The Nation 1926-12-08: Vol 123 Iss 3205

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Way

' Y ork The Nation

FOUNDED 1865 1, CXXIII NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1926 No. 3205 walking arm in arm with the Ohio gang, with a Len Small- Contents arty Pear v rank Smith gang, with that most cynical, most sinister of American figures, the “political Dry”. ... While the 57 This is refreshing candor, and indicative, perhaps, of a new 1 EARN MY OWN LIVING. Anonymous............-.+.-++-++ 579 awakeni Tae _ . : - ; Ai 5 i iY IALL-MILLS CASE IN THE NEWSPAPERS. By Silas Bent.... 580 4W&kening. Since the Christian Century's editorial was FFERSON’S DISCIPLES—1926 MODEL. By Harry S. Bressler ae 582 written we have had two more exhibita of “political Dry- ERSONISM IN DENVER: DEMOCRACY RECEIVES A QUEEN 583 ‘ ” . : — a : 5 WARD THE ARCTIC OCEAN. By Lewis S. Gannett........... ... 68 ness.” The first came in the story of the arrest of the SLESS AMERICA. By Stuart Chase................esseeeeeeeeeees 586 Governor of Alabama at a liquor-drinking party. The dis- — NEW GENERATION. Bee See B, BRIG. ccc cccscctsncsesss 58 : ai THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter.............0.ccscccecceeccuee 682 patches report that a Negro servant, after receiving a SOMSPONDENO 2.00. ..000cccsscccrccsseresrcccceccocessesceeeees 688 promise of pardon from the Governor, long an ardent po TERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION : The British Commonwealth of Nations...........+--seeeeeeeeeeeees 590 HOLIDAY BOOK SECTION £ IMPORTANCE OF PAUL VALERY. By René Lalou............ 597 DISCOVERING THE SPIRITUALS. By SE od tiienn das K ued 598 E CRITIC'S ANSWER. By Eliseo Vivas.........--.+++.s++ee+> ... 600 oT TO YOU ONLY, O PUTMIAM. Be Mary Beetle... cccscsescces 601 “S: a Glance. By Mark Van Doren. neces ese ee teen enseeseensesenees 601 The Complete Die-Hard. By Keith Hutchison...............+++-+-- 602 Mr. Mencken’s Best. By Joseph Wood Krutch ee aaa a eas alin aahe aad ; 603 State and Government. By Harold J. Laski.......-----++++++es+e+> 603 Seeing Things. By Donald Douglas.........---.e-eeeeeeee ee eeseees 604 Mr. Eddison’s Second. By Abbe Niles.........-.--+seeeeeeeeeeeees 605 Fremont Older and Jack Black. By R. L. Burgess.............-+++. 605 What Price Happiness? By John Haynes Holmes..........-.-.++-- 606 A Philosophical Poem. By Mortimer J. Adler.........---+++++se+ 606 Relow Par. By William MacDonald. ...........+eeeseeeeeeceeeeeree 607 Disraeli and Gladstone. By J. A. Hobson.........-++eeeeeeeeeeeees 607 Man versus Nature. By Alice Beal Parsons.........---+++++eeee++> 608 Thick and Thin. By Lenore G. Marshall..........-.+++:seeeeeeeees 608 Deep as First Love. By Donald Douglas.........---+++-++++seeeeee 612 Why Women Are Scabs. By Paul Blanshard............-++-++++++5 612 Harsh White Noon. By Gerald Carson..........+++-+eeeseeeeeeees 614 New England. By Alice Beal Parsons..........+..++seseeeeeereees 614 Religious Problem in Mexico. By Carleton Beals........-.--+-++++: 615 Mostly Fudge. By R. F. Dibble. ...........-.- cece cece cece cree eens 616 Once More the Impossible. By Sidney R. Packard..............--- 617 The Nation’s Poetry Prize. .........ccecee reece eens erereresseenees 618 A Library List of Children’s Books..........----eeeseeeeeeeeeeeees 619 Dashes fe WiBac osc cccccccccccceccccccccecscsstcsesesconeveceescece 619 Music: Music and Common Sense—!. By B. H. Haggin.........--- 621 Drama: “The Witch.” By Joseph Wood Krutch..........---++++++ 623

OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, EpitTor ASSOCIATE EDITORS LEWIS S. GANNETT DOROTHY GRAFFE VAN DOREN ARTHUR WARNER JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH MANAGING EDITOR LITERARY EDIToR EDA KIRCHWEY CONTRIBUTING EDITORS JOHN A. HOBSON LUDWIG LEWISOHN H. L. MENCKEN NORMAN THOMAS CARL VAN DOREN DAVID BOEHM, ADVERTISING MANAGER MARK VAN DOREN

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‘\HE MORAL CRISIS OF PROHIBITION” is the title of an editorial in the Christian Century, which omes close to being the most Christian church periodical This paper attacks the political methods of n America. he Anti-Saloon League, saying: If the churches are to continue to support prohibition as a moral issue they cannot do so on a basis which is itself morally questionable. Prohibition is a moral issue, not the moral issue. It does not transcend nor fuse into itself all the other moralities. . . . Almost without know- ing how it happens they [the churches] find themselves litical Dry, assured the court that the liquor was his and that he was giving it to the Governor and his friends. The other and more encouraging exhibit is a speech by Governor Pierce of Oregon, who is said to be personally as well as politically Dry: he calls for a new campaign of education, charging that the attempt to browbeat people into Dryness has failed. “We cannot legislate people into being moral and temperate,” he says. And he is right; this country has had too much political and not enough personal Dryness. NOTHER ELECTION SCANDAL has bobbed up to bother the Republicans—this time in their own of Maine, where Arthur R. Gould, a rich Republican, was elected as United States Senator against Fulton J. E. Red- mond, Democrat. The first charge was that Mr. Gould went far beyond the legal limits of primary expenditures in his recent campaign. This was declared unproved by the Secre- tary of State. Worse than this, his Democratic op- ponent has brought out the fact that Mr. Gould in 1918 paid $100,000 to the then Prime Minister of New Bruns- wick, Mr. Flemming, during the construction of the St. Johns Valley and Quebec Railway, of which Mr. Gould was the leading spirit. This was termed an act of bribery by Chief Justice Harrison A. McKeown of New Brunswick and, because Mr. Gould had been held personally guilty of this bribery, he was non-suited in the effort made by him and his associates to recover $335,000 which they claimed was due them from the Province. Mr. Gould ad- mits that the $100,000 was paid, but asserts that it was done against his protest by his associates, that it was not a bribe but a political assessment demanded by the Premier as the price for the continuance of this American enter- prise. Subsequently, Mr. Gould declares, another demand was made for $50,000, and when this was refused his com- pany was put out of business. Since he adds that every American enterprise in New Brunswick was similarly held up by politicians, it is evident that we have here a first- class scandal which should be investigated by the authorities in Canada as well as by the Senate of the United States. State ECRETARY HOOVER rejoices, and well he may, that in the fiscal year 1925-1926 prosperity in the United States reached a point never before attained in the volume of production and consumption, in the quantity of exports

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574 The Nation [Vol. 123, No, 993 and imports, and in the rate of wages. He admits that there are three or four bad spots—the New England textile industry, the bituminous coal fields, and, “in two or three sections,” the agricultural industry. On the whole, he declares, “the country was able to maintain the highest standard of living in its history—a standard far above that in most other countries of the world at this or any other time.” Since the close of the last fiscal year, however, the agricultural distress, which was never confined to only two or three sections, has grown steadily worse, particularly among the cotton growers. In Iowa the situation is alarm- ing; no less than nineteen banks failed there in one week, all in agricultural sections. In North Dakota, where 600,000 persons inhabit a State larger than New York, conditions are equally harassing, while in the East the farmers are just about able to hold out, though making no money. On the same day that Mr. Hoover declared that agricultural conditions were improving, Senator Brookhart of Iowa declared that “America’s much-vaunted prosperity means sheriff sales for the farmer.” A million farmers, he asserted, have lost their homes during the Coolidge and Harding Administrations. Laws, he added, have created this situation and only new laws can remedy it. As a matter of fact, the worst offenders are the tariff laws; we are seeing now the fine flowering of the protective tariff system which has exalted manufacturing at the expense of agriculture. Perhaps the Business Men’s Commission on Agriculture, which has so wisely chosen Charles Nagel as its chairman, will see and recognize this truth. HE REVOLT OF THE JUDGES will doubtless result in the modification of some of the more hysterical provisions of the Baumes laws in New York. Designed to reduce crime they are succeeding most effectively in reduc- ing justice. They have so completely robbed the courts of their discretionary powers in sentencing offenders previously convicted for felonies that one judge after an- other has protested. Judge Taylor’s refusal to give a life sentence to a Negro with three previous convictions, who had been induced by the District Attorney’s office to plead guilty as a first offender, will be reviewed by Justice Lewis of the Supreme Court. Following Judge Taylor, but em- ploying opposite tactics, Judge Collins in the Court of General Sessions sentenced a man to life imprisonment and then publicly denounced the Baumes laws as “inflexible, arbitrary, mandatory” and plainly suggesting “mob philos- ophy in the enactment of legislation.” The prisoner had been sentenced to five years for the offense in question— an assault with a knife during a drunken brawl—but had been remanded for resentence when a third conviction was found in his record. A few days later Judge Allen simi- larly increased the term of a prisoner from eighteen months to life imprisonment with reluctance and a vigorous attack upon the mandatory features of the laws. Even a few district attorneys, including Love of Monroe County and Banton of New York, have expressed disapproval of the mandatory life sentence for offenders who have already committed three felonies. When the rest of this hard-boiled brotherhood suffers a similar change of heart we may hope for a reversion to justice. W* HAVE LONG been skeptical about the alleged superiority of Jersey justice, as our readers who have followed our comments on the Passaic strike must be aware. Now, having watched the conduct of tha Hel Mills murder trial, we are emphatically of the op;);. that whatever the verdict another severe blow ha: % dealt to the judiciary in that State by the conduct 9; . case. In common, we are convinced, with multitude: ; people, we have found ourselves disgusted by the ap: of the prosecuting attorney, Mr. Simpson, who ha: himself to thank if the average newspaper-reader Consider him a mountebank, a play actor, and a low-grade politi, with no regard for the standards and ethics of his py, fession. But what shall one say of the judges who Der mitted this prosecuting attorney to turn upon Maal Stevens and ask him whether his mother was a Virtuoy woman and whether his brother was not the bastard ¢}j) of a mulatto? No one can pretend that these questin, had the remotest connection with the guilt or the innocey, of the Stevens brothers. No judge who respected 4; ermine would have permitted them to be asked. Sch, happening would have been unthinkable in an Englis courtroom. The tables are turned when well-to-do ay; cultivated people thus suffer the treatment accorded 44 Negroes, radicals, and friendless folk in general, but thy dignity of the courts is not enhanced nor is the cause justice served. N OUR ISSUE of February 18, 1925, we told how Roth schild Francis, editor of the Emancipator of St. Thoma: Virgin Islands, had been prosecuted for libel because of ; criticism—which to us seemed quite within bounds—of th local police force. He was declared guilty by Judge Georgs Washington Williams, sitting without a jury. When in; subsequent issue of his newspaper Mr. Francis took excep tion to this conviction he was again haled before Judgs Williams, who sentenced him to jail and a fine for contempt of court. Mr. Francis took an appeal from both conviction to the federal courts in this country, where the convictia for libel was overthrown but the sentence for contempt was upheld. A. A. Berle, Jr., carried the latter decision to t) United States Supreme Court in behalf of Mr. Francis, bu that tribunal recently refused to review the case. When news of this action reached the Virgin Islands Judge Wi liams clapped Mr. Francis into jail for the thirty days t which he had been sentenced and, as the editor did not pay the $100 fine which was a part of the punishment, 100 more days in prison were imposed on that account. With fine courage and appreciation of the principles involved, Mr. Francis refused to ask the Governor for a pardon or commutation of sentence. HAT A MAN of such mediocre abilities and temper? mental unfitness for the bench as George Washington Williams should occupy the highest judicial post in the Vir gin Islands is due to their remoteness from our continental press and a lack of local democratic control. That Judge Williams should be able to vent his spleen upon so devoted and unselfish a popular leader as Mr. Francis—who hai incurred judicial displeasure by opposing the reappointmet of Judge Williams—should be an argument in Congress fot ending the anomalous and autocratic “temporary gover ment” by naval officers that has spelled political dissati* faction and economic disaster for the islands since we %& quired them almost ten years ago. Incidentally the se™ tence of Mr. Francis calls attention to the unfairness “ compelling a man to work out a fine at the rate of $1 day. The extreme penalty for contempt of court in th

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voc, 8. 1926] The Nation a or ~l] irgin Islands is thirty days in jail, but to this may be ijed a fine of $200, which if not paid means 200 days’ iitional imprisonment. The era is far in the background yen even the humblest worker’s time could be rated at 1 3 day. Prisoners ought to demand a more adequate st. If necessary to obtain it, they would be justified in slking out. a, HE SALE OF THE WHITE STAR LINE to the Royal Me, Mail Steamship Company interests consummates a a] which will be of considerable value to that lame duck, ye International Mercantile Marine, an organization to iO Her re ri ‘minate the North Atlantic trade formed by the elder J. P. aa (organ On an economically unsound basis. It has been at- 7 vked from the beginning as an organization inimical both a » American interests and to British interests, for it has Be: sant the operating of ships under three flags by one com- by any. For a long time past the sale of the White Star ships i as plainly been called for, but for some mysterious reason a ye bargain arrived at between the International Mercan- led Mae Marine and the Furness-Withy interests, outlined in our it amitorial of May 12, 1926, failed to go through. The ac- med sisition of the White Star vessels makes Baron Kylsant he world’s greatest shipping operator, controlling, as he row does, 5388 ships—he bought his first steamer in 1889. Rothmince he became chairman of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company in 1902 it has acquired the fleets of the Pacific team Navigation Company, the Glen Line, the Shire Line, he Lamport and Holt Line, the Forwood Line, the Shaw, Savile, and Albion Line, the great Union Castle fleet of ffty vessels, the Elder, Dempster Line, and now the White tar Line. If Baron Kylsant continues absorbing fleets we may yet see almost a monopoly of British shipping in one man’s hands. [* 1895 A MARRIAGE was contracted and solemnized at St. Thomas’s Church in New York City. In 1920 the 5 thammarriage was dissolved and each of the divorced pair mar- ’ red again. In 1926 the original marriage was annulled, Vhenmmceclared never to have existed, by the Rota, high court of Wiggtte Roman Catholic Church. This apparently superfluous -s tommcormality was carried out in order to regularize in the - param cres of that church the second marriage of one of the per- moréqm:ons involved, whose Catholic husband was not permitted frefm o Marry a divorced woman. If the existence of the second Mr ™4rriage was to have religious recognition the non-existence ) org! the first marriage had to be established. And so the court at Rome annulled, on the ground of coercion, the mar- rage performed in New York by a Protestant Episcopal bishop. A case of bad professional manners, no doubt, and a silly business all around. But when the ministers of various sects in the United States, from John Haynes Holmes and Harry Emerson Fosdick to John Roach Straton, support Bishop Manning in his denunciation of this in- fringement of Episcopalian and American rights we are astonished. If Consuelo Vanderbilt, in order to satisfy the demands of her present marriage, finds it necessary to have a previous marriage wiped off the ecclesiastical record why should anybody regret that the legal system of the Church of Rome permits so elastic an interpretation of the Mm Marriage vow? But we cannot accept the optimistic ser: lief of the Living Church (High Church Episcopalian) ‘Mi ‘hat “marriage standards in Rome and Soviet Russia appear ‘0 be approaching a common plane.” Vir. —_—" na eel & & = Nonsense birth to a modern nation, She has been to stop dosing her ( LD China, struggling to give ) is in a stage of spasmodic convulsions. begging the Powers to leave her alone, with their medicine. And at a moment when she seems to have some hope of pulling herself together, when the Canton group is at last uniting the country, the Powers, deaf these many years, suddenly present their report, which says in effect: We will not change our tactics until you get well. The Extraterritoriality Commission, Strawn as chairman, having China, notes her chaotic with Silas spent some months studying condition and coolly concludes, if the preliminary summaries are to be trusted, that this is no time to change medicine. In the future, if conditions mend, perhaps, the Powers will consider, pos- sibly, local changes in their claims of extraterritoriality. This is nonsense. It exhibits an appalling lack of sense of proportion. Here is a solemn report, signed by the representatives of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Japan, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, the Empire, and the United States—the “Treaty Powers.” Italy, Spain, and Portugal are ruled by military juntas, Japan by a despotic clique; Britain holds India by force alone; Belgium and Italy have compounded their debts, but France is simply stalling, with no apparent intention of paying her debt to the United States; and the United States seems utterly incapable of solving its own gunman and lynching prob lems. Yet the representatives of these nations presume to sit in judgment on China, to complain that she is gov- erned by military leaders, that her treasury is depleted, that “the extension and protection of the new legal and judicial systems are being retarded,” and smugly demand that China reform herself. Before the Powers withdraw tueir claims to separate jurisdiction in China, they assert, China must reform her police, her prisons, her commercial code (“in- cluding negotiable-instruments law, maritime law, and insurance law’’), establish modern detention-houses, and so on through a long string of requirements to the condescending conclusion that may be, gritish After the principal items thereof have been carried out the Powers concerned, if so desired by the Chinese Govern- ment, might consider the abolition of extraterritoriality, according to such progressive schemes (whether geo- graphical, partial, or otherwise) as may be agrecd upon. Preposterous as this is on the face of it, it is even more ridiculous in view of the facts of the Chinese situ- ation. China is in civil war; but in her attitude toward foreigners she is united. “The gravest situation since the Boxer uprising,” British dispatches call the present patri- otic effervescence. The Powers are in no position to dictate to her, partly because there is no government to dictate to, still more because they have no power to coerce four hundred million people scattered along the river val- leys of a nation as big as a continent, feeling, thinking, and acting—toward the foreigners—as one. One American diplomat put it thus: “We Westerners are like a man tied to the rear platform of a moving train and trying to keep his footing.” China, huge, apparently chaotic, is driv- ing powerfully toward independence. Bit by bit she is destroying the shackling treaties. The Powers can accept gracefully now or, later, yield clumsily; to attempt to refuse is to ignore dynamic facts.

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The Nation [ Vol. 123, No, godine Storm Signals in Mexico O, not Mexican signals, but United States signals, and for the fourth time in 1926. Secretary Kellogg has broken loose again. He has, first, inspired a vicious press attack on Mexico apropos of Nicaragua, so that for several days our highly reliable dailies were filled with assertions that from Mexico, that hotbed of Bolshevism, a most dan- gerous communistic and anti-American propaganda was going all through Central and South America. This he followed up by similarly inspired suggestions that if Mexico persisted in her course in regard to her constitution and land laws there was every prospect that there would be a rupture of diplomatic relations. Simultaneously with this appeared the stories of various minor revolts and of im- pending revolts in Mexico to which we have already referred. Never was there a clearer case of government-inspired propaganda, and, to our regret, we must record that the Associated Press lent itself to this outrage by carrying the sensational anti-Mexican matter without citing the source. Hitherto it has been Associated Press policy, according to our understanding, to state the origin of a story in order that no charge of being used for propaganda purposes might lie against it. We regard these developments as serious despite the fact that this is the fourth flurry in this year and that the English oil companies in Mexico have announced their acceptance of those provisions of the Mexican petroleum laws which have so excited our State Department under Messrs. Hughes and Kellogg. Our anxiety is due to the fact that the foreign policy of the United States is in the hands of two exceptionally weak men, Mr. Kellogg and Mr. Coolidge, the latter of whom has, if Washington dispatches are to be trusted, about made up his mind to attempt to break the third-term tradition by becoming a candidate for the Presidency in 1928. Weak men are more to be feared in our foreign affairs than strong men—witness the readi- ness of William McKinley to plunge this country into war with Spain purely for partisan reasons, to which fact the historian James Ford Rhodes is the latest witness. We are well aware of the high-sounding words used by Presi- dent Coolidge in regard to our foreign affairs, to which the New York World calls attention in this connection. He said to Congress that for a hundred years we had been pledged “to the peaceful settlement of controversies between nations; by example and by treaty we have advocated arbi- tration.” He also told Congress in his last message that “the policy of our foreign relations, casting aside any sug- gestion of force, rests solely on the foundation of peace, good-will, and good works.” But coming from Mr. Coolidge these sentiments are nothing but the ordinary politician- bunk. They mean nothing. They afford not the slightest guaranty that our policy toward Mexico and Nicaragua will be decent or humane, for Mr. Coolidge is the tool of big business and what big business wants he will do. If our capitalists who have investments in Mexico do not desire to be reasonable and sensible, like their British brethren, we shall undoubtedly have a rupture of diplo- matic relations and a policy based upon force—perhaps even a nice little war. We therefore urge all who have the interest of both countries at heart to rouse themselves once more to make it known in Washington that they do not propose ty ha the United States play the bully and put itself in position of attempting to dictate to Mexico what her la and her constitution shall be—a policy we should ye, dare to assume toward any country of our own size. Rigk now is the time to make those protests felt in Washingt, not after the breaking off of relations. This time th, who deliberately seek strife with Mexico are reinforced } many thousands of our countrymen of the Catholic {,; who, not without some reason, feel themselves outrage; } the policy of the Mexican Government toward the Catholj faith. President Coolidge wisely refused to make this rj gious issue the basis of a remonstrance to the Mexiq; Government—a fact we are glad to record to his cre even though we cannot help suspecting that he was mo, afraid of the Catholic issue than inspired by a desire; keep his hands off a purely domestic Mexican issue. multitudes of Catholics will stand behind Congressm, John J. Boylan of New York in his announced determinatip to compel the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House: act upon his resolution for the severance of diplomatj relations with Mexico. Fortunately Senator Borah }; spoken out well and refuses to be stampeded in t}j direction. Again must we call attention to the deliberate pro ganda to get us into war with Mexico. The worst offende are the owners of the Chicago Tribune and Liberty, m who in their callous disregard of justice and right-dealjy are constantly urging upon the United States the forcij annexation of Mexico upon the purely materialistic grow that the Mexicans are not exploiting their natural resour and that therefore we should. Liberty has just been caugi printing a picture which purported to portray “Catholi Withdrawing Deposits from the Bank of Mexico in Pn test Against the Seizure of Church Property,” whereas was a picture taken and published eleven months before ti attempted boycott, in fact before the troubles with tx Catholics began, and represented persons depositing inste of withdrawing funds. It is thus that feeling is arousd against Mexico, and always these inciters to strife assum that the United States is inevitably and invariably right and that we have the power, the right, and the duty 4 supervise her conduct of her own affairs and even of he foreign relations. The assertion that Mexico is bolshevik and is spreading bolshevist propaganda is the merest nonsense. Unde President Calles, as we have repeatedly pointed out, there! being carried on a progressive, social policy in the interes of the Mexican masses, which the United States in som respects ought rather to be imitating than criticizing. Lea of all should there be criticism of her oil laws at the momet! when Fall, Sinclair, and Doheny are on trial for alienating part of the birthright of the American people. If certail Mexicans choose to supply arms to revolutionists i Nicaragua, they are merely imitating what United Stat# citizens have been doing in most of the republics to t south of us for the last hundred years. Blustering agains Mexico and the threats against her can have only one effe’ —the rousing of all the Central and South Americ# republics against us.

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nec. 8. 1926] The Nation 577 Britannia Still Rules HE British Empire has been indulging in a mild ses- sion Of psychoanalysis. The resuit is a document ,jch indicates no profound change in the relations of the mponent parts of the empire, but a considerable gain in th baal self-knowledge. The assembled imperial statesmen admit Rie » paper conditions which already existed in fact. They ell rove themselves true to the British tradition of writing “SE, stitutions only after muddling them out in practice. all We print in the International Relations Section this ic fais eek the first part of the report of the Inter-Imperial Rela- eal tons Committee of the Imperial Conference. It has not ‘atho} et been accepted by the governments concerned, but in ie a jew of the fact that the prime ministers of every Dominion flexied srticipated in its sessions there can be little doubt that — report may be accepted at face value. It declares that . reat Britain and the Dominions” are sire | autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal e, B in status, in no way subordinate one to another in essm any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though inatig united by common allegiance to the Crown and freely use | associated as members of the British commonwealth of lomati nations. ah haggis recognition of the independence and sovereignty of n thgggee Dominions is essentially a mere formulation of a fact nade evident by the separate membership of the Dominions propa the League of Nations, by Canada’s independent nego- ‘endeqmmiation Of a treaty with the United States, and Ireland’s y, mamgend Canada’s appointment of their own ministers to Wash- jealingmmcton. But it is new as a formulation of a principle which orciigmmead been growing without definition. To realize how new sro the acceptance of that formulation it is only necessary oursammeo recall the furore aroused by General Hertzog’s speech cause Stellenbosch last May (reprinted in The Nation for tholigmuly 14), when the South African Prime Minister said: 1 Pr Each Dominion is, by virtue of its self-governing reas lm constitution, created a free, independent state, with the re thm right to international recognition by foreign Powers; but th thle with a common connecting link between itself and Great nstes Britain, centered in the King. All unity among the Dominions themselves and between the Dominions and Great Britain must originate in agreement and cooperation. roused ssums right ity + of he or that speech General Hertzog was denounced by the british in South Africa as a traitor to the empire, and at e opening of the Imperial Conference he was treated by i¢@ London press as a dangerous wild man. It was not et permissible to assert in plain words what was already m fact the practice of half the Dominions. Yet after eeks of earnest study the committee has reached a formula hich can scarcely be differentiated from General Hertzog’s. It must be recognized that the British Empire is still dual organism. Recognition of the independence of the Yominions, with a home population essentially similar to hat of Great Britain itself, does not alter by one iota the ar-flung structure of the great red empire on which the lun never sets. Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Suez, Aden, ndia, Singapore, Borneo, Hongkong, the Sudan, East and lest Africa, Kenya, Rhodesia, the Falkland Islands, the british West Indies, and the rest—they remain as before, utposts of an empire which rules them primarily in its wn interest. Nowhere in the report is that harshest of mperial problems, the color line, touched upon. South ading Unde ere | Africa may, conceivably, have a little freer hand than before in holding down her natives and barring the Hindus; India remains precisely where she was. Some of these domains may be conceived, as Mr. Zimmern optimistically paints them, as part of a parade of colonies marching upward toward dominion status, self-government, and essen- tial independence; but the Imperial changes their status only in so far as it alters the position of the Dominions, which may be regarded as their ideal. While this long report deals with the intricate ques- Conference tions of independent and semi-independent treaty of dominion merchant marines and of dominion in foreign countries, of conflicts of dominion leyislation and of appeal to the Privy Council as a sort of Supreme Court for the empire (characteristically sidestepping this stumbling-block by a thoroughly ambiguous i making, consuls a ’ fs - ) form Of words), it nowhere touches upon the questions of imperial pref- erence and of imperial economic unity. The emphasis has shifted since the early post-war days. Then there was talk both of preference and of a joint imperial foreign policy for which the Dominions would share responsibility. Times have changed; the Dominions have in practice worked out their salvation, and in the main this document accepts their independence. It is an impressive object-lesson in political evolution without the rumble of threatened armed conflict. the war the Dominions have grown mightily, and Britain, with some anguish of soul, has had the good sense freely to recognize their new stature. The chief empire have come not from those regions to which the greatest autonomy has been granted but in those where the ruling country still tries to sit on the lid. Since troubles of Midway in the Season’s Books HOUGH only one-half of the books announced by Ameri- can publishers in their fall lists have yet been issued, it is now possible to survey the season with a degree of understanding which will justify generalizations. ‘The first of these is that the much abused two-volume biography is holding its own, at least with the publishers. Poe gets two long biographies almost simultaneously, Hervey Allen and Mary E. Phillips entering into competition for the honor of having written the most exhaustive life of that unhappy man. John Wanamaker, as will be seen in the literary sup- plement to the present issue of The Nation, gets another without exactly deserving it; it remains to be seen whether Joseph Conrad is worth the two volumes promised by G. Jean Aubry. There can scarcely be a doubt that Asquith and Ex-Secretary Houston in their memoirs, and H. A. L. Fisher and Francis Hirst in their lives of Lord Bryce and Lord Morley, and Sidney Lee in his continuation of the “Edward VII” will make contributions to the history of politics and political theory. Cobden-Sanderson and Rider Haggard, lately dead, have left copious autobiographies. Rupert Hughes’s recent volume on George Washington was only the first, presumably, of several which he will publish; and there is still to come an extensive work on Washington —a “pictorial biography”’—from Joseph Dillaway Sawyer. Then Walter Edwin Peck will devote two volumes to Shelley, and Percy MacKaye two more to the life of his father in the American theater. The two-volume form, it would seem, is still anything but vanquished.

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578 | The Nation | [ Vol. 123, No. 3205 In the department of literary criticism two develop- ments are particularly noticeable. The American critical renaissance bears fruit this season in three anthologies of contemporary reviews and articles prepared by William A. Drake, Lewis Worthington Smith, and James Cloyd Bow- man. The range of theme and skill exhibited by the three volumes will surprise any reader who has not been aware of the strides made within the past five or six years by the Tenth Muse in the United States. In the second place there is a notable increase in the number of volumes devoted to figures in French literature. W. F. Giese’s “Hugo,” Cleve- land B. Chase’s “The Young Voltaire,” E. B. D’Auvergne’s “Pierre Loti,” René Benjamin’s “Balzac,” John Garber Palache’s “Gautier and the French Romantics,” and Ernest Boyd’s and Robert Sherard’s studies of de Maupassant—no such attention is being paid just now to any other foreign literature; and while this list may be more or less an acci- dent of the current season, it seems that the younger American writers are set upon making themselves ac- quainted with both past and contemporary France. The newest idol of all, Paul Valéry, succeeding, as it seems, Anatole France and Remy de Gourmont, is represented by “Variety,” a collection of his essays. Anatole France him- self, though he is honored with one more volume of remin- iscences in the worshipful vein—Kemeri’s “Rambles with Anatole France”’—hears this year the first echo in America, in a book by Barry Cerf, of the detraction which has been his fate in France almost from the day of his death. In fiction and poetry we find, as always, old names rid- ing the top of the wave and new ones rising into recogni- tion. This season brings novels or stories from Anderson, Bennett, Cabell, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, Dreiser, Hamlin Garland, Ellen Glasgow, Hergesheimer, Kipling, Maugham, May Sinclair, Van Vechten, Walpole, Wells, and Elinor Wylie. And that might seem to be the whole story—except for the certainty that among the novels by less known per- sons there are a few which will one day be considered as having made the literary history of 1926. Some of these, it is likely, have received little notice or none; and guessing who of all the newcomers will survive longest is extremely hazardous business. Will it not be, however, one of the fol- lowing: H. E. Bates, E. R. Eddison, “H. D.” (as a novelist), Ernest Hemingway, Frances Newman, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, E. H. Young? As to poetry, the crop is the poorest in years—collections and selections predominating in the list and thus attesting better than anything else could do the lack of current enterprise. New publishing houses continue to spring up over night. Most interesting this fall are the John Day Com- pany and the Vanguard Press. The first, in accordance with what has come to be the conventional practice, drew much of the talent for its staff from older houses; and its program, so far admirably carried out, is to issue only a few books each season, to see that as many of these as may be are good, to print them well, and to keep their dust-jackets innocent of meaningless superlatives. The Vanguard Press will sell all of its books at cost; and its aim will be to fur- nish cheaply the means of a radical education. Its reprints from Karl Marx, Ruskin, Tolstoi, Lenin, Kropotkin, Wells, Henry George, Thorstein Veblen, William Morris, Upton Sinclair, Edward Bellamy, Benjamin R. Tucker, Darwin, Haeckel, Buckle, and Lecky promise much in this direction; of the volumes which contain new material time and criti- cism will have more to say. —, Ghosts at the Horse Show HERE were ghosts at the forty-first annual exhj}j;;,. of the National Horse Show Association of Amer, Limited, held in New York the week of Thanksyiy;,. There was the ghost of Eohippus, rabbit-sized, fiye.t,,; monkey-toothed, tapir-nosed, scurrying about under the fas backed draft horses. There were the ghosts of Orohipp,, and Mesohippus and Parahippus and Merichyppus, tos), their fossil heads and prancing on feet which in one stam after another came nearer to the hard, single hoof, ,: Equus caballus. There were the ghosts of the descenday horses which men learned first to eat, then to draw on th walls of smoky caves, then to ride, then to hitch to cart and plows and chariots and wagons and carriages, yy; finally, as at the Horse Show, to make the plaything; i prosperous leisure. There were the ghosts of charger: screaming on battle-fields, of ponies deep undergroung ;, laborious mines, of stallions matched in bloody confjc; for the sport of Vikings, of wild horses sweeping ov: wilder plains in swift freedom, of mangy, beaten plug: and of philosophical Houyhnhnms. The two thousan; actual horses which trod the neat floor of the arena wer but a handful to the ghostly tribes which drifted throug: and over it. Not even the elaborate specialization which alway Officers’ chargers, horses suitable to become hunters, haci. neys in harness, novice saddle horses, artillery teams, foy. in-hands, ladies’ qualified hunters, novice five-gaited sadd horses, thoroughbred hunters, geldings under saddle, tz. dems, hunt teams, pairs of roadsters, pairs of wagy horses, polo mounts, children’s ponies, green hunters oth than thoroughbreds—what were all these but the heirs : Eohippus? And what was the intense, patient curiosiz of the spectators but a survival of the centuries of interes in man’s most diversified servant and pet? Perhaps acquired characteristics are not inheritabi and perhaps a fondness for horses has not really bex handed down from father to son in the human cells then: selves. And yet the feeling for horses has so long bez so profoundly a part of human culture that a generation of automobiles has only begun to root that feeling ov Even when the last man who ever rode or drove a hors is dead there will .still be literature and oral memories In the meantime, plenty of horses still live to presen the ancient tradition. They keep to the side of the row while motors rush by them. They have given over to stear and gas the work of drawing the heaviest loads. But m field and the race course they have no rivals to speak 0! and in a large department of human affection and concer they have no rivals at all. They are the most splend: playthings ever used by men. If horses should becom: entirely useless, there would still be men who could 1” be quite themselves away from stables and paddocks. “T" first money I laid out,” said Lemuel Gulliver on his re‘u" from his travels, “was to buy two young stone-horses, whi I keep in a good stable, and next to them the groom is ™ greatest favourite.” Those ghosts at the Horse Show were not mere! shadows out of history. They were strands woven into the complex constitution of mankind itself. givt eon f tl are if prow

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The Nation W LiDitigg meric £1Ving "e-toed ‘This is the second of a series of anonymous articles he flas. ving the personal backgrounds of women active in profes- Np IPD nal and public life. Our object is to discover the origin ‘OSsing MM: sheir modern point of view toward men, marriage, chil- “HE en, and jobs. The next article is by a lawyer who was met, brought up in the South. ] ON the OR thirty years I walked primly, directing my course a by the social guide-posts set up in a New England own for the direction of well-born, well-bred little ladies. Then I broke loose. My former friends consider me a sort of wild woman because I earn my own living, do not ake my husband’s name, and have been known to live in CSR ange, dirty neighborhoods where the rents are lower. To myself I seem much the same person who used to leave properly engraved visiting-cards on proper occasions at proper houses. I earn my living as a matter of course now, but the habit started from a childish sense of guilt at making my parents so much trouble. My mother took life rather hard. She was extremely sensitive to responsibility; she hated routine duties, but her conscience forced her to perform them scrupulously. Again and again she gave up the nerve- racking struggle and took to her bed, discovering nervous prostration long before it was recognized by the medical wth profession and taken up generally by distressed gentle- an women. Both she and I thought that taking care of me_ Pe ‘Mwas what made her sick. . ria Like all children I was a complete egoist. My world tere revolved around myself and when it was a clouded world l assumed that I was to blame. There was always in the foreground some naughtiness like screaming against bed- time, demanding a toilet where there was none, refusing ther.qmto wear a certain dress, or being impertinent. I could not - borfmecomprehend that my parents’ gloom came as much from ratiocfmmeing married to each other as from being my father and » oy fgemother. Early in life I figured out that the least I could horegmeco for two people who had done so much for me was as oriesgEsoon as possible to earn my own living. I hoped thus to sseryemeessen my sense of guilt in living at all. Some of my playmates, now middle-aged, have tried to assuage a simi- lar feeling in a different way; they have continued in their childhood homes instead of forming independent ties and their parents have become their children. Later on, I carried over into my marriage the old, illusive sense of guilt and a passionate desire to be no trouble to my husband. I had the naive belief that men loved best women who were no bother to them. I had the ‘curious idea that my husband would admire my power to earn money and be proud of my standing in my profession. The working-for-wages habit was well established before I turned critical eyes on the courtship, engagement, is mend marriage customs of my town. In the large city where ; 5. Thad received a school appointment after graduating from ere f/ ollege, I “poured” at “receptions,” played atrocious bridge, o thm Went to dances, taught in Sunday school, and expected to These Modern Women Why I Earn My Own Living ANONYMOUS marry a pleasant house with steam heat, electricity, and a husband. Until | was more than thirty years old I re- frained from thoughts about sex because “there is time enough for that after you are married.” Through the printed word I escaped the dreary com- monplace. The verses of Hovey, Carman, and Le Gallienne were my creed. I soaked up the saccharine art of the Pre- Raphaelites in English galleries and mooned about the English Lake district, tested life by the philosophy of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, adored Maude Adams and Sothern (before he took to Shakespeare), and wrote diluted love lyrics. The girls of my little group of young folks were al! weltering in sentimentality, but they were mostly able to distinguish between reality and fantasy. The other girls didn’t try to make an apple-pie by the rule for a sonnet. They wrapped their affections about young men who had what was called “character” in distinction to “personality.” After marriage they discarded romantic fancies and stag- nated in mild discontent. But I had only one foot firmly planted on solid respectability; the other was sliding round on romance. You recognize this situation as what we now name “a conflict of desires.” The romantic side of my nature led me to pick out a charming man in the city where I was teaching. Or did he pick me out? I do not know; it was love at first sight; and, looking back, I would not have missed it for the world. The practical side of my nature compelled me to take him home to my parents to be approved. They refused their approbation. The man had been divorced, he was a Socialist, and had been brought up as a Catholic. My home circle was monogamous, Republican, and Protestant. One marriage, one political party, one church were the portion of one individual in those days. My parents declined to accept my man as a son-in-law. I would not marry him without their consent because “a bad daughter makes a bad wife”; yet I wouldn't give him up because life without him was too utterly dreary. The outcome was that he went back to the city to make a fortune as a substitute for “character,” while I returned to teach school in my home town. In those days an engaged girl stayed with her parents during her engagement because she was so soon to leave them. I spent my leisure filling my Hope Chest. All my lingerie was made by hand. It took longer than we expected for my fiancé to make a fortune and I watched myself grow older. My man actually did make a fortune. But he married a woman who, I afterward learned, had been working and living with him during his long, hard pull. Everyone was satisfied but me. I was mad clear through. I had been a good daughter and had lost my lover thereby. I had no desire to be anything but good, but I did not want to be punished for it. Reviewing the affair, I could not see that anyone was to blame. The code had let me down. Then and there I renounced allegiance to ready-made codes. I again left my home town and went away to work

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580 The Nation [ Vol. 123, No. B25 out my salvation or destruction. I had to be free to study what had happened to me and to figure out a working plan for my life. Being self-supporting I was able to move about. Even now I do not like to recall the suffering of that period. For several years the world was a gray fog spinning about me. Every guide-post by which I had directed my course had been swept away. I had lost, not a lover but a universe. Intense curiosity awoke in me. Always I had re- pressed questionings because they led to criticism of the fundamentals of society. The brain cannot function if it is not allowed to question, and my intelligence was as weak as that of a new-born babe. I got a job reading in libraries, gathering material for a writer. Seven hours a day I put in on the assigned subjects and the rest of the time I read about anarchy, sex, votes-for-women, edu- cation, divorce, and similar topics. I read till my eyes puffed out and my head was splitting. I went to university lectures and also met soap-box orators. I gobbled ideas. Books were not enough. I went in for people, plunged headforemost into crowds. I lived in a tenement, worked in factories, and went to meetings and meetings and meet- ings. The sweat, the vulgarity, the commonness of humans in the bulk were both a horror and a pleasure to me. I experimented conscientiously with being “wicked,” and was keenly disappointed to find so little excitement in sinning and so little sense of guilt. The driving emotion of that period of my life was curiosity. I was insatiable concerning every subject with which I came in contact. I even got jobs to investigate wages, prostitution, fire-escapes. Because I had known so little I wanted to know everything. I prowled the world like a cat on the housetop. Along with curiosity went pity. My own suffering had opened my eyes to the suffering all about me. Working conditions, living arrangements, the general social code seemed to me extraordinarily stupid. I discovered that I was not the only woman uncomfortable in the world. The office charwoman’s cracked hands were dyed brown from washing filthy floors; growing girls lugged heavy babies about the playgrounds; prostitutes complained because they had to hand over their earnings to pimps; virtuous women shriveled at their desks; men got the good jobs. —, I flung my puny strength into the fight for social] leg, lation. Occasionally the group with which I worked », some well-intentioned law passed, but immediately a ;,, condition arose which was different but quite as intolerg}), My reaction to the suffering which I could not was similar to my attitude toward my broken hear; Since I could do nothing about it, I would pass on. I reacted violently at that time against all establishs: institutions, like marriage, spanking, meat diet, prisop; war, public schools, and our form of government. 1;, mere fact that a condition existed was evidence to me thy it was wrong. Yet as I watched the lives of those radic,, who dared live their rebellion, the rebels appeared to gu no more satisfaction than did the conformists and smug. ness seemed equally common among both extremes. | gj some experimenting myself, and never have I found ay completely satisfactory arrangement of financial, social, » personal relationships. The wise course now seems to m to decide what one wants, whether one can get it, whethy or not it is worth the price that must be paid, and thy to go after it. “Will it work?” is my moral code. Although I supported myself in the beginning becays I thought it was my duty it has become a matter of cours. I have no principles on the subject but I prefer mong. earning to being dependent on a father, a lover, or a hy band. Dependent women seem hampered even more tha wage-earning ones. Likewise I hold no brief for or agains marriage, having tried celibacy, free union, and marriags I do not know what woman’s job in life is, any mor than I know what man’s job is. And I feel it is rathe silly to drag sex into the matter. My journalistic care: the fact that I have turned to account in printed word ai cold cash the curiosity that drove me in my groping midi: years, is the source of a certain pride and self-confiden: which is the springboard for my future. Now, at forty-odi, I stand where the young man of thirty stands, with enougi solid achievement behind me to nourish an ambition to é still bigger things. I see quite plainly that it is the fact: my being a woman which has delayed me fifteen years i: reaching this point. It is nobody’s fault; I was born in ci: cumstances which our generation has helped to destroy. Tk younger women seem able to get away to a start without » much muddling. The Hall-Mills Case in the Newspapers By SILAS BENT OT since Harry Thaw killed Stanford White has the American press found crime news so much to its taste as the Hall-Mills mystery. Tons of white paper have been covered with trivial details about clothes, with personalities and highly colored descriptions of individual deportment in the courtroom. Somerville, N. J., is by journalistic consent the news center of the world. The New York Times has already devoted to the trial (which is by no means com- pleted as this is written) more words than Theodore Dreiser needed for the development of his monumental novel, “An American Tragedy.” The others have not been idle. Enough words have been sent out of the Jersey village to fill nine volumes of the “Encyclopaedia Britannica.” A giant telegraph switchboard, incorporating 120 “pr sitions,” has been rigged up in the basement of the cour: house. The daily capacity by Morse code is half a millia words, and the telephone company has imported eight add: tional operators to help move the spoken load. A notewortl! aspect of this trial is the variety of “trained seals” wht are helping to report it. The daughter and widower © Eleanor Mills, one of the murder victims, are signing storié for a syndicate, but do not write them. Mrs. Henry Stevens wife of one of the defendants, is writing for Cyrus H.} Curtis’s papers, which have also assigned to the case Jor? thy Dix, their staff counselor and consoler of the lovelor! The reverend fundamentalists, Billy Sunday and John Roa!

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Dee. 8, 1926] The Nation 581 straton, are moralizing for the public benefit on the sudden geath of their fellow-clergyman, Edward W. Hall. For a rime former Police Commissioner Enright contributed odgily to the Hearst string; but the brunt of this work is now being done by Rita Weiman, a playwright; Louella Par- sons, a movie reviewer, and Damon Runyon, a sports writer. Reporters are in the minority, apparently.) The Hearst ners are also represented by specialists on “heart inter- ‘legal aspects, features, defense, prosecution, and so on. ps, the number of employees, counting photographers and mes- ; sngers, is seventeen. The News, which serves also its elder brother, the Chicago Tribune, has a staff of nineteen on the job, and is signing half a dozen names. The reams printed in the Times are ground out by anonymous drudges. 4 The Hall-Mills case affords an excellent opportunity to observe the methods and practices of metropolitan news- papers. I have measured the space given to news and pic- oe tures of the trial in three representative journals: the vhether Times, which advertises that its circulation is “among intel- ether d tho lami gent, thinking, substantial persons, a quality of readers "AB not equaled by any other newspaper”; William Randolph Hearst’s American; and New York’s most widely read tab- loid, the Daily News. These three have a combined average morning circulation of more than a million and three-quar- ters, and they are not overlapping circulations. A tabulation of the three for twenty days (including three Sabbaths, Armistice Day, and one suspension on account of a witness’s illness, when no court sessions were held) shows the follow- ing results in column inches for news and illustrations, and in total number of words: News Pictures Words TOD sccdaheseacne 4,893 290.5 338,000 AMCTICER 2c ccccee 4,656.5 1,903 232,800 fidenss BE 8 te cw aeeus 2,991.5 2,138.5 149,000 V -00¢, The American ran second to its picture paper competitor in enougt the space accorded to photographs, drawings, and maps, and A 7 second to the Times in the number of column inches devoted ar -M® tonews. The Times used fine type plentifully, and squeezed ‘oll ‘in more words to the column inch than any of its com- v. Te _ptitors. The News was chosen for this examination in- “* “"® stead of the competing tabloid picture paper, Hearst’s Daily Mirror, because the Mirror, having turned up the case, and having gathered practically all the evidence on which the prosecution relied, had the inside track. The News plunged knee-deep into the story with unblushing gusto; both the Times and the American honored it with editorial clarifica- tion—or justification. “It is to the public interest,” said the Times, in a dignified half-column editorial, ‘“‘and not merely because it is a ‘celebrated case,’ that there should be a full 2) “poff/ report in the newspapers of the trial of Mrs. Hall and her courage Orothers. . . . His [Special Prosecutor Simpson’s] inquiry milliof™me Yas conducted with all the help he could get from the press, t add-qmme Decause it was Mr. Simpson’s theory that publicity might vorthi [me ‘2Courage witnesses to come forward.” And soon. (The » while Mirror had found the witnesses.) The American came out ver (fm ‘atly: “If ever publicity was warranted, it is here. Human storiéae interest is instinctively keen over money, sex, and religion.” ‘eves Arthur Brisbane, in his signed first-page editorial column, H. kg S8w no need of defending the journalistic ethics involved. Nout % Dome This horrible case,” said he, “will again remind men that velo Whoever stirs up jealousy stirs up danger.” 2oatt The Times ran no first-page head more than three col- umns wide, but used eight-column streamers inside. The tabloid ran a streamer across the top of its first page every day, whether or not there was any news; so did the Ameri- can, except that the streamer was sometimes only six col- umns wide. After the Armistice Day interlude the Times led Page One with a sympathetic forecast of the defense, although there were still seven days to come of testimony for the prosecution. The first object of attack, the Times story said, would be a calling-card found at the clergyman’s feet, bearing a finger-print identified by State witnesses as Willie Stevens’s. The Times spoke of the finger-print as a “black smudge, a vague and partly obliterated mark.” The News devoted less than one hundred words to the testimony of Philip A. Payne, manaying editor of the Mirror, who took the stand for the prosecution and who was responsible for damaging its rival’s circulation and prestige. It is impossible to accord the palm for thrilling narra tive to any one of the three papers I have been studying Take your choice, for example, of these selections from the news of a single day, the day an effigy of Mrs. Mills's head was exhibited: From the Daily News: Mrs. Hall went to a matinee yesterday. The rich widow who is battling for her life attended a hideous exhibition staged for her benefit But she could not look at it. Her brothers looked. The show fascinated them. From the American: Ah, yes, this Mrs. Frances Noel Stevens Hall is human, after all. . . Human—and a woman! She showed it yesterday afternoon. The proud, stoical front she has been presenting to the world as she sits in the little chapel-like courtroom in Som- erville . . . was shaken by a distinct shudder. From the Times: Shudders passed along the rows of spectators as the doctor marked in red crayon the entry point of the bullets, or in a sweeping motion of the crayon showed how the choir singer’s throat had been cut. ... Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall had shot a second’s glance at the exhibit and had averted her eyes. When it was placed on the witness stand railing, directly in her line of vision, she reached quickly into her pocketbook and began to examine the documents. She dropped coins, one by one, into the black leather purse; she looked fixedly at the back of the room, then her eyes traveled to one of the small galleries. counting the spectators. She seemed to be The tabloids are reviving an obsolescent form of jour- nalistic activity. In the days of the Guldensuppe case, for instance, the Times and World and Sun did their own inves- tigating, and murder mysteries were solved. How much real newspaper work was done on the Elwell murder mys- tery? It remained unsolved. The standard-sized news- papers appear now to be too lazy or too respectable for that sort of thing. They wait for a “privilege of publi- cation.” They wait for dunderheaded policemen to do the work, and apparently the work doesn’t get done. Perhaps the despised and irrepressible tabloid has more to its credit than we suspected. Whether right or wrong in its facts, the Mirror followed a long journalistic tradition. If the ac- cused were innocent, they should have been cleared four years ago; that the case came so late to trial is due not only to the defects of “Jersey justice” but to the change in the press.

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The Nation [Vol. 123, No. 22: HB pe

—— - oe PGR Gf PIAA LP TRIOS. LORI OPAL LATE E OLIN LEN Ae Ae, — | ce 7 - - ; — ‘ re 1o7 rn] er WOOLY ah! SWRA ROR RIN 9 ON Ot ee! 4 PORE AR ROAR) TH 1) ta on ‘a ee — A , Cainer Oia oh iO nee , fn tO SKK Pg 4: ALL GA Be Pd ae ¥< LEE SEH on TEIELTS ae SES. Mak BA 279? bij a 3 tld a fi Sed Wx 4 m) #21 -fT= TCE =" LUV ULAR IAA eae . ‘ POOL ARO AMIN OL AN MES LO —by Harry S. Bressler Jefferson's Disciples—1926 Model

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A AER ORRIN 9 OD ek ON OSA deere Jj WR WON i

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The Nation 583

DENVER WE

THER] Inspects Mysteries ~w came OF Engine During | StopinCanon | “3 OS VIEWS HOT SPRINGS “weanesday night and warmer N : ue HERMOPOLIS, Wyo., Nov. 10.—! (By Associated Press }—For the first time on their transcon-| tinentai trip LOCOMOTIVE’S CAB

—=i4 . Princess =; and the prince inspected the cab »™*' of a locomotive. During the stop} ocr" in the Wind River canon the) “ queen and her party were shown | the cab of the Burlington loco- their train. | THE POST Telephone crive 2911 pulling MamtrSix Thousand “Wren sa t ;

Kind But Practical. Seys Frank Berham,

ip amara tures of the roysi

m the banks of the Nite will around the eyes of * suse tt is a sin to kil

The daponese are eastern, but also hate hydrophobia. S« ¢, they celebrate “dog

e The cubs bad * avtema was miraculously re al! livgd happily

o Page 2—Col 3.) DENVER WILL CELEBRATE SDK ARMISTICE ARNIVERSARY ter-Parade to Feature Day—City to Observe General Holiday and Period of Silence To Honor War Dead.

er will celebrate, Thursday, the eighth anniversary ot! tice which ended the World war The boys who came back wil] parade in celebration of the truce which stilled the guns and stopped the slaughter. The whole city te to the heroes who were left ‘‘over there’’—victims

t in contemplation o aid the

town streets. On , (the five parade ¢

pe At the end of the two minutes’ of lailence, the parade will ewing inte action again. the t strike op . © celebration w

‘ 4 r standing ¢ purnde

heads and stan activity in the cit

whole city and state FIFTEEN CHILDREN DIE AS TORNADO LEVELS SCHOOL .. . existence, which were sheared

PON entering our country, with outstretched arms and eager eyes, you asked for our love, for our affection and friendship. In the short time you have Seen among us you have won all of this and more. Men make kings and queens and rulers, but only God Himself makes real men and women, and God must have smiled at His handiwork when He treated you. No man or woman, no king or queen, or potentate, has created such an enthusiastic and spontaneous wave of love and respect in the United States as you hace. You are the American ideal of what a queen stiould be—beautiful, ‘gracious, re- sponsive, intelligent and loving—and so Colorado and the great Rocky Mountain regions welcome you today to their territory

Twister Cuts .500-Yard- Wide Path Thru Small Town in Maryland. La Plata, Md, Nov. 10—(By Associated Presb.)—This little ~«- town of 500 souls stooped in sor. '* row Wednesday to take up again“ the usually placid threads of its

f the suddenly Tuesday afternoon bY) ing wee « the wrath of a tornado that) 4 wreaked havoc and destruction 5. ¢ along @ path at times 600 yarda maced

TO MARIE, RUMANIA’S GLORIOUS QUEEN: wide thru a portion of southern “= Maryland, killing fifteen and in cs faring two score, mostly school «parse children, here, coon juring four more at Cedarville fourteen miles K 2 tr at thousends of dollars, The

x “AMERICA'S SWEETHEART rv | with love and admiration for your many charms, for your beautiful character, and tor the very delightfal and loving and un- usual femininity that you bring to us. Our welcome is equally extended to the charming Princesa llecna, your daughter, and to the fine, manly Prince Nicolas, your son And may God return you aad them to your country in safety and in good health, and may the bond of mutual love, friendship and admiration linger with you and us until the end, Mey your visit to us be one of unforget- able joy and pleasant memories during all the coming years. And may peace and hap- piness and prosperity remain with you and your country; and may the friendship that exists between your people and ours be one of lasting satisfaction and advantage to | both our great nations,

region of and severely fn.” northeast of here

a tele © everybedy” be (Turn to Page 2 Gol. 2)

| (Turn to Page @—Coh 6) |

QUEEN MARIE TALKS TO CROWD OF 14,000 AT CITY AUDITORIUM Even Sun Welcomes Me in Denver, She Says—Thanks Citizens for Turn- ing Qut to Meet Her

UEEN MARIE was given an ovation when she wa rod 4 at the aod k we “rt the cont e whe has been ¢ o* me as even the we y v i a \ over a I x wha ay i i have We do not come these days as king? and queens oretve gold and frankincense We come with ar ereage + sage of friendship. We believe tha the © gets “* pe more heed to those things wh ane © weet The message I bring with me us «of peace and . Let this message be given too + ¢ pame e king whe sw me in spirit. Let me greet you all and thank r this bes ul reception given me Denver ank ¥ Py T ctming bere today; thank you for t a way ® hick ave received me; thank you for the lk q eipress I read opon every face bs wera ex vomarn roman GOOK REFUSES TO TELL WHAT QUEEN ATE FOR BREAKFAST s eSpeper ror os pend

exretiont appetite and is “very fond of American dishes DENYER PLANE SETS NEW ALTITUDE MARK CORONER'S WURY a9 teem Oto Geenntia, aun Sitie Alle ate ber; she is not permitied by royal custom to give interviews « ed when the 4 me. resounding OF reams of) her heart consequently ber Post Alliance qrticies ars of incale - me, 5 he Denve t slone in the : other farm ~ th her t The Den read her enprem

Jeffersonism in Denver: Democracy Receives a Queen

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The Nation [ Vol. 123, No. 3205 — a, Toward the Arctic Ocean By LEWIS S. GANNETT [This is the last of a series of three articles describing the author’s trip across Mongolia from the Chinese to the Trans-Siberian Railway. | HREE days were usually needed to obtain permission to leave Mongolia, but Nikiforoff, the Russian Consul, was eager to be rid of a troublesome visitor, and sent his secre- tary with me to make the rounds of the magnificent collec- tion of secret-service, passport, and police departments with which the would-be modern Mongols toy. Cars started for Siberia, so read the announcement in the Russian news- paper of Urga, every Saturday at nine. At 9:30 a boy came to inquire whether I really wanted to leave that day. They would rather, he said, wait until Monday. I explained that I wanted to catch the weekly Trans-Siberian express on Wednesday. The boy took the message; an hour later he returned to say that the ice on the rivers was breaking, and it was doubtful whether we could make the Wednesday train anyway. I replied that I was more than ever con- vinced that we had better start at once and be sure of the next week’s train. And finally, after long discussions, it was so agreed. The nine o’clock car called for me at half past two. The chauffeur, Mikhail Vassilievich, was an American-type lad, clever with his hands and quick at in- vention; the other passengers were his sister, returning to Moscow; Bajin, a merchant, and a peasant who lived eighty versts from Urga. None of them spoke any West- ern language but Russian. Down the side-valleys into Urga thousands of ox-carts were pouring—long caravans of two or three hundred, each cart loaded with a huge section of tree-trunk, or with chunks of charcoal, the last two or three with hay to feed the oxen on the long trek from the forest to the city. The Holy Mountain across the river is tree-covered with the only trees for forty miles, but the wood of the sacred moun- tain may not be cut. Until dark we tugged up through one rolling bare valley after another, lifeless except for a singie covey of ptarmigans. The brown sweep of the hills reminded one of those magnificent pictures of more West- ern hills in “Grass.” We crossed three passes before dark, always to find new mountains opening before us. The road was a camel-track, sometimes barely wide enough for a car, sometimes broadening hundreds of yards wide across the meadows where camels and ox-carts had sought fresh routes in place of trodden mire. Sometimes it disappeared in hard hummocky meadows or hillsides of jagged rocks. The driver, who had never been over the route before, kept his eyes glued on the ruts of a previous car. It was nine o’clock when we came to a river—and the tracks were lost. The ice was broken; melting snow had swollen the current. Passengers piled out; we hunted the valley up and down for a possible ford, or for tracks of the preceding car. But it had done as we—crawled to the edge of the river at a score of points, and then backed out. At one point the ice seemed safe; our peasant-passenger tried it—and broke through, above his waist in ice-water. It was midnight before we finally found automobile tracks that entered the river; we tested the depth with a stick, slipped gently into the stream, and roared safely up tp, opposite bank with a cheer. And it was after midnigh; when we routed out the Chinese keepers of a lonely moyp. tain inn and had a belated supper. We rose at four the next morning, and were off soo, after five, with tea and bread inside us. About ten we can, to the home of our peasant-passenger, a lone pioneer |og cabin away up in one of the high Mongolian valleys. }, had hauled his wood thirty miles, built his own house anj barns, and was enormously proud of his work. Even }j; furniture was home-made, except for an American Singer sewing machine! He gave us fresh boiled eggs, and fres) milk, and soft home-made bread, baked from his own whes: flour. There are scores of such Russian frontiersmen push. ing their way into Northern Mongolia, and a few Chinese farmers; but the Mongols, desperately afraid that their grazing-land will be lost, oust them on any excuse. The mountains lay cold and bare to the south by warmly birch-wooded on the northern slopes. We ray smoothly from one valley to another, then down to the ford of the Khara-gol River. But the ice was out at the edges and the water flowing swiftly. A lone Mongol on horseback made his way through the water and across the ice, by there was no hope for a heavy car. We backed off and tried again, and again. But the spring warmth was against us, and the black water turned us away. Twenty miles down. stream, the Mongol told us, was a wooden bridge—almost the only bridge in Mongolia. We found the bridge but could not get to it. One route after another across the soggy meadows proved impossible. The road for a mile short of the bridge was a canal of deep, soft, moving mud. We tried it once, and worked for an hour to back the car out of the slippery ooze. Deep ditches three feet wide, with swirling water, ran on either side of it, and shallow mud-lakes lay beyond these. Finally Bajin and I, prospecting on foot, worked out a route which lay across meadows part of which were under water but a least seemed snow-covered or grassy, not mere mud. The car maneuvered into position, attacked the course, ran hal way smoothly, then stopped, up to the hubs in ice-water. There was nothing to do but push—not a living soul within twenty miles; not a service-station within three hundred. Bajin and I rolled our trousers to the knees, which was sometimes not enough, took off shoes and stockings, and for the next two hours waded among ice-cakes, adding our feeble man-power to the sturdy engine of the car. By mi¢- afternoon we were within a few yards of the bridge—with the swirling ditch still in front of us. We spent the rest of the afternoon tearing up a corduroy road and building a bridge across the ditch. Almost at sunset we rolled blithely across the river, and sped, at a perilous angle, along the edge of the mountain, across the valley, the road being deep in water; then turned north again, over more Alpine passes. I have seldom seen a lovelier sunset than that night, the sky’s fire reflected from a thousand pools in the river-bottom—but the chauffeur, who knew that the road lay through those flaming pools, was utterly unmoved when I pointed to the reflections.

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Dec. 8. 1926] The Nation 585 Four more rivers we crossed the next day. The ice gas gone from the first, and the stream was too deep for a podge unaided. We unlashed the bags from the running- poards and piled them high inside the car, took out the arbureter, greased the rest of the engine, and hired two horses to haul us through. The second river we boldly forded. The third, after long hesitations and testings, we crossed on the ice—safely. The fourth, the Ura, was a longer story. The ice was out and the river ran free along both shores, but the center ice seemed solid. From the near shore the Mongols had built a log bridge out to the solid ice; on the north side the ice came so close to the soping shore that it seemed safe. We reinforced the log pridge; the car gently slid across it, raced across the ice for the far shore, when—crack! the Dodge plunged through, whirred a moment, and lapsed into discouraging silence. And there it sat, in the river above the hubs, water flowing through the bottoms of both my bags. For- tunately, we were close to a Mongol village, and they had We were ferried to dry land; again we rolled up our trousers and waded in; we hitched a dozen ropes to the car, and Mongols, Russians, and American slowly hauled the car out of the river and up on the sand. Toward evening I saw mountain-peaks to the north which looked blue instead of brown; and suddenly I be- came aware that their skylines were fuzzy, like the sky- lines of the wooded mountains at home. The ranges flat- tened out and the country softened. Aspens, birches, and pines mingled with one another— occasionally we ac- tually ran through forest, AS One never does in lowland China or in high Mongolia. We passed tiny villages of Russian pioneers —pushing into the wilderness, build- ing their own houses, and con- triving their own machinery, self-de- pendent and re- sourceful — the Americans of the next century. That third night we reached Troit- skosavsk, the fron- tier town, and slept, with an army of cockroaches, in 4 Russian inn. a boat. nn ae annancinaan ns: ni TB ccc: ie. wate enough to get out of Mongolia, but it took most of a day to yet into Russia. Every parcel and paper was pried into. With some difficulty I conveyed the idea that I still hoped to catch the weekly train next afternoon, and at length we set out again. More rolling birch-and-pine country that evening, and more deep sand. It strange but friendly to see seemed occasional bits of plowed land and even fences. Toward midnight, just short of the great Selenga tiver, we roused a peasant village and found a family willing to take us in for the night and give us tea. The air struck one in the face as the door opened—it must have people were more or less asleep on the been carefully preserved all winter—and_ eleven floor, including a sick baby; but when I attempted casually to lean against the door and keep it open for a minute they came to me and pointed out that the malinka was ailing and must not suffer fresh air. I slept in the car, and yot four and a Monyol huts have one advantage over Russian—they leak air half hour’s better sleep than I had had since Urya The great Selenga River lay ahead, a big navigable stream, to be crossed twice. Sut the Selenyva ice was stronger than we knew. It had broken a bit at the edges, but log bridges had been laid, and we were past the fir crossing before six. We passed Selenyginsk- —a little one green-rooled, Diue- bulbe d story town dominated by two huge churches and then wan- dered miles out of our course. Sut finally we came upon the new road marks the route of the future Trans-Mon- which golian Railroad, and while it was oft and unfinished, most of the lesser bridges had been built and were usable, Wind drove the loose sand into yur faces, but we were covering the miles. Our long detour and the bad roads, however, had cost us so much gas that the chauffeur vas doubtful whether we could get through. At 1:30 we were only thirty versts from the goal, the meter showed one and a half gallons of gas, and we stopped to eat. Five miles short of the rail- road the meter Customs offi- ‘ials cannot be hur- ried. It was easy A pro-Russian Mongolian poster showing England reaching ower the Himalayas, knife and telegraph in hand to ensnare and threaten Tibet; the Chinese colonizer enters from the East; Mongolia tends her sheep; and Red Russia stands guard. showed zero, but the car puffed on, and we caught the

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586 The Nation [Vol. 128, No. 3295 weekly train with half an hour to spare! And that is the route over which some say Russia ships great quantities of munitions to her friends in China! Six days crossing the snowy plains of Siberia—endless, half-cultivated, still in the log-cabin stage, but looking for- ward to a boundless future with a boundless self-confidence. Siberia is American in its spaciousness, its optimism, its faith in its future. Four days in Moscow, where Henry Ford and Lenin are enshrined as twin gods, where a cult of American mechanism is arising, along with new skyscrapers, electric sky-signs, and even talk of a subway, and mingles its familiar jargon with the lingo of communist ideals. Two more days, and I was back in Western Europe, where frontiers huddle on frontiers, where men bathe and talk familiar languages and wear familiar clothes—a land achingly nostalgic, living on memories of the good old days before the war, praying for restoration, reconstruc- tion, rebuilding, always looking backward. A continent —— where the great races of the nineteenth century do po; know that their moment of history is done. China still slumbers, perhaps—but she has never Jog faith in herself, and today, with the weapons of the Wes in hand, retains her ancient pride in the power of her foy, hundred million citizens; Mongolia is an interlude, a qy. ing race that once ravaged a continent awakening, as all Asia will awaken, and rubbing its eyes in a new dawn: Russia is a bridge between East and West, enormous, , young people four times as numerous as America wag q half century ago and as sure of an infinitely expanding future—and the little crowded countries that have mage history on that Western plain of Europe, blinking behing their customs frontiers and separate armies and diplo- matic staffs and mutual hates and jealousies, seem pitify), lost, unimportant in comparison with these mighty peoples. China, Russia, America—these are nations of the future. They are none of them meek, but they will inherit the earth. Gasless America By STUART CHASE UR culture complex—as the anthropologists say—is © changing, nay, has changed. While England and Ger- many still remain coal civilizations, the United States has become, with unheard-of rapidity, a gasoline civilization. The acid test of a culture complex is the nursery. In Amer- ican nurseries the choo-choo gathers dust on the topmost shelf while the red racer holds the position of honor on the floor. Little Archie can tell you on the nail the make of every car that passes him. The grocer boy will call it a day any time to help you change a tire. Where is the urchin who has not mastered the calisthenics of the traffic cop? Of a Sunday, in front of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Pittsburgh one may behold an impressive ceremony. One by one, all day long, motor cars draw up before the church door. A priest sprinkles each with holy water and pastes upon the car a seal which insures auto- mobile, driver, and passengers the protection of St. Christopher, lately appointed the patron saint of motor cars. Ten years ago the consumption of gasoline in the United States was 300 million barrels; today it is 800 million bar- rels. Ten years ago there were two million cars in the coun- try; today there are over twenty million. It is gasoline which has girdled the country with 300,000 miles of mag- nificent highways; decreased distances between communities as no other form of transportation has ever done; and with the shrinkage, stamped identical habit patterns upon the citizens of Boston, New York, Atlanta, New Orleans, Kan- sas City, Salt Lake, Los Angeles, and Seattle. It is gasoline which now propels, in motor trucks, more gross tonnage of freight than the railroads move. The Florida boom would have been unthinkable without gasoline. In the last few years has appeared the strange phenomenon of gasoline gipsies—uncounted thousands of families on the march from one automobile camping ground to the next, the coun- try over. It is gasoline which has made possible the mass production of week-ends—the synthetic gin is only a by- product—which has made the reclamation of abandoned farmhouses by city folks a major industry; which has quad- rupled the radius between the skilled worker’s home and his job; which has built golf courses and demoralized the work- ing schedules—to say nothing of the pantaloons—of practi- cally the entire business world above $7,500 a year; which has in the guise of the tractor revolutionized farming meth- ods; which has created the road house, the night club, put the hot-dog industry on its feet, added stupendous efficiency to the art of banditry. No saxophone blows without a faint whiff of gasoline behind it; no silver screen can flicker with- out its parking lines outside. It is gasoline, not cosmetics, which has given the flapper her final polish, and made the boy friend what he is. Which brings us to the folkways of courtship. No longer do we love by dim gaslight but by dimmed headlights —and gasoline. Cruise around the outskirts of any city or town on a summer night and note the parked and silent mon- sters up every lane, before every vista where moonlight sparkles on the water; tail lights glowing, and kisses warm above the steering wheel. Dr. Watson holds, not without some show of reason, that what chiefly marks off man from the other animals are language habits. The influence of gasoline on the American language is profound. A whole new dialect of slang has been created, much of which in due time will force its way into accredited forms of speech. Coming down Tuckerman’: Ravine on Mount Washington the other day, we overtook a girl in riding breeches, resting on a rock. “Pretty stiff drop,” said we, obeying the courtesies of mountain trails. “Tough on the brake bands,” said she with equal courtesy. “Step on it, kid”; “park your hat here”; “I’ve been goin’ it on high for a month”; “aw, put it in reverse”; “a regular self-starter”; “flivvered out”; “throwing the Rolls Royce”; “you’ve got water in your mixture”; “a six-cylinder guy.” Gasoline will start the next war; gasoline in airplanes carrying poison gas will win the next war—or end the career of homo sapiens—it is not quite clear which. And now comes this aggregation of flat tires, the Fed- eral Oil Conservation Board, and wants to conclude it all by giving us only six more years of gasoline production at the

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205 Dec. 8. 1926] The Nation 587 | il resent rate in America. The threat is grotesque, inconceiv- “hie, A law must be rushed through Congress prohibiting " From the roar of the gusher and the shrieks of the spec- tators to the last flying explosion in the muffler, gasoline ryns—the heart’s blood of the nation. Six years—and then ,gasless America! The mind reels at the contemplation of it, What? No taxis, traffic cops, Dixie highways, one-way streets, better Buicks, Standard Oil companies, filling sta- tions, schoolgirl complexion billboards, airplanes, football stadia (for how could they be filled?), five-ton trucks, Klaxon horns, 25,000 new graves a year, Saturday Evening Post advertising, Fifth Avenue buses, road maps, dash-board architecture, lubricating oils, four-wheel brakes, Diesel en- gines, instalment selling, “Punkville 4 miles, Goodrich Tires,’ Tumble Inns, submarines, Ye Olde Antique Shoppes, gunmen in Packards, back-seat driving, back-seat kisses? America without gas is a pipe without tobacco, a hearth without a fire, a suit without trousers. . Death rather! The New Generation By MATHER A. ABBOTT [An address delivered by the headmaster of Lawrence- ville School before the Rotary Club of Trenton, New Jersey, on Armistice Day, 1926.] A* I looked over my boys this morning, when we were {i celebrating Armistice Day in chapel, I said to myself: “The war is an ever-present evil with me. I suffered so much during my three years in the navy—we all suffered so much —that we can never forget it. But not one of these fellows knows anything about it. The oldest boys were only ten years old when the Armistice was signed.” Then I saw a picture. I saw a picture of myself at eighteen, and the world as it was then, and a picture of this maelstrom of a world in which our boys are now placed. Think of it, and remember your youth. In the last eight years we have had: 1. Prohibition and all it entails. 2. The ubiquitous automobile. 3. The cheap theater, especially the movies, with its sex problems. 4. The absence of parental control. 5. The ignoring of religion. 6. The emancipation of womanhood, combined with the modern dance. There are just six things. Now, when we were eighteen, liquor was hardly thought of. We knew there were certain boys that used to drink and we did not often associate with them. As for carrying a pocket flask, it was practically un- known. When we took a girl out for a drive, we had to hire a one-horse rig and we were all properly chaperoned and looked after. We had no cheap theaters and no movies. Our parents were addressed as “sir” and “ma’am,” and their word was absolute law. God was an ever-present power, whom we held in deadly awe. Imagine our feelings if a lady, with a cigarette in her mouth and drinking a cocktail, should have shown herself at one of our dinner parties thirty years ago! That sort of thing we relegated to certain streets which had red lights. And the modern dance I saw first in 1902, when I went up the Nile, in certain Ethiopian villages where the tomtom was no louder than the present- day drum! Into this maelstrom the modern youth has come, knowing nothing else, and you and I and all the members of this parental generation are absolutely responsible if youth is going to the devil. But it is not! I have been in the business of teaching boys for thirty years. I have at present under my charge 540 boys col- lected from nearly every State, and I have never known a more truthful, clean-living, honorable set of young men. They are different from the boys of my youth as the sun is from the moon—full of nonsense, full of passion, headstrong, mischief-loving, but five times as decent, as truthful, and as manly. Let me describe them to you: ‘ In the first place, their leading characteristic is that they must prove everything by trying it. They do not begin where we leave off, as we want them to do; they must go through every experience themselves. They take nothing for granted. They want facts, the false through a ten-inch board. devilish intuition—I say “devilish” caught so often! They will have nothing of what they call “bull” on the part of an older person. I would rather talk to five thousand people of your aye than I would to my five hundred boys. prove every word I say! Secondly, the absence of religious instruction in their youth. Unfortunately, the mothers are too busy to give the fireside and bedside talks that they used to vive the little fellows, and the fathers are too busy in business even to tell them the truth about the sex problem. Now you cannot prove the other world and you cannot prove God, and the modern generation will not accept anything you cannot prove. So, though “the fear of God is the beginning of wis- dom,” the modern generation is practically without it Since the great fear which held us is absent, these boys, having the spiritual longings that all boys have, are restless Unwilling to face the deep questions of life, they try to seek happiness in the material, and most of this desire that we hear so much of for a thrill, fo. breaking the law, and so on, comes from an unanswered longing within, which they think they are going to satisfy with material things, only to find that the material things cannot satisfy. So these lurid tales we hear are usually caused, not by any evil in the boy or girl, but by the untrammeled pursuit of truth which is so evident in all the young of our generation. They want to realize everything and, of course, you and I, in our maturity, know that very few things in this world can be realized. In this connection, I wish to use a place nearby as an illustra- tion. This town has suddenly become notorious, but I be- lieve there are 20,000 people in it who are not notorious, who are living lives that are decent and straight and true. 3ut the news of a certain family in the town blackens every paper every morning. So it is with these stories of the youth of today. They are frightful stories, absolutely true, most likely, but I do not believe that 10 per cent of our youth could be thus characterized. If we looked upon the notorious happening in that town as the rule, where would America be going? But it is the great exception. So with these lurid stories; they, too, are the great exceptions. Now, lastly, the equalization of the sexes: When you and I were boys, woman was on a pedestal; we worshiped her. There was pursuit; there was mystery; there was worship. Did we worship that which was true or that which was false? The worship has gone, disappeared, and I am told that modesty, too, has gone. Perhaps it has, but we are getting at facts; we are getting at companionship; we are not camouflaye. They can see They have an almost because I have been I have to be so abominably careful that I can

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588 The Nation [ Vol. 123, No. 3205 getting at the truth. The double standard has vanished. Of course, there are terrific calamities, terrific failures, but out of them there is going to come something remarkable. To sum up, therefore, what do I find? First, a truth- lover. Second, a word of honor that is never broken. Third, a reasonable being that will not take a rule as final until it is approved. Fourth, and most astonishing, on the whole, a clean-minded individual. And then—what will always hap- pen where God is not regarded as supreme, what has hap- pened throughout history where a nation has given up its God—a restlessness that is always unaccountable, a dissatis- faction of mind which makes the youth probe into things we never thought of going into, which we took on faith. Also, many failures, many disasters, as there always are in a great upheaval, where freedom gets confounded with license. No, gentlemen, the youth of the present generation, as far as I know, and I know five hundred of them very intimately, are on the way to great discoveries, have made a step toward happiness and a step toward self-government far ahead of anything we had in our youth. They need very careful handling. They need all the love and affection that a man can give them, and they are going to bring this old world of ours one step nearer heaven in the end. In the Driftway HE death of Leonid Krassin of pernicious anemia in London last week sent a pang of regret through the Drifter’s breast. He recalled Krassin’s first appearance in London as a Soviet envoy when the Drifter, too, happened to be sojourning in London. Krassin was in looks anything but the typical Bolshevik. Quiet, reserved, unassuming, and obviously in delicate health, he seemed the student and teacher. Yet many people then, as now, expected that be- cause he was a Bolshevik he must have the mustachios of a pirate, long, flowing and unkempt hair, a bomb in one hand and a dirk in the other. Instead, he was a modest, accessi- ble diplomat who differed in no wise in his personal appear- ance from the conventional Russian gentleman. * * * * * ATURALLY Mr. Krassin’s first appearance in London was not altogether easy nor without uncomfortable happenings, even beyond the nasty editorials in the con- servative press. But sometimes there were rays of light and little experiences which greatly smoothed the road for this representative of the Soviet. Thus, the Drifter recalls Kras- sin’s experience when he undertook to give a dinner to which he invited some of the men most prominent in British public life, including Lloyd George. He was at first at a loss to know where to give the dinner, but finally decided to try one of the great hotels in the Strand. He interviewed the maitre d’hotel with distinct uneasiness. He explained that he wished to give a large dinner party, but desired to have it understood in advance that if the hotel agreed to take the dinner it would give its word to live up to its agree- ment and to let nothing interfere. The puzzled maitre d’hotel, piqued, declared that his hotel did not break its word. “Wait a minute,” said Krassin, “you do not know who I am. I am the Bolshevik envoy, Krassin. I do not wish you to say you will serve me and then have your managing director tell me three days before the dinner that you cannot serve Bolsheviks.” The maitre d’hotel smiled skeptically. “You are not Krassin?” “I am,” replied the envoy, and reinforced —— his statement with his passport and other official documey;, The maitre d’hotel looked at them and turned upon Kraggj, “Do you mean to say that you wish this hotel to seryp 5 dinner for you? Well, Mr. Krassin, I wish you to knoy that I shall consider it the greatest honor I have ever hag» — * * * * ESPITE this welcome Krassin felt uneasy unti| th repast was over. Afterwards he told the Drifter th: never had he eaten so fine a dinner, and never had he dreamed that a dinner could be so perfectly served. “Th. most interesting thing about it,” he added, “was that we had a new set of waiters for every course. Later | aske the maitre d’hotel why that was. He laughed and said ‘s, many of them begged the privilege of serving you that | had to compromise by letting a new crew serve each course!’” And then comes the most remarkable part of } Mr. Krassin confided to the Drifter that he could not preva; upon a single waiter to accept a tip! There is no doubt jp the Drifter’s mind that that incident brightened life fo, Krassin for many a day and offset some of the coldness }» encountered when he was first received as a diplomat anj people did not know whether to regard him as a wild anima! or an escaped convict. If what has since been widely re. ported is true, Krassin steadily made his way wherever he went, because of his ability and his modesty and his quiet devotion to his job. And that is also the belief of his acquaintance, THE DRIFTER Correspondence In Defense of Fascism TO THE EDITOR OF THE NATION: Sir: Able and efficient government can never be attained through the head nor through the heart, but only through the hide. Even your distant proteges in Russia have been compelled to see the wisdom thereof, and, chop as much logic as you will, you cannot disprove it. Force, brute force, is the one and only method toward efficacious government. How can you dare to assert that Fascism and its philosophy are inferior to our much-mooted democracy and liberty? Pray, where is that democracy, that liberty? In Prohibition, perhaps, or the Teapot Dome, or the crookedest Cabinet in the history of the American Presidency? By what heavenly sign has the divine right of the majority been established? Why the right of the majority any more than the similar right of kings? It is evident (to me, at least) that our theory of govern- ment is fallacious as well as inefficient. We rule, not by the ablest, but by the most popular. At election time it is not the man who can best fulfil the desires of the voters, but the man who spends the most money in advertising, who brays the loudest, that wins. The record of Congress scarcely dis- plays any signs of intelligence, let alone of brilliance. Granted that free speech is denied in Italy—what good does it do us here? Has it helped with Prohibition? Has it pre vented such outbreaks of delirium as were witnessed in Tennes- see and, more recently, in Boston during the Mencken-Mercury altercation? It is much like having an expensive automobile when you haven’t the money to buy gasoline. In brief, Fascism places the needs of the nation above a!!l— above the individual, above the group, above the interests of either capital or labor. When, in 1921, all industry, all pro duction was at a standstill in Italy, because of the bickering: of the laborers and the manufacturers, the Fascists, the middle class of Italy, rose and forced the workers to work and the capitalists to pay. Then why this outburst? New York, November 12 VICTOR ZORIN

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lima; V Te. Yr he quiet his ER cury pro- ings ddle the gives us uncommon joy. coming to an impasse, and it is aware of the fact. Dec. 8. 1926] The Nation 589 That Glorious Word—Damn To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION: Sir: Your symposium on profanity is of great interest. Qnce Lord Tennyson discanted to me at great length on the Litass . silence of half a minute, or more, his whole face lit up and he exclaimed enthusiastically: “But that word “Damn” is a glori- ys word, is’nt it? Often, nothing else can take its place, or express the exact shade of your feeling”! Columbia, S. C., November 13 And What About Europe? To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION: Sir: Have you ever considered the tremendous target ofered by the City of New York to an enemy’s attack? It would be impossible to miss such a mark. It is close to the sea: it is almost as high and wide as a mountain; and it is as destructible, for modern artillery, as a glass house, or a china shop. A single first-class enemy ship could destroy the city on Manhattan Island, in half an hour, from a distance of twenty miles. Each high-explosive shell would pass clean through the skyscrapers, and blow them into ruins of twisted steel and shat- tered concrete; and every shot would cost us thousands of lives and millions of dollars. Fire would complete the work of destruction. The City of New York is the heart of America, and should be defended, as men defend their own hearts. The approach of an enemy by sea or by air should be made impossible. An attack from the air, with the use of poison gas, might be even more disastrous than a bombardment. America should not disarm. America should double her armaments by sea and by air. She should have a navy and air forces capable of stop- ping the combined fleets of Europe in mid-Atlantic. Chicago, October 26 BERTRAND SHADWELL Mr. Bruce Spills To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION: Sir: In an interview obtained recently by the New York Evening Enquirer, W. P. Bruce, a geologist of Boston, spills the beans. Mr. Bruce has been seeing Venezuela, and what he has seen puts Mr. Bruce fearfully in the dumps. Was Mr. Bruce moved by the sardonic mischief-making of those who put up innumerable monuments to Simon Bolivar and put down with iron heels the consequences of Bolivar’s passion? Was he stirred by the realization that Venezuela through all the days of Gomez’s dictatorship has been suffering an unending Santa Marta? No, it is oil that afflicts Mr. Bruce so pro- foundly—oil and the bad state of health of that humanitarian, Juan Vicente Gomez. Here are Mr. Bruce’s own words: Be Be Yes, General Gomez is failing in health, and I fear is fail- ing fast. It is said that he has Bright’s disease, or nephritis, and you know what that means. However, credit must be given him for the way he has developed Venezuela’s natural resources, especially her oil fields. What will happen down there if he should happen to pass out, the future only knows. I rather dread to think about it, because there is no one quali- fied at the present time to step into his shoes. Just how capital views the situation, I am really at a loss to understand, be- cause all the oil concessions have been granted by the Chief Executive himself, and therefore are illegal under the laws of Venezuela, and will necessarily be subject to future revision. Here is a problem confronting not only American capital in- vested there, but British as well. I really see nothing but chaos ahead, It is perhaps bad manners, but what makes Mr. Bruce sad Imperialistic capital in Venezuela is It is con- fused, and brought to confession. “All the oil concessions have been granted by the Chief Executive, and therefore are illegal under the laws of Venezuela, and wil! necessarily be subject to revision.” Indeed, they will be, Mr. Bruce. And other things will be subject to revision, a drastic change. And on that purgative day Simon Bolivar will return to Caracas, to a new birth! Brooklyn, N. Y., October 27 MARTIN FEINSTEIN, English Secretary, The Venezuelan Labor Union Encouragement TO THE EDITOR OF THE NATION: Sik: I have read “Music and the External World” to a number of visitors; it always provokes discussion, and it teresting to see just where the individual begins to I hope B. H. Haggin will continue. West Medford, Mass., November 14 E. H Is In remonstrate Contributors to This Issue SILas BENT was formerly associate editor of the Nation Business. LEwis S. GANNETT, associate editor of The Natio pe last winter in the Orient. . STUART CHASE is the author of “The Tragedy of Waste MATHER A. ABBOTT is headmaster of the Lawrenceville School. RENE LALou, author of “Contemporary Literature in France,” is engaged upon a study of Paul Valéry to be published soon in Paris. ABBE NILES, coeditor with W. C. Handy of “Blues,” has made a special study of Negro folk-music ELISEO VIVAS was the author of the anonymous article, The Unknown Critic, which closed the Critic’s series in The Nation two years ago. Mary AUSTIN, author of “The American Rhythm” and many other books, now lives in Santa Fe. KEITH HUTCHISON is the author of “Labor in Politic HAROLD J. LASKI, of the London School of Economics, is the author of “The Grammar of Politics.” DONALD DOUGLAS is the author of ‘The Grand Inquisitor.” R. L. BURGESS is on the staff of the San Jose News, San Jose, California. JOHN HAYNES HOLMEs is pastor of the Community Church of New York. MORTIMER J. ADLER is a member of the department of psy- chology, Columbia University. WILLIAM MACDONALD is the author of “A New Constitu- tion for a New America.” J. A. HoBsoN, the noted British economist, is a frequent contributor to The Nation. ALICE BEAL PARSONS is the author of “Woman’s Dilemma.” PAUL BLANSHARD is a trade-union organizer and author of “Outline of the British Labor Movement.” GERALD CARSON is a New York business man and literary critic. CARLETON BEALS is the author of ‘““Mexico—an Interpreta- tion.” R. F. DIBBLE’s most recent biography is ‘‘“Mohammed.” SIDNEY R. PACKARD is a member of the department of his- tory, Smith College. B. H. HAGGIN, a musician of New York, is contributing a series of articles to The Nation. The author of Why I Earn My Own Living is a well-known magazine writer.

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International Relations Section The British Commonwealth of Nations E print below the opening sections of the report of W the Inter-Imperial Relations Committee of the Im- perial Conference, issued November 19, as cabled to the New York Times. I.—INTRODUCTION We were appointed at a meeting of the Imperial Con- ference, October 25, 1926, to investigate all questions on the agenda affecting inter-imperial relations. Our discussions on these questions have been long and intricate. We found on examination that they involved con- siderations of fundamental principles affecting the relations of the various parts of the British Empire inter se as well as the relations of each part to foreign countries. For such an examination the time at our disposal has been all too short, yet we hope that we may have laid a foundation on which subsequent conferences may build. II.—STATUS OF GREAT BRITAIN AND THE DOMINIONS The committee are of the opinion that nothing would be gained by attempting to lay down a constitution for the British Empire. Its widely scattered parts have very different char- acteristics, very different histories, and are at very different stages of evolution, while considered as a whole it defies classi- fication and bears no real resemblance to any other political organization which now exists or has ever yet been tried. There is, however, one most important element in it which from a strictly constitutional point of view has now as regards all vital matters reached its full development—we refer to the group of self-governing communities composed of Great Britain and the Dominions. Their position and mutual relation may be readily defined. They are autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by common allegiance to the Crown and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations. A foreigner endeavoring to understand the true character of the British Empire by the aid of this formula alone would be tempted to think that it was devised rather to make mutual interference impossible than to make mutual cooperation easy. Such criticism, however, completely ignores the historic situ- ation. The rapid evolution of the oversea Dominions during the last fifty years has involved many complicated adjustments of old political machinery to changing conditions. The tendency toward equality of status was both right and inevitable. Geo- graphical and other conditions made this impossible of attain- ment by way of federation. The only alternative was by way of autonomy and along this road it has been steadily sought. Every self-governing member of the empire is master of its destiny. In fact, if not always in form, it is subject to no compulsion whatever. But no account, however accurate, of the negative relations in which Great Britain and the Dominions stand to each other can do more than express a portion of the truth. The British Empire is not founded upon negations. It depends essentially if not formally, on positive ideals. Free institutions are its life- blood; free cooperation is its instrument. Peace, security, and progress are among its objects. Aspects of all these great themes have been discussed at the present conference. Excel- lent results have been thereby obtained, and though every Dominion is now and must always remain the sole judge of the nature and extent of its cooperation, no common cause will, in our opinion, be thereby imperiled. Equality of status so far as Britain and the Dominions , concerned is the root principle governing our inter-imper:, relations. But principles of equality and similarity appro; riate to the status do not universally extend to the function. [.>, we require something more than immutable dogmas. For example, to deal with questions of diplomacy and ques. tions of defense we require also flexible machinery—machine,, which can from time to time be adapted to the changing ¢ir. cumstances of the world. This subject also has occupied oy; attention. The rest of this report will show we have endeayoreg not only to state political theory but how to apply it to oy common needs. III.—SPECIAL POSITION OF INDIA It will be noted that in previous paragraphs we haye made no mention of India. Our reason for limiting their scope. to Great Britain and the Dominions is that the position of India in the empire is already defined by the Government of India Act of 1919. We would, nevertheless, recall that by resolution of the Imperial War Conference in 1917 due recognition was given ty wealth. Where in this report we have had occasion to consider the position of India we have made particular reference to it. IV.—RELATIONS BETWEEN VARIOUS PARTS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE Existing administrative, legislative, and judicial forms are admittedly not wholly in accord with the position as described in Section II of this report. This is inevitable, since most of these forms date back to a time well antecedent to the pres. ent stage of constitutional development. Our first task, then, was to examine these forms with special reference to any cases where want of adaptation of practice to principle caused or might be thought to cause inconvenience in the conduct of inter-imperial relations. A—Title of His Majesty. The title of His Majesty th: King is of special importance and concern to all parts of His Majesty’s Dominions. Twice within the last fifty years has the royal title been altered to suit changed conditions and constitutional developments. The present title, which is that proclaimed under Royal Titles Act of 1901, is as follows: George V, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions Beyond the Seas, King, Defender of Faith, Emperor of India. Some time before the conference met it had been recog- nized that this form of title hardly accorded with the altered state of affairs arising from the establishment of the Irish Free State as a Dominion. It had further been ascertained any recommendation for a change should be submitted to | as a result of the discussion at the conference. We are unanimously of the opinion that a slight chang is desirable and we recommend that, subject to His Majesty's approval, necessary legislative action should be taken to secure that His Majesty’s title should henceforth be: George V, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions Beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India. B—Position of Governors General. We proceeded to con- sider whether it was desirable formally to place on record 4 definition of the position held by the Governor General as His Majesty’s representative in the Dominions. That position, though now generally well recognized, undoubtedly represents a development from an earlier stage when the Governor Genera! was appointed solely on advice of His Majesty’s Ministers in London and acted also as their representative. The Governor of Newfoundland is in the same position as the Governor General of a Dominion. Ac ‘+ |

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—. © —_— — me pec. 8. 1926] The Nation 591 Here Selfishness and Unselfishness Go Hand in Hand. OR your benefit we have here gathered together many suggestions for Christmas gifts to yourself, your family and your friends. WE have the good fortune to be alive during an important and one of the most interesting and fastest moving periods in the history of the world. We all want to relish it and to comprehend it as fully as possible. TS Wor.p Tomorrow is for people who want to live fully and act intelligently on opinions formed from facts and reflection. It supplies data for examination of the ele- ments of our political and social life. Under the topical plan of arrangement, THE WorLp Tomorrow covers in each issue the important material of one particular subject. “Twelve care- ful studies of the more vital problems of our times are thus made each year. January—‘‘The Mind of Youth,” in which we publish the eight prize winning essays of our Youth Contest. February —‘‘ The Philippines’’. & & & =] o o HERE must be many of your friends who want THE Woritp Tomorrow during 1927 and would appreciate your thoughtfulness in giving it to them for Christmas this year. And you may have been wanting one of these several books. You can subscribe to THe Wortp Tomorrow for your friends and get the books for yourself and at the same time save a great deal of money. An appropriate card will announce your gift. THE WORLD TOMORROW —— & with George Washington, the Image and the Man, AAS SO ear $6.00 $4.50 with The Story of Philosophy, by Will Darant... 7.00 5.50 with Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, by 2 0 EP erraprey 5.50 4.25 with The Man Nebody Knows, by Brace Barton. 4.50 3.50 with Collected Poems of Carl Sandburg, by FR ETS 400 3.25 with Her Son’s Wife, by Derethy Canfield Fisher. 4.00 3.25 with The Time of Man, by Elizabeth Madox Roberts 4.00 3.25 with The Second Book of Negro Spirituals, by James Weldon Johnson................ 5.50 4.00 with Education and the Good Life, by Bertrand as de css pea ss aati Acie OSH 4.50 3.50 with An Old Man’s Folly, by Floyd Dell....: .. 4.00 3.50 with Preface to a Life, by Zona Gale .......... 4.00 3.50 with Fire, @ quarterly devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, premier issue ............ 3.00 2.25 OU may have a subscription to THe Wortp Tomorrow and you want a subscription to one or more of the maga zines listed here. Why not send Jiie Wortp ‘Tomorrow to one or more of the many friends who would enjoy having it and get the other magazines for yourself? An attractive Christmas card will announce the gift and the name of the giver. Regulars Our THE WORLD TOMORROW Pree Pree with The Bookman. . Renan $6.00 $5.00 with St. Nicholas 5.08 4.00 with Harper's 600 5.00 with The Intercollegian ..... 3.25 2.00 with The American Mercury ... 7.00 6.00 with The Atlantic Monthly 6.00 5.00 with The Century bia 7.06 6.00 with The Christian Century...... 6.00 4.00 | re 7.00 6.00 with The Nation......... 7.00 6.00 with The New Republic... . . 7.00 6.00 with Survey Sak) teats 7.00 6.00 with The Survey Graphic... ... ... 5.00 §=64.00 with The Youth’s Companion . . 400 3.5 NSTEAD of Christmas cards, which can not carry your whole thought and affection, we suggest that you send six months’ subscription to ten or more of your friends. “These you can have for $1.00 each and secure ‘Preface to a Life,” by Zona Gale, for yourself or as a gift for someone else. ‘I hese Christmas card subscriptions will be announced appropriately. — r= «a= aes eas ae THE WORLD TOMORROW, Inc., 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York City. For the enclosed $ please enter my order for your special combination offer checked above. I enclose in addition as Christmas gifts to my friends. Name Address | names and addresses for the books and magazines I want sent N 12-8-26 When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation

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592 The Nation [Vol. 123, No. 3295 In our opinion, it is essential in consequence of the equality of the status existing among the members of the British Com- monwealth of Nations, that the Governor General of a Dominion is a representative of the Crown, holding in all essential respects the same position in relation to the administration of public affairs in a Dominion as is held by His Majesty, the King in Great Britain, and that he is not a representative or agent of His Majesty’s Government in Great Britain or of any department of that Government. It seemed to us to follow that the practice whereby the Governor General of a Dominion is the formal official channel of communication between His Majesty’s Government in Great Britain and his governments in his Dominions might be regarded as no longer wholly in accordance with the constitutional position of the Governor General. It was thought that the recognized official channel of com- munication should be, in the future, between government and government direct. The representatives of Great Britain readily recognized that the existing procedure might be open to criti- cism and accepted the proposed change in principle in relation to any of the Dominions which desired it. The details were left for settlement as soon as possible after the conference had completed its work, but it was recognized by the committee as an essential feature of any change or development in the channels of communication that the Governor General should be supplied with copies of all documents of importance and in general should be kept as fully informed as is His Majesty the King in Great Britain of Cabinet business and public affairs. C—Operations of Dominion Legislation. Our attention was also called to various points in connection with the operation of Dominion legislation which, it was suggested, required clarification: The particular points involved were: (1) The present practice under which the acts of the Dominion Parliaments are sent each year to London and it is intimated through the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs that His Majesty will not be advised to exercise his powers of disallowance with regard to them. (2) The reservation of Dominion legislation in certain circumstances for the signification of His Majesty’s pleasure which is signified on advice tendered by His Majesty’s Government in Great Britain. (3) The difference between the legislative competence of the Parliament at Westminster and the Dominion Parliaments in that acts passed by the latter operate as a general rule only within the territorial area of the Dominion concerned. (4) The operation of legislation passed by Parliament at Westminster in relation to the Dominions. In this connection special attention was called to such statutes as the Colonial Laws Validity Act. It was suggested that in the future uni- formity of legislation as between Great Britain and the Domin- ions could best be secured by the enactment of reciprocal statutes, based upon consultation and agreement. We gave these matters the best consideration possible in the limited time at our disposal, but came to the conclusion that the issues involved were so complex that there would be grave danger in attempting any immediate pronouncement other than the statement of certain principles which, in our opinion, underlie the whole question of the operation of Dominion legis- lation. We feel that, for the rest, it would be necessary to obtain expert guidance as a preliminary to further consid- eration by His Majesty’s Governments in Great Britain and the Dominions. On the questions raised with regard to disallowance and reservation of Dominion legislation, it was explained by the Irish Free State representatives that they desired to elucidate constitutional practice in relation to Canada, since it was pro- vided by Article 2 of the articles of agreement for the Treaty of 1921 that “The position of the Irish Free State, in relation —— ——— pro For Dour Christmas Giving Bog ———— THEY STILL NEED YOU The Passaic Textile workers are still on strike. They are waging a courageous battle against in- dustrial autocracy. They look to you, the readers of THE NATION, to support them in their struggle for decent Ameri- can living conditions. Will you continue your support of these fighters for democracy and help their children have a happy Christmas by sending your contributions to H. S. RAUSHENBUSH, Treasurer Emergency Committee for Strikers’ Relief ROOM 638, 799 BROADWAY NEW YORK CITY Special Milk Fund Committee Norman Thomas, Chairman Forrest Bailey J. A. H. Hopkins Roger N. Baldwin Florence Kelley Harriot Stanton Blatch Paul U. Kellogg Susan Brandeis Dr. Henry R. Linville Mrs. George Burnham, Jr. Rev. J. Howard Mellish Rev. Edmund B. Chaffee Dr. Henry Neumann Stuart Chase Mrs. Gordon Norrie Herbert Croly Amos Pinchot John Dos Passos Evelyn Preston Mary E. Dreier Samuel Untermyer Elizabeth Glendower Evans Oswald Garrison Villard Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Lillian D. Wald Elizabeth Gilman James P. Warbasse Arthur Garfield Hays Bertha Poole Weyl Rev. John Haynes Holmes Mrs. Stephen S. Wise And Others Emergency Committee for Strikers’ Relief 799 Broadway, Room 638, New York City Enclosed is check for dollars for the Passaic strikers and their children. Endorsed by The Nation When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation

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Dec. 8. 1926] The Nation 593

$100 WORTH of BOOKS for $5 IN THE FIRST SIX NUMBERS OF TWO WORLDS MONTHLY ULYSSES » fevée which cannot be purchased for less than $50 in the Paris [dition, is appearing serially in TWO WORLDS MONTHLY; MAGGIE: A GIRL of the STREETS Stephen Crane’s great novel, obtainable in book form only ina set of 12 volumes (the author’s collected works) selling for $90, appears complete in the 4th number of TWO WORLDS MONTHLY. BROKENBROW: 4 Play in 3 Acts by ERNST is obtainable only in a Nonesuch Press Edition selling for $5—it appeared complete in 3rd number of TWO WORLDS MONTHLY. 60 SHORT STORIES ,, .,, distinguished writers as D. H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas, Arthur Schnitzler, Giovanni Verga, T. F. Powys, Hugh de Selincourt, Frank Wedekind, T. S. Eliot, Ludwig Bird and Cunninghame-Grahame. 75 DISTINGUISHED POEMS | by Carl Sandburg, Richard Le Gallienne, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, A. E. Housman, A. E. Coppard, E. Powys Mather, Ezra Pound and others—making | two remarkable anthologies—one of peo—-—-— | other of the best modern poems. If you hurry you can still begin your subscription with Number One. You will not easily forgive yourself if you fail to get a complete set of TWO WORLDS MONTHLY.

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594 The Nation [Vol. 123, No. 329; ——, to the Imperial Parliament and Government and otherwise shall —— be that of the Dominion of Canada.” On this point we propose that it should be placed on record that apart from the provisions embodied in the constitutions or in specific statutes expressly providing for reservation, it is recognized that it is the right of the Government of each Dominion to advise the Crown in all matters relating to its own affairs. Consequently it would not be in accordance with constitutional practice for advice to be tendered to His Majesty by His Majesty’s Government in Great Britain in any matter appertaining to the affairs of a Dominion against the views The Training School for Jewish So- of the Government of that Dominion. e Ww : Appropriate procedure with regard to projected legislation cial ork offers a fifteen months in one of the self-governing parts of the empire which may course of graduate study in Jewish affect the interests of other self-governing parts rests on Family Case Work, Child Care, previous consultation between His Majesty’s Ministers in the . Sn . rs . aeeedl notte senmereel Community Centers, Federations and On the question raised with regard to the legislative Health Centers. competence of members of the British Commonwealth of Nations Several tuition scholarships and other than Great Britain and in particular to the desirability maintenance fellowships are avail- of those members being enabled to legislate with extraterritorial : ! effect, we think that it should similarly be placed on record able to especially qualified students. that constitutional practice is that legislation by the Parliament The winter quarter begins January 3) at Westminster applying to a Dominion would only be passed 1927 with the consent of the Dominion concerned. E P , As already indicated, however, we are of the opinion that For further information, address the there are points arising out of these considerations and in Director, application of these general principles which will require detailed examination, and we accordingly recommend that steps THE TRAINING SCHOOL should be taken by Great Britain and the Dominions to set FOR up a committee with terms of reference on the following lines: To inquire into and report upon and make recommendations JEWISH SOCIAL WORK concerning, first, existing statutory provisions requiring the r y y ; reservation of Dominion legislation for assent of His Majesty 210 West gist Street, New York City or authorizing disallowance of such legislation; second (a), the present position, as to competence, of the Dominion Parlia- ments to give their legislation extraterritorial operation; (b) the practicability and most convenient method of giving effect to the principle that each Dominion Parliament should have T > y the power to give extraterritorial operation to its legislation FIFTH AVENUE RESTAURANT in all cases where such operation is ancillary to provisions for 200 FIFTH AVENUE peace, order, and good government of that Dominion; third, principles embodied in or underlying the Colonial Laws Validity NEW YORK Act of 1865 and extent to which any provisions of that act ought to be repealed, amended, or modified in the light of | A LUNCHEON RESORT FOR THE ——s a, ee the prone yy of seed British DISCRIMINATING CLIENTELE— ommonwealth of Nations, as described in this report. THOSE APPRECIATING UNEX- [Sections on Merchant Shipping Legislation and Appeals CELLED CUISINE AND SERVICE. to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council are here omitted. ] V—RELATIONS WITH FOREIGN COUNTRIES PRA From pg gt oe the hapa . ae EVENINGS—SPECIAL PARTIES ous parts of the British Empire with one another we naturally 1 Te turned to those affecting their relations with foreign countries. ONLY. ANNIN ERSARIES, BANQUETS, In the latter sphere a beginning had been made toward making LADIES NIGHTS, BEEFSTEAKS, clear those relations by resolution of the Imperial Conference SMOKERS, SUPPER AND DINNER of 1923 on the subject of negotiation, signature, and ratification DANCES. of treaties. But it seemed desirable to examine the working of that resolution during the past three years, and also consider OUR BANQUET DEPARTMENT SPE- a on gn agate down pope ngperboe treaties could CIALIZES IN SERVING not be applied with advantage in a wider sphere. GR A—Procedure in Relation to Treaties. We appointed a OUP DINNERS UP TO 1000 AT $2.00 A COVER UP. special subcommittee, under the Chairmanship of the Minister of Justice of Canada, the Honorable E. LaPointe, K. C., to con- sider the question of treaty procedure. The subcommittee, on Ownership Management whose report the following paragraphs are based, found that the resolution of the conference of 1923 embodied, on most by THEODORE KEMM points, useful rules for the guidance of the governments. As they became more thoroughly understood and established they GRAMERCY 4900 to 4907 would prove effective in practice. Some phases of treaty procedure were examined, however, When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation

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J pec. 8. 1926] The Nation 595 = , greater detail in the light of experience in order to consider ; what extent the resolution of 1923 might with advantage be supplemented. - p—Negotiations. It was agreed in 1923 that any of the governments of the empire contemplating the negotiation of a treaty should give due consideration to its possible effect upon Ol iiss to the other governments to say whether they are likely to be interested. When a government has received information of the inten- tion of any other government to conduct negotiations it is incumbent upon it to indicate its attitude with reasonable promptitude. So long as the initiating government receives no adverse comments, and so long as its policy involves no active bligations on the part of other governments, it may proceed on the assumption that its policy is generally acceptable. It must, however, before taking any steps which might involve other gov- ernments in any active obligations, obtain their definite assent. Where by the nature of a treaty it is desirable that it should be ratified on behalf of all the governments of the em- pire the initiating government may assume that the government which has had full opportunity of indicating its attitude, and has made no adverse comments, will concur in the ratification of the treaty. In the case of a government that prefers not to concur in the ratification of a treaty unless it has been signed by a plenipotentiary authorized to act on its behalf it will advise the appointment of a plenipotentiary so to act. C—Form of Treaty. Some treaties begin with a list of the contracting countries, and not with a list of the heads of states. In the case of treaties negotiated under the auspices of the League of Nations adherence to the wording of the annex to the Covenant for the purpose of describing the contracting party has led to the use in the preamble of the term “British Empire,” with the enumeration of the Dominions and India if parties to the convention, but without any mention of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the colonies and protectorates. These are only included by virtue of their being covered by the term “Brit- ish Empire.” This practice, while suggesting that the Dominions and India are not on a footing of equality with Great Britain as participants of the treaties in question, tends to obscurity and misunderstanding and is generally unsatisfactory. As a means of overcoming this difficulty it is recommended that all treaties (other than agreements between governments), whether negotiated under the auspices of the League or not, should be made in the name of the heads of the states, and if a treaty is signed on behalf of any or all of the governments of the empire the treaty should be made in the name of the King, a symbol of the special relationship between the different parts of the empire. British units on behalf of which a treaty is signed should be grouped together in the following order: Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and all the parts of the British Empire which are not separate members of the League; Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State, and India. A specimen form of treaty as recommended is attached as an appendix to the committee’s reports. In the case of a treaty applying to only one part of the empire it should be stated to be made by the King on behalf of that part. The making of a treaty in the name of the King as a sym- bol of the special relationship between the different parts of the empire will render superfluous the inclusion of any provision that its terms must not be regarded as regulating inter se the rights and obligations of various territories other than that on behalf of which it has been signed in the name of the King. In this connection it must be borne in mind that the ques- tion was discussed at the Arms Traffic Conference in 1925, and c) WHERE TO BUY BOOKS CJ — BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS x¥ The fun of giving with none of the drudgery. Book " gifts in imported decorative wrappings sent direct to your friends post free anywhere. Send for our illus trated Christmas catalog. THE POST-BOX BOOK SERVICE Inc 15 West 44th Street, New York GOOD CHEER, COMRADES! Daca sells you all books 20 tw 80% of list: Durant, Cabell, Schnitzler, Mencken, etc. Many unusual items. Come on over to THE NEW DOOR, 4 Christopher St (W. of 8th St. and 6th Ave.), N. 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Give a man TOASTER’S HA NDBOOK and MORE TOASTS—$1.80 per volume, only $3.60 for both Another handbook commended by The Harvard Review is SELEC- TION AND CARE OF SOUND INVESTMENTS, by Arthur Herschel This book, written by an investor for investors, is of particular “use as a handbook by the individual who wishes to gain a concrete know edge that will assist him to make his investments in an intelligent manner.’—Harvard Review. 400 pages, price $4.00 THE H. W. WILSON COMPANY 971 UNIVERSITY AVENUE NEW YORK CITY When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation A MOSCOW DIARY je ees cole in Soviet Russia today, by Anna Porter. Cloth. $1.00 postpaid. Ask for book catalog. OHARLES H. KERR & OO. 247 East Ohio Street, Ohicago INSTINCT IN THE CELL AND ORGANISM (Deacriptive Table of Contents Free) HIS volume of NEANDER P. COOK is a survey of the instinctive reactivities of the living organism. Based upon the most recent biological discoveries, it is an amazing revelation of the hidden powers that drive the living world onward and upward, from ita lowliest beginnings in the Protozoa to its highest achievement in man. Though written for the scientific investigator, it comes in language and illustration so simple, that any intelligent reader, desiring first-hand knowledge, need not miss a page of it. $5.00 postpaid. THE WEIMAR PRESS, Alhambra, Calif. —If you have a house or property to sell or lease, try The Nation classified advertising section. —If the experience of other advertisers of real estate is a guide, your advertisement in The Nation will pay. —Write for rates to Dept. R., The Nation.

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596 The Nation [ Vol. 123, No. 3205 that the Legal Committee of that conference laid it down that the principle to which the foregoing sentence gives expression underlies all international conventions. In the case of some international agreements the govern- ments of the different parts of the empire may be willing to apply between themselves some of the provisions as administra- tive measures. In this case they should state the extent to which and the terms on which such provisions are to apply. Where international agreements are to be applied between the different parts of the empire, the form of treaty between the heads of states should be avoided. D—Full Powers. Plenipotentiaries for the various British units should have full powers issued in each case by the King, on the advice of the government concerned, indicating and cor- responding to the part of the empire for which they are to sign. It will frequently be found convenient, particularly where there are some parts of the empire on which it is not contemplated that active obligations will be imposed, but where the position of British subjects belonging to these parts will be affected, for such government to advise the issue of full powers on their behalf to a plenipotentiary appointed to act on behalf the gov- ernment or governments mainly concerned. In other cases pro- vision might be made for the accession by other parts of the empire at a later date. E—Signature. In a case where the names of countries are appended to signatures in a treaty different parts of the empire should be designated in the same manner as is proposed in regard to the list of plenipotentiaries in the preamble to the treaty. The signatures of the plenipotentiaries of the various parts of the empire should be grouped together in the same order as is proposed above. Signature of a treaty on behalf of a part of the empire should cover territories for which the mandate has been given to that part of the empire unless the contrary is stated at the time of signature. MOTION PICTURE Po) ARMORED CRUISER The Sensational Russian Film which has taken all Europe by storm. “GREATEST MOTION PICTURE EVER MADE”’ Say DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, EMIL JANNINGS and MAX REINHARDT “Towers above all other films.” —Evelyn Gerstein—New Republic. CHANIN’S 47th St., W. | Twice Daily, 2:30-8:30 | All Seats Reserved ILTMOR of B’ way Sunday, 3 and 8:30 | Tickets Now on Sale LECTURE i) | Reserve your places now Nation Dinners December 7 PROHIBITION Clarence Darrow “The Duty of Civil Disobedience” Major William B. Wright, Jr. Chief Enforcement Officer of Prohibition in Pennsylvania “The Obligation of the Law” Chairman: Arthur Warner, Associate Editor, The Nation January 11 “CENSOR THE STAGE?’ Elisabeth Marbury, Joseph Wood Krutch Frank Gillmore Executive Secretary, The Actors’ Equity Association Chairman: Lewis S. Gannett, Associate Editor, The Nation February 15 “MEN—WHAT OF ’EM?” Ruth Hale, Lorine Pruette Chairman: Freda Kirchwey, Managing Editor, The Nation March 8 Songs and Dances by American Indians Speakers to be announced on “THE ART OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN” Chairman: Mark Van Doren, Literary Editor, The Nation April 12 “WHO IS CALVIN COOLIDGE?’ Frank R. Kent, William Hard Chairman: Oswald Garrison Villard, Editor, The Nation OPEN FORUM The Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th St., New York City, Sunday, Dec. 5, at 8 P. M. Frank Tannenbaum on “MEXICO” SUNDAY, DEC. 12, AT 8 P. M. « Tendencies in the Modern Theatre” SPEAKERS, HENRY G. ALSBERG, Translator of “The Dybbuk” and adaptor, with Isaac Don Levine, of ‘“Turandot.”’ JAMES LIGHT, of the Provincetown Playhouse, Director of ‘“‘Hamlet in Modern Dress,” “Beyond the Horizon," etc. Questions and Discussions Public is invited ALL DINNERS WILL BE HELD AT THE FIFTH AVENUE RESTAURANT 200 FIFTH AVENUE, AT 7 P. M. $2.75 per plate. $12 for the series of five. Tickets may be bought only by Nation subscribers, although each subscriber may bring as many guests as he wishes. —If you are not a Subscriber— You may have The Nation for a year (regular price $5) with a ticket for the first dinner for $6.25, or with a ticket for the five dinners for $16.00. The Nation 20 Vesey Street, New York Send me The Nation for a year places for me at The First Dinner 0 The Series Address Tickets will be mailed a few days before the dinner. When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation

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Holiday Book Section The Importance of Paul Valery By RENE LALOU AUL-AMBROISE VALERY was born in 1872. A P friend of Pierre Louys, he contributed several poems the symbolist reviews from 1889 to 1895; and he was then ysidered as the most promising disciple of Stéphane Mal- ,ymé. He also published two prose works, “Introduction a i méthode de Léonard de Vinci” (1895) and “La Soirée vec M. Teste” (1896), whose importance was to be fully realized only twenty years later. At that early time nobody ~emed to understand that he had given in the two books yoth a clue to his problem and an explanation of the silence hich was to ensue for more than fifteen years. Van Bever ond Leautaud, the authors of the best symbolist anthology, ‘ound much difficulty in accounting for what they thought be mere perversity. “Paul Valéry,” they wrote, “has viven himself for several years to extra-literary researches which it is not easy to define, as they seem to be grounded . premeditated confusion of method between exact sci- and artistic instincts.” This definition was not quite ear; yet something in it, as will appear vafter. In 1917 Valéry published “La Jeune Parque,” a poem of five hundred lines which created a stir in literary cir- - others followed till 1922, when they all were collected ina volume significantly called “Charmes” (Carmina). Each f them was hailed as a masterpiece; Valéry’s old work in prose and verse was studied anew; and he now offered sev- eral essays, two Socratic dialogues, and some fragments of his notebooks. His fame was spreading rapidly, not only sa poet but also as a master of French thought and as one our intellectual leaders. His election as a member of the Academy honored that institution rather than added new ‘ory to his name. The reason for Valéry’s extraordinary success must be sought in those very researches which perplexed his former ritics. His problem is the highest problem, the problem of the mind. He has stated it unequivocally: “The things of the world interest me only in their relation to the intellect. Bacon said this intellect is an idol. I agree, but I have never found a better one.” From his youth Valéry has been busy answering that ever-recurring question: What can man accomplish? What is he master of? His intellect be- ng his only weapon, where does that lead him? Can the nity of the mind prevail over the diversity of things? Can mind form that “decisive image” to which it aspires and lassify things “according to their facility or their diffi- ity’? The aim of the intellect is an infinite extension of ntinuity; can it create a continuous universe? The struggle, at first glance, seems best exemplified in those we name our great men. The “Introduction” is the tudy of a great man who stands as “a complete system in “mse'f” and who possesses the secret of “recovering rela- tons between things whose law of continuity escapes us.” dong we must notice that genius is something logical, not at all m} sterious: “Where others had not yet seen anything, he had already looked, combined, and did no more than read ‘nhis mind.” In the note he added in 1919 to his “Introduc- there was i ” of 1894, Valéry explains why he chose Leonardo for is hero: “I felt that this master of his means, this pos- sessor of drawing, of images, of arithmetic, had found the central attitude starting from which the enterprises of knowledge and the operations of art are equally possible.” He elected Leonardo for his champion because Leonardo had proclaimed: “It is easy to make oneself universal.” Too easy, indeed, in such a conception; hence arose a new scruple. Once he had reached that central point in the mind where all its powers, scientific or artistic, passive or creative, are Valéry was “Genius is easy, fortune is easy, divinity is easy I entitled to write: united, mean I know how they are conceivable.” To become uni- versal is not difficult; the hardest task is to remain so, never surrendering the relentless ideal of precision. Is that the case with our famous men? Of course not. As Valér writes in “La Soirée,” “every great man is tainted with error, ... the initial error which made him famous.” The “great man” belittles his may perceive it. This led Valéry to imagine that the great est among mortals are not the acknowledyed yvreat men but some unknown individuals who will die without having ever greatness in order that the crowd confessed their superiority. To embody that truth Valér invented Edmond Teste. “La Soirée” is the intellectual biograpt I Teste, a solitary man whose dwelling is “analoy to the any-point-whatsoever of the theorems.” There he re the highest degree of consciousness, the most refined sense of liberty: “He was the being absorbed in his variation, the man who becomes his system, who gives himself entirely te the dreadful discipline of the free mind, who joys kill his joys, the weakest murdered b M. Teste “defeats everything except the suffering of hi body beyond a certain intensity.” He can do everything but he would lose that universal power if he attempted to do anything. A lordly, comprehensive inaction was the last word of Valéry’s second witness, the testis of his distinctness, of his murdering lucidity. The same ob- stacle had blocked his way both as a writer and as a thinker: “Whenever I began throwing the dice on paper, I produced only words witnessing the impotence of thought: Mystery, Profound. I replied so promptly with my piti less sentences to my nascent propositions that the sum of my exchanges, at each instant, was nothing.” only issue left. In his retirement, however, Valéry kept faithful to “the obstinate rigor’ of Leonardo; he could then notice that “once rigor has been instituted, a positive liberty becomes possible.” He studied the exact sciences, which him the certainty that the human mind cannot err as it confines itself to the arbitrary systems of its own mak- ing. A correct mathematician is infallible provided he strictly obeys the laws of the abstract game. Cannot a poet do the same, work on relations only, thus reaching an equal degree of immaterial reality? The “mechanical which Teste was demanding Valéry found in language with its two uses, practical and poetical, and its two values, intel- lectual and sensuous. What Valéry has called “pure poetry” (a much-misunderstood expression) requires two conditions: a perfect lucidity excluding all instinctive enthusiasm and a coherent “language-machine.” Firmly convinced that “learned poetry is a profoundly skeptical Valéry planned his “Jeune Parque” as an exercise and cast it in the molds of the classical language-machine. The writer, he as- serted, must feel himself at the same time “source, engineer i desperate Genius, Silence was the Wal brought long ajeye” art,” ’

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598 The Nation [Vol. 123, No. 3295 and agent of constraint.” As a source, he must use his inspiration without ever allowing himself to be carried away by it. As an engineer, he must proceed to a kind of mental alchemy, creating both the work and the emotions that the work will suggest to the future reader. As an agent of con- straint, he will augment the power of his fire by submitting it to a system of coherent contrarieties. For a French poet such a system is not to be invented over again; our classical prosody offers it, strengthened by the efforts of several cen- turies. “The obligatory numbers, the rhymes, the fixed forms, all these arbitrary elements once for all adopted and opposed to ourselves, have a certain philosophical beauty of their own.” That philosophical beauty is always present in the work of Valéry. His poems rank already among our most precious treasures. Even those romantics who complain about a haughty disdain of sensibility in his pure poetry willingly agree that his dialogues and essays make him a master of French prose, not only for the strength of his argument but also for the matchless grace of his style. Valéry indeed is a Mediterranean; if he is always painting the incessant strug- gle of the mind, he embodies it in beautiful images. Beauty with him is not an abstract idea but a sensuous form. Edgar Poe and Mallarmé taught him the charm of music; from the Greeks he has learned the splendor of architecture; his crea- tion aims at the combined beauty of the two arts. He knows what danger threatens the intellect. “Nothing,” he says, “leads us to absolute barbarity more surely than an exclu- sive love for pure mind.” That is why he honors the human body, which holds the soul “as the anchor holds the ship.” If we are allowed to use as convenient landmarks the names of Plato and Keats, we may say that Valéry is the equiva- lent of either and covers the interval between. During the war some people discovered that, twenty years before, Valéry had contributed to the New Review an article which William Henley had published as The German Conquest. The article of 1895 looked so much like a prophecy for the readers of 1915 that it was reprinted under its true title, A Methodical Victory. In 1919 the Ath- enaeum printed La Crise de l|’Esprit, another essay by Valery. It opened with impressive words: “We, civiliza- tions, know henceforth that we are mortal. .” It con- cluded with a solemn query. Would Europe, Valéry asked, keep her place at the head of the civilized world or would she become in every regard what she is geographically, “a small cape of the Asiatic continent”? Most of his admirers will declare that he is the answer to that question, that Europe has lost nothing so long as it remains capable of giving birth to men like Valéry. No one will deny that there is something typically French in his personality, in the way his art harmonizes symbolism and classicism, his thought reconciles the intellect with the senses. But the French tradition he revives is that of the seventeenth century, when French thinkers often were the leaders of European opinion. In every European country where he has been invited to lecture, Valéry has been revered as a kind of unofficial ambassador, standing for the most exhaustive analysis of the human mind that has been at- tempted since the days of René Descartes. At a time when what we call, on this side of the Atlantic, Western civiliza- tion is reacting against all the Asiatic mysticisms as well as looking somewhat distrustfully at the industrialization of the mind in business-like America, the importance of Paul Valéry in European thought can hardly be exaggerated. ee Rediscovering the Spirituals’ By ABBE NILES IKE a poor congregation’s church, the now pey,, recognition of the Negro’s contribution to Am>-- music through his religious songs was a long time Mr. Fisher’ seems correctly to credit H. T. Burleiy’ ushering in the good day when in 1916 he published « River,” but fails to note that not this, but certain examples in Krehbiel’s* study of two years earlier, enn» tuted the first arrangements of spirituals for solo voice and piano; nor does he mention the part played by Homer Ro. heaver* in introducing some of these songs to Billy Sy». day’s hundreds of thousands, scarcely habitués of halls. For the rest, thank an already waning fad whic) leaves behind a solid body of knowledge and beauty for th: constant. Several myths have been dispelled; others are tottering Item: that the Negro merely filched, say, from the pale an; flabby “gospel hymns.” Krehbiel commenced and Ballanta’ has completed the demolition of this absurdity; Mrs. Burl: has summed up the facts: .. . the characteristics which give to his [the Negro’s] music an interest worthy of particular study are precisely those which differentiate Negro songs from the songs of the neighboring white man; they are racial traits, and the black man brought them from the Dark Continent. It is becoming less and less easy to pirate the aesthetic product of the blacks and simultaneously dub them “the most imitative race on earth.” Item: that the spiritual were “group compositions,” each a sort of monstrous coinei- dence. Not the accumulation of collections will dispel such a fallacy, but the repetition of even such qualified dissents as James Weldon Johnson’s’: My opinion is that the far greater part of them i work of talented individuals influenced by the pressur reaction of the group. Some, indeed, are too elaborate to have been born otherwise than in solitude. Item: such expressions as Henry 0. Osgood’s®: The spirituals have a great vogue today, one that is hardly justified by the aesthetic value of any except a small group of them. today indicate merely that the speaker has not taken the little trouble necessary to acquaint himself with more than a small group. More can be asked from no body of folksong than may be found among the spirituals. More, by the way, need not be aspired to by their admirers. Specifically, it is difficult to appreciate Mr. Johnson’s® concern that Negr themes should be commonly employed in this country as material for music in the larger forms; an anxiety under- laid by the idea which comes out in grosser form in Paul Whiteman’s'® What folksong would have amounted to anything if some great writer had not put it into a symphony? Dvorak’s use of Negro themes doubtless helped the spirituas toward recognition, but the weaving of an integral living thing like a folksong into the structure of a symphony may place, even invigorate, the latter only at the expense 0! * This is the first of several articles which will appear in the |x bers of The Nation on contributions to American literature and art other than Nordic sources.

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, nader- pec. 1, 1926] The Nation Al Je) © tne former; it is by no means written that the “New World symphony” will outlive “Go Down, Moses.” Item (but this “np still debatable): the theory gently questioned by Mr. Fisher: sz Writers (usually not musicians) speak of preserving -he “original harmony” of the spirituals. Is there any to preserve? The truth, as the writer then points out, is that two collec- ons which painstakingly record the four parts as sung by xogroes exhibit except for a few features the most con- venti nal harmonizations, contrasting with the many and fen striking peculiarities of the melodies themselves. But \r, Fisher does not discuss in this connection the har- monies recorded with equal care in the new compilation® ‘rom the little South Carolina island of St. Helena; these indeed are often both alien and stirring in a harsh wild way, and coming from this isolated spot they help suggest the answer “some” to Mr. Fisher’s question. And while the possibly opportunist Snyder collection’! demonstrates that -ne simplest voice-and-piano settings will pass, Mr. Fisher’s isa dangerous question, for future arrangers may read in ts implied negative an unmeant permission not merely to jiscard such racial earmarks as are available, but to produce spirituals” suggesting Les Siz, or another blonde smiling at the front rows over her manuscript. Not every accom- paniment in his own volume avoids such a horror. ' On the constructive side, through Krehbiel? we have aquired as illuminating an analysis of this body of song as could be hoped for from a white man; in particular, the dassification of over five hundred specimens which revealed that the oft-mentioned effect of “sadness” derives not from the use of the minor mode (actually uncommon) but from the raising, flatting, or studiously avoiding certain tones of the xales familiar to us, intensifying by strangeness to West- ern ears a melancholy otherwise dependent on deeper secrets of melody, rhythm, and form. Krehbiel’s illustrations are atreasury of the weird, and while comparatively few, assay higher (see “Dig Ma Grave,” the passionate and somber ‘You May Bury Me in de Eas’,” and “Come Tremblein’ Down,” anomalous for its triple time and uncannily suggest- ing a primitive English carol) than any other substantial lection. Krehbiel’s method has now been applied to new material by Mr. Fisher, whose volume’, with its historical and critical introduction, bibliography, and notes to every wng, is a model for future editors. The songs themselves— the several work of no less than ten musicians—are natur- ally of uneven merit as arrangements, but many are excel- lent and a number new, while particular attention is due the heavenly “Sail Over Yonder” (Grant-Schaefer); Mr. Fisher’s versions of “Give Me Jesus,” “Don’t Be Weary, Traveler,” and “Troubles Gwineter Weigh Me Down”; the majestic “Ride On, King Jesus” (Gaul) and “Walk Together, Children” (Rosamund Johnson); and two notable new- mers from Tennessee splendidly arranged by Charles Fonteyne Manney. With Krehbiel’s and Fisher’s must be nsidered a third work’, in reviewing which a well-known sociologist (himself coauthor of a volume on Negro songs ining no note of music) permits himself to say: 3allanta’s foreword is hardly the kind of foreword which the average person who is interested in Negro song could comprehend. His ultra-technical discussion of rhythm, scales, and tones, his theorizing on the characteristics of and differences between African and American Negro music are hard enough for a musician to digest, much less the ordinary devotee of Negro song. A few words about the people of St. Helena Island, their songs, customs, and the like would have been much more appropriate for the sort of collection which Ballanta made. —a winningly naive exposure of the mind of the specialist in A(1) contemplating an original and momentous excursion in field A(2). It is true that this explanation by a native African of the racial concepts back of the rhythmical and melodic phenomena which Krehbiel merely noted and classi fied is abstruse, but any inquiring musician would welcome it though tacked on to a seed catalogue. Moreover, the hun- dred-odd songs in this book are presented in a form more adapted for (Rosamund Johnson has already used a dozen or more to great advan- tage) than for the “ordinary devotee.” With a few excep- tions their poetry is below the averaye; the accompaniments uncompromisingly follow the parts in which they are sung in St. Helena; this is a musician’s collection and most appro- priately prefaced, although “I’m a Runnin’ Fo’ Ma Life” as it stands would bring shouts of joy from most audiences, and though no arranger’s finger is needed to point out the stern beauties (what bassoes must inhabit this islet!) of “Eagle’s Wings,” “Too Late,” “Way By-and-By.” The first Johnson volume’ has had the lion's public notice and has deserved it as the first token of an attempt at something definitive, though as such both it and its successor exhibit the inexplicable defects of omitting any disclosure of the birthplaces and histories of the songs. Mr. Johnson’s forewords are too nearly briefs—very excusably so, but the spirituals are their own best advocates and one grudges the space which might have gone to supple- ment such authoritative portions as the genera! discussion from the poetical viewpoint, with definite information about the tunes and poems themselves. Here must be confessed a disappointment with the arrangements in the first volume which may be largely due to the difficulty (alone, at the piano) of combining these accompaniments with the airs; at any rate the writer found these settings, while always competent and sometimes—as par excellence in “Jacob's Lad- der”—brilliant, often thin or distracting, while he found his judgment reversed as to almost every one he heard played and sung by the arranger himself and Taylor Gordon. In the second volume’, on the other hand, the keenest private pleasure is to be found, and it is unreservedly recommended to the voiceless pianist, especially for such examples of un- earthly melancholy and charm as “Chilly Water” or “Death's Gwineter Lay His Cold Icy Hand on Me,” such a creation (the word is advised) as “Daniel Saw de Stone,” for the gloomy agitated rhythms of “I Want to Die Easy,” the tem- pestuous brief cry “My Lawd Says He’s Gwineter Rain Down Fire,” the finality of perfection in the version of the St. Helena Charleston-spiritual “Same Train.” Emmett Kennedy’s'* text is not informative; his arrangements are distinguished and uniformly imaginative and original. His material—found in Louisiana—is mostly unpublished else- where (though it is amusing to find that our old friend “Frankie and Johnny” takes for Mardi-Gras the mask of “My Baby in a Guinea-Blue Gown” and deceives Mr. Ken- nedy himself); and at least one song, air and setting, touches the heights: “If You Can’t Come Send One Angel Down.” But too little, if anything, has been written about the two modest paper-covered Frey collections'’, one the first of all the recent company. Mr. Frey, best known as the com- poser of such witty and melodious ragtime as “Shakes- pearean Love,” “Havanola,” “Calicoco,” thus meets one of two near-requirements: color, and a term served writing students and prospective arrangers anare of ! Several

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600 The Nation [Vol. 123, No. 394 for Broadway (Mr. Johnson, writer of “My Castle on the Nile,” meets both). If his work is properly light-footed, it displays also the feeling and understanding necessary to convey no less of dignity, sorrow, or exaltation than his sub- ject requires, and while space permits mention here only of that free deep flow of rueful grace, “The Lonesome Valley,” his seems to the writer the outstanding collection by any white man, and his the happiest guises in which a number of these gracious airs have found themselves. 179 Negro Spirituals.”” Edited and with a Foreword by William Arms Fisher. Oliver Ditson Company. $2.50. 2Mr. Burleigh has published many arrangements of spirituals not yet collected in book form *“Afro-American Folk Songs.” G. Schirmer. $2.50. * See ‘“‘Rodeheaver’s Negro Spirituals.””. The Rodeheaver Company. 5“St. Helena Island Spirituals.” Recorded and with a Foreword by N. G. J. Ballanta. G. Schirmer. $1.50. *“Hampton Series, Negro Folk-Songs.” Natalie Curtis-Burlin. G. Schirmer. $2. 7“The Book of American Negro Spirituals.” and Lawrence Brown; Foreword by James Weldon Johnson. $3.50. *In “So This Is Jazz.” *“The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals.””. By Rosamund John- Viking Press. 3.50. By Henry T. Krehbiel. New edition. Recorded and with Notes by By J. Rosamund Johnson Viking Press. aon: Foreword by James Weldon Johnson. In “Jazz.” ‘The Jack Snyder Collection of Spirituals.” cents. 22 “Mellows.” By R. Emmett Kennedy. A. & C. Boni. “Famous Negro Spirituals’; “‘Celebrated Negro Spirituz Frey Robbins-Engel Each 75 cents. Jack Snyder Company. 75 The Critic’s Answer’ By ELISEO VIVAS MRANTING that the American artist can be productive IT here and nowhere else, the most important question of all remains yet to be answered. For it is obvious that the artist can create in America. One need only consult the fall lists of New York publishing houses to be con- vinced that the spring of artistic production which before the war was becoming a rushing torrent has already become a flood, and that it grows with time. But if we are to understand the problem of art in America, we must first question in different terms from which it has already been answered. For what we really desire to know is whether conditions of life in America in any way hinder the artist’s expression. And this we cannot find out until we have ascertained whether that which the artist has been creating in this country in modern times is great. If it is, we must ask how, then, does it com- pare with the product of the ages? Further, if it does not compare favorably, why not? And in the answer to this question, I think, we have the key to the whole question. To answer such questions, however, one must go much further than the personal and limited experience of the artist. For this reason, I believe, the critic should be al- lowed to have his say. For one has to study questions and conditions with which the artist is seldom concerned, and which may seem to him, in fact, little relevant to his One must investigate ideals, ideologies, philosophic and spiritual currents playing on the artist, and one must seek to discover exactly what influences institutions exert on him and on his material. It must already have become apparent that in order answer the those in own creative process. series of articles by American writers, answering in the light of their general experience the question: Can an * This is the eleventh of a artist function freely in the United States? Sherwood Anderson, Zona Gale Sinclair Lewis, Floyd Dell, Irwin hitherto contributed. Mary Austin, Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Ludwig Lewisohn, Edman, and Ralph M. Pearson have ——e to answer the question fully it is not sufficient to poin; as Mr. Dreiser and Mr. Masters have pointed oy: the American scene is varied and rich enough for a; . —none richer today. Of course it is, to the Amer; . artist. The truth is that the scene of life, no matte, in what country, at what date of its history, in life’s eter, flux and in the paradoxical recurrence of permanen: seemingly ever new manifestations, never for one instan: ceases to be a fitting subject for the artist. The art. who says (if any such ever existed) that the life of his age has ceased to interest him, that he would like to hay, been born in another age, and that the dulness which he encounters around him is the reason why he does pn» create, is simply and obviously shifting the responsibility for his own sterility. Nor may we escape this truism speaking of a period of decadence. Decadence is too vag a term and no one has yet successfully defined it. Dee in what? Do we mean that the human spirit, at cert); periods of history, enters into a lethargy? The idea decadence with which we love nowadays so much has no scientific validity. It seems rather more plausi to say that the human spirit (relatively constant in powers, for we have absolutely no data on which to res the belief that the Periclean age had more brain conte: than that of 700 A.D. or our own) meets occasionally with conditions and circumstances so complicated, so utterly beyond its control, that it cannot grapple with them. Now here, indirectly, we have come to the crux of oy problem. The question we have asked is really whether conditions in our times in America are such as to alloy the birth of great art—and what greatness they do alloy I do not alone mean by “conditions” such obvious an‘ superficial manifestations of our age as_ industrialisy These can be easily recognized and evaluated. I mean als conditions emanating from the philosophic structure age: the dogmas, the prejudgments, the spiritual as we! as intellectual or material forces which govern us. Dogma: and currents from which the age draws its co! acquires its temper. And which draw the artist int: vortex more violently than he ever knows and inexorably than he would be willing to admit. The answer to the question, I may say imm is a negative one. Great art, that is to say, art which car compare with that of Aeschylus or Euripides, wit of Shakespeare or Rabelais or Cervantes, is not possi)! in America today. And I say today because I do not second place to any one in my faith for the potentialities which lie hidden in the soul of this empire. I may furt point out, before I attempt to defend my belief, that th art of America today is of importance, and perhaps wi! live, not as art, intrinsically, but as an index of an impor- tant civilization in its early stages of development. We may here without danger of confusion or vagueness yiell to the popular clichés and say that the soul of Europ impotent, that such strange and indefinable products of i genius as “Ulysses” and “A la recherche du Temps Perdu’ are the last rich fruits of an arbor already dying. Fr though these phrases do not explain much in reality, th bear a sediment of demonstrable truth. But my contention that we cannot produce art of th first magnitude should need no defense, nor can | |! furnish an elaborate one. Yet if we take our contem: masterpieces it will be easy for us to see that, n by the criteria with which we judge those of the : they fall into the categery of minor works of art. cha ‘ aa! ies)

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Nee. a 1926] The Nation — . doubt that Edgar Lee Masters has written in the neat River Anthology” something which will baffle the z.rte of oblivion. One feels something in it which is of vermanent and universal human interest. And the same ae true of “Winesburg, Ohio,” and, in spite of its slip- J form, of “Sister Carrie.” It is not as apparent, per- ns. of “Jurgen.” But shall we say that these, the great- . works of art of contemporary America, compare with yamlet” or with “Don Quixote’? With “Rabelais” or “King Lear’? Are they as significant, as profound, : unmistakably works of genius—so that it can be said shat they will live as vigorously as they do now outside i the peculiar material and ideal conditions which saw them born? And why not? Not, it seems to me, because their »eators are smaller than the masters. Again such a facile answer leaves everything to be explained. Nor should we enter into futile and perhaps even odious comparisons of ‘he moderns and the masters. On that score I would not venture an opinion. But whatever their relative merit, it must also be borne in mind that our artists are laboring ynder circumstances which they cannot, for the present, expect to control, of which they are, and must for some time yet remain, the victims. Exactly what are these conditions? It will be suf- fcient for our purpose to say that the artist here is not able to create great works of art because, no matter what degree of detachment he could achieve from the contem- porary scene, no matter how far he could recede from the crazy pageantry which constitutes his material, even under the most auspicious circumstances he could not expect to digest that scene totally, he could not expect to see it, that js to say, steadily and wholly under the light of a unifying principle. The confusion of our age is too great, too loud is its din and too quick its tempo, for us totally to master its intricate pattern. And without the mastery of the de- tails of life and a complete cognizance of the forces that guide it, we can never hope to express it fully. We may today, it is true, take a small section of existence and say of it, it is thus and so, we can perceive such and such forces playing in it for good or evil, such forces carrying it hither or thither. In so far as we are able to do this we will dimly foreshadow, as Dreiser and Masters and Anderson have already foreshadowed, some qualities of life which justly appear to us to be permanent and radical characteristics of existence, independent of superficial mani- festations and impervious to superficial pressures. But until we are able to see the whole phenomenon of life as aunit, and until our understanding of the forces which move it becomes so thorough as to play freely, the cre- ation of great masterpieces—the advent of Hamlets or Quixotes, of Gargantuas or Fausts—will be denied us. Our age obviously does not lend itself to such an under- sanding. Are we not proud of its confusion? And to believe that one could express confusion is to fall into a sad contradiction in terms, to say the least. For to express is to define and limit something in the phenomenal world frst, that is to say, to understand it and then to render it symbolically. But how can we express contemporary life if its most radical characteristic is its confusion, if it is hot amenable to be understood and defined and limited? hat is to say, how can we express it if we cannot analyze it, and, having analyzed it, we lack a concept—philosophical t religious or moral—through which we can achieve a synthesis? al | i Not to You Only, O Pythian By MARY AUSTIN Not to you only, O Pythian, Out of rock crevices, Out of earth’s sacred middle Where the ancient spore of the Sun Still works in her, Comes madness. Here, out of Arroyos Hondos, Between the prevailing Stiff stems of the junipers, Dream shaping vapors set back the moonlight. Here, from the wine red rift of the rim-rock, Weighting the eyelids, Out of the Grand Canyon’s motionless unreality, Visions prophetic. Not to you only, the wish-colored Word Hieratic, Not solely at Delos, O Pythian, But here at the desert’s fire new edges, Inebriate of the Earth, to the Sun corybantic The god with my voice declaring What I discern not. Books I'irst Glance & Ric ce aed ENEATH the organized vivacity of our American communities, who is not aware of a blankness, a sterility, a boredom, a despair?” Lewis Mumford asks this question at the end of “The Golden Day: A Study in Ameri- can Experience and Culture” (Boni and Liveright: $2.50), and does not wait for an answer. He does not wait for an answer because he has given one in the form of an explana- tion. His book, which starts from a feeling that life in America is unsatisfactory today, is an investigation of our past undertaken with a view to discovering in the first place whether we ever were happier than we are now and in the second place whether, if there is a reason for our spiritual condition, that reason can be followed back to its roots. Mr. Mumford did something of the same sort of thing in “Sticks and Stones,” taking his departure there from architecture as it has revealed, generation in and generation out, our weaknesses and our occasional strength. Here his material is literature. In appearance a series of essays on Ameri- can authors who would be significant in such a study, “The Golden Day” is in reality all one essay, all one ery of hope mingled with despair. It is intensely unified—wherefrom comes its charm and wherein lies its error. Mr. Mumford’s error is that he too much suffers in the presence of error—which he defines in too strict terms. Like Van Wyck Brooks, from whom as critic he stems, he makes too fine a demand upon both books and men: and though there is certainly nothing amiss in a beautiful idea —Mr. Mumford’s central idea is a veritable gem, polished

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602 The Nation [ Vol. 123, No. 39 YA 5 and radiant—it is permissible to point out that history needs to be written with a rougher hand. Mr. Mumford looks for evidence that America once possessed a literature which expressed the single portion of her soul he likes to contemplate. This is the mystical portion—the portion hav- ing to do with those states of being in which the whole of experience is transformed in the mind and made to shine there with a pure white light. Mr. Mumford dis- misses under the head of error every book which has failed to participate in this vision or has succeeded incompletely. He asks first what the American experience is, and the answer takes him back a long way into the history of European culture, of which we seemed to promise an im- provement. He asks next what the American mind, work- ing freely and passionately, can do with such experience, and the answer takes him up and down our literature. His criticism of most American literature is that it has done nothing with American experience; the pioneer, far from facing the Nature he came to seek, merely evaded society and became a savage; and since the Civil War we have either debauched ourselves with externals—been prag- matists of the present moment—or gone mooning back to Europe, which, unfortunately, is dead, for relics of its culture to place in our museums. Only once, in a Golden Day which lasted twenty years, did we see life whole. That was the day of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Melville. Those men opened their eyes and saw “ a new America”—an America which we have not yet realized. I am far from denying the importance of Mr. Mum- ford’s golden five, but I am far from believing that they or any other five are a cluster of touchstones by which earlier and later men can be evaluated. Mr. Mumford, blinded by their light, makes a sorry mess of Jonathan Edwards, Mark Twain, and Theodore Dreiser, to name only three authors whom his eyes were not built to see. “Emer- son achieved nakedness,” he insists with some pleasure. There is the trouble. I like clothes, too, even when they are absurd and awry. MARK VAN DOREN The Complete Die-Hard England. By the Very Rev. W. R. Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s. The Modern World Series. Charles Scribner’s Sons. §$3. EAN INGE has for many years enjoyed distinction as a churchman and a scholar. Recently, however, he has de- serted the mystics, whose thought he interpreted so admirably, and has devoted some part of his talents to journalism. In this field he has struck and assiduously exploited a very profit- able vein. His specialty is gloom—prophetic gloom. He essays to be the Jeremiah of the British Empire, bewailing its lost glories and prophesying its downfall; but, unlike his ancient prototype, he is not stoned by his fellow-countrymen. There is no martyrdom coming to him, unless the enthusiastic approval of the Daily Mail be counted as such; only generous royalties. For the English have always rewarded and honored those who tell them they are degenerate and their country going to the dogs. In this newest addition to the Modern World Series the Dean sets out to give a picture of England today as he sees it. His artistic methods are simple and sweeping. He has no use for half-tones. In the center of his picture is an oak-tree. It has been a splendid tree in its time, but now it is looking dis- tinctly wilted. Round the trunk and reaching into the upper branches climb parasitic plants, nasty poisonous-looking things. The biggest of these is an insidious red creeper labeled s,,., calist Trade Unionism. Another plant with luxuriant, »...; foliage is indicated as Roman Catholicism, while a thir4 me. an unmistakable resemblance to the shamrock. Round ; of the tree and gnawing busily at its roots is an army , pellent-looking animals, instantly recognizable as of origin. A little to one side is another tree—a ver, specimen. It apparently began life as an oak, but it ha how turned into a hybrid unlike any other tree in t It is very healthy, nevertheless, with a profusion leaves, and it is growing so rapidly that, although younger than the oak, it is considerably higher and is robb ng td neighbor of light and air. In the background of this trag’ picture is the setting sun trailing clouds of glory; the fore. ground, in strong contrast, consists simply of a deep, dec black shadow. In creating this masterpiece the Dean has made no pretense of an objective approach. “I have tried,” he say in his preface, “to be candid; I have made no attempt whatoys to be impartial.” And indeed he hasn’t! 1 His main thesis is that England is tottering to her fg) because of “the anti-social and unpatriotic sectionalism whic, is the curse of industrial civilization.” So far it is possible if not to agree, at least to sympathize. “Unpatriotic sectiong). ism” is a phrase that might cover a multitude of sinners—co,| owners, for instance. But one soon realizes that the sectioy offensive to the Dean is nothing less than the whole Britis working class. Since 1880 or thereabouts they have deteriorate rapidly. Their days are spent, not in honest toil but, egged by those who are plotting the ruin of industry, in contriving ingenious methods of ca’canny and sabotage. They have use their political enfranchisement to hold the propertied classes to ransom, securing for themselves all manner of doles and pensions. They are reluctant to emigrate (and so relieve the pressure of population at home) “while a grateful country pm vides them with the means of leading a parasitic existence battening on the rates and taxes.” They breed like rabbits, while the “better stocks” are so burdened that they have almost ceased to reproduce. It is true that at one point the Dean relents slightly. The average worker is not, in himself, anti-social. He is “a good natured, humorous, kindly, and sensible fellow.” But that js irrelevant, because “the syndicalist leaders” (“syndicalist” is a favorite abusive adjective with the Dean; it covers apparently every kind of radical leader from Philip Snowden to Lenin) “have made the discovery that the opinions of the vast uncon scious mass need not be taken into account.” These leaden will be amazed to learn that they hold the workers to thei sinister purposes by the exercise of an “iron discipline.” They are the more easily able to do so because “the army of rebellion” includes, in addition to the unconscious mass of decent working- men, a horde of the submerged—“a large number of degenerata who might have been eliminated under ruder social conditions, but who are now encouraged to live and multiply. Some of thes are imbecile, neurotic, half-insane; others are chronic invalids; others are psychopaths with some morbid strain in their char acter.” This formidable force is led by “renegades from the ranks of civilization. These leaders are often brilliant men with a fatal moral and mental twist, really insane, but with # frightful method in their madness.” I have quoted this description of the British labor move ment because it illustrates perfectly the turgid depths to which the Dean can fall when he forgets that he is a Christian, 4 scholar, and a gentleman. One cannot argue with the Dean, for he lives in too remote a world; one can only be a little sorty for him. His primary grudge is against heaven, which decreed that he should be born into a twentieth-century civilizatio equipped with an excellent but entirely out-of-date mind. How happy he might have been as an eminent ecclesiastic of th first Georgian era! Then there was none of this silly talk abowt democracy; industrialism had not yet cast its shadow and per yeat wou It h flat best with the the light aver ties but fine that page with imit, sim] whic put the toh to s have to s cate’ him Men pole dese of t] enot and and up, | his grov tion to b sens beca

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‘tional. —t0al. section British lorated Ted on geU triving e used Classeg es and ve thel ry pro stence, ‘abbits, almost . o | good that is ist” ig rently Lenin) uncon leaders > thei They ellion” rking- erate litions, f these valids; > char ym. the n with vith 8 move- whieh ian, & Dean, sorty ecreed zation How of the about d per pec. 1, 1926] The Nation 603 ea verted the proletariat by cheapening the luxuries which were the prerogative of the wealthy and well born; Americans were | colonists and of no account at that. What a pleasant Society was an efficient and well-oiled mechanism and was no need for a dean to neglect his cloistered studies .. point out what was wrong with the works. ~~ Dean Inge is so completely overwhelmed by his prejudices that although he is terribly in earnest his book cannot be taken .¢ a serious contribution to current politics. As a revelation of the complete die-hard it is indeed worth skimming. As an sttempt to carry out the purposes of the Modern World Series +is nonsense. One must regret that the editor and the publish- mm of the series, which has included some admirable volumes, chould have been tempted by a big name to lower their KeitH _HutcHIsoNn Mr. Mencken’s Best Fifth Series. By H. L. Mencken. Alfred A. Knopf. standards. Pre judices ? “$2.50. Notes on Democracy. $2.50. Yon MENCKEN has achieved, in spite of himself, more than 11 a measure of popularity. To admire him ceased, several years ago, to confer distinction, and accordingly all those who would rather be wrong than go with the crowd ceased to admire. It has become smart to say that he is overrated; it is merely fat to call him great; and yet the fact remains that he has grown steadily in strength and that he is, today, one of the very best writers America has produced—grotesque, of course, but with as good a right as Mark Twain ever had to be so if such is his nature. With the content of the two present volumes— the one a collection of short pieces upon very varied subjects, the other a Rabelaisian disquisition which begins with a de lighted analysis of the moral and intellectual depravity of the average Man and proceeds to a rapturous account of the absurdi- ties of our national political life—I have no immediate concern; but with their manner I have, for it is Mr. Mencken at his very fine best. This style of his seems easy to imitate. Many have imagined that they had caught the knack when they had sprinkled their pages with a few favorite words like “bilge” and “gaudy” and with perhaps a phrase or two from the German as well; but imitation Mencken is very sorry stuff indeed, and the reason is simply that from the diverse and apparently base elements which make up his style he has forged a weapon—sword or bludgeon— which only he can wield. Menckenese is not something to be put on or discarded at will but, instead, like every true style, the perfect expression of a mind and temper. It is not sufficient to have the desire to share his popularity or even the willingness to slash as he slashes. To write like him one would have to have, in addition, his thoughts and his feelings; one would have to share his exuberant interest in the contemporary scene and catch at the same time the glad irresponsibility which enables him to find in fools nothing but amusement; one would have, in a word, not merely to imitate or admire but actually to be Mencken. And hardest of all to catch would be the joyousness of his polemic. “Bitter” is the adjective which has been chosen to describe on the jacket the book on democracy, but it is just one of the most essential of his characteristics that he is never near fnough to frustration to be bitter. The words flow so freely and the epithets are so adequate that emotion is purged away and he is, as a writer, too triumphant to be bitter. Damn him up, take away his superlative gift of words, make him feel that his contempt was greater than he could express, and he would stow savage; but as long as his language does not fail vitupera- “on will keep him sweet and laughter, not rage, will continue ‘o be the fundamental note of his work. Every fresh outrage to sense which he can discover adds to the hilarity of his mood because it furnishes another occasion to which he knows he can By H. L. Mencken. Alfred A. Knopf. rise. The worse things can be shown to be the more obvious are his high spirits, and thus, to him, even democracy is justified by its absurdity. Of Bryan's failure to get himself elected President he sa Dulness has got into the White IH t sme of cabbage boiling, but there is at least nothing t ompare to the intolerable buffoonery that went on rennessee The President of the United States may be an ass, but at least he doesn’t belleve that the earth square The Golden Text is not painted weekly on the White House wall, and there is no need to keep ambassadors waiting while Pastor Simpson of Smythville prays for rain in the Blue Room. We have escaped something-——-by a narrow margin but still we escaped One wonders if he is really glad My case must rest ultimately upon a quotation, and I choose one—from the In Memoriam on Bryan in t Prejudices” which is quieter than much of Mr. Mencken's writing. It has its touches of the grotesque but it does not depend upon them alone. In it, besides the humor, is the steady march of great prose: the quiet, confident progression which is the mark of the strong writer who knows his strength. Of its kind it is as fine as anything written in America. Here it i There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village and that death found him there such simple and sweated freely, of the toilet. Street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upper valleys of the Cumberland aside, his bare arms and hairy chest bald head sprinkled with dust-—so accoutred and on display he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early In the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen He liked country lawyers, country pastors, all country peo ple. He liked country sounds and country smells this liking was sincere—perhaps the only sincere thing in the man. ... The simian gabble of the cross-roads was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. ...And toward the end, as he gradually forsook mundane politics for more ghostly concerns, they began to elevate him in their hierarchy. When he died he was the peer of Abraham. His old enemy, Wilson, aspiring to the same white and shining robe, came down with a thump. But Bryan made the grade. His place in Tennessee hagiog- raphy is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today. JOSEPH Woop KRUTCH The man felt at hore in Christian scenes He liked people who and were not debauched by the refinements Making his progress up and down the Main his coat laid linge shining damply, his I believe State and Government The Modern State. By R. M. Maclver. Press. $7. O student of political science can afford to leave this book unread. It presents, in reasonable limits, an admirable and suggestive view of the whole range of problems raised by the modern state; and there are few of them, indeed, upon which it has not something wise to say. I am tempted, indeed, to say that there has been no book quite like it since T. H. Green. It lacks something of the latter’s superb mora! insight; and it does not dig so deeply. But it has breadth, learning, and clarity. It is written in an interesting style, and it has the great quality of raising the ultimate questions in a significant way. Were I a university president (there is no danger of the event) who de- sired to have political philosophy taught in the grand style, I should not leave Professor Maclver long at Toronto. The period since the war has seen a large effort at the revision of accepted notions in political science. In almost every country there have arisen groups of thinkers who insist that the complex of powers summarized under the name of sovereignty cannot be thought of in the old way. Its defenders have retorted Oxford University

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604 | The Nation [Vol. 123, No. 399; with vehemence; and the debate has now assumed formidable proportions. Professor Maclver may be said to occupy a middle position between the contestants. On the one hand he insists on the unique position of the state as a legal fact; on the other he admits that this is a historical category subject to change in a changing world. His method is to trace the development of the state through the historic period, to seek from its history the clue to its powers and functions, to discuss the bearing of form and organization on its purpose and operation, and finally to explain what he believes to be the truth in the present chaos of conflicting opinions. Roughly, his position is somewhat as follows. He will have nothing to do with the equation of state and society. The state is an organ of the community the function of which is to main- tain “the universal external conditions of social order” by means of coercive power. It has the authority necessary to this end, but no more. It is not sovereign in the sense of being omni- competent. Other bodies are as original and real as itself; and, like them, it is dependent upon the opinion of its members for its well-being. The order it maintains does not mean merely the absence of violence. It is an order which embodies the protection and development of personality; all, accordingly, that affects these comes within the sphere of the state. Professor Maclver discusses the mechanisms it requires for this purpose; and he concludes, broadly, in favor of representative democracy based upon the party system as the most useful and satisfactory. He denies that the state is merely power. He will have nothing to do with theories of contract. The state for him is the agent of society in the creation of rights; and he faces the dilemma of how a power which creates rights can itself have obligations by arguing that behind the state is the community, and that it is the common interest of the latter which gives the state-power its nourishment. The community, in other words, as the source of organization gives to all its instruments the value which enables them to live. The state has high value, but upon the grim condition of deserving it. Its power is subjective, is set by men’s opinions, and is not independent of them. The more the state lives by winning their allegiance, the greater its power, because the greater thereby is the unity of society. Much of Professor Maclver’s thesis I should venture to indorse from a different angle. I see no reason why anyone should respect the state as such; it is entitled to my allegiance only by what it shows itself able to perform. I am entitled to judge it, and, if need be, to condemn it, because, in the last analysis, it lives neither for nor to itself but to me. The great merit, as I see it, of Professor MaclIver’s book is that it states the results of what it is now customary to call the pluralists in sociological terms. If I indicate some difficulties that I feel, these are rather problems upon which I am anxious for enlight- enment as to Professor MaclIver’s views than attacks upon his position. I cannot, in the first place, understand what he means by words and phrases like “solidarity” or “common interest”; I see no unity of any kind in society except what is put there by men, and I see none possible of achievement except by a complete reconstruction of the foundations of the present order. Professor Maclver seems to me to write as though there is somehow a unity in society which a force called “progress” or “evolution” is unfolding; I cannot see that this is so. In the second place, he seems to me to use the term “state” where a political scientist would often replace it by “government”; and in those instances the functions he attributes to the state seem to me to bear much less real relation to the facts than he ad- mits. And, as a corollary to this view, he seems to lay far too little emphasis upon the importance in the social order of the system of property. It is, in fact, from the rights annexed to property that a social order takes its color. Society may make its impact upon the state; but the state also makes society, and the whole process of life is set in the context of what its prop- erty-system implies. Rights, for instance, which Professor Mac- Iver admits the state exists to maintain are always, in fact, relative to property, whether it is freedom of discussion, equality ——, before the courts, or a living wage that is involved. 1 of unequal property is, accordingly, that the state exists , to protect unequal rights and in “maintaining the unive, ditions of social order” it is, again in fact, maintaining y, rights. This is the great truth in the communist answer classical political philosophy. There is a real sense in y the modern state is substantially the “executive committ.« the capitalist class.” To those of us who believe that the p; system involves the class-war as its inherent logic, this asp... of the problem is urgent, and needs more discussion than Prof... sor Maclver has devoted to it. HAROLD J. Lasxy Seeing Things A Million and One Nights: The History of the Motion | By Terry Ramsay. Simon and Schuster. Two $10. i so long ago when you lived in Cairo (Ill.) or Bra; (Ind.) you had to content your desire for the play wit: attendance at heart-rending performances of “Hamlet” or “T), Minister’s Sweetheart” given by incidental traveling compan(ic: dignified with the poetic name of hams. Now you can live ; Carthage (Ind.) or Centralia (Mo.) and observe the Fal] Babylon or the domestic habits of pythons or “This Side of Paradise” or the other side of Dante’s “Inferno” or the impre:. sive public appearance of Calvin Coolidge in a silk hat is all the fault of the moving pictures that dull lives ma witness the blood-lust of romance and go on vicarious ga|!eo to the uttermost parts of the sea and watch Douglas Fairbank: take himself seriously as a black pirate. It is common enough to find deep-browed intellectuals w} deny art to the moving pictures and weep for the glad times when little children read the complete works of Charles Dickens instead of shivering at the great stone face of William Har They protest that people no longer read books or go to the theater. They get as much shocked at the scandalous privat lives of Hollywood mummers as the good Elizabethan burghers got shocked at the abuses of the theater and the ribaldries the Mermaid Tavern. They see Douglas Fairbanks turn t Three Musketeers into acrobats or read that “Cyprienne” is to be called “Don’t Tell the Wife’; and they go away quit angry. They believe ingenuously that the public which now adores so many silly movies really did read Shakespeare ani Meredith once upon a time. They love the _ blood-boltered Elizabethan dramatists and refuse to be serious about “Thi Perils of Pauline” or “The Iron Claw” or “The Exploits Elaine” or the other heart-shuddering serials of the golden ag: The most casual glance at Mr. Ramsay’s pages will | course prove the intellectual’s case against the motion pictur industry, but also it may remind him that at its best the motion picture does what no book or play or picture can ever do. It can show action in visible terms of motion; and even if it can not plumb the soul or write blank verse it can bod) forth panorama and landscape and mountain range and medieval battle and the unhappy lives of Keystone cops on a scale ani magnificence impossible in the theater. It may be no more t gesture and pantomime; and yet “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” just as grisly and artistic as Poe’s “Mask of the Red Death’ and the Babylon episodes in “Intolerance” and the sea-figh! in “Cabiria” dazzle the eye and rouse the blood to an « ment at least as great as the best pages of Dumas and Tolsto: That is the final argument for the art of the movies. I for one am merely bored by Mr. Ramsay’s multitudinous reference to every lawsuit and personal interview and salary contrat: that ever happened for the past fifty years. It is muc! chronology than it is history. It is amusing enough, and Mr. Ramsay is extremely funny and penetrating, but \t! too choked with heaped facts like faggots piled up to hide 1! face of a cathedral. It tells everything and thereby f

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The Nation 605 pec. 8. 1926] ant tell enough. It is a mine of information; but I wish that an one would analyze fully the change which has come over American motion pictures since the golden age of the crook rials to the bourgeois morality which now dominates the No one can deny all the bloated finance and corruption and «i] which have festered in the motion pictures just as they lest r in any art where the producer or publisher wants artists ., serve a8 pimps to the lowest grade of public taste. »as suffered more than I have suffered from uncounted spec- les of incredible dulness and silliness. Yet I cannot see «hy the average novel or play or biography is any less corrupt ind imbecile than the average motion picture. What else can y expect in an art accessible to everybody? What else can vou hope for in a land of sumptuary laws and democratic ideals of art? That is no argument against “Intolerance” or Peter the Great” or “The Last Laugh” or “The Mark of Zorro” any more than Harold Bell Wright is an argument against Theodore Dreiser. After all, to read even the best pages of “War and Peace” is not quite the same thing as seeing those terrible battle pictures in the “Birth of a Nation.” It is one function of every great novelist to make you see. I think the artist himself would be the last person to deny the virtue f an alien art which can do things he cannot do and show so poignantly all the gestures of visible life caught in the net f passionate action. DONALD DOUGLAS No one Mr. Eddison’s Second By E. R. Eddison. Albert and Charles Styrbiorn the Strong. 3oni. $2. om ETHING of the elder Norse hung over the battles of “The ‘J Worm Ouroboros”; here we have it neat in the author’s own saga built up on the fragments of information available con- cerning the great son and nephew of the Swede-Kings Olaf and Eric, who lived, harried, and gloriously died in twenty years of the tenth century. The first and least thing which the reader notes is a manner of discourse: how the writer reproduces the tones and cadences of the bards, talking their talk without accent r self-consciousness the while he pictures for modern readers scenes, looks into subtleties of motive and character, as to which through use or indifference those ancients might have remained silent. More important in itself than with reference to any such standard is this astounding prose, changing hue with its changing subjects, flashing here and there with half-forgotten words which, like steel that for a while has rested, have thereby a keener edge; the word, moreover, the phrase, the incident, held back, timed, balanced, then thrown unerringly where it inevita- bly belongs and utterly realizes its value. That is method only, but this, a small book, is a spacious legend. If, as may be, Mr. Eddison is oppressed by the petty and transitory, he will not do it the honor of an offended repro- duction in his pages. If of the figures—virtuous or evil—that stalk through those pages too few by our experience are meanly so or unworthy a share of their creator’s love, he errs on the neglected side, and we have need of more who are acquainted with nobility, to remind us of its lineaments. But hastily be it said that these are men and women of flesh and blood, and vio- lent, headstrong, proud, or surly enough in all conscience to satisfy all demands of the current realism save that one re- jected. “A strange unlucky tale,” full of the sea and the vikings’ ships and the tall, arrogant, eager, figure of Styrbiorn drawing love and hate from every hand, shining in the light and at last, to a curious wrench of the heart, darkened by the dust of Fyris- field: to a wrench for whose pain one is somehow jealous to the point of rejecting and regretting the comfort of the magnificent final picture, Valhalla. Mr. Eddison himself has written else- where: “I have known Juss and Gorice for some 35 years; Styrbiorn, etc., only 25.” Few minds could have afforded space at once for more than the vast round conception of “The Worm,” and “Stybiorn the Strong” is distinguished where that, it is submitted, was great. But distinguished it is, and of a royal breed apart. me one regrets only the fewness of Keith reproduction without a credit line, In a hand Henderson’s designs, their and the anonymou anachronism of Arthurian knights in panoply ABBE NILES Black Macmillan Con pany. on the jacket Fremont Older and Jack My Own Story. By Fremont Older. The $3.50. You Can't Win By Jac k Blac K. The Ma millan Company $2 N San Francisco they tell you that Fremont Older moved heaven and earth to get Abe Ruef into the peniten tiary, and then moved earth and heaven in a vain effort t t him out. Now, they add, Fremont Older rarely sits down to a meal without having some ex-convicts at the tabl At t point the tales diverge, one man telling you that Older is a dangerous anarchist and another insisting that he is one of the saints of democracy. In “My Own Story” Mr. Older tells how he developed fro “a young man with a nose for news” into a self-mghteous crusader bent on throwing grafters into jail, and how, finally, he developed into that gentler being who said: “I shall never forget the morning that the bitterness and hatred of all the years of pursuit came into tuef started for the penitentiary. All my mind to reproach me. I thought, ‘Is thi iccess or is it utter failure? Is this a real victory After all the years of mad pursuit, is this the harvest? The imprisonment and or an appalling defeat? branding of one poor, ml human being.’ ’ To this ramping Western editor long accustomed to wield ing a newspaper as a spiked club there came, then, a v n such as came to Francis of Assisi when he met the leper, or such as came to the man-hunter on the road to Damascu But instead of founding a monastic order or a new religion Mr. Older began, with that “nose for news” still guiding him, to make his newspaper a confessional where the poor and broken and outcast told their stories to all San Francisco. There, after some years, he joined them with his own story, which, after part of the being read with eagerness in a limited edition by journalism and politics, is now a book for the The rise in California of the Progressive m resulted in Hiram Johnson’s governorship and senatorship is told in “My Own Story,” as it was the prosecution of Abe Francisco and tudents of public. becoming legend of San vement w en tuef, the San Francisco boss, which brought to a head the indignation resulting in the successful drive of 1910 against the ’acific’s political domination of the State. many famous names in this portion of the story. manipu- lating, hating, electioneering, lambasting scorch the pages. Not earthquake, not fire, could halt the ruthless charge of Mr. Older and his crusading associates, nor could the corruption they fought be checked by the ruin of a city. Here the tale moves like a whirlwind against a background of conflagration. Turning from the relatively respectable political world, in the latter portion of his book Mr. Older tells story after story of burglars, dope fiends, women of the streets, of their agonies and clutchings after happiness, and, only too often, of their failure to be anything in the end but what some stranve twist of soul had made them from the beginning. But Mr. Older does not walk in this museum of the underworld like a Barnum pointing out freaks. He loves and sympathizes with each one of these distorted creatures. One of the outcasts was Jack Black, whom Older found he could not classify with other criminals he had known, declaring: “He is in a class by himself. That is why he is so interesting.” When Older first met Black, the latter had lain six years in a San Francisco jail, neglected and forgotten because the records of his case had been burned in the great fire of 1906. Black Southern There are Scheming,

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606 The Nation [Vol. 123, No. 329: was under sentence of twenty-five years for highway robbery, and so did not press his case. If he got out of the jail he would go to the penitentiary, so why bother? But he was given his chance to reform, and he reformed. For years now he has been librarian of the paper of which Mr. Older is editor, the San Francisco Call. “You Can’t Win” is a story told, as Robert Herrick says in the foreword, by a man who has “an instinct for realities.” Jack Black tells his tale straight on, marching with a firm tread and with very little sentimentalizing through an account of highway robberies, safe-crackings where his fellow-yegg was killed by pursuers, penitentiary horrors, violent deaths by acci- dent in boxcars and by murder beside jungle campfires, and opium dens. The tale takes hold of the teller and he sweeps along, never asking whether this or that, incident will help or hinder the propaganda of his friends, the prison reformers. But despite the fascination of these picaresque adventurings, the most nobly exciting thing in the book is the revelation it gives of the unbreakable spirit of Jack Black himself. Here is a man tramping the most devious byways, but always with his head held up and his spirit firm within him. There is no moral to the tale save that some souls are strong, unquenchably so. R. L. BURGESS What Price Happiness? Memories of a Happy Life. By William Lawrence. Houghton Mifflin Company. $5. are book is aptly named; Bishop Lawrence has had “a happy life.” Born to the purple, raised to the lawn, heir of wealth, culture, social standing, dowered with physical health, personal charm, a good mind, successful as the world counts success, companion of the great and powerful, now coming to life’s close with . . . that which should accompany old age, As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, what wonder that the Bishop confesses he has been “blessed beyond measure.” Were this the life-story of any other than a distinguished Christian leader, we should read it with joy, perhaps with envy, certainly with admiration. Bishop Lawrence found his ap- pointed work early, and has labored at it diligently through more than fifty years. His chief thought has always been his diocese, and in this vineyard he has brought forth abundant harvests. Outside he has been busy also, raising the Harvard Endowment and the Church Pension Funds, sitting on innumer- able boards and committees, participating in public affairs of large importance, traveling widely for business as well as pleasure. This man has been no idler. But—fatal word!—there is something wrong. What is it if not a complacency, not with himself and his work, for the Bishop is a modest man, but with the world in which his lot has been so happily cast? What right has any religious leader to be on the whole so contented with things as they are, to adapt himself so easily to the wealth and power of his time, to move so easily among politicians (Henry Cabot Lodge), millionaires (J. P. Morgan), kings (Edward VII), to be so conspicuously a member of a class and that the upper class of such a society as ours? There have been great labor troubles in the Bishop’s day—one unforgettable strike in his own feudal barony (Law- rence, Massachusetts)—but, barring a few casual lines, they are not r.entioned. There have been vast political struggles for larger freedom and fuller life for the people but they do not intrude upon this world. There have been three wars—and they are received as natural, even glorious events, and valorously sup- ported. Not since the fall of Rome has there been such a rock- ing of the social fabric, such a challenge to civilization, as in this age—yet one feels scarce a tremor in this narrative. Bishop Lawrence has lived a happy life primarily because he has adapted himself successfully to his narrow, highly pros- perous, perfectly protected social group. He has accepted the “ ——— world as good because it has been good to him. risties leaders have not always been so conventional, and not 4), ao JOHN HAYNES Howwps therefore so “happy.” A Philosophical Poem Love-life in Nature. By Wilhelm Bélsche. A. Two volumes. $10. PROPHECY is doubly an act of daring. The prop} ;' be strong in the loneliness of his vision; but courave als is required of him who has heard the seer, and wil! cr “yp it is here. The day is come!” Santayana, finally e\ luatis Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, beheld them fulfilled in a foyy:. philosophical poet who would add Goethe’s immediate «.; human experience to the Roman poet’s conception of naty, and who would comprehend in a cosmic epic man’s fy!J« knowledge of the universe, and the widest diversity of hy ; values. “Throw open to the young poet the infinity of natyr. let him feel the precariousness of life, the variety of Purposes. civilizations, and religions even upon this little planet; |«t }; trace the triumphs and follies of art and philosophy, and thei; perpetual resurrection.” Should that poet have genius, “; taste for the world in which he lived and a clean view of jt’ he might write the great poem of Nature, having the double insight of Lucretius and Goethe. He could “reconstruct the shattered picture of the world. He should live in the continya! presence of all experience and respect it; he should at the same time understand nature, the ground of that experience: and he should also have a delicate sense for the ideal echoes of his own passions, and for all the colors of his possible happi- ness.” Wilhelm Bélsche is this poet, and “Love-life in Nature’ is the great philosophical poem of naturalism. “De Amorum Natura.” That title reveals the altered meta- physical perspective. Lucretius wrote of the things of nature. dead bits of “solid singleness,” the atoms that in their local and universal movement produced mechanically the changing aspects of substance. It is the procession of these changes that Lucretius draws upon his canvas. This is a picture for Democritus and Newton, but not for Darwin. Biology and psychology have gone beyond the old physics, have added to the picture in terms which are not incompatible but which rather enlarge and transform it. The treatment of the great suns and stellar systems, of the earth and of ail that is thereon, as organisms which have been formed from other organisms, as living beings which have a pattern of growth and decay, and a force to recreate new forms—this is the metaphysical outlook of our age, based in the biological sciences. It is of all Nature thus conceived that Bélsche writes, and he has chosen as his central theme the fact of love which is present in all natural life as the fact of creation and recreation, love in the sense of life itself governed by its essence, yearning to live and increase life. Bélsche has written this epic, as Lucretius did, with the concrete panorama forever in the foreground; never, on the other hand, blurring the magnificently clear outlines of the whole. But in the two thousand years between them more has changed than viewpoint. and | Lucretius had to learn only what Democritus and Epicurus could teach; but Bélsche faced, and has mastered, the incomparably greater task of rendering the vaster store of our knowledge of the universe and of man in a coherent form, not only accurate before scientific standards but throughout transcending mere investigation and reasoning in the achievement of insight, or what Santayana calls “theor) —a steady contemplation of all things in their order and worth.” It is for this reason that Bélsche is a philosophical poet, having turned “his practical and passionate imagination on the order of all things, or on anything in the light of the whole.” The fullest enumeration would fail to indicate the diversity of the particulars which Bélsche has informed with the significance of order. Perhaps it will suffice to say that pro wh Cor

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neta- ture, local ging that . the live Dec. 8. 1926 ] The Nation 607 ee »e has employed the materials afforded him by astronomy, astral physics, physical chemistry, bio-chemistry, geology, sgleontology, all of the biological sciences, cytology, proto- ology, genetics, embryology, psychology, and anthropology. This survey is no mere gesture in the direction of science. The facts are numberless. On the other hand, Bélsche never loses .is fundamental philosophical attitude. “The material that seience gives us,” he says, “is absolutely free. All you have to io is accept it. What use you make of it is your own affair.” But even more than that. The poet of our civilization ~yst encompass not only its knowledge but its wisdom and te art, especially if his theme be Nature, for man and all ,is works cannot be divorced from the main currents of life. fquman culture cannot be reported as science can, by inventory ¢ fact. It must be reflected as in the “Divine Comedy.” «Love-life in Nature” succeeds here, catching the values of art and philosophy in its cosmic network, and making them luminous with the meaning of the whole. The reader can be instructed here only in the most gen- eral structure of the work. Like a great symphony it plays myriad variations upon a few inescapable motifs. The open- ing theme is the dominant, the evolution of love-life, of organic form and creative force, from the day-fly, to use Bélsche’s metaphor, to the Madonna. The elements later to be encoun- tered are here intimated. Succeeding sections develop the out- always keeping the meaning of human love as the focal point of the vision, and enriching that meaning by the accumulated force of factual reiteration in endless variety of detail. The method Bélsche employs in doing this is that of a kaleidoscope. It brings picture after picture into view without obvious ar- rangement and yet the sequence moves onward to the final completed view in ever-broadening circles of comprehension. Mr. Cyril Brown’s translation suggests the passion and sweep that the original German prose must possess with even greater dignity. Bdlsche through 1,400 pages is in conversation with his reader concerning love, and the exposition always maintains the personal directness of that manner. Even more extraordinary is the way in which complicated metaphors are elaborated, with clear accurate imagery sustained for pages. It is this power which enables Bélsche to substitute the mag- nifications of light-imagery for the microscope, and to throw immense spaces into defined perspective. Without suffering confusion or aimlessness, the reader travels through ceons of time, through stellar distances, and to all nooks and crannies of the terrestrial globe, and witnesses the wildly super- abundant variegation of life upon this planet in all of the concrete phases of its cyclical manifestation. This is undoubtedly a great work. To evaluate it thor- oughly either as a work of art or as a philosophical expression would require more extended criticism. Enough if to Bélsche’s prospective readers it be suggested that here is an epic over whose composition the spirits of Plato, Lucretius, Spinoza, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Darwin must have presided. MORTIMER J. ADLER Below Par Congress: An Explanation. By Robert Luce. versity Press. $1.50. TRE substance of this book, originally prepared as a series of five lectures on the Godkin Foundation at Harvard, may not inaptly be characterized as a plea of confession and avoidance. Surveying the everyday work of Congress from the standpoint of an experienced member of the House of Representatives, Mr. Luce does not seem to go far beyond asking the reader: “What would you do if the job were yours?” Congress, he tells us at the outset, “is not to any material extent an originating body,” far the larger part of the bills that come before it being pre- pared by, or in response to the wishes of, interests or depart- Harvard Uni- ments which want this or that done. It could not well be much of an originating body, however, even if it so desired, since the aggregate of its knowledge is hardly sufficient to compass all that the public or the interests want, while to pass expert judg- ment upon the details of all that is asked would be impossible. Debate on the floor is grievously restricted, what is said by members at public hearings is largely for public consumption, and the real work is done in committees behind closed doors, where inconspicuous members shine; but the calendar is over- crowded, the really important committees are swamped, and amendments carried in open session are, on the average, few in number and of no great consequence. Mr. Luce enumerates the arguments in favor of a budget system mainly to refute them, but he nevertheless believes in the system, defends Congress against the charge of extravagance, shows how many formalities must be complied with before the lid of the pork barrel can be lifted, and insists that the real struggle for economy is between the President and the depart ment officials. For none of these shortcomings does there appear to be an assured remedy, although Mr. Luce, like a number of other writers who seem still to feel the spell of Gamalie!l Brad ford, thinks it worth while to discant upon the possible advan tages of seating Cabinet members in either house. The book i: full of information, but it does not dispel the conviction that while the average quality of members of Congres be as high today as ever, as Mr. Luce feels confident that it is, their efficiency as a legislature is a long way below par. WILLIAM MACDONALD may perhaps Disraeli and Gladstone Benjamin Disraeli. By Sir Edward Clarke. The Macmillan Company. $2.50. Disraeli and Gladstone. Company. $3.50. HILE few Englishmen will agree with Sir Edward Clarke that his hero was “‘the greatest Englishman who was born and died in the nineteenth century,” most will admit that Dis- raeli was the most romantic figure in the drab politics of that century. The long official biography of the statesman-novelist will be read in America only by expert historians, but many readers may be found for this vivid and entertaining story of the young Jew who, by sheer dint of ability and persistence, forced himself into the leadership of the Conservative Party, remodeled its policy, set the nation on its imperialist career, and won the heart of Queen Victoria and the almost abject venera- tion of the aristocracy of England. The political struggles and issues will be of little interest to most readers in comparison with the problem of personality—the combination here of an extravagant fop and poseur with an enthusiast and tireless toiler in the art of political intrigue and management. A radical, a Chartist in his early sympathies, and the author of “Sybil,” a truly revolutionary novel, Disraeli never shed the sort of sentimental socialism of his youthful outlook, but simply allowed it to be displaced by new enthusiasms better accommodated to the conveniences of his career. The passages here chosen from his speeches to illustrate his extraordinary vigor and felicity of expression go far to explain the mastery of the House of Commons he attained in a period when oratory was less suspect than now. He spoke for hours upon intricate issues without a note, but with careful preparation and with lively sallies of wit and invective. Less verbose than his great opponent, Gladstone, his utterances better stand the test of time, and Sir Edward Clarke can rightly claim for them that they contain a better and fuller exposition of modern British Conservatism than can be found elsewhere. There was private romance as well as political in Disraeli’s life, and we have here a delightful picture of his happy married life with an elderly wife, together with the extraordinary philandering of his later years. By D. C. Somervell. George H. Doran

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608 - The Nation

In Mr. Somervell’s brilliant duo-biography Americans will find all the essential facts of the public careers of the great Mid-Victorian antagonists, with some penetrating glances at their strangely contrasted characters. How the “rising hope of the stern unbending Tories” became the accepted leader of British liberalism for thirty years without shedding any of his deeper conservative convictions, and how the dandiacal Jew radical novelist obtained an ascendancy over the aristocratic conservatives of England which passed into worship and is still enshrined in “‘Primrose Day”—this pair of paradoxes fur- nishes a most illuminating commentary upon what upon the surface seems the haphazard opportunism of British politics. Gladstone was au fait a moralist and preacher, Disraeli an actor-artist, and each found a place for his peculiar gifts in the least expected quarter. Disraeli’s was the more extraor- dinary achievement, Gladstone’s the more serviceable. Each had remarkable intellectual powers, but Disraeli’s wit gives a higher survival value to his utterances. Even in the realm of literature Disraeli’s “Sybil,” and perhaps his “Coningsby,” will live, whereas the volumes upon Homer and theology which occu- pied Gladstone’s leisure never achieved more than a passing succes d’estime. J. A. HOBSON Man versus Nature The Book of Marriage. Arranged and Edited by Count Hermann Keyserling. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $5. “— every society, its civilization is the territory conquered in its contest with nature.” So Tagore writes in his con- tribution to this polyphonic symphony of Count Keyserling. “It seems that in the age which has now come upon us, man is giving up the desperate hope of victoriously maintaining this constant struggle. He would now make his peace with Nature —and that duty has been intrusted to science. But the mar- riage system of every society belongs to an age when, in the parliament of life, man was sitting on the opposition benches against Nature’s government. And Nature has ever retaliated against his obstructive tactics. Thus far they have nowhere come to any satisfactory agreement. That is why these ubiquitous attempts at the external regulation of man’s most intimate relations have been insulting his best feelings and degrading the greatest of his institutions, all over the world.” The majority of the contributors to this symposium are still sitting on the opposition benches against Nature’s govern- ment. For although their task was supposedly to locate mar- riage in Time and Space and so necessarily involved a descrip- tion of the various attempts at regulation made by different peoples at different times, this task was dealt out to them by a very active director of the polyphonic orchestra, who, among other things, writes in his letters patent that “in spite of its polyphonic modulations . . . the entire work is attuned — and should always return,” and who therefore fur- nished his collaborators with his definition of the ‘conventional marriage” to which it should return. “By ‘conventional mar- riage’ I mean, in accordance with its original and correct sense, marriage as the body of a specific ethos, the ethos of a definite cultural order, of a definite ‘standing’ in the cosmos.” Who further illuminates his definition by interesting sidelights like the following: ‘‘The possibility of remarrying every year ruins marriage much more fundamentally than even the most frequent practice of adultery, for the latter does not at all affect marriage as such, but only offends against certain of its components, whereas divorce lays an ax at its roots. Adultery existed .all through the ages and was never looked upon as a real danger to marriage, in spite of the stringent protective and deterrent measures that were continually in force, for good reasons of their own; whereas facilitating divorce does seriously threaten marriage.” Who asserts that “man is a human being only if he conquers Nature by spirit,” and who sees in Nature’s retaliations upon man for his obstruc- ——y tive tactics chiefly a superb opportunity for the practice of + renunciation through which alone, he believes, man can a4:.:. full spiritual development, though he concedes that a no need to marry in order merely to gratify one’s mane : Whoever does so sins against himself as a human being.” ; There is also to be considered Marriage as an Eterna} Problem, and I advise any reader who may find himself wi gering faintly through Time and Space to persevere until he reaches this section. For though it is full of contradiction: of non sequiturs and of unscientific dogma, it is its great mers that it touches, sooner or later, on every complexity of ¢);. subject so overwhelmingly interesting to the modern mat. @ let us say the cultivated man, since marriage becomes a aa b. lem in proportion as personality develops. “The person who feels inclined to live on a plane too high for him becomes . dangerous fool,” Jung observes in a particularly thoughtfy] essay. Havelock Ellis discusses Love as an Art and varioys psychologists discuss love as a science. So discord is a]), wed

POS a to function in our polyphonic symphony, but it recurs to j+ Ase & > \ OD,

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Dec. 8. 1926] The Nation -_ we —_— --~ —s EER ODT SIS RAR SIS ACLS SIS RO SISA OS tJ ~ > = PMOKG akhoss - Ie > QDR OSI QTR SIE OLAS Te SS —_ fa) =a BOOKS LANDMARKS OF A MEMORABLE SEASON BIOGRAPHIES EDISON The Man and His Work By George S. Bryan “Extraordinarily capa- ble and interesting. It is brief, well planned and not too technical for a popular audience. It explains Edi- son as well, probably, as the man can be explained.” —New York Sun. [llustrated. $4.00 GUY DE MAUPASSANT A Biographical Study By Ernest Boyd The most absorbing of all Maupassant’s stories is the story of his life, as told by Ernest Boyd in this authoritative and pioneering work. Illustrated. $4.00 (Ernest Boyd is the editor of The Collective Novels and Stories of Guy de Maupassant, complete in eighteen volumes. Critics have left no doubt that this is the definitive English edition of Maupassant. $2.00 a volume.) Givea BORZOI BOOK for Christmas ALFRED A. KNOPF, Publisher Recent BORZOI Fiction MY MORTAL ENEMY By Willa Cather ‘***My Mortal Enemy’ is a brilliant study of tem perament. Nothing that Miss Cather has written not even A Lost Lady—has more vitality; and noth ing is more relentless. . . . ‘***My Mortal Enemy’ shows Miss Cather’s power at its most concentrated, and has passages of a clear, etched beauty. It is a fine piece of art.’’—-Aflantic Monthly. THIRD LARGE PRINTING $2.50 THE ORPHAN ANGEL By Elinor Wylie “The story is charming and engrossing even with- out reference to the subtle lacquer of its whimsical satire, without knowledge of its imperceptible height- enings and broadenings and delicious humors, without recognition of its wink at history, which makes it every step of the way a two-faced shield of fancy and fact.”"—-New York Times. THIRD LARGE PRINTING $2.50 A DEPUTY WAS KING By G. B.Stern, author of ‘The Matriarch"’ “G. B. Stern is a creative artist indeed. . . . No writer of our generation has achieved anything more marvelous in the way of character building than ‘the Matriarch’ whom we met in the novel of that name and meet again in ‘A Deputy Was King.’ ” —Rebecca West. SECONDLARGE PRINTING $2.50 TAMPICO By Joseph Hergesheimer ‘“**Tampico’ is an absorbing picture of the pictur- esque, sanguine and dangerous life.” —Burton Rascoe. $2.50 NIGGER HEAVEN By Carl Van Vechten “IT read straight through from the first page to the last without putting it down. ‘Nigger Heaven’ is an amazing thing, vivid, barbanc, and so alive that it bleeds.’’—Ellen Glasgow. SEVENTH LARGE PRINTING $2.50 AT ALL BOOKSTORES TO STIMULATE THINKING ALCOHOL AND LONGEVITY By Raymond Pear! lrector of the Imatstute for Hu : peal Reasearch, Johna Hopkins nivermity, and author of “The Biology of Population Growth A sound scientific stud: of the effect of alcohol on the individual and on the race. “There is nothing essen tial in Pearl's book which is beyond the average com prehension. It put the bur den of proof on the pro kitionists as never before.’ H. M. Parshlev, in the N. Y. Herald Tribune $3.50 CONCERNING IRASCIBLE STRONG By William H. Smith “I rejoice that a man has at last been produced who can see the evolu tionary facts of nature and depict them so clearly, humorously, with such mathematical precision and accurately in accord with the thought of the best modern thinkers on the sub jects of evolution and social progress. I believe your book will have a tremen- dous circulation and receive a hearty welcome.” —Luther Burbank. $3.50 Give “d BORZOI BOOK for Christmas BVA ASQ ASE KASEY BASE 730 FIFTH AVENUE, New York -— & > SSR OBL ROBE RR LK When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation SEK OS OBS KK BLK SS ares EBA EDS RE ED RID: SOR SE =o DoF $O

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The Nation [ Vol. 128, No. 3205 Det a ANUHANUUAUOOUOUUUERNEAATEEADAAAUTEAERANEET AGUA EnENNAEA Wil TT TT li PU HLL mT T Wit tdi ATL nn T Lil UAH } HTH | AUN Y TNT HUTT bl sanonggng0i]nnnnnt PUL LULLELLLL UUVURAUUOTT OMA UHHA ATU HE =) Wii T PRATT TUE UL TMNT AU i MMT il Havelock Ellis One of the most en- during of all of Ellis’ studies, “The Soul of Spain,” a brilliant volume on Spanish history, psy- chology and charac- ter, is now issued in popular edition, uni- form with “The New Spirit,’ in which Ellis discusses Heine, Whitman, Ibsen, Tolstoi and Diderot. x 4 AP TOVT BIEN OV 2 Park S Gift Books fort ! HOUGHTON treet, Boston, Mass. Free copies of our Holiday hI :Cata Each, $2.25 Jefferson and Hamilton Claude G. Bowers The intimate account of one of the most memo- rable struggles in history. “No lover of American history can afford to overlook it.”"—John W. Davis. $5.00 Gamaliel B; The life story of the man who “made heaven a laug! both live and luminous by his psychological mode of a dispassionate zeal that stimulate the reader and giyg d’ heave ihe W of clar Richard Kane Looks at Life Irwin Edman A finely tempered philosophy of youth which “puts Mr. Edman in the class of Santayana and James.” —Buffalo Times. $2.50 On the Stream of Travel James Norman Hall ble in a si Heart of Emerson’s Journals Bliss Perry The quintessence of Emerson’s Journals is now acce “Here is a book that deserve ngle volume. place beside Will Durant’s ‘Story of Philosophy.’ loaded with nuggets.”"—New York World. Mal on De ught a prop well | I + . + A modern Odyssey which takes the wanderer from Tahiti to Iceland. “His prose is smooth and facile, his love for beauty genuine.”—New York Herald Tribune. $3.00 The Social Worker in a Hospital Ward Elsie Wulkop An invaluable book with comments by Dr. Richard C. Cabot which illuminates the extensive possibilities of social service. $3.00 Viscount Grey statesman, these essays are inval trated from woodcuts. Falodon Papers “As a contribution to the underst: ing of the true character of an emi —The Independent. Attractively . I ( a tak pat EVE s of ined bughon uab D4 - The Little Blue Man Giuseppe Fanciullt A book for children between 5 and 10 by one of the best Italian story-tellers. Illustrated. $1.75 In harmo The Pueblo Boy Cornelia James Cannon A thrilling story of the Spanish conquest of generation Streets in the Moon Archibald MacLeish ny with its distinction, of American poets” tion, beautifully printed and bound. this new volume poems by “the most significant figure among the youn is issued in limited ¢ hie illum intere on of erials. + ~*~ + America with a sound historical background. Ages 8 to 14. Lllustrated. $2.00 Letters of a Roman Gentleman Arthur P. McKinlay A particularly happy selection of Cicero’s letters which gives a classic picture of this very human and very modern Roman orator. $4.00 TAUNTON When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation Intimate Paperfto The best of all gift books, the most thrilling, absorbi understanding of the war as is the map of Europe." the ‘Arabian Nights.’ ” —Chicago Post. —Claude G. Bowers in the ant 0} trard Net . eH

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Dec. 8. 1926] The Nation 611 | 47 ON Readers WEIN COMPANY 16 East 40th Street, New York » as Catalogs will be sent on request. mds Darwin heaven a dream.” “Mr. Bradford makes biography {he writes with an unembellished facility of style and of clarity and security.”"—New York Times. $3.50 if Making of the Modern Mind John H. Randall, Jr. in Dewey calls this “the only history of modern yght and philosophy which puts their development in proper perspective.” “Anything better... could well be imagined.” —Boston Transcript. $5.00 Demosthenes Georges Clemenceau a taken on the proportions of a atevent.”—New York Times. “Pas- sof imaginative beauty but re- ES ined by reason are scattered [Sm wghout.”"—New York Post. $2.50 hiers & the French Monarchy “John M. 8S. Allison ne™ illuminating portrait of the life of this most gifted ung™ interesting literary statesman, from 1797 to the revo- | gon of 1848, drawn from an extensive study of original efials. $5.00 olonel House ant of all the books on the war. “As necessary to an tard in the Bookman. “As stirring as a story out of “Will revolutionize the history of 1912 to 1917.” Two volumes. $10.00 SE ee eee ee ee ee es ANN HANI MV AS When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation Murasaki When “The Tale of Genji was pul lished critics pro nounced this Japa nese classic “one of the world’s greatest masterpiece lhe second volume, “The Sacred Tree,” is con fered by Witter Bynner to be even “more suavely potent than the first Each, $2.25 George Rogers Clark Temple Bodley A vivid and striking picturesque men who helped push forward the early American frontier. $5.00 The Yankee Whaler Clifford W. Ashley The most sumptuous volume on whaling, scenes and whale men that has lished. Lavishly illustrated in color. East Wind Amy Lowell “Seldom if ever has Miss Lowell so completely revealed her depth of human feeling and sym- pathy. . . . The poet’s consummate art never falters.’—New York Times. $2.25 account of one of the most whale ever been pub $20.00 My Antonia Willa Cather A new revised edition of Miss Cather’s master- piece which led H. L. Mencken to say: “No novel ever written in America by man or woman is one half so beautiful.” $2.50 Palimpsest H. D. This first novel by a distinguished contemporary poet thrusts forward the established frontiers of prose fiction. $3.50 Other People’s Daughters Eleanor Rowland Wembridge “An unusual book written with the psycholo- gist’s scientific knowledge of human nature.”’— New York Times. $2.50 William Jackson, Indian Scout James Willard Schultz This story of one of the most famous scouts in the Indian wars is an ideal book for boys from 10 to 16. Illustrated. $1.75 iif UL VT TT ery AAHAUUTADUUYOU SATA LAST PAN AASVOIHAV (I HUIDEH La " i

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612 The Nation [Vol. 128, No. 3205 De —_ simple, spontaneous lyricist, her voice remaining as pure as it was ten years ago but carrying a maturer note. Always in such a personal collection there is the danger of monotony, and Miss Teasdale does not wholly avoid this; the same exquisite melancholy touches each poem, she is too clear to be subtle, her mood seldom varies. Her poems should be read singly—one at a time they sometimes touch perfection. Mrs. Conkling by contrast is opulent and resonant and highly conscious. She reveals a carefully balanced, intelligent design, lavish in its variety, abundant in its detail, daring and luminous in its imagery. “Flying Fish” is better than the author’s previous work. Her tendency has always been to thicken with a quantity of color, to confuse and stifle with a luxuriance of beauty, but in this latest volume she has resisted more than ever before the surfeited picture and the prodigal de- scription. Even this book would be better for some further prun- ing, although the group of poems called A Child in the Mexican Garden is free of all obstructions. It is, however, significant that Mrs. Conkling’s first lines are usually her best. The con- tinuing cadences sometimes get out of hand, run off into words, lose their first clarity. Undoubtedly she has recognized this herself, since she has so greatly improved; since also she admits: Give me the words and I shall hear Their wisdom later. LENORE G. MARSHALL Deep as First Love Translated by Madelaine Boyd. Henry Holt and Mitya’s Love. By Ivan Bunin. With an Introduction by Ernest Boyd. Company. $2.50. ( NE is often given to marvel at the legend which describes youth as a time of gay and careless rapture and dignifies the birth of passion with the sacramental name of “calf” love. The thing is said to offer no more serious a vision than a moon- calf bleating for the stars; and especially in these years the habit of patronizing the calf with a lecture on the proved trivi- ality of love has become a literary business with the intellectuals. Armored in a thick hide of corrupt frivolity they go about being very wise and witty about the facile penalties of young love and solving every obscure entanglement of the soul with a nice logic. It is no longer fashionable to be serious about trivial matters, and to be serious about a serious matter like adolescence is an unpardonable blunder in literary etiquette. One is also given to marvel whether there was ever an age wherein so many wise men were so rooted in their own wisdom and their liberty to advise the young about experience. Elegant bigots are really quite sure that Tristram was no better than a neurotic fool to let himself be doomed by passion. Mary Stuart was born too early to profit by the “Book of Knowledge”; and Cleopatra really died from a bad cold. The Shropshire Lad had no business hav- ing those thoughts which put lads in their graves. Men have died and the worms have eaten them, but not for love: no doubt from suppressed desire. They understand these things better in Russian novels; but, of course, Russian novels are rotten with morbid passion and Russian students who kill themselves never had the chance to go to state universities where informed pedants teach healthy- minded boys and girls how Medea should have “risen above” her passion and resolved all her tearing riddles by studying psychology, or perhaps have given up the adolescence of love for the maturity of a career in interior decorating. The young man in “Mitya’s Love” meets betrayal in first love and after a horrible torture of isolation puts a revolver in his mouth and pulls the trigger. No wonder Russia needs civilizing! There is nothing “new” in Bunin’s haunting and exquisite story of Mitya’s awakening to the world’s painful beauty through his infatuation with Katya and his subsequent long- drawn torment and sudden death. The theme is as threadbare as the continued presence of tragic love in a world so wise that it has already suggested every expedient for remedying —— the mistakes of lovers who take passion as seriously as ; take death. The story shows the familiar process of a , man caught in all the agony of the damned and all the erc+... of the blessed by discovering life and death and the ach ng wonder of natural beauty through the involuntary agency ,¢ a quite ordinary young girl. It has none of the spectacular melodrama of “The Gentleman from San Francisco” or +}, descriptive sociology of “The Village.” It avoids the virging poetry of Turgenev’s “First Love” and the deep purple of Compton Mackenzie’s “Youth’s Encounter.” It has nothing stronger to recommend it to wisdom than its profound evocation of those years when girls really are wounded with beauty of the summer night; and when young men enter through the scorching magic fire into the enchanted circle which rims th. world and conjures up the divine and terrible goddess shape like a young girl and holding in her sorcery all the illusory phantasms of heaven and all the infernal racks of hell. DONALD Dowuc.as Why Women Are Scabs The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions. son. International Publishers. $1.75. HE best American women in the labor unions are Russian Jewesses; the hardest women in American industry to organize are the 4,567,346 Anglo-Saxons who are going to marry the district attorney. Labor organizers have discovered after bitter experience that most American girls are too stupid, to ladylike, or too suppressed to join labor unions. The reasons for all this have now been explained by an insider in the labor movement, Dr. Wolfson of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. Her book is both an analysis of theory and a manual for practical work, a thoroughly satisfying book which should become the authority in the field. Of the 8,500,000 working women in the United States only 250,000 are organized in trade unions. Why is the union repre- sentation so small? Dr. Wolfson goes back to the position of women in the home. “The linking of the woman to her home has undoubtedly secured the perpetuation of the family, but it has at the same time created a state of introversion, an interest in her immediate surroundings and herself, which forms a real obstacle to any attempt at trade-union organization when the woman enters the industrial field.” The suppression of women in industry is partly a carry-over from their suppression in the home. Women are generally classed as unskilled workers and it is a common assumption that they receive low pay because they are unskilled. - Perhaps they are classed as_ unskilled because they receive low pay. Dr. Wolfson at least raises the question. Are chocolate dippers, she asks, any less skilled than garment pressers? It takes about the same time to become proficient at either job, but the girl chocolate dippers receive much lower pay than the men pressers. The average earnings of women in American industry are only one-half to three- quarters the earnings of men. Give a skilled job to a woman and pretty soon it is classified as “semi-skilled.” The efforts of the American Federation of Labor to organize the women workers have been pitifully inadequate. Craft jealousy has played a large part in keeping the women unor- ganized; resolutions passed at annual conventions about equal pay for equal work have been “wish fulfillments.” The Exccu- tive Council of the A. F. of L. has never had a woman member: the annual sessions of the Federation are smoke-befogged mai monopolies with a few women delegates even more inconspicuous than the women of the British Trades Union Congress. [ii intelligent efforts to organize women have come chiefly from the New York needle-trades unions, which owe their spirit to Euro- pean socialism rather than to the A. F. of L., and from Women’s Trade Union League, which is fostered large!) middle-class sympathizers. Dr. Wolfson does not directly att: By Theresa Wolf-

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Dec. 8, 1926] The Nation 613 | 9dhd555808554455554358885593448433388824e ‘4 BAABSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS324 me] 2, “2: BSRBABZSSSSS22S 2232233 ~~ Y22 HERE ARE IMPORTANT SCRIBNER BOOKS FOR HOLIDAY GIFTS The Silver Spoon By John Galsworthy “I had just finished three improbable but exciting detective stories, and I found ‘The Silver Spoon’ more difficult to lay down than any of them."’—W4/liam Lyon Phelps. $2.00 of the Moon Kermit Roosevelt graphic."'—Philade Iphia Re Cynthia Asquith’s The Treasure By Mark Sullivan East of the Sun and West By Theodore Roosevelt and “The adventurers describe witt cursians into India. . on narrative is clear, co e and Our Times: THE TURN OF THE CENTURY The Golden Key By anti van Dyke “The all stories of deliverance from some kind of or pe le Kity or t lag says Dr. van Dvke. A supert hock Clot? 1 fervor and | Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also ‘ . Ship This unusual history is a book for every home. It will be Rises The work of famous authors and an ac: seme book for your Christmas gift list. Readers ee illustrators, a superb bcok for of middle years find especial delight in it in lean bard, boys and girls. $2.50 610 pages. 213 illustrations. $5.00 York Ti Ignatius Loyola By Paul van Dyke A comprehensive and impartial biography of a great world figure. $3.50 England By the Very Rev. W. R. Inge An honest and courageous view of England's present and future. $3.0 Our Mobile Earth By Prof. R. A. Daly A foremost geologist tells the fascinating story of the earth's formation. Illustrated $5.00 Beyond the Milky Way By George Ellery Hale The very latest discoveries and researches in astronomy. Illustrated $1.50 The Pulse of Progress By marviopeiey eengren An eminent ¢ progre grapher as to the rr a! causes $§ 1N Civilization > Foundations of the Republic By Calvin Coolidge The President’s views on fundamenta! Americ an principles The American People: A History By Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker A one-volume, readable history 1 answer to the pica for ritten for the adult mind interesting histor ‘**An undiluted American Excellent Fiction HEAVEN TREES By Stark Young Charm and serenity in a ‘Smoky’ novel of the old South mi $2.00 our langua SEA WHISPERS By W. W. Jacobs A famous story-teller’s first book in seven years $2.00 SUSAN SHANE By Roger Burlingame novel,”’ says Wm. Lyon Phelps. 52.00 PAGE MR. TUTT! By Astwat Train j ie The delightful and canny : eae old lawyer in a new book ws Tones’ § Werte: — $2.00 “ar — THE STORY OF A ONE-MAN HORSE Ea is one of the jeu lvie With 43 of Will James’ FAMOUS PRINTS ted by Frank Weiten kampf, limited to 1000 By Will James eae? ye alg ata issued in America §$ f y great Aare Stories in . ‘Smoky’ ring tre ie on every page.”’ W's heen T. Hornaday THE COPELAND cx citin gZ dra awings. $2 ,O READER Prof, ¢ T. Copeland I page anthe of Lnglish poetry Five Large Printings oO ADVENTURES AND CONFESSIONS Prof Wm. Lyon Phel calls th i his most con | book $200 FIX BAYONETS! I Murge printing t great sar book 7 CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK When writing to advertisers, please mention The FF EEEE EF EEEEEEEEE EEE EE EEE EE EE SEES EEEEEFE Nation a NT EEE EEE EERE

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614 The Nation

[Vol. 128, No. 3205

the A. F. of L. for negligence, but her description of the situa- tion constitutes an indictment of the policy of the A. F. of L. and of the general anti-feminism of American trade unions. The choicest example of the stupidity of old-line craft unions in facing the woman problem is afforded by the barbers’ union. The barbers were having a hard struggle to maintain their union. Suddenly a heaven-sent opportunity was presented to them in the world-wide movement toward bobbed hair. Beauty parlors began to spring up everywhere and women bar- bers knocked at the door of the union. What did the male barbers do? They fought the entrance of women at every opportunity; the lady barbers of Chicago, Seattle, and Portland were refused charters and defiantly continued as non-union. One of the reasons quoted by Dr. Wolfson was: “In view of the fact of her physical make-up is it not a fact that if she were comely to look upon and possessed extreme charm, would it not have a tendency to create discord among the men who, up to the time of her admittance to membership, were real working brothers?” Now the barbers have lowered their bars to women members, but it is too late; the beauty parlor of the future will be a scab shop. Can American women be organized in spite of their “well- padded group loyalty to the boss”? Dr. Wolfson says, Yes, on four conditions: if the union broadens its structural boundaries to include the unskilled workers, if the union officials appreciate in their organization campaigns the psychology and racial tradi- tions of the women to be organized, if the union does not give its benediction to the existing differential in wages between men and women, and if the women workers generally will learn to consider themselves a permanent group in industry despite the impermanence of the individual. PAUL BLANSHARD Harsh White Noon Through Many Windows. By Helen Woodward. Harper and Brothers. $2.50. T is an old pleasantry among temperamental conservatives to say that the ranks of political and economic radicalism are recruited from among those who have lacked the compe- tence to thrive under the beneficent regime of the established order. Mrs. Woodward is avowedly and determinedly radical and in her business life she decidedly made a go of it. Thus the autobiography of her business life affords a pleasing dis- harmony in an old tune which, since people are traditionally conservative, is inconsiderately lodged in the common mind. Mrs. Woodward’s business life lay within the confines of the first quarter of this century, and her success lay in adver- tising—not merely in writing words which sold books and cos- metics but equally in selling her own commodity—advertising itself—and in managing the complex human relationships which are involved in the pleasant occupation of dispensing someone else’s money for words and pictures to influence the public to demand, or accept, one article over another. Mrs. Woodward grew up in a radical Jewish household, but, by that dispensation whereby each generation turns its hand against the truths of the elders, she took refuge in reaction. It was purely an affair of the interplay of natural forces within the family group. When the family group no longer mattered she swung sharply toward the left—‘‘my weakness is always to like the new’’—and there she resided. It was during her conservative period that Mrs. Woodward stepped forth into life, with a wide-eyed “faith in the cool, bright perfection of American business.” The moment taxes severely the historical imagination of a generation that is incapable alike of wide eyes or acts of faith. At this time advertising was the youngest of businesses. That meant that it was full of color and personality, but deficient in organization, prestige, or ethics. As it became more respectable, more codi- fied, more ethical, Mrs. Woodward found herself less and less in

—— sympathy with advertising and with the established e« =" order. Order and dignity are incompatible with joustine aa excitement, and smug Hypocrisy, she observed, attends re upon Ethics. Writing as an uncompromising realist, Mrs. Woodward refuses to regard business success as worthy of such term); as “achievement” or “career,” nor will she have any other epithet for it which evokes the suggestion of the use of creative faculties. Business has only to do with raking in cash, andj he who is cutest accumulates the most counters and is declare + have won the game, which is played without rules. Epochal changes have come over the philosophy and pr tice of business in America during Mrs. Woodward’s conn: with it; but since it occasioned her no pleasure to reflect : she had a part in making them, she took consolation, as res]jc+< so often must, in entering joyously and completely into the eh} and flow of each day’s event and circumstance. She liked tho noise and stir, the authority, the application of her own | to specific problems, the dust and affray and frenzy with which her daily work was invested. In short, business afforded her 4 life of adventure, each moment to be lived for itself, and ¢} structure of her occupation to be supported only by the philoso. phy that there was no philosophy. Indubitably many thrills and a certain qualified happiness are possible under such an arranve- ment; under some such charter, indeed, most modern inte!}e, tuals live out their tale of days, waiting for a new faith. Activity for its own sake is not satisfying ultimately. Mrs. Woodward became impounded by a sense of the futility and determinism of life, which whirls intelligence “like chaff before the winds.” Gently and not too happily she slipped out of the harness, her “success in life’? deeply impaired by her devotion to an occupation in which she couldn’t believe. I have tried to indicate that this business autobiography is really a spiritual and intellectual autobiography, for in that direc .ion lies its importance. Twenty years is a long time to spend living in the world yet denying it. Mrs. Woodward did it and preserved her integrity. But the price was high. She closes with these cryptic words her interesting account of a rather significant life: ‘So at last I made up my mind just to stop and drift. That would be enough. I was mistaken.” GERALD CARSON New England Early Autumn. By Louis Bromfield. Company. $2. GAIN, in this third of his series of panels of the American scene, Louis Bromfield conveys a sense of life, diverse and warm. If that sense is thinner than in the first two books, it is because he conceives of the New England spirit as thin and wintry, just as he sees, most extraordinarily, the rich New England countryside as bleak and unbeautiful, and just as he patronizes the New England deities to whom he refers as Mr. Emerson and Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Lowell. His concep- tion of these last is evidently that formed by a very small boy from the pictures on the cards of his game of authors. Long- fellow, the first daring young American literary expatriate who brought back to his country the best in European literature; Emerson, from whom an enterprising author today could still cull a five-foot shelf of high explosives, these he does not know, but only white-haired gentlemen whose clothes are amusingly out of date. He seems as little conversant with the individual New Eng- lander, that astonishing blend of passion and mysticism, of inhibitions that spring more often from a philosophic fatalism than from respect for social regulations, that poignant burning creature from whom I suspect we shall hear again in American life, even though today he may be frustrate. The very capacity for frustration involves a spiritual and emotional ardor that these people of Mr. Bromfield do not know. Frederick A. Stokes

De will aro rem of ¢ cise turb stun rom: prin cert the | wom and wom can he i this rath Chu 1 he rise two decr Vale that peop expr Mr. of tl and Mex task at p pend tions cohe ing pend start a sti lems Reng geno simp son | unde the 1 inhe1 Worl but : polit: (sic) subse Arril lican sent and to be Cent: vs. § intris rtisi

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Dec. 8. 1926] The Nation Yet they are people who are to be found everywhere. I will grant them their collective power to thin the atmosphere around us and to deaden the sky, if the author will first remove the New England label. They are to be found in Boston, of course, but also in New York and Chicago and San Fran- cisco. They form, as Mr. Bromfield rightly assumed, a dis- turbing background for living passion. But here again one stumbles. It is Mr. Bromfield’s chief virtue that he sees the romance in human nature. It is his increasing defect that he brings this out for the reader by sentimental exaggerations of certain heroic traits, rather than by scrupulous respect for all the divergent qualities that enter into every human being. No woman was ever so consistently brave and patient and beautiful and self-denying as his Olivia; and yet any old doddering char- woman one shoulders on the street is more interesting, if one can catch her living and whole. Mr. Bromfield still leaves the impression with me that he is one of the most richly gifted of our novelists. But in this book he seems definitely to have chosen to let himself off rather easily. ALICE BEAL PARSONS The Religious Problem in Mexico Church and State in Mexico, 1822-1857. By Wilfrid Hardy Call- cott. Duke University Press. $4. HE title of this book is justified only to the extent that in the period under survey the Church-State relation gave rise to the most outstanding political issues and because the two commanding historical peaks are the reform laws and decrees of 1833 (pushed through by that remarkable personality, Valentin Gomez Farias) and the reform constitution of 1857 that “caught the principles of democracy which the Mexican people for half a century had been working out and . expressed and crystallized them in a great legal document.” Mr. Callcott’s book is a scholarly and occasionally vivid account of the political manifestations of these multitudinous tendencies and ideas which disrupted the social and political fabric of Mexico for nearly half a century. It could have been no easy task thus to trace the tangled threads of the conflicting forces at play during the chaotic years when Mexico first tested inde- pendence, threads further snarled by rampant personal ambi- tions, foreign intrigue, and lack of racial and geographic cohesion; but Mr. Callcott capably accomplishes this by sketch- ing the key-pattern of the Colonial régime at the time of Inde- pendence and thus tacking each unruly thread to its proper starting-point. Mexico was not merely attempting to become a nation with a stable government; she was obliged to face the major prob- lems which had agitated Europe most violently since before the Renaissance, a collective task complicated by stubborn indi- genous difficulties quite beyond the ken of Europe. Mud-pie simple were the problems of the Thirteen Colonies in compari- son to those of that harried country to the south of us, which under the régime of Iturbide was “the third largest empire in the world.” We started relatively with a clean slate. Mexico inherited the worst evils and most chronic conflicts of the Old World. From many angles its independence movement was but an attempt to shut out the French enlightenment. In the political field Monarchism was still a vital issue. Freedom (sic) began with a Spanish emperor, Iturbide. At least three subsequent heads of the Government, Alaman, Paredes y Arrillaga, and Santa Anna, favored the overthrow of Repub- licanism. As late as 1854 Santa Anna, supported by the Clergy, sent a representative to Europe to scare up a foreign prince; and even after the Juarez Reform Laws of 1859, Mexico was to be ruled by a Hapsburg. Monarchism vs. Republicanism, Centralism vs. Federalism, Democracy vs. Class-rule, Church vs. State were still bellicose problems not simplified by foreign intrigue, American aggression, militarism, geographical sepa- ratism, financial instability. Institutionally, racially, culturally, Urhing POWER by Lion Ke “The story of a its degradation as in its hervisim A tremendous al a magnificent drama and philo for all of us.’—The World. synthesis of uchtwan yer soul as great in legory of power; melo - & book $2.50 2.5 sophy .. Cw Ow The SECOND BOOK of NEGRO SPIRITUALS Carl Van Vechten in The Herald Tribune as popular as that this new collection will be the first, and deservedly so.” introduction, just Ch To “I predict With 61 songs and an $3.50 THE TIME OF MAN by Elizabeth Madox Roberts A Book-of-the-Month “A wonderful wood Anderson. Club performance “A work of genius selection —Sher- —Edward Garnett. “A beautiful work of art.”—Carl Van Doren. The most talked of novel of the day. 47th Thousand. $2.50 Cw Dd TRANSITION by Edwin Muir Illuminating and wise essays on the most baffling and interesting figures in contemporary literature: Joyce, Lawrence, Strachey, Huxley, and many more. “He is the only critic who has succeeded in grasping the modern situation as a whole.’—The Nation. me ae) $2 aT SATIRICAL POEMS by Siegfried Sassoon One of the best and most popular of the younger English poets breaks a silence of seven years with this new volume of verse. $1.50 30 Irving Place THE VIKING PRESS WNee York When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation

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616 | - The Nation economically Mexico was a super-charged, unstable complex. To consider these and other factors in their just relations has been the praiseworthy achievement of Mr. Callcott, who surveys the broad river of what he calls “the liberal movement” of the nineteenth century in Mexico, a movement that carried upon its widening current the germs of race and class liberation, twisting in and out through the preliminary yet significant church struggles of the ’thirties and the ’fifties, finally to flow into the broad harbor of the 1857 Constitution. Yet while this constitution magnificently closed an era and paved the way for a long peace, Mr. Callcott, with less of an historian’s eye and with more sensitivity to the bitter irony of Mexico and its repeated frustrations, well might have carried his study over into the temporary debacle of democracy and religious liberty—the Maximilian régime. It is to be hoped that he will use his impartial talents to give us a treatment of the subse- quent era from 1857 to the present, with similar emphasis upon the Church-State relation. Had such a volume been at hand during the recent religious crisis, we might have had fewer newspaper scareheads and editorial superlatives. CARLETON BEALS Mostly Fudge John Wanamaker. By Herbert Adams Gibbons. Two volumes. Harper and Brothers. $10. | ERE they come again—those “two fat volumes” which Mr. Strachey deplored a few years since. These particular twins are dressed up in a luxurious and yet dignified fashion that would befit a great subject and a great biographer. Had Caesar been the theme, and Plutarch the author, the publishers could hardly have bettered their end of the business. This is not to say that either the subject or the author is negligible. John Wanamaker may have been as great a man as Mr. Gibbons so staunchly believes and tries to prove through more than 800 detailed and painstaking pages; he may have been as important as some thousands of Americans believe. To some others, how- ever, this story which rings all the familiar changes on a thread- bare topic—the rise of a poor American boy from the position of a brick-worker to the eminence of a great American merchant— appears about as drab and dispiriting as any Horatio Alger masterpiece. Here, for the hundredth or thousandth time, are concretely illustrated those sterling (catchpenny, one might say) American virtues of grit, thrift, spunk, “money back,” “infinite capacity for detail,” and, of course, piety. No matter what Wanamaker did—whether he passed around those religious tracts with which his pockets commonly bulged; whether he had a “fine talk” with Queen Victoria’s daughter, the Princess Louise (“My, but I enjoyed it!’’); whether he continued the salaries of his employees who volunteered for the Spanish- American War; whether his account book and his New Testa- ment perpetually jostled each other in his inside pocket; whether he tried his “best to buy in falling markets’; whether, in visit- ing the Holy Sepulchre, “yielding to an irresistible temptation, I stretched myself out on the tomb’; whether he served efficiently as Postmaster-General under Harrison; or whether, at eighty- four, he “jumped out of bed eager for the day’s work”—he always did those things that the average American most heartily applauded and most wished that he himself might do. And yet, despite the fact that his life was “radiant adventure, always, always, always,” his greatest desire remained unfulfilled. “In each man’s soul is some cherished dream or purpose that he confides to none. Mr. Wanamaker’s dream was to write a life of Martin Luther.” There were times, indeed, when his optimism (“Pollyanna,” next to the Bible, was his best-loved book) almost failed him. On July 4, 1903, he wrote: “The pity of it all for- ever to drudge and never to budge from mostly fudge!” Mr. Gibbons has done his job with appalling thoroughness —no one, it is safe to say, will ever be tempted to write another two-volume life of Wanamaker. Yet it seems that the author is still unsatisfied with his labors, for in one place he darkly com- When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation [Vol. 128, No. 3293 ——— Clergymen and _ laymen alike, atheists as well as the devout, join in praise of MY HERESY by Bishop William Montgomery Brown The story of a man who lost a religion and found a faith. John Dewey says: “The movement which the book records has a typical significance which is absent from most heresies.” Rev. William Norman Guthrie says: “A bit of palpitating humanity.” Herbert Asbury says: “A sparkling and witty account.” Dudley Siddall says: “Takes on the character of a Holy Revelation.” The New York Evening Post says: “Likely to keep anyone who begins it in the evening up all night.” A 272-page book, but priced at $2.00—far below the usual scale— to keep it within reach of the widest possible number of persons seeking new faith. NEW SCHOOLS IN THE OLD WORLD by Carleton Washburne, Superintendent of Schools at Winnetka, Ill. in collaboration with MYRON M. STEARNS Report and comment on_ twelve progressive schools in Europe. $1.75 “No one interested in educational methods, either in theory or practice, can fail to find it richly stimulating.” —New York Times. “Here's a fresh wind to blow upon this discussion of what to teach our children in the public schools —and how. To a layman like myself the book is interesting on every page.”—Harry Hansen in the New York World. A CHILD'S MAP OF THE ANCIENT WORLD by Alice York Designed by ILonKA Karasz For the first time, the ancient world of myth and history is graphically presented in a pictorial map, done in six colors. Bright and decorative, to quicken youthful imaginations, it is designed to serve as a guide to fascinating discoveries. Folded, in envelope, $1.50. At all Bookstores The John Day Co., 25 West 45th Street, New York of | him: ing, Perl open ive as li nove) up h datio His | plex so la expe) It w count it is it sir majo with recei' in V adjec made own impe1 no or } the b has b he ha medie val a

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Dec. 8. 1926] The Nation ments: “A volume could be written about Wanamaker and the piano business.” He also brandishes a threatening pitchfork at possibly captious critics by stating in his bibliography that “the authority for every statement made and the quotations very often in Wanamaker’s own handwriting—are preserved on ffteen thousand cards, thoroughly indexed and Nevertheless his logic is sometimes rather curious. These two sentences are taken from the same paragraph: “Wanamaker . was instinctively incapable of partisanship or sectarianism at every stage of his life. ... Through thick and thin, from Lincoln to Harding, he stuck by the [Republican] Party.” And ence he allows a slight speck to remain on the portrait: ‘“AI- though we doubt whether he read every word of it, he sometimes ealled ‘Les Miserables’ his favorite work of fiction.” For few, indeed, are the dark shadows that lurk in the background of the picture—Mr. Gibbons has brushed them away. But he defends his hero so vehemently that one begins to wonder: could there have been so much smoke without a tiny blaze somewhere? And then one turns to take another look at the intriguing copyright. And so, while this is assuredly the definitive and official life of Wanamaker, one still wonders—is it the life? Wanamaker himself, in one of his lucid moments, once telegraphed: ‘Think- ing, trying, toiling, and trusting in God is all my biography.” Perhaps Mr. Gibbons bettered this laconic utterance in his terse opening sentence: “John Wanamaker earned money for seventy- five years.” A thousand years hence, will anyone remember even as little as that? R. F. DIBBLE classified.” Once More the Impossible A Short History of Civilization. By Lynn Thorndike. F. S. Crofts and Company. $5. ROFESSOR THORNDIKE has placed a tolerably adequate account of the development of civilization from the Old Stone Age to Locarno within the covers of a single volume. He has, of course, rushed in where his colleagues fear to tread. Few men in this age of specialization care to expose themselves to attack upon so many fronts. But Professor Thorndike is no novelist with a sudden enthusiasm for Kulturgeschichte, getting up his subject overnight. As a medievalist he has sure foun- dations for a survey of the cultural history of Western Europe. His studies in magic have led him into the heart of that com- plex of science, pseudo-science, and superstition which forms so large g part of our vaunted civilization. Finally, he is an experienced teacher, not in one field of history but in many. It would be rash to assert that he is the one man in the country who should have undertaken this particular task, but is clear that he is by far the ablest who has yet tackled it single-handed. His book is carefully planned and clearly written. The major problems of emphasis and proportion have been solved with considerable success. The Far and the Near East have received due attention, though the center of interest is naturally in Western Europe. Neither constant use of the compound adjective nor the veritably interminable flow of fact has made the book unreadable. Pert statements of the author's wn prejudices are sufficiently frequent to lure the reader on. “The human mind moves slowly at best, and the military mind till more slowly.” “It is not recorded that the great librarians ff Alexandria ever attended a library school, but they knew what was in the books in their library.” “The Fascisti with Mussolini as dictator instituted a regime of forced labor, so- briety, and order, seasoned with much sententious bombast, imperialistic ‘flapdoodle,’ and occasional bloodshed.” This is no ordinary textbook. New viewpoints and novel theories are to be found in the book, but they are not numerous. In the main the author has been content to skim the cream from the works of others; he has used the best books, however. The chapters devoted to medieval Europe are exceptionally good, notably that on medie- val art. An earlier chapter on Hellenistic culture and later Bo oks MANY BOOKS of MANY KINDS THE VAGABOND DUCHESS By Cyril Haghes Hartmann 7 he life of Hor- tense Mancin:, mece of Cardinal Maza- rin. “One of the most amazing tales ever heard.” N . 7. Sun. Boxed, $5.00 } THE CHEVALIER DE BOUFFLERS By Nesta H. Webster Attractively bound and boxed. $5.00 BEATRICE D’ESTE By Julia Cartwright $3.00 THE MEDICI By G. F. Young The only complete account of this great family Two splendid volumes boxed. $12 00 for Gifts MANY FOLK for of MANY MINDS BIOGRAPHY THE FACE OF SILENCE By Dhan Gopal Mukerji The sublume record of religion in prac tice of a holy man | in India y the au thor of ° My Broth ers Face.” $3.00 QUEEN ELIZABETH’S MAIDS OF HONOUR By Violet Wilson $5.00 MARY STUART By Flevence A. Maccann $3.00 FICTION, HUMOUR AND POETRY ANN’S CRIME By R.T. M. Scott \ ripping detective which “Secret Service story in Smith” a ppears again. $2.00 USELESS HANDS By Claude Farrere author of * Thomas the Lambkin.” $2.50 THE POETRY OF NONSENSE DEVICES AND DESIRES By Vera Wheatley A story of youth. Most attractively ound and jacketed and encased in glassine paper for Christmas giving I SING THE PIONEER By Arthar Gaiterman PRECIOUS BANE By Mary Webb Rare and fine and beautiful."-—N. Y, Evening Post Lit erary Review. $2.00 THE LUNATIC IN CHARGE By J. Storer Clensten Ballads of the author o “The Making of the Lunatic at Large,” Nation. $2 00 etc. $2 00 CASEMENTS By Emile Cammaerts $1.75 By Richard Cloudes'ey Savetge $2.00 TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE IN MANY LANDS By Cecil Gosling $3.50 THE SURGEON’S LOG By ‘ J. Johnston Abraham $5.00 &) a iG From the iacket of ‘*The Surgeon's Log”’ A NOVELIST’S TOUR OF THE WORLD By Vicente Blasco Ibanez $6.00 THE FIRE OF DESERT FOLK By Ferdinand Ossendouski Mz author of * Beasts, Men and Gods.” $3.00 Check the books you want and take this list to your favorite | 0okshop unless you prefer to order direct from us. Free upon Request “Dutton Gift Books’’ Fifth Avenue | DNuutons. When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation at 54th Street

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618 The Nation [Vol. 123, No. 3205 chapters on the religious changes in early modern Europe and on the economic changes at the beginning of the nineteenth century are new in manner and admirable in content. The comparative neglect of Charlemagne and the absolute omis- sion of Frederick II are hard to understand. The institutional phases of European civilization have been slighted. The des- cription of feudalism is especially unsatisfactory. The author seems curiously unappreciative of the contributions of Erasmus, Luther, and Voltaire. On the other hand both Louis XIV and Napoleon have fared better than one could expect. Henry VIII still seeks a “divorce.” Many would not agree that Joseph II was the best example of enlightened despotism. But it is as a textbook that it will be judged. And here the reviewer confesses to firm convictions. His experience, reasonably extensive, has persuaded him that we already at- tempt too much in our general courses in European history. Professor Thorndike would have us abandon the relatively simple thread of political history and take up the whole field of cultural achievement; he would have us start with the Old Stone Age. He thinks that we are now prevented from so do- ing only by a lack of able teachers and an adequate textbook. The latter he has supplied. Turn to the accounts of the Pelo- ponnesian League or of the “fuller democracy of Athens” or to the beautifully balanced summary of Chinese culture or to the masterly digest of Restoration England. What will the average student derive from all this? To him even the names are new, almost every phrase without helpful connotation, un- less he already has other and extensive contacts with history or allied subjects. Barrett Wendell once remarked that thirty years of experience had convinced him that English composi- tion could not be taught, but that the attempt should be made.: The failure of the history of civilization as an elementary sub- ject in our colleges seems assured; the necessity for attempting it, of course, may still be demonstrated. SIDNEY R. PACKARD The Nation’s Poetry Prize HE NATION offers an annual poetry prize of $100 for /, the best poem submitted by an American poet in a contest conducted by The Nation each year between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. This year in addition a second prize of $50 and a third prize of $25 will be offered. The rules for 1926 are as follows: 1. Each manuscript submitted in the contest must reach the office of The Nation, 20 Vesey Street, New York City, not earlier than Wednesday, December 1, and not later than Friday, Decem- ber 31, plainly marked on the outside of the envelope “For The Nation’s Poetry Prize.” 2. Manuscripts must be typewritten and must have the name of the author in full on each page. 3. No manuscripts submitted in this contest will in any cir- cumstances be returned to the author. An acknowledgment of the receipt of each manuscript, however, will be sent. 4. No more than three poems from the same author will be admitted to the contest. 5. No restriction is placed upon the subject or form of poems submitted, which may be in any meter or in free verse. It will be impossible, however, to consider poems which are more than 400 lines in length or which are translations or which are in any language other than English. Poems arranged in a definite sequence may, if the author so desires, be counted as a single poem. 6. The winning poems will be published in the Midwinter Literary Supplement of The Nation, to appear February 9, 1927. 7. Besides the winning poems, The Nation reserves the right to purchase at its usual rates any other poem submitted. The judges of the contest are the editors of The Nation. Poems should in no case be sent to them personally. BOOKS OF ENDURING VALUE SWNT O A Golden Book of Science and Adventure THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE WILLIAM BEEBE This has proved the most popular book that has come from Beebe’s gifted pen. The Saturday Review of Literature calls j: “A book for everyone who is stirred by the strange and beau- tiful in nature, by exciting and decidedly unconventional! a venture, and by a true tale well told.” Lavishly illustrated $6. CWO Exploration in Mongolia ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN by ROY CHAPMAN ANDREWS This story of scientific ardors and accomplishment is one of the most fascinating volumes imaginable. The Christian Scienc: Monitor says: “One rarely reads a book on exploration or travel written in such a charming manner and relating facts of such absorbing interest.” Illustrated. $6.( CWO The Dark Continent Exposed DENATURED AFRICA DANIEL W. STREETER The New York Herald Tribune says: “Richly humorous trave! books are so rare that lovers of the genre are advised in- stantly to pounce upon ‘Denatured Africa’ and drag it to a secluded spot for some hours of uninterrupted enjoyment.” |: is sound advice. Illustrated. $2.50 CWOTO An Historian Contemplates His Age WORDS TO THE DEAF GUGLIELMO FERRERO In this volume the great Italian historian diagnoses the mala dies from which the world today is suffering. Industry, art, finance, and international relations are all considered. There is intellectual dynamite in these pages. Translated by Ben Ray Redman. $2.0 G. P. PUTNAM’S SON’S New York London When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation libra of th for] on Wig Miln Mac! Gard Skin! Field Moor Lust: Shan Mort Putn Tee-" { ‘ Whit Zeitl: Dani defici some is ey assul of & rebu: Loya Ame: histo econ The legen

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Dec. 8. 1926] The Nation A Library List of Children’s Books In response to a request from The Nation the children’s .qrians of the Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis public libraries have selected the following as the best children’s books of the current season. Each librarian was asked by The Nation for five titles. Only the first four of the titles below appeared on more than one list. Wiggin, K. D., and Smith, N. A. Tales of Laughter. Illustrated by Elizabeth MacKinstry. Doubleday, Page. $3. Milne, A. A. Winnie-the-Pooh. Dutton. $2. MacManus, Seumas. Donegal Wonder Book. Stokes. $2. Gardiner, Alice Cushing, and Osborne, Nancy Cabot. Father's Gone Awhaling. Doubleday, Page. $2. Skinner, C. L. White Leader. Macmillan, $1.75. Field, Rachel. Taxis and Toadstools. Doubleday, Page. $2. Moon, Grace. Chi-Wee and Loki. Doubleday, Page, $2. Lustig, Sonia. Roses of the Winds. Doubleday, Page. $2. Shannon, Monica. California Fairy Tales. Doubleday, Page. $2. Morrow, Honoré Wilsie. On to Oregon. William Morrow. $1.75. Putnam, David. David Goes to Greenland. Putnam. $1.75. Tee-Van, Helen Damrosch. Red Howling Monkey. Macmillan. $2. White, Hervey. Snake Gold. Macmillan. $1.75. Zeitlin, Ida. Skazki. Doran. $5. Daniel, Hawthorne. Gauntlet of Dunmore. Macmillan. $1.75. Books in Brief Miniatures of French History. By Hilaire Belloc. Brothers. $3.50. Mr. Belloc, as a historian, has three claims upon public consideration: he writes readably, carries the burden of his learning easily, and never permits his cranky notions to inter- fere with fact. The present gift-volume—a very neat one in its external make-up—will be particularly acceptable to eager, studious boys and girls of sixteen or thereabouts, staring round- eyed, from the Darien-peak of their youth, upon the wonders of the human past. Eve Walks in Her Garden. By Louise Ayres Garnett. The Macmillan Company. $2. A volume of utterly simple poetry, which for all its delicacy covers deep ranges of emotion. It passes from rhythmic ballads to two or three-line lyrics, from strong moving assertions of faith to fresh and fanciful pictures; and in whatever the author touches is the quality of truth. The Story of the Catholic Church. By Cuthbert Wright. Albert and Charles Boni. $2.50. This volume lacks learning, an insight into the moving laws of human history, reconstructive power, a title indicative of content, and an index. What is left, after all these deficiencies are accounted for, is an impressionist sketch of some picturesque details of Roman ecclesiasticism. The book is evidently founded on the time-honored Greenwich Village assumption that susceptible nerves and a thin, newspapery sort of education are the sole prerequisite of writing “de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis.” Loyalism in Virginia. Chapters in the Economic History of the Revolution. By Isaac S. Harrell. Duke University Press. $1.50. An excellent help in the study of the static forces of the American War of Independence, which assists in putting the history of our nascent commonwealth upon the solid soil of economic fact. The Great American Ass. Brentano’s. $3.50. “I, the Yankee cub nursed on the milk of Massachusetts Harper and An Autobiography. Anonymous. legend and reared up to roar the Yankee triumphs, am an ass (jigs s When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation tt 4 THE STORY | OF THE 4 EVOLUTION OF LOVE yy by Wilhelm Bolsche \ \ LOVE-LIFE IN NATURE wore Set ae ee | a & k B re re Cr | ONG regarded as the standard book on its subject in all } European countries, this masterpiece, which has sold over 150,000 copies in Germany, is now available here. ‘Lhe story of the evolution of love, holy and profane, as the great cosmic force in all life throughout the ages, is here fascinatingly de scribed in all its amazing variety. SOME OF THE SUBJECTS TREATED: OVE and Religion; Love and Art; How Love begins in art; Relics of primitive love; The first visible evidence of love on this planet; The nature of emotion; The law against in- breeding ; The animal in man; The contrast between male and female love; Polygamy, polyandry and monogamy ; Communal marriage; Natural history of prostitution; The wonder of creation. Two volumes, boxed, $10.00 CARAS CARAS CAMS CABMAS CAG CAKES CAMS THREE YEARS RUNNING the critics have acclaimed Ford Madox Ford's book “The Finest Novel of the Year” OR years Ford Madox Ford has enjoyed a subterranean reputation as one of the great writers of English prose. During the last few years the public has awakened to his im- portance, and each new book has enjoyed a larger audience. SGME DO NOT, published in 1924, ran through three edi- tions. (Acclaimed the year’s best novel.) NO MORE PARADES, published in 1925, ran through five editions. (Acclaimed the year’s best novel.) A MAN COULDSTAND UP just published, will take its place with the year’s best sellers. “About the most exciting thing that has happened to the novel since The Way of All Flesh.’-—New York Times. A Man Could Stand Up, $2.50 net. The three volumes, boxed, $7.50. Albert & Charles Boni—66 Fifth Avenue, New York

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620 The Nation [Vol. 123, No. 3205 I write the ‘Mother,’ in the wilderness of frustration (p. 3-4) defeatist’s saga of the prairie empire (p. 3) said [my father] ‘we’ve raised a foolish child’ (p. 12) I am a mean guy and I exult in wholesome exter- mination even though I and my own tribe be the ones that are exterminated. Down with all self-kidding weaklings. Damn them (p. 273) As I flop around with a consumptive’s restlessness, my sound is a rattling dirge, an aching yawp. I froth at the mouth with frustration. I think of my kin in tradition, another amiable gullible ass, Henry Adams (p. 315) At any rate, it’s great to be an ass (p. 140).” It must be. Darwin. By Gamaliel Bradford. Houghton Mifflin Company. $3.50. Seven chapters make up this book: The Observer, The Thinker, The Discoverer, The Loser, The Lover, The Destroyer, The Scientific Spirit. It is possible that Darwin may be best comprehended if viewed from these several angles; but—as Mr. Bradford is doubtless aware—any such analytical device is largely arbitrary and, furthermore, it tends to a certain amount of overlapping in both argument and illustration. As a working device, however, it is sufficiently effective and perhaps, in the case of such a man as Darwin, analysis and argument should supersede narration. If Mr. Bradford is sometimes too gar- rulous and repetitious, he is frequently shrewd and discrimin- ating; if he tends to exhort too much, he has no patience what- ever with the theologians who dogged and besmirched Darwin; and if he is somewhat too personal and plaintive in his con- cern over metaphysical mysteries, he shows a minute, judicious, and urbane knowledge of the vast revolution which Darwin was chiefly instrumental in effecting. Causes and Their Champions. By M. A. DeWolfe Howe. Little, Brown and Company. $4. This book has two aims: it deals with eight causes “directly affecting contemporary life in America,” and with the man or woman who was principally instrumental in furthering each cause. While including Phillips Brooks as the champion of tolerance in religion, Mr. Howe yet excludes Garrison on the ground that anti-slavery “is omitted only as a res adjudicata.” To those who are interested in a surface presentation of things, this distinction will doubtless appear valid; to those who, with Carlyle, believe that Negro slavery was only a symptom of a national disease that still persists in other forms, and that reli- gious toleration is most decidedly unsettled, the distinction will be unsatisfactory. The volume, in short, while written in a clear and businesslike fashion, offers little that is new in material, in method, or in theory. Translations and Tomfooleries. Brentano’s. $2.25. The Austrian novelist and playwright Siegfried Trebitsch translated into German the bulk of Shaw’s work and Shaw out of pure gratitude undertook to render into English Herr Trebitsch’s “Jitta’s Atonement,” although—as one might have guessed beforehand—he found it impossible to refrain from making it over to suit himself. This is the “Translations” (sic) of the present volume. The “Tomfooleries” include the well- known “Admirable Bashville’ and “Press Cuttings” as well as several even slighter skits, one or two of which were written for theatrical benefits. Shaw’s more extravagant burlesques are usually amusing in dialogue but rather feeble in general conception. The Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni. Translated by John Black. The Blue Jade Library. Alfred A. Knopf. $3. In his introduction William Drake justly accepts the state- ment of Gibbon that these memoirs are the most pleasing and vital of their author’s comedies. Written in old age after his retirement to France, they are admirable expressions of the same ebullient, superficial nature which went to the making of the plays and, being less artificial, have less quickly faded. himself gives a more vivid picture of By Bernard Shaw. Casanova scarcely rococo Venice. ? {4 ‘ When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation =a ar wr Shae ene ‘LIPPINCOTT Books Gifts for Every Taste ‘*Anatole France to the life’”’ —EmiLte Henriot in Le Tp) RAMBLES WITH ANATOLE FRANCE By SANDOR KEMERI Never has the personal charm of the Master been felt as jn this book of his enthusiasms. Through old Paris, Milan Naples, Rome we run the fire of his comment on art and men and ideas. From the Hungarian. Illustrated wi hitherto unpublished photographs and facsimile letters. head le handsome octavo. $5.00 FORGOTTEN SHRINES OF SPAIN By MILDRED STAPLEY BYNE A volume that throws Spain open like a great museum to the art-lovers of the world. 65 Beautiful illustrations, quaintly drawn frontispiece and map. $5.00 THE DEAD RIDE HARD By LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE A galloping tale of love, intrigue and breathless adventure, by a master of romance. It tells of that intrepid American, Andrew Brull, and his service to an imperious lady of Buda pest in the days when the White Terror rode hard upon the Red. $2.00 THE PRACTICAL BOOK OF LEARNING DECORATION AND FURNITURE By EDWARD STRATTON HOLLOWAY A humanized course in Interior Decoration. It presents by the picture and illustration method an easily grasped survey of the whole subject, and includes suggestions for more inten- sive study of details. 180 Illustrations. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Edited by DR. E. C. HAYES, University of Illinois (Lippincott’s Sociological Series) The seven stimulating chapters have each been written by a specialist and cover the following fields: Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Anthropogeography, Economics, Political Science, History. This is a critical survey of the recent developments oon in such a fas as to make most interesting reading. SOCIAL PROGRESS By ULYSSES G. WEATHERLY, University of Indiana (Lippincott’s Sociological Series) Here is no ordinary historical survey of theory of progress, but a stimulating study of the dynamics of change. The author’s method is pragmatic rather than historical or speculative. $2.50. For Boys and Girls Fairy Tales from India Little Abe Lincoln ‘tlustrated with Special Lining Papers, By BERNIE BABCOCK. The true stor Decorations and {2 Exquisite Coler of Abraham Lincoln's boyhood acve Plates by KATHARINE PYLE. One tvres and achievement, a_ wildwood of the most beautiful gift books this story full of the a. humor ustrated. season. These old Deccan stories of of the backwoods. Rajahs and Ranees, Wuzeers and $2.00 Brahmins, cobras, jackals and wicked Wisdom of the Woods By DAN BEARD. Fascinating back Martha thy Seventh woods secrets that will rejoice ‘Scouts and all outdoor boys. New v e By JANE ABBOTT. What happened to aan me a “seventh child of a seventh child’ one = Beard’s be ee pone mal at Twin Farms in the green bills of tlustrations, colere _ 9 50 Vermont,—a New England story for was $1.15 The Stories All girls. illustrated. The Rider in the Children Love Series 26 FAVORITES—the stories that 1 Green Mask rakshas are colorful with the magic ” a mystic land. $3.50 By RUPERT SARGENT HOLLAND. grow oll. Beautifully bound A stirring tale of the American Revolu- charmingly illustrated in tion—the daring pursuit of the “Carrots” and ‘“‘Eveli, the Litt ‘Wolves’ of Watson's Glen. Colored Singer’’ are the 1926 additions \ frontispiece, 3 other illustrations. to see the books in the gay tar $2.00 jackets. Each $1 At All Bookstores J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY PHILADELPHIA LONDON $4.50 | ! | | 4 3 DA Dit he Di Ds ie a a Das Do De De ican of ou and ‘ rdin there to o1 gene tions is ap Stance

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Dec. 8. 1926] The Nation Apostate. By Forrest Reid. Houghton Mifflin Company $4. Spiritual autobiography is a difficult literary medium, and this one—for all its tranquil detail, its quiet sincerity, and its anceasing effort to recapture the moods of childhood—fails to aah a rounded reality. The style is limpid and many of the ures are vivid, but the recital seems lacking in cohesive strength. It ends, moreover, on an indeterminate note, baffling the reader. pict to The Painted Room. By Margaret Wilson. Harper and Brothers. $2. Not particularly interesting people are moved about here like furniture. Like much of the current vintage of fiction, departing generation, but it adds little to the already over- crowded warehouse. If done brilliantly the theme still justifies itself, but here the touch is inclined to be heavy, fraying out in thin philosophy. The Clean Up. By Mark Lee Luther. Company. $2. The endless petty politics of the small American city in which not even a fire is handled to the satisfaction of the party is out of office affords Mr. Luther a theme which he jevelops in a manner half Rotarian and half satirical. The characters are all black or all white, in accordance with the tested formula of melodrama, which simplifies the author’s problem and places no mental burdens on the reader. The The Bobbs-Merrill is a shrewd transcriber of the contemporary idiom, and it is this which constitutes the best feature of his story. Americana 1926. Edited by H. L. Mencken. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. “The boobus Americanus”—Mr. Mencken once informed the readers of The Nation—“is a bird that knows no closed season,” and the adage explains why both barrels of Mr. Mencken’s shotgun are kept smoking hot month in and month out. The editor of the American Mercury is' as heedlessly destructive of ur American fools as the pioneers were of wild pigeons and bison. Can it be that the supply already begins to diminish? It sounds impossible, but the fact remains that in his second anthology of American asininity Mr. Mencken ekes out his mate- rials with an Appendix from Foreign Parts. His statement that the appendix was added at the request of various Amer- ican patriotic societies contains probably a germ of truth. Lovers of our native wild life begin to sicken at the unending slauchter and to dart foreboding eyes toward a drab and foolless future. But their alarm is perhaps slightly premature. Musie ‘ ~ . Music and Common Sense—I ) relations expressed by musical sounds, I have explained,’ are not relations between the quantities and qualities of rdinary experience, but relations sui generis. They do not, therefore, conform to the categories derived from and applicable to ordinary experience, but to categories which are again sui generis, which represent special aural adaptations to combina- tions of musical sounds. This means that the common sense that is applicable to ordinary experience does not enable one to under- stand musical relations or provide a standard by which to judge them. What a person guided solely by common sense under- stands by the developing of a theme—what he knows of the process as it is applied to a subject of ordinary experience— does not enable him to understand what is meant by the process it is applied to a musical subject, or to follow it through when he meets it; for the processes are as unlike as the subjects. And though he is familiar with a formal quality like symmetry or proportion in groups of physical objects, he does not understand ‘In “Music and the External World,” The Nation, October 13. ooks to give and to keep é Sixteen men, ranking scientists at the University of Chica and found, and wnitten down for the satisfaction al of iile wr imcgul the facts about the world and man Their book, The Nature of the Worid and of Man “fascinating reading . . on the unity, the coherence, the march of one ¢ é Outlook for American Prose By Joseph Warren Beach In the New York Times Book Review J. Brooks Atkinson say: is accurate, audacious, and broad.” And H. L. Mencken j the first Look, written by an American, in which prec practise. Mr. Beach writes very effecuvely, and has m fulfilling rarely its purpose ‘ 7 ia] ¢ The Panchatantra Translated from the Sanskrit by Arthur W. Ryder. Of thes I Sherman said in Books: “Here is one of the world’s old story books ...a_ racy humanity, its pervasive humor. . t and most far : . translation... refreshing in it Ss ¢ The Democratic Way of Life By T. V. Smith [he professional man who conceives a ministry as well as a mission for his calling will find here enthusiastic confirmation. Mr. Smith offers * an intellectual exuberance and a brilliance in the management of abstract thought that make his pages both agreeable and stimulating to read. $1.75 ¢ Brains of Rats and Men By C. Judson Herrick perhaps, the HH. L. Mencken says of it in the American Mercury: “It as, 5 best summary of the known facts about mental processes yet put into English.” And the Forum praises it as tield of public education im science.” $3.00 “one of the most readable volumes in the oS 4 The Psalms Newly Translated by J. M. Powis Smith The Nation commends this new version which has benefited by modern scholarship as ‘dignified and clear.” The Jewish Forur trustworthy. and beyond the ordinary cavillings of the critic at Bible translation.” $3.00 1 calis it exa.ted of new efforts University of Chicago Press 5807 Ellis Avenue, Chicago When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation

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622 The Nation [Vol. 123, No. 3205 it and cannot recognize it when it is the attribute of groups of musical tones. A scientist, then, may not be able to distinguish one phrase of music from another, since the intellectual dis- cipline is distinct from the specialized musica] discipline that makes it possible to apprehend a type of music. This may appear cbvious, but many notions prevail which fail to observe the distinction. For example, a popular program, by which is meant one that consists of simple, obvious music, is regularly spoken of as suiting the taste of a popular audience, by which is meant one that consists of intellectually unsophisti- cated persons; whereas in fact it suits the taste of even educated persons to whom all but the simplest of the special materials and processes of music are something of a mystery. And of late the demand has been more insistent than ever that music and its criticism and commentary be made intelligible to the layman; or rather that music—the art discussed, as well as individual compositions heard—be made intelligible to him by means of criticism and commentary that are intelligible; a demand which again, as I shali show, ignores the distinction between music and ordinary experience and between the musical discipline and the intellectual. Parenthetically, it is interesting that the failure to observe this distinction—like most of the errors with which musical com- mentary swarms—results itself from the very distinction ignored, that is, from the fact that usually the man who knows his music cannot think straight enough, and the man who can think straight does not know enough about music to avoid error. When—to take the first case—music is left, as apparently it should be, to be handJed by the musical specialist, it is left in effect to one who usually has not learned objectivity, and who, therefore, is constantly guilty of special pleading—and this on behalf of nothing more than his little prejudices against this type of music or for that. He sets out, as he thinks, to trace the connection between the revolutions of a century ago and music,’ but in reality to make out a case against program music end other more recent tendencies as being infantile. He ends, therefore, not only by not discovering the connection but by confusing, among other things, musical with intellectual sophis- tication. On the other hand, the identical confusion is made by the intellectually sophisticated person who out of his ignorance of music demands a musical counterpart of “Why We Behave Like Human Beings.” And it is this demand, as I have said, with the relation it implies between music and common sense, that calls for discussion. Music has its proper place with activities like philosophy and mathematics, which use a technical terminology or a special set of symbols, either to introduce a desirable economy in ex- pression or to express relations that cannot be expressed in any other way. But even in this class music stands apart. If Ein- stein’s final results can be expressed only in mathematical sym- bols, nevertheless the relations so symbolized can be reduced to (or, in a sense, expanded into) other mathematical relations and this process continued until a relation is reached simple enough to be expressed adequately and clearly in ordinary language. The same can be done, with less difficulty, for the ideas of philosophy, and with comparative ease for those of anthropology. The layman must, then, be willing to learn the definitions of cer- tain technical terms (the successful popularizer, then, is one who can induce his readers to learn them; the most easily popu- larized science that one of which the technical terms are most closely related to, and most easily incorporated in, the ordinary vocabulary); but if he does learn these definitions he has the means, not, probably, of appreciating the aesthetic qualities of a philosophic or mathematical demonstration, but at least of understanding some of the materials and processes which exhibit, in certain combinations and to certain individuals, these aesthetic qualities. Not so with music. The simplest verbal definition or description of the simplest musical relation uses terms which stand for purely musical facts, and which are mean- ingless until these musical facts have been apprehended directly *Daniel Gregory Mason, in “Contemporary Composers.” a ° > oe “‘ Proof that real masterpieces can still be v written in the Russian tongue.’’ Ig —New York Times \) ee 9 z Mitya’s Love : \ By IVAN BUNIN v Translated by Madelaine Boyd y With an Introduction by Ernest Boyd 4 JouNn Erskine, author of “The Private Life of Helen of Troy” and “Galahad,” says: “It is a long time since I have read a story so profound in its psychology and so dramatic in its method. It seems to me a very perfect D CARAS SCL FWD FCF FU D FN FULD FULD SNL D masterpiece. I feel that I have made the ac- g quaintance of a writer of the first rank.” .) JoHN Cournos says in New York Post: } “What a relief, after reading so-called ‘mod- 8 ern’ novels, to turn to this simple, poignant and \ exquisite narrative written by a living Russian, but in the traditional manner of the great Rus- |/ sians who went before him!” j $2.00 at all booksellers ) HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY i One Park Avenue New York v *) CPS DWI DW DRT DROID - “ Stimulatingly provocative” THE NEW LEADERSHIP IN INDUSTRY By SAM A. LEWISOHN Evans Clark in The New York Times says: “He sees both the outside and the inside of the labor question. ... It is rich in suggestion, both for the average reader who seeks an understand- ing of the world he lives in and for the scholar who would push forward the frontiers of human knowledge.” $2.00 at all bookstores E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY, NEW YORK | ee by FRITZ MRS. SOCRATES = %hike “An example of the en- “This book demands a “Stimulating.” during quality of good hearty shout of grate- aia, Seanive fiction.” ful praise.” “Delightful.” —N. Y. Sun. —N. Y. World. —Hartford Times THE WOMAN CHAINS BROKEN EARTH WORKER and the by Maurice Hindus TRADE UNIONS $2.00 by Henri Barbusse by Theresa Wolfson 2 vols. $4.00 oi $1.75 The new THEATRE ’ and CINEMA of OIL IMPERIALISM WHITHER RUSSIA? SOVIET RUSSIA by Louis Fischer by Leon Trotsky by Huntly Carter $2.00 $1.50 $6.00 EDUCATION IN FOUNDATIONS of LEFT WING SOVIET RUSSIA CHRISTIANITY UNIONISM by Scott Nearing by Karl Kauteky by David J. Saposs $1.50 $4.00 $1.60 At all INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS — Write for Book Stores Catalog 381 FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation As L, W ences identi! play : consti in the for th tomed mytho T ployed sentin the sp and h experi by th foreig conce! the ré exam} gloom which the or @ uni than of its A ment. pose j did. way

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Dec. 8. 1926] The Nation — musical facts. There is, then, no making music intelligible the absolute layman by using language that is intelligible as anguage. What such language makes intelligible is only what- pit quantities and qualities the words refer to in ordinary exp rience; the judgments that are made are judgments of only gch quantities and qualities; and the criteria that are intro- ced by these judgments are common-sense criteria which gov- an only the aforementioned quantities and qualities. It requires _owledge of music in addition to translate these quantities and ties into musical facts, the judgments into musical judg- sents, and the criteria into musical criteria. And since one posses ing the requisite knowledge of music does not need the ‘ntelligible language, the use and value of such language is in ny case solely that of literature or entertainment, not of en- tenment. I have, it is true, been dealing with the extreme and rare f the absolute layman, the person absolutely unacquainted “ith music; but what I have said of him remains true up the ne: where the direct experience with the musical fact is ade- yate to a correct understanding of the verbal explanation the explanation is superfluous; where the direct experience is not adequate the explanation is useless. And so, given a person h actual but slight musical sophistication, there is no making hms intelligible and enjoyable to him by mere verbal descrip- tions of the intricate materials and processes involved. Instead there must be direct, comprehending—which means educated— experience with the materials and processes, but experience itself educated by direct experience with less intricate materials and ses. Otherwise, if the reader ever gets to a concert he inds that the verbal descriptions he understood do not confront him, and the processes that confront him he does not understand. B. H. HAGGIN as Drama “The Witch’’ [ AST season “The Dybbuk” illustrated one of the ways in 4 which a playwright may avail himself of emotional experi- ences completely alien to his audience. Throughout, the author dentified himself with the milieu he described and wrote the play as if he shared to the fullest extent the beliefs which constituted its premises. The audience was asked to put itself in the place of those with whom the story dealt, to renounce for the time being the spiritual world in which it was accus- tomed to live, and by an act of poetic faith to believe in the mythology of the Chassidic Jews. The result of such a method, when it is successfully em- ployed, is the production of a beautiful anachronism. By con- senting to accept, during a certain time, an alien weltanschauung the spectator opens his soul to new terrors and new sublimities and he is led to partake in whatever strange and beautiful experiences his borrowed faith makes possible. He is frightened by things which he does not really fear, moved by passions foreign to his nature, stirred by conflicts that do not really concern him. He accepts, in a word, both the penalties and the rewards of a spiritual world not his own, so that, for example, in the case cited, he endures the dark terrors of a gloomy superstition for the sake of the compensating sense which it brings of inhabiting a universe made important by the omnipresence of unseen powers whose concern is with him: a universe, that is to say, at once darker and more sublime than that daylight one which rationality has robbed at once of its terror and its grandeur. A play of this sort asks of the intellect sympathy, not judg- ment. It aims to lull the critical faculty to sleep and its pur- pose is to make the distant past live again exactly as once it did. Successful as it may be, such is not, however, the only way in which an alien world may be presented. We may be Pe a ee ee Two New Plays THE CAPTIVE 3y Edouard Bourdet Translated by Arthur Hornhlow “An unprecedented play, an absorbing play young woman struggling helplessly in the onormal, erotic passio ALEXANDER WooLtcort in the N.Y. Wo “Bourdet has of compassion and dramatic etfect JOHN ANDERSON in the N.Y THE WITCH By John Masefield Adapted from the Norwegian of H. Wier wrought a play of gigantic candor, and, a ve all, of prop iT Evening Post Jenssen “The author has devoted himself as lovingly to nat folklore for dramatic purposes as Ansky of “The Dyb did. Something of the same fervor and complete plicity is in both plays. A worthy contribution to th drama of all nations.” GILBERT GABRIEL in the N. Y. Sun Publishers BRENTAN)D’S New Vork “Belongs to all time’’ FORTY IMMORTALS by BENJAMIN DeCASSERES The Story of the World’s Great Civilizers ‘Forty Immortals’ 1, erty Immortal’ | Anatole France est books of criti- cism that I know. I ; 7 ; have read nothing in Friedrich Nietzsche criticism which is Invigorating, das as condensed, as Gabriele D’Annunzio tling.”"—-The Book- “Unhackneyed, bril- liant.’’ m Hs Mencken. won't ‘Forty Immor- tals’ DeCasseres comes nearer to achieving the pur- pose of constructive criticism than any- body else we can re lyrical, as fulgurant, men as intuitional. From ’ the background of | Percy B. Shelley ‘Tee call an imposing erudi- athens » anh ead tion there leap from ° ay ove ~~ vou each page lightning Walt Whitman ume.”’—Kenelm Dig- flashes which illumi- by nate a complete 7 pate © gucci Janes B. Cobel sal complete human ile soul, where they are | William Shakespeare seen for an instant as one could not see them in a year,| Gustave Flaubert pe cae - A = time of study. is book is not criti- Thomas Hardy cism; it is crea- I] to mind.””"—New tion.” — Maurice Eda S It ca > mind. ‘ gar altus York Timea. $3.50 AT ALL BOOKSTORES Maeterlinck. 371 Pages. SEVEN -ARTS PUBLISHING COMPANY 160 Fifth Avenue, New York When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation

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624 The Nation [Vol. 128, No. 326 asked instead to go back with our eyes open, to judge events as we should judge them here and now, to react with our waking souls to other creeds and other deeds. Then we do not, as we did before, live the lives of those we watch and, starting from their premises, reach their conclusions; we stand over them instead. Viewed thus from a different angle events take on different meanings, so that the performance of a duty becomes, perhaps, a folly and justice mere cruelty. Judgment, not sympathy, is called into play and our experience is not wholly, at least, poetic, but in part critical as well. Such is the method employed in the somber tragedy which John Masefield took from the Norwegian of Wiers-Jenssen and called “The Witch” (Greenwich Village Theater). The scene is sixteenth-century Norway and the subject witchcraft, not witchcraft as it appeared to those who lived in the days when it flourished and when burnings seemed as inevitable as executions scem teday but witchcraft as we in retrospect see it. To those who played their parts in the ghastly tragedies enacted throughout the Western world it appeared as a terrible emergency, a visible eruption of hell, and upon their premises a moving play could be written; but Wiers-Jenssen has chosen to give us instead the drama of witchcraft as we see it, the tragedy, that is to say, of a delusion so cunningly calculated to play into the hand of all human weakness—superstition, fear, malice, and insanity—and to unite them into one frightful weapon of evil as to be worthy of any devil the human imag- ination has ever conceived. And the result is that while “The Dybbuk” made us almost regret our rationality, “The Witch” holds us shuddering over an abyss which, thank God, no longer yawns for us. In the beginning the author prepares us for the full sig- nificance of what is to come by striking terror to the heart with a ghastly scene in which an old woman (unforgettably played by Maria Ouspenskaya) is dragged away to the stake; then, in a series of vividly imagined scenes, he shows how the net, which she herself helps to weave, closes round the body of an unfortunate girl and destines her too for the stake. The sexually starved wife of an old man and the daughter of a dead woman upon whom the suspicion of witchcraft had fallen, she herself at moments mistakes her incipient hysteria for demonic possession, and so when her husband dies sud- denly she is half convinced that her wishing killed him. The dead man’s mother, seizing, without quite knowing what she does, this pretext to indulge in a long-nourished hate, denounces her and she, stricken with terror, faints under a test. Then her lover, overcome with fear and unconsciously glad of an opportunity to shift the burden of his guilt and to blame his fall upon supernatural powers, deserts her at the last moment and her fate is sealed. One by one, morbid nerves, then malice, and then fear have played their parts, and thanks to them a whole people, strengthened anew in their delusion, will harden their hearts in the name of righteousness and rejoice at the spectacle when fire wraps itself around shrinking flesh. Montague Summers, whose researches into the drama and se recent fanatic book upon the subject of witchcraft both » him a certain right to speak, calls “The Witch” “probably inest piece of work dealing in domestic fashion with the warlock and sorceress that has been seen on the English stage since the reign of wise King James,” and in spite of the fact thet its last two acts never reach the high level of the first two and that there are moments when it loses itself in too extended treatment of the love of the witch and her paramour, I think that he is right. Here are genuine pity and genuine terror in which both the imagination and the intellect are involved. The production is generally excellent and two performances besides that of Maria Ouspenskaya demand especial mention— the restrained intelligent performance of Alice Brady as the witch and the burning intensity of James C. Malaidy’s playing in the role of a fanatical priest. JOSEPH Woop KRUTCH | on THEATER ——The Neighborhood Playhouse,“ o7n2¢ Street. Y Evenings (Except Monday), Matinee Saturday The Hindu Classic THE LITTLE CLAY CART ———— Theatre, 48th St., West of Broadway. Evenings 8: Matinees Wednesday and Saturday at 2:30 THEODORE DREISER’S A N AMERICAN TRAGED “A PLAY WHICH IS BOUND = WRENCH A MILLION HEARTs. —Jou DRAMATIZED BY PATRICK KEARNEY. Longacre LIMITED ENGAGEMENT THEATRE PRODUCTION EUGENE O’NEILL’S “BEYOND THE HORIZON” Mansfield Theatre 47th St., West of B’way Eves. 8:30. Chickering 5852 Mats. Wed. & Sat. 2:30. ACTORS’ YIDDISH ART THEATRE 12th St. and 2nd Ave. Stuy. 7195 MAURICE SCHWARTZ PRODUCTION OF ABRAHAM GOLDFADEN'’S ‘‘The Tenth Commandment” Matinees Saturday and Sunday 2: Evenings 8.30 CIVIC REPERTORY THEATRE 20% W, i si. EVA Le GALLIENNE Thursday, December 2, “Three Sisters.” Friday, December 3, “‘La Locandiera.”’ Saturday Matinee, December 4, ‘‘La Locandiera.”’ Saturday Evening, December 4, “Master Builder.” Monday, December 6, “La Locandiera.” Tuesday, December 7, “Three Sisters.”’ Wednesday Matinee, December 8, “La Lacondiera.” Evenings & Saturday Matinees, 50c to $1.50. Wednesday Matinees, 35c- THEATRE GUILD PRODUCTIONS SIDNEY HOWARD'S COMEDY Ned McCobb’s Daughter JOHN GOLDEN Sian 7k BERNARD SHAW’S PYGMALION “The most refreshing intellectual shower bath on Broadway, with the tingling drops of Shaw’s wit to tickle the spine.” Frank Vreeland, Telegram. GUILD THEATR 52nd St., W. of B’way. Evs. 8:30. Matinees THURS. and SAT., 2:30 SECOND DANCE PROGRAM THIS SEASON THis SUNDAY EVENING, DECEMBER 5TH AT 8:30 P. M. ANGNA ENTERS Premiere of Five Compositions in Dance Form: (Der Rosenkavalier; Odalisque; Man, His Origin Is Dust; Colombine; and Bar Maid. Also Sapphic; Feline; Habanera; Dance of Death ; Promenade; Second Empire; Bourree; Cardinal; Moyen Age; and Colombine.) 7 238 W. 44th St. LITTLE THEATRE Lackawanna 6620 Seats now on sale: $2.20, $1.65, $1.10. When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation

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