 1,200 Advertising 800 Total costs $5,100 Income from sales 5,800 Net profit $ 700 I do not mean to suggest here that a reduction in the price of a book would result in a sale five times as large, but merely to indicate the very great reduction in unit cost possible when a comparatively large number of books is originally published. This result arises from the fact that the chief single item in the cost of a book is usually the cost of the plates, which remains fixed regardless of the sale, while other items (with the possible exception of over- head expenses) vary approximately in direct ratio with out- put. For two thousand copies of a two-dollar book the cost of plates is almost 40 per cent of total costs; for ten thousand copies of a dollar book the cost of plates is only 14 per cent of total costs. The unit cost to the publisher, consequently, falls from 96 cents a book to 51 cents. On a second ten thousand copies, the cost of the plates may be written off altogether, and the unit cost of production becomes 43 cents. Whether novels at an original price of a dollar become economically feasible, then, depends solely upon the extent to which a radical reduction in price will increase sales. The plan cannot succeed unless the demand for books proves to be what economists call elastic — i. e., the number of books sold must increase in more than an inverse ratio to the reduction in price. In other words, if a publisher sells only double the number of books he otherwise would have, the plan will fail ; if he sells only 50 per cent more it will of course fail worse. Where the publisher at present has to sell 2,500 copies of a book to "break even," he will have to sell anywhere from 5,000 to 6,500 to do so with ,a dollar book. To make the same net profit from a dollar book as from a two-dollar book, he will have to sell at least two and a half times as many; to make the same net profit from a dollar book as from a two-dollar-and-a-half book, he will have to sell at least three times as many.

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June 11,1930] The Nation 677 (And the early results of the present move may easily be misleading. As long as a few publishers cut their prices and the majority do not, dollar books — popular novels, detec- tive stories, and the like — may increase their sales merely at the expense of "replaceable" two-dollar books in the same class. The increased sale of these dollar books, in other words, would not necessarily indicate any real, or at least any proportionate, expansion of the book market as a whole. In that case, a large part of the sales increase would be found to disappear if competing publishers met the lower prices; which would mean, of course, that publishers would simply be in a worse plight all around.) It is not difficult to see, therefore, why there is such a wide difference of opinion among publishers on the present price war, with the majority still declaring that to price books originally at a dollar is economically unsound. The price-cutting publishers are making a bold experiment ; for no one yet knows just how "elastic" the demand for books is — just what effect changes of price can have on sales. On the one hand, there are such precedents as "The Story of Philosophy," selling at five dollars, to indicate that high prices do not keep the public from buying the books it wants ; on the other hand, there are the very large sales of the dollar reprint series to indicate that a reduction in price may have a very material effect in increasing sales — that a book which has stopped selling at two dollars to five dollars may start selling again at a dollar. If the various price-cutting plans succeed (each of those so far announced is slightly different from the others) what is likely to be their broader effect? Here again it is better to indicate possibilities than to attempt confident predictions. It must be kept in mind to begin with, however, that when a publisher turns to dollar books his mistakes become more costly than when he is dealing with two-dollar books. There has always been a large gambling element in the publishing business. It has been estimated that the average sale of a novel is only about 1,500 copies, and perhaps one is safe in saying that the publisher loses money on four out of every five books he sells. He must depend on his successes to carry his failures. As a dollar book, if it failed, would in- volve more serious losses, it seems probable that the tendency of publishers would be to print fewer books. Such a result is commonly regarded as a consummation devoutly to be wished ; but it is not the number of books that is important, but their quality. Whereas today the publisher who wishes to avoid losses must ask himself whether a book is likely to sell at least 2,500 copies, he will have to begin asking whether it is likely to sell at least 5,000 to 6,500. And this question seems likely to hurt two classes of books — those too bad to have an assured mass appeal, and those too (subtly or esoterically) good to have an assured mass appeal. There is a possibility, in short, that the dollar-book field may develop into a sort of publishers' Hollywood. Certainly it would accelerate the present tendency toward concentration of advertising and selling effort on fewer titles. On the other hand, there is the possibility that, just as the tabloids obtained an enormous circulation without materially affecting the circulation of the regular newspapers, so popular novels at a dollar may find a field of their own while more expensive volumes with a narrow appeal will continue to sell in the same quantities as at present. Still again, it is possible that American publishers may begin on a wider scale the European practice of printing all books of whatever quality in paper covers first, and then leaving it to readers to decide which books are worth keeping and binding durably after they have once been read. If the present experiment should succeed, it seems likely to have important secondary effects. Will existing dollar reprint libraries become fifty-cent reprint libraries? What will hap- pen to the business of the rental libraries? Will the so-called drug-stores become regular instead of crisis bookstores? From many angles the new experiment is extremely significant. Can mass selling be applied to belles-lettres? We must wait and see. Dialogue in Kansas — 1850 By THOMAS HORNSBY FERRIL Some dim rememberer of quarter-decks had brought A globe of the earth to Kansas and had given This fading world to the new bride in the clearing, And the bride loved best the blue where the ships were driven. "The prairie rolls like sea, new bride, but is not sea," The globe had said, "but you are a woman fair Enough to be a shining harbor's name, or the dream In the wind that makes the tallest ships go there." "I will be shining harbor then," she told the globe, "With the oldest prairie beating on my breast, And the blue of it shall sing like sea in me forever, And my tall man will say that this is best." "But your tall man will never stay," the globe had said. "He plows as if no women wait for ships, For there's a westering, ever a westering, That is another lover to his lips. "You must be that to him, if you be shining harbor, And you must be another prairie far From here, and another home he cannot see from here, Perhaps the Oregon will be his star. "After the ice, but still before the grass has come, You will know this. Gently he will have curled His fingers through your hair at night and darkly stroked Your body with the circles of the world. "Those hours when you are Oregon and not his bride, He'll be your lover home a night from sea ; Morning will pull his draw-knife on new oxen yokes, Sundown will hack an axle from a tree. "He'll say this little world is like a wagon wheel, And he'll get a wheel and prop it in a yoke, He'll show you that from here to Oregon is less Than a span from one spoke to another spoke. "And wheels like this will roll to Oregon, you'll say, But not to him, and if you must go there, Who must you be to him in Oregon at night, To feel sea fingers moving in your hair?"

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678 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3388 The New American Drama By JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH WHEN I joined the staff of The Nation there was an understanding between its editor and me to the effect that all dramatic critics should be shot at the end of five years of service. Six seasons have now passed since I thus gaily set a term to my existence, but justice has been tempered with mercy and it has been agreed, not only that my life shall be spared, but that, after a banishment of fifteen months' duration, I may return to the practice of my profession. Accordingly and with a muttered Auf Wieder- sehen I depart from Broadway — though not without the few words which follow by way of farewell. I am aware of the fact that dramatic critics are popu- larly supposed to view the stage with a jaundiced eye. The necessity of making a business out of what ought to be a pleasure is thought to result inevitably in bad temper, and to produce a state of mind which leads naturally to the choice of What's Wrong with the Theater? as the topic which the critic is most eager to discuss. Yet it is not, in my case at least, a "loathed stage" which I quit, for I must confess that I find in myself an optimism which others may not have noticed, and that, after a good many hundred eve- nings in our various playhouses, I still believe the New York theater to be a not unadmirable institution. Indeed, the contemporary American drama seems to me to compare very favorably both with the other departments of contemporary American literature and with the plays produced during any except a few widely separated epochs in dramatic history. Perhaps neither our dramas nor our novels have achieved that perfection of form which alone is capable of enabling any work of literary art to endure beyond the age in which it is written, but our plays, like our novels, have at least been the result of a conscientious effort to be as sincere and as significant as their authors could make them. And though I have heard graybeards lament our decline since even the recent days of Daly and Mansfield and Drew, I cannot bring myself to regret the change which has given us the dramas of O'Neill, Behrman, Stallings, Anderson, Barry, et al., in place of those of Boucicault, Clyde Fitch, and Bronson Howard. Perhaps the plays of the generation before this were better acted. I am willing to take on faith the statement that they were. But from my own reading I know that those of our own day have more substance in them. The drama is, of all the forms of art, the one which seems to have the greatest difficulty in maintaining contact with the interests, the opinions, and the tastes of the most enlightened portion of any general public. Not without reason the adjective "theatrical" has come to be used as synonymous with all that is false, artificial, and preposterous, for the drama has been content to remain during whole half- centuries at a time a form which no one regarded as a pos- sible vehicle for a "criticism of life." Twenty years ago the American drama was, moreover, still in the condition from which the European drama had begun to rescue itself some twenty years before that. By comparison with the novel it was timid, superficial, and trivial — all but untouched by the intellectual and moral forces which had revolutionized the thought and feeling of intelligent people. It was as flac- cid and simple-minded as though Zola and Tolstoy and Nietzsche and Anatole France — to say nothing of Ibsen and his followers — had never written. The same people who read Hardy and Wells and George Moore in their libraries complacently accepted the most trivial sentimentality in the theater, because they had come to regard the theater as an institution not to be taken seriously. On entering its doors one regressed by force of habit to a simpler level of intelli- gence, and anyone interested in it might have been pardoned for doubting whether or not it could ever again be used by an adult mind. Yet today our theater is at least once more a part of the main stream of our artistic life. I do not mean merely that it is once more a place where "problems" may be dis- cussed with the same frankness as in the novel, but also that the attitudes which it exhibits toward characters and deeds are the same as those exhibited in other forms of creative writing. It has rescued itself from a set of infantile con- ventions which were almost as absurd as those which now stultify the movies, and it has become once more a channel through which intellectual and artistic impulses can flow. The playwrights who have written during the past twenty years have accomplished this rescue, and even if they have not written a single play likely to endure they have accom- plished much by making the theater once more intellectually and artistically respectable. Twenty years ago the drama was hardly a department of contemporary American litera- ture; today it emphatically is. By a stroke of good fortune it so happened that the first play which I was called upon to witness in my pro- fessional capacity was the Anderson-Stallings "What Price Glory?" and that play may be taken as typical of the kind of excellence that has been found in the drama of the six years which followed. Scarcely had the curtain risen upon this play before one was aware that one was in the presence of some kind of originality and power. Out of the rich, living, and Rabelaisian language there was gradually built up a tale unlike any tale of war hitherto presented upon any stage, and marked by certain excellences which were, more- over, of a purely dramatic kind. It had, to be sure, no easily definable thesis. Indeed, the public argued hotly concern- ing the question of whether it was to be regarded as "for" or "against" militarism and war. And yet, without any re- course to didacticism, it achieved something beyond even the striking naturalism which characterized it. Here, translated into dramatic terms, was the record of a terrible experience set down in a manner which managed to convey some sense of the peculiar quality of that experience and thus to dif- ferentiate it from the experience of other generations with the same ghastly phenomena of war. It was certainly no mere cold academic retort to those who have glorified martial adventure, for it communicated something of the excite- ment, of the fierce atavistic joy, which its protagonists some- times felt. And yet, at the same time that it thus com-

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June 11, 1930] The Nation 679 municated to the spectator the extent to which the typical American soldier was like all other good soldiers of all time, it managed to suggest how different he was also — how far, for example, he was from feeling the unmixed emotion which Shakespeare had so perfectly described when he spoke of the "pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war." Here, in other words, was a play which did what only a play, and only a play written in the twentieth century, could have done — which, that is to say, reconstructed with a vividness almost equal to the vividness of experience a series of events, and at the same time discharged the tension of an audience by formulating for it the confused emotions to which a knowledge of, or a participation in, the war just past had given rise. When the curtain descended I felt that a theater which could even occasionally reveal plays like that was a theater worth studying, and I have not, during the six years which have followed, changed my opinion. Europe today has no group of young playwrights com- parable in importance to that which founded the modern drama a generation ago. The impulse which led the earlier group to create the drama of social discussion has pretty well exhausted itself, leaving the newest generation of play- wrights in England, France, and Germany to write without the advantage of any common trend. And while I do not by any means wish to maintain that the contemporary Ameri- can playwrights are sure of a historical importance equal to that achieved by the Ibsens, the Shaws, and the Haupt- manns, I do believe that one may see from such a play as "What Price Glory?" both that they are superior to their present European fellows and that there is at present in the process of formation an American tradition of dramatic writing which is gradually detaching itself from the tradi- tion out of which the established classics of modern European drama grew. Let me see if I can suggest what that tradition is. In various of their plays, Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Shaw achieved a purely dramatic excellence in varying degrees, but there is no doubt of the fact that their chief significance is to be found in what they taught. The best measure of their importance is the influence which they had upon the moral and social thought of their contemporaries, and Shaw, at least, so far accepted this as a generally applicable measure of dramatic importance that he declared Shakespeare to be a trivial dramatist, because, in effect, "Romeo and Juliet" contained no criticism of the Elizabethan social system. But when, to choose at random, we consider such plays as "What Price Glory?" "Strange Interlude," "Street Scene," and "The Green Pastures," it is obvious that these plays do not teach anything definable and that, if we consider them "important," it cannot be for the reasons that "A Doll's House" or "Man and Superman" is important. Now I do not for a moment believe that the authors of these American plays said plainly to themselves, "Art can achieve an importance which is not identical with the im- portance of the doctrine taught." As a matter of fact, the American drama began as an offshoot of the European, and it began to be serious when it began, like its model, to deal with material sociologically significant. But even in the work of certain individual dramatists like Eugene O'Neill or Elmer Rice one may trace the process by which didacticism is gradually replaced by a feeling for effects more purely aesthetic, and the result is that plays like "Strange Inter- lude" and "Street Scene" are, whatever one may think of their absolute merit, obviously efforts to write plays more like the plays of Shakespeare than like the plays of Shaw — in the sense, that is to say, that they aim less at the enforcement of a moral than at the achievement of that miracle by which pain is transmuted into beauty, which goes under the name of Tragedy. I would not, be it understood, be thought to maintain that art has no human importance, but I do maintain, first, that the American drama has differentiated itself from that of the masters of the modern European drama by ceasing to cultivate the "problem play," and second, that the direction of this differentiation is admirable because comedy and tragedy per- form for the human being a function not performed by either the profoundest sociological treatise or the plays whose purpose is primarily sociological. I have sometimes been asked what "Strange Interlude" means, and I could reply only that no answer of the sort which the inquirer obviously expected is possible. The ques- tion is a question of the sort which we learned, and quite properly, to ask in connection with "An Enemy of the People" or "Man and Superman," but it is not the kind of question any sensitive person would think of asking in connection with "Othello." Such a play does not, in that sense, "mean" anything. It has, that is to say, no doctrine. And if we are considering not magnitude but manner, "Strange Interlude" is like "Othello." Defending this same play before a hostile audience in Boston I was once inter- rupted by a Communist who demanded to know whether or' not the author had in this play "any message for the workingman." I replied — without, I am sure, being under- stood— "Yes, in so far as the workingman is also a human being." But in that question and that reply lie, if only they might be elucidated, the whole meaning of the relation of art to life and the whole defense of the effort of the con- temporary American dramatist to make out of the materials of contemporary American life comedies and tragedies ac- ceptable to the souls of contemporary American audiences. The sciences of sociology, politics, and economics have as their purpose the adjustment of the individual to his material surroundings. There is, besides, the science of ethics, which endeavors to teach us how we ought to act, and there are, still further, schools to train us for the prac- tice of the professions by which we hope to earn the means of sustenance. But every man is something more than a citizen, a parent, and a breadwinner. Even the Communist workingman is a human being also, and as such he has a problem only distantly related to the problem of making his living and raising his family. He has the problem of learning how to accept, with fortitude if necessary and with joy if possible, the experience of living, and of seeing others live — the problem of finding a way to "accept the universe." And it is the answer to that problem which art attempts to give, by showing how the chaos of experience may be contemplated under one or another of those various patterns among which comedy and tragedy are the most inclusive and the most satisfying. I am not deluded into supposing that the American theater achieves for us that purpose as well as, let us say, the theater of Shakespeare achieved it for the Elizabethan age. But I respect it because it seems to me to be addressing itself to the effort to do so. I

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680 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3388 Hardy's Other Life The Later Years of Thomas Hardy: 1892-1928. By Florence Emily Hardy. The Macmillan Company. $5. MRS. HARDY'S biography, of which this is the second and concluding volume, seems to be little more than a chronicle of her husband's thoughts and movements as he himself recorded them in his journal. But she makes up for the meagerness of her method by having a great man to reveal, and she reveals him, or allows him to reveal himself, with a most interesting fulness. There will be more orderly and ingenious books about Hardy than this, for criticism surely is not done with him; but Mrs. Hardy will remain the authority on the subject, at least as long as she lives and keeps possession of the journals and the letters. Whether she has held back anything important, whether she is aware of any secrets, one can only guess. For my own part, although I have found in neither of the two volumes the thing I wanted to find, I am willing to believe that it never existed. What I have always wanted to know is the reason, if any, for Hardy's inclination toward tragedy. This man whose every story and poem, almost, is concerned with failure or disappointment — did this man suffer once himself? So far as I can see he did not; any more, at least, than most men do, and that may be a good deal. He seems never to have been thwarted or blasted in any of the numerous ways he invented for his heroes. The answer, if this be true, is simply that he was possessed of the tragic temperament, and possessed of it in some extreme degree explainable only in terms of his genius. When "Jude the Obscure" was under fire in 1895 he wrote to a friend: "As for the story itself, it is really sent out to those into whose souls the iron has entered, and has entered deeply at some time of their lives." That may be enough. Certainly the iron was in his soul, and it may make no differ- ence when or how it got there, or whether, as is possible, he was born with gloom in his eyes and a dagger in his heart. Mrs. Hardy naturally makes much of the furor over "Jude the Obscure" — an epidemic of stupidity among the English (and American) reviewers which, coming as it did just after the unpleasantness concerning "Tess," confirmed Hardy in his resolve to quit the field of prose fiction. The reviewers of the poetry which followed were scarcely less stupid, and Mrs. Hardy naturally becomes exercised about all that too. She almost makes her story, indeed, the story of Hardy's reception by the public. But it is not the main story. The main story is of how a man at fifty-five went on to live another life, of how a seasoned novelist who might very well have been exhausted by the composition of seventeen extended narratives took up another kind of pen and produced, in the more than thirty years to come, ten volumes of verse which made him — though few persons seem to be aware of the fact — one of England's greatest poets, past or present. A year or so before his death he told his wife that his only ambition, so far as he could remember, had been "to have some poem or poems in a good anthology like the 'Golden Treasury.' " He has already achieved that end, but a greater end is easily in sight — fame for the "Collected Poems," and a general acknowl- edgment that "The Dynasts" is so far the masterpiece of the twentieth-century muse. Mrs. Hardy says .enough to convince me of what I had suspected, that Hardy's interest in his poems was deep and serious. The hoarseness of their note was studied; their cacophonies were carefully planned; their oddities were almost regular. He was constantly experimenting with meters, as he was constantly searching the world for subjects sufficiently unusual. "We tale-tellers," he said, "are all Ancient Mariners, and none of us is warranted in stopping Wedding Guests unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experience of every average man and woman." He sought subjects in newspapers, old books, and the numerous histories of real people which came to his ears ; he found them also in himself, for he was rich not only in fancy, but in obser- vation and reflection. "Courage has been idealized; why not fear? — which is a higher consciousness, and based on a deeper insight." "I often think that women, even those who consider themselves experienced in sexual strategy, do not know how to manage an honest man." The whole point, I suppose, is that Hardy was himself an unusual man. I wonder, finally, if any light is thrown upon his character by the entry which he made in his journal on November 13, 1917: "I was a child till I was sixteen ; a youth till I was twenty-five ; a young man till I was forty or fifty." Mark Van Doren Mr. Sinclair's Alger Novel Mountain City. By Upton Sinclair. A. and C. Boni. $2.50. "\/f OUNTAIN CITY" is exactly the kind of novcl i V I Horatio Alger might have written if he had pos- sessed a social conscience. It is a rapid-racing nar- rative, gaspingly rapid after it achieves its momentum, vivid with episodes one more incredible than another, rising to a climax cinematographic in intensity and thrill. Its characters, how- ever, are no more, or no less, real than those in "Phil the Fiddler," and its theme is hardly more convincing than the old familiar one that is to be found in almost any Algeresque fic- tion. One never comes to know the people in the book in any more intimate sense than one comes to know the people one reads about in the newspapers. The names of the people in the news- paper are there; their features are described with photographic precision ; their actions are recorded in definite detail — and yet we somehow never know them, and, what is more, seldom become very anxious to know them. There is no doubt about the fact that they are real, as real as ourselves. But their realness is never communicated to us unless we happen to know them personally, which means that we know them in terms of something which is more intimate than names, features, or actions. We know them, it might be said, as part of ourselves, and can realize their presence even when they are not to be seen or heard. Now it is the task of the artist to make his characters into personal crea- tions of that variety. In doing this lies the subtlety of his art. Fiction which does not do this is not art. And it is for that reason, namely, because it fails to achieve that subtlety, that "Mountain City" is not art. Most attacks upon Sinclair's fiction have attempted to ex- plain its weakness in terms of its propaganda. That, I believe, is a false emphasis. Propaganda, after all, is too vague and mischievous a word to be employed as a critical tool. A strong case can easily be made out to show that much great art has been propagandic in purpose. For a long time English literature served as an agency for moral propaganda. Addison, Pope, Johnson, Dickens, Trollope were all propagandists for morality in one way or another. George Bernard Shaw is one of the most avowed propagandists of our age. Even T. S. Eliot today has asserted that "the greatest poets have been concerned with moral values." It is not propaganda that ruins fiction, then, but the failure of the writer to achieve that contactual com- munication between his materials and his audience. It is not propaganda that makes "Mountain City" an inferior piece of work. It is its failure to communicate its conception that is the cause of its failure. Every intelligent American, liberal as well as radical, is in sympathy with Sinclair's satire — and "Mountain City," it should

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June 11, 1930] The Nation 681 be added, is a satire. The difficulty in appreciation, therefore, is not with the theme but with its execution. The story of the novel is simple. Jed Rusher, a poor boy, the son of "a driver and a handy man," learned early in life that money is the root of all success. When he grew up he soon saw that money was the source of privilege as well as power. Hinks, the rich ranch- owner, was able to "beat his women because he had the money and they didn't." Jed Rusher, as a consequence of this realiza- tion, decided that at all costs he would not remain poor. "Get money, Jed Rusher, get money" — this became the challenge and inspiration of his life. Everything else was sacrificed to that end. Every action that he undertook, once he had got into the good graces of the millionaire single-taxer, Mr. Warrener, was as carefully calculated as the hours on a clock. Even his mar- riage, effected by subterfuge and vicious stratagem, was an expression of this same logic. His success as a financial titan, which was marred but slightly by his wife's desertion, found its finale in his decision to reward his former university chancellor with an endowment of fifty thousand dollars to establish "a chair to combat single tax and other economic fallacies." Now this whole story, we are informed, is not an invention. It is based upon the real life of a certain individual in Mountain City, which to all appearances and intents is Denver. The reality of the story, however, as was pointed out before, does not make it a reality for the reader. Authentic as a living fact, it is incredible as a literary fiction. Its satire fails because it never gets beneath the surface of its material. In other words, it is interesting as a newspaper report but unconvincing as a novel. V. F. Calverton Credo of the Engineer Toward Civilization. Edited by Charles A. Beard. Longmans, Green and Company. $3. PROFESSOR BEARD, the doyen of American political sci- entists, has here edited a sequel to "Whither Mankind?" In the former book literary gentlemen expressed their views on a civilization founded on the basis of a machine technology. In the present volume technologists, "insiders looking out," tell us their reflections on the upshot and outcome of their work. For, as Professor Beard adds, "are not tech- nologists thinkers as well as doers?" As is customary with collections of this kind, the key in which the articles are set varies considerably — all the way from contributions adipose with facts to Dr. Pupin's personal explanations of why he does not regret that "fifty-four years ago I deserted my beloved Serbian oxen and ran away to the land of machines." The heart of the whole matter is to be found in a phrase used by Mr. Harvey Davis: All that can be said either for or against the machine is that it is making possible (not probable — or improbable — but merely physically possible) a spirit and culture which, both in intensity and in depth of penetration into the masses of the population, can conceivably far outshine anything that the world has ever known. The issue, of course, is precisely whether the civilization of the machine has anything at all to do with intensity of culture and whether, in so far as there is a relation, it is not an inimical one. Let us grant that machine technology at the moment increases worldly prosperity (Mr. Stuart Chase warns us that, under capitalism, it may increase goods while de- creasing jobs). It enables the undertaker to buy an automobile and to call himself a mortician — an outrage which shocks the sensitive soul of Mr. Aldous Huxley. Indubitably it renders possible more cheap books, more cheap film shows, more cheap radio sets broadcasting to those who would (and those who would not) hear the insistent dialogues of Amos 'n' Andy, more automobiles, more traffic regulations, and more sheep- herding. This may be "depth of penetration of spirit into the masses of the population." In a sense it is true: humble men who before only gossiped about the tavern, the dance, or the prayer- meeting now entertain hopes of sending their sons to a hotel- management course at college or even read a Harper s article on Einstein or the Duty of Disobedience. Dignity is demode, inconsistent with this age of speed. Mr. Kenneth Burke has told us, in the New Republic, that "dignity is Ptolemaic, in- dignity Copernican." And nobody would wish to be "Ptole- maic," that is, self-centered, when he can revolve round some- thing else (it doesn't matter much what), in fact, be "Coperni- can." It nevertheless happens to be true that, from the point of view of those who believe that the external means of ex- pressing culture are the rewards of those who have first at- tained admission to a class disciplined in internal culture, this whole system is topsy-turvy. From the point of view of the introvert, from the point of view of the entire European tradi- tion which traces from the Hellenic antithesis of busi-ness and culture, the whole system is an anathema, a nihilism of values. We are at the parting of the ways. On the one side lies all that we have, through the ages, meant by culture: in- trospection; cultivation of the soul; leisure for some; distinction between those who did attain a standard of human dignity, whether as aristocrats above the vulgar or as elect above the worldly, and those who did not attain this standard; a civiliza- tion controlled from above by rare standards of excellence; wealth negligible save as a conspicuous means of displaying these standards. Over against this we have the new philosophy with its heterogeneous affiliations to equalitarianism, democracy, and the rise to power of money. It is pronouncedly extrovert and objective. It frankly accepts the world and the flesh and has its doubts about the soul. Values are to be found by steeping oneself in the living stream of external affairs. Not leisure for some, but the chance of an executive position for all. Skepticism of distinctions as, at the best, self-conscious, probably sham, and always priggish. Democracy and the abo- lition of class power. Prosperity and the welcoming of every new technical invention. The importance of wealth as a means to prosperity for all. That is the new program, and the writers of this book contribute to show how inventions, engi- neering, and business have conspired to make it feasible. With this new philosophy of Americanism I confess to a profound sympathy, as well as to a speculative curiosity about what is the most momentous spiritual change of our age. To the Hegelian there is nothing shocking in substituting the values of objective reality for those of subjective reality, to finding individualism only in adventure and initiative and not at all in self-cultivation. The cultural connections of this philosophy are not with Paris and Weimar, but Moscow and perhaps Rome are connected with it. Its greatest dangers would seem to be that its exponents will not realize how im- mense is the movement that they have started. It is foolish to nourish a blind hope that a man in spare hours, which im- proved machinery may allow him, can acquire the old culture which was a manner of life masterly with a sense of superi- ority and power. To its very marrow it is hostile to him. The new philosophy cannot be taken so easily, as if it were a patchwork of all colors, a ragout of all desirable things. The facts on which it has to be based are coming into existence fast; it requires master-minds to think out all the implications. It may very well be that this denial of the unique individual, this elevation of all individuals to efficient cooperation, this zest for the technological, the external, the organized whole, spell in the end the philosophy of communism. Not for nothing Count Keyserling (who has inspired moments) declares

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682 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3388 America to be the most socialistic of countries. The engineers and experts who soberly contribute to this volume supply us with lines of thought — one wonders whether or not unwittingly — which may end in our subscribing to the Count's belief. Let those who have eyes to read, read. George E. G. Catlin Art Without Chest Poems. By Peter Quennell. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $2.50. ELSEWHERE, in the epilogue to his book on Baudelaire and the symbolists, Mr. Quennell remarks on a contem- porary preference for those forms of art anticipated by Jules Laforgue in his phrase, "l'Art sans poitrine," as if the artist belonged to a race already conscious of exile and, retreat- ing steadily before the new barbarians, demanded a goddess not too ponderous to embarrass him in the years of his flight and banishment. Mr. Quennell's own twenty-one poems, the labor of nine years, handsomely printed for this American edition, are themselves excellent specimens of that "slender, bosomless Art," sexless, exacting, abstruse, serious, and elegant. An evasive, disquieting art, engaging in no trade with the con- ventional emotions; a personality dividing and dividing again, as if to escape integral annihilation; a voice threading out of a hero's tomb, a sea grave, a fountainhead, an angel's brain; a distinguished address to goddesses and hermaphrodites; a side- long vision, fugitive, with "thoughts all turned back like birds against the wind." The flexible, but never loose, rhythms of Mr. Quennell's unrhymed verse depend mainly on the image rather than on the idea. Round an external stimulus [he writes in a short fore- word] like the branch or twig which Stendhal speaks of, tossed into the salt mine, images, gradually accumulated, sometimes from experience, sometimes from reading, had suddenly flown together and formed novel and disturbing shapes. It seemed important then that the spontaneity of the process should not be impaired; that the oddity of the crystals might excuse their fewness . . . When the crystal is of this nature: Now huddled waves had lulled their bursting foam And slight clouds laid their breasts upon the sea; The sullen winds, head downward from the sky, Solicited his movement on their viols, I fear that it is more odd than virtuous, and I should be glad for a cleaner vision, more proper to sight, with less of the ballooning phantoms of twilight and the waking dream. The Sunflower, a short early poem employing concealed rhyme, the record of a single moment of intense perspective, is flawless and powerful: See, I have bent thee by thy saffron hair, O most strange masker, Towards my face, thy face so full of eyes, O almost legendary monster. Thee of the saffron, circling hair I bend, Bend by my fingers knotted in thy hair, Hair like broad flames. So — shall I swear by beech husk, spindle-berry, To break thee, saffron hair and peering eye, To have the mastery? Much of Mr. Quennell's work appears neither inevitable nor decisive, more like fragments of a larger poem unwritten than like achieved entities, the images accumulating without fusing, accumulating often without manifest purpose, either be- cause the genetic emotion has been strangled (in fear of the obvious?), or else because that emotion is too ambiguous, too "poetic," to sustain its identity from stanza to stanza. The more ambitious pieces are successful only when the crystals of imagery cohere to a central branch of impulse; cohering in The Flight into Egypt to a narrative device, in Leviathan (I) to a profound symbol of the perfectible and corruptible flesh. I have space to quote only a few lines from Leviathan: Leviathan drives the eyed prow of his face, With the surge dumbly rippling round his lips, Toward the Atlantic shore; Not flat and golden like the Cherubim, Or a face round and womanish like the Seraphim, But thick and barbed — the broad, barbed cheeks of Donne. The salt had scurfed his body with white fire And knotted the rough hair between his breasts, And as he rose delicate Atlantis trembled, Tilting upon the sea's plain like a leaf. A broad full-bosomed poem it is for Mr. Quennell to take with him from "the twilight of literature" into the spiritual exile that he prophesies! Stanley J. Kunitz A Transcendental Prude Philine. From the Unpublished Journals of Henri Frederic Amiel. Translated by Van Wyck Brooks. With an In- troduction by Edmond Jaloux. Houghton Mifflin Com- pany. $3.50. AMIEL is in many ways the most complete example of that malaise — called, variously, spleen and Weltschmerz; Wertherism, Faustism, Hamletism; epigonehood, the sick will — to which, some hundred years ago, the Western world fell prey. To describe that malaise here is neither possible nor necessary, for a great part — perhaps the most relevant part — of the literature of these hundred years has been engaged in its description, from Arnold and de Vigny to Eliot, from Stendhal and Turgenev to Hemingway. And there is no space to guess at its social causes, which must include the whole history of the West. Whatever its name, its kind, and its causes, it has mani- fested itself in the feeling that between the soul of man and the uses of this world there is a necessary and rigid divorce. This is not a philosophical and reasoned conclusion; indeed, the trend of philosophy has been in quite the opposite direction. Rather is it a multiple personal intuition. Sometimes it is experienced as a loss of savor from the world (as in Stendhal), sometimes as a loss of strength and desire from the individual (as in de Vigny and Amiel), sometimes as both (as in Eliot). In a more religious age these manifestations would have been re- garded as a normal part of the preliminary paraphernalia of religious conversion. This, indeed, they sometimes become, but on the whole the sufferers from cosmic despair have adjusted their lives — if at all — without the ministrations of orthodoxy. Amiel was not only one of the greatest sufferers from the malaise but he was its most thorough and devoted investigator. In him the sense of the divorce between man and the world was raised to a pathological intensity and he lived his whole life in it. "Journal of a man who has been poisorted (the hour and a quarter before his death)" — so runs a note which Amiel made, perhaps for a projected piece of fiction. And his own journal is almost exactly that: he too has been poisoned, and he keeps the record of the many years before his death. He has been poisoned by the ideal, which, as he understands it, is necessarily a foe to the real. Physically and spiritually he is oppressed by listlessness and inertia. The ordinary deeds of life have little significance; the ordinary personal fulfilments

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June 11, 1930] The Nation 683 attract him in spite of his philosophy, but he despises them. So thoroughly did Amiel live his life in the melancholy disease and so thoroughly did he canvass it in the best pages of his "Journal intime" that he has become the very symbol of the sick will. Edmond Jaloux, one of the editors of this new selec- tion from the Journal which has been called "Philine," objects, in his introduction, to the literary handling which has petrified Amiel into a symbol and to the diagnosis which has declared his will sick. M. Jaloux's first objection has point, but it must be di- rected rather at Amiel's editors than at his critics. The first editor of the Journal, Mile Mercier ("la belle Calviniste," as Amiel called her), adored Amiel and had no intention of rep- resenting anything less than the platonic beauty of his soul. By her selections (published in 1883) — and by her alteration of the text — she placed him in a moral and emotional vacuum. Bouvier's edition of 1923, by adding to the selections and re- storing the original readings, by lightening the religious em- phasis and by allowing the diarist's religious musings and a first kiss at thirty-one, gave back to Amiel some semblance of humanity. But even Bouvier's edition was largely a collection of "beauties" which left Amiel still in a vacuum. "Philine," which is Amiel's record of his only love affair, gives him the full reality of a man and takes considerably from his value as a symbol. It becomes hard to interpret him in terms of a ■world tendency of the spirit and necessary to interpret him in terms of psychological predisposition and physical economy. But M. Jaloux's second contention, that Amiel's will was not sick, is scarcely borne out. M. Jaloux cites Amiel's activity as a teacher, as a writer of bad verses, and as a diarist, and concludes that no sick will could have carried on such activity. But it is, of course, not by physical activity or achievement that we may measure soundness or sickness of will but by the sub- jective reaction to events. What the quality of that reaction was in Amiel, "Philine" gives us perfectly. An unknown young woman has written to him and, after tortuous doubts, Amiel meets her. After tortu- ous doubts he becomes intimate with her. For a while the friendship is simple enough ; they fall into the relationship which is usual between Amiel and sensitive women, in which, much like Richardson, he plays father confessor. (He could not al- ways keep the relationship paternal, however; he remarks that, though he has made none, he has received five or six proposals — and refused them all.) Very soon Philine wants more than paternalisms. As for Amiel, he cannot fall in love; he has a terror of the real; he is disgusted by physical love. But at thirty-nine he is ashamed of his virginity. He develops a lust for lewd books and pictures. His dreams disturb him. And he sees in Philine his Madame de Warens, with whom he can have his experience and have done with the whole business of sex. This most delicate of men, by his very excess of delicacy and hatred of the gross, begins to coarsen his friendship. In his desire to learn about sex and have it over with, he begins to see Philine very simply as a sexual instrument. He decides to attempt a consummation and does not. He moralizes away his indecision and despises himself for restraint. At last he takes Philine. But what a disappointment! Is that all? And (as- tounding phrase!) "at the price of my first fruits." "The fear of what I love is my evil," Amiel says. The relationship continues but Amiel is constantly attacking it. It I fades from passion back to friendship. He contemplates mar- riage but is deterred. In his fiftieth year, moved by gossip and the suspicion of disingenuousness on her part, Amiel breaks with Philine. It is not a new Amiel that "Philine" gives us, but merely an Amiel whose sick will is turned from the cosmic and eternal to the mundane and diurnal. The cosmic priggishness of Amiel Pioneering On Social Frontiers GRAHAM TAYLOR The autobiography of the founder of Chicago Commons — a civic and social leader for thirty years in a changing and growing Chicago. $4.00 Problems of the Pacific, 1929 The Institute of Pacific Relations Edited by J. B. CONDLIFFE The official and only complete report of the Third Conference at Kyoto, 1929. $5.00 THE JACK-ROLLER A Delinquent Boy's Own Story CLIFFORD R. SHAW The vivid, authentic, autobiography of "Stan- ley"— truant, runaway, thief, vagrant, jack- roller. $2.50 Above Pompeii ERNEST H. WILKINS Ten thoughtful and thought-provoking essays by the President of Oberlin College. $1.25 New Zealand in the Making The 5807 J. B. CONDLIFFE In which a ninety-year experiment in democ- racy is described and evaluated. $5.00 University of Chicago Press Ellis Avenue Chicago When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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684 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3388 LEADERS My Life An Attempt at an Autobiography by Leon Trotsky "Here he composes better than most novelists the story of fifty years of adventure." — Saturday Review of Literature. 600 pages. $5.00 Long Hunt by James Boyd author of "Drums," etc. "A valuable contribution to the literature on the early days of America." — Boston Transcript. $2.50 The Scarab Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine author of "The Bishop Murder Case," etc. A brand new adventure — in story and treatment — of the inimitable Philo Vance. $2.50 at your boo\store ^ Charles Scribner's Sons, New York f MARRIAGE By Ralph de Pomerai A scholarly history of marriage and divorce and a forecast of future development. Discusses the new moral code which deprecates chastity at the expense of mental and physical health as strongly as it condemns licentiousness. $4.00 TOWARDS MORAL BANKRUPTCY By Paul Bureau The author discusses present day sexual morality in France, and conditions of a return to moral discipline. A serious scientific contribution, that should be read by all who are interested in the future of the race. At your bookstore RICHARD R. SMITH, Inc. 12 East 41st Street New York City 1 h «-^ WHi <;• t WH' will make up the per- sonnel of the 2nd Cultural Tour to So- viet Russia under the personal guidance of Dr. Joshua Kunitz? Educators — Sociolo- gists— intelligent persons of the busi- ness world, in short, brilliant men and women with whom it will be a privi lege to mingle. New York June 26; this tour is of neces- sity limited. Can be taken for 12-24 or 35 days. The 35 day tour includes a special itinerary through the Cau- casus and the Ukraines. If one can only read the fine tributes to Dr. Kunitz's first tour I We will be glad to mail you excerpts as well as rates, itineraries etc WORLD TOURISTS, Inc. 175 Fifth Avenue, New York. Algonquin «65« in vacuo was merely a little irritating, but this mundane prig- gishness of Amiel facing life cannot but be exasperating, even disgusting. Nevertheless, it is not mere charity that dictates to us the necessity of respect for this transcendental prude, for he is, as M. Jaloux says, one of the few men who has tried to tell the very whole of the truth about himself. Lionel Trilling History as Fiction Guerra. By Alfred Neumann. Alfred A. Knopf. $3. IN "The Devil," "King Haber," and "The Rebels" Alfred Neumann showed with what success psychological values can be applied to historical characters and events. In each one of these books we note that the author has proceeded on the assumption — an anathema, I imagine, to most professional historians — that the arcanum of facts must not be too rev- erently searched or worshiped. To put it another way: history- writing and fiction meet at that focal point where both the his- torian and the novelist begin to revise and color the available data, which has been, of course, already tainted by the dust of time. Both go in quest, not of "ultimate truth," but of sound values. In modern philosophy these values are called percepta; nor need we think that they are themselves apprehensions of pure reality; for there are, it is conceded, many veils between our ordinary perceptions and the thing we are seeking, com- monly called the truth. Alfred Neumann in the present book takes up the revo- lution of the Carbonari, as in "The Rebels," and rewrites it for us from the viewpoint of Guerra, the leader. The story begins with Guerra's release from the island of Elba. It is both effective and plausible, and the dramatic crises — of which there are many — are not at all forced. They occur naturally in the flow of the tale, which is thick with intrigue, dark plots, the scheming of prelates and aristocrats, love and lust, the shedding of blood, and the half-finished talk and action of conspirators who scarcely dare trust one another. Guerra is in love with the Princess Maria, who is the mistress of the Grand Duke, the enemy of United Italy. He is also sinisterly attached to his own sister, who marries the head of the Radical Party. In the end he is shot when about to address his faithful followers in the piazza at Rome. From a balcony a blind man exclaims: "Why — why isn't he speaking?" The novel is full of just such dramatic touches. And it is this sort of literary device that best gives us the clue to the differ- ence between the ordinary kind of history and the historical novel that perhaps justifies itself by the urgency of its inner truth. Pierre Loving The Mahabharata Blues The Art of Reading. By A. R. Orage. Farrar and Rinehart. $2.50. AR. ORAGE has a vast reputation for profundity, and indeed is more than a literary critic in the eyes of his intimates: he is a sage. But I fail to see what it is that so interests our Columbuses of the spirit, for I can find nothing in the man except an Englishman who happens to be a fairly interesting critic. And it would be a gross bit of flattery to say that as a critic he deserves the majuscule. This latest book of his is made up of selected excerpts from literary notes originally printed in the New Age. It is amus- ingly miscellaneous, and whoever tried to get some order into the chaos did not do a very good job. In fact the book would

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June 11, 1930] The Nation 685 have been just as interesting if it had not been marked of! into sections, and more interesting if the labor so expended had gone into dating the excerpted passages. Fortunately Orage knows how to write, and however they are presented his remarks have point. They were, most of them, written controversially, and they still bite and sting. They make good literary paragraphs. Of course in a book made up of paragraphs the number of ideas which the author presents is large, but with a fair degree of accuracy it may be said that Orage's principal beliefs are these: (1) that the first duty of a literary critic is that he study texts; (2) that style is the man; (3) that biography and literary gossip are a plague and a nuisance; (4) that most current lit- erature is journalism; (5) that we have gone as far as we can with the intelligence, and what we now need is to draw upon some other human faculties for knowing; (6) that Western European literature is hopelessly dry and uninteresting and needs to be revived by contact with a radically new fecundat- ing force, which force, in his opinion, is bound to be the "Mahabharata." (1) No one in his right senses would deny that Mr. Orage is quite correct in insisting that the business of criticism is the study of the texts of literature. (2) In his effort to prove that style is the man Mr. Orage carries his dogma to absurd ex- tremes, even deducing the moral character of a writer from the nature of his prose. (3) His anxiety that the text be studied leads him into an excessive depreciation of biographical fact. So far does he go in this direction that my impulse is to defend even literary gossip rather than admit the validity of Orage's strictures. (4) Calling what one doesn't happen to like "jour- nalism" is a quite popular dodge, but so overworked as to be unimpressive, especially when one's author writes: ". . . popu- lar writers (I mean journalists) like Zola, Bourget, Maurice Barres, and Andre Gide . . ." (5) I have many times lately had occasion to say that I do not agree that intelligence has yet proved itself an incompetent instrument for solving the prob- lems facing mankind. And certainly when the appeal is from intelligence to mysticism, true or false, one cannot but draw back with reasonably polite disdain. (6) Orage's appeal to the "Mahabharata" as the body of literature which is to bring in a Western European renaissance leaves one pretty cold, since it is obvious that his reason for thinking so is its mystical content. Together with these major ideas one finds in Orage a host of minor notions which are even less appealing. He makes a monotonous appeal to tradition. For instance, he writes that a "critic's principles of judgment should be the established prin- ciples of the world's literature," and on another occasion makes reference to "the established laws of literature." What are these "laws" beyond such elementary ideas as the necessity for communication, the revelation of original insight before the writer deserves the honor of praise, and others of the kind? So long as they remain undefined they are concealed blackjacks for knocking out the unsuspecting aspirant. Orage is a linguistic imperialist, holding that anything written in the so-called Eng- lish language must be judged by English standards. This is a curious notion to find in a man like Orage, but it is there. At bottom every Englishman is a nationalistic patriot and most of them are imperialists. Orage talks too much about the com- mon and vulgar (like an Englishman!) on the one hand, and the noble on the other, that is, he is a snob in his thinking and has never analyzed these terms to discover that they are survivals from a feudalistic social situation and have a distinctly snobbish connotation when used today. Mr. Orage's reputation as a sage seems to rest on two pillars: first, his constant reference to Sanskrit writings, and, second, his devotion to "psychological exercises," whatever they may be. There is, it is alleged, an aura which hangs about him, and his mere presence plus the utterance of a few commonplace words is enough to change the course of one's life. By way of When writing to advertisers Amiel's Philine Translated by Van Wyck Brooks For half a century Victorian prudery suppressed from the famous Journals of Amiel all mention of his liaison with Philine. Here is a study in the psychology of love franker than Rousseau. $3.50 Builders of the Bay Colony by Samuel Eliot Morison The author of "The Maritime History of Massachusetts" makes an outstanding contribu- tion to American history. In "Builders of the Bay Colony" the reader meets a fascinating com- pany of men and women. Illustrated, $5.00 Roger Williams by Emily Easton "Miss Easton brings out every fact obtainable. She calls Roger Williams a 'prophet and pioneer', but her book shows him also a daring frontiers- man, a statesman and an adventurer." — N. Y. Times. Illustrated, $5.00 The Anvil by Gustav Frenssen After the great German war novels comes this magnificent story of Germany at war and at peace. "A great novel, marked with a deep knowledge of human nature." — Post, {London). By the author of "Jorn Uhl." $3.00 Poetry and Poets by Amy Lowell " 'Poetry and Poets' is a fine addition to her earlier studies of the same nature and will take its place among critical works of American verse."— Philadelphia Record. $2.25 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY please mention The Nation

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686 The Nation •[Vol. 130, No. 3388 illustration I may refer the reader to Margaret Anderson's "My Thirty Years' War," pages 268-270. In any case, the point is that Mr. Orage is a pleasant fellow, well read in literature, who has a weakness for the esoteric and the vague. He makes a pretty obvious appeal to the soft spot in the American men- tality, the spot that allows men like Count Keyserling to flour- ish in this country. It is not at all curious, I think, that but two American critics, so far as I know, would acknowledge the influence of Mr. Orage: Gorham B. Munson and, with a chuckle in his beard, Ernest Augustus Boyd. C. Hartley Grattan Notes on Fiction Money and Other Stories. By Karel Capek. With a Foreword by John Galsworthy. Translated from the Czech by Francis P. Marchant, Dort Round, F. P. Casey, and O. Vocadlo. Brentano's. $2.50. An interesting group of tales, noteworthy for their keen insight and for Capek's restrained sympathy for his characters. These latter are all men and women of weak will tortured by circumstance into one proud gesture of defiance — after which they sink back into their habitual spiritual mediocrity. What one misses in these stories is style (though the stiff and un- distinguished prose may be the fault of the translators) and that warmth and depth which fiction has when it is rooted in a recognizable national life. Capek's civilized cosmopolitanism, admirable for a play of ideas such as "R. U. R." works against him in this little volume of short stories. They have that curi- ous coldness which results from a conscious desire to make them comprehensible to many different peoples. Wishbone. By Stirling Bowen. E. P. Dutton and Company. $2.50. This volume, by a new young writer, consists of three long short stories. The first, An Imperfect Crime, is a clearly con- ceived if somewhat lengthy fictional indictment of American judicial methods; the second, Townsman, by far the best of the three, is a realistic study of the minor tragedy implicit in the wasted life of a small-town moron; the final story, Some Go Away, deals with more subtle psychological states and falls into sentimentality and vagueness. Mr. Bowen has an honest and searching mind and a feeling for little souls that reminds the reader of the early Sherwood Anderson. The first novel from his pen should be worth reading. His main defect is his in- sensitive Middle Western prose, which suffers from a youthful revolt against undue color or variety. Mr. Bowen's career will be hindered rather than helped by the stupid publisher's blurb which informs us that his style "recalls the structural beauty and strength of modern architecture." The Fiery Dive and Other Stories. By Martin Armstrong. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.50. Only one of these stories attains a higher level than that of merely agreeable or sympathetic writing. Sombrero is a remarkable account of a court martial held in 1810 upon an English captain who was guilty of needlessly marooning a dis- obedient sailor. The tale, which appears to be drawn from actual maritime records, is stamped with a grave and bitter irony. The others, though they are all nicely written, are less notable, and seem to be the products of a patient mind studying life at second or third hand. The Widow of Ephesus and Saint Hercules are merely pseudo-classical exercises of the sort which delight the "literary" English reading public. The Fiery Dive would be a good story if A. E. Coppard had written it. In the Wilds, with its ridiculous portrait of a "strong" lover, is perilously near to the bathetic. The longest story of the group, Portrait of the Misses Harlow, is a study of the con- trasting temperaments of two sisters. It is intelligently con- ceived and well enough written, but the characterization has an abstract, almost pedantic, quality. In general, the volume is not up to Mr. Armstrong's earlier and fresher work. O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1929. Edited by Blanche Colton Williams. Doubleday, Doran and Com- pany. $2.50. This is the annual selection made from the more conven- tional American magazines. As the editor, with the persuasive- ness of a circus barker, puts it: "Here are realism, romance, fantasy, humor; stories of character, plot, and local color; here are, besides one of Paris and one of England, stories of the South, the West, and the East of America." The prize-winner, Big Blonde, by Dorothy Parker, is one of those slick, ironic, modernist character studies that is likely to fool an unsuspect- ing reader into overrating it. Mr. Howard's story of mental telepathy is too attenuated for our taste. Mr. Wilbur Daniel Steele contributes his annual unreadability; and Margaret Leach bears off the palm for contributing the cheapest and vul- garest tale in the collection. Her contribution, Speakeasy, is one that Fannie Hurst might be proud to sign. By far the cleverest writing is that to be found in Mr. Bromfield's The Apothecary, which, despite its melodrama, is a fascinating macabre yarn; but the stories which gave us the most pleasure are precisely those which are least pretentious and "artistic," namely, the humorous pieces: The King of the Cats, by Stephen Vincent Benet, Two Red-Haired Women, by Don Marquis, and Professional Pride, by Ruth Burr Sanborn. The last-named, which is a farcical tale of the misadventures of a circus fat lady, is really funny. In general, however, one finishes the volume wondering why year after year it continues to get itself published. It is only necessary to read the editor's introductory remarks to realize that her standards of selection are hardly artistic ones. Fables. By Theodore Francis Powys. The Viking Press. $2.50. Mr. Powys remains the strangest writer in English, but his uniqueness is likely to lose some of its savor if he continues to repeat himself. "Mr. Weston's Good Wine" was a remark- able book; "The House with the Echo" was not, and these "Fables" bear still more obviously the mark of a talent that should not expend itself so prolifically. One tires a bit of Mr. Powys's peculiar, morbid pessimism which was so fascinat- ing in his earlier books. In these "Fables" his spring winds are too consistently "cold and clammy," his ponds too inevitably "filled with sour mud and cold tadpoles." After a few pages of this his twisted view of the world begins to appear a trifle funny, and one begins to think of him as a sort of Gloomy Gus, carrying on interminable muttering conversations with corpses, fleas, withered leaves, worms, spittoons, and blind hens — the heroes of these philosophical chronicles. Here and there one catches a glimpse of the pure gold, but for the most part the mine seems overworked. Translated from The Macaulay The Royal Woman. By Heinrich Mann. the German by Arthur J. Ashton Company. $2. Heinrich Mann is looked upon as a kind of godfather by certain of the younger German novelists, and in his own coun- try enjoys a reputation almost equal to that of his brother Thomas. But to those not afflicted with the myopia which goes with joining literary schools and movements there seems to be no good reason for comparing the two. Heinrich Mann scarcely touches the foot of Olympus. "The Royal Woman"

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June 11, 1930] The Nation 687 Outstanding New Books MENTAL HYGIENE By ERNEST R. GROVES and PHYLLIS BLANCHARD A clear and concise discussion of the origin and development of mental hygiene, its psychiatric back- grounds, the problems of mental disease, and the ameliorative influence of mental hygiene on child- hood, adolescence, marriage, schooling, business, rec- reation, religion, literature, social work, and public opinion. $4.00 THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN CIVILIZATION By CHARLES S. JOHNSON , This book is a "Negro Middletown" on a national scale, being the most important study of the Negro in America ever made. Every phase of the Negro's life is discussed in the light of statistical and factual data. Essential to the understanding not only of the Negro but also of a vital part of American life. $4.00 A HISTORY OF MODERN CULTURE By PRESERVED SMITH "Few contemporary historians writing in English combine an erudition so scrupulous and profound as his with the catholicity of interests required for so vast a subject; and still fewer unite to these gifts a prose style of such charming and unaffected lucid- ity."— GEOFFREY BRUNN in New York. $5.00 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY One Park Avenue New York MODIRMA«C adds originality and in- dividuality to the ac- knowledged comfort and luxury of upholstered furniture. The Modernage col- lection, which is the largest and finest in America, includes an exhibit of six distin- guished rooms. Open Monday* until 8 P. M Saturday* until 5 P. M. EUGENE V. DEBS A Man Unafraid By McAlister Coleman There was about Debs a spiritual magnetism which won the loving allegiance of all sorts and condition of men. Rarely had a man in public life been so deeply loved and so desperately fought. But even those who fought him respected and admired him. There are few biographies richer in human material or so full of drama. Illustrated. There are thousands who honor Debs for what he thought. There ought to be tens of thousands, quite antagonistic to what he thought, who revere him for how he thought. He was as pure a soul as ever lived. . . . All these things come to the reader very poignantly from Mr. Coleman's book — Boston Transcript. Use This Coupon Today! GREENBERG: PUBLISHER 160 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK Send me EUGENE V. DEBS, by Coleman. ($3.60 postpaid) □ I Enclose Check □ Send C. O. D. MANlllAnUBlireHT ODE W a\« E FURNITURE COMPANY 54 1 EASTI7tkSTREIT HEW YORK CITY 5 T U V \/ E 5 A N T 54&6 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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688 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3388 is a skilfully executed social comedy played in an atmosphere of impending doom. The time is shortly after the Franco- Prussian war. Consul West and his lovely French wife are each in conflict with powers of darkness. The consul is en- tangled in questionable speculation. His girl wife, victim of her instability and romanticism, finds herself through her flir- tations, fears, and fancies enmeshed in intrigue. A play based on the fortunes of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie, which is in rehearsal throughout the novel and which is being presented when the climax occurs, is like a grotesque shadow cast by the actual, living drama in which the amateur players are involved. Perhaps in its original language the beauty of the style serves to bring about a full emotional response to the symbolism. In its English version, however, the overtones of the novel have a hollow ring. Bourru, Soldier of France. By Jean des Vignes Rouges. Trans- lated from the French by Ernest Hunter Wright. E. P. Dutton and Company. $2.50. Written by a French soldier before the armistice and first published in France over ten years ago, "Bourru" stands second to Barbusse's "Under Fire" in order of publication among the serious war novels. It is not, strictly speaking, a novel at all, but a series of sketches describing the hard fighting around Vauquois in the Verdun region in 1916 as it affected Bourru, the peasant soldier, who is less an individual than a type, a composite poilu created to serve as a point about whom the sketches may cluster. Comparing it with recent war novels, one is struck by a difference which appears to be due chiefly to the difference in the times. The novelist of the World War who looks back from the vantage-point of today tends to give his characters the full and comprehensive bitterness which only the intervening years have brought to realization. "Bourru," while equally realistic, sensitive, and sincere, is nevertheless impreg- nated with a spirit of idealistic patriotism. This Bourru suffers, he hates it all, he trembles and sometimes flinches; but the little poilu carries on, happy to seize any respite that may come his way, willingly undertaking the most desperate assign- ment if he must. That the emotionalism of these stories is overkeyed is natural under the conditions. for unforgettable impressions VISIT SOVIET RUSSIA Continental standards of safe and comfortable travel. Interesting itineraries. Frequent sailing dates Write for Booklet "N" Amalgamated Bank t?ept.l 11-15 Union Square, New York City Films Stark War ACCORDING to one of Bernard Shaw's pet theories the stage in the matter of ideas is usually ten years behind literature. It would be difficult to say how far behind the movies are, for as a rule they care precious little about ideas. But there is one exception. Let the idea attract public interest, let the book in which it has found expression be a best-seller, and no expense will keep the film companies from producing the book as a movie as quickly as they can get the rights. During the past year the Great War was the most popular subject in literature, and for once, to refute Bernard Shaw, also on the stage; and so "All Quiet on the Western Front," as well as "Journey's End," has already found its way on to the screen. Need it be added that both cost tremendous sums to produce (it is said, two millions in the case of "All Quiet"), and that both have been unprece- dented box-office successes? There can be little doubt that Remarque's "All Quiet" is not a great literary masterpiece. At least this was the conclusion that I arrived at after I had found that nearly every page of the book required a special focusing of imagina- tion in order to bring out in clear relief the episodes and facts that stud the author's guileless and inarticulate prose. Never- theless, there is no denying the interest and importance of the story as a human document. No book had spoken so coura- geously and, granting the necessary effort of mental readjust- ment, so vividly of the sheer horror of war — of man's relapse into bestiality with its frenzy of fear and rage, of his physical suffering and moral prostration. It is just as such a docu- ment that "All Quiet" emerges in a film of the same name (Central) — a terrifying document that reveals the carnage of war with staggering force. Battle scenes have been repre- sented in many a picture, but "All Quiet" surpasses them all in the stark horror and madness of the business of fighting. Although the picture is not devoid of gentler moods, and is sprinkled generously with captivating humor, the predominant impression is that of life in the raw, of existence stripped of all adornments and bared to the bone. For this reason the total effect produced is not so much the tragedy of war as its callous bestiality. One is staggered, and shaken, and almost ready to sob, but one is not really thrilled. It is probably because of the elemental quality of its material that "All Quiet" is not so good a drama as "Journey's End"; but its appeal is more immediate, and technically it is a superior piece of cinematic craftsmanship, for which achievement Mr. Mile- stone, who directed the picture, deserves unstinted praise. Considered as a picture of an unfamiliar land, "Turksib" (Eighth Street Playhouse) is quite exciting. The strange Asiatic types and the primitive mode of living, contrasted with the invading mechanical civilization, provide sufficient material to make the picture extremely interesting. There is also an imaginative touch in the treatment of detail which does credit to the picture's director, Mr. Turin. He is not so successful, however, in his attempt to dramatize the stirring feat of the construction of the Turksib railroad. There is a great deal of hectic movement in his characteristically Russian technique of "cutting," but this movement lacks the necessary force to make the progress of the construction, its strain and effort, its setbacks and its victories, as dramatically effective as a subject of such potentialities would have been made if treated by a Griffith. This defect notwithstanding, "Turksib" is a fine picture, and should not be missed by anybody who is interested in the art of the movies. Alexander Bakshy When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18, 1930 No. 3389 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS EDITORIALS: The Hoover Happiness Boys A Jugoslav Trial The Cup Races Hammock Reading IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN INDIA CONFRONTS BRITAIN. By Richard B. Gregg THE GOVERNMENT IN BUSINESS. By Major General T. Ashburn THE BISHOP'S CHALLENGE. By Paul Y. Anderson DULCINEA AND DOROTHEA. By Alfred Kreymborg IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter CORRESPONDENCE CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE BOOKS: The Ambience of Love. By Isidor Schneider Liberty, Classic and Romantic. By Henry Hazlitt The War for Modern Art. By Matthew Josephson Civilization and Unreality. By Dorothy Van Doren Eighteenth-Century Emotion. By Alice Beal Parsons To Make Thinking Beautiful. By Eda Lou Walton Vive la France. By Carlton J. H. Hayes Galleries of Women. By Dorothy Brewster Books in Brief INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: Britain's Vanishing Farmer. By J. A. Hobson Q- 689 692 693 693 694 695 696 699 701 702 703 703 705 706 706 707 707 708 709 709 710 711 714 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Literary Editor HENRY HAZLITT H. L. MENCKEN CARL VAN DOREN Dramatic Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. . THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. THE FIRST VOLUME of the Simon report is out at last and appears to be heralded by all sections of the British daily press as epoch-making. It does not contain the promised definite proposals, which are to be published in the second volume two weeks hence, but it does declare that "progressive realization of responsible government in British India as an integral part of the Empire" should be the goal of British policy. This is interpreted to mean dominion status — but only after a long period of evolution and further tutelage. Ancient social and economic customs are correctly blamed for most of India's ills. The report is thoroughly temperate and friendly in spirit, but the question whether India will longer accept government by England is another matter. Certainly there will be no adequate representation of India at the proposed Round Table Conference in Octo- ber unless the promise of dominion status is clear, unequivo- cal, and convincing, and fixed for an early date. STARTLING, INDEED, IS THE NEWS that comes from Bombay that the native medical profession there has declared a boycott against all British medicine. These doctors are very largely graduates of British universities. In general assembly by unanimous vote they have decided to use hereafter only non-British drugs. The significance of this action lies in the fact that it is a protest by this learned profession against the "violations of the laws of humanity committed by government authorities in different parts of India against non-violent Indian men, women, and children during the present non-violent struggle for national libera- tion." More than that, the profession has appealed to the Swiss Federal Council to appoint a commission of inquiry into these violations of the laws of humanity and has called the attention of the Red Cross societies throughout the world to the "atrocities perpetrated by the government." This is confirmation of the charges of horrible cruelty reported from Indian sources which we have been reluctant to believe and to report. We do not see how Mr. MacDonald and his Government can now fail to make immediate answer to the world. Meanwhile, England has a full-fledged frontier war with the Afridis on her hands despite her persistent bombing of some of their refuges — in the name, we pre- sume, of Christianity and the brotherhood of labor. Last week the Afridis raided up to the very walls of Peshawar under a huge fort manned by strong British forces. PRINCE CAROL OF RUMANIA is home again, with the prospect of having things pretty much his own way until he suffers another outbreak of temperament. The dear lad has had rather an uncomfortable time of it for the past four years and more, wandering about with his un- canonical lady-love and scheming to get back the crown which Rumanian politics forced him to renounce in Jan- uary, 1926. Now, however, all is lovely. Carol has "un- expectedly" plumped down on Rumanian soil in an airplane, Parliament has restored him to the throne with only one dis- senting vote, and the delighted populace is shouting and weeping for joy. Little King Michael, of course, is set back a peg in becoming crown prince, but he will probably be glad that he does not have to dress up for royal functions quite so often or so much. Even Carol's divorce, which has been a stumbling-block to some Rumanian Christians, is likely, it is said, to be annulled and the family bond may be re- stored. Queen Marie, for once, is badly flustered, but she is exoected to pull through — she usually knows how. We are all for self-determination when it comes to kings, and if Rumania is satisfied with Carol everybody else ought to be. DESPITE THE DIPLOMATIC ATTITUDE of Premier Tardieu and the reasonable self-control of the French press, it cannot be said that the relations between France and Italy are in anything like a happy condition. It is not surprising, therefore, that some of the Paris corre- spondents look for the failure of any further fleet negotia- tions between Italy and France. It is all very well to say that one must not take Mussolini seriously, but his rattling of the saber remains precisely as menacing to the peace of Europe as were the similar speeches of Kaiser Wilhelm in ante-bellum days. In one sense Mussolini is more dangerous, for dictators invariably turn to foreign complications when things begin to go badly at home, and there appears to be plenty of evidence that the Fascist finances and industry are in anything but satisfactory condition. As for Mussolini .

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690 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3389 himself, he has recently been interviewed after eight years by Theodor Wolff, the distinguished editor of the Berliner Tageblatt. Herr Wolff reports him in the pink of health, showing no strain whatever from the heavy burdens that he carries, and ready to talk quite freely about the relations of his country with Germany. To Herr Wolff Mussolini gave the assurance that Italy would stand with Germany on two questions — the desired colonial mandates and universal dis- armament! Indeed, in his general political remarks Herr Wolff found nothing aggressive, but on the other hand thoughtful and sober expressions of opinion. This reminds us of the way the Kaiser's private conversations were simi- larly praised until it was suddenly discovered that he was really bent on conquering the entire world in the interest of the devil. IF CHIANG KAI-SHEK'S ENEMIES had any points of agreement except their common dislike of the Chinese President, that gentleman would long ago have started on what Chinese generals call a "study tour" of Western coun- tries. But the enemies consist in part of old-fashioned rival generals, and in part of those curious bands which the cor- respondents call "Communist armies," and the two cannot possibly get on together. Not even one rival general with another, or one "Communist army" with another. Every- where in China today there are roving bands of unemployed soldiers, many of them once loyal and convinced soldiers in the early Nationalist armies, where education in revolution- ary nationalism went hand in hand with training in shoot- ing. Such men, united in little armies, would five years ago have been called "bandits" — and, in a way, they are. They live off the land, but they live as Robin Hoods, pillaging, by preference, the rich. Convinced Communists have gone among them, preaching a hatred of landlords and encour- aging the peasants to throw off the feudal yoke. In South China such armies appear to be acquiring an increasing measure of organization. But it is difficult to believe that the movement has the solid basis in either peasant or indus- trial-worker organization which any really significant eco- nomic revolution must have, and a Communist movement can hardly be seriously Communist so long as it accepts the leadership of generals. Yet this will bear watching. IT IS A MAD WORLD, indeed, with our master, Secretary Mellon, reported shaking his head over the tariff bill and wondering whether he can approve it, and rumor declaring that both Senators from Pennsylvania are in doubt as to whether to vote for it. A tariff bill beaten by the votes of "Joe" Grundy and David Reed — both acting from diametrically opposite points of view — would be a sight to make the gods shake their sides. Grundy, of course, would denounce it because it is not drastic enough. Reed will do what Mr. Mellon tells him ; Mr. Mellon, it appears, has not definitely made up his mind. Like Mr. Reed he will "study the measure" in complete philosophic detachment. He must "compare the rates" — several thousand of them — before, Solomon-like, he judges. Meanwhile, the Democrats are trying to decide whether or not they want the bill de- feated by the Republicans or passed by just enough Democrats to give these conscienceless hypocrites the chance to go before the country next fall deploring this betrayal of the American people. The final vote is, as we write, scheduled for the day after publication of this issue of The Nation. The next one, Friday, June 13, strikes us as the right and proper one to be a day of sadness and wrath-to-come for the American people. SAINTLY BISHOP CANNON! The unfortunate man, according to his own statement, "fell into the hands of a bunch of sharpers" when all that he wanted was to do a little honest speculating with the material rewards of his righteousness. Confronted with these facts, the Epis- copacy Committee of the Methodist Episcopal Church South voted by fifty-four to eleven "that the character of Bishop Cannon be passed." Unhappily the committee does not tell us what its passing mark is. And now the godly man has flatly refused to tell the Senate Lobby Committee anything about the distribution of $48,300 given him to help defeat Al Smith in Virginia, and has walked out of the committee room in defiance. We leave aside all question of his technical rights and all question, too, of the unenviable position of the committee if the recusant Bishop is allowed to get away with it. We ask simply, how long will a great American religious body rest content with spiritual leadership of this character? TO THE RESCUE of the good name of the State of Ohio has come the District Appellate Court of St. Clairsville, Ohio, which reversed on May 25 the convictions of the three Communists who were sentenced to five years in jail and fines of $5,000. The court found that the convic- tions were against the weight of evidence and that the Com- munist literature distributed at Martin's Ferry, Ohio, last August was "intemperate, improbable, vague, and absurd," but that it did not incite to any overt act; no charge was made that the Communists had uttered a single word. Meanwhile a Communist organizer in Newark has been con- victed of "sedition" under the Sedition Act of 1918 passed at the height of war-time hysteria, the sedition being speeches urging the organization of white and colored workers against unemployment. Eight others under indictment merely at- tended the meeting. In Pennsylvania a Communist boy of twenty-three has been sentenced to prison and fined $5,000 for sedition. In Georgia the situation is still worse. Two white women and two Negro men have been held for the Atlanta grand jury without bail on charges of "insurrection" and "attempting to incite insurrection." They are labor- union organizers and, like two Communists soon to be tried, they face the death penalty if convicted under the archaic statute involved. All this in the home of the free — not in the land of the Czar of 1890. ANOTHER ENLIGHTENED DECISION of the United States Supreme Court has relieved the rail- ways of a menace that has been hanging over them since 1925. The Hoch-Smith resolution, passed when Congress, in its zeal to do something for the farmers, was elaborating the McNary-Haugen bill which President Coolidge vetoed, directed the Interstate Commerce Commission, "in view of the existing depression in agriculture," to make such changes in freight rates as would promote the movement of agricul- tural products "at the lowest possible lawful rates com- patible with the maintenance of adequate transportation service." Accordingly, the commission ordered a reduction of rates on California fruits destined for points east of

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June 18, 1930] The Nation 691 the Mississippi River, and the order, against which the Ann Arbor Railroad appealed, was upheld by the Northern California District Court. The order has now been swept aside by the Supreme Court in an opinion written by Asso- ciate Justice Van Devanter and concurred in without dissent. The decision reminds the commission that the primary law regarding railway rates is the Interstate Commerce Act, and that it is not within the power of the commission to go counter to that act by establishing discriminatory rates, especially since most of the roads affected by the order in question have not yet earned the fair return on their property which the act designates as one of the means of insuring the maintenance of an adequate system of transportation. THE DEFEAT OF SENATOR SIMMONS of North Carolina in the Democratic primaries leaves the political situation in the State decidedly mixed. In 1928 Senator Simmons bolted the nomination of Governor Smith and gave his support to Mr. Hoover. Some 80,000 voters, it is thought, followed his lead in the election, and North Carolina went Republican. For his breach of party regu- larity Senator Simmons was denounced by Josiah W. Bailey, a Tarheel Baptist who had been one of Simmons's most faith- ful supporters, and Bailey has now carried off the Senatorial nomination with a majority of more than 60,000. His suc- cess ends Senator Simmons's long political career, but the prospect of a return to power of the Old Guard Democrats, steeped in regularity and invincibly opposed to anybody and anything that lacks the party label, is far from agreeable. For one thing, party regularity in the South means insistence upon white supremacy. The evident care that was taken by the Bailey forces to avoid attacking Senator Simmons personally or raising the anti-Catholic issue seems to indicate a purpose to draw to Mr. Bailey's support in the election those who voted for Senator Simmons in the primaries — another way of keeping regularity to the fore. MASSACHUSETTS, home of the Watch and Ward Society, sticks to its guns. Its Supreme Court has upheld the $300 fine imposed on Donald S. Friede for selling to Lieutenant Hines of the Boston police a copy of Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy." At the same time it upheld the thirty-day jail sentence and the $500 fine im- posed on James A. Delacey, of the Dunster Book Shop in Cambridge, for the sale of a copy of D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" to an agent of the Watch and Ward Society who had induced him to send for it. Later the prison sentence was remitted, but the verdict stands, though Delacey had contended that he had been unfairly entrapped, and both the prosecuting attorney and the judge had condemned the provocative methods by which the Watch and Ward Society procured its evidence. These methods call to mind the famous wire-tapping case of two years ago, in which the government obtained the necessary evidence for conviction by tapping telephone wires, though this was against the law of the State where it was done. The United States Supreme Court upheld the conviction thus obtained, but Justice Brandeis, in dissenting, observed that "to prove its case the government was obliged to lay bare the crimes committed by its officers on its behalf. A federal court should not permit such a prosecution to continue." For Friede and Delacey there was no dissenting voice. HOUSING IN NEW YORK CITY, especially low- priced dwellings for persons of moderate means, should make progress if the plans of the Housing Association of which former Governor Smith is the head are carried through. The association proposes not only to cooperate with individuals or other organizations in dealing with the whole question of housing and regional planning, but also to extend financial aid to well-devised, low-cost housing enter- prises either for new construction or for the improvement of existing structures. The need for such concerted effort is lamentably great. Notwithstanding the enormous expendi- tures for new subways, bridges, wider streets, and costly skyscrapers, "thousands of families," as Governor Smith pointed out, "are still living in old-law tenements declared unfit for occupation forty years ago, and bringing up chil- dren in them." Comparatively nothing has been done to keep the population of the city "properly housed at costs which meet low incomes and within reasonable distance of work." There is a State housing law establishing a State Housing Board, but only a "very inconsiderable amount of new housing has been built." The difficulty, of course, is largely financial. The acquisition of land is only the first step ; there must be also a willingness to build and an oppor- tunity to obtain money at low rates. If the Housing Asso- ciation can find the money on really sound economic terms and at the same time stir up a building spirit, there is no limit to its usefulness. PRIVATE ENTERPRISE has no monopoly of busi- ness efficiency. We publish in this issue an article by Major General T. Q. Ashburn describing the organization and work of the Inland Waterways Corporation, created by the federal government to handle the barge fleet on the Mississippi and Warrior Rivers, and thus help control freight rates. There is far too much of loose assumption that all private business is efficient, and all public business inefficient. General Ashburn describes with particularity how this government corporation has been organized to do business economically, and he indicates concretely the success with which it operates. To those who want to study a specific example of high-grade organization and operation of a public enterprise in the field of transportation we com- mend a careful reading of this interesting and highly im- portant article. THE UNTIMELY DEATH of William Bolitho removed one of the most interesting of contem- porary journalists. He was versatile, informed, and cul- tured. Perhaps the most striking of his virtues was an extraordinary liveliness which seemed to spring from a passionate interest in life and an unfailing sense of the dramatic. Mr. Bolitho, whose real name was William Bolitho Ryall, was born in Cape Town and rose from poverty in a most dramatic fashion. He had been in bad health ever since he was injured in the Great War — which made his gay spirit and his literary achievements the more remark- able. Americans knew him best for his regular contribu- tions to the New York World and for his two recent books "Murder for Profit" and "Twelve Against the Gods," but he was extremely prolific and his disappearance will leave journalism very distinctly the poorer. No one could com- ment upon passing events in a fashion more sprightly than his.

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692 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3389 The Hoover Happiness Boys NOTHING is more admirable than courage and cheer in the face of difficulties. The American people have been treated to a truly notable display of these qualities in the months since the stock-market smash. On October 26 President Hoover stated: "The fundamental business of the country, that is, the production and distribu- tion of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis." On November 24 friend Julius Barnes pointed out: "The factors of previous depressions are absent." Therefore, he sent to 200 business leaders the cheering word: "The problem now is fortunately not one of starting a stalled engine, but of facilitating the present momentum on which employment and earnings and buying power have risen to high levels." On the same day Dr. Julius Klein, Assistant Secretary of Commerce, in a radio speech dispelled public misapprehension by pointing out that the White House conferences had not been for the purpose of alleviating any let-down in business because there had been no let-down of any consequence. At the turn of the year, on December 31, Secretary Mellon profoundly stated : I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism. . . . During the winter months there may be some slackness or unemployment, but hardly more than at this season each year. I have every confidence that there will be a revival of activity in the spring and that during the coming year the country will make steady progress. On the same day the Secretary of Commerce declared : It is impossible to forecast what temporary ups and downs may occur, but the nature of the economic dis- position of the United States is such that one may con- fidently predict for the long run a continuance of prosperity and progress. Happy disposition, that! On the first day of 1930 Francis I. Jones, director of the Employment Service of the Depart- ment of Labor, gave the country a New Year's message: Confidence, the fulcrum of business, was considerably shaken, but the vigor and strength of the nation are evidencing themselves, and after a careful survey of the business outlook we enter the new year with optimistic spirit and high hopes, and predict that 1930 will measure in volume of business with the preceding year. Bless that fulcrum and its careful survey of our optimistic spirit! What a volume of vigor and strength the Unem- ployment Service has! We thank Mr. Jones. His optimism was soon justified. Only twenty days later President Hoover, in a statement that has become his- toric, announced after the Cabinet meeting that the Depart- ment of Labor had informed him that for the first time since the stock-market crash the employment trend had assumed a favorable aspect. In another week he was able to assure us that "the increase of employment is current in practically every industry," and on February 10 Secretary Lamont stated that "industrial production and distribution have reached an approximately normal level for this time of year." The Employment Service on the same day predicted that "within the next sixty or ninety days the country will be on a normal employment basis." Not perfect teamwork, to be sure, but still not bad, coming from another depart- ment of the government and a busy one at that. Lest the public officials weary in well-doing, pinch-hitter Julius H. Barnes, chairman of the National Business Survey Conference, came to bat on February 18. After surveying encouraging reports from all sections of the country, which he said indicated that the shock of the stock-market slump had been absorbed in three months, he declared that the dan- ger of a long depression appeared fairly over, "with every evidence of early renewal of the normal onward march of living standards and business prospects." Unfortunately Secretary Davis on March 3 suffered a fit of temporary de- pression. "I admit," said he, "that there is distressing unem- ployment" ; but his usual cheery optimism quickly reasserted itself and he added that the Administration by its policies had "held unemployment to less than one-half that of previ- ous crashes," and that as a result "work is being provided in a way that should relieve most of this within the very near future." Under these circumstances the President naturally took the people into his confidence. On March 5 "it was revealed at the White House" that "President Hoover is hopeful that the unemployment situation will be greatly remedied in the next sixty days." He "believes that the machinery already set in motion will bring the desired relief." Again confi- dence was well justified, for it was only two days later that he was able to announce that unemployment "amounting to distress" was limited to twelve States and that all evidence indicated that the worst results of the crash would be over in sixty days. Another month, and once again Mr. Barnes saw "a trend to recovery"; business recession, happily, had been only "a temporary interlude" in national progress. And now clear the decks again for the President in a brand-new month. Speaking before the United States Cham- ber of Commerce on May 1 he said in happy vein : While the crash took place only six months ago, I am convinced that we have now passed the worst and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover. There is one certainty in the future of a people of the resources, intelligence, and character of the people of the United States — that is, prosperity. Bearing this in mind, we do not find it strange that on May 19 Secretary Lamont was able to point out that if present tendencies continued, "normal conditions should be restored in two or three months." Just ten days later Assistant Sec- retary Klein injected a note of wise caution by pointing out that no instantaneous revival could be expected in a short time, but that a healthy revival of business may be expected by the end of the summer. We are more than grateful for all these reassurances. There have been dark hours when we thought that business men and workers were in real difficulties, and even that we were in the midst of a world-wide economic depression. But no more! Like the apostle when the brethren met him at the Three Taverns we thank God and take courage. ^

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June 18, 1930] The Nation 693 A Jugoslav Trial WHEN King Alexander proclaimed an absolute royal dictatorship in Jugoslavia on January 6, 1929, he did so with high-sounding words. Parliamentary government, he declared, was his ideal, but it had been so abused by blind party passions that he felt it his duty to withdraw parliamentary government for a time. A "truly democratic" regime was promised when the task of unifica- tion and reorganization was ended. No one could deny that both were needed. The struggle between Serbs and Croats, the most serious obstacle to peace, had reached a crisis seven months before when Stefan and Paul Raditch (Stefan, the head of the Croat Peasant Party) had been fatally shot within the walls of the Belgrade Parliament, and that event had not served to decrease the bitterness of the struggle. The dictatorship was received complacently both in and out of Jugoslavia. Even the Croats at first were pleased, for King Alexander was popular in Zagreb. They were only mildly disturbed by the fact that the Cabinet included but four Croats as against nine Serbs, and that none of the Croats were of the Peasant Party. It was freely predicted that the dictatorship would end and a new constitution be granted within six months. That was a year and a half ago. Since then the dic- tatorship has become notorious for its absolute and brutal suppression of all forms of liberty. Zagreb not only hates Belgrade. It hates King Alexander. Red-hunting has be- come the national pastime; hundreds of political prisoners, I charged with communism, are rotting in Jugoslav jails, where unspeakable torture produces a prolific crop of "confes- sions"; and Croatians seem to have been the special objects of persecution. There could be no more sorry commentary on the state of life and liberty in Jugoslavia than the accounts of a trial now in progress in Belgrade. Dr. Vladimir Matchek, whom Stefan Raditch designated to succeed him as leader of the Croat Peasant Party, is the most important of the twenty- four Croats who are being tried for treason before a special court for the defense of the state, a court created by Alex- ander from which there is no appeal. Dr. Matchek is charged with financing certain terrorist activities against the dictatorship — the amount named is about $270! — and with publishing an anti-Serb article in a Croatian newspaper. The first charge is based on "confessions" made by several of the other prisoners. All these confessions, except one, have been repudiated on the ground that they were obtained by means of torture. The trial has consisted largely of descrip- tions of this torture too detailed and specific to be entirely discounted. Moreover, the chief physician of the police in Zagreb, where the arrests were made, testified, on being re- leased from official secrecy, that he had found the bare soles of one of the prisoners covered with blood, the injuries obvi- ously having been caused by the bastinado. As for the one prisoner who reiterated his confession incriminating Dr. Matchek, it was brought out by the defense that during the last weeks of his imprisonment he alone of all the prisoners had been given special treatment on account of his health and had received several hundred dinars with which to buy clean linen, as well as fifty dinars daily for extra food. It is hardly surprising that this man should have stuck to his story! Undoubtedly, most of the prisoners are guilty of what appear to have been amateur and not very dangerous dem- onstrations against the dictatorship, but there seems to be no reliable evidence that Dr. Matchek was involved. He has denied all charges against him. As far as he is concerned, the whole affair has the unsavory air of a frame-up and a clumsy one at that. There is the rumor that Dr. Matchek was offered his freedom if he would declare allegiance to the present regime, but this is now denied. There is the fact that Dr. Matchek's leading counsel was arrested on a minor charge shortly before the trial began. The 163 barristers who offered to defend him were barred by the court. He was finally represented by M. Trumbitch, formerly Foreign Minister of Jugoslavia. Although all the testimony is in, the verdict has not yet been announced. The conduct of the presiding judge during the trial does not augur well for Dr. Matchek's acquittal but public opinion may prove effective. Western Europe has been awaiting the verdict with obvious sympathy for Dr. Matchek, with obvious belief that the trial is a tragic farce. And King Alexander, who cannot escape responsibility for the affair, must surely remember that unconstitutional gov- ernment cost three of his predecessors their thrones and one of them his life. The Cup Races LOVERS of yacht-racing have before them the most interesting summer in the history of the sport, be- cause Sir Thomas Lipton has issued his fifth chal- lenge for the America's Cup and because there are no less than four new contestants for the honor of defending that historic trophy. More than that, the conditions of the race have been so completely altered as to make the contest more nearly equal and just to the challenger than ever before. That is something to be proud of, this fact that American sportsmanship has voluntarily ended conditions and require- ments which seemed to make success for the challenger alto- gether impossible. A new generation of our yachtsmen has evidently far higher racing ideals. Thus, the custodians of the trophy have agreed that the race shall be sailed over a course beginning nine miles south- east of the Brenton's Reef lightship near Newport instead of over the old Sandy Hook course which not only gave an advantage to those locally expert, but usually afforded only light winds in early September. The new course is a genu- ine offshore racing one, certain to be much fairer to both boats and likely to produce wind enough. Again, the chal- lenger has hitherto had to be a stouter boat than the defender because it must cross the Atlantic, and supposedly under its own canvas, though actually at times towed. That again gave an unfair advantage to the American boat, and it has now been done away with by new racing rules which compel an equally heavy defender and thus insure not flimsy, freakish racers, but genuine seagoing boats capable of sailing the seas after the race and not having to refuse ignobly to sail if the wind should be as much as twenty-five miles an hour, as has happened more than once. In other words, the contest is between boats and not mere racing machines. When one

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694 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3389 considers the evil effects upon small-boat designing of the extreme fln-and-bulb keels of the racers from 1892 on, the change is of the utmost importance. The four competing American yachts are the Weetamoe, designed by Clinton H. Crane and owned by a syndicate headed by George Nichols and Junius S. Morgan, of the New York Yacht Club; the Yankee, designed by Frank C. Paine and owned by a Boston syndicate headed by Mr. Paine, Chandler Hovey, and John S. Lawrence; the Whirl- wind, designed by L. Francis Herreshoff, the syndicate own- ers of this boat being headed by Paul Hammond, winner of the ocean race to Spain last year, and Landon K. Thorne; and the Enterprise, designed by W. Starling Burgess and owned by a syndicate headed by Winthrop W. Aid rich and Harold S. Vanderbilt. There are thus pitted against each other four of the leading American designers, all experienced in yacht-racing and thoroughly familiar with the require- ments of the contest. It is especially interesting that Mr. Burgess is the elder son of Edward Burgess, who designed the Puritan, Mayflower, and Volunteer, all of them success- ful defenders of the cup, while Mr. Herreshoff is the fifth son of N. G. Herreshoff, the most famous of American yacht- builders. All four of the competing craft embody the latest de- sign, carrying between 7,550 and 7,583 square feet of canvas as against the 7,540 square feet of the challenger, Sham- rock V. From mast-heel to truck the height of the mast runs from 162 to 168 feet — enormous spars for such hulls. The waterline lengths range from 80 to 86 feet, and the overall length from the 120 feet and 9 inches of the Enter- prise to the 130 feet of the Whirlwind. The new rules have in fact produced boats almost identical in nearly all impor- tant features, the Shamrock displacing 134 long tons as against the Whirlwind's 158 and the Enterprise's 128. It is interesting to note that the centerboard, which has played such a part in American yacht-racing, is entirely missing in Mr. Herreshoff's Whirlwind. Weetamoe and Enterprise carry only the small centerboard familiar in the racers of 1920, while Yankee has a small auxiliary centerboard of bronze at the after end of the keel. Finally, the masts are all hollow spars ; that of the Yankee is a rectangular sec- tion, practically a long hollow tube with corner pieces join- ing the four sides. The four cup defenders are already afloat and are busily tuning up; they have three months before them be- fore the first cup race, which is to be sailed on September 13. Their own first race was scheduled for June 1 1 ; in it were also the Resolute and Vanitie, former cup contenders. The interesting and sportsmanlike suggestion has been made that if the challenger should get over here earlier than usual one or more of the defenders might be placed at her service for tuning up in actual racing, the lack of which has also been one of the great handicaps of the challenger. In any event, the conditions this year are entirely favorable to a genuine test, one which will leave behind no feeling of dis- crimination. That the contest will have its effect upon the sport as a whole is beyond question. Yachting has grown at a tremendous rate since the war, and the development of power craft has not hurt, but apparently helped, sailboat- racing. At least, last year's season was the best ever known. Whether bad business conditions will cut down the number of boats this year remains to be seen. Hammock Reading THE automobile has been held guilty of most of the ills of modern life, from polluting the countryside with carbon monoxide and gaudy filling stations to corrupting the morals of youth and killing 30,000 persons a year; but at least it may be said to its credit that it seems in some indirect manner to have rid us of the hammock. It is hard to discover the old knitted hammock nowadays except perhaps in the most remote outposts of civilization, and that is an excellent sign. The hammock was probably responsible for more bad novels than any other single contrivance. Until a few years ago no romance could be fluffy enough for re- viewers to condemn it roundly. There was always a quali fying sentence somewhere admitting that it might make good enough reading for a hammock. The hammock, of course, was merely an excuse for bad taste, and as such was on a par with the plea of great statesmen and executives that they read cheap detective stories because their tired minds needed a rest. If their minds were really tired, one naturally wanted to know, why didn't they try taking a nap? There is no reason, in common candor, why a person who naturally enjoys good reading in the winter shouldn't enjoy equally good reading in the summer. There are days, of course, when the weather is hot enough to make one men- tally languid, but such days are after all comparatively few. Among the large group who give their poor tired minds three months' vacation there seem to be few persons willing to give up during the same period their golf or tennis, although there is no case on record of a man dying from sunstroke or heart disease from reading even Hegel. There is no sound reason, in short, why just as many solid and important books should not be read in July and August as in any other two months in the year. Indeed, one would expect more of them to be read in the summer months if only because the vacation period allows more leisure for reading. Here the publishers, perhaps, are hardly less to blame than the reading public, for it has long been a super- stition in the publishing business that any books of real weight and lasting value must appear either in the early spring or the late fall. Now there are healthy signs of a change. At least the hammock has been abolished, and hammock reading should logically go with it. The much-abused book clubs do not suspend business during the summer months; last year, in July and August, they chose such volumes as "The Wave," by Evelyn Scott, and "They Stooped to Folly," by Ellen Glasgow, which did much to raise the summer average. The public at that time, too, was avidly buying "All Quiet." Things do change. There was a time, not so long ago, when even producers of musical shows thought it a risk to try con- tinuing through the summer, but in recent years plays like "What Price Glory?" "Porgy," "Strange Interlude," "Vol- pone," "Street Scene," and "Journey's End" have broken the old habits, and we enter the present summer with "The Green Pastures," "The Last Mile," "Strictly Dishonorable," and Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" still running, and even a revival of Aristophanes. If the quality of summer plays can so improve within a few years, what may not be hoped for in the quality of summer books ?

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June 18, 1930] The Nation 695 It Seems to Heywood Broun WHAT are we to do about the books that children read? I do not altogether trust the judgment of librarians who arrange lists of things they think are good for little ones. Still less am I certain that grown- up judgment is eminently right as to the things that chil- dren like. I want to hear from the unpolled masses of the immature. Many fallacies have been perpetuated for generations. For instance, there is some reason to doubt the popularity of "Alice in Wonderland" among boys and girls. I am not attacking this work of sheer genius, but it is a book aimed above the heads of the readers usually I assigned to it. Distinctly this is an adult book. You have the privilege of checking me up and furnishing such cor- rection as comes out of your own experience, but all the really rabid "Alice" enthusiasts I ever met were well beyond j twenty-five. The idea will not down that children adore fairy stories and other chronicles of fantasy. That can quite reasonably be doubted. Of the popularity of the Dr. Dolittle books I can raise no question, but these seem to me to be written in I a far more straightforward way than is customary in most yarns of the outlandish. I think that the average child is \ not richly endowed with imagination. The growth of this ) faculty is one of the steps which mark the departure from | adolescence. Fables and parables lie mostly beyond a young- | iter's comprehension. Other readers are able to compel '! :ditors to hand out what their particular section of the public i wants. Children must pretty much take what is handed to :hem. Their capacity for protest is distinctly limited. I am nclined to believe that if there were ever such a thing as :he Amalgamated Union of Tiny Tots the whole tenor of uvenilia would be changed. The sort of reading which is deplored by most associa- :ions of mothers is precisely the variety which children crave. I'm for the rights of small people. The most important hing with which a youngster should be imbued at an early tge is the notion that reading is good fun. Better by far, I )elieve, that a child should turn to trash which he enjoys han be forced to worthy books which he hates. I was told it ten that I must not read the nickel novels dealing with he adventures of Frank Merriwell and his brother Dick, iuch preoccupation, they informed me, would ruin a possible aste for good literature in later life. Fortunately, I paid cant heed to these injunctions and continued to peruse the ively chronicles which I liked. And now, at forty, I realize hat many tales have been fashioned more sprightly than 'Frank Merriwell, the Young High Jumper at Yale." And et I am prepared to acknowledge my debt to Burt L. Stand- >h for that series. It was he rather than Walter Scott who irst taught me the fact that a book could be absorbing. Many of the books eagerly placed in the hands of the oung and impressionable by generous aunts and uncles are iiuch too sadistic. In this class I place very many of the raditional fairy tales. Even such a familiar story as Red tiding Hood has done its share in bringing night terrors to ittle boys and girls. To be sure, there is a postscript to the lie in which the wolf when killed disgorges the living grand- mother of Miss Hood. But a child has every right to assume that it was a most distressing experience for the old lady. The child makes identification with characters in a story very readily, and naturally a little girl shakes with fear during the encounter between Red Riding Hood and the beast con- cealed in proper night dress. My contention goes no farther than the claim that it is not well to frighten young people too much, and there is ample material in approved books to convey to them many horrors. For almost forty years I've carried with me a nightmare about a barrel filled with boiling pitch into which an old lady was nailed by means of long and lacerating spikes. This was no Love Fiend's Crime from any tabloid. We didn't have tabloids when I was a boy. It was merely an incident in a tale by the Brothers Grimm. And who would hesitate to choose Grimms' "Fairy Tales" as a very proper book for any nephew's birthday? I would for one, but the revolt is not yet general. Of course, the old lady who met such cruel and unusual punishment was a wicked old witch, but I should not care to have a son of mine grow up serene in the conviction that any sort of torment is suitable for the transgressor. In maturity he may quite likely find, as I have done, that some of his best friends are transgressors. And where does Hans Christian Andersen get off to be the kindly patron of the little lover of good reading? Against the high gifts of Andersen I raise no objection what- soever, but this melancholy prose poet is by no means always suitable for children. He is as gloomy as Ibsen. Well do I remember what he did to ruin an entire Christmas as far as I was concerned. It was my ninth Christmas, the year I had the measles. To my sick bed where I lay, ill-satisfied with life, yet fearing dissolution, there came a kindly aunt bearing the fairy stories of Hans Christian Andersen. Eagerly I picked up the book and sur- veyed the interesting pictures. And then, as was my wont, I plunged into the middle of the book and struck a story about a little match girl. She had ventured forth into a blizzard to ply her trade in a period of depression. It was, as I remember, Christmas Eve upon which the poor child got her taste of what we know as Hoover prosperity. There were none to buy her matches. She grew colder and colder and finally froze to death most realistically. That tale surely did nothing to promote the spirit of a merry Yuletide. The same mothers who blithely place the most savage fairy stories in the hands of their youngsters raise strenuous objection to having their children look at the comic strips in the daily or Sunday newspapers. I don't understand why. I am aware of the fact that many of the best-known comic series are built upon personal encounters in which the chief characters behave to each other with consummate cruelty. "Zowie!" indicating the impact of a heavy object upon a human skull, and "blug! blug! blug!" meaning that an indi- vidual has been dropped from a high place into deep water, are common enough. But at least the comic-strip characters do serve to illustrate to the adolescent mind human stamina and the indestructibility of matter. Hbywood Broun

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696 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3389 India Confronts Britain By RICHARD B. GREGG DESPITE the government censorship in India, the news that leaks through the cables, together with British journalistic comments, makes a very inter- esting picture to one who is familiar with the forces at work. The arrest of Gandhi has not weakened but strengthened the power of the Indian Congress movement. That was natural, for not till he was imprisoned did the full force of his example and ideas begin to tell upon the hearts and minds of Indians. More and more of the Indian liberals and moderates have openly deserted the government, and many others are wavering. In addition to the earlier resignations of Pandit Malaviya, Mr. Birla, and others, Pandit Kunzru, a promi- nent liberal, has recently resigned 'from the National Assem- bly. Two members of the Viceroy's Council of State, Dewah Bahadur Ramchandra Iyer of Madras and Mr. Ratansi Morarji of Bombay, have resigned. The Council of State is in effect an Indian Cabinet and its members form the closest official Indian advisers to the Viceroy. Mr. Morarji stated that his resignation was in protest against "the ruthless repression culminating in the arbitrary intern- ment of Gandhi." Mr. Iyer said that he resigned as a pro- test "against the imprisonment of Gandhi without trial, the revival of the Press Act, and the illegal, unwarranted use of violence against the satyagrahis and innocent members of the public in Madras and elsewhere." The Bombay Presidency Association, of which Mr. Dinshaw Petit, the Parsee mer- chant and cotton-mill owner, is president, passed a resolution on May 8 protesting against the detention of Gandhi "with- out fair and open trial" and against the revival and use for that purpose of an obsolete, century-old regulation. Many noted Indians are giving up the decorations and titles bestowed upon them by the British. Official district and municipal boards are resigning in great numbers through- out India, according to the Chicago Tribune's special corre- spondent. The meeting of the All Parties' Conference on May 15 and 16 was very thinly attended, only seven out of a membership of thirty-four being present. Notable for their absence were the prominent Hindu leaders, Pandit Malaviya, Mr. Jayakar, and Dr. Moonjee, and the influen- tial Mohammedans, Mr. Jinnah and Sir Mohammed Shaft. Messrs. Malaviya and Moonjee are actively working for full independence. On May 14 the Working Committee of the All-India Non-Brahman Conference passed a resolution disapproving of the government's "repressive policy," as well as of the civil-disobedience movement, and regretting that there had been no clean statement by the government as to its policy in regard to aims and objects of the Round Table Conference. These meetings and that of the Na- tional Liberal Federation were supposed to prepare the way for the Round Table Conference, but the results were such as to lead the correspondent of the London Morning Post to state that "it is abundantly clear that liberal support of the government is valueless" ; while Mr. E. Ashmead-Bart- lett, the Daily Telegraph's correspondent, wrote on the same day in regard to the Indian liberals: "They are of no sup- port to the government and the Nationalists ignore them altogether." With the melting away of Indian moderate and liberal support to the government, the value of Mohammedan alle- giance has been greatly lessened. There cannot be a Round Table Conference with only Mohammedans present from the Indian side, nor can the country be governed with only Moslem support. Moreover, it would seem that certain influential Mohammedans are themselves wavering. Maybe they are wondering where they are going to find themselves if the Nationalist movement continues to gather speed and momentum. The failure of two such important Moslem leaders as Mr. Jinnah and Sir Mohammed Shafi to attend the All Parties' Conference is significant in this connection. The Palestine Arabs are urging the Indian Moslems to join the Nationalist Hindus. Many Indian Moslems have been active supporters of Gandhi from the beginning and are now in prison for their convictions, thus moving the others. On May 8 the Council of the All-India Moslem Federation passed a resolution disapproving of civil disobedience. But it also passed a resolution expressing the widespread alarm and anxiety of Moslems throughout India on account of the recent firing at Peshawar and the consequent loss of life, and declaring that the government communique on that matter fails to carry conviction. It asked that the federation be permitted to send a deputation to Peshawar to learn the facts. Throughout the country prominent Indian lawyers are showing their sympathy by failing to attend court on days of hartal. (A hartal is a sympathetic suspension of all busi- ness.) On May 16 a meeting of the All-India Journalists and Press Owners' Conference protested against the rigid press censorship and restrictions, and also passed a resolution demanding the immediate release of Gandhi and urging the need of negotiating with him. The Sikhs have swung mor< strongly into the Nationalist movement. Following th( April resolution of the Akali section of Sikhs, several jathas or bands, of them started to march from Amritsar to Pesha war. One of their leaders, Tara Singh, was arrested ai Lahore, and on May 17 ninety-nine others were arrestee near Jhelum, but another band has started to take their place The Central Sikh Committee has voted to join the Nation alist movement. Women are taking very active part in the campaign This was not so in Gandhi's campaign of 1920-22, and it i: a momentous break in Indian traditions of womanly con duct. It marks the increase in Gandhi's influence and thi depth and power of the Indian desire for independence Three prominent Indian women have been arrested and im prisoned, all in connection with the salt-law violations Madame Naidu was arrested at Dharasana and giver nine months' imprisonment. Her sister-in-law, Mis Chattopadhyaya, got a sentence of nine months in Bombay Mrs. Lakshmipathi, a leading social worker of Madras, wa given a year's imprisonment. More than 300 high-cast' women paraded at Delhi, 200 at Karachi, and largi

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June 18, 1930] The Nation 697 numbers at other places in addition to those mentioned. The Indian business community is strongly supporting Gandhi's movement. One clear indication of this is the nation-wide boycott of foreign cloth, the results of which are being felt in Germany, France, and Italy as well as in England. On May 7 there was a meeting in Bombay of fourteen Indian commercial organizations at which a reso- lution was passed requesting the Indian Merchants' Cham- ber to call on its representatives in the Indian National As- sembly and in the Bombay Legislative Council to resign. This cloth boycott puts tremendous pressure on Great Britain. Her cotton industry produces nearly one-fifth of the total exports of the United Kingdom, and even during the last three years has averaged more than £140,000,000. A substantial part of British cotton cloth was absorbed by India. The market for British cottons in China has been greatly reduced by the boycott and trouble there. Now comes the Indian boycott to increase British unemployment and financial losses still further. The Indian boycott applies also to British drugs, banks, ships, and other enterprises. The campaign to violate and nullify the government salt tax and monopoly proceeds with increasing momentum. There are said to be more than 3,000 persons imprisoned already for violation of this law, as well as an equal number for sedition. Extemporized prisons and detention camps are being created, but the feeding and guarding of so many will be a great expense and difficulty to the government. As I write (May 26), the wireless tells of a new raid at Wadala salt works in which 40,000 Indians took part and in which apparently only seven were arrested. The Congress Working Committee's resolutions to en- courage the peasants to refuse to pay land tax and showki (police) tax are bearing fruit. The peasants of the Sarbhon division of Bardoli district in Bombay Presidency have re- solved not to pay land-revenue taxes until Gandhi or Mr. Vallabhbhai Patel, both of whom are now in prison, order them to pay. Bardoli district defeated the Presidency gov- ernment by a no-tax campaign only two years ago. The land-revenue tax is due, I understand, on July 1, just after the proposed date of issuance of volume two of the Simon Report. The example of Bardoli will doubtless be followed elsewhere. The correspondent of the London Times de- scribed the land revenue as "the very pith and marrow of government in India." In Bihar the peasants are eager to refuse the police tax. On May 19 there was a report of a refusal to pay water tax at Multan, in the Punjab. The peasants' opposition to taxation will have good opportunity to reveal its strength before the proposed date of the Round Table Conference, October 20. It is impossible to keep from wondering whether this tax-refusal campaign is not partly responsible for the sudden flotation in London on May 20 of a Government of India loan of £7,000,000, whose officially described purpose is "to provide funds for capital expenditure on railways in India and for general purposes." The last phrase is both vague and elastic. According to the Daily Telegraph, the loan "came as a surprise." It seems quite possible that the Gov- ernment of India expects a very considerable shortage of funds due to the boycott, decline of trade, and refusals to pay land tax, and to increased police, troop, and prison expenses. Just what happened at Peshawar we do not yet know. That it was shocking and not creditable to the government seems probable in view of the instant application of gov- ernment censorship. The government issued an official com- munique describing the events and placing all blame on the Congress party, but somehow none of the Indians seem to believe it. The National Liberal Federation and the All- India Moslem Federation have both officially expressed their doubts and requested permission to investigate the Peshawar occurrences. Mr. V. J. Patel has done likewise on behalf of the Working Committee of the National Congress. Pandit Malaviya has individually requested permission to go to Peshawar to help the wounded there. But the acting gov- ernor of the Northwest Province has refused such permis- sion to Messrs. Patel and Malaviya, and probably also to the two organizations. Public opinion has been so aroused, how- ever, that the government has had to appoint a special com- mission to investigate occurrences there. Sholapur has been played up in the Western press as a place of horrible riots, but now the horrors begin to appear as mythical as many of the war-time Belgian atrocities. The Bombay Presidency government has officially announced in regard to Sholapur: Nearly all the rumors of hideous brutalities by the mob which have been freely circulated are without foun- dation. It is not true that policemen were tied together and burned alive, or that one had his eyes gouged out, nor is there any suspicion whatever that two were thrown into a well. It is hoped that all the missing policemen will yet be found. This statement was printed in small type at the foot of a column in the London Times of May 20. But the heavy fines, long prison sentences, and floggings imposed upon the Indians of Sholapur by the military there have turned Indian opinion still farther from the government and raised doubts even in the minds of some Europeans in India. Of course, the London Tory papers are full of stories of communism in India. But Mr. Benn, Secretary of State for India, stated in Parliament on May 12 in response to a question : "There has been no evidence that Communist agents were responsible for any of the recent disturbances, though the use of red uniforms and hammer and sickle badges has been mentioned in some of the official Peshawar telegrams." There are undoubtedly some Communists in India, as in all other countries, but their numbers and, in my opinion, their influence there are very small. When the censorship and prejudices have cleared away, I feel sure that it will be found that a large number of the stories of violence were pure fabrications. We know from our war experience what happened in the British and Ameri- can press in that time of national excitement and crisis. The people of India are more pacific even than the Chinese. Of course, there are some Indians who disagree with Gandhi and believe that violence is an efficient weapon. But they are not the majority. The more recent reports speak of the continued insistence of the Indian leaders upon non-violence, and we have the old war correspondent, Mr. Ashmead- Bartlett, reporting to the Daily Telegraph on May 21 that "the perpetual struggle for the salt pans at Wadala, just outside Bombay, continues, but there has been no violence." That the whole struggle is predominantly non-violent on the part of Indians is indicated by the continued deser- tions of moderates and liberals from the government. Vio- lence by the Independence Party would only have driven

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698 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3389 these men more strongly to the British side. But the volun- tary non-violent suffering by Nationalists for the cause of Indian independence is too much for the moderates to endure. It touches them too deeply, as indeed it must eventually touch all men, including the British themselves. The West understands violence, so the cables are full of stories of vio- lence; but the much greater amount of wholly non-violent resistance is not understood and so does not get reported. But non-violent resistance is the great power that is moving events in India. At all events, it seems to be touching the Indian troops and perhaps it will soon touch the police. Two platoons of Indian troops evidently mutinied at Peshawar, for they were immediately removed from their regiment and sent to an- other station, where preparations were made for their court martial. There were also rumors published in the Times of May 18 about a mutiny of Gurkhas at Calcutta and of trouble in a Sikh regiment at Delhi. How long Indian troops can keep their morale and continue to see their coun- trymen voluntarily and without violence enduring suffering for their country remains to be seen. Evidence is not wanting that the morale and obedience of the Indian police will progressively weaken, and that they may transfer their loyalty en masse the moment they come to feel reasonably sure that the followers of Gandhi have more power in India than the British. We shall see. Even the Indian servants are beginning to stir. The special cor- respondent of the Chicago Tribune stated on May 19 that "a new feature of the campaign was introduced today when cooks and other servants, including barbers, refused to serve wearers of foreign-woven clothing." This was in Calcutta. The day may come within a few months when Indian serv- ants of all British people will go on strike. It is undoubt- edly a fact that one link in the chain of British power in India is the cooperation of Indian cooks, body servants, and scavengers. Indeed, the only two reasonably firm bulwarks of British power today in India are the landowners in the provinces, where the land revenue is paid through the large landowner as a combined rental and tax, and the few indi- vidual rulers of Indian states. But even these two groups may come to see that although they will lose much by trans- ferring to the Independence Party they will lose all if they cling to Britain. Altogether the situation points definitely to the failure of the proposed Round Table Conference. I think it will not occur at all. By October the campaign of repression will have alienated practically all the Indian moderates and liberals and most of the Mohammedans and proved to their minds that Britain will yield nothing of real power without coercion. The no-tax campaign will not permit the govern- ment to let up on repression. The Simon Report will, I believe, prove to be a dud. Probably it will make conces- sions which a year ago would have seemed large, but now will fail to satisfy. This prophecy is easy when you realize how completely the British fail to understand the Indian situation. They do not understand Gandhi, or his weapon of satyagraha. Most British officials and the British press have steadily sneered and jeered at Gandhi, and since 1922 ^ave wholly underestimated his moral and political ability, luence, and power. The Viceroy himself has been led into same error of underestimating Gandhi. The Vice- an honest and high-minded man, but his class limita- tions hamper him and he is surrounded by a bureaucracy who are misguiding him. A sentence in a leader in the Manchester Guardian Weekly for May 16 scolds Gandhi for "compelling the gov- ernment of India to choose between confessing impotence and appearing brutal." Yes, Gandhi's tactics have compelled the government of India to reveal to all Indians and the rest of the world that imperialism is fundamentally predatory and brutal. So when trustful, comfort-loving, ostrich- minded, yet kindly and conscientious, liberals and moderates of India or England are compelled to recognize and admit the ultimate ugly and brutal nature of empire, they will reluctantly, but inevitably, renounce their loyalty to it. Englishmen ceaselessly talk about the many divisions, "minorities," races, languages, castes, and religions of India. That fixed idea about Indian divisions is blinding Britain and the West to the rapidly increasing unification of Indian opinion around the Congress program and the personality and tactics of Gandhi. By contrast, British opinion is becoming more and more divided, wavering, and weak. In Great Britain the Independent Labor Party has come out in favor of complete Indian independence, while the Tories are, of course, all for the status quo and stern repression. A good many members of Parliament are for dominion status. Much of the rank and file of British labor and the traders, espe- cially Lancashire textile interests, want trade resumption and consequent increased employment immediately, and are not so sure but that it will come sooner by giving up politi- cal control over India. The big investment bankers and steel interests, however, want no concessions to India, be- cause their profits come out of Indian government bonds, Indian railway securities, and the control of Indian funds. In India, British opinion is also divided. Mr. Richard Lane, who has recently returned from India, writes in the English Spectator: The few thousand Englishmen who are responsible for India's government are in despair, disheartened by the seeming ingratitude of those whom they have sought to serve, disheartened by the consciousness that whatever the course of their action it will be unsupported by the people at home, and themselves not untouched by feelings of sym- pathy for Indian nationalism. I would say that the British bureaucracy and military men in India are against all concessions and many are in favor of harsh repression, because their jobs depend upon maintenance of the status quo. British commercial interests there, how- i ever, would probably be willing to make very great con- ' cessions if thereby they could get a resumption of their busi- | ness. Even if they have to lose much, they don't want to lose all. And they know that Japanese, Germans, French, Ital- ians, and Americans are all eager to jump in and get a bigger share of the trade. The India Chamber of Commerce, a European organization, I believe, with headquarters in Cal- ) cutta, about May 20 informed the Viceroy, according to the Chicago Tribune, that "the continuance of the present politi- cal policy will lead to chaos in business." Besides these divisions of British opinion there are the probable conflicts in the minds and hearts of the Labor Cabinet. It is disquieting no doubt to two professed pacifists such as Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Snowden to be acqui- . escing in the imprisonment of Gandhi, the greatest pacifist in the world.

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June 18, 1930] The Nation 699 So the push and pull of forces, the currents of opinion and feeling and will eddy and whirl and surge. But it is important to note that the Indian Nationalists have the initiative and Britain is on the defensive both morally and materially. The question of India's ability to govern herself is merely academic. The real question is whether India has sufficient power to prevent Great Britain from governing her. If she has that power, then no outside nation can gov- ern her either, and she will learn to govern herself. It seems to me that no matter what Britain does, whether re- pression or conciliation, withholding or yielding, she will lose heavily, both politically and economically. The proba- bility is that all concessions will be made too late, for the combined effect of British ignorance and seven hundred mil- lion pounds sterling of British investments in India is inevi- tably conservative. The political self-liberation of one-fifth of the human race is a momentous event. Primarily it is a moral and spiritual affair, and it touches all of us. In forming our opinions and reaching our decisions we can no longer limit our loyalties to any one nation or any one civilization. We must be loyal to the highest interests of humanity as a whole. The Government in Business By MAJOR GENERAL T. Q. ASHBURN CAN the government successfully carry on a business? I believe that it can if the business is rightly organ- ized. In the case of the Inland Waterways Cor- poration, I believe that we have shown how it should be organized, namely, so that it may function as any private business corporation functions. The Inland and Coastwise Waterways Service lost nearly $1,000,000 a year from 1920 to 1924, inclusive. Reorganized in 1924 as the Inland Waterways Corporation, it has turned that loss into an average annual net income from operations of $82,000 for the years 1925 to 1929. The Inland and Coastwise Waterways Service was created in 1920 under the jurisdiction of the War Depart- ment, to succeed the Railroad Administration in the oper- ation of certain boats and barges upon designated streams of the United States. Its function was to carry on a water- transportation system analogous to a great trunk rail system, providing cheaper transportation to the public than all-rail. From 1920 to 1923 the service existed under the greatest difficulties. It was poorly equipped, its yearly life depend- ing upon the temper of Congress in the matter of appro- priations. These appropriations were subject to technical restrictions that prevented the use of funds for purposes for which they were clearly intended. It had no assurance for the future and could therefore make no plans ; its very ex- istence was threatened by interdepartmental quarrels, while it was continually coming up against the national slogan: Less Government in Business; More Business in Govern- ment. Moreover, there was in Congress a gradually grow- ing resentment against appropriating an average of $1,000,- 000 a year, to be sunk, as Senator Warren once remarked, "in the deep black mud of the Mississippi." The service was absolutely doomed to fail unless it could have a fair chance to operate as any other transporta- tion agency would operate. Realizing this fact, and being responsible to the Secretary of War and to Congress for the operation of the service, I suggested in my annual report for 1923 that since there seemed to be a sincere disposition to develop common carriers on our interior streams there must be a general recognition of what our experience had demonstrated, and that there should be presented to Congress a concrete program based on that demonstration, this pro- gram to be accepted or rejected. Congress was to be fully informed in regard to the following points: (1) the inherent difficulties of govern- ment operation, including the handicaps of a pioneer demon- stration of government operation; (2) the necessity of con- ferring upon the Secretary of War, as the mandatory of Congress, power to do all that the head of a great private transportation agency ordinarily does; (3) the necessity of providing the Secretary of War with sufficient capital ; and (4) the necessity of having a permanent executive head and a continuing policy exactly as in a private corporation. The duties and the demands made upon the time of the Secretary of War [said the report] are so stupendous as to preclude his giving more than a very limited time to the study and administration of this particular national question, although he is the mandatory of Congress. In spite of that, the responsibility for the success of the pro- ject lies with him, and his is the final decision. He must delegate a personal representative to do many things which he cannot possibly find time to do himself, and give him such authority to act as he may see fit. Not only must this man devote his time and attention to the problems, but he must be continually acquiring useful knowledge that does not spring spontaneously to the brain of any man, and much of which is not written in books; he must gain by experience, feel his way carefully in view of past pit- falls and mistakes, and grow with an institution as it grows. Fulfilling his duties as the Secretary of War's representative should be his permanent vocation. The creation of the present Inland Waterways Cor- poration was then recommended. The argument for such a corporation was set forth, in brief, as follows: Congress has invested hundreds of millions of dollars for the purpose of making streams navigable in the hope that cheaper transportation will result. It is appropriating nearly fifty million dollars annually; it has created an or- ganization to carry into effect its policy, but has so ham- strung this organization that its annual loss averages almost a million a year. It cannot overcome its losses as long as it must operate under the same restrictions regarding its disbursements as an ordinary bureau of the government. Continuance under the present form of operations is hurting the cause that Congress seeks to foster. We believe that if a corporation is created, provided with $5,000,000 capital, and given all the powers necessary to fulfil the pur- pose of its creation, we can so function as to demonstrate in five years either that water transportation can be placed

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700 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3389 on a self-sustaining basis or that our whole policy of making streams navigable is a colossal mistake and should be abandoned. There was never a more interested audience than the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House, or the Commerce Committee in the Senate, as I presented this argument. The proposition aroused interest because of its very audacity. It was finally recommended by these committees and enacted into law, although no such corporation had ever before been created by Congress. In the drafting of the bill every conceivable form of government corporation was studied. The object was to create a corporation with all necessary powers, to place it under a single responsible head, and to eliminate any merely supervisory authority over this head. The corporation was granted therefore all the powers possessed by any private transportation agency, and in addition "such other powers as may be necessary or incidental to fulfil the purpose of its creation." If the public was to have assurance that it might safely patronize government lines it was necessary to make certain that operations would not suddenly be dis- continued and that new projects would not dissipate our funds. The law accordingly provided that "the operation of any such facilities shall not be discontinued and new lines shall not be developed or operated until authorized by Congress." For the further protection of the public, the corporation was made liable before the courts and it can be sued without the consent of the United States. In order that it might operate like a private corporation the neces- sary money had to be available at all times and subject to no restrictions except that it must be spent to carry into effect the policy of Congress. This end was achieved by having a capital stock of $5,000,000 appropriated by the United States, which money was to remain available until expended. Such action obviated technical objections to our expenditures, removed any limit on the time during which the appropriation should be available, and created a revolv- ing fund capable of being used over and over again. Congress thus created a corporation with capital stock fully paid up, with all necessary powers definitely granted, with a continuing executive head, and with all the responsi- bility for the success of the enterprise vested in one man, the Secretary of War, who represents in himself the stock- holders and the board of directors. Nevertheless, the law provides for the appointment of a board of six members which meets at such times and places as the Secretary of War deems necessary. Its functions, however, are purely advisory, and not binding on the Secretary. Power and responsibility are lodged in the Secretary of War because he is in charge of those non-military activities which pertain to the construction and the maintenance of harbors and channels. During the hearings Secretary Weeks told the committee: I do not want a board of directors. . . . The Secre- tary of War has no time to sit down and discuss things in the way that is done by a corporation which has an executive officer and a board of directors. . . . There must be mandatory authority in the Secretary of War to enable him to perform, even in a reasonable degree, the duties of his office. . . . I do not wish to be responsible for a thing I cannot direct [italics mine]. The Secretary's approval or disapproval is final, and not subject to review by any authority except the courts. Under the by-laws, the chairman of the board is the execu- tive of the Secretary of War in the performance of the duties vested by the act in the Secretary, who under the law may delegate all his authority to the chairman. In general, the chairman's position corresponds to that of the president of a railroad, but his actions are less restricted because of his intimate personal contact with the Secretary and his ability at any tim« to get immediate and definite instructions from him. The chairman is in direct control of the executive de- partment, which is located in Washington. Its total over- head is less than $50,000 a year. Each year the chairman prepares and submits to the Secretary of War a budget covering all salaries for the next year, which includes every employee except laborers paid by the day or hour. Owing to our accurate cost system this budget, prepared a year in advance, has rarely if ever been exceeded. Within this approved maximum budget the chairman is authorized to classify offices and positions and maximum rates of pay for each, and to employ, promote, demote, or discharge em- ployees. Each department head has the same authority within the limits of the budget prescribed for that depart- ment. These men are made as independent as possible within the limits of their departments, and while there are certain general rules and regulations defining their duties and powers no attempt is made to dictate the manner of performance as long as results are satisfactory. All capital expenditures, regardless of amount, must be approved by the executive department, but all operating expenditures within the limits of the by-laws may be made by depart- ment heads. The prescribed system of reports keeps the executive department in constant touch with the other departments. The corporation operates mainly on the Mississippi and Warrior Rivers. Because of different operating conditions separate operating managers are necessary for the Upper River Division, the Lower River Division, the Warrior Division, and the Warrior River Terminal Company. The managers, who are charged with maintenance and repair of terminals, have full authority within the limits prescribed by the by-laws, their activities being coordinated through the executive department. The budget for hull and machinery repairs for line and harbor vessels is prepared annually by the executive department, and as long as this budget is not exceeded and the by-laws are not violated the managers can make repairs without reference to any further authority. In erecting the function..1 '-•'•cnnization to operate our facilities we followed the best lines ot railroad practice. We consulted freely with outside experts and paid them well for their services. We continue to do so. All line vessels are equipped with wireless, and we have four land stations. Each tow or express boat reports to a central station every two hours, giving its position and any difficulties encountered. These reports are charted, and any necessary information regarding channel conditions or other matters of importance is constantly available. Our bills of lading are similar to railroad bills of lading. We offer insurance against all hazards. Each shipper, wherever he may be located — on the river or in the interior — gets precisely the same saving in cents per hundred pounds when he ships by our lines. In the making of joint rates

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June 18, 1930] The Nation 701 the normal 20 per cent river saving is applied to a combined rail-river haul. For example, if the river saving from St. Louis to New Orleans by water were one dollar per ton, this saving would be subtracted from the all-rail ton rate from Chicago to New Orleans, and the joint rail-water rate, Chicago-St. Louis-New Orleans, would be one dollar less per ton than the all-rail rate from Chicago to New Orleans. What have been the results of this government enter- prise? The history of the Warrior River Terminal Com- pany, a subsidiary of the Inland Waterways Corporation, offers one striking example of the efficiency with which the corporation operates. The Warrior River Terminal Company was originally the Ensley Southern Railroad, and was owned by the Southern Railway. The Southern Railway claimed that the Ensley Southern was a non-paying line, threw it into the hands of a receiver, and finally asked for its abandonment. This action was not approved by the court, which ordered the road sold for $500,000. It was bought in 1926 by the Warrior River Terminal Company, the entire stock of which is owned by the Inland Waterways Corporation. We have rehabilitated the road and provided equipment at an additional cost of about $383,000 up to November 30, 1929. The total corporation investment in the Warrior River Terminal amounted to $775,018.26 in 1928. On April 18, 1929, the Interstate Commerce Commission wrote us a letter of which the essential paragraph follows: In your letter of April 12, transmitting the return of the Warrior River Terminal Company to the commission's order of January 18, 1929, you state that although the return shows net operating income of $30,885.98 in excess of 6 per cent on the value of the property of this company, no remittance of such excess has been made. Thus, the corporation took over a railroad nineteen miles in length which had been thrown into the hands of a receiver and ordered sold by a court in 1926, and rehabilitated the property so that in 1928 it earned more than $30,000 in excess of 6 per cent on the value of the property. When the Inland Waterways Corporation was organ- ized a survey was made by the American Appraisal Com- pany to adjust and appraise the value of the assets of the Inland and Coastwise Waterways Service transferred to the corporation. The sound value, with nothing allowed for good-will, thus entered upon the books of the corporation amounted to $9,762,858. In November, 1929, the book value of the corporation was no less than $19,746,350.06. The capital stock of the corporation, originally fixed at $5,000,000, was later increased to $15,000,000. On Decem- ber 31, 1929, there was a little more than $2,200,000 of cash on hand and unissued stock to the amount of $6,000,000. A study of the accounts of this corporation, its methods of operation, and its financial results will, I believe, demon- strate that its operations have been highly efficient. In my opinion, any similarly organized government corporation can be made just as efficient. The Bishop's Challenge By PAUL Y. ANDERSON Washington, June 7 IN the contest of strength between the United States Sen- ate and Harry Sinclair it was finally and satisfactorily demonstrated that a hundred million dollars can be put in jail in this country. The issue raised by Bishop James Cannon's curt refusal to testify before the Senate Lobby Committee this week is far more interesting and significant. It involves not the mere power that resides in great wealth, but the combined political influence of the Methodist church, the Anti-Saloon League, and half a dozen other religious and dry organizations. If the Bishop gets away with it, as it seems he may, the prestige of the Senate will be seriously im- paired, and its most useful function — that of making inves- tigations— will be crippled for a long time, and the com- mittee, therefore, ought to be the more vigorous. Writing as one who witnessed both incidents, I can testify that the con- tempt for which Sinclair served a jail term was the perfection of deference compared to the Bishop's insolent and calculated challenge. Politely, on advice of counsel, the oil magnate declined to answer four questions. After refusing to answer at least forty, Cannon crowned his defiance by deluging the committee with abuse, and walking out of the room in con- tempt of an order to remain on the witness stand. It was the most complete, direct, and deliberate affront ever admin- istered to a body of Congress. It was planned in advance, carried out with deliberation, and delivered with a degree of rank insult perhaps unequaled in Congressional history. THE committee had ascertained that E. C. Jameson, New York insurance broker, supplied a total of $172,- 000 to accomplish the defeat of Al Smith in 1928 and that $65,000 of it went to Cannon. At his insistence some of it was delivered in cash, and none of the checks covering the remainder bear his indorsement. Subsequently, in accord- ance with the Corrupt Practices Act, he accounted for $17,300. When Congressman Tinkham called attention to the $48,000 not accounted for, Cannon declared that it was expended through the Virginia Anti-Smith committee. In a lively desire to learn how the entire sum was spent, Chairman Caraway summoned Jameson before the commit- tee and subjected him to a thorough cross-examination, in which Jameson admitted that Cannon's explanation was in- correct. Caraway also sent the committee investigator to New York to examine the books of a defunct bucket-shop with which the Bishop had dealt. Three days before the Bishop's scheduled appearance before the committee Caraway departed for Arkansas to deliver a series of speeches. Cannon appeared, made tentative objections to being questioned about his politico-financial operations, whereupon the absent chairman issued a statement apparently upholding him. Thus emboldened, Cannon flatly refused to testify, and after accusing Senators Walsh and Blaine of conducting a wet, Roman Catholic persecution against him, walked out, leaving them holding the bag. Being fairly familiar with Caraway's mental processes and habits of

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702 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3389 speech, I think it altogether probable that he did not intend to convey the impression which his statement left. I sur- mise that he actually intended to say that if a man in Cannon's position, confronted by such charges and such evidence as had been presented, was unwilling to explain them, the committee should be content to let the public draw its own conclusions, without forcing him to testify against himself. If that is true, his statement was unfortunately worded, and it does not change the general situation. Cannon does not greatly improve his case by basing his refusal on the technical ground that he is a voluntary witness. The chairman's absence at such a time is difficult to excuse. ***** ASIDE from whether it will attempt to restore its sadly shattered dignity through contempt proceedings, the committee is confronted with other important questions. In its possession is evidence disclosing how Bishop Cannon dis- posed of large sums of money. Will it place this evidence in the record and wait for the Bishop's explanation, if any, or will it be content to drop that phase of the inquiry? There have been blunt intimations, supported by some docu- mentary evidence, that Jameson did not actually give the money, but that it was contributed through him from other sources deeply interested in the defeat of Smith and the elec- tion of Hoover. One hears the familiar name of the power trust. How far will that inquiry be pursued, if at all? Many persons believe that under its authorizing resolution the committee lacks the necessary power to complete its in- vestigation. Will it ask for an extension of authority? And if it does, will the Senate have the courage to grant it? These questions are pertinent and vital. The committee and the Senate are on trial, and this humble observer is by no means sure of the verdict. ***** IF the Senate fails in courage or leadership, God help the country, because every passing hour adds to the panic and confusion which prevails at the other end of Pennsyl- vania Avenue. The relationship between the White House and the Republican leaders in the Senate can no longer be described as mere discord; it has reached the stage of a singularly vindictive feud, and the condition is spreading to the usually dumb and docile members of the House. At this moment the attitude of Senators Borah and Norris toward the President might be characterized as effusively cordial in contrast to that privately manifested by such Old Guard leaders as Jim Watson and George Moses. The situation is constantly aggravated by the amazingly indiscreet expres- sions of petulance and distrust which emanate from the White House. Among the staunchest party regulars the feeling deepens that the President is not only a weak execu- tive and a poor politician, but that he is ready to sacrifice anything or anybody for his own political safety. They com- plain that he seeks advice only to disregard it; that he ignores the rules of the game in making appointments; that his secretiveness about his intentions keeps the regulars in hot water and often makes them ridiculous; that his fear and indecision are endangering the welfare of the entire party. Obviously, such criticisms do not disclose the noblest motives on the part of their authors, nor are they so intended. They are the plain, practical complaints of the plain, prac- tical men who compose the working organization of the Re- publican Party, and they arise from the plain, practical desire to keep the party, including themselves, in power. Official Washington is suffering from a case of prickly heat from which winter will bring no relief. ***** IT assumed a malignant form around executive quarters a few days ago as the result of the well-meaning but mis- guided effort of Old Guard Senators to delay action on the anti-injunction bill. These amateur Machiavellis, inspired by the ineffable Steiwer of Oregon, concocted the scheme of sending the measure to Attorney General Mitchell for an opinion on its constitutionality. Apparently it never once occurred to any of them that the natural result of their action would be to make Mr. Hoover responsible for the bill's fate. That harassed statesman discovered it promptly when the representatives of organized labor descended on him and his Attorney General with vigorous demands for a quick and favorable report. On his other side, demanding the death of the measure, were the representatives of organ- ized business. There was a great deal of perspiring, accom- panied by no little pain. Finally the issue was met in char- acteristic fashion when Attorney General Mitchell sent the bill back with a letter explaining that he didn't see why he should pronounce any opinion at all. INCIDENTALLY, such is the President's desire to ele- vate the tone of the federal judiciary, and such is the esteem in which the Attorney General is held by his chief, that he is reported to be scheduled for an early vacancy on one of the Circuit Courts of Appeal. The whisper is current that Solicitor General Thacher will succeed him. There has been some indication in the neighborhood of the White House that the amiable Mr. Mitchell does not possess all the qualities of firmness and decision which are desirable in his present post. I am reluctant to believe this, and for two reasons. Did not Mr. Mitchell eventually decide to institute a prosecution, albeit a genteel one, against the radio trust ? And would lack of firmness and decision tend to dis- qualify any man for membership in the present Administra- tion? The replacement of "Puddler Jim" Davis as Secre- tary of Labor would not seem to require deep thought unless drastic improvement is contemplated — and apparently it is not. Mr. Hoover is toying again with his original desire to name William Doak, of the Brotherhood of Trainmen. Doak enjoys the distinction of being known to labor men as a politician, and to politicians as a labor man. Filling the hole left by "Puddler Jim" is not a task requiring the talents of a Great Engineer — a dentist could do it. Dulcinea and Dorothea By ALFRED KREYMBORG When Don Quixote rode on Rosinante, Challenging windmills in his lady's name, Imagination drove his mind astray — Illusion his love, and love, his own heart's flame: Though wings I ride are ten times madder still, And things ten times as mad are riding me, The girl I love, the woman, lady, all Are all I know on earth of certainty.

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June 18, 1930] The Nation 703 In the Driftway IN the Drifter's early back-yard days a cork was one of the minor mysteries. Here was neither wood nor rubber, yet it looked like the one and reacted like the other. He never got around to asking about it. Children, the Drifter has long since concluded, ask relatively few questions of their elders in view of the innumerable queries that rise between four and fourteen. Most of them rise and are forgotten in those long solitudinous hours that children spend. The Drifter accepted cork much as he accepted rubber balls and all-day suckers. In fact, he never realized what cork was and where it came from until one day many years later when he happened to take a bus ride from Seville to Algeciras. ***** THE Calle Serpiente, that narrow street which is the center of Seville's existence, was utterly deserted at four-thirty on a morning in mid-June when the Drifter, breakfastless and porterless because he had not been able to obtain either comfort at that hour, set out for the square from which the bus for Algeciras was scheduled to depart at five. The winding street was still warm with the heat of the day before and of many days before that. The day that was just breaking would be no cooler. The deep silence and the shuttered shops gave the Street of the Serpent an exhausted air. The crow of a rooster from a roof-top chicken yard and the Drifter's heavy footsteps as he lugged two weighty bags intensified the stillness. The bus was waiting when the Drifter arrived. Moreover, it left on time, and as the first rays of the sun silvered the waters of the Guadalquivir, the wide river which makes Seville a seaport, the city had become a patch of white on the farther edge of the fertile green valley. The wind increased as the road ascended toward the high country that lies between Seville and Algeciras, and the bus driver maintained such speed that he endowed the wind with the velocity of a gale. The windows of the bus proved un- closable; the window shades refused to roll up; a few hours from Seville, in June, the Drifter was shivering midwinter shivers as the awkward bus with flapping blinds careened crazily over and around and down the hills of south Spain. It was all a little fantastic, and the country was hardly less so. ***** IT was unfriendly but impressive country. Gaunt moun- tains rose on every side, crowned with slabs of gray rock. Ruins of old Moorish towers topped many a hill ; and on one high, treeless place stood the ancient Moorish city of Medina- Sidonia, its white walls and cobbled streets scoured and worn by the wind. But the Drifter remembers most vividly the cork forests through which the road led for many miles. Cork trees are low and round of top, and they look in- describably old, perhaps because of their queer denuded trunks which are stripped of the outer bark every ten years to provide stoppers for the world's bottles. Little donkeys, loaded with the bark, plodded the roads and impeded the speed of the bus as they climbed slowly up the road's em- bankment. And the forests, the purple thistles on their spiked stalks, the tails of the patient donkeys, the sombreros of the men who drove them — everything in sight leaned away from a wind that had been blowing from the same direction since the world began. ***** THUS the Drifter learned about cork. Yet cork and the strange country in which it grows are still as mysterious as ever. For the Drifter's castle in Spain is a ruined Moorish castle on a gaunt hill flanked with cork forests. Purple thistles nod on their stalks, the sky is blue, cloud shadows play over gray cliffs, the sun shines fitfully; but the whole world is wrapped in a wind that strips it not only of all warmth but somehow, too, of all reality. The Drifter Correspondence The Jewish Morning Journal and Mr. Zukerman To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: Since you have seen fit to introduce Mr. William Zulcerman, the author of the article Zionism Finds Itself, in your issue of June 4 as the "manager of the European bureau of the New York Jewish Morning Journal," I am asking for the privilege of stating that Mr. Zukerman's views on the present status of Zionism are not necessarily expressive of the policy of the Jewish Morning Journal, but reflect his own personal opinions and reactions. With Mr. Zukerman's remarks about the more favorable attitude of the British press and public toward Zionist achievement in Palestine, I have no fault to find. I would fain wish that every word were true, though I have a feeling that he is over-optimistic. It is with Mr. Zukerman's categorical statement that "there has been a break in its [Zionist] ideology," and that "the political aspects of Zionism have been obscured" that our paper differs widely. Mr. Zukerman bases his beliefs on the proceedings of the conferences of the Zionist General Council and of the Adminis- trative Committee of the Jewish Agency held in London at the end of March. It is true that the economic questions were stressed then, but this was mainly owing to the fact that the report of the Shaw Commission had not been published then, leaving these gatherings in the dark about important and major policies of the British government. Since then, however, there has developed a definite deadlock between the Zionist organi- zation and the Jewish Agency on the one side and Great Britain as mandatory for Palestine on the other. It is in- accurate to give the impression that either Dr. Weizmann or the other responsible Zionist leaders have "scrapped" Zionist political aspirations. It is true that the extremist p«int of view did not prevail, but this has been the case for the past decade in Zionist affairs. Generally speaking, the body of Zionists are as firm today as they have ever been in their conviction that only political stability and clarity can pave the way for further economic progress and peace in Palestine. This, it seems to me, is axiomatic about every country and every people. I believe also that Mr. Zukerman has permitted himself to fall into error when he characterizes Zionist political aspiration as a purely Eastern European product, and when he states that Jewish labor in Palestine "has been indifferent to the political side of the Balfour Declaration." With re- gard to the last statement, the very opposite is true. New York, May 27 Jacob Fishman, Managing Editor, Jewish Morning Journal

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704 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3389 A Great American To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Jose Carlos Mariategui has died in Lima, Peru. These words sufficed to plunge the intelligentsia of all Hispano-America into sorrow; and nothing could be more eloquent of the cultural separation between the two halves of the new world than the fact that to most of us these words convey no meaning. Mariategui was the leader in Peru of the literary and intel- lectual revolutionary movement. He was a young man, about thirty-two or thirty-four. But he had already won a place of far more than local or even national importance. He was revered and loved as a guide by the younger generation in all the South American countries. He was perhaps the clearest mind, the purest and most devoted spirit which our century has given to our continents. When a man's greatness inheres in the whole human being rather than in a particular gift it is hard to define his essential value. Mariategui reached farthest, perhaps, as the founder and editor of a magazine called Amauta which now for several years has been the home of the enlightened groups of Peru and a forum of creative revolutionary action for all America. Mariategui called himself a communist, although he had no affil- iations with the orthodox Moscow party — nor indeed with any strictly political organization. He based his revolutionary creed on a profound aesthetic and intellectual acceptance of the Indian of the Andes, on an evolution of the values of the Inca culture in terms of modern life, and on a harmonization of these with the basic laws of industrialism and of modern socialism. His two latest books, "In Defense of Marxism" and "Essays in In- terpretation of the Reality of Peru," might be called the incep- tion of an American communism rooted in our Indian soil and functioning in our industrial world. But Amauta is no more a political organ than are the murals of Diego Rivera in Mexico City. Mariategui was above all an interpreter and a fomenter of the creative spirit, a believer in the potential spirit of the Americas. And his magazine was the home of the Peruvian painters and poets and story-tellers who expressed this spirit. It was even more their home than it was that of the sociologists, economists, and archaeologists who are beginning, in Lima and Cuzco, to bring Mariategui's Peru into birth. In these pages, moreover, the literature of Europe and of North America was fully represented. Mariategui was no sentimental enemy of the United States: he recognized with his passionate clarity that we hive the same cause and the same enemy as have the Americas of Spain. Appearing month after month on cheap paper with cheap reproductions of superb native art, Amauta has been one of the most dynamic and creative organs of our days. Amauta was only part of the man's work. He founded a popular weekly, Labor, addressed more immediately to the worker who was barred from Amauta by its high intellectual standards. The weekly, last year, after several suspensions, was finally suppressed by President Leguia of Peru. In addition Mariategui had begun to publish books and regularly arranged exhibitions in Lima for the superb new generation of artists who called him master: Jose Sabogal, Julia Codesido, Carmen Saco, Camillo Bias, among others. By such means, at thirty, Maria- tegui had become a "maestro" for the intellectual and the studi- ous along the whole Pacific littoral, from Colombia to Chile and north to Cuba and east to Argentina. On my recent journey through these lands university men everywhere came to speak to me of Mariategui. "You are going to Lima," they said, "you will see him. Tell him for us that we read him and love him, and that we follow him." In Lima I found him, a short lean cripple with burning eyes of black in which, it seemed to me, lived the power and passion of the Spaniard together with the exquisite sensibility of the Quichua — the Andean red man. He suffered from a tubercular infection which had required the amputation of one leg and the other was useless. He lived in a wheel-chair. But he was active, mobile, happy, beyond any of his American brothers. All day he worked in one of those tropical apartments open to an uncovered patio, among his family and his friends. And all day they came to him there — the writers, the painters, the scholars, the boys, and the girls, to win sustenance from his mind and from his heart. There also, periodically, came the police of President Leguia (the last of these assaults had been just a week before my arrival) and stuck him into jail, while they rifled his papers, bivouacked in his home, and then released him until the next of their visits. Mariategui lived in a state of perpetual siege. Often his letters never reached him, his papers were wantonly destroyed; in a hundred petty ways life was made miserable for him and work almost impossible. Yet the spirit of the man was so hale that these misfortunes did not touch its happy bloom. Never- theless, he knew that he had reached the limit of his usefulness in a Peru stifled by Leguia. His activity was continental; it was high time he removed to some greater and freer center. This next step had been arranged for him. The intellectuals of Buenos Aires, chiefly through the propaganda of the brilliant Argentine publicist, Samuel Glusberg, had invited him to settle in their city. There he was to write, to lecture, possibly to edit a continental organ. In Buenos Aires he would be free, since Argentina is one of the freest countries in the world ; he could earn money, almost an impossibility for a man of his stamp in Peru, and he would, moreover, find the type of med- ical aid which, he trusted, would save his life. Everything was prepared, and he was to have gone this May. His journey would have been a turning-point in the cultural history of America Hispana. All his friends attached great importance to this transference of Mariategui from the Pacific to the Atlantic. To me it seems symbolic of the potential cultural coordination of Hispano-America, even as the passage a hundred years ago of Bolivar and San Martin from the Atlantic to the Pacific was symbolic of the continent's liberation, politi- cal and economic, from Spain. Mariategui's death is one of those bitter and irreparable losses which try a man's faith in life and test his courage to go on living. He was truly a great man in a great cause, a continental cause — the cause of the cultural and spiritual freedom of America. He died poor. The expenses of his burial had to be met by a collection among his friends — most of them as poor as he. And he leaves absolutely penniless his widow and three children. His friends in the different Amer- ican countries have therefore determined to raise a fund for the support of his family. They have asked me to take charge of any contributions from the United States. I sh.ill be glad to forward any contributions to Lima. Or money may be sent direct to Dr. Alberto Luis Sanchez, Apartado 12-53, Lima, Peru. New York, May 6 Waldo Frank Letters of Edward Carpenter To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The literary executors of the late Edward Carpenter have in preparation a memorial volume, and I have been asked to write the chapter on Walt Whitman and Carpenter's other American friends. If any of your readers have any letters from Carpenter, or letters from Carpenter to Whitman, I should be grateful for copies. Waterbury, Vt., May 28 WlLL S. MoNROB

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June 18, 1930] The Nation 70S Rushbrook Williams Replies To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: My attention has been drawn to your criticism of an interview which I gave on landing in New York. In answer to a question as to whether Mr. Gandhi's views were progres- sive, I quoted from his "Confession," which he has never re- tracted or modified in his copious speeches and writings. To speak of my having produced this quotation from among my "private state papers" appears to me an attempt to invest my uninteresting personality with some romantic glamor. I can only conclude that a similar spirit has converted the ordinary courtesy call which I said I hoped to pay at the Embassy in Washington into an "official mission" of the true best-seller brand. I termed Mr. Gandhi a reactionary because I consider the appellation strictly accurate. Mr. Gandhi dislikes all that is most characteristic in Western civilization, from modern transport to modern medicine. I am unable to see what my connection with the Chamber of Princes has to do with the matter. If the chamber were, in your words, "probably the most reactionary body in India," why does it not support Mr. Gandhi, who never attacks the Indian states, publicly ex- presses his admiration for Indian kingship, and in general desires to revert to all that is time-honored? But it is perhaps news to you that the Indian states, through the chamber, have accepted, and are working for, dominion status, with co- operation with British India as their watchword. Their atti- tude toward Western civilization is more liberal than that of Mr. Gandhi, and they have a clearer realization of world tendencies. But is not all this beside the point? I mention it only since you seem to think that I have described Mr. Gandhi as reactionary because I am the envoy of a still more re- actionary force. With shame I confess my inability to follow your reasoning. New York, May 25 L. F. Rushbrook Williams Contributors to This Issue Richard B. Gregg, author of "The Economics of Khad- dar" and "The Psychology and Strategy of Gandhi's Non-Violent Resistance," spent nearly four years in India, living most of the time in the Gandhi colony. T. Q. Ashburn, Major General, United States Army, is chairman of the board of the Inland Waterways Corporation. Paul Y. Anderson is the national correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Alfred Kreymborg is the author of "Our Singing Strength." Isidor Schneider is the author of "The Temptation of Anthony." Matthew Josephson is the author of "Portrait of the Artist as American." Alice Beal Parsons is the author of "John Merrill's Pleasant Life." Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at Washington Square College, New York University. Carlton J. H. Hayes is professor of history at Colum- bia University. Dorothy Brewster is assistant professor of English at Columbia University. J. A. Hobson is a foremost British economist and a con- tributing editor of The Nation. EHERMS DIE IN BED By Charles Yale Harrison A stark, realistic picture of the Canadians in the War. Mr. Harrison's book has aroused a storm of controversy in Eng- land and in Canada. Here is the first authentic account of the looting of Arras. John Dos Passos says of it: "This is a hell of a good book." Just published. WILLIAM MORROW $2.50 MARY GLADSTONE HER LETTERS AND DIARIES Edited by Lucy Masterman Mary Gladstone knew everyone of note in Victorian Lon- don. Browning "spit in her face," Tennyson kissed her and was almost a philanderer; Disraeli "was impertinent and vulgar." Her diary is a glittering day-by-day record of that vanished era. "One of the most interesting, most im- portant, most entertaining, most diverting biographies I have read in some time." — William Lyon Phelps. 492 pages, octavo, bound in green decorated cloth, <with unusual illustrations. At all bookstores. $6.00 E. P. DUTTON & CO., Inc., 300 4tu Ave., N. Y. SUMMER READING Consequences By JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD Introduction By JOHN HAYNES HOLMES "The book is essentially timely in view of the whirlwind which Great Britain is now reaping in India after centuries of sowing the wind." — The New Republic. Libraries, Schools, Anti-Narcotic Associations, Clubs, Special Price. Apply to author, Bye, N. T. DUTTON and all bookstores $1.50 When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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Books The Ambience of Love By ISIDOR SCHNEIDER I The ambience of love incores us like a fruit that huts and feeds the seed and leads its root. The ambience of love is as spring's napless rain that clothes the earth and seeks to take earth's stain. The ambience of love is like a brooding sun filial, to whom, like flowers animals may run. II I lift myself to you as often I have stood and shook the slept-with sun out of my blood ; and laid me down again, and again rose up in thinned new shadow to let rinse my hot hair in the wind. Liberty, Classic and Romantic Liberty. By Everett Dean Martin. W. W. Norton and Com- pany. $3. TO write a book on liberty in general seems at first glance an unenviable task. What, after Milton, Locke, Voltaire, Mill, and a score of other great champions, is there left to say? And how can one write a full-length book in defense of abstract principles to which nearly all of us are already willing to pay our best lip service? "There are three irrefutable reasons," writes Charles Horton Cooley, "why views that seem dangerous, unpatriotic, or otherwise abominable should be freely expressed: (1) Discussion is the only way to modify or control them. (2) It is the only way to mobilize conservative views in order to combat them intelli- gently. (3) They may be right." When one can say the thing so compactly, why spread it over three hundred pages? It is with such misgivings that one approaches Everett Dean Martin's "Liberty." These misgivings soon dissolve, however, before the flow of Mr. Martin's eloquence, his gift for felicitous and forcible statement, his attractive historical summaries, his broad, humane culture, his shrewd analysis and unfailing clarity. His "Liberty" is not perhaps a profound book or a remarkably original one, but it is none the less admirable. For in spite of the great existing classics, and of the fact that much of his argument is necessarily repetition, Mr. Martin has done a task that greatly needed to be done. So long as we have new forms and examples of censorship we shall need new tracts against them. When one learns that in the last month six newspapers and fifteen books have been suppressed in what is called the Irish Free State one can hardly regard Mr. Martin's book as academic. With the suppression of free utterance in Italy and Russia, the present censorship of news from India, and the relentless activity of our own Smoots and Sumners, we should be impressed today as never before with the truth of the aphorism that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And books like Mr. Martin's are an essential part of such vigilance. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of the present volume is its analysis of the confusion and inconsistency among present-day liberals. Mr. Martin defines a liberal as "a rationalist who walks by faith in the wisdom of the irrational majority." Because the liberalism of today stems partly from the Renaissance and Voltaire, and partly from Rousseau, most liberals are not quite sure whether they are champions of cul- ture or of nature, whether they are advocates of reason or of instinct: Today the liberal proclaims himself a rebel against authority, a free spirit who must be rid of his inhibitions, and tomorrow he announces that liberty is a myth having no reality in an industrial civilization. It is good liberal- ism if one holds with Jefferson that that government is best which governs least. It is also good liberalism to work for the extension of the activities of the government, especially its control over industry. I know liberals who at the same time invoke the Bill of Rights in defense of civil liberty and denounce the Constitution because it is a barrier to the absolute rule of the majority. In one sentence a liberal will say that the public is always wrong because the average man cannot and will not think for himself; in the next sentence he will cry, "Let the people rule!" Liberalism is undecided whether it is individual- ism or socialism; whether liberty is a human achievement or a gift of nature; or whether the "progress" in which liberals believe should be directed toward further advance of civilization or toward revolt against civilization and a return to nature. This confusion, according to Mr. Martin, results from the permeation of the liberal tradition by the philosophy of Rousseau. The "classical" view of liberty, which Mr. Martin supports, conceives of liberty as a name for certain concrete rights; it appeals to historic precedent, to reason and experi- ence; it is a cultural achievement, dependent on personal responsibility, and it holds that sovereignty must be limited by law. The "romantic" view, stemming from Rousseau, con- ceives of liberty as freedom in general, a gift of nature to be restored to all mankind in equal degree by the emancipation of the masses from social bondage to the institutions and tra- ditions of civilization. Its hope of freedom is based on a belief in the good intentions of man acting as mass, and it regards any other guaranty of the individual as unnecessary. Its slogan is, "Let the people rule," and the "self-government" it worships is, in the words of Mill, "not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest." Liberty as un- restricted rule of the people, holds Mr. Martin, destroys liberty as individual right. Such liberty is merely "the tyranny of all over each," or, worse, merely the tyranny of the best-organized faction. Liberalism today can survive "only if it can de-Rousseauize itself." Mr. Martin carries his advocacy of individual liberty almost to the lengths of Thoreau. He takes no stock in the view that men are under moral obligation to give support to laws "the enforcement of which can work only injury, until they are repealed," nor in the view that if a law is wrong the surest guaranty of its repeal is its rigid enforcement:

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June 18, 1930] The Nation 707 I am at a loss to discover what psychological or his- torical facts have led to this generalization. The idea is apparently both unpsychological and un-American. It is at least not the way such matters have usually gone in this country. Bad laws are seldom repealed. The statute books are still cluttered with them. They merely become "dead letters" through inability to enforce them or some shift in popular interest which no longer demands their enforcement. . . . The assumption that the people will not accept a bad law if it is really enforced has little to support it. People are very likely to do the opposite, for, once enforced, the law is held to be a success; it is an accomplished fact. ... It is because bad laws cannot be enforced, rather than because they can, that persistence in them is ever abandoned. In spite of the cogency of this argument, one regrets that Mr. Martin does not give the opposing view a fuller consideration. The general principle that the individual, even when guided by his "moral conscience," may choose which laws he is to obey and which he will ignore is not one to be advocated without mature consideration of its probable consequences. Henry Hazlitt The War for Modern Art My Thirty Years' War. By Margaret Anderson. Covici- Friede. $4. THE revolutions of poetry and art in the United States during the twentieth century were conducted largely by inspired women. These female crusaders and zealots — Amy Lowell, Isadora Duncan, Harriet Monroe, Margaret Anderson, and numerous others — toured and stumped the coun- try in behalf of free verse and realism, free dancing, or free love. Many of the younger writers of today may recall how in their youth, somewhere between 1914 and 1924, they were sheltered and nurtured by the forensic prowess of these amazons. Their first effusions were examined by the indefati- gable Miss Lowell and printed either by Miss Monroe in her Poetry or by Miss Anderson in her Little Review. Militant women were making literary history and artistic history in those days; and often in so doing they showed strong points of resem- blance to their grandmothers or great-aunts of Abolition and Temperance-Ball days, save in one important respect: that they were largely for "self-expression" rather than for measures of repression. It was for self-expression that Miss Anderson left her old- fashioned home in Indiana and took the first step toward the metropolis of Chicago, and along the aesthetic-sensuous-intellec- tual highways which led so many Middle Westerners to the left bank of Paris. It was for self-expression with fanfares of enthusiasm that the unforgettable Little Review was launched. The pages of this militant modern magazine which, coura- geously enough, made no compromise with the public's taste were opened to Sherwood Anderson and Ezra Pound, Ben Hecht and William Carlos Williams, Yeats and the "Baron- ess," Henry James and Mary Garden, the Mason and Hamlin piano, dadaism, anarchism, Hart Crane. That Miss Anderson had in her mind an articulate plan or program is doubtful. What she had in abundance was her vague, powerful enthusiasm. For whenever she bends herself to apologetics or interpretations of her brood of artists, char- acters, experimenters, they become a little compromised in her hands. Indeed, the whole modern movement, as we look back upon it in America, rescued and nursed as it was by crusading women, assumes peculiar overtones; it suffers from being en- tangled with all sorts of "causes," such as birth control, Greek dancing, Lesbianism, psychoanalysis. Its motives, its growth, its orientation seem obscure and become all the more so in the emotional, subjective prose of Miss Anderson's memoirs. The whole exciting, fermenting epoch, in which we still move, can be characterized already by its greater "self-con- sciousness" about art. A decade or two earlier no American would have dreamed of canvassing Wall Street for the sake of revolutionary modern artists! And yet this is precisely what the heroic Margaret Anderson does. The writers of the Little Review take literature as an art, explore its technical resources, listen for the latest note from Paris or Dublin, and labor for their own pleasure; whereas for older Americans the only writ- ing that was ever heard of to any extent was a "business" that "paid." For a long time Miss Anderson wages stoutly her "thirty years' war" for modern art, until in fatigue she drops her armor and becomes an exile in France. It is a war that will take all of thirty years; its outcome is still doubtful; and its peace will probably involve strange terms. During hostilities Miss Anderson's instinct was generally true, and she had her luck, if I may call it that. She was lucky to have secured the collaboration of Ezra Pound, and to have joined forces with so provocative a person as Jane Heap. For years Pound, from Europe, carried on a magnificent work; he brought home much bran, but also a surprising quantity of talent. (The letters he wrote, freely cited, make delightful, acrid reading and one hopes for more, in another form.) The Little Review, at any rate, was for some time the only American periodical which one opened with the hope of being surprised. The culmination of its brave work came with the publication of Joyce's "Ulysses," a book which has had amazing repercussions upon modern writers everywhere, and for whose presentation the Little Review was peculiarly fitted. The campaigns and trials that followed have become part of our literary history. All of Miss Anderson's twentieth-century Odyssey through the cultured purlieus of Chicago, New York, and Paris offers valuable documents for the future biographies of many potential immortals. But is it good history? Why do so many presumably fascinating and original characters among whom she passed shrink to small stature in her narrative? Why — save for the inimitable mad "Baroness" — do they seem to forget their lines when they stride the stage? We must have more memoirs of the twentieth century and more brilliant actors. Matthew Josephson Civilization and Unreality Kindness in a Corner. By T. F. Powys. The Viking Press. $2.50. Apples Be Ripe. By Llewelyn Powys. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.50. THE Messrs. Powys will doubtless not thank the reviewer who lumps them together, as if all books labeled "Powys" came out of the same bag. But there is enough similarity in these two novels to make their joint consideration something more than a caprice. Mr. T. F. Powys's tale of the Reverend Mr. Dottery and the little parish in which he is the great and good man is of course very different in its externals from Mr. Llewelyn Powys's account of Chris and his loves. But both books have a complete absence of reality — of which Mr. T. F. Powys is perhaps the more aware — that makes them charming; and both are written from precisely the same van- tage-point of civilization. These two writers are civilized in the same way. That they know the same country and the same people in it is an accident of birth; that they see the same things as fresh and good and the same things as vulgar and empty is an accident of mind worth noting.

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708 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3389 Mr. Dottery, the good, innocent, natural man, whose taste is for excellent wine and a good table, who lives the quiet life of a scholar and might be expected to be terrified by the world, is as ready to accept experience as is Chris, the hero of "Apples Be Ripe." Mr. Dottery is willing to learn of love, although his heart is as pure as new milk. Chris is born with a natural yearning for what is joyful and unashamed in the relationships of lovers; because he could not capture her without marriage, he marries a wife who finds love-making filthy and disgusting. He leaves her and takes to the road; winds hardly touch him, he is almost not wetted by the rain. Without effort he learns the hard labor of a farm hand and makes love to the farmer's beau- tiful daughter on Sundays. His heart, however, remains faith- ful to the playmate of his youth, whom later he runs off with on a wild winter night that gives him pneumonia from which he dies. He is as much a child of nature as Mr. Dottery, learning of love from Lottie, the kitchen-maid. If I understand Mr. Aldous Huxley, these Powyses, in their naturalism, are civilized in the way he would have the world be. This is the naturalism that accepts all experience, because all experience has been perceived; that is surprised at nothing, because life is full of surprises. The honest country- men in both these novels take birth and death and bedding maids and receiving Holy Communion in much the same spirit. Those persons who shy at love, like Chris's wife, or who are looking for sin, like the wife of Canon Dibben in "Kindness in a Corner," are vulgar, ignorant, uncivilized. They are unnatural, when naturalism means the height of sophistication. They refuse life and will not expect death. These are frank books, amusingly so in the case of "Kind- ness in a Corner." They are bold and at the same time gentle. And they are written with expertness and delicacy. Dorothy Van Doren Eighteenth-Century Emotion The Stricken Deer. The Life of Cowper. By David Cecil. The Bobbs-Merrill Company. $5. COWPER'S face itself illustrates the theme, that decorous, pleasant, witty, urbane, gentle face with the mad eyes ; and Lord Cecil states it in a brilliant introductory essay on the eighteenth century. The form taken in our minds by that much-invoked period is too homogeneous to be true, he says, adducing Cowper as an example. Past periods, like foreign countries, become the fashion. Today the eighteenth century is the fashion. . . . [People] like its sensibility because they dislike emotion. . . . They profess to like pure form, whatever that may mean, and the eighteenth century had a talent for form. . . . Finally they dislike the nineteenth century, and they see the eighteenth century as its opposite. They see it as worldly-wise, modish, mocking, decorous, elegant. And in fact some of its typical figures are modish and elegant — Casanova, Voltaire, Lord Chesterfield. But Casanova shocked his own Venice ; many Englishmen agreed witli Johnson that Chesterfield's "Letters" taught "the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing-master"; while "to imagine that Voltaire expressed the general opinion of his time is to imagine that Jonah expressed the general opinion of Nineveh." Outwardly fashionable society was ... at once narrow and cosmopolitan, as much at home in Paris as in London. ... It liked painting and politics, but painting meant Leonardo and Raphael and nothing else, and politics meant the Whig cause and the balance of power and nothing else. Its classical learning was more Roman than Greek and more French than Roman. But underneath its formal appearance ... it was really very English, impulsive, copious, untidy, full of exceptions to the rule, of eccentric characters, excited by sudden gusts of enthusiasm. It made up only a small part of eighteenth-century England. There was the middle-class England of Fielding, and Smollett, and Gillray, and the Beggar's Opera, and Hogarth — . . . the life of the plain man in a decent brown stuff suit and shoes with steel buckles, who lived over his shop and went to Vauxhall on a holiday and sat under Seed or Jortin on Sunday; who gave money to an orphanage, and took his wife to see an execution. There was the adventurous England too — . . . the adventures of the young men who were pressed for sailors, or taken by pirates, like Captain Singleton; or who explored New Zealand with Captain Cook; or were shipped off as incorrigible rakes at eighteen years old, to make fortunes as Indian nabobs, like William Hickey. It is a whimsical contrast between the dying Mogul empire, still illumined by gleams of fantastic splen- dor, and its prosaic red-faced conquerors with an unap- peasable thirst for good living, and without a nerve in their bodies. Without a nerve in their bodies, and there were the three vol- umes of "Clarissa Harlowe"! There were also Gray, and Ca- gliostro, and Mesmer, and the Jacobites, and the miners of Cornwall, "howling and foaming at the mouth under the elo- quence of the Methodists." There were — . . . the bishops whose dioceses were in Wales and whose residences were in London, and who edited, with dignity, the more scabrous classical authors. There were Burke, and Garrick, and Goldsmith, and Miss Burney, and Gibbon, and Doctor Johnson, and there was Wil- liam Cowper, whose life presents one of the most teasing of all literary enigmas, alternating as it did between extremes of decorous placidity and wild emotional anarchy. Three times Cowper went mad and twice he struggled successfully out of the black slough in which he suffered. Re- ligious ecstasy saved him the first time. Alone among the philosophies of its day [evangelical religion] could satisfy the temperament of the artist. It alone set a supreme value on that emotional exaltation in which the greatest art is produced, it alone made the imagination the center of its system, and not a mere decorative appendage to it. . . . Wesley could have un- derstood Dante as Voltaire, or even Doctor Johnson, could never have done. The second time he was saved by the placid domestic routine which he and Mary Unwin had been building up together for many years. Both experiences open up to us intensely interest- ing vistas of eighteenth-century life that are left out of the current fashionable picture. In presenting this life Lord Cecil is tentative and intelli- gent. He puts forth no ironclad explanations of Cowper's mad- ness. To be sure, the loss of his mother at the age of six made a deep mark on Cowper. His first experience of public-school bully -.ig shattered his nerves, though it did not prevent his being very happy in his second school. He had, or thought he had, a physical deformity, which may or may not have been the cause of his failure to press his suit of his cousin Theodora when difficulties intervened. His failure to marry and to have a nor- mal sex life may or may not have had anything to do with those recurrent fits of melancholy which led at times to black madness. The reader wishing easy conclusions or the airing of his favorite theories will have to look elsewhere. But whoever wishes to explore in minutest detail all the recorded facets of an intensely alive personality will find this copious though not

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June 18, 1930] The Nation 709 untidy book a mine of interest. A dozen neat, dogmatic, little titillating biographies could be made from its generous wealth — Cowper's relations with Mrs. Unwin, with that tempestuous Evangelical divine Mr. Newton, with the vivacious and per- ceptive Lady Austen, with the vivacious and steadfast Lady Hesketh, with Theodora, with the "mad poet" Hayley, his madness, his hidden deformity, his faith, his gallantries. Lord Cecil has, in fact, written a biography after my own heart. He has taken advantage of modern methods of organ- izing a great mass of material into a readable narrative, with- out subjecting that material to a falsifying simplification. When facts fail him he refrains from the dubious virtue of invention, and he displays a quite unusual knowledge of and sympathy with the chaotic processes of human nature. My only discon- tent is with the rapidity with which he passes over Cowper's boyhood and early manhood. I wish more letters and concrete incidents had been introduced here. Failing them, one feels a little as if Cowper first came on the stage in his proper person, instead of as someone talked about, after his first attack of madness. When he comes he takes his place at once as one of those few individuals, like Pepys, and Horace Walpole, and Montaigne, and the younger Pliny, whom we know almost better than ourselves. Alice Beal Parsons To Make Thinking Beautiful Intellectual Things. Stanley J. Kunitz. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2. STANLEY KUNITZ'S poetry, even upon rereading, gives the curious impression of a divorcement from life. And (in this the poet is very much in the main trend of the times. He handles romantic themes without anything other than an intellectual emotion. His theme is beauty, and he is (capable of stirring up in his reader considerable vibration of feeling without once being passionate himself. As Jose Ortega y Gasset has said in an essay in the Symposium, there is going on today a general "dehumanization of art"; the period of ro- mantic work is over, at least temporarily, and the poet is no longer bent on sharing his emotions, which are identical with those of the bourgeois: I do not know, but I believe that the new poet when he writes poetry aims simply to be a poet. We shall see how all the new art, agreeing in this with the new school of science, the new politics, new life, repulses above all things confusion of frontiers. It is a symptom of mental health to wish that frontiers between things should be sharply defined. Life is one thing and poetry is another — let us not mix them. And Mr. Kunitz is a very expert poet who does not mix them. He entitles his book "Intellectual Things," but bases his title on Blake's mystic analysis — "For the tear is an intellectual thing." Mr. Kunitz is not, as are some "cerebral" poets, striving after metaphysical abstractions, nor is he concerned with the fever of the brain in revolt against its physical world; he is concerned with writing modern poetry which in- terprets the modern remoteness from reality, the passionless motion of the mind moving over its scenes, the reflection in the thought of all that is felt through the senses. It is easy enough to point out this poet's affiliation in method with the metaphysical school — his use of delicate and strange conceits. There has been so much comparing of modern poets with Donne and his school (more or less without distinguishing one poet from another in that century) that one hesitates to indicate how a modern employs the same manner of association in image between two very different objects, as, for example, here, between the violet and the thoroughbred: APPROACH OF AUTUMN The early violets we saw together, Lifting their delicate swift heads As if to dip them in the water, now wither, Arching no more like thoroughbreds. Slender and pale, they flee the rime Of death: the ghosts of violets Are running in a dream. Heart-flowering time Decays, green goes, and the eye forgets. Forgets? But what spring-blooded stock Sprouts deathless violets in the skull, That, pawing on the hard and bitter rock Of reason, make thinking beautiful? And this is what Mr. Kunitz attempts: to "make thinking beautiful," glamorous, almost, one might say, romantic in itself. And he succeeds, partly because he knows his own limitations — and this type of lyricism has them — and never sings too stridently or importantly. He is a graceful writer of very feminine tone, perhaps almost over-delicate in gesture and accent; he is nevertheless beautifully in command of his medium and of his own subtle shadings through language and rhythm: Only, when loosening clothes, you lean Out of your window sleepily, And with luxurious, lidded mien Sniff at the bitter dark — dear she, Think somewhat gently of, between Love ended and beginning, me. He strikes no profound note. His is the art of creating poetry for poetry's sake. Mr. Kunitz gives the reader always the impression of the romantic image of delight seen through the fragile lense of the mind, no impact against the flesh, but, nevertheless, a wistful, remote eagerness. His unique quality is the perfection with which he accomplishes this, and his waving, scarflike rhythm. Eda Lou Walton Vive la France A Short History of the French People. By Charles Guignebert. Translated from the French by F. G. Richmond. Two volumes. The Macmillan Company. $15. France, a Study in Nationality. By Andre Siegfried. Yale University Press. $2. HERE are two attempts of distinguished Frenchmen to ex- plain their country to Americans. Professor Guignebert, in response to the compelling patriotic call of 1918, turned aside from his studies of early Christianity to lecture American soldiers on the history of France, and the results are now available in English translation in two fat volumes. Pro- fessor Siegfried, heeding a later and more subtle call to patriotic service, has published in a little volume his Williamstown lec- tures on contemporary France. English-speaking people have certainly been in need of a readable, reliable, up-to-date survey of the whole history of the French people, and Guignebert's work comes nearest to satisfy- ing the need. It covers chronologically the whole span of French history from the Gaul of the Celts and of Caesar to the France of the World War, and it is based largely on such well- known secondary writings as those of Lavisse, Rambaud, Glas- son, and Viollet, with honorable mention of Michelet. But it is not wholly reliable. It is marred by a considerable number of factual errors and inaccuracies, and preeminently so by the author's biases, notable among which are his inveterate prejudice against Catholic Christianity and his sterling devotion to French patriotism of the Jacobin variety. As a good Jacobin, he ap- plauds the Revolution and especially its quickening of national

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710 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3389 spirit, and he is highly critical of Louis XIV, Napoleon, and royalists in general. As a good patriot, he perceives an almost providential evolution of the French people, always, however, with a fixed national character of moderation and mental lucid- ity; he interprets the Hundred Years' War, not as a civil feudal war, which it was, but as an international war between France and England, which it was not; he rejoices that the Revolution- aries extended French frontiers to the Rhine and regrets that Napoleon lost them; he maintains that Germany in 1914 was dominated by Pan-Germanism but overlooks the propagation of revanche in the schools and press of his own country after 1870. Nor is Professor Guignebert's work up to date, according to American standards. It is narrowly political, with a few paragraphs here and there on intellectual developments, but it is not economic or broadly social. It is really a history of French politics rather than a history of the French people. Be- sides, it is badly proportioned. Almost half of the first volume is consecrated to obscure kings of the Dark Age (Thierry IV, Childeric III, Louis the Stammerer, and the Charleses — Bald, Fat, and Simple), while the vitally important modern events since 1815 are thinned out in the last quarter of the second vol- ume. The translator, moreover, has done his worst to make the work unreadable. He bestrews the undoubtedly lucid French text with such curious English words as "aeonian," "energumens," "distemperature," "Napoleonean"; he injects into it every once in a while a sentence that defies syntax; and he astounds the historian by writing about "Philip the Handsome" when "Philip the Fair" is meant, and by referring to "Etienne de Blois" for "Stephen of England," "Gand" for "Ghent," "Charles Quint" for "Charles V," "Vienne" for "Vienna," "Toussaint" for "All Saints," and "patrice" for "patrician." And why hyphenate MacMahon? — he was Irish, even if President of the French Republic. And why the awful "civism," "civicist," and "incivism"? Professor Siegfried's book is bright and easy to read, but its title is misleading. "A Study in Nationality" creates the ex- pectation of a painstaking, scientific inquiry into the origin or nature of French national consciousness. It is nothing of the kind. Actually, it is a popular sketch of the political groups in contemporary France, with some attention to their general atti- tude toward international affairs and with a few incidental ipse dixits of the author on French "character." On the politi- cal groups, the sketch is notably clear and useful: it should en- able the American reader to understand the purposes and prac- tical operation of French politics. At the same time, the Ameri- can reader should be on his guard against some of Professor Siegfried's easy generalizations, such as his insistence that the French "personality" is fixed, that it is far older than the Ameri- can, the German, or even the English, and that its supreme attri- bute is "individualism," or his notion that the contemporary Frenchman does not have any "export complex" and is there- fore not interested in imperialism or foreign affairs. The French "personality" is plural, not singular; there are among Frenchmen many different and frequently conflicting attitudes and behaviors, and about them there is more fluidity than fixity. If the author had centered his attention upon economics instead of politics he would have observed that the French "personality" is undergoing in our day, as surely if more slowly, the same industrial transformation as the English, the German, or the American is experiencing. Of course, the French are individual- ists— about some things — as are the other Latin peoples and most nations of the Continent, but they display relatively great conformity in their school system, in their obedience to army demands, and in their patriotism. In these respects the French are anti-individualists par excellence. Nor may the French be quite so disinterested in world affairs as the author would have Americans believe. It is true that they export certain kinds of manufactured goods in smaller quantities than some other na- tions, but they do export capital to their colonies and to foreign countries, they do have a Comite des Forges, they do form car- tels with foreign manufacturers and bankers — and the French are human; where their treasure is, there will their heart be also. It is convincing evidence of Frenchmen's interest in for- eigners that both Professor Siegfried and Professor Guignebert have addressed their books to us Americans. "The Frenchman," says Professor Siegfried, "looks life straight in the face, with no trace of hypocrisy or childishness and with no illusions"; and Professor Guignebert echoes and re- echoes the self-flattering refrain. Why is it, then, that both professors metaphorically weep when they refer to the wrongs done France by nineteenth-century armed invasions of their country — three within fifty-six years? Both professors should look those invasions straight in the face and realize that the first, in 1814, was the outcome of French support of Napo'eon's am- bition to dominate all Europe; that the second, in 1815, was the result of the French rallying to Napoleon after he had broken his most sacred promises; and that the third, in 1870, was pre- ceded by popular French opposition to German unification and was precipitated by a French declaration of war against Prussia. Carlton J. H. Hayes Galleries of Women Daughters of Eve. By Gamaliel Bradford. Houghton Mifflin Company. $3.50. Three W omen: St. Teresa, Madame de Choiseul, Mrs. Eddy. By H. E. Wortham. Little, Brown and Company. $3.50. WITH the exception of Catharine the Great, Mr. Brad- ford's seven daughters of Eve are French. French women have always been allowed by Anglo-Saxon male commentators a wider unrebuked latitude in experimen- tation than is accorded to Anglo-Saxon women. So one is not surprised at the enthusiastic tone of the concluding paragraph: "They were all adventurers, all free, joyous, careless experi- menters with life." Mr. Bradford does utter a mild warning not to regard the case as typical when the accepted conven- tions of morality seem to be pretty thoroughly contradicted by the career of Ninon de Lenclos: "There is not one girl in a thousand who could start as Ninon did and end as she did" — in the port of peaceful and respected age. But of Catharine the Great he ventures to say that "she was good, though she was an empress and she had her little eccentricities" — a euphe- mism perhaps for lovers. Eve's daughters have a wide range of activity. Ninon de Lenclos had a delightful time in the apple orchard; Mme de Maintenon, combining the talents of dove and serpent, held the devotion of a king for thirty years; Mme Guyon achieved a mystical union with God but split the church into factions; Mile de Lespinasse experienced the ecstasies and miseries of earthly love and analyzed them with amazing intellectual precision; Catharine ruled her empire and managed her lovers; George Sand and Bernhardt deeply stirred the imagination of their time with their art. They did in fact nearly everything except function as mothers. It is interesting that none of the ten women selected for portrayal by Mr. Bradford and Mr. Wortham regarded her children, if she had any, as other than a minor issue. They all found family life quite inadequate for their satisfaction and sought that satis- faction elsewhere. All but the Duchesse de Choiseul. Her devotion to her husband was the guiding force of her life; but although he was agreeably surprised that his wife did not fol- low the accepted fashion of other wives at the court of Louis XV he took it rather lightly and made no pretence himself to marital fidelity. There is a touch of the. "let us now join the ladies" manner

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June 18, 1930] The Nation 711 in Mr. Bradford's deft "psychographies" — an excess of consid- eration. Yet one has confidence in the soundness of his scholar- ship and in the balance and the sympathy of his judgments. Mr. Wortham is less scrupulously considerate, and more prodi- gal with his facts and opinions; and he has to be watched mere alertly for ironical implications. One suspects him of malice in his frequent quotation from Mrs. Eddy's verse — though of course that suspicion rests on the reader's estimate of its quality. He offers the miracles of St. Teresa and the marvels of Mrs. Eddy on a platter and commits himself to no psycho- logical theories. Referring to St. Teresa's skill in cooking, he remarks that there was a Martha as well as a Mary in her: "She had at least one rapture in the kitchen when, frying-pan in hand, she was seen to rise off the kitchen floor." If God spoke to St. Teresa in praise of poverty, and advised Mrs. Eddy to charge more for her lessons, these divine inconsistencies must be left to pundits to explain. Both authors appear to have a very real admiration and respect for the women they portray. On the surface there is little trace in either book of that irritated concern with male superiority that Virginia Woolf recently amused herself by tracking down through the many volumes written by men about women. Mr. Bradford finds it humiliating to detect in so shrewd and clear-sighted a person as George Sand a "vast in- stinctive contempt" for the human male. But he evens up the score elsewhere by a touch of that patronizing flattery that conceals contempt for the human female. "Are there not mil- lions of American wives," he says in commenting on Mme de Maintenon's managing ability, "apparently considerate and def- erential, keeping suavely and deftly within their province, yet at the same time having their little dainty fingers on every pulse of their world?" If Mr. Wortham — an Englishman — happens ever to see this remark about American wives he will be more than ever convinced of what he casually refers to as the predominance which women have won for themselves in American life. His opinion of American life is as flattering to American pride as the opinion of Englishmen usually is. Hence his opinion of American women — but he had better be turned over to Virginia Woolf for cross-examination. Dorothy Brewster Books in Brief The Canterbury Tales. The Prologue and Four Tales with the Book of the Duchess and Six Lyrics. By Geoffrey Chaucer. Translated into Modern English Verse by Frank Ernest Hill. Illustrated by Hermann Rosse. Longmans, Green and Company. $3.50. Mr. Hill has adhered more closely to Chaucer's line and word than any other modernizer, from Dryden on, has done. Whenever possible he has preserved Chaucer exactly as he was, changing only the orthography to meet the demands of a mod- ern eye. Unfortunately this has not been often possible, since there is that little matter of the final "e" which we no longer pronounce, and which therefore wrecks the rhythm for us. Mr. Hill has constantly needed to throw in a word or two to complete the line; or has had to find another word than Chau- cer's altogether. On the other hand he has usually left the last word in a line as it was, the only difference being that it now sports no superfluous, mellifluous syllable wherewith to charm our ears. Mr. Hill, to be brief, has done all that can be done to translate Chaucer faithfully. But this, one fears, is not enough. Dryden produced something better with his mod- ernizations, which, being free, were free also to achieve some sort of poetry of their own — as it happens, a very fine sort. And Dryden actually came pretty close to Chaucer; at least he came close to being as rich and entertaining as the original. He could not reproduce the peculiar caressing softness of Chau- cer's rhythm. Neither can Mr. Hill or any other modern. All that Mr. Hill gives us is the sense. He is to be thanked for that; but one wonders whether he is right in insisting upon the difficulties of the original for any except a scholarly reader. The reviewer believes that a modern person, without any lin- guistic training whatsoever, can get the most pleasure out of Chaucer by being thrown into his text as it stands. Stresemann. By Rudolf Olden. Translated by R. T. Clark. E. P. Dutton and Company. $3. Mr. Olden, formerly on the staff of the Wiener Tag, now on the Berliner Tageblatt, writes a sympathetic biography which briefly reveals the childhood, the modest youth, and the political achievements of Germany's greatest reconstructive statesman. There was nothing unusual or spectacular in the course of Stresemann's early life. He was born in Berlin, the son of a merchant of the middle class. His parents, by thrift and care- ful management, accumulated enough capital to enable them to send Gustav through the university, after which his career was not unlike that of the ordinary university graduate until the World War called him to participate in events which made him a world figure. With his later life the readers of this notice are generally familiar. The narrative, which is well written, does not attempt to give a history of the period but holds rather closely to the subject. However, it may be said that the last decade of Stresemann's life, cut short on the third of Octo- ber, 1929, was the political history of Germany, and of Germany — largely because of his achievements — at her best. A Study of the Principles of Politics. By G E. G. Catlin. The Macmillan Company. $6. It is difficult to indicate just wherein the present volume offers a new departure. The thesis that politics is concerned with all forms of human relations in which one will attempts to influence other wills, and that politics is a science, in the same sense as economics is a science, the author has already presented in a former book on the "Science and Method of Politics." Again, not only does the list of political "laws" consist of adaptations of those given by other writers, but the author's argument on behalf of their relevance to concrete issues is not invulnerable. Nor does the discussion in the second part of the book of some of the major problems of political philosophy, as, for example, liberty, equality, and sovereignty, offer much that has been hitherto unexplored. Here, the author's frequent profession of his devotion to "social facts" and his use of an improvised ter- minology do not conceal the fact that the view offered is not uncommon among those who accept a position midway between Bosanquet and Laski. It does not appear that the difference between Professor Catlin's analysis and those of Hobhouse, Maciver, or A. D. Lindsay is crucial. In fact, this book, to- gether with those recently published by Bernard Shaw, Cole, and Hobson, tends to indicate that the contemporary current of political ideas in England is already a spent force. Neverthe- less, while the present volume does not promise to be of seminal significance, it is far from containing merely a solemn iteration of the tolerably obvious. The book is generally lucid and incisive. Professor Catlin, too, possesses the fatal gift to chal- lenge and provoke. The Letters of Lafayette and Jefferson. Edited by Gilbert Chinard. Johns Hopkins Press. $8.50. This book was edited with a twofold purpose, stemming from the chief two preoccupations of Professor Chinard's re- searches extending over many years. In addition to having made himself the leading authority on everything relating to Jefferson, he has been deeply interested in tracing international

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712 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3389 for unforgettable impressions VISIT SOVIET RUSSIA Continental standards of safe and comfortable travel. Interesting itineraries. Frequent sailing dates Write for Beoklet "N" Amalgamated Bank tSept.l 11-15 Union Square, New York City WITHIN THE FORTNIGHT Plays to See ^Flying High— Apollo— W. 42nd St. •Hotel Universe— Beck-^Sth St., E. of Eighth Ave. tLost Sheep — Selwyn— 42nd St., W. of B'dway. Lysistrata — 44th St.— 44th St., W. of B'dway. •Michael and Mary— Hopkins— 155 W. 49th St. Spook House— Vanderbilt — 48th St., E. of B'dway. tStrictly Dishonorable — Avon — W. 45th St. Strike Up The Band— Times Sq. — 42nd St., W. of B'dway. •The Green Pastures — Mansfield — 47th St., W. of B'dway. •The Last Mile— Sam. H. Harris— 42nd St., W. of B'dway. The New Garrick Gaieties— Guild— 52nd St., W. of B'dway. -fTopaze — Music Box — 45th St., W. of B'dway. Films All Quiet on the Western Front — Central — 47th St. and B'dway. Cain and Artem — Cameo — 42nd St. and B'dway. Journey's End — Gaiety — 46th St. and B'dway. • Drama, t Comedy, t Musical. r—COOLING PLANT NOW IN OPERATION— l 1 CAMEO 42nd St. & B'way Second Big Week TENSE.' POWERFUL! DYNAMIC! Truly one of the most extraordinary films ever made "Rhote Fahn" Berlin MAXIM GORKI'S "CAIN N ARTEM" Newest Sovkino Triumph! Fine Picture . . . Pure Art . . . You Must See This Masterpiece . . . "Tempo," Berlin influences, particularly those at work in the relations between his native France and his adopted America. The letters and papers which he now prints, in most cases for the first time, art in themselves sufficiently important additions to our knowledge of the mind of Jefferson. In the second place, and on this the editor lays most stress, they illustrate very happily how indi- vidual minds influence the historic process as well as do the generalized and now all too popular "social forces." The editor rightly attacks the overemphasis which in the past few decades has been placed on economic factors, and in the corre- spondence printed offers his evidence for the value of highly in- dividualized intellectual and spiritual factors. Although the book is not likely to prove popular reading it was well worth compiling from both editorial standpoints, and Professor Chi- nard has done his own work on it with his usual qualities, too infrequently combined, of scholarship and sanity. The Life of Miranda. By William S. Robertson. The Uni- versity of North Carolina Press. Two volumes. $10. Francisco de Miranda is one of the most fascinating of the many romantic minor figures who appeared upon the stage of our earliest national history. Heretofore little attention has been paid to him other than in his relations to the men and events — relations obscure enough — of our own country. Per- haps no other man of his time, however, had so many personal contacts with the great of a score of countries in Europe ana the two Americas, or spun such tangled webs of world-wide plots as did this Venezuelan adventurer. Professor Robertson's unflagging zeal for his subject has unearthed a vast mass of manuscript material of the greatest importance in relation to it, and in two massive and scholarly volumes he has given us the story of the man's whole life with a wealth of detail at every point. The result is a work for the reference rather than the private library. The scale is great for a minor figure. It is a good deal as though the tenant of a flat were presented with a full-length, life-size portrait of a great-uncle. A miniature would suit his quarters better. The historian, however, will be grateful. Miranda is no longer a shadowy figure. The amount of new material concerning him is immense, and is pre- sented lucidly and accurately. Anyone handling the period of Hamilton and Jefferson has a new tool of prime importance. Baudelaire. By Lewis Piaget Shanks. Little, Brown and Company. $3.50. Professor Shanks has no brilliant theories to offer in regard to either Baudelaire's life or his poetry. He is content to give a straightforward and well-informed account of the poet's unhappy struggles, together with much interpretative and appreciative criticism. Often an illuminating critic, he is seldom a profoundly judicious one, and one feels that he never quite succeeds in defining Baudelaire's peculiar qualities or in explain- ing his importance. It is always a temptation to emphasize the romantic and decadent elements in Baudelaire, and though Professor Shanks, both in his translations and in his interpre- tation, avoids this evil more acutely than some others have done he often blurs the essential clarity of the poet's thought. Thus it is that Shanks's Baudelaire is not quite the Baudelaire that interests us today. His book, however, is valuable as an introduction to the poet and praiseworthy as a careful, sympa- thetic, and rightly directed attempt to understand a peculiarly difficult personality. Songs of the Coast Dwellers. By Constance Lindsay Skinner. Coward-McCann. $2. Constance Lindsay Skinner has for a number of years been a student of American Indian verse and song. And this vol- ume of interpretations of Indian moods (not of translations at all) is based upon familiarity with the literature and culture When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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Tune 18, 1930] The Nation 713 of the British Columbia coast tribes. The poems that result are often very beautiful and simple statements of Indian reli- gious symbolism and ritual. The identification of the poet with the Indian and his world, an identification which in both litera- ture and painting has led to the enrichment of American art, is very nearly perfect. Miss Skinner understands these people and feels them very deeply; she becomes one of them. There- fore her poems, although they are not translations, have usually a definite authenticity of rhythm, mood, and expression. Only occasionally is there the false note of sentimentality — of the Anglo-Saxon mind too much persuaded to be emotional over primitive feelings — and therefore of restraint lost. The prob- lem of presenting another literary art than one's own, through either translation or interpretation, is always a difficult one to solve, and any satisfactory result is achieved only when the artist is completely saturated with the art he wishes to inter- pret. Miss Skinner is one of the few poets so imbued with the thought of the Indians as to be able to re-present their crea- tive passion, the world as they see it. Cornered Poets. By Laurence Housman. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $2.50. Mr. Housman, himself a poet and a critic, has written a series of possible dialogues between well-known poets and their literary friends or acquaintances. Blake refuses to paint ac- cording to a patron's dictation; Donne orders his tomb carved; Burns composes a poem on love while he is being rebuked by the village pastor. The incidents are characteristic of the poets, but the dialogue is not particularly suggestive or interest- ing. The book throws no new light on the characters of the poets nor does it greatly familiarize us with them as human beings. Such dialogues should be as definitely a work of art as is a good poem ; as were, for example, Walter Pater's or Walter Savage Landor's. Mr. Housman's are a bit obvious and dull. Town Government in Massachusetts, 1620-1930. By John Fairfield Sly. Harvard University Press. $2.50. There have been many scholarly studies of the origins of New England town government, as well as several theories to account for them. There is little that is new (there can hardly be now) in this volume concerning the earliest New England period, but the various theories of origins are well summarized and appraised. The most valuable portion of the work is that which treats of the town in its modern aspects and forms. The subject remains local but the treatment is not antiquarian, and the book offers an excellent history, in mod- erate compass, of the New England town considered as a liv- ing cell in the body politic from the earliest period to today. Mengelberg and the Symphonic Epoch. By Edna Richolson Sollitt. Ives Washburn. $2. If Willem Mengelberg should become a candidate for the presidency of a musical league of nations, this monograph might be used as a campaign document. Any other value is vitiated by the author's fulsome and gushing eulogy. She proclaims that the appreciable growth of interest in symphonic music during the last three decades ("the symphonic epoch") is due entirely to Mr. Mengelberg's activities. Walt Whitman. A Brief Biography with Reminiscences. By Harrison S. Morris. Harvard University Press. $1.50. Mr. Morris's account of Whitman's life adds nothing that is new until the end, when the fact that he knew the poet in his dotage at Camden makes it possible for him to indulge in reminiscence. Even then he adds few strokes to the picture already drawn by Horace Traubel. Yet in its modest way the volume takes its place among the first-hand biographies of Whitman. □ PLAYS □ FILMS □ DANCE □ • THEATRE GUILD PRESENTS- The NEW GARRICK GAIETIES GUILD THEATRE 62nd St., W. of B'way. Eves. 8:80. Mat*., Thura. * Sat.. 2:10 HOTEL UNIVERSE A new play by Philip Barry As the subscription season for this play is over, excellent seats are available for all performances. MARTIN BECK THEATRE tt^^uZJ^T&Z. * s... 2*0 ^LYSI STRATA- "If y»n can throw back yonr head and langb, unabashed, at the grandly comic spectacle of life, yon will find this 'I^yslstrata' an event you will Ions; remember." — Richard Loekridte, The San. FORTY-FOURTH ST. R^^TZPiErJ* "MIGHTIEST WAR DRAMA EVER SEEN" — N. T. American. "ALL QUIET £ WESTERN FRONT A Universal Picture presented by Carl Laemmle Directed by Lewis Milestone yy "A notable achievement, sincere, earnest, vivid and graphic. Better than anything so far done." — Mor- daunt Hall, N. Y. Timet. "Enormously compelling talking motion picture. As a show some- thing to get definitely excited about.' A very fine motion picture." — How- ard Barnes, Herald Tribune. CENTRAL fS THEATRE, B'dway and 47th Street Daily: 2:45— 8:45. times Sat. k Sun., 2:45—5:45—8:45. ^ EMBASSY" J THE NEWS REEL THEATRE r i Broadway & 46th Street Cooled by Refrigeration ^ ANY oe« ANY 55 CONTINrOtS 10 A.M. SEAT ^«->"~ TIME 55 TO MIDNIGHT Complete change of Program weekly — Midnight Shows every Sat. THEATRE OF THE DANCE 116 West 65th Street, Studio 220— S US. 0855 D O R S H A Unusual program of contemporary dances every Saturday evening. Subscription {1.00 Note! Last program of the season Saturday, June t$ THE GROUP Invites you to attend its Season's Closing ENTERTAINMENT AN© DANCE on Tuesday evening, June 17th, at 8 :30 P.M. at Ball Room— 150 West 85th St. DORSHA DANCERS will contribute to program Admission $1.00 Dancing until 1 A.M. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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International Relations Section Britain's Vanishing Farmer By J. A. HOBSON THE inability of farmers to make a decent living out of growing foods and raw materials is a world trouble of our times. But it presses with a special urgency upon Britain. It is no new trouble. For the past fifty years with a growing population England has been producing at home a continuously smaller proportion of the staple foods and raw materials which her climate makes it possible for her to raise. Since 1913 this tendency has been accelerated, notwithstanding the lesson afforded by the war of the perils of dependence upon overseas supplies. No other important country is anything like so dependent for its living upon outside supplies, or has so small a proportion of its population engaged in work upon its soil. During the war years a special effort was made to increase the amount of our food output under the stimulus of high prices and the submarine menace, but our latest statistics show that the nor- mal pre-war economic tendency has resumed its sway. We do not produce much more than a third of the foods we con- sume. Since 1854 our production of wheat has fallen by something like 45 per cent, barley by approximately 30 per cent, oats by 15 per cent, while horses, cattle, and sheep show a large absolute diminution. Since 1913 every crop has fallen in amount of yield, including potatoes, turnips, and hay. Less land is in cultivation and the agricultural popu- lation steadily diminishes. The new generation of townsmen hardly realizes the significance of the change; it doesn't matter to them where their food comes from; they see it abundant and in ever-increasing variety as foreign fruits and meats come to play a larger part in their diet. But the more thoughtful of our politicians recognize the extent to which we have given hostages to fortune in our dependence upon other countries over which we have no control. Even the convinced free-trader is disturbed in his old indifference as to sources of supply when he realizes how the new bristling array of tariff* makes it harder for him to make payment in manufactured goods for the foods and materials he is willing to import. Though unemployment in our export industries is the chief ingredient in our new protectionism it is supplemented by alarm at the decay of agriculture. While the main cause of the trouble is low prices, the result of actual or potential world overproduction, there are special features in our situation that make adjust- ment to the world situation difficult. The tripartite division and conflict of interests between owners, tenants, and laborers still persists. Though it cannot be held that agri- cultural lands, save in rare instances, yield any income rightly termed rents (as distinct from interest upon recent improvements of a capital character) the hand of the owner upon the tenant farmer is still oppressive as regards restric- tions upon cultivation and sporting rights, and the yearly or short-lease tenure on which most land is held is a deterrent to enterprise and improvements on the tenant's part. The hired laborer is mostly ill paid for his skill and industry as compared with town workers, though the rises secured by the county agricultural boards have somewhat improved his position. Higher pay, greater freedom, and more amuse- ments still drive the younger men and women into city life, even with the greater risks of industrial unemployment. No political party can produce a confident and a con- vincing remedy for what has come to be regarded as an inevitable, perhaps a desirable, process. Can we produce in- creased quantities of foods at a price determined by the world market under conditions of pay and social satisfactions agreeable to our farmers and agricultural workers? In theory, yes. Though we could not become a completely self- sufficing nation for wheat, meat, and other food supplies we might use our land far better than we do. Denmark is a largely exporting country and our land is better than hers. Improved tenure, smaller holdings, with cooperation in buying and selling and use of electricity, could go far to increase our products. Credit facilities could do much to furnish the capital needed for machinery and for the im- provements which the "impoverished" landlords cannot now afford, and which farm tenants, who bought their farms during the post-war boom at exaggerated prices, are unable to provide. Credit, organized marketing, and security of tenure are the three chief requisites to meet immediate needs, according to the new Liberal program. Labor politicians — pending land nationalization, a formal part of their program — pin their faith largely upon control of prices and the elimination of middleman's profit, and an attractive proposal is urged by Mr. Wise for state purchase of overseas supplies with the view of stabilizing prices and enabling our pro- ducers to escape the disastrous fluctuations in prices that dis- able them from planning crops ahead. Farmers are not good business men, and yet the application of their efforts and enterprise is subjected to fluctuations of price more in- calculable than those of any other business. If the state undertook to buy in bulk foreign supplies it would be in a stronger position to bargain with great exporting organiza- tions and to hold their supplies so as to maintain a level of prices in this country sufficient to encourage home produc- tion. Part or most of the risks of unexpected falls of price would be passed from the feeble farmer on to the broad back of the government. But the proposals which for a time excited most atten- tion were the product of the journalistic enterprise of Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, two great newspaper mag- nates who used their huge engines of publication to boost an economic United Empire scheme involving free, or at least freer, trade within the Empire, with a tariff on foreign im- ports, inclusive of foods. It was accompanied by all kinds of specious propaganda to show that the Empire, with adequate application of capital and immigration, could speedily be con- verted into a virtually self-sufficing economic area, with an inter-exchange of surplus goods that would release this country from dependence upon the unreliable foreigner, while it would bind the Empire into a close political as well as economic union. This proposal has rent the Conserva- tive Party. All sections would like to accept the gospel, if

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June 18, 1930] The Nation 715 only they could believe it. But Mr. Baldwin and other party leaders, who remember the food-tax election of Mr. Chamberlain twenty-five years ago, dare not touch it. They would be prepared to extend preference to manufactures and to apply to them an enlarged safeguarding scheme, but they dare not face the electorate with a proposal to tax bread and meat, or commit themselves to persuading the city electorates that their food will not cost them more. It may well be that the decline of our agriculture has touched bottom, and that with a cessation of our growth of population and some provisions of secure tenure and prices for our farmers we may even recover some of our lost land, but to suppose that any large return to the land or any great diminution of our dependence upon overseas supplies can take place is a quite quixotic notion. Nothing short of a near- impending famine, through inability to find any export means of paying for overseas foods, would turn the cityward tide of the past few generations, or put sufficient enterprise into our food producers to enable the country to keep alive on its own resources. If there be, as some of our idealists affirm, some human feeling of attachment to the soil, some Adamite instinct, which will come to find the machine life of the city repellent, or if the old rural communities can be pro- vided with sufficient of the valued interests of town life, it is possible to conceive that men and women may come to regard the calmer and less driving life of the country as preferable to the megalopolis. But I can find no immediate indications of a widespread desire for this return to nature. Nor do I believe that any of the proposed reforms of tenure, credit, improved cultivation, or better marketing will go far toward removing the preference for town life with industrial and trading occupations as the means of livelihood. A world of thrills and undreamt of adventures for the Student and Worker. Ask us about our special "Rough ing It Tonr." 7 days in Soviet Rus- sia. S.S. Mauretania, June 28th. $280 Com- plete. Nothing like it anywhere! Full information mailed on request, also rates, itineraries, etc., for future sailings, WORLD TOURISTS, Inc. 175 Fifth Avenne, New York. Algonquin tW.Vt &2> CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING KATES Minimum 30 words $3.08. Note : See that your classified ads reach us b y Friday, together with remittance, to in- sure their appearance the following week. THE NATION 20 Vesey St., N. Y. T? "Rich Humor" BLACK GENESIS By SAMUEL O. STONEY •nd GERTRUDE M. SHELBY Du Bose Hey ward says it "will take iu place beside the Georgia legends of Joel Chandler Harris." MACMILLAN S3.S0 PERSONAL, "VT^OUNG lady, traveling thru Europe this ■*• summer desires congenial young lady com- panion. Good tourists accommodations on boat already reserved for two. References. Box 2451. % The Nation. RESTAURANT tflacBotignl Street {Eabern 179 Macdougal. near 8th St. In the Old Gonfarone House Sclf-Service Unusual food — Unusual prices. A foreign dish each day for the epicurean. Open from 10 A M. to 9 P. H. □ EDUCATIONAL □ FRENCH SPANISH ITALIAN GERMAN Conversational method. Native teachers. Private lessons, 75c, short course, 9 to 9 daily. 18th year. FISHER'S SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES 1264 Lexington Avenue, N. W. Cor. 85th Street FRENCH-SPANISH-ITALIAN GERMAN. Private lessons 75c (Daily 9-9). Na- tive teachers. Interesting conversational method. 19th year. Also neglected English education. rNIVKRSAL SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES 1263 Lexington Ave., Northeast Cor. 85th St. rlTvCIAW taught by university graduate, in- I-UJiJ.rt;' structor in Russian at Berlitz School. Private lessons or classes. VICTOR RECORDS USED. Michael Jerlitzyn 25 W. 123rd St. Harlem 0487 A BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY M ERIC AN with knowledge of Latin-Ameri- in Spanish language, contemplates trip to Mexico this summer. Will be glad to accept business matters for attention there. Highest references. Address Box 2452, % The Nation. POSITIONS WANTED SECRETARY-stenographer, considerable cor- porate legal experience, desires position with European or oriental branch of American house. Box No. 2455, % The Nation. AF RTIST painter, young, original figure deco- rations, landscape. Also A-l lithographer seeVts connection. Anything with future. Box 2456, rA The Nation. FOR SALE OWN YOUR OWN BUNGALOW on a beautiful Lake in the foothills of the Berkshire* With a Large Campsite for only $ Payable on Easy Terms Full rights to the Lake. All out-door sports in one of America's health spots. Clubhouse, community dining hall, tennis courts, rowboats, base- ball field, &c. on property. Three hours from New York by train or auto Copake Falls Mountain Club Dept. N 55 West 42d 8t., New York tWVtMWVWWWUI CRAGMERE-in-the-RAMAPOS "C^ARLY American type home — weathered -*— ' shingled 7 rooms, 2 baths and lavatory ; storm sashes, copper screens and gutters, awnings ; fine condition. Special features : Newt! post from old New England home, brick fireplace, large porch, magnificent view. Landscaped plot 100 feet front, 50 rear, 375 deep ; fruit trees, asparagus bed. PRICE — $20,000 Mabel L. Heidgerd, Mahwah, N. J., Cragmere 436 FOR SALE OR RENT CUMMER rental or sell — Heath, Mass. Ideal "■^ vacation country, pleasant community. Two attractive furnished houses, 6 and 10 rooms. Rents $180 and $296. Several bathrooms, garages, fire places, screened porches, telephone, furnace. Photographs submitted. References. Faraway, Heath, Mass. HOUSES FOR RENT A/fT. AIRY, CROTON-ON-HUDSON. Bunga- *■"■*■ low. sale, rent. Screened porch, running water, electricity, near river and beach. One hour Grand Central. Write Box 177, Croton, or telephone Croton 777. FURNISHED HOME IN N. Y. SUBURBS CEVEN rooms, modern home in White Plains. •^ 24 miles from N. Y. in beautiful West- chester County. Attractive grounds, excellent neighborhood ; garage. June 25 to Sept. 2. Reasonable. Mrs. George Benneyan, 95 Grand View Ave. Tel. 442 W. CHILDREN — SUMMER ■\XriLL give excellent care to one or two chil- vv dren, under six years, in my country-village home. Interview and references. Box 2463, % The Nation. SUMMER BOARD WANTED yOUNG literary mother and 16 month child L would appreciate room and board in rest- ful country home for summer, preferably where there is another young child. Box 2457, % The Nation. When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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716 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3389 D FOR RENT D FURNISHED APARTMENTS CONCOURSE, Corner Tremont. For July and August, 2 rooms, kitchenette and bath, ele- vator apartment, fully equipped for housekeep- ing. Piano. Artistically furnished. Reason- able. Phone Fordham 3884 evenings, or write Box 2454, % The Nation. EAST 30th St. Nicely furnished, cozy and homelike, 2 rooms, tiled bath, shower, kitchenette, Frigidaire. Fireplace. Outside win- dows, awnings, cool. Summer or part. 2nd Floor. Reasonable. Caledonia 3667. GREENWICH Village; charming 2 room apartment. Bath, shower, kitchenette ; nicely furnished ; cool and comfortable ; con- venient transportation. Sacrifice, July, August, September. Please write for appointment. Oatrow, 51 Morton St. /'rTH ST. 7 West Two rooms, bath, kitch- '"'*' enette, Frigidaire. Near Park. To Sep- tember 1st or later. Trafalgar 5545. 'T'O SUBLET for July and August, two room -*- apartment in Warren Hall, 166 2nd Ave. Complete kitchen ; Grand piano ; very conven- ient. Reasonable rent. Call evenings. Algon- quin 9804. SUBLET to young woman, July to Nov., dis- tinctively furnished room, complete kitchen ; bath ; fireplace ; piano. $35. Write E. Baker, 240 E. 22nd St. or call mornings before 10, Stuyvesant 2868 npo SUBLET until Sept. 16th— Brighton ■*■ Beach — Comfortable 2 room furnished apart- ment, right off the beach and near subway. All conveniences. Call 7-9 P. M. or Sunday morning— Sheepshead 9039. SUBLET, artistically furnished apartment, from June to September ; five rooms, two baths, two grand pianos. Eastern and Western exposures. 102nd Si. cor. West End Ave. Phone Academy 3829. T70UR room, attractively furnished cool ■*• apartment, adjacent Central Park and all transportation ; reasonable rental. Inquire superintendent, 9 East 97th St. /"*ENTRAL Park — Beautiful studio 40 feet ^-' long, completely furnished. Bath, Kitchen- ette, very cool. Grand and upright pianos. Sac- rifice rental for summer. Phone Traf. 9880. 1 *?A. ^' "r<* St. Modern 3 rooms and dining l^T- alcove; large, light attractively fur- nished ; Steinway Grand piano ; June to Sept. Reasonable offer from responsible person ac- cepted. Inquire of Superintendent. APARTMENT, one block from Columbia, overlooking park. Six rooms, well-furnished. Low rent arranged. Apt. 33. 60 Morningside Drive, N. Y. 'T'O sublet — Attractively furnished one room apartment, kitchenette and bathroom, for summer months in Bay Ridge, near Shore Road. One block from subway station — very reason- able rental. Phone Cloverdale 1189. "C'OR rent. Attractive, large skylight studio for summer. $60 monthly. Ideal working room for sculptor or painter. Telephone Cal. 1582. CPLENDID large, cool front room, suitable *■-' two. Private family. Use immense kitchen. porch, entire lovely duplex apartment during summer. Near Drive. Terms most reasonable. Edgecombe 7819. 614 W. 148th St. UNFURNISHED APARTMENT ■j yTH St. 817 East. 2 rooms, bath, kitchen- * » ette: fireplace; facing Stuyvesant Park; Southern exposure ; sublet. Reasonable. Phone Barclay 7197. SUMMER % $ In the heart of the Adirondack? A Summer Camp For Grown-nps A camp devoted to assuring its guests a good wholesome va- cation. Every known sport; bathing, boat- ing, riding, golf and tennis. Excellent So- cial Staff. Dietary laws observed. En- dorsed by the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of America. Rates $3(5. per week Write for illustrated booklet C ALL EXPENSE TOUR FOURTH OF JULY WEEK-END Albany Night Boat and De ^l ^_ ._ Luxe Buses through pictu- CXA resque Adirondack! to Pio- ^r^W^* necr Lodge. All expenses, in- (Rertb E»rr«) eluding fare, room and meals on entire trip and at Camp. Accommoda- tions limited. Early reservations advised New York City Office: Pioneer Lodge 145 W. 41st St. Tel. Wisconsin 3151 FOURTH OF JULY Extra Low Rates WEEK-END at the for June Camp Sports, Boating, Bath- ing, Fishing, Dancing, Enter- tainment galore. Tennis, Riding, Xioli and every enjoyment for a happy week-end. KENMORE on the Beautiful Lake NORTH WHITE LAKE, NEW YORK N. Y. Office: 521 Fifth Ave. Murray Hill 4221 Write for Booklet "N" SONAQUA CLUB Lake Mohegan, N. Y. The Haven for Sport Lovers. Ideal for tvoB and relaxation. Convenient for week-ends. Only 46 miles from New York. Sports Special feature program Tennis, Boating, for Fourth of July Swimming, Dancing. Weekend. For reservation* coil PetktkSl 1276 Bethlehem Country Club lti'tlili-hcni. Conn. An ideal Vacation Camp for discriminating adults. In the Litchfield Hills Private Lake, land and water sports, dancing Rates: June, $20— July, $25— Aug., $27.50 Special 4th of July Weekend Rate Descriptive IJooklet Upon Request Phone: Woodbury 48, Hint 2 Rleber's Cottage, Belle Harbor, U. I. 50 feet from Beach and Boardwalk. For com- plete relaxation, invigorating sea air. Modara accommodations ; excellent home cooking. Forty minutes from city. $26 per week until July 1st. Call Belle Harbor 0089. RIVERSIDE INN, Derby Conn. on Housatonic River, swimming, bathing, boat- ing. Modern improvements, tennis. Vegetar- ians accommodated. Rates $23 per week. Also furnished bungalows. Tel. Derby 231-2. P. O. Seymour. Conn. MAKE YOUR RESERVATIONS NOW! ! In a beautifully situated Village, Connecticut Berkshires, 2 hours from N. Y., I offer just for a few summer guests in my Sunset Cottage, with modern accommodations, a complete rest- ful farm life. Excellent food. Per week $21-$28. 203 W. 81st St.. N. Y. Trafalgar 3574 CPEND delightful summer ia Virginia. Off *~J tourist route. Large colonial estate in Shenandoah Valley. Privacy. Beat of Southern cooking. Seven hours to City. Free golf. $10 to $16 weekly. Major Marshall MacDonald, Marl). Farm. CHARLES TOWN. W. Vs. INDIAN HEAD an ideal camp for adult* Echo Lake, Warrensburg, N. Y. Dancing Swimming Fishing Rowing Canoeing Tennis Golf Raseball Basket ball Horseback riding Fourth of July Week-End $15.50 which includes free transportation from Albany to camp and back. Take Albany night boat on Thursday, July 3rd, and meet our bus at Albany pier on morn- ing of July 4th for a delightful trip through the Adirondacks. Back at your desk Monday morning. New York Offi.ce Bronx, N. Y. 370 E. 149th Street Phone: Mott Haven 470$ BAILIN'S MAPLEDALE HOTEL "The Hotel with the Camp Spirit" Roscoe (Sullivan Co..) N. Y. Tel. Roscoe IY2 For the Modern and Moody Conveniences • • River • • Sport* • • Casino • Recreation • Social Activities * Supreme Jewish Cuisine Special Jnne Rates City address : 570 7th At., Suite 1002, N.T. Phones : Pennsylvania 1777 I. B. Bailin Coney Island 17S0 Eva Bailin SKA GATE KENDE2-VOUS Where food it the beat A VACATION is a necessity; a change of 1 •*■ surroundings greatly beneficial ; wholesome food an elixir. You will enjoy all this at the Sea Gate Rendez-vous, where food ia the best, where comfort, coziness and simplicity, aided by the sea air, and the health-giving rays of the sun, combines to restore poise, harmony and well being to the vacationist. Arrangements by week, day, or as long as your vacation lasts. Write 3918 Laurel Ave., Sea Gate, N. Y. Harbor, or Telephone Mayflower 8666. ROCKY DALE LODGE Ao Adult Camp in the Hills— Sellersville, Pa. 2% hour* from N. Y. — 1 hour from Phila. Outdoor activities— NO GREENS FEES. Rates July and August $37.50. Writs for Booklet. Special Rate July 4th Week End Executive Directors Wm. J. Helfgott Wm. D. Tbndlcb Social Director: "Morbt" Goldbbbo HAMBURGER'S EVERGREEN (Health) FARM Tel. Farruingdale 40 F 81— near Asbury Park, Farmlngdale, N. J. VEGETARIAN HOUSE A farm resort in a delightful rural setting. 1% hr. from New York. Plenty of ground to play about, sun baths, showers, bathing, games and sport. Natural delicious health foods. Write or telephone for information. L^OR relaxation, beautiful country, pleasant *- companionship ; also tennis. Phone to THE HIL-BERT HOUSE. Lake Mahopac, N. Y. Ha. FBreiientG, Prop. Tel. Mahopae 85$ When writing to advertisers please mention The Nation

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The Nation FOUNDED 1865 Vol. CXXX NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25, 1930 No. 3390 Contents EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 717 EDITORIALS: The Tariff Crime Complete 720 Germany Sets a Pace 721 The War for Freedom 721 Apostles of Passive Resistance 722 IT SEEMS TO HEYWOOD BROUN 723 THE PRESS TODAY: VII. WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD? By Oswald Garrison Villard 724 JAPAN AND THE NAVAL PACT. By K. K. Kawakami 727 AMERICAN SPORTS AND AMERICAN LIFE. By John R. Tunis 729 ATLANTA'S COMMUNISTS. By Walter Wilson 730 IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter 732 CORRESPONDENCE 732 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE 734 BOOKS, FILMS, DRAMA: Skull of Ecstasy. By Stanley J. Kunitz 735 Emerson Mauroisized. By Henry Hazlitt 733 -Mystery and Mystification. By Granville Hicks 735 Pleasant Poetry. By Eda Lou Walton 736 The Jesuits. By E. Boyd Barrett 737 The Man on the Train. By Horace Gregory 737 Is Unity Inevitable? By George E. G. Catlin 738 Books in Brief 738 Films: A Lesson from Moscow. By Alexander Bakshy 739 Drama : "Lysistrata." By Henry Hazlitt 740 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: The Killings at Peshawar 741 OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY, Managing Editor Associate Editors FREDA KIRCHWEY DOROTHY VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER Dramatic Editor Literary Editor JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH HENRY HAZLITT Contributing Editors JOHN A. HOBSON HEYWOOD BROUN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS LEWIS S. GANNETT CARL VAN DOREN MARK VAN DOREN LUDWIG LEWISOHN DAVID BOEHM, Advertising Manager Subscription Rates: Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and Mexico; to Canada, $5.50; and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00. THE NATION, No. 20 Vesey Street, New York City, Cable Address: Nation, New York. British Agent of Subscriptions and Advertising, Miss Gertrude M. Cross, 23 Brunswick Square, London, W. C. 1, England. SENATOR PAT HARRISON was correct when he declared in the Senate on June 16, in referring to President Hoover's statement as to his reasons for signing the tariff bill, that there was never "a document sent out with the approval of a President of the United States that had more misleading statements in it and more alleged facts that do not exist than in the statement [of Mr. Hoover]." Unfortunately, Mr. Harrison talks so much, and at times so loosely, that these words will not carry the weight they should. Far more than that, however, is the fact, which Senator Harrison was careful to conceal, that but for shame- less ratting by five Democratic Senators Mr. Hoover would not have had a chance to sign the bill. These Democrats who were purchased by local tariff favors are Broussard and Ransdell of Louisiana, the beet-sugar Senators, Tram- mell and Fletcher of Florida, and Kendrick of Wyoming. They should be blacklisted not only by their party but by men everywhere who believe that the interests of the Amer- ican people as a whole should never be sacrificed to local log- rolling. But they are not the only Democratic offenders, heaven knows. All through the struggle Democratic Sena- tors voted for higher rates even when they later turned around and voted against the bill. Never was there better proof of the need of a new, decent, and honest party. This whole tariff crime is a challenge to liberals everywhere. TfOR MR. STIMSON, too, the admirals have gone too £ tar. In a speech over the radio on June 12 he paid his respects to them in unmeasured terms. Those who opposed the treaty he declared to be "blindfolded," "intol- erant and against all naval limitation." "Never " he de ITS: ,W2S thC narrowness and intolerance of militarism tZ V ,'" 3 rrVtn'k,'ng ligHt-" Precfse1^ This » w^t rll'r) Tr LbCen Say,'ng f°r years Past> w"en Mr. Cool.dge, Mr. Hoover, and Mr. Stimson, too, were ko^ rSd^n 7aVal AXper"° ^ 3S Mr- StJ£, 21 ' hantCaPped ^ a kind °* training which tends to mk^ men think of war as the only possible defense against war He most effectively showed that the die-hard admirals n England and Japan are also crying treason and betrayal and reminded his hearers: From the very foundation of their government the American people have placed the decision of these matters m the hands not of their admirals and generals but of their cmhan representatives. By our Constitution the size and character of the American fleet, so far as it is determined by appropriation, rests with the President and Congress- so far as it is determined by treaty it rests with the President and the Senate. The naval officer is relegated to the func- tion s.mply of giving advice on technical matters to these civil officers who have the duty of making the decision. This is all the exact truth. But why does not Mr. Hoover act. He is the commander-in-chief and could at once rele- gate these dangerous militarists to their proper places. But he has not even spoken out as has Mr. Stimson. No wonder the admirals are insubordinate and disloyal to their chief It is not a question of the right of free speech. Every officer abandons that when he puts on the uniform. gECRET DIPLOMACY comes to the front again, Y father arrogantly and quite needlessly as far as the Administration is concerned, in the controversy between Sec retary Stimson and the Senate Committee on Foreign Rela tions over the naval-treaty documents. The committee asked tor certain confidential memoranda and other papers relat- ing to the London negotiations. Secretary Stimson, with Mr. Hoover s approval, declined to transmit the papers on the ground that to do so without the consent of the other governments concerned would be an act of bad faith The committee, accordingly, was asked to take the treaty as it stands, with only such relevant documents as the Adminis- tration saw fit to communicate to it. Both sides, in a way are right. Diplomatic documents regarded as confidential have often been withheld by the Presidents, and there is no way to get them if the President refuses to give them up lo ask a Senate committee, on the other hand, to content :tself with only what the President hands out is to deprive the Senate of a constitutional right to know all it wishes to know about diplomatic business. A little less high-har on Mr. Stimson's part and a little more openness on Mr Hoover s would have avoided an unseemly clash and allowed the committee to examine the documents privately without having to ask for them as a matter of right.

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718 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 A CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH has been handed to William B. Shearer of Geneva-naval-conference fame by Senator Shortridge, chairman of the Naval Affairs Subcommittee which investigated Mr. Shearer's activities. According to the Senator, Mr. Shearer's record, which looked rather bad as it was set out in the newspapers from day to day while the investigation was going on, was in fact of unsullied purity. There is no evidence that the ship- builders who employed him sent him to Geneva to defeat, if he could, the naval-reduction plans of the American gov- ernment. "He may have been extravagant and assertive," the Senator remarks, "but so far as I see it there is no reason for criticizing him." Even a formal report on the case appears to the Senator to be unnecessary, and if one is made it will not radiate any censure in the direction of Mr. Shearer or his employers. Mr. Shearer himself, who writes a plaintive letter to the New York World arraigning a press which "as a whole either ignores entirely or buries in a remote paragraph in a most obscure corner this exculpatory statement," actually claims that his Geneva activities were "merely directed in behalf of parity." Mr. Shearer ought to be content even if he no longer gets front-page publicity. "f^ET THE REDS" is to be the blithesome slogan of VJ Congressman Fish and his committee associates dur- ing a part, at least, of the heated term. The red menace is upon us, and the business of the committee will be to expose it in all its terribleness so that Congress may go at it ham- mer and tongs. Judging by the reports of the first few com- mittee hearings, the same old gang of treason-smellers and bomb-hunters is ready to offer its services. The committee is to depend "in large measure," it is reported, "on leads furnished by the Departments of Justice, State, and Labor" — the three executive departments whose imaginative facility in dealing with evidence that is mostly bunk has hitherto been exceeded only by their stupidity in giving their case away. The Reverend Edmund Walsh, of Georgetown Uni- versity, led off at the opening hearing with the startling alle- gation that Soviet Russia had officially "declared war against all humanity." What mystified the good father was where all the Russian propaganda money came from ; he thought, he was reported as saying, "it must come from the outside." The great labor philosopher William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, followed with a vision of Communism gnawing at the vitals of the American trade unions and carrying on "a vicious campaign of propaganda in the central coal fields of Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Penn- sylvania." It is earnestly to be hoped that Mr. Fish, with $25,000 for his committee expenses, will keep on in the way so convincingly begun. We have no doubt that the commit- tee, if it will only stick to its job, will find that American radicalism, backed by Russian gold, is largely responsible for the market slump and the low price of cotton and wheat. WE ARE GLAD that the bill providing for a full-time Federal Power Commission has been passed. Power is the economic question of the immediate future. Three honest and able men giving their whole time to the important duties devolving on them under the Federal Power Act can perform a great public service, and President Hoover should spare no effort to secure high-grade appointees. In its report for 1928 the commission pointed out that applications then pending involved no less than 20,500,000 horse-power, a total more than one-half greater than the entire hydro installation of the country at that time. The public needs all possible assurance that its interests in the remaining federal water powers will be safeguarded against the manipu- lations of those great power companies which, with much talk of service, have given only too clear evidence of a determination to carry off everything that is not nailed down tight. Muscle Shoals, Boulder Dam, Flathead, and a dozen lesser cases all illustrate the bitterness of the fight waged by these interests. As long as we cannot get the basic advan- tages of public operation, so long must we wage the unequal struggle for effective public control of private operation. Public attention, therefore, ought to be directed narrowly at the further and more controversial features of the Couzens and Parker power-commission bills when they come up for consideration at the next session of Congress. THE ATTEMPT TO SIDESTEP the Shipstead anti- injunction bill by referring it to the Attorney General for an opinion on its constitutionality failed ingloriously. Mr. Mitchell sent it back with a letter reminding the Senate Judiciary Committee of the notorious fact that in accordance with the statutes and the uniform practice since 1818 "the Attorney General is not authorized to give his official opinion upon the call of either house of Congress or any committee or member thereof." Chairman Norris, over whose protest the committee applied to the Attorney Gen- eral, "agrees wholeheartedly" with the position of the latter. The committee, driven into the open, on June 9 voted by 10 to 7 to report the bill unfavorably, and Senator Steiwer was allowed until June 20 to file a detailed adverse report. Senator Norris is seeking a unanimous-consent agreement for a vote in late December. In urging the confirmation of Judge Parker some of his supporters maintained that the way to cure the injunction abuse was not to reject the North Carolina jurist, but to change the law. Among them were four members of the Judiciary Committee, all of whom later were also of those voting to send the Shipstead bill to the Attorney General. These statesmen were Senators Gillett, Hastings, Overman, and Waterman. As we recall it, Dickens, in a work by no means wholly forgotten, created a character known as the Artful Dodger. IN THE LAST PRESS OF BUSINESS before the ad- journment of Congress certain bills stand out as deserv- ing of attention. Chief among them are the Wagner bills for dealing with unemployment, which are now before the House Judiciary Committee. Another measure, long over- due, is the Vestal bill, now before the House. This bill affords protection from piracy to the designer, whether he be a designer of printed materials, fountain pens, glassware, or clothes. The bill defines design in a manufactured product as a pattern, shape, or form which is "original ... . by reason of an artistic or intellectual effort," and stipulates that an original design shall receive protection from the time of its registration. Passage of this bill would be welcomed abroad and at home. A third and extremely important measure which should be pushed through before adjournment is the proposal to appropriate $1,500,000 to acquire for the Library of Congress the famous Vollbehr collection of incunabula, including a unique fifteenth-century Gutenberg

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June 25, 1930] The Nation 719 Bible. The House unanimously voted the appropriation on June 9, but the Senate has not yet acted. A rich university is known to be angling for the collection, and if Congress does not make up its mind to accept the offer, Dr. Vollbehr, who brought the books to this country several years ago, may be forced to seek another buyer. The Senate should act at once to secure this famous collection to the nation. SO BISHOP CANNON gets away with it, as far as the Lobby Committee is concerned. That body inglori- ously concluded its work by resolving "that it should not insist on answers to questions propounded to Bishop James Cannon, Jr., and the transcript of the whole record be laid before the Senate." At the same time it made public a mass of correspondence between Bishop Cannon and the bucket- shop with which he dealt with such fidelity that even on the Sabbaths he telegraphed or wrote to his bankers in his eager- ness for 1 per cent profit. A servant of the Savior gam- bling with low-down hucksters in the marts of trade like this? It is so disgusting that his church in common decency ought to act at once, and would — if it did not happen to be the Methodist Church South in America. A LOSS OF $13,000,000 since April 25 is the result, up to June 14, of the Farm Board's effort to support the price of cotton by the use of its revolving fund in large- scale speculation. Of course this is a paper loss and no one can tell what the final actual outcome will be, but the prospects are not flattering. In March, when cotton went down to fourteen cents, the board came to the rescue of the hard-pressed cotton cooperatives, and it is now supposed to hold more than 1,000,000 bales of the fleecy staple, out of a 1929 crop of 14,500,000 bales. The statistical position is thoroughly bad : foreign consumption during the nine months ending April 30 was down more than 1,000,000 bales from last season, and domestic consumption in the ten months end- ing June 13 was off by 679,000 bales; the carry-over on July 30 is expected to be at least 1,000,000 bales greater than last year. So much for the immediate situation. Fundamentally, does the board really believe that it can keep acreage down at the same time that it keeps prices up? Chairman Legge, in reviewing the first year of the board's work, feels that "fairly satisfactory progress has been made in the short time the board has been at work." Perhaps so, but has the board abolished the immemorial relation between the production and the price of commodities sold in a com- petitive world market? WHAT PRICE NATURALIZATION? is the ques- tion which the friends of the alien in this country are asking. The Cable bill, which as it passed the House of Representatives made provision for equalizing the citizen- ship of women who had lost their citizenship through mar- riage with an alien, has been amended in the Senate by the requirement of educational qualifications so high and rigid as to make naturalization extremely difficult. The knowledge of the English language and American history which the Senate changes prescribe is so considerable as to make possi- ble the rejection of a large proportion of applicants if the court chose to interpret the requirements strictly. If the Senate amendments prevail the alien would find himself caught between two fires. He must register if he is an alien ; he must pass an oversevere educational test if he wishes to become a citizen. Meantime the applications for naturaliza- tion are being kept down by high fees and unemployment, although on the financial side the Treasury is not worrying; in Boston, for example, in November, 1928, 1,066 applied for their first papers and paid a fee of one dollar apiece; in November, 1929, the 106 applicants paid ten dollars each. There is no question that a considerable number of members of Congress would like to see naturalization made as difficult as possible, short of prohibiting it altogether, and that the advocates of a more generous policy need all the support they can get. WELL, THE POOR OLD NATION and the New Republic and others of their ilk have been exposed again. This time it is Paul Elmer More, one of the two chief exponents of humanism, who has done the trick. Listen to his words: The chief opposition to humanism is confined to the would-be leaders of intellectual life in the New York news- paper world — chiefly the weekly newspaper world. But this is no advantage, because the intelligentsia of New York is the most tawdry and dingy ever found in history. We confess to being entirely crushed ; not even the fact that in tawdriness and dinginess we have set a new record con- soles us. Something in his words suggests to us that Mr. More is rather mad about something. Could we be wrong about this? In our pitiful blindness we had suspected that humanism suggested a philosophy of kindliness and human sympathy as well as the insistence that individual life and the life of the world have a purpose. Waiving that, how- ever, we are compelled to admit that Mr. More knows some- thing of what he is talking about, for "Who's Who" verifies our recollection that for five years Mr. More was editor of The Nation. Can it be that after enjoying for that period the benefit of his gospel to the heathen the intelligentsia of New York is really as tawdry and dingy as he thinks? ALL HONOR to Ernestine Schumann-Heink! Her sixty-ninth birthday has found her still singing and singing well and hoping to die while singing her last song as her valiant spirit takes flight. Truly a heroic figure ! There was a day when, deserted by her husband, with no money, with no furniture left in her apartment save three chairs and a bed, she tried to throw herself and her children before a train. The engine was at hand when her little girl saved four lives by screaming "Mamma, mamma, I love you, I love you, take me home." The appeal was irresistible. If there was fortunate infirmity of purpose then, there has been no other case of it in all Schumann-Heink's long life. Rising above several deep tragedies — one son was lost in a German submarine — she has been the great artist. Exemplar of many another heroic woman to whom public recognition has not come, we rejoice at her courage and her perseverance and hope that we may salute her on her seventy-ninth birthday with similar words of gratitude and admiration. IN OUR ISSUE of April 18, 1928, we referred at some length to a libel suit brought by Captain Calvin H. Goddard against The Nation. As a matter of record we are glad to state that the suit has been voluntarily with- drawn by Captain Goddard.

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720 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 The Tariff Crime Complete IT was a crime against the American people — yes, against the whole world — to sign the Hawley-Smoot tariff bill, but Mr. Hoover has done it. He has done it moreover in a way to inflict the greatest possible damage on his own repu- tation for intellectual honesty and straightforwardness. Not ten days ago he let it be known that he would not act until he had referred the bill to experts, to Mr. Mellon, and to other Cabinet officers. Instead of doing so, he announced within twenty-four hours of the passage of the bill, before it had even reached him, that he would sign it, and accom- panied his decision with a statement which for moral obfus- cation and mental confusion is almost without parallel in our history. Anyone who may hereafter maintain that his is a first-rate mentality can be laughed out of court by the mere citation of this memorandum. It proves beyond question that in economic matters he is a child and that the idea that he is especially versed in economic affairs is another one of the long list of Presidential myths. Mr. Hoover has, moreover, taken this fatal step — we believe it will prove fatal politically — in the face of an unprecedented outpouring of protests. Doubtless the speed of his decision was due to a desire to head off the avalanche of demands for a veto of the bill which was certain to de- scend upon him. Never in our entire tariff history has there been such a volume of protests from sources hereto- fore favorable to tariff legislation. When before did the president of the American Bankers' Association denounce such a measure? When before did the leading exporters of the country unite in their protests and declarations that it would gravely injure business? When before has a majority of the leading newspapers of the country demanded a veto? When before have the leaders of the business world declared that the signing of such a measure would retard the recov- ery of business and further injure our serious economic situation? When before has Wall Street reacted so unfavor- ably to a bill raising the tariff? During the week when the bill was actually being passed by Congress the average price of fifty industrial and railroad stocks, as reported by the New York Times, fell 13.79 points. The news that the Senate had passed the bill caused a bad break in prices. The news of the Presidential approval sent prices into a collapse. As for aiding the farmer, cotton and wheat slumped badly. How pleased our rural population must be as it reads that while the bill was becoming law there were declines in wheat, corn, rye, oats, flour, butter, and eggs! To fly in the face of all this would in itself have been bad enough. To excuse it with such arguments as Mr. Hoover offers is really incredible — no wonder that even the New York Times asks if Mr. Hoover has saved his official integrity. Take, for example, the question of the effect of this tariff upon the rest of the world. Three or four weeks ago Mr. Hoover assured a group of editors that the bitter protests from thirty-three countries amounted to nothing — they would all blow over. In his memorandum he dismisses all these protests with this trifling reference: "The com- plaints from some foreign countries that these duties have been placed unduly high can be remedied, if justified, by proper application to the Tariff Commission." What chance could a foreigner have before such a commission? Indeed, almost at the very moment that the President was writing these words, French manufacturers were moving to organ- ize those of other countries against us, and the French Min- ister of Commerce, M. Flandin, publicly denounced the meas- ure as a "false remedy," "a dangerous procedure," stupid and unsound. Even more striking is his remark that "it is unfortunate that on this economic ground the warlike instincts of men are now let loose." Precisely. That is in- evitably the net result of such legislation. It menaces peace. What of the rest of Mr. Hoover's excuses? He signs the bill to relieve business from further anxiety due to un- certainty— when a veto could have established the only real certainty. He forgets his own demand of Congress "for limited revision of the tariff" and cites the Kansas City Re- publican platform as justifying the present measure. Why then did he not urge general revision from the first? Again, he rejoices that the flexible-tariff provision has been voted because, he quite truly says, "Congressional revisions are not only disturbing to business, but, with all their necessary [!] collateral surroundings in lobbies, log-rolling, and activities of group interests, are disturbing to public confidence." No better bit of state's evidence has come from an authorita- tive source in years. The protective-tariff principle, he says, remains, and the commission is to see to it that it adjusts "the rates so as to cover the differences in cost of production at home and abroad"; it can make changes up to 50 per cent. The commission is thus to have legislative power, sub- ject to his approval, over the 3,300 items in the bill, which he declares are far too numerous for any President to pass judgment upon. The commission is to make over an admit- tedly bad job by revising all the schedules that call for change — something that everybody knows is impossible in view of the influences that are certain to be brought to bear upon the commission. But that bad job, due, as he says, to log-rolling, to pres- sure by special interests and lobbies, is, it appears, not so bad after all! "No tariff bill has ever been . . . perfect"; so why should you expect this not to be full of errors and wrongs? Aren't we all fallible? Let us all sit back and think no more about it, and let the Tariff Commission do it. This is childish enough, but it is as nothing compared to the President's utter failure to realize the vital thing — that the protective principle strikes today at our national welfare as never before. At the very moment when we need our export trade more than ever before, when our tre- mendous production in many lines has outrun domestic needs, when the streets are full of unemployed, when our foreign debtors more than ever need low tariffs in order to pay what they owe us, we strike a deadly blow against each and every one of these parties in interest. Let the President say what he pleases about the 2,170 schedules that are un touched ; everybody else in the world knows that this is pro- tectionism run mad. If it does not bring the swiftest po- litical penalty with it, it will do violence to unbroken prece- dents of our tariff historv.

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June 25, 1930] The Nation 721 Germany Sets a Pace THE successful flotation of the so-called international loan under the Young Plan marks another stage in the settlement of the reparations issue and the prog- ress of Germany toward economic and political rehabilita- tion. Properly speaking, the loan is not an international loan at all, but a series of national loans each of which is payable in the currency of the country of issue. American and British bankers in particular objected strongly to a loan represented by bonds payable in gold anywhere, fearing, ap- parently, that the international backing of such a loan might give it a prestige which would work to the disadvantage of purely national loans. The present loan, accordingly, achieves a unique straddle of the difficulty. The terms exacted by the cooperating banks, too, are heavy. The American syndicate pays 85.25 for bonds which it offers to subscribers at 90, while in France, where the bonds are put out at 98.25, the Treasury takes 8.25 in return for an ex- emption of the bonds from taxation. Nevertheless, with the loan successfully out of the way, Germany can proceed with unwonted assurance to put its economic house in order. Under the Dawes Plan, such steps as were taken to improve financial and economic conditions were essentially tentative, for the reason that no agreement had been arrived at regarding the total amount of reparations that would have to be paid. No country can make any but temporary arrangements to meet its obligations as long as it does not know how great the obligations are. A good deal was done when the currency was stabilized and the railways reorganized, but the annual payments under the Dawes Plan were largely offset by receipts from foreign loans. More- over, as S. Parker Gilbert, Agent General for Reparation Payments, again points out in his final report on the opera- tion of the Dawes Plan, the German budget has not been balanced and the financial system of the Reich is still in dis- order. The public revenues have been sufficient to insure budgetary equilibrium, but "any determined effort to control public expenditures" has been lacking, and Germany has been living beyond its means. It has been easier to be extravagant because, while the Reich collects the revenue, the states and communes claim a large share of it for their own purposes and spend it without any effective central control. It is this situation that enables Dr. Carl Bergmann, a high authority on German finance, to maintain in the June issue of Foreign Affairs, in opposition to Mr. Thomas W. Lamont, that even the Young Plan "is not the final solution of the reparations problem," but must be classed as "a political venture" rather than as "the result of economic experience." Whether final or not, however, both the reparations total and the scale of annuities have been fixed, and for a number of years at least the figures are likely to stand. How will Germany now pro- ceed? It is already producing more goods with less labor, it is reorganizing its industries so as to reduce the number of separate establishments, and it is multiplying its cartels and trade associations. It now proposes a further step intended to enlarge its share of world trade. There is in contempla- tion, it is announced, an immediate reduction of 10 per cent or more in the prices of products sold for export, the reduc- tion to be effected through a lowering of wages and a cut in the price of coal. The Westphalia iron workers, it is re- ported, are about to agree to a 7^ per cent cut in wages pre- liminary to a 10 per cent cut in iron, and the export price of coal, of which there is a large excess stock in the Ruhr, has already been substantially lowered. The gain, it is expected, will be in a marked increase of German exports during the present period of world depression in trade, a further recov- ery of foreign markets, and the possibility of higher prices when trade conditions improve. Incidentally, the grave un- employment situation, with some 2,800,000 persons out of work, should show marked amelioration. Germany, in short, is now in a position to regain the trade of which the Allies, in the peace treaties, sought per- manently to rob it. It is ready to go farther than it has already gone in capitalizing for its economic benefit the inter- national good-will which it has won since the war. Only in the stuffy circles of superheated hundred-per-centism is Ger- many any longer an outcast. Mr. Dwight Morrow's recent repudiation, in one of his New Jersey campaign speeches, of the vindictive allegation of exclusive German "war guilt" is a gratifying sign of the changed attitude of sensible people. There is more to the matter than reconciliation, however. If the economic policy which Germany is thinking about goes into operation, the industrial and commercial world will have to meet the vigorous competition of German intelligence, ambition, and hard work. For the United States, saddled with a Congress and an Administration whose tariff philoso- phy is the acme of stupidity and national arrogance, a stiff fight to keep its economic head above water would be an unmixed blessing. The War for Freedom IF anyone doubts that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, we advise him to send to the American Civil Liberties Union at 100 Fifth Avenue, New York City, for a copy of "The Story of Civil Liberty— 1929-30," being the annual report of the Union for the year just past. He will read in this fascinating pamphlet, illustrated by ex- tremely interesting maps, the story of the unending war waged by this admirable organization against repression, intolerance, official lawlessness, and all the combined forces of political bourbonism and economic greed that forever menace our liberties. It is an extraordinary report, and no genuine American can read it without a fresh realization of the strength of these powers of evil, and a new sense of gratitude for the Union's work in combating them. The field of campaign is nation-wide, extending literally from Boston to Los Angeles, and the battle rages almost constantly on a dozen different fronts. How many of our readers, we wonder, know that thirty- two out of our forty-eight States have criminal-syndicalism or sedition laws, twenty-six of them passed in 1919 or later; that twenty-eight States have laws against the red flag, all passed in 1919; and that twenty-three suffer from both abominations? Only ten States are free of both, and of these the most are Southern States, many of which have old 1 coming down from reconstruction days, aimed at "incite- ment to insurrection and rebellion," and equally adaptable, as current events in Atlanta show, to the suppression of labor

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722 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 organization and radical activities of every variety. How many persons are cognizant of the actual state of the law regarding Negroes as it exists in these United States of ours in this year 1930? Despite the Constitution, ten States deny Negroes the right to vote and to marry with whites, and segregate them both in public schools and on public conveyances. Five more impose all these disabilities except the denial of voting rights. Most surprising of all, perhaps, to the ordinary uninformed American, no less than thirty of the forty-eight States, including many of the most liberal ones in the Union, still prohibit intermarriage of Negroes with whites. We have scarcely made a beginning in guaranteeing the full civil rights of our colored fellow- citizens. The machinery of repression embodied in our law has been strengthened rather than weakened during the year by legislation and court action. There are some gains to be recorded, like Judge Thacher's decision that mere member- ship in the Communist Party does not make an alien deport- able, the decision of the United States Court of Appeals reversing the conviction of Mary Ware Dennett, and the appointment by the Federal Law Enforcement Commission of a special committee on official lawlessness. On the other hand, there have been plenty of setbacks, like the conviction of strikers and the acquittal of their assailants in trials filled with religious and political prejudice in North Carolina, the denial by the Supreme Court of the United States of citizen- ship to Rosika Schwimmer for her refusal to bear arms in time of war, and the conviction of five young women in Cali- fornia for displaying a red flag. Concerning the general situ- ation the report says : The police and prosecuting officials always respond to the urge of employers and red-baiters. The machinery is chiefly used in strikes and against radical propaganda in industrial centers. The constant violations of Negroes' rights continue unabated. Religious and racial intolerance is firmly intrenched. Though 1929 showed only 228 free-speech prosecutions against 418 in 1928, yet during the first three months of 1930 no less than 920 such cases were brought, as against only 36 in the same months of last year. Unemployed people must not talk too much. Public opinion, however, the Union finds, is on the whole more alert to defend civil liberties, and defense organizations are stronger than in the past. We wish that there were space to record fully the work done bv the Union in fighting repressive laws, in opposing censorship, police lawlessness, and the activities of the pro- fessional patriots, in asserting the rights of strikers, aliens, Communists, and other unpopular minority groups. It is a fine story of the old traditional Americanism functioning under new and more difficult conditions, offering a splendid contrast to the intellectual and spiritual pusillanimity of so many of those who sit in the seats of the economically and politically mighty. We hail with admiration and gratitude the completion of ten years' work by the Civil Liberties Union, and we agree heartily with the more than moderate statement of its report: Our services are essential for whatever degree of tolerance we can achieve, and will be until a political and economic opposition arises strong enough to defend its own rights, and in so doing to stem the tide of intolerance and repression which marks the country today. Apostles of Passive Resistance THE scene at Peshawar described in an article in the present issue — the spectacle not only of revolutionary leaders voluntarily giving themselves up to the authorities, but of unarmed men deliberately baring their breasts to British rifles and calmly allowing themselves to be shot — all this seems almost incredible to the Western mind. But it should not be forgotten that the doctrines of non- cooperation and non-violence, though they are at present taken far more in earnest and held against greater provoca- tion in India than they have been anywhere else in the mod- ern world, are not exclusively Indian doctrines. Within the last century the idea of passive resistance has been held by several great predecessors of Gandhi. Gandhi himself, as was pointed out in an article in our issue of May 21, has frequently confessed his debt to Tolstoy. Tolstoy, in turn, acknowledged his debt to William Lloyd Garrison : The principle of non-resistance to evil by violence, which consists in the substitution of persuasion for brute force, can only be accepted voluntarily. . . . Garrison was the first to proclaim this principle as a rule for the organiza- tion of the life of men. . , . Therefore Garrison will for- ever remain one of the greatest reformers and promoters of true human progress. The doctrine of non-violence, in short, though it has re- mained for India to give it by far the most remarkable appli- cation in our time, owes a great debt to American thinkers. We find the doctrine clearly enunciated not only by Garri- son, but by Emerson ; and it was acted upon by Thoreau. The country [remarked Emerson in 1844] is fre- quently affording solitary examples of resistance to the government, solitary nullifiers, who throw themselves on their reserved rights . . . who embarrass the courts of law by non-jury, and the commander-in-chief of the militia by non-resistance. In Thoreau we find the American archetype of such figures. He was opposed to a government that was support- ing slavery and prosecuting a war of aggrandizement against Mexico. "I quietly declare war with the state," he said, "after my fashion." When he refused to pay his poll tax, he was put in jail. But he declared: If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison or give up war and slavery, the state will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your office." When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accom- plished. If the followers of Gandhi adhere steadfastly to this plan, their ultimate success is far from hopeless. As they love liberty, let them not break faith.

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June 25, 1930] The Nation 723 It Seems to Hey wood Broun ALTHOUGH I was among the voters who had no enthusiasm for Herbert Clark Hoover I must admit that the gentleman has fallen far below my expecta- tions. A violent partisan of Governor Smith, I felt that the election of Mr. Hoover would be unfortunate. I did not begin to realize its catastrophic quality. Let it not be for- gotten that President Hoover has established two records already in his Administration. Under his leadership more men have been put out of work and more put in jail than America has ever known. The stock-market crash and the business decline which hit the country late in the year 1929 may not justly be at- tributed directly to the President. It was hardly Mr. Hoover's fault that the nation had indulged in a wild orgy of overproduction and consequent inflation. It is true, of course, that a firmer and a prompter policy upon the part of the Federal Reserve might have toned down the excesses of speculation. But that is surmise. Wall Street had the bit in its mouth and was running away. It is at least pos- sible that no living man could have stopped the mad gallop to the edge of the precipice. But it can clearly be charged against Mr. Hoover that he has been an exceedingly ineffective leader once the acci- dent occurred. His boosters presented him to us under sin- gularly false colors. Here was the great engineer, the great executive. They said that he knew nothing of practical politics and that his worth lay along the lines of quiet unob- trusive efficiency. By now we know that President Hoover's greatest flair — his only one as far as can be ascertained — is a capacity for publicity. Not for a minute would I deny his great skill as a ballyhoo artist. Upon retirement from the White House there is no reason why he should not obtain a lucrative position in one of our great advertising agencies. He performed an extraordinary feat first of all in sell- ing himself. Even today there are little groups here and there who look upon Mr. Hoover as the trained expert. The notion is not yet gone that he feeds upon statistics and grows strong thereby. A few still believe that he lives and moves and has his being by clinging to sagacious graphs embodying subtle wisdom hidden from the brain of common mortals. Not many think this any more, but it is a mark of sheer genius that a single disciple should still remain. The plain fact is that Herbert Clark Hoover is the most ignorant man to sit in the White House within the memory of any living man. And I am not forgetting that there was a Warren Gamaliel Harding. This is by far the kindest view which can be taken of the leadership of President Hoover. It would be simple and silly to look upon him as a deep-dyed villain. His mistakes have been made in good faith. God help him, he could do no other. We have been living for the better part of two years on slogans. No hungry man has ever been denied the benefit of an optimistic Presidential statement. And the curious quirk in Mr. Hoover's mind is his childlike belief in "psychology." One has but to smile and smile and chirp a little and everything will be for the best in the most per- fectly adjusted of all nations. I ask you to recall the manner in which Mr. Hoover is said to have saved the nation after the Wall Street panic. His device was simplicity itself. He encouraged the busi- ness leaders to do some tall talking. Down to Washington they flocked, the public-utility princes and the railroad kings. One said : "I will spend a hundred million," and under the emotional appeal of the revival meeting another raised the bet and pledged two hundred million. Industry must hum because all citizens both great and small had announced the starting of vast projects. It may be argued that such a process of expansion would have been economically fatal in a period of readjustment. But there is no need to argue that, because no one save Mr. Hoover took these promises of vast expenditure as anything more than ballyhoo. Many a captain of industry hotfooted it back from Washington where all had grown drunk on figures and in the cold dawn of the morning after proceeded to lop a few more thousand employees off the pay roll. But the problem of unemployment never bothered the President very much. That, too, he met like a true press agent. He solved unemployment by saying that it didn't exist save in the usual seasonal quantities. People close to him learned that he could grow furiously angry if unem- ployment were mentioned. If it were not talked about it would not exist. That too was psychology. To say a thing was to have it come immediately into existence. To refrain from mentioning a condition would assure its immediate disappearance. Take, specifically, Mr. Hoover's attitude toward the tariff. He made public announcement that he would con- sult with trained experts before affixing his signature. All the practical economists of the country from Henry Ford up and down rushed into print to denounce the pending tariff. They assured America that it would deal a heavy blow to our already dwindling export trade. The Presi- dent's response to this testimony was a hasty statement that he would sign the bill. He said that business needed it. Once again Mr. Hoover was content with the gesture. The advance man of a circus comes to a small town and placards every billboard and assails all the local publi- cations with the information that the show will bring with it a herd of twenty elephants. When the attraction arrives the populace finds that there are but two. Nobody is par- ticularly indignant. The townsfolk have had experience with press agents before. They allow for natural exaggeration. There is no suggestion that the man be pursued and required to produce the eighteen missing animals. The press agent has done his duty after his fashion. It was up to him to make the community elephant-conscious. It was a good story while it lasted and so he moves on to bring hope and ex- citement to another village. But the circus plays each stand for a single dav. The government of the United States is a show which functions 365 days in the year, and so I think we have a right to ask the press agent in the White House : "Where are those eighteen elephants, Mr. President?" Heywood Broun

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724 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 The Press Today VII. What's Wrong with the World? By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD MUCH is wrong with the New York World. Any practiced eye perceives it and the unpracticed also. The fact disquiets liberals everywhere, but espe- cially those in New York because the World's editorial page has been the last remaining morning one in the metropolis that did not bow the knee to the god of things as they are, that felt that there is a better kind of America and a juster one to be achieved, that stood ardently for the rights and liberties of the individual. The solicitude that one hears on all sides is the best tribute to what the World has been and could be. Such criticisms as are uttered — and those to be found in this article — are born only of friendship and good- will, and the fear lest something happen to the one powerful New York morning daily which still in the main recognizes liberalism when it sees it. Primarily it is, I suspect, the will of Joseph Pulitzer which is largely at fault. It has laid down conditions and made dispositions which on the one hand have harassed the managers and on the other have lulled them into a too easy security. The will specifies that the World cannot be sold, and otherwise has caused the World to suffer the evils which are certain to attend every endowed newspaper. Its increas- ing deficits — said to be over a million dollars annually — have been carried by the other members of the Pulitzer news- paper family, and it appears to have been only recently recog- nized that, will or no will, this situation cannot continue indefinitely. So there has been since the retirement of Ralph Pulitzer and the assumption of managerial direction by his younger brother, Herbert, a great effort to help the situation. This resulted about Christmas time, 1929, in the ruthless discharge of eighteen or more employees, some of long ser- vice and advanced years, and in radical cuts all along the line in each department. The result upon the morale of the staff has been precisely what could have been expected. Only a few of a staff of brilliant reporters remain ; its ablest men are in Washington. In other words there was economy just at the time when, if in any way possible, a good deal more money should have been spent upon the paper. The World lost its great opportunity when it did not deliberately pattern after the Times a few years ago. Had it done so under able managers it would not only have built itself up, it would also have challenged the community lead- ership of the Times. That this is no idle theory is proved by the success which the New York Herald Tribune, al- though handicapped by a conservative tradition and a heavy and conservative editorial page, has achieved by pursuing just this policy. Two factors have contributed to bring about the World's present position — and to prevent its seizing the opportunity which the Herald Tribune took — the inherited admonition of Joseph Pulitzer to hold its labor-class support and at the same time to maintain an able and liberal editorial * This is the seventh in a series of articles on the American press. The eifihth, on the newspaper situation in Montana, will appear in our issue of July 9. — Editor The Nation. page, and the latter-day belief that the World could not be a newspaper with all the news but must be one of selective news. The result of the first has been that the World has continued to indulge in a cheap-looking typographical make- up and news display, while maintaining an editorial page that appealed especially to the highbrows, the liberal-intellec- tuals, and the thoughtful lawyers and business men who for years followed the fine leadership of Frank I. Cobb. As for the theory that the World was superior to the need of printing all the news and could become purely a "selective" journal — that called for journalism of the ablest type to justify itself. That ability has not been forthcoming. As the Times and Herald Tribune waxed steadily in the size of their issues, the World shrank by contrast until the very feel of the paper seemed to suggest that it was an incomplete product. And that it has been. It is not as if there were a deliberate attempt at condensation so as to cover completely a great field. The scarcity of white paper in the World office has, it is true, led to condensation of a type one would like to find in the seriously overwritten Times, which so often tells the same story four times in succession, beginning with the headlines. Unfortunately, however, the selection of the news has not even been second-rate ; excellent news stories go to waste in the World office. Its admirable Wash- ington staff, for instance, often wakes up in the morning to find its stories cut to pieces, or badly displayed, without any recognition of the news value of the telegraphed matter. Thus, newspaper Washington is still smiling over the treatment accorded to a World beat in the World office. Its Washington bureau discovered that Senator Grundy, soon after taking his seat, had moved his tariff-lobbying staff into his office in the Senate office building. It led to an imme- diate explosion on the floor of the Senate. The Washington Post, which gets copies of the World's special dispatches, "played up" this dispatch on its front page. The World cut it down and buried it on an inside page. This is not an isolated example. One has only to contrast the news service of the St. Louis Pulitzer newspaper, the Post-Dispatch, with that of the World to see how much valuable matter is lost to the latter because of its selective process. The simple truth is that the men in the World office are not nearly so live or able newspapermen as they ought to be; there lies the chief weakness. Like most of the other metropolitan dailies the World does not really know what is going on. Under the elder Pulitzer it was often a terror to Tammany Hall. For many years it went out after, and got, big and original stories. One felt that it was really behind the scenes both in the City Hall and in Albany; one felt its ability to deal the sledge-hammer blows it gave; one knew that it was virile and powerful. Curiously enough as it has grown less forceful and less newsy its news pages have become more and more respecta- ble, thus appealing less and less to the great working class

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June 25, 1930] The Nation 725 in which Mr. Pulitzer found his greatest support, especially in the time when no well-bred household would permit the "yellow" World — of those days — to pass its doors. The loss of prestige and of news value came largely after the death of Frank I. Cobb in 1923 and during the managing editor- ship of Herbert Bayard Swope. Here one must write very carefully, for Mr. Swope at his best was one of the most brilliant reporters and newsmen in the entire profession. For him as a journalist it was a pity that he reached the position that he did ; there came days when he had other interests and other irons in the fire — and we cannot serve two masters in journalism any more than anywhere else. There came days of entangling alliances ; of much absenteeism — often in successful search for good news ; of the development of hos- tile cliques within the office. It is an old problem which confronts the newspaperman of today: shall he have inti- mate social contacts with those he might at some time have to pillory? Should he. in order "to be in the know," be the friend of the men with whom his newspaper may have to disagree ? As for Ralph Pulitzer, who during these years was the titular head of the daily, it is impossible to think of him without recalling Hey wood Broun's generous tribute to him in The Nation of February 26, 1930 — a tribute all the more remarkable because Mr. Pulitzer had felt it necessary to dismiss Mr. Broun because of the latter's criticism of the World in its own columns and in The Nation. Mr. Broun wrote : Curiously enough, the task of continuing the Pulitzer tradition was intrusted to a man who had little in common with his father. The force, the drive, the vitality which animated Joseph Pulitzer were never in his eldest son Ralph. But at the outset I might as well pick my side in this duel between the living man and the dead hand. I was and am for Ralph Pulitzer. The paper's peak during his period of control constituted a higher journalistic achievement than it had ever known in his father's day. Though the younger Pulitzer lacked the founder's force he did bring to the job a far more sensitized intelligence. He brought the paper up out of the field of cheap sensationalism into which Joseph Pulitzer plunged it back in the days of the duel with Hearst. And so, though he may have plunged it at last into the red, he did remove it from the yellow. No one who knows Mr. Pulitzer can fail to respect his personal standards, his kindly feelings towrard his associates, his earnest desire to uphold his father's and the World's traditions. But sometimes it appears that sons in inheriting newspapers do not inherit enough ; to succeed, they must also be endowed with journalistic ability. There have been others besides Mr. Pulitzer in New York who have inherited daily newspapers and failed to make good with them, as, for instance, the editor of a certain liberal weekly! To follow in the footsteps of Joseph Pulitzer, that restless, dynamic, dominating personality with its touch of genius, and to live up to his standard was to subject anybody to a dreadful test; was to demand the almost impossible. Yet a newspaper built up by a great and virile character, which put its hall-mark on everything it touched, needs a virile successor to carry it on. Editorially Joseph Pulitzer had such a successor in con- siderable degree in Frank I. Cobb, one of the most beloved men in the profession of his day, who but for his untimely end would today still be making the editorial page of the If orld what Mr. Pulitzer wished it to be — a great leader in liberalism. Not that his judgment was beyond fallibility. I, for one, remembering the fight the World put up against the Spanish War, cannot believe that Joseph Pulitzer would have declared as did Mr. Cobb that there was nothing else for Wood row Wilson to do but to go to war with Ger- many— especially if he had written as Mr. Cobb did on January 24, 1917, that when Mr. Wilson declared for a "peace without victory" he "uttered a profound historical truth." But Cobb had vision and ideals. He was the first daily editor to come out after the war against the public hysteria about reds and dissenters, in favor of the old Ameri- can ideals which have never yet regained the position from which they were driven by the hysteria and the intolerance of war. More than that, he knew, and exercised to the full, the power of reiteration. Once he began on a crusade he could no more be driven from it than a bull-terrier can let go of the tennis ball between his jaws — as witness his extraordinary series of articles on the theft of the Panama Canal, those dealing with Theodore Roosevelt's shortcomings as President, and those treating the insurance scandals. He had, as Woodrow Wilson wrote of him, "a peculiar genius for giving direct and effective expression to the enlightened opinions which he held." His death was an irreparable loss to the World. To its editorial page. Here again writing is not easy and not only because of a valued friendship. Walter Lipp- mann's abilities are beyond question. His reputation as a speaker and wrriter grows month by month ; his books com- mand a wider and wider public. The skill of his pen is beyond denial. Yet the fact remains that editorially the World is much weaker. There appears to be not only a lack of driving force, but often an inability to take a position and hold it through to its logical end. Too often it charges right up to the breastworks and then slowly retreats or even yields its arms and its entire position. Again, it sometimes abandons its historic principles. I am well aware of Hey- wood Broun's sentiment : "You cannot run today's news- paper by assuming what some dead man would have done if he still walked the earth." Surely a dead man's hand should not control ; but if his fixed principles were the points of the compass by which he successfully steered his course, those fixed principles are as good forty years after his death as when he was alive. If there is to be a new chart and a new course that is another matter. But newspaper principles, like those of individuals, should be fixed. There will always be new problems and positions, new ways of approach, but the point of attack should remain the same. So it was profoundly disconcerting to have the World haul down the flag of uncompromising opposition to all tariffs save for revenue only and to find it falling for the childish economics of Al Smith, who declared that if elected "it will be the prime aim and prime purpose of a Democratic administration to extend the benefit of tariff favors to all classes, and to spread prosperity generally throughout the United States," while at the same moment he promised to put an end to the tariffs sheltering "extortion and favorit- ism." Yet the World actually hailed this nonsense in • words : Governor Smith has offered something more than a mere tariff prescription. He offers a pledge of full and free economic opportunity to labor, industry, commerce,

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726 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 and agriculture alike. . . . Governor Smith offers a plan for eliminating the existing evils and abuses while at the same time presenting wider opportunities for prosperity. But the World is not content to take two positions; it can sometimes take three or four. To quote Broun again, "So constant were the shifts during the Sacco-Vanzetti case that the paper seemed like an old car going up a hill." Then there was the battle for the child-labor amendment to the Constitution. On June 4, 1924, the World declared that it (the amendment) should not have become necessary, "but it has become necessary because the United States Supreme Court, by a close decision in each case, has denied the right of Congress either to use its taxing power to this end or its power to regulate industry or commerce. ... In form the amendment is as it should be . . . there should be little objection to ratification." On August 25 it was still true to the faith, declaring that "the regulation of child labor should be a State function, but the truth is the States have shown themselves incapable of handling it. The sudden growth of textile factories in the South has had too much influence on a number of State legislatures." On December 8 of the same year the second thought came. Again the World admits the magnitude of the evils, but, "after careful con- sideration, has come to the conclusion that it [the federal amendment] is not necessary and may be highly undesirable." It was kind enough to add that "in opposing the ratification . . . the World recognizes the educative effect ... of the campaign for the amendment itself." On January 29, 1925, it recorded the death of the child-labor amendment and declared that the opponents of child labor should now "in our opinion concentrate on the States," quite forgetting that it had pronounced the States "themselves incapable of handling it." Time has at least shown the correctness of the latter opinion. That year of 1924 was a thoroughly bad one for the World's editorial page. In April, very much worried about the possibility of John W. Davis becoming Democratic candidate for President, it called him "the ablest conserva- tive lawyer in the party," and declared that if the party were not looking for a conservative it would not for an instant consider Mr. Davis's name. It felt that "Mr. Davis as President would have too many difficult problems of con- science to handicap him." By the end of July, Davis having been nominated, it was sneering about the intolerance of those who voiced its own April views, who, like the World in that month, condemned John W. Davis "before he has had a chance to open his mouth." This violent prejudging of Mr. Davis, it opined, "will injure him far less than it will injure the cause of liberalism." It had previously declared, after the nomination, that his was "as spontaneous a popular choice as any convention has ever made ... his friends and followers can accept with enthusiasm the leadership of John W. Davis." By October it discovered that his admirable personal qualities "are combined with an experience in gov- ernment, law, business, and diplomacy that has marked him for years as a man of Presidential size." As for Mr. La Follette, he was quite as bad as Ramsay MacDonald, the same Ramsay MacDonald that the World has been praising to the skies since he became Prime Minister and offered to move for disarmament in consultation with Mr. Hoover. In 1924 MacDonald was a "disaster both for Labor and for the Liberals, plus a triumph for the Conservatives. . . . Mr. MacDonald has burnt down the progressive house to roast the Liberal pig." Of course La Follette in his cam- paign exhibited in the eyes of the World "every folly and weakness which conservatism could desire, the same ambition [as MacDonald's] to rule or ruin, the same far-fetched, ill- informed theorizing, the same top-lofty self-satisfaction, the same inevitable but unconscious assistance to reaction." Whoop-la ! Four years later the World was even more enthusiastic about Al Smith. It discovered that his homely speech reminded it of Gladstone, Balfour, and Asquith, for it had "some qualities of this parliamentary oratory." When the last New York mayoralty campaign came on the World was at least consistent, though entirely confused. Thus, it would not support Norman Thomas though it had "no hesi- tation in saying that he expresses the only intelligent oppo- sition to Tammany. . . ." Independent voters might sup- port him, it said, with a good conscience. Indeed, it rather urged them to vote for Thomas, and it hoped that his vote would be large enough "to show that the State is lost to the Democracy if the Democracy does not hasten to win back the independents" — as if there were the slightest possibility of Tammany being affected by any such argument. Any independent who voted for Walker or La Guardia would, the World said, "waste his vote." But for itself it would, like the Times, "take no definite stand"! Finally, it said that if the contest were a real one with a chance of La Guardia's winning, the World would at once urge the elec- tion of Walker as the lesser of the two evils. It is all very well to talk about the dead hand ; that rests very lightly on the World of today when such stuff can appear on its edi- torial page. Certainly if Joseph Pulitzer is aware of it in another sphere it must cause him the sharpest pain. And so on and so forth. All through the contest against American imperialism, against which the old World stood foursquare, this same twisting and turning is to be found. As to Nicaragua it has blown hot and cold, and it took no lead in the fight to free Haiti of government by, for, and with our marines. It even supported the fifteen-cruiser bill on the naive theory that if an international agreement is to be made "the United States must enter the conference with enough ships laid down, appropriated for, and authorized to convince the naval authorities abroad that limitation is neces- sary and desirable . . . the conclusion is . . . inescapable that the influence that the United States can hope to exert ... is very largely dependent upon its strength as a naval Power." The London conference has given the full answer to this policy of bluffing your adversary while publishing abroad the fact that you are out for bluffing, with the result that we are faced with the possibility of adding a billion dollars worth of additional ships to our armaments. The long series of articles in which Mr. Lippmann belabored the conference during its sessions illustrates clearly the dif- ficulties under which the World's editorial page labors. They were extraordinarily learned, very well written, but so clever as to be Machiavellian in their finesse. One feels that there is something metaphysical about it all ; that here is a special pleader weaving his web with singular skill, but enticing nobody. One longs for the straightforward slashing of Cobb, his clear-cut analyses, and his going to the heart of the thing, to the principles involved ; one longs for less dialectics and more straight thrusting from the shoulder. Finally, it is a commentary upon where the World's policy leads that

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June 25, 1930] The Nation 727 in playing into the admirals' hands by supporting the cruiser bill it helped to make them so arrogant and pestiferous that the World has finally come to an almost hysterical demand that President Hoover should make them shut up and stand aside. There are so few newspaper editorial pages left in America which retain the critical faculty that it is really a great misfortune when one which has so long exercised admirably the critic's role, which can examine and analyze and dissect a politician's speech or argument with genuine intelligence and with very considerable background, should fail in the quality of its criticizing. Most of the editorial pages of today are written by yes-men who always approve whatever the man in authority says. The World has, fortu- nately, never come to this. Only one other point. When Charles E. Hughes was nominated it jumped into the breach by saying that his ap- pointment "has been received with universal approval . . . he is ideally suited to the office." But the liberals whom the World ought to lead looked at the situation differently. Had there been one week longer in which to fight, Mr. Hughes would have been defeated. As it was, he had a close call, instead of "universal approval." Call it what one will, this sort of thing is neither liberalism nor leadership. And so the simple fact is that in a growing city the circulation of the morning World was 51,000 less on April 1, 1930, than on October 1, 1924, and the Sunday circulation 17,000 less for the same period; the advertising lineage has dropped in greater proportion. The remedy? It is easily stated. The question was once put to me by one high in the Pulitzer organization. My answer was : Make the World as admirable a paper as the St. Louis Pulitzer daily, the Post-Dispatch. What Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., has done there can be repeated in New York. It requires similarly able managers and a fixed edi- torial course, steadily steered in unequivocal fashion, with no twistings in the wake. I have listened to many argu- ments as to whether the Baltimore Sun or the Post-Dispatch is the finest liberal daily in America. There is no need to decide the question. The point is that the New York World is not regarded as being in their class and there is no earthly reason why it should not be. It has a greater field, a greater opportunity, as fine a tradition, and heaven knows that American journalism never needed the leadership the World used to give as much as it needs it today. Until the World renews that leadership, liberal causes in America will suffer and the keen anxiety felt by its friends will not die down. Japan and the Naval Pact By K. K. KAWAKAMI TESTIFYING on the London naval treaty before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations the other day, Secretary Stimson gallantly said : "I take off my hat to the Japanese government in this treaty." He had in mind the great courage that was required of the Cabinet at Tokio in accepting the London agreement in the teeth of the solid opposition of the navy. There is no doubt that the treaty, so far as it affected Japan, was made possible largely by ignoring the theories and contentions advanced by her naval experts. There is reason to believe that ex-Premier Wakatsuki, head of the Japanese delegation, approved the celebrated Reed-Matsudaira understanding without consulting his naval advisers. Evidently he and Matsudaira acted upon the theory that America would be faithful to the Kellogg pact, and that Japan's acceptance of a naval arrangement satisfactory to the United States would contribute toward the improvement of the Pacific situation. They hoped, perhaps, that the good feeling thus created might even help solve the vexed problem born of the American immigration act of 1924. With such beliefs and such hopes the civilian members of the Japanese delegation cast the die, and vir- tually confronted their naval colleagues with a fait accompli. To appreciate the real significance of this bold step taken by Wakatsuki and Matsudaira we must note the prerogative long enjoyed by the army and the navy in Japan's political organization. In our government the Minister of the Army has always been a general and the Minister of the Navy an admiral, both in active service. Technically, neither is responsible to the Prime Minister or the Cabinet, much less to the Diet, in so far as they deal with matters of national defense, but both are responsible directlv to the throne. Neither the army nor the navy, accordingly, is under the direct control of the Cabinet except that appropriations for national defense must be initiated by the Cabinet and approved by the Diet. They are controlled, respectively, by the army and the navy ministers and by the chiefs of the General Staff and of the General Board. Theoretically, the two ministers are not required to resign with the Cabinet, though as a matter of fact they are obliged to follow the example of their civilian colleagues in a cabinet crisis. At the time-honored tradition of military control of defense the present Hamaguchi Cabinet and its civilian rep- resentatives at London have dealt a blow by accepting an agreement strenuously objected to by the navy. Replying to an interpellation from the Opposition in the House of Rep- resentatives, Premier Hamaguchi virtually declared that the Cabinet, and not the army and the navy ministers alone, nor the chiefs of the army and navy general staffs, was responsible for national defense. Plainly, the declaration was a challenge to the prerogative long enjoyed by the army and the navy. It may even prove a step toward the appoint- ment of civilians to the portfolios of the army and the navy — a revolutionary change in Japan's political organization. Japan's thesis at London was a peculiar mixture of liberal and reactionary ideas. It was liberal in so far as it advocated reduction and not mere limitation. It was reac- tionary in that it claimed for Japan 70 per cent of the auxiliary-craft tonnage allocated to the biggest navy in the Pacific. Had she concentrated upon the first point, and called upon the Powers to prove their fidelity to the Kellogg pact by substantial reduction in their respective tonnages, her voice would have rung through the world and she would have become the recognized champion of the disarmament

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728 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 movement. But her demand for 70 per cent, however justifiable from the naval standpoint, vitiated her admirable advocacy of reduction and compromised her otherwise enviable moral position. In the early stages of the discussion Japan felt that the cruiser tonnage tentatively allocated to Great Britain and the United States was too great, and that it should be scaled down in conformity to the professed aim of reduction. But of course she was powerless to secure any change in the figures agreed on. The only point which she thought still open to discussion was the ratio of 60 per cent allocated to her, quite arbitrarily, as she saw it, by Anglo-American understanding. The result was the provisions developing from the now celebrated Reed-Matsudaira conversations. What are those provisions, which created such a furor and turmoil in Japan? First, they allow Japan 60 per cent of American tonnage in eight-inch-gun cruisers, whereas she considers 70 per cent her irreducible minimum compatible with safety. Secondly, they give Japan 70 per cent in six-inch-gun cruisers and destroyers, whereas she would have taken 60 per cent in these categories. Thirdly, in submarines they give her 52,700 tons on a basis of parity with the United States and Great Britain, while she thinks something between 70,000 and 80,000 tons her minimum requirement, irrespective of what America may choose to build. She is still convinced that sixty or seventy submarines are absolutely needed to defend her long chain of numerous islands. Secretary Stimson has told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that "our problem was to ask Japan to stand still for six years and let us build past her." That is quite true, but it is not so much the "standing still" which irritates Japan as the ratio which her navy thinks has been arbitrarily fixed for her. Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol, chairman of the Navy General Board, testifying before the same committee, insisted that Japan's ratio should not be higher than 60 per cent of American force, and said: "If any differences should arise which might result in war or threatened war between the United States and Japan, we would necessarily have to carry the campaign into Japanese waters." When Senator Reed reminded the admiral that even with the higher ratio Japan could not invade America, the admiral agreed with him, but added : "But we should lose the war." I am afraid the chairman of the General Board has let the cat out of the bag. He has implicitly admitted and confirmed the Japanese suspicion that America's naval policy in the Pacific is offensive, that its objective is to invade Japanese waters in time of war, that the American navy can conquer Japan if Japan's ratio is held down, as he thinks it should be, to 60 per cent of American force. No doubt our Japanese navalists will hail him as an unexpected cham- pion for their consistent demand for 70 per cent! It has long been plain, and the Senate hearings have made it plainer, that America's naval aim in the Pacific is twofold : first, to defend the Philippines, and second, to protect American interests in China, which interests are usually called by the less mundane name of the "open door." This raises the question whether force should be considered the only or a justifiable means of attaining these aims, espe- cially after America made so much of the Kellogg pact. Now, if the United States is apprehensive of Japan's possible aggression against the Philippines, Japan is no less afraid that the United States will use the Philippines as a base of aggressive operations against her. Let Japan pledge itself not to attack the Philippines, and the United States pledge itself not to use the islands as a base of operations against Japan in case of war, and the naval problem in the Pacific can be made much easier of solution. Japan need not insist upon 70 per cent of American force, nor does America need to be afraid of the Japanese navy as long as it is too small to carry war into American waters. But there remains the more knotty problem of the open door, or American rights and interests in the Orient, espe- cially in China. It is, perhaps, in this connection that America wants to keep the Philippines rather than for what the islands may in themselves be worth to her. Asked by Senator Black whether Philippine independence, if granted, would lessen American naval responsibilities, Admiral Bristol replied that in any event the United States must have a naval base there. Why? Because America must stand guard over the open door. Admiral Jones, also before the Senate committee, frankly said so. American ambition to establish and maintain a naval base in the Far East is an old story. Even Admiral Perry, to whom Japan is sincerely grateful, recommended the seizure of a Japanese island as a base for the American fleet. Again, thirty-odd years ago the American navy tried to secure a base on the coast of Fukien Province, China. The scheme, abandoned because of Japanese objection, was revived in 1912 in another form, though this, too, failed to materialize. The American naval doctrine of the open door is well expressed by one of its exponents, Captain Melvin F. Talbot, in this language : Distant battle fleets still mount guard over the trade of the Orient, lest one national appropriate to itself the sole right to buy cheap, sell dear, and lend at high interest in the unsettled markets of the Far East. The policy of the open door rests today on a solemn treaty backed by the fleets at target practice off Chatham and San Pedro. Strange that it does not occur to the American navalists that other Powers are just as much interested in the open door in the Caribbean or in Central America as the United States is in the open door in the Orient. Suppose we para- phrase the preceding quotation somewhat as follows: Distant battle fleets are today powerless to enforce the open door principle in the Caribbean Sea and in Central America, for one nation has long since established hegemony over those regions, and has appropriated to itself the sole right to buy cheap, sell dear, and lend at high interest in a closed market. The closed door under the aegis of the Monroe Doctrine can be opened only when the Powers combine forces in the interest of international fair play. Surely, such a variation of Captain Talbot's sentences is not entirely impertinent. Yet the sentiment expressed therein is decidedly anachronistic. In these days, when the outlawry of war has come to occupy an important place in international thought, no one but ultra-navalists and ultra- militarists believes the arbitrament of force to be a justifiable means of maintaining one nation's economic interests in another's jurisdiction against such monopolistic policy as may be concocted by a third nation in the same jurisdiction. The only means that conforms to the best spirit of the age

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June 25, 1930] The Nation 729 would be consultation, conciliation, or arbitration such as is envisaged by the Pact of Paris. In any event no single nation has a right to set itself up as the world's sole judge of what constitutes the open door — as the world's only custodian of international justice. The testimony before the Senate committee is bewilder- ing, discouraging, disquieting. No one listening to these voices can help wondering whether America was sincere in initiating the Kellogg pact or was only jesting when she declared so solemnly that the same pact should be made the starting-point in the deliberations of the London conference. Washington, which six months ago cooed the song of peace, is now singing the hymn of war couched in the naval jargon of tonnage, and gun caliber, and cruising radius, and naval bases, and what not. And the world is at a loss to know which of the two Washingtons represents real America. American Sports and American Life By JOHN R. TUNIS ~^ VERYONE who gets behind the scenes of American |"i sporting life must be struck with the fact that there -* — ' is amazingly little real sport left in the United States today. Over-organization has throttled the real spirit of sport, the feeling of the game for the game's sake. It has substituted in place of this spirit not merely a desire for victory, but an alarming insistence on winning. Laugh if you will at the misguided idealism which sent our fathers out to die for dear old Yale; at least it was idealism. There is precious little idealism of any sort at present when a squad is asked to go out and die for a $15,000-a-year head coach. The American attitude toward athletics is simply a part of the general attitude toward life in this country, the belief that civilization consists chiefly in bigger and better Buicks. Who is a success in the United States? The scientist work- ing alone on a cure for some disease that has baffled the research of centuries? The unknown school teacher who struggles toward death on an insufficient salary, without praise, without thanks, without reward, performing year in year out one of the most important tasks in the nation? The country doctor, underpaid, frequently not paid at all, work- ing twenty hours a day? No, the real success in this country is the president of the soap factory, or the man who makes a half-million in half an hour on the stock market. When we wish to know about a man we do not inquire about his char- acter, his intellectual or artistic integrity; we ask what kind of car he drives. "He is a ten-thousand-a-year man." Notice how this attitude is exactly paralleled in our sport. Decent and sincere sportsmen, of whom there are many thousands in the ranks of the sporting throng, pass unobserved. The unfortunate scrub who takes his punish- ment each afternoon for the sake of the varsity without benefit of trainers, doctors, rubbers, masseurs, dietitians, and the other indispensables of the star player ; the pacemaker for the champion half-miler ; the number 4 on the third fresh- man crew — no one knows or cares about them. Here the success element enters into our sports. What young American cannot name you the two all-American ends, or has not by heart the names and prodigies of our golf and tennis cham- pions? Never mind if the two all-American ends should happen to be known by players the country over as the two dirtiest men in the game, never mind if the champion should be celebrated among his acquaintances as a point pincher without a peer. After all, are they not champions? To descend from the general to the particular, who got the praise from the mob — Knute Rockne, the Notre Dame coach who turned out a championship eleven that played before a half-million people, made a half-million dollars and a joke of an institution of learning, or Arthur Sampson of Tufts, an unknown coach of a small college in New Eng- land, who actually made his men love football and taught them even to enjoy daily practice? Who received the ap- plause and the congratulations — Frank Hunter who, pushed aside at the last minute in an important Davis Cup match by the orders of an ignorant noncombatant superior, re- fused to sulk but stayed with the team, practicing and encouraging them up to the final minute, or Henri Cochet, the amateur tennis player with sporting-goods stores in Lyons and Paris, who defeated all opponents and became the cham- pion of 1929? Sitting on the sidelines at a big athletic contest recently, I expressed a timid surprise to the veteran sports reporter beside me at the attitude of the numerous officials. They were as merciless and rude as subway guards at the rush hour; they bellowed and delivered their pronunciamentos with the manners — and the voices — of traffic cops. At my surprised ejaculation when one of these gentry in the white golf pants which are apparently the insignia of the profes- sion was more than necessarily brutal, I was told by my companion: "Aw . . . they hafta be hard-boiled or the game'd get away from 'em." The same excuse the traffic cop gives when he draws the car up to the curb and proceeds to insult the victims to the extent of the traffic-cop vocabulary. But the closest analogy between American life and American sport is perhaps to be found in our prohibition law. Here is a law which no one obeys or makes any pretense of obeying, a law which was voted for but which everyone openly flouts. Yet the American public, as it tolerates pro- hibition and its attendant abuses, tolerates our ridiculous system of amateurism with exactly the same faults. The hypocrisy is as apparent in the one case as the other. Thus with prohibition we have federal authorities often cognizant of bootlegging trips, policemen on duty enjoying their liquor with the rest of the citizenry, wet goods smug- gled in at every turn and on every frontier, and all the other amazing paradoxes of this law. So, too, in sport, you have an amateur law voted for by the constituted majority and upheld by no one. The governors of the various sports know perfectly well that the athletes are taking money on the side; the recent Carnegie report showed many of the football players in the colleges to be as plainly bought and paid for as the players on the New York Giants. And as you have liquor smuggled into the country you have athletes smuggled into the colleges and paid to stay there. All this the heads

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730 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 of the colleges know; but they subscribe to the subterfuges by which the athletes are rewarded because — well, because it is good publicity for Dear Old Blank to have a winning team. The officials of the various sporting associations may be said to correspond to the policemen; they know that the athletes under their aegis are breaking the amateur law in a dozen ways every day ; but they do nothing, for if the cham- pion is disqualified there will be no crowd to watch the championships, and if there is no crowd there will be no gate. Of course, a few hundred courageous sporting writers could do something toward influencing public opinion; but they seldom say anything, for like the politician who votes dry and makes money out of being wet, they too can draw a profit from the established order. "Huh, call that kid an amateur!" "Football ... a great, commercialized spec- tacle." These are the remarks you hear the sports writer make but do not often see in print. The current belief that all is for the best in American life has him choked intellec- tually. "Don't Sell America Short." So they don't sell America short — not, as is commonly supposed, because they are afraid for their jobs, but because anyone who is not a booster in stocks and sports today is looked on with intense suspicion. "Be constructive," says some jackass, which ren- dered into the vernacular means "Be flattering." And they are. The sports and athletics that we get, then, are not only the sports we deserve, they are the sports that a materialistic civilization would naturally bring in its train. You may not like the American idea of sports; but it suits the moving- picture masses, the Army-Notre Dame game thousands, to a T. After all, one shouldn't be pessimistic about these things. In a few hundred years some changes in our civiliza- tion and in our athletics are more than likely. And besides, didn't we break all possible track and field records, and records in every sport, during 1929? Didn't we get crowds of 110,000 out to see the big games? Didn't we sell more golf balls and polo sticks than any other nation last year? Something wrong with American sport? Come, come, don't be sacrilegious. Atlanta's Communists By WALTER WILSON Atlanta, June 10 SIX young Communists are held incomunicado with- out bail in Atlanta for trial, June 19, on charges car- rying the death penalty. Their crime was to hold an unemployment meeting of white and black workers and later a protest meeting against the Sherman (Texas) lynch- ings. They are held under an archaic law originally aimed at slave uprisings. In 1833 an act was passed by the Georgia legislature to guard against possible insurrection of slaves and "free per- sons of color." At the end of the Civil War agitators in the Southern States began raising the question of Negro rights. Friends of the Negro, many of them ex-slaves who had traveled the "underground railroad," came South intent upon turning the proclaimed emancipation of the slaves into fact and upon making the Negro fully cognizant of his new prerogatives. In North Carolina a Negro minister from Connecticut, together with a native Carolinian, organized an Equal Rights League and started a newspaper at Raleigh. Georgia also was invaded by the agitators, and the ex-slaves were singing : "We ain't agwine ter hoe the white fo'ks co'n no mo." The whites were alarmed. Stories of rape, arson, murder, and insurrection circulated in the press. A constitu- tional convention, meeting in 1865 at Milledgeville, Georgia, then the State capital, authorized the appointment of a com- mission to draw up tentative regulations establishing the relations of freedmen to the rest of society. In 1866 the legislature enacted the Freedmen's (Black) Code, denying suffrage to freedmen and applying to them the insurrection laws of 1833, and also punishing agitators, both white and black, who attempted to enlighten the freedmen concerning their constitutional rights. Only one case ever came into court under the insurrec- tion acts of 1866. In 1868 "John T. Gibson, a 'free person of color,' a preacher, was charged with an attempt to incite an insurrection by encouraging his congregation to attempt to rescue one Charles Fryer from jail." He was convicted without jury recommendation for mercy, and was therefore held liable to the death penalty. The Georgia Supreme Court, however, reversed the lower court on the ground that no penalty was provided for mere attempt to "incite." The legislature of 1871-72 accordingly passed an act prescribing the death penalty for even "inciting to" insurrection. This is the law under which the Communist organizers are on trial for their lives. The history of the cases in brief is as follows. A meet- ing of the unemployed was scheduled for Atlanta on March 6 as part of an international unemployed demonstra- tion. Negroes and whites were invited. Because of stormy weather locally, the gathering was postponed until March 9. When the meeting started, police under Captain Fain raided the hall and asked for the "boss." Joseph Carr, eighteen, of Wheeling, West Virginia, and W. M. Powers, twenty- four, of St. Paul, Minnesota, the father of two small chil- dren, were arrested and carried to police headquarters, being abused and threatened on the way. Both are Communist Party organizers. Robert H. Hart, a young Emory Uni- versity student who was presiding at the meeting, asked the audience to wait, stating that their twro fellow-workers would return soon. A man who was thought to be a detective threw a tear-gas bomb into the hall in order to break up the meeting. Meanwhile, the Chief of Police, after talking to Powers and Carr, released them, as he could find nothing to hold them on. They went back to the meeting, but by this time the audience had been driven out of the hall and had congregated near the doorway. The two organizers said : "We have been released and can hold our meeting. Come on in." At this point they were rearrested and held on police evidence for disorderly conduct and throwing a tear-

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June 25, 1930] The Nation 731 gas bomb. Cash bail of $100 each was furnished by Mr. Oliver C. Hancock, attorney for the International Labor Defense. On March 10 Carr and Powers were tried in the Recorder's Court before Judge Calloway on the original charge and also one of "spieling" (based on a city ordinance forbidding merchants to call customers from the streets into shops). The charges were all dismissed, but the accused were now held on $1,500 each to the Fulton County Grand Jury on the present charge of "attempting to incite insur- rection and circulating insurrectionary literature." It was the fertile brain of Assistant Solicitor General John H. Hudson, of Fulton County, which conceived the idea of trying the Communists under the ancient statute. According to a United Press interview of May 31, he "will demand the death penalty for every Communist who comes into the State and publicly preaches their doctrines." Indictments were returned and a date for trial was set, but when Carr and Powers appeared for trial the prosecution announced : "Not ready." The sheriff was ordered to hold the accused without bail because of the possible capital sentence involved. They have been confined in the Fulton County Tower ever since. On May 21 a local protest meeting against the Sher- man (Texas) lynching was called by the American Negro Labor Congress, with Gilmer Brady of New York as the principal speaker. About fifty persons, mostly colored, attended the meeting. Just as Brady began speaking, the meeting was broken up by the police. Six persons were arrested on charges similar to those against Carr and Powers. They included two white girls — Ann Burlak, eighteen, In- ternational Labor Defense organizer, from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Mary Dalton, twenty, of New York, organizer for the National Textile Workers' Union; two Negroes — Gilmer Brady, twenty-five, of New York, organ- izer for the American Negro Labor Congress, and Henry Story, twenty-three, an Atlanta printer; and Julius Klarin and his wife, local whites. On the intercession of a local politician the Klarins were released, though they are still actively carrying on work along the same lines. The grand jury, on May 30, returned indictments against Story, Brady, Miss Burlak, and Miss Dalton, and the trial was set for June 19. At present Joe Carr is in the death cell, while Powers, Brady, Story, Miss Dalton, and Miss Burlak are being held incomunicado — all without bail. The Interna- tional Labor Defense, whose local attorney is Mr. O. C. Hancock, is in charge of the defense. The American Civil Liberties Union has retained Mr. W. A. McClellan, of Macon, Georgia, to assist. Both attorneys think the situation critical in the extreme because of the issues of religion, race, and "outside meddling" that are almost sure to be intro- duced into the case. It is to be feared that there will be many difficulties in the way of securing a fair trial. In the indictment the prisoners are charged with cir- culating a long list of "insurrectionary" literature which was found either on their persons or in their office, or had been advertised by them. The list includes the "Communist Manifesto," Lenin's "The State and Revolution," and many other books, papers, and pamphlets. Both the "Manifesto" and "The State and Revolution" are in the circulating room of the Atlanta (Carnegie) Public Library, and the "Mani- festo" constitutes required reading in a class in social reform in Emory University, located just outside Atlanta in De Kalb County. When this latter fact was called to the attention of Prosecutor Hudson, he intimated that some ground for legal action could probably be whipped into shape against the Emory professor by an alert public attorney. Meanwhile stories of "communal women, 'nigger' equality, atheism, outside meddlers," and the like are being circulated in Atlanta to inflame the common mind against these six young enthusiasts for promulgating their strange new religion, which includes equality for Negroes and organization for the textile workers of Atlanta. According to Miss Mary Barker, of Atlanta, president of the Ameri- can Federation of Teachers, Jerome Jones, editor of the Atlanta Labor Journal, Carl Karston, secretary of the Atlanta Federation of Trades, and others, the cases are plainly persecutions. "The National Textile Workers' Union was organizing the employees of the ^ulton Bag and Cotton Mills here," these laborites say, "and the textile interests became frightened. The same tactics will be used against the American Federation of Labor as sure as we continue in our apathy." The young woman secretary of the local branch of the International Labor Defense has been warned to cease her activities or leave town. Gilmer Brady reports that he has been threatened by police and others that they will get him either way — electric chair if convicted, mob if released. In connection with these charges, the facts of the arrests deserve attention. In one instance the Communists were arrested before anybody had made a speech. No literature was distributed and there was no incitement to insurrection. In the other, one speech was being made denouncing unem- ployment. "Atlanta police," says the Macon Telegraph (founded in 1826), "could hear the same speech any day in the Senate from the Democratic side. It is no incitement to insurrection." The Telegraph goes on: It strikes us that despite the ancient statute the Com- munists have some rights on their side ; they have the rights of free, lawful, orderly assemblage. There is no evidence so far that the meeting was unlawful or disorderly, except as the police made it so. As long as they do not violate such sedition laws as we have, they have a right to speak even to urging membership in the Communist Party. No matter what the purpose of the statutes of insur- rection that still grace the statute books of some Southern States, no matter who is back of the present prosecutions of the Atlanta cases, there is little doubt as to the future role of the laws if the State is successful in using them in the present cases. In 1919 Marvin L. Rich, Charlotte organizer for the United Textile Workers' Union (an American Fed- eration of Labor organization), was indicted under an old North Carolina law of 1868. Soon after the Marion kill- ings last summer, Alfred Hoffman, organizer, and Lawrence Hogan, striker, were indicted under the same act of 1868 for "attempting to overthrow the government of North Carolina." In Atlanta, Georgia, six young Communists held orderly meetings and organized textile workers. For this crime they are being held in rigid imprisonment and threatened with death under an obsolete law of 1866. To what other fields can these old laws be applied ? Small wonder that ex-Senator Hardwick, of Georgia, calls them "dangerous."

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732 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 In the Driftway THE Drifter's plea for good bread has not fallen on deaf ears. From Massachusetts one who signs him- self, simply but eloquently, A Brother Sufferer, writes as follows : You're right about this bakers' "sandwich loaf." The only serious objection I have to your objections is that they are not half virulent and vitriolic enough. When I am served at home with the abominable powdery chaff, I insist on designating it as "dog bread" — albeit I apologize to all dogdom therefor. I'm told that a chap in a small town called Vineyard Haven, in Massachusetts, was given some loaves of it by a grocer friend to feed to his forty-odd pullets. Actually, they all died. In the old town of Edgar- town, Massachusetts, those natives whose wives are too lazy to cook are a little better off, for there are so many local, private-home bakeries that the regular bakeshops are obliged, their proprietors ruefully complain, to eschew the ordinary bakers' recipes. Your article deserves the highest commendation by all those whose epicurean instincts have not quite died. It is splendid to see the signs of revolt appearing among the intelligentsia. "Do not be mystified, though," continues A Brother Suf- ferer, "as to why the American public puts up with the most accursed stuff. It is due to the so-called emancipation of women." Well, perhaps it is, but the Drifter fails to see in that recrimination any practical suggestion toward the im- provement of our bread. The emancipation of women and the machine age look pretty permanent at this writing. We shall have to achieve good bread in spite of them. # » * * * MEANWHILE those who suffer from the lack of good bread will continue to solve the problem by devious ways that lead to Little Italy or to some "little white shop" like that described in a letter from another sympathizer and another New Englander: Let me say [says Mrs. Florence L. C. Kitchelt of New Haven] that in our family our bread is better than our automobile! Our loaf is as large as a cartwheel and provides excellent motor power — for walking. Nor do we, being busy people, make it ourselves. We buy it at a bakery. It is so heavy that we carry it home on a trolley. It has that highly prized sponginess and chewiness of the grains of the field. It is no processed lily, but a rich brown substance. The people in the trolley-car sniff the air, and look our way. But this bread is not for the heedless. Only an ex- ploring drifter may hope to find it. Occasionally its imita- tion is found in shops on Main Street, but beware! It is as different from the genuine as the cowbird's egg in the bluebird's box on our oak tree. How is it to be acquired? A secret to be disclosed. Pass by the windows of fashion and the big hotel. Trail down the back and unadorned byways where the immigrant Jews live in old houses cheek by jowl with barnlike fac- tories. Amidst the clutter of papers, persons, and pickles shines a little white shop, its windows heaped with every size and shape of breadstuffs, its rear door opening into a room of great ovens. "A five-pound loaf of pumpernickel, please." You will receive a hot and fragrant mound, made of whole wheat and whole rye, its center slices twelve inches long, half as wide, and as thick as you please. A shining brown, seeded, snappy crust serves as an envelope, the whole both grainy and brainy. The origin of pumpernickel is simple. One lowly Nicholas, a dolt, fell down with a thump, or "pump" as the Teutons have it. So, in the humor of Westphalia, rye bread in all its heftiness was christened after Nicholas. But the Jews have bred a better namesake. It is so good that many a Gentile has adopted it, and the Dean of our Episcopal Divinity School carries home almost daily, for his wife, his children, and his students, that forty-cent mound with a five-pound look. The Drifter Correspondence A Quaker Memorial To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: Chicago, in a competition of 113 architects, recently awarded a prize of $20,000 for the design of a vast war memorial for the shores of Lake Michigan. Harvard, in the Bulletin, published for her forward-looking alumni, announces the growth of the fund for the Harvard war memorial. Mean- while little bronze soldiers carrying little bronze guns guard the Town Hall greens of forty-eight States of the Union, to warn us of America's hourly peril from invasion. In America there is not one completed memorial to commemorate the practical work of peacemakers, or to visualize the spirit of conciliation that stirs in the world today. The Quakers for a hundred years have been the American pioneers in interpreting the ideal of peace in terms of active good-will, yet no pioneers' monument has been raised to their conquests. The American Society of Friends has a membership of a little more than 100,000 persons. This organization, equivalent in numbers to a small American town, sent 600 volunteers to France in 1917. Its work in village reconstruc- tion, evacuating refugees under heavy shell fire, removing insane to safety, feeding, nursing, buying from our government ma- terials from army dumps to convert into houses, creating and giving to the Department of the Marne the Maternity Hospital of Chalons — all this in a way paralleled the work of the other relief agencies that had begun to make France the center of sympathetic reconstruction. The Friends then turned to Ger- many, which was under the blackest cloud of hostile suspicion. There they found a terrible food shortage. Jane Addams, Dr. Hamilton, and the Quakers' medical emissary, Dr. Haven Emerson, reported back to the Quakers at home that a large proportion of the child population of Germany was becoming crippled, dwarfed, and tubercular from the diseases of mal- nutrition. In 1919-20 almost a thousand Friends had rallied to a German child-feeding campaign. The Quakers gathered to themselves and trained a vastly larger force of other volun- teer workers to struggle against the rapid advance of starvation. It was ten years ago, in the summer of 1920, that one million German children were fed each day at the Friends' soup kitchens. When zeal for relief work had faded out every- where else the Quaker volunteers stayed on, pumping life and blood into the famished bodies of German children and expectant mothers. For six years the spirit that lifted them through these years of grinding labor, combined with great administrative ability, made it possible for this whole child- feeding campaign to be accomplished with the expenditure of only $7,750,000 in money and food supplies. But it was the swiftness and fearlessness of the Friends' decision to go at

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June 25, 1930] The Nation 733 once to Germany in her defeat and humiliation that had a value no one has computed. President Ebert, thanking the Society of Friends in 1925 in a public address, said : Not only have many, many German children been saved from hunger and long illness through . . . material aid, but still greater than this is the moral value of the work. We will never forget that America, against all opposition, reached out to our children the hand of friend- liness in the time of greatest need. A German teacher wrote : It will not be easy for you to realize what all this means to us. For years we were cut off from everything; for years . . . nothing . . . but hatred. Now, suddenly, you come to us and show us that behind the world of political strife the real world still exists, the world of brotherhood and love. Remembering these things, six years ago several Americans — not Quakers — a German artist, a Swiss wood-carver, a Russian metal-worker, began to build a memorial to keep the Quakers' long fight a living memory. An American architect, builder of many libraries, gave his conception of a design for the Altar of Good-Will; the half-fed European carvers gave more work than their commissions required; Samuel Yellin beat out on his anvil symbols of good-will for the Friends. With sweat and rejoicing the building fund grew, dollar by dollar. A Negro poet gave five dollars; the Christus of Oberam- mergau, from his gaunt old purse, sent more. It was possible to order our bas-relief carvings a little faster from Bavaria. Through lean years and years a little less lean $10,000 was gradually gathered in money and gifts of labor. Now all the original carvings and the metal work for the memorial are finished. We are almost at the tenth anniversary of the feeding of the children of Germany, when a million cups were held up each day for soup from the Quakers' caldrons. To complete the memorial $7,500 is still lacking. Curiously, this amount is almost exactly one one-thousandth part of what the Quakers spent, in money, upon their child-feeding campaign. Contributions may be sent to me, care of H. F. Fox, River- side, Connecticut. Riverside, Court., May 23 Louise Herrick Wall Justice Holmes Dissents To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The rebellion of the Senate in the recent debates on the confirmation of the Hughes and Parker appointments has just been met by a similar outbreak within the domains of the Supreme Court itself. None other than our beloved Mr. Justice Holmes has expressed himself on the court's deification of the Fourteenth Amendment in terms that for bluntness and frankness have no counterpart in the history of American con- stitutional law. The occasion for this unprecedented and important declara- tion was the case of Baldwin v. Missouri, in which the prevail- ing opinion of Mr. Justice McReynolds held that the State of Missouri did not have the power, that it was a violation of the "due-process clause," to impose an inheritance tax on a bank account or a negotiable bond or note within the State owned by a non-resident decedent. Justices Holmes, Brandeis, and Stone (would the name of Roberts be found here?) dissented, Mr. Justice Holmes speaking for the dissent in the following scathing language: I have not yet adequately expressed the more than anx- iety that I feel at the ever-increasing scope given to the Fourteenth Amendment in cutting down what I believe to be the constitutional rights of the States. As the de- cisions now stand I see hardly any limit but the sky to the invalidating of those rights if they happen to strike a majority of the court as for any reason undesirable. I cannot believe that the amendment was intended to give us carte blanche to embody our economic or moral be- liefs in its prohibitions. ... Of course the words "due process of law" if taken in their literal meaning have no application to this case. . . . We . . . should be slow to construe the clause ... as committing to the court, with no guide but the court's own discretion, the validity of whatever laws the States may pass. Is this not refreshing? Such straightforwardness could only come from a man like Holmes. This scintillating opinion will be the polestar for countless opinions to come — and unless the Parker rejection is truly the sign of a new era they will all be dissenting opinions. New York, May 28 Charles Looker <( Forceful English" To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: In The Nation some weeks ago Heywood Broun undertook to belittle the Communists by saying they had "only two writers of forceful English in America." On important counts this is unworthy of Heywood Broun and violates the liberal tradition under which he proceeds. I could imagine that the poverty of the "commies" in the respect indicated is explained by an insufficient budget. No one knows better than you that expert writers and jesters of the fancy variety are for hire; even that they will leave particular adherencies in flocks for higher pay, as witness the Hearst- Pulitzer war when whole staffs migrated to the ocherous banners of the Western marauder. And this is by no means meant as a reflection upon the good names of the baneful one of the world today and the smaller fry of "independent" thinkers who through investment interests find less difficulty in developing the personal point of view. When all is said what is "forceful English"? In writing that is perhaps better understood by those more immediately concerned, namely, the unemployed, the Communists are ex- plaining unemployment as due to withholding, beyond the need and application of development capital, from producers and their useful colaborers the surplus value of production. I protest that they are saying something forceful. Provincetown, Mass., June 1 Bruce Rogers The Last, Worst Month To the Editor of The Nation : Sir: Your editorial comment on the sad case of John Santanella who attempted to escape from Sing Sing so near the expiration of his sentence brings to mind the following passage from Stendhal's "Love": If there were any period at which, according to vulgar theories, called reasonable ones by ordinary people, prison can be bearable, it would be when, after several years of confinement, a poor prisoner is only separated by a month or two from the moment at which he is to regain his liberty. But crystallization [the italics are Stendhal's] ordains otherwise. The last month is woi than the previous three years. At Melun prison M. d'Hotelans has seen several long-term prisoners die of impatience within a few months of the day which was to give them back their liberty. North Rose, N. Y ., May 26 L. J. Salter

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734 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 Posthumous Libel To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: In The Nation of May 28 Mr. Villard, in his review of the Means book, uses the words "were there libel laws to protect the dead in this country as abroad." Whatever may be the law of the District of Columbia to which he refers, that of New York is very clear. Section 1340 of the Penal Law pro- vides as follows (italics mine) : A malicious publication, by writing, printing, picture, effigy, sign, or otherwise than by mere speech, which ex- poses any living person, or the memory of any person deceased, to hatred, contempt, ridicule, or obloquy, or which causes, or tends to cause any person to be shunned or avoided, or which has a tendency to injure any person, corporation, or association of persons, in his or their busi- ness or occupation, is a libel. New York, May 28 Benjamin Tuska An English Subscriber Speaks To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: As an English subscriber, I follow your comments on things British with added interest. Your attitude on India, I beg to submit, shows a lack of appreciation of the realities of the situation and also an absence of knowledge of even the most salient points of Indian development since the war which are surprising. Again, on page 613 of your issue of May 28, you give a wholly wrong impression of the Egyptian situation. The ^5 I am a modern, sophisticated person, yet I AM AFRAID OF HELL And so are you! The fear of Hell was driven into us, and only a full, free, and outspoken discussion of the whole religious question can save the coming generation from our fear. For that reason I hail with joy the bravest, most pungent and powerful book in years: Treatise on the Gods By H. L. MENCKEN A best-seller in every city in America $3.00 at all bookshops ALFRED • A ' KNOPF ■ PUBLISHER, N. Y. ^s^^sg^s^^s^^sg^s^^sgl Egyptians have no share in the administration of the Sudan; they want it, and that is the crux of the whole matter. The British are endeavoring to lead the Sudanese to self-govern- ment (or are dominating them, as you would put it) and share the administration with them to a small degree. The Sudanese and the Egyptians are separate races and that is what your comment fails to appreciate. New York, May 25 E. Williamson Soldier and Newspaperman To the Editor of The Nation: Sir: The marine officer mentioned in Mr. Villard's article on the Associated Press is General F. E. Evans, commandant of the Garde d'Ha'iti as well as the correspondent in Haiti for the Associated Press. While I do not uphold the practice of having a partisan act as a newspaper correspondent there is something to be said in favor of General Evans. Although he was often charged with the duty of arresting Haitian newspapermen and other political offenders he performed this function without the usual odious- ness that characterizes police action. Under General Evans's command the Garde d'Haiti has earned the respect of a large body of anti-Occupationists. A few weeks ago I visited Haiti on a newspaper mission. When I met General Evans I found a well-mannered, sensible fellow. He did not assume any military arrogance, and in his answers to queries gave uncolored information which did not always vindicate the Occupation. General Evans's A. P. dis- patches carried no animus; they drew a picture of Haiti which, if it was incomplete, was as accurate as he could make it. I believe that he displayed inordinate honesty and fairness in his treatment of Haitians — considering, of course, his oath to the American government and his high office in the gendarmerie. One of the warmest impressions made by any person in Haiti came from this officer. It is to the credit of the Occupation that such a gentleman was placed in charge of prisons, com- munications, traffic, military intelligence, and fire control. Incidentally, General Evans is as much a newspaperman as a soldier. He formerly was on the staff of the New York Sun. New York, May 15 Don Glassman Contributors to This Issue K. K. Kawakami is the Washington correspondent of the Osaka Mainichi. John R. Tunis is a sports writer for the New York Evening Post. Walter Wilson is a Southerner who has made a special investigation of the Atlanta Communist cases for the American Civil Liberties Union. Stanley J. Kunitz is the author of a volume of poems, "Intellectual Things." Granville Hicks is assistant professor of English at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Eda Lou Walton is assistant professor of English at Washington Square College, New York University. E. Boyd Barrett, author of "While Peter Sleeps," was a member of the Jesuit order for twenty years. Horace Gregory will publish this fall "Chelsea Rooming House," a book of verse. George E. G. Catlin has recently published "A Study of the Principles of Politics." When anting to advertiser! please mention The Nation :

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Books, Films, Drama Skull of Ecstasy By STANLEY J. KUNITZ Five dewy russets and a hill's sweet curve Burst in his forehead with a rainbow-spray Of atoms; tender phantoms of the nerve Melted in unrevolving light one day. Now that his heart is quiet, let him climb Over and under the mind ; catch in his skein The shapes of things interior to time, Hewn out of chaos when the Pure was plain. Used bees with golden bellies ripped, be still. The bitter spider ravels out his wit Deep in the grated dungeon of the eye Where old gods shaggy with gray lichen sit Like fragments of the antique masonry Of heaven : snared by five russets and a hill. Emerson Mauroisized Emerson: The Enraptured Yankee. By Regis Michaud. Trans- lated from the French by George Boas. Harper and Brothers. $4. THIS, I suppose, is a good biography of its kind. It im- pressed the Abbe Dimnet, M. Edouard Herriot, and M. Henri Bergson, whose tributes are carried on its jacket; and Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn writes an approving preface for it. The book, indeed, revp-.ls admirable narrative skill; its portraits and incidents are handled dramatically and vividly; its prose is graceful and sometimes affecting. M. Michaud, I doubt not, has read his Emerson through, and he reveals a knowledge of minor figures and of our national mind and history that in a Frenchman is remarkable. The very first sentence, however, warns us that our biog- raphy is to be discreetly Actionized, that M. Michaud is a dis- ciple of his compatriot M. Maurois: In Boston, two steps from the house of Benjamin Franklin, on May 25, 1803 (one year before the corona- tion of Napoleon at Notre Dame), the blue eyes of a little boy opened to the light. May — the late and violent spring of America! Pink maple buds give place to pretty tri- angular leaves. The elm (Ulmus americanus) sways in the wind its harps and lyres. The bluebird, arriving with the snowflakes of the last blizzard, has begun to make its nest under the roof of the old shed. The American thrush tunes its flute in the cedars. The American redbreast . . . And so on. And a few pages farther on more of the same: On an Indian summer night flooded with lingering warmth, serenity, beauty, abandon, mirage, when the fields of New England were full of goldenrod and when maple woods were more resplendent than the purple of kings, Ralph was conceived. M. Michaud appears to have had unusual sources of infor- mation. Had he consulted the family physician? Did he secure that day's weather reports to make sure the night was not rainy and chilly? This purple padding, when it is done with caution and skill, as it often is by a Strachey, may have its own attraction, but there are two serious objections to it: it contributes nothing essential to the knowledge of the intelligent reader (who can fill in his own birds and weather), and it may lead that reader to distrust a biography through his inability to know exactly when an author is reporting reasonably well-established facts and when he is merely drawing upon his imagination. One's sus- picions of M. Michaud's biography in particular increase when one observes the liberties that he sometimes takes with chrono- logical order. One would gather the impression from this vol- ume, for example, that Margaret Fuller edited the Dial after her work on the Tribune, and that Fort Sumter was fired on toward the end of the Civil War. More serious is the patronizing tone that M. Michaud consistently takes toward his subject. He is not above cheap witticisms at Emerson's expense. Thus when the sage was in Paris during the revolution of 1848 he was "slightly intoxi- cated" by the city: "It gave him the effect of lemon soda, the equivalent of champagne for a Yankee." When Emerson lectures in the West, he is an "intrepid peddler of the ideal," and so on. The Emerson that emerges from these pages, in brief, is griev- ously diluted. His ideas are sometimes watered down to the point where they lose all meaning and savor. What we get is an amusing and sometimes touching portrait of a Yankee tran- scendentalism full of dreams and naive optimism; what we miss is any profound recognition of Emerson's significance either as a literary artist or as a philosophic force. Slovenly proofreading has been responsible for such errors as Carlisle for Carlyle, defied for deified, casualty for causality. Henry Hazlitt Mystery and Mystification The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson. By Genevieve Tag- gard. Alfred A. Knopf. $4. THE position which Mrs. Bianchi takes — that the world has no right to know the identity of Emily Dickinson's lover and that the desire to learn his name is merely a matter of cheap curiosity — is, as has been said before and as must be said again and again, extraordinarily objectionable. It assumes both that an artist may be regarded as family property and that the facts of an artist's life are irrelevant to the appre- ciation of his work. The first assumption is arrogant and stupid. The second might possibly be defended, but surely not by one who has written a biography of the poet in question. If any fact of Emily Dickinson's life is important to the world in general, it is precisely the fact that Mrs. Bianchi makes such a show of concealing. To understand the growth of the poet's mind we need to know something of the mind of the man whom she loved and renounced. If Mrs. Bianchi knows his name she is under heavy obligations to reveal it. If she does not she should admit her ignorance and lend her assistance to every earnest effort to discover the truth. Her present attitude, which apparently involves complete unwillingness to cooperate with a biographer of independent spirit, is a monstrous barrier to the intelligent appreciation and criticism of the poet whose apostle Mrs. Bianchi asserts herself to be. One result of this obstructionist attitude is apparent in Genevieve Taggard's '"Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson." It has forced Miss Taggard, whose gifts and interests would nor- mally limit her functions to those of the interpretative critic and biographer, to become a literary Hawkshaw, and it has made her book, which would otherwise be unified in tone and purpose, a combination of creative character portrayal and pe- dantic sleuthing. The results of the sleuthing are, no doubt, interesting, and they may briefly be summarized. A friend of

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736 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 the Dickinsons, who insists that her name be concealed, swears that she was told by Lavinia Dickinson, Maggie the servant, and Mrs. A. B. H. Davis that the man Emily loved was the Reverend George Gould. Another person, also anonymous, states that Lavinia told her the same. Aside from these asser- tions, Miss Taggard's case for Gould closely resembles that which Josephine Pollitt made for Lieutenant Hunt, and the evidence is no stronger in one case than the other. Miss Tag- gard has not disposed with any certainty of either Lieutenant Hunt or the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, and her minute examination of all records connected with Dr. Gould has failed to find any confirmation of her correspondents' claims. The strongest defense of her position lies in the fact that one can see little chance that her authorities could be mistaken and no reason for their lying. So much has to be said about the question of Emily's lover because, until it is settled, that question has an interest out of proportion to its intrinsic importance. Nevertheless, it should be made clear that Miss Taggard's book, in even greater degree than Miss Pollitt's, derives its value from qualities other than the accuracy of its detective work. It is more successful than Miss Pollitt's book, both in its evocation of Emily's life and in its criticism of her poetry. The attempt to define the attitude which lay behind the poetry is suggestive if not wholly satisfying, and Miss Taggard's remarks on specific themes and methods are uncommonly discerning. As a whole the book is by far the best that we have on Emily Dickinson. There is perhaps only one person who could improve on it, and that is Genevieve Tag- gard herself if she were given the proper resources, including all available data on Emily's life and the manuscripts of her poems. One's attention comes back in the end to Mrs. Bianchi. The situation is this: apparently less than half of Emily Dick- inson's poems have been published; those that have been pub- lished have been edited arbitrarily and perhaps stupidly; impor- tant facts regarding her life have been concealed. This is a situation so appalling as to be almost ridiculous. Here is America's greatest poet, and here is a large and appreciative audience for her poetry placed entirely at the mercy of a woman who, much evidence goes to show, is unworthy of such a respon- sibility. In countries whose inhabitants are both more demon- strative and more deeply concerned about literature than we there would be riots and mass meetings. In the United States we calmly invite Mrs. Bianchi to be the principal speaker at centennial celebrations. Granville Hicks Pleasant Poetry Fire for the Night. By Babette Deutsch. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $2. Fifty Poems. By Lord Dunsany. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.50. The Wind in the Cedars. By Glenn Ward Dresbach. Henry Holt and Company. $2. IF poetry is a skilful manipulation of words and meter, an ability to paint word pictures, if poetry is an easily com- posed and pleasantly read lyricism and very little else, then Babette Deutsch, Lord Dunsany, and Glenn Ward Dresbach are authentic poets. If, on the other hand, poetry is passionate realization of experience, if it is interpretative of contemporary scenes or of any milieu, if it is the sincere expression of emo- tion, then these are not authentic poets. Of the three Miss Deutsch has the largest range, although Lord Dunsany is equally skilful in technique. All three write the type of verse, popularly defined as poetry, most frequently printed in maga- zines, most acceptable to publishers because it soothes and it sells. It is a kind of somniferous eloquence which lulls the senses and the mind. One reads it; it sounds well, but it means very little. It is too facile and too completely apart from any complete realization, emotional or intellectual. Of strikingly original poetry, poetry arising out of necessity, most readers are afraid; of this familiar and pleasant poetry they are not afraid at all. They find it expressive of their momentary moods and com- pletely unilluminating of life. And this is what they choose when they choose poetry at all. But the results of this type of verse-writing are rather appalling. After reading a few such pleasant books of verse one reaches the conclusion that a poem may be composed by picking out and combining stanzas of poems by various poets. Here is such a poem from stanzas written by the three poets under scrutiny. Suppose we call it The Heart at Autumn Season. Gray among dead leaves deep The sad November fires Burn in the land asleep All among old desires. And rested there, the rover, Safe with that shape alone, Unharmed, unfrightened, over The gentle heart of stone. The crimson leaf has fallen After the shining thing That slid from it and glistened Down like a silver wing. So in this autumn of our love, My heart, night being at its noon, Woke, startled, and began to move On the cold roadways of the moon. All this is a little unfair, but one can grow so tired of mere words: "pines that cool the grass with shadow spray . . . under a hot sky as blue as Persian tile"; "afternoon edges toward evening like a tired stallion snuffing the yellow grain that the road spreads before the bin of sunset" — all very pretty, all very fanciful, but not very important. Miss Deutsch has, in her volume, some poems original in their conception — Pithecan- thrope, for example, or the Nation prize poem, Thoughts at Year's End — but one wishes there were more of those and fewer like this: NARCISSUS Pale as translucent wax, intense and frail, Whiteness of stars, poised in immaculate flame, Ivory fire, unflickeringly the same, Holding a cup red-rimmed ; the elfin Grail Wherefore the sons of Oberon wear mail, And vainly, — O rapt flower, whose antique name Remembers beauty loving without shame Its own adorable image doomed to fail! O incense-breath'd, dove-breasted flame, O star Caught in a trance of sweetness still as frost, Shall then your candid perfectness be lost, Fade, wither, drop away, and leave no scar Even, to show what's gone, nor petulant ghost, Unhoused with innocency's avatar? "Caught in a trance of sweetness" is exactly a definition of this kind of verse. And from the West, a stern, dramatic land, Mr. Dresbach writes simpering lyrics like this: When a spring goes dry in the desert More than the spring is lost, Death creeps in the little willows, Sands fill the trails that crossed. Doves come and blink in wonder To find no silver pool — Only the cracked bowl, only The cattle that stare and drool.

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June 25, 1930] The Nation 737 Such rhythm would ruin any serious poem. As for Lord Dunsany, whose literary reputation in general is high, he is, as a poet, still in the tradition of the minor English poets and without great originality. For example: IN A WILD-ROSE GARDEN An evening like an opal, The air one scent of May, A nightingale beginning To practice at his lay. A moth along a laneway Of air goes like a ghost, A sense grows deeper round me Of something, near, but lost. Eda Lou Walton The Jesuits The Power and Secrets of the Jesuits. By Rene Fiilop-Miller. Translated by F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait. The Viking Press. $5. MR. FULOP-MILLER seems to have grasped the wis- dom of the Jesuit Gracian's maxims: "Leave others in doubt about your attitude . . . what is likely to bring disfavor get others to do" (p. 472) ; for he leaves readers uncer- tain regarding his real views on most of the great questions connected with Jesuitism. Did Jesuits hold that the end justifies the means? Mr. Fiilop-Miller will only say that Jesuits did not "coin the maxim" and that "many Jesuit casuists hold that to whomsoever the end is permitted must also the necessary means be allowed, yet the qualification is always added that wrongful means are always to be deprecated" (p. 153). Did the Jesuits obey or disobey the brief, "Dominus ac Redemptor," by which Clement XIV suppressed the society in 1773? Mr. Fiilop-Miller shirks this question also, and contents himself with stating that "the Society of Jesus, notwithstanding all royal edicts and papal briefs, did not for one moment cease to exist" (p. 384). Only in regard to non-controversial matters such as art and literature does the author express himself clearly, as when he states that in these fields the Jesuits produced "only a few men of talent" (p. 424), and that "Jesuit literary criticism frequently bases its estimate of great imaginative writers not so much on their creative power as on their religious faith" (p. 465). The most interesting parts of this book are concerned with the picturesque exploits of Xavier, de Nobili, Ricci, Marquette, Possevino, and Parsons, the great Jesuit missionaries and "po- litical conspirators" (p. 26). But their exploits have been already recorded a thousand times, and in any case they are rather indicative than explanatory of "the power of the Jesuits." The long discussions of free will, philosophy, moral theology, atomization of morality, and confessional practice suggest the idea of a university thesis on ethics incorporated into this book on the Jesuits. Neither Part III nor Part IV helps a great deal toward elucidating the question : What is the secret of the Jesuits? The author is at his best when adroitly introducing apposite sayings of great men — Adams, Jefferson, Voltaire, and others — about the Jesuits, and when describing the curiosities of the Jesuit theater and ballet, but he has not half a dozen passages worth reading on the Spiritual Exercises or the Constitutions. No Jesuit could read Part I without discovering a hundred errors and inexactitudes. Mr. Fiilop-Miller shows (p. 23) that he has not taken the trouble to find out even what "a pro- fessed father's" status is. About the inner life of the Jesuits, and about such men as Acquaviva, who remade the society after Ignatius's day, he has not a word. When it comes to the touchy question of the relationship of Jesuitism with Christianity the author pleads an alibi. "The purely lay observer has no sort of qualification to enable him to judge whether the Jesuits in accommodating the demands of religion to the level of humanity and in utilizing worldly means for the attainment of religious ends are fulfilling or contraven- ing the real spirit of the gospel" (p. 475). He shifts on Dos- toevski the responsibility for the statement — a propos of Jesuit Catholicism — that "the mind which distorts Christianity by bringing it into harmony with the aims of this world destroys the whole meaning of Christianity." Mr. Fiilop-Miller holds that the actual political power of the church is due to the Jesuits, but we miss any allusion to the fact that the Papal-Mussolini pact was negotiated by Father Tacchi-Venturi, S. J., and that Jesuit interests were safe- guarded in that pact. He holds that "the rapid rise of neo- scholasticism" is due to the Jesuits, but does not explain their bitter opposition to its founder, Cardinal Mercier. He dwells largely on the achievements of modern German Jesuits to the exclusion of American and English Jesuits of recent times, like Tondorf and Martingdale. Among the modern German Jesuits whom he praises highly is the Father Friedrich Muckermann, whose cordial indorsement on the cover leaf declares that with Mr. Fxilop-Miller's book "the order may well be content." But one wonders whether many Jesuits will read with content that "with the Jesuits the confessional is to no small extent con- nected with politics" (p. 476). All save liberal Catholics will find themselves embarrassed at seeing in many cases the order glorified at the expense of the honor of the papacy and the good name of the Franciscans and Dominicans. This reviewer feels that Mr. Rene Fiilop-Miller has failed to cast any light upon the ultimate source of Jesuit power — its secret, namely — for he had not the means of approaching its hiding place. That hiding place is in the form and spirit of the routine life, religious and social, of the ordinary Jesuit com- munity. E. Boyd Barrett The Man on the Train Harm's Way. By Roberts Tapley. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. RICHARD ANNESLEY, the hero of '"Harm's Way," thinks of himself as a young man seated in a railroad train that is rushing head-on into an abyss. Throughout the course of the novel the analogy of the train is repeated again and again, unifying a series of events that carry the action of the story forward. What happens is this: Richard Annesley is expelled from college. Through the social connections of a well-to-do Uncle Baxter he obtains a job in a high-powered department store in Boston. By hard work he becomes editor of the Busy B, the store's house organ. Slowly, imperceptibly, the economic and social machinery that has made the store possible rises before him. He leaves the job to take another in a factory. Mean- while, Uncle Baxter, vigorous lodge member and patriotic busi- ness man, becomes involved in a scandal that concerns the gov- ernment at Washington. He is made a scapegoat of Adminis- tration politics and neatly stripped of everything he owns. He and Aunt Isabel come to live with Richard in the slums of Boston, and Richard is forced to deny himself the luxury of a love affair. He finds himself accepting another job in an adver- tising agency, very like the one he held as editor of the Busy B. And the train roars onward. So much for the story. The value of the novel lies in the ironic implications surrounding its episodes and in the person- ality of the author. Roberts Tapley has written a first novel of unusual interest and distinction. It would be an easy matter

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738 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 to compare his method with that of Proust. In fact, a bit too easy. For Tapley's hero is indelibly a product of our New England bourgeoisie, elevated for the past hundred years into all that we can claim for an American aristocracy. Whether Richard Annesley happens to be living in Boston or Paris, the young man is trapped. Highly sensitive and frustrated in all his efforts to exist as an individual human being, he is a perfect specimen of his class. In his conflict with contemporary civ- ilization a great part of his strength is dissipated in a war against his own inhibitions. He has the ability to perceive the monstrosities that dance behind the patterns of modern society, but he has no weapons with which to combat them, nor can he close his eyes to the spectacle before him. Here is an incident that shows Richard Annesley's relation to the people with whom he is thrown into contact. He is living in the same boarding-house that feeds and shelters his immediate superior in the department store, a Mr. Finsbury. Miss Fell, a clerk in the hosiery department, and Mr. Finsbury conceive a vague, timid, and altogether hopeless affection for each other. The situation is grotesque and very real. Here is Mr. Finsbury, a thin, prim, schoolmasterish sort of person who has vaulted himself into an executive position in the store, and there is Miss Fell, a fluttering, chattering, pathetically eager old maid. They are united by an equal faith in reciting the flowery success platitudes which have contributed much to Mr. Finsbury's self-confidence and will-power. Richard is unable to stop the progress of a ridiculous and futile tragedy. Miss Fell loses her job and becomes (more pathological than ever) a priestess in an evangelical temple. Mr. Finsbury, threatened with the loss of his position, commits suicide under the wheels of a subway train. Richard Annesley can do nothing more than to sit tight, safely riding to his destination, reading the banal and fascinat- ing literature of the advertising section of a magazine. Horace Gregory Is Unity Inevitable? The Unity of the World. By Guglielmo Ferrero. With a Foreword by Charles A. Beard. A. and C. Boni. $2.50. THE best part of this book is Professor Beard's foreword to it. But to the statement that "this book will be read with Plato and Aristotle," unless it be by mistake, the reviewer must demur. Professor Ferrero's treatment, for ex- ample, of the question of the freedom of the seas, which he con- siders one of the essentials of world unity, is quite incredibly vague considering the importance of the subject and his own great distinction as a scholar. One wonders what international lawyer he could find to indorse his apparent thesis that before the war everybody was of the blissful belief that no such thing as right of search existed, whereas since the war "it is known that one day Might will close the oceans." These are days when writers like broad canvases which must be viewed in their cosmic stretch from a distance and must not be judged on nuga- tory details. But much fine talk about "suddenly one day in 1914 the gates of the Apocalypse were thrown open" can scarcely excuse dangerous generalizations such as the above. It may be, however, that the present reviewer is congenitally unsympa- thetic to the apocalyptic school. Professor Ferrero, moreover, in his short chapters on great topics seems frequently to point out the obvious but to omit the generalization which is perhaps more valuable because less patent. The process of world Americanization is emphasized. The highly interesting consideration is left unnoticed that this is largely due to inventions which know no nationality and is not concurrent with political commitments. The revolution is about an attitude, a manner of life; almost for the first time it is not a crusade for an imperial city or for a nation. Again, Pro- fessor Ferrero rightly insists that the unity of the world is not to be won by forcing people to change their mother tongue. But no allusion is made to the interesting phenomenon of American immigrants desiring for prestige reasons to forget their ances- tral language and religion. In Europe, Professor Ferrero records, increase of natural prosperity in the artisan class seems to lead not as in America to a stable democratic republic, but only to a "messianic faith in the efficacy of world revolution" and an endeavor to encompass the destruction of their superiors. Even were this generalization, pregnant of reaction if true, to be accepted, it will not be forgotten that the American republic began not with stability, but with a certain rising against aristocratic privilege. That the difference between America and Europe may not be due to some temperamental deficiency of European workers but to the role played by the birth-rate and population pressure is not mentioned. Professor Ferrero's pessimism concerning the probable future of the educated class, much better discussed by Julien Benda, is suffused and justified by a fatalistic philosophy which has the appearance of profundity. The question whether the demo- cratic idea and the idea of progress contribute or not to the welfare of the human race "is unanswerable and useless, because our welfare has little to do with these great historic changes." Why anyone should accept or work for the democratic idea who does not think it will have a bearing on one's welfare is not made plain. However, if movements are inevitable, at least book readers need feel no obligation to think about them. Even Professor Ferrero, however, seems to welcome, as the bulwark of freedom, a world-uniting polymorphous democracy, too incapable of agreement to be capable of intolerance. The reviewer does not for a moment wish to appear to deny that the democratic movement has sprung out of environmental conditions, but that little of it which has been consciously con- nected with our psychological urge to pursue our own welfare is a little that matters mighty much. If, in brief, I turn to the present volume from such a great book as Dibelius's "Eng- land" or from Siegfried's admirable survey, "France," or from the excellent "Decline of Rome" and "Triumph of Christianity," by Professor Ferrero, himself a distinguished defender of liberty, honesty compels me to record that I feel unhappy. It is no good Professor Beard's telling me that I ought to feel exhilarated. George E. G. Catlin Books in Brief Medal Without Bar. By Richard Blaker. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. Orderly. By M. R. Werner. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. $2.50. In Spite of All Rejoicing. Anonymous. With an Introduction by Henry Williamson. Duffield and Company. $2.50. Here are three honest war books, documents worthy of a place among the growing list of serious books on the personal side of the war. Mr. Blaker's volume is a long novel built up on a vast accumulation of detail and telling the story of the artillery on the British front through the medium of a middle- aged subaltern, his fellow-officers, and his battery. The novel is thoroughly realistic. But through it runs a strain of senti- ment— the theme of man's fundamental brotherhood with man under suffering and fear. Mr. Werner's book is strictly auto- biographical— a lucid, undramatic account of his experiences as a soldier in a unit »f the American medical corps attached to the British army for two unforgettable years. For the greater

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June 25, 1930] The Nation 739 part of the time he served as an orderly in a base hospital where wounded, gassed, and mutilated British soldiers came and went in batches. He neither spares his readers gruesome details nor dwells upon them. As a result the narration is admirable in its restraint and balance; but it is too slight for its subject, and lacking in power. The anonymous English diary is even less dramatic. One must read it imaginatively and have some knowledge of what the war was like to get much out of it. A bath becomes a much more important thing to jot down in one's notebook than an emotion on killing a man. But the mere fact that these pages were originally scribbled down day by day by an infantry soldier and (later) aviator, whatever the conditions in which he found himself, gives to the volume a certain im- portance. The Obelisk. By William Rollins, Jr. Brewer and Warren. $2.50. Mr. Rollins's novel, parts of which appeared in "The American Caravan," is an unusual and engaging piece of work. It consists of a medley of assorted episodes in the life of Lewis Raey, a young man who from childhood has been fearful before the powers of his vivid imagination and, inwardly, painfully self-conscious. At the same time, to all outward appearance Lewis is a normal boy, Harvard student, and young business man. He dreams of escape, but at bottom feels that every place is about the same. His sense of futility keeps him from making any strenuous effort to break away. Some of the episodes are penetrating and luminous, particularly those which deal with this New England boy's adolescence. Some are highly amusing. Two or three are dramatic. And several seem merely imitative, echoes of Huxley, Dos Passos, even Joyce. The Saint. By Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Translated by Ed- ward Franklin Hauch. Simon and Schuster. $2. "The Saint" is the first of a series of books for which the Germanic Society is sponsor in an effort to bring before Ameri- can readers the little-known works of German nineteenth- century novelists. For this reason alone it deserves a welcome. Meyer, writing in German, is one of Switzerland's foremost literary figures, his fame resting chiefly on his series of histori- cal Novellen. The present translation tells the story of Henry II and Thomas a Becket. Meyer takes liberties with history. He seeks for motives, forces, and conflicts that lie behind his- torical acts, and with a poet's license invents where he finds it necessary to his purpose — which is the study of human emotions. "The Saint" in its present form, however, does not seem a very powerful or penetrating study. Meyer, who was a consummate stylist, loses, very likely, much of his effectiveness in translation. A Treasury of Middle English Verse. By Margot Robert Adamson. E. P. Dutton and Company. $2. This charming anthology is a real treasury of Middle Eng- lish verse transliterated so as to be directly accessible to the ordinary reader unfamiliar with the original texts. Such read- ers are frightened away by even the Scotch of Burns, or the archaic spellings of Spenser, or the unfamiliar language of Chaucer. They have never, therefore, been able to appreciate the wealth of song which has come down to us from medieval and for the most part anonymous singers. Miss Adamson, whose ear is delicately and accurately attuned to rhythm and rhyme, has in this volume given such readers their rightful heritage. Her transliterations, in so far as I have had the chance to test them, are very close to the original text. She presents only such brief lyrics as will be self-explanatory. Since, as she states, the medieval poets did a "lot of talking on their knees," the greater number of the songs included are naively religious. But there is a scattering of seasonal songs, lullabys, and verse dialogues. The book as it stands serves excellently for the general reader; one regrets, however, that for classroom use Miss Adamson did not see fit to add an appendix of notes stating definitely just what word changes she has made in order to carry out the verse pattern or rhyme scheme of the original. When the West Is Gone. By Frederic L. Paxson. Henry Holt and Company. $2. This volume is made up of three lectures delivered by the author under the Colver Foundation at Brown University in 1929. Although the volume is small, only 132 pages, it is one of the most valuable contributions to the history of the influence of the frontier on American life that has come to hand in a long time. The first lecture discusses the formation and typical character of the successive frontiers that we have come to call the "West." The second is a singularly lucid and stimulating account of how the old America came to survive and be enshrined in the "Middle West," while the East, South, and Far West developed encircling types of civilization of their own, differing from one another and the past. In the final lecture the author attempts to forecast the future trend of character and events now that the West is gone in the old sense. The frontier, winning against conservatism under Washington, Jef- ferson, Jackson, and Lincoln, was defeated under Bryan. The book is as strong in its appeal to the interest of the scholar as to that of the layman, and thanks to its attractive style can be enjoyed by both. The Misadventures of Martin Guerre: A Dramatic Idyll. By Gaston Delayen. Translated from the French by Farrell Symons. E. P. Dutton and Company. $3.50. The publishers announce this tale as one intended for sophisticated readers. It is laid in sixteenth-century France and tells of the childhood marriage, the tragic impotence, the picaresque wanderings, and the final return of its hero. A long court trial to determine which of two returned Martin Guerres is the impostor and which the true husband and heir concludes the story and supplies the drama. The story is writ- ten in ironic vein and is supplied with copious mock-serious notes and a parade of pseudo-learning. This is a difficult order of writing and one for which there is no formula. Rabelais, Sterne, Anatole France, to name a few, have used it to create masterpieces, but usually, as in this instance, it falls rather flat. Films A Lesson from Moscow IT is to be assumed that only the best of the Soviet pictures are exported abroad. But whatever those kept for home consumption may be, no country has yet equaled the Soviet record on the picture screens of America as set during the past season in that extraordinary series of pictures: "Arsenal," "New Babylon," "A Fragment of an Empire," "China Express," "Old and New," and "Turksib," to which now we have to add "Cain and Artem" (Cameo). Without claiming for all of them the exalted name of masterpiece, it must be admitted that their general level of excellence is something altogether unprecedented in the history of the cinema. Whether one approves or not the main line of development in the Soviet cinema, Moscow's lead- ership today is indisputable, as it is certainly highly welcome. The latest Soviet arrival, "Cain and Artem," would have made a sensation if it had appeared three years ago when the silent film was still holding sway. In these days of the talking picture it would do Hollywood an unholy amount of good to learn this picture's methods of telling a plain, straightforward story both intelligently and imaginatively. Unlike so many Soviet films, "Cain and Artem" has no political ax to grind, or

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740 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 perhaps it has just enough to observe the Soviet proprieties without appreciably spoiling the story. It is as broad in its appeal, as tensely dramatic, and as full of color as Hollywood could wish. But over and above this it has something that so far only Moscow has been able to supply — a freedom from the stereotyped and a genuine pathos. The plot of the film, which is based on Maxim Gorki's story, is concerned with the romance of the wife of an elderly fishmonger with a handsome longshoreman, Artem, the sullen and bullying hero of a market place in a small Volga town. With the help of a few hired roughs the jealous husband nearly succeeds in doing away with Artem; but taken care of by a little Jew, Cain, a mender of boots, Artem recovers, while the fishmonger's wife, believing him dead, drowns herself in despair. Around this simple plot the director, P. P. Petrov-Bytov, has painted a picture in rich and vibrant colors of the stifling, stag- nant life of the small toiling and trading folk in old Russia. The market place is the focus of that life, and as one striking detail after another is presented, the spectacle of a few sensitive souls suffering in the midst of dismal poverty, filth, brutality, and superstition takes on the quality of something that is tangi- bly real. Then the plot begins to develop, and the dramatic situation, growing in intensity, passes through a series of rising climaxes. Here again the director's masterly treatment brings out the utmost in each situation, and now and then strikes a note of marked originality, as in the use of distorted images, or in the alternate "cutting" of the woman coming down the steps to the river bank and the view of the river. Next to the richness of characteristic detail and its telling use for dramatic effect, the most notable feature of the picture is Emil Gall's acting in the part of Cain. This is a rare exam- ple of acting in which it is impossible to detect a single false note — so convincing and so moving it is in revealing the beauty of character that irradiates the unkempt and sorry image of the little Jew. Among the few blemishes that mar the picture the most important is the too theatrical conception of the part of Artem, which finds its expression even in his make-up as a tattered toreador. Alexander Bakshy

A CLASSIC has been happily defined as simply a work of such intense vitality that it is always modern, and "Lysistrata" (Forty-fourth Street Theater), first pre- sented in Athens 2,341 years ago, fills this definition completely. It is a play about war and about sex, and it reminds us that in spite of all the profound differences that thousands of profound Keyserlings find between the mentality of one nation and an- other, and notwithstanding the profound differences that hun- dreds of profound Spenglers find between the world outlook and Zeitgeist of one time and another, the psychology of war and sex was not substantially different in the Athens of 411 B.C. from that in the New York of 1918 a.d. Then as now the populations of warring cities were taught to believe that the enemy was utterly without honor, that his soldiers were at once cowards and brutes; each city was sure that it was doing more than its allies to win the war, and as passions ran higher war aims became more and more unintelligible. All this Aristoph- anes attacked not with bitterness but with derision; and he pictured the war spirit not as something wicked but as some- thing puerile. When "Lysistrata" was produced, the Peloponnesian War had been going on for twenty years. It is with this situation that the play opens. Lysistrata, realizing that the war will only bring ruin to Athens, and that the men will never settle it, conspires to put all the women, not only of Athens but of Sparta and her allies, under oath to have nothing to do with their husbands or lovers until the war is ended. This peace plan, through terrific renunciation, is carried to success. The result (in 1930) is still a rollicking and bawdy farce-comedy that it would be sinful to miss. And it succeeds in exact proportion as everyone concerned forgets that it is a sacred classic. Great credit must go to the adaptation and translation of Gilbert Seldes, which is thoroughly modern and non-literary without ever descending to cheap slang. Mr. Seldes might, indeed, have profitably taken more liberties than he actually did with the original text; the scene between the women and the old men, for example, becomes tedious after the first ten minutes. The two outstanding comic performances are those of Ernest Truex as one of the returning Athenian soldiers and of Sydney Green- street as president of the Athenian senate. Mr. Truex acts as if he were in a modern, although slightly more outspoken, bed- room farce, which is exactly right, and Mr. Greenstreet is clever enough to take it for granted that the president of the Athenian senate is no different in essence from a Tammany alderman. Miriam Hopkins and Hortense Alden also take their parts in the Al Woods spirit. Violet Kemble Cooper's acting, while distinguished, appears a trifle stiff; she seems too aware that this is after all from the ancient Greek. Most of the rest of the cast are overwhelmed by this consideration, and their performance reminds one chiefly of a college revival under the direction of studiously gay professors. The setting by Norman-Bel Geddes was architecturally impressive, but otherwise irritating. It was, to begin with, tragic rather than comic in its atmosphere — less Aristophanes than Aeschylus. And it was unsafe. It has never been clear to me why so much "modern" scenery must consist in flights of stairs. True, it makes pretty pictures and striking silhouettes for the high-class theater magazines, but surely at the price of physical risk for the actors. Even if they never turn an ankle or bump a shin, the spectator is distracted from the main busi- ness in hand by the constant fear that they are going to. There was, in fact, one major and quite unintended sprawl in the per- formance I witnessed. When, in the last scene, everyone on the stage was supposed to abandon himself to an orgy of joyous dancing, I found myself watching the performers carefully pick- ing their way from step to step. Must both play and perform- ers be subordinated to a setting? It is time the scenery designer was put in his place. The new "Artists and Models" (Majestic Theater) began in Boston and Philadelphia as a musical comedy called "Dear Love," acquired Phil Baker somewhere, and now opens on Broadway as a commonplace revue. Such plot as it retains is stale and feeble, nor it there a single song or tune in it worth remembering. Nearly all its humor is supplied by the afore- said Mr. Baker and his assistant in the box, who continue to be genuinely amusing. For the rest the management relies heavily on the most generous display of nudity that has been seen here in several years. Henry Hazlitt The Grand Street Follies are dead. Long live the Garrick Gaieties! The current performance (Theater Guild) is swift, gay, and youthful. Among the most attractive numbers are a lively travesty on Grover Whalen's return to Wanamaker's; Albert Carroll's skilful, and rather disturbing, misinterpretation of the art of Mei Lan-Fang; and a risque skit in which the junior members of the Senior League produce some extraordi- nary testimonials for the Persimmons bed. And then, of course, Philip Loeb, Sterling Holloway, and Edith Meiser are Gaieties in themselves. M. G.

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International Relations Section The Killings at Peshawar THE events at Peshawar on April 23 have never been fully reported. There are very strong indications, as Richard B. Gregg pointed out in our issue of June 18, that they were not creditable to the government. A rigid censorship was immediately imposed ; a government communique was issued placing all blame on the Nationalists; V. I. Patel, Nationalist leader, and Pandit Malaviya, promi- nent Indian liberal, were denied permission to go to Pesha- war and make an investigation. If the following frankly Nationalist account, which was printed in Young India for May 8, is the truer version, it throws an entirely different light on the Peshawar incident. It should be remembered that Peshawar is a Moslem city and that the British have been deliberately courting Moslem support in fighting the Nationalist movement. Mr. Abdul Quadir Kasuri, president of the Punjab Pro- vincial Congress Committee, Lahore, and president of the Pun- jab Satyagraha Committee, has circulated the following state- ment: As various and conflicting versions of the happenings at Peshawar have been appearing from time to time, I have been at pains to discover the true facts as far as possible at this junc- ture. I have interviewed several responsible eyewitnesses, and after considering all the statements I believe the following ver- sion to be the nearest possible to truth. It is well known that the All-India Congress Committee deputation that went to make inquiry into the working of the Northwest Frontier regulations was stopped at Attock early in the morning of April 22 and not allowed to proceed any farther. Meanwhile all the prominent Congress leaders and work- ers with a large crowd had assembled at the Peshawar railway station for a fitting reception to this deputation. When the news came through that the deputation was not allowed to come to Peshawar, a procession was formed and led through the city and in the evening a huge mass-meeting was held to protest against the repressive policy of the government. It was also announced at the meeting that the decision of the Frontier Pro- vincial Congress Committee that had already been arrived at to picket the five liquor shops in the city would be put into effect from the morning of the 23d. The Frontier government, seeing the thoroughly business- like preparations made by the Congress Committee to carry out the picketing and fearing that it would have great effect on the people, decided to arrest all the important leaders. Conse- quently between three and six in the early hours of the morning on the 23d of April six [leaders] were arrested. . . . At six o'clock in the morning, when the congressmen came to know of the arrest of the above-mentioned six leaders, they met in the Congress Committee office and there they also learned that warrants were out against Syed Lai Badshah, member of the All-India Congress Committee and president of the War Council, and Mr. Mohd Khan, secretary of the City Congress Committee, and immediately, without any police officer's ask- ing for the arrest of these two, they took them out in a proces- sion to the police station just inside the Kabli Gate and handed them over to the police officer there in charge. The crowd accompanying the procession afterward came back in a very peaceful manner to the Congress office. . . . At sunrise, as soon as the news got abroad that the leaders had been arrested, there was a spontaneous hartal all over the city. At about nine-thirty, when a huge crowd was standing peacefully in front of the Congress Committee offices in a very orderly manner and giving a great ovation to the volunteers who were being sent out on picketing duty, a subinspector of police with armed constables came in a lorry to the Congress Committee office and told the person in charge there that he had with him two more warrants of arrest — against Mr. Gulam Rubani and Mr. Allah Bux. On receiving this news the crowd immediately made way for the two leaders to come out of the office and they presented themselves before the subinspector, who put them in the lorry and proceeded to the town. When the lorry reached the Chowk Yadgar it had a punctured tire, and while the subinspector was thinking of sending for another lorry the two arrested gentlemen told the subinspector that they would of their own accord present themselves in the Thana just as the two other leaders had done earlier in the day. The police agreed to this and went away, and the pro- cession started with these two gentlemen and reached the Kabli Gate Thana. They found, however, the gates of the Thana closed. The two leaders shouted out that they had come to offer themselves for arrest, but nothing was done until about half an hour later when the subinspector who had come to the Congress Committee office to arrest them reached the spot and assured the officer in charge that the crowd was peaceful. . . . After the gates were opened and the prisoners were taken in, the crowd in a most peaceful manner gave a great ovation to the arrested leaders and raising shouts of Inquilab Zindabad started to go back toward the city. This fact should be noted — that though it was by now a little past ten o'clock and some leaders had been arrested, some had voluntarily offered themselves for arrest, and there was a complete hartal in the city, nothing had been done by the crowd to give the least cause for the officers to have any apprehension. Under such circumstances, when the crowd had throughout been behaving in an exemplary manner and was returning to- ward the city, two armored cars full of soldiers came from behind without blowing their horns or giving any notice what- ever of their approach and drove into the crowd regardless of the consequences. Many people were brutally run over, several were wounded, and at least three people died on the spot. In spite of this provocation the crowd still behaved with great re- straint, collecting the wounded and the three dead persons. We possess photographs of some of them. At this time an English officer on a motor cycle came dashing past. What happened to him is not quite clear. There are two conflicting versions. The semi-official version says that he fired into the crowd and a man whom he wounded by a shot struck him on the head and he died. The other version that has been given to me is that he collided with the armored car which was standing by and was killed as a result of the collision. Until further inquiry is made it is difficult to say what are the true facts. At the same time one of the armored cars caught fire. Here again it is alleged on the one hand that it was set fire to by the mob, while another version is that it caught fire accidentally. By this time, how- ever, a troop of English soldiers had reached the spot and with- out any warning began firing into the crowd, in which there were women and children as well as men. Now the crowd gave a good example of the lesson of non-violence that had been instilled into them. When those in front fell down woundr d the shots, those behind came forward with their breasts bared and exposed themselves to the fire, so that some persons got as many as twenty-one bullet wounds in their bodies and all the people stood their ground without getting into a panic. A young

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742 The Nation [Vol. 130, No. 3390 STRESEMANN By RUDOLF OLDEN Stresemann was the one German post-war statesman whose fame and influence was world-wide. Herr Olden's biography is the first full-length portrait of the man — and a notable contribu- tion to the history of our time. $3.50 THE FUTURE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE By GENERAL VON SEECKT Whither Germany? With a special knowledge and unusual concision, her great soldier statesman tells what Germany ex- pects of the future and what the future demands of Germany. Authorized translation by Oakley Williams. $2.50 At all Bookstores E. P. DLTTON & CO., Inc., 300 Fourth Ave., N. Y. The American Labor Year Book for 1930 is now ready The year 1929 will undoubtedly go down in labor history as one of the most sig- nificant since the end of the World War. RAND BOOK STORE 7 East 15th Street New York, N. Y. Back Nu mbers Available Price $3.15 Pos tpa id When writing to advertisers Sikh boy came and stood in front of a soldier and asked him to fire at him, which the soldier unhesitatingly did, killing him. Similarly an old woman seeing her relatives and friends being wounded came forward, was shot, and fell down wounded. An old man with a four-year-old child on his shoulders, unable to brook this brutal slaughter, advanced asking the soldier to fire at him. He was taken at his word, and soon he also fell wounded. Scores of such instances will come out on further inquiry. The crowd kept standing at the spot facing the sol- diers and was fired at from time to time, until there were heaps of wounded and dying lying about. The Anglo-Indian paper of Lahore, which represents the official view, itself wrote to the effect that the people came forward one after another to face the firing and when they fell wounded they were dragged back and others came forward to be shot at. This state of things continued from eleven till five o'clock in the evening. When the number of corpses became too many the ambulance cars of the government took them away. It is said that they were taken to some unknown place, and though they were mostly Mohammedans the bodies were burned. After this struggle the leaders of the public and volunteers collected all the remaining bodies. These alone came to sixty-five in number. . . . Two facts are noteworthy in this connection. One is that of all the dead collected by the congressmen there was not one single instance where there was the mark of a bullet in the back. Further, all the wounds were bullet wounds and there was no trace of grape shot. Neither the police nor the military nor anybody else alleges that there was any stick or weapon, blunt or sharp, with the persons in the crowd. The attitude of the crowd and the splendid hold that the Congress had on the peo- ple are evidenced by the fact that in spite of the presence of the British troops patrolling the city the picketing went on with- out a break and the batches of volunteers were sent according to the program. The whole day of the 23d the picketing con- tinued and no arrests were made. Though Section 144 was pro- mulgated on the night of the 23d and any gathering of more than five persons was prohibited, the picketing was continued on the 24th and Section 144 was defied openly and peacefully. On the 24th three batches of volunteers were one after the other arrested, but more batches came and the picketing continued. The authorities, finding their policy of arrest unavailing, re- leased the volunteers and, it is said, also ordered the liquor shops to be closed for two months. At this stage it is very difficult to say what is the number of the dead and wounded. It seems likely that the number of dead is in the hundreds, and a careful study of the situation indicates that the incident was a repetition of the Jallianwala Bagh [Amritsar] massacre. It is a regrettable fact that the government showed its cus- tomary heartlessness by providing no facilities even for first aid to the wounded; all that it did was to cart away as many dead bodies as possible and burn them, as alleged, in some far-away spot with a view to minimizing the extent of the havoc. . . . These are the facts as far as I can gather them. On learning of this terrible incident I sent the following telegram to the Chief Commissioner of the Northwest Frontier Province: "Committee sending medical deputation for relief of wounded as result of firing at Peshawar. Hope deputation will be pro- vided facilities for this humane work." I received the following reply: "Have consulted local lead- ers who authorize me to assure you that all arrangements for medical treatment have been made and there is no need for you to send medical deputation. Please therefore do not send it." Thereupon I sent another telegram to the chief commis- sioner intimating to him that I had received no reply to my telegram from the Congress Committee of Peshawar and ask- ing how he could say that the leaders did not want any help. This telegram did not elicit any reply. please mention The Nation _

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