The Outlook 1915-03-24
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The Outlook MARCH 24, 1915 LYMAN ABBOTT, Editor-in-Chief HAMILTON W. MABIE, Aésociate Editor R. D. TOWNSEND, Managing Editor THE PRESIDENT AND THE PUBLIC LANDS When President Roosevelt withdrew from entry public lands in order to preserve to the public the wealth that those lands contained, there was an outcry against his action. It was declared that he was doing something which the Executive had no right to do, that he was acting unconstitutionally, and that he had no authority to do anything except what the law expressly required that the President should do. These withdrawals, however, stood, and as long as they remained unmodi- fied no private persons obtained possession of land within the area withdrawn. Later, President Taft, facing the same sit- uation, withdrew a large area of oil lands, and there was protest. Men who discovered oil on those withdrawn lands attempted to file claims and were stopped by the Government. The suit finally reached the United States Supreme Court. In all this controversy The Outlook has taken. pains to point out the fact that the Executive authority is derived directly from the Constitution and is not the gift of Con- gress ; that the Executive is a trustee, account- able not altogether to Congress but to the people ; and that he is under obligation, not merely to do what the law directs, but to do everything that it is in the interest of the people for him to do that is not expressly forbidden by law. It is wholly gratifying to find now that the action of President Roosevelt and President Taft in these withdrawals is sustained by the United States Supreme Court in this oil land case. Inits opinion, delivered a month ago by Mr. Justice Lamar, but just now issued in print, the Court points out that, although the Constitution places the legislative power over the public domain in Congress, yet the President, ‘“‘ as agent,”’ is ‘“‘in charge of the public domain,” and that the President’s action in withdrawing public lands from entry is justified by the fact that, since it was not forbidden by Congress, by its silence Con- gress has acquiesced in those withdrawals. This recognition by the United States Su- preme Court of the Executive authority with reference to the public domain and of the rule that the President can: do what is for the public interest, provided he is not forbidden, is of historic importance. This decision will render a lasting benefit upon the Nation if it reduces the opposition to the exercise of the Executive power in the public interest, and if it shall serve to strengthen in the future any man who as President may be tempted to view with timidity the powers which for the public good the Constitution has given him. THE NEED OF A BUDGET Last week an interesting document was made public—an issue of the “ Congres- sional Record” containing a discussion of the Government’s financial situation by Rep- resentative John J. Fitzgerald, of New York, Democratic Chairman of the House Com- mittee on Appropriations, and Representa- tive Frederick H. Gillett, of Massachusetts, senior Republican member of that Committee. Mr. Fitzgerald says that, should the excess of ordinary disbursements over ordinary re- ceipts continue, at no higher rate than five million dollars a month for the remaining four months of the present fiscal year, the deficit would be no less than $103,000,000. Including Panama Canal expenditures, it would be about $133,000,000. We are not surprised, therefore, at Chairman Fitzgerald’s assertion that the Federal Government’s finances must be readjusted. This is also Mr. Gillett’s opinion. He declared that the Secretary of the Treasury’s estimates of the appropriations were both mis- leading, larger than those ever submitted by any Republican Administration, and $13,000,000 larger than the record of last year. Both Mr. Fitzgerald and Mr. Gillett agree 655-657
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658 that something should be done to reform the methods of appropriating Government money. Mr. Fitzgerald advocates, we are glad to say, an abandonment of the present system of permitting no less that eight com- mittees of the House to frame the annual appropriation bills. He believes in concen- tration of this work. We are interested in reading, therefore, a subsequently published despatch from Washington to the effect that a plan is shortly to be considered by Presi- dent Wilson with various representatives from the House, looking towards a budget system of estimates, appropriations, and expendi- tures. The good work in this direction done during other Administrations should not be allowed to lapse. First, as recommended by Secretary Cortelyou in the Roosevelt Ad- ministration and by Secretary MacVeagh in the Taft Administration, upon the receipt of the regular annual estimates of the appro- priations needed for the Government’s various branches, the Secretary of the Treasury should prepare a budget, estimating as nearly as may be the Government’s expected rev- enue; and, if the estimates for appropria- tions exceed that revenue, should advise how they can be reduced so as to bring them within the revenue. Second, there should be a concentration of the consideration of the budget by the eight House Commit- tees. THE COUNSELOR FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE The recent notes from the Department of State to the English, French, and German Governments reveal a practiced hand. Less than a year ago, when Mr. Robert Lansing (whose portrait appears on another page) was named as counsel for the Department, it was anticipated that he would confine his services to an exposition of the purely legal aspects of the various problems that might arise. In the various notcs and protests recently put forth by the Department, how- ever, we have had a direct, individual, expert expression of opinion. Mr. Lansing is a son-in-law of the Hon. John W. Foster, one of our most eminent diplomats and Secretary of State under President Harrison, 1892-3. Mr. Lansing’s first appointment was that of associate coun- sel for our Government in the Bering Sea Fur Arbitration. Four years later he became counsel for the United States in the Bering Sea Claims Commission, and six years later THE OUTLOOK 24 March was solicitor for the United States in the Alaskan Boundary Tribunal. Between the times when Mr. Lansing was employed by the Government in international arbitrations he practiced law at his home in Watertown, New York, but since 1908 he has been almost constantly in the employ of the Government. In 1909 and 1910 he was counsel for the North Atlantic Coast Fish- eries Arbitration at The Hague. In 1911 he was technical delegate at a Conference held in Washington with Canadian delegates for the practical application of the fisheries award, and later was technical delegate at the Fur Seal Conference, held in the same city by the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and Japan. In 1912 Secretary Knox named him as counsel before the American and British Claims Arbitration; and in 1913 President Taft commissioned, him as agent for our Government. Mr. Lansing was one of the organizers of the American Society of International Law in 1906, and continues an associate editor of the “‘ American Journal of International Law.” He has published articles on international sub- jects, and also, in collaboration with Mr. Gary Jones, a book on “ Government: Its Origin, Growth, and Form in the United States.” While every one assumes that Mr. Lan- sing’s appointment is distinctly non-political and for merit only, it is nevertheless interest- ing to know that he has always been a Democrat, and has, when at home during a political campaign, taken as active a part in politics as would be indicated by his service as Chairman of the Democratic County Com- mittee of Jefferson County, New York. WORSE AND WORSE IN MEXICO! When Carranza’s forces attempted a feeble blockade of the port of Progreso in Yucatan by one little gunboat, and thereby threatened to interfere with the exportation to United States from Mexico of sisal fiber, said to be important in certain American industries, our Government remonstrated instantly and for- cibly. According to press reports, Carranza was warned that any attempt to use force to interfere with this commerce ‘‘ would be met by the guns of the United States vessels.” This is strong language, and it met with an immediate result. The so-called blockade was stopped and, so far as this matter goes, American dollars once more are safe. Contrast this with the gentle and almost
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1915 THE apologetic tone of the remonstrance sent to Mexico by our Government on the occasion of the murder the other day of an American citizen, John B. MacManus. Mr. MacManus was an active, intelligent, and public-spirited man, who had done what he could to allevi- ate the present wretched conditions of the poor in the Mexican capital. When Zapata first occupied Mexico City not long ago, Mr. MacManus defended his home against an attack by some of Zapata’s guerrilla followers. On Zapata’s return, quite lately, after the evac- uation of the capital by General Obregon, Mr. MacManus was murdered at his home by assassins who resented his. former resistance. Our exceedingly mildly worded protest has met with vague assurances from Zapata and Villa that the matter will be looked into; and our Administration last week declared that it has every hope that reparation and punish- ment will be meted out. Let us all hope so ; but with the recollection of what has hap- pened—or, rather, what has not happened —when remonstrances have been made as to former outrages on American persons and property in Mexico, let us hope also that the matter wiil not in any case pass into oblivion without such action as will make it clear that our Government will not be less moved by injury to life‘than by injury to business. Meanwhile press despatches of March 17 state that ‘‘ Zapata’s troops are looting Mex- ico City, where a reign of terror prevails even worse than when General Obregon was in charge ;” that efforts are being made by Sec- retary Bryan (apparently without much suc- cess) to get American citizens out of the capital to Vera Cruz, which is now shut off from Mexico City; that General Villa has executed for treason General Almanza and his entire staff—Almanza is said to have deserted first Villa for Gutierrez (one of the numerous temporary, alleged Provisional Presidents), and then again Gutierrez for Carranza; that Villa is preparing a strong attack on Tampico; that “ snipers ” at Vera Cruz have fired on sailors of the United States battle-ship Delaware, but without re- sulting injury; and that Roque Garza has again been named Provisional President and has proclaimed martial law in Mexico City. It cannot be said, in view of this brief review of recent Mexican news, that the prospects of peace, or those of good govern- ment, are improving in Mexico. On the contrary, the necessity is increasing every WEEK 659 hour for strong representations which will say plainly, and mean positively, that the United States has reached the end of its indifference to American interests and the world’s interests in Mexico. JAPAN AND INTERNATIONAL MANNERS Readers of The Outlook have probably not forgotten Miss Scidmore’s striking article on the attitude of Japan towards her enemies. Other information since received serves to confirm Miss Scidmore’s statements. When Japansent her ultimatum to Germany, we learn, Baron Kato, Minister of Foreign Affairs, publicly invited German merchants in Japan to remain in that country and carry on their business as before, and asked individual Japanese to avoid any expression of hostility to individual Germans. Mr. Osaki, the Min- ister of Justice, and one of the leaders of the Radical party, declared that German residents in Japan might rely on full pro- tection of their persons and property. Count Okuma, the Prime Minister, reinforced this message by a message to the provincial governors in which he said that it was the purpose of the Government to afford every possible protection to German subjects, and enjoined all Japanese to act “‘ with good grace and hospitality towards German subjects resi- dent in Japan.” The result has been that Germans living in Japan are carrying on their business as usual. The only German who has been interfered with was the editor of an evening newspaper which published incendiary and inflammatory articles. All commercial busi- ness in which Germans are interested goes on precisely as it did in time of peace. Germans in Government employ, either as teachers or otherwise, are treated precisely as their colleagues are treated. A letter from Matsuyama, where many German prisoners have been lodged, reports that many of them have been lodged in temples; that Christ- mas celebrations were arranged for them, Christmas trees brought in from the woods and carried by the railways without charge, and Christmas greetings in various forms given to each individual German soldier. IS THE UNITED STATES A MUSICAL COUNTRY ? It is often said by those who are hopeless about the zesthetic taste of the American people that the United States is not a musical
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660 country. Of course the whole question rests upon the correct definition of ‘a musical country.” A genuine love of beauty and a profound appreciation of art cannot be meas- ured by statistics of production and consump- tion. But it is certainly a matter of signifi- cance that no other country in the world manu- factures so many musical instruments as the United States. Both the production and consumption of pianos, organs, piano-players, band instruments, and all forms of mechanical producers of music, we are glad to say, are prodigious. The critics, however, say that it is not the performance of music, but the creation of music, which makes a country musical. In reply to this, it may be said that the interest in musical composition is growing steadily in the United States. We have good reason for such a statement. Two articles on Ameri- can music, one by Mr. Arthur Whiting and one by Mr. Daniel Gregory Mason, were re- cently published in The Outlook. It might naturally have been expected that they would appeal wholly to the professional musician or to the accomplished amateur. As a matter of fact, they seem to have aroused wide and unusual interest. Violent protests on the part of readers are generally a good journalistic barometer, and we have at least one violent protest from a musician who attacks both Mr. Whiting and Mr. Mason because they are apostles of Brahms. er contra, Mr. Richard Aldrich, one of the most accomplished critics of this country, devotes practically his entire weekly article in the New York “ Times ” of Sun- day, March 14, to a discussion of Mr. Whit- ing’s and Mr. Mason’s papers in these pages. Mr. Aldrich speaks of them as “two able and courageous articles by American musi- cians.” Both Mr. Whiting and Mr. Mason insist that high ideals and careful, patient, even grinding technical training are necessary to the production of great and lasting music. The same thing is, of course, true of litera- ture. The “best sellers” are not often the products of the best writers. But even the best sellers are indicative of an appetite for literature. ** Popular music”’ is not to be despised. Folk songs, which are coming into their own again, are pre-eminently popular music. Cer- tainly the United States is a musical country on the side of consumption, and our belief is that consumption must come before pro- duction. THE OUTLOOK A VERSATILE BRITISH ARTIST , If one portrait more than another by the late George Frederick Watts may be consid- ered his masterpiece, it may well be that of Walter Crane. Once seen, the features re- vealed by this canvas cannot be forgotten. While the face is one of infinite refinement and charm, the power of the portrait lies in what one. might call its atmosphere—the man depicted seems breathing. Mr. Crane has just died, in his seventieth year. He gave early expression to artistic impressions, and when thirteen years old was apprenticed to William James Linton, the well-known wood-engraver, whose favor had already been gained by the boy’s colored illustrations of ‘Tennyson’s “ Lady of Shalott.” As a wood-engraver young Crane had abun- dant chance to study the work of contem- porary artists which passed through his hands. But a more important influence to him came in his study of Japanese color-prints. He imitated some of their methods in a series of nursery rhyme, three-color books ; their influ- ence may also be seen in his tiles, stained glass, pottery, wall-paper, and textile designs. The influence of Japanese art was then shown more markedly by subsequent series of books; one of them, “A Romance of the Three R’s,” provided a regular course of instruction in art for the nursery. Then came “ The First of May,” and then “ Household Stories from Grimm”? (the “ Goose Girl” illustrations from this book, reproduced in the tapestry by William Morris, are now in the South Ken- sington Museum). There followed “ Flora’s Feast,” Hawthorne’s ‘‘ Wonder Book,” Mar- garet Deland’s “Old Garden,” and “ The Glittering Plain.” In purely decorative im- portance Crane’s finest illustration is doubt- less found in Spenser’s “ Faerie Queene ” and the various Shakespeare plays. Future interest in Walter Crane, however, is not unlikely to be more attached to his larger works and easel pictures, especially his “ Fate of Persephone” in the National Gal- lery at London, and “ The Renaissance of Venus ” in the Tate Gallery there, and his portrait of himself in the Ufizzi Gallery at Florence. The mention of William Morris recalls the association of both men with the Socialist movement in the early eighties. We are accustomed to think of Morris as the one Englishman who in that movement brought art into the daily life of all classes. But
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1915 THE Crane doubtless did quite as much. Not only did he devote much attention to the more practical domains of house decoration and of designs for wall-papers and textile stuffs, he also used his art directly to advance the cause of Socialism, for he long provided the weekly cartoons for those Socialist papers, “ The Commonweal ” and “ Justice.” Thus there passes a real contributor to British art and life. A CORRECTION In an editorial statement relating to bills before the last Congress which, if passed, would give the Postmaster-General power to exclude from the mails any periodical which he might decide to be libelous as to church organizations, we reported the statement of a witness before the Congressional committee which was considering these bills, relating to the trial of Cardinal Newman for alleged libel against Father Achilli. The witness, Dr. Williams, stated that Newman was convicted of the libel and was fined £12,000. A cor- respondent calls our attention to the fact that this is a mistake. The facts as stated in Dr. Wilfrid Ward’s “ Life of Cardinal Newman ” and in the “ Encyclopedia Bri- tannica” are that he was fined £100, but that his expense for the trial was something like £14,000. Of course the question of the amount of the fine does not at all affect the principle involved. LIBELING A CHURCH To the statement in The Outlook that, if the Roman Catholic Church is libeled, its remedy is a prosecution of the libeler, the Paducah “ Evening Sun”’ replies as follows : The law holds that attacks upon such bodies as secret societies and churches do not make libelants amenable to prosecution under the libel laws except as their victims’ material re- sources are impaired. It maintains that in the arraignment of corporations, whether the ar- raignment be just or unjust, no damages can be secured, no punishment meted out, unless proof of damage to material resources is shown or future material prospects injured. If this is the law, the remedy is not a Federal act authorizing the Postmaster to refuse the mails to any publication which he regards as libelous. It is such a change in the libel law as will render publications liable to criminal prosecution for libels against or- ganizations, ecclesiastical or secular. There is no reason why societies and churches WEEK 661 should not be furnished the protection which is furnished to individuals. DARING THAT LEADS TO DEATH That Lincoln Beachey’s death in San Fran- cisco Bay on Sunday of last week may put ‘‘ an end to dare-devil flying,’”’ as Mr. Howard Huntington, of the American Aero Club, ex- presses it, is a wish that will be universally echoed. If this wish is to come true, how- ever, it must be through public condemna- tion of such foolhardy exhibitions ; at present sensation-loving mobs throng exhibitions which advertise ‘marvelous aerial feats,”’ “defiance of physical laws,’’ and “ dips to death ’’—the last the very phrase used to describe Beachey’s fatal attempt. The man- agers who thus plan to attract crowds and the people whose thrills are accentuated by the knowledge that such desperately danger- ous feats have ended in the death of many aviators are not without guilt. Beachey had once retired from his perilous profession, partly at least because he was shocked at the deaths of two or more young aviators who had met disaster in emulating his feats; but the lure of excitement and perhaps that of “easy money” were too strong for him. On the first flight after his return his aeroplane swept two women from a roof, killing one and injuring the other. On his last and fatal flight he was in a new monoplane, a machine far more dangerous than the biplane which he commonly used. Some fifty thousand people witnessed Beachey’s death ; one does not envy their feelings as they realized that this death had been incurred in an attempt to win their applause by trying to skirt the very edges of death and yet escape. No exhibition aviator except the Frenchman Pégoud ever showed such audacity and start- ling ingenuity as Beachey—* perpendicular dives,” “ loops,”’ “‘ corkscrews,”’ and “ upside downs ”’ were his familiar tricks. Aviation with proper machines and under scientific control is none too safe, yet it is constantly becoming safer; exhibition “ stunts ’”’ which for pay or fame all but defy nature are in the end suicidal, and to encour- age and enjoy them is morally, if not legally, criminal. A GREAT NEWSPAPER “ Yellow journalism ” is an American blight that has excited contempt on the part of
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662 foreign critics and a mixture of disgust and despair on the part of judicious journalists in this country. ‘The journalist is born with a love of printing ink and the printing-press running in his veins. The best type of jour- nalist has standards of his art just as truly as the architect and the painter have of theirs. The painter who believes in his art despises and opposes his colleague who prostitutes pigment and brush and canvas to purely commercial ends. Sometimes these com- mercial painters seem to succeed. In the long run, however, they fail. Joseph Pulitzer and William R. Hearst have been the great apostles of yellow journalism in this country. They have achieved a kind of success in so far as notoriety and dollars may be taken as the measures of success. But their malign influ- ence has been felt in almost every town and city of the United States, and the newspapers which twenty-five or thirty years ago relied upon accuracy, intelligence, and good taste to attract and hold their readers now too often rely upon sensations, screaming type, and news articles with a “ punch” in them. The newspaper man who entertains these gloomy but not wholly unjustifiable impres- sions of American journalism is_ greatly cheered when he comes to consider the life- work of such a man as Samuel Bowles, editor and proprietor of the Springfield “Republican,” who died in Springfield, Massachusetts, on March 14. Mr. Bowles was the third of his name to be connected with the paper, his grandfather having established the business nearly one hundred years ago, although it was the second Samuel Bowles who made the Springfield ‘‘ Republican ” as we know it to-day. ‘The Springfield ‘“ Republican ” is a great local newspaper, giving the local news of human interest without descending to ludicrous and futile trivialities; it is a great National newspaper containing both National and foreign news in a form as good as, and sometimes even vetter than, the presentation of such news in the so-called great metropolitan dailies ; it is permeated with intelligence and good taste without being artificially ‘“ high- brow;’’ and, not less important to know, it has been a steady and profitable com- mercial enterprise. The Springfield ‘“ Re- publican ” and the Bowles family have been to New England what the London “Times ” and the Walters family have been to old England. Every American journalist is proud THE OUTLOOK 24 March of the-record of the ‘“‘ Republican ” and hopes that the death of Mr. Bowles will not weaken its standards, decrease its intelligence and high character, or lessen its well-merited financial success. THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AND PUBLIC HEALTH It begins to appear that we are headed towards the Chinese system of paying our doctors only during the continuance of health. At least our civic communities are more and more devoting their energies and their funds towards the work of keeping their citizens well rather than in the direction of curing them after they are sick. A recognition of this tendency was given several years ago when the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of ‘Technology united in the establishment of a course leading to the degree of Doctor of Public Health. The holder of this degree must be a graduate physician who, in the course of his studies, has obtained a thorough knowledge of sani- tary engineering. The hospital facilities of Boston, the social problems available for study in this great seaport, the possibilities for research into the etiology of the obscure diseases that occur at such a focus of trade, have all gone to make a pronounced success of this work in Massachusetts. The University of California has now undertaken the same work upon the Pacific coast. -Like Harvard-in the East, the Uni- versity of California has always laid great emphasis upon the value of cultural studies. Like Harvard, too, it sees these studies chiefly in relation to the public welfare. It is natural, therefore, that the University of California should become a leader in organiz- ing the training of servants of the public health. The organization of this new school was in a very large measure due to the in- spiration of the late Dr. George Frederick Reinhardt, an intense believer in preventive medicine, and one whose services to his uni- versity will not soon be forgotten. The graduate course in public health of the University of California will be given in part in San Francisco in the Medical School and in part in Berkeley. As in Boston, hospital facilities and opportunities for co-operation with Governmental agencies are readily avail- able. Opportunities for factory inspection, studies in the prevention and emergency treatment of industrial accidents, in the
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_-- Sa oo aa at iO a 1915 THE conduct of milk depots and day nurseries, practice in making sanitary surveys, the medical problems confronting the officers of quarantine and immigration stations, the investigation of plague problems—first-hand information on all these important matters may be had at or near the California School of Public Health. The extension of effort by the University of California in this new direction is very deserving of success. A NOTABLE SOCIAL SURVEY Since a few social engineers under the auspices of the Charity Organization Society of New York made, some years ago, the epoch-marking Pittsburgh Survey some cities have done the like. Churches here and there have followed this lead on a smaller scale. Eminent among such surveys is that which has been ‘published by old Trinity in New York concerning its work last year in that line. This is of Nation-wide importance, especially for industrial centers and cities with slum distriets. Trinity Church, facing the head of Wall Street, stands in a residential district in which ‘Trinity Corporation neither owns nor controls any property. This contains 144 tenements and a population of 6,401 souls. Here some of the worst conditions in the city exist: rooms overcrowded with lodgers and boarders herded regardless of sex ; filthy toilets and sinks for promiscuous use; tuber- culosis nests—within one square block sixty- three cases—and a high’rate of infant mor- tality. Practically the entire population of this district is of foreign descent, and almost two- thirds are foreign-born. A large majority of its families consists of unskilled laborers with low wages. and casual employment. Rents are high for the accommodations provided. In 818 families selected at random—about half of the total number in the district—sixty- three per cent of mothers known to its “health center”? have to supplement the family income by outside work. Cheap sa- loons abound, many of them vile dives, a menace to the whole city. Such is the district between Broadway, Liberty Street, and the water-side, whose ill conditions and their feasible remedies are set forth in this seventy-page pamphlet, copiously illustrated by diagrams and photo- graphs. ‘The findings of the survey, under- WEEK 663 taken under expert guidance by the social welfare section of Trinity Church Men’s Com- mittee, and reported in full detail, classified as Housing, Immigration, Recreation, Indus- trial Conditions, Child Welfare, Delinquency, Health, are presented both descriptively and in tabulated statistical form. Responsibility for coping with the evils exhibited is definitely apportioned between voluntary enterprise and public authorities. This masterly speci- men of social engineering concludes with the ‘‘ social histories of 818 families ” complete in tabulated form. It has set the standard for such work by any church disposed to attempt it. . Trinity Church’s Committee had the initial advantage of a delimited field and an undi- vided responsibility for working it. Wherever a single church or a group of churches is intent on constructive philanthropy in needy neighborhoods, this is the prime essential. Those interested in the making of social sur- veys will find many valuable suggestions at hand in this report to Trinity Church. “SING SING MUST GO" Sing Sing Prison is a disgrace to the State of New York. It must be replaced by some- thing more modern, decent, humane. A competent architect, with the assistance of Dr. O. F. Lewis, General Secretary of the Prison Association of New York, has made estimates for the construction of a modern prison farm. The estimated cost is $1,000 per inmate, or approximately $1,500,000 for 1,500 inmates. The alternative is to patch up the present prison. The only possible ground upon which the advocates of the patching up of Sing Sing base their argument is economy; but even that is swept from under their feet, since, unless the work should be done more cheaply than such work has ever been done before, the new cell block they pro- pose would cost approximately as much as a modern prison farm, namely, $1,000 per inmate. Since the ways of politicians are past finding out, it is scarcely worth while to search for the reasons that impelled the commission appointed by the New York Legislature last year for the investigation of State institutions to recommend the _per- petuation of archaic conditions at Sing Sing. Against this makeshift is the plan of the
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664 Commission on Prison Reform, of which Thomas Mott Osborne is chairman, that is approved by State Superintendent of Prisons John B. Riley ; the Prison Association ; Dr. E. Stagg Whitin, of the National Committee on Prison Labor ; Miss Anne Morgan, Mrs. Au- gust Belmont, Mrs. Francis McNeil Bacon, Jr., Miss Maude Wetmore, and Miss Emily Cross, of the Woman’s Department of the National Civic Federation and members of the Joint Committee on Prison Reform; Richard M. Hurd, of the Lawyers Mortgage Company of New York; Professor George W. Kirch- wey, of Columbia University; and by every other intelligent student of modern peno- logical science .in the State—for the con- struction by prison labor on an ample area of farm and forest land, within one hundred miles of New York, with as inexpensive buildings as possible on the cottage plan, of a prison where both industrial and agricultural occu- pations may be taught, with as great a variety of outdoor work as possible. THE PRISON FARM The practicability of the prison farm has been demonstrated by the success of the ex- periment at Great Meadow, in Washington County. During the three and a half years of his wardenship there, William J. Homer, who introduced the honor system in the State, has had under his charge more than two thousand prisoners. Six hundred are now on the farm. More than fourteen hundred have been paroled, of whom fewer than forty have been returned to prisons. The number of escapes and attempts to escape has been less than one-half of one per cent—11 out of a total of 2,095 prisoners, to be exact. Several hundred former prisoners of Great Meadow are working on farms in the neigh- borhood, for there is no prejudice among the farmers of Washington County against ex- convicts. Three thousand and two of the 4,852 in- mates of all the prisons in the State, accord- ing to the last report of Prison Superin- tendent Riley, were committed between the ages of sixteen and thirty years, and 1,021 between the ages of thirty and forty, making a total of 4,023—an enormous percentage of the whole number—at ages at which new vocations may readily be learned. The experience of penologists is that agri- culture is one of the most useful occupations to be taught boys and men who. may have been led into crime in the cities, where the same THE OUTLOOK 24 March temptations to which they succumbed before await them on leaving prison. One of the objects that the Commission on Prison Re- form is working for is the acquisition of land in the vicinity of Auburn, and of all the other prisons and reformatories in the State, where the inmates may be instructed in farming. Aside from the prison farm of eleven hun- dred acres at Great Meadow, New York has already purchased eight hundred acres _of land for the State Industrial Farm Colony, and is planning a State reformatory for misdemeanants on a farm, while the city of New York has purchased six hundred acres for the City Reformatory for Misde- meanants, and eight hundred acres on which the’ home for inebriates committed from the city will be situated. Throughout the United States the idea of outdoor work for inmates _of prisons is spreading. Massachusetts has a State farm of several hundred acres for tramps and vagrants, and is planning a. prison farm to replace the present State institution at Charlestown. New Jersey has purchased a thousand acres of land on which a struc- ture will be erected to replace the State Prison at Trenton. Pennsylvania has ac- quired five thousand acres for a central prison to replace her two State institutions, the Eastern Penitentiary and the Western Penitentiary. ‘The new House of Correction for the District of Columbia is on a thousand- acre farm at Occoquan, Virginia. Ohio has voted to abandon the State Prison at Colum- bus, and has appointed a commission to secure a site for a farm prison in its place. The State Prison Board of Indiana is plan- ning to lease between five hundred and one thousand acres of land adjoining the present prison at Michigan City, with a view to aban- doning that structure within a few years for a farm reformatory. Minnesota already has a prison farm, and Illinois is about to build a State prison on wide acreage. In Colo- rado, Oregon, and Washington hundreds of prisoners from State institutions are working on road camps. Other Western States are also discussing the prison farm movement, while in most of the Southern States prison- ers are working on contract labor, either in mines or on the roads or plantations. In- deed, throughout the country wherever new prisons are being considered facilities for out- door work by the inmates are a primary con- sideration. That the State of New York, in the van of
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1915 prison reform, should now take a retrograde step is not to be thought of. ‘Sing Sing must go.”’ A TIME FOR CALMNESS Two recent events have brought the Euro- ' pean war very near to America. One is the sinking of the American four-masted bark William P. Frye by the German auxiliary cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich. The other is the issuance of orders-in-council declaring to the world that Great Britain and her allies will stop all vessels, including neutral vessels, from carrying goods to and from German ports, or goods of German origin or destina- tion. Though in these two events American interests suffer, there is no warrant for indig- nation or excitement. Indignation at injustice to others is a virtue; but that is an ignoble trait which enables a man to remain unmoved at wrong done to others, and then rouses him to indig- nation when wrong is directed against him- self. This is equally true of a nation. There is a time for indignation ; there is a time for calmness and coolness. When Belgium was invaded, when unfortified towns were bom- barded, when deadly mines were sown in the open sea, when peaceful merchant vessels were torpedoed without warning—that was a time for indignation. Now, when an Ameri- can merchant vessel has been seized and, with due regard for passengers and crew, has been sent to the bottom by a German war-ship ; now, when American trade on the high seas is hampered and restricted by the British orders-in-council—this is a time for calmness. Happily, the American people, who have been outraged and indignant at the inhumanities of this present war, are evidently keeping their heads. It is the business of the American Government to represent them. It did not succeed very well in representing their indignation ; it is to be hoped that it now will represent their calmness. Neither by the sinking of the William P. Frye nor by the issuance of the orders-in- council is the life of a single American or a single non-combatant of a belligerent nation threatened, nor is a cent’s worth of property recklessly or criminally imperiled. Whether American rights are infringed in either case is a question that is subject to investigation and determination by an orderly and well- recognized process. In cases that concern A TIME FOR CALMNESS 665 individuals there is a clear distinction between criminal prosecution and civil suits. A simi- lar distinction may be made in cases that con- cern the relation between nations. Neither the sinking of the Frye nor the issuance of the orders-in-council calls for any action on the part of the United States that corresponds to criminal prosecution; the most that either calls for is action that would correspond to a civil suit. It is somewhat of a question whether in either instance the United States would have a strong case. Whatever ques- tion of international law may be involved consists not of a violation of international morality—such as is involved in the invasion of guaranteed neutral territory by a guarantor, or the sowing of mines in the open sea, or the reckless killing of non-combatants—but the stretching or misinterpretation of a rule. In the case of the Eitel Friedrich a neutral merchantman was sunk after due warning and with due provision for the safety of crew and ship’s papers. This is not a lawless thing to do under certain definite circum- stances. The whole question consists in whether those circumstances existed at the time. It is a well-recognized principle of international law that a belligerent war-vessel may stop and search any merchantman, and, if she finds on board contraband destined to the enemy and cannot with safety to herself or due regard for her warlike operations conduct the merchantman to port, she may, if she provides for the safety of all on board and for the preservation of the ship’s papers, destroy both cargo and vessel. In the case of the Prinz Eitel Friedrich the whole question is whether the cargo on board the William P. Frye was contraband destined to the enemy. The German captain decided that it was. It is embarrassing to Germany that in reaching this decision he followed a course of reason- ing which the German Government, without his knowledge and in its own interest, had repudiated. It is in this peculiar situation, involving a contradiction between the Ger- man Government’s announced policy and the action of this German captain, that the strength of the case of the United States lies. But it is a case that is almost wholly technical, a case in which the disputed points are points on which authorities on interna- tional law disagree, and it involves in not the remotest degree any question of international morality. Similarly in the case of the orders-in-coun- cil, no question of international morality is
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666 involved, but simply a question whether those orders, for which no exact precedent can be found, and which, therefore, are not covered by any written rule, constitute a justifiable appli- cation of old and recognized principles of international law to new and unprecedented conditions. In these orders issued by the British Privy Council in the name of the King there is no use of the word “ blockade ;”’ but the action which the Council announces _ that the British naval vessels will take is the sort of action that is taken in a blockade. In his “ Digest of International Law” Professor John Bassett Moore, whose authority on the subject is universally recognized, says: ‘* The investment of a place by sea and land with a view to its reduction is a mode of warfare which cannot reasonably be objected to, so long as war is recognized as an arbiter of national disputes.” ‘The blockade is one of the means of investing a country or parts .of acountry. In the old days it was made effective by the placing of war-vessels out- side of a port or the ports of the enemy’s country so that no neutral vessel could go in or out without passing within the range of the war-ships’ guns. Conditions of warfare have changed, and this particular way of invest- ing an enemy’s ports is hardly more practicable in the case of war between nations with large military and naval resources than de- pendence upon horses or camels or elephants forthe transportation of weapons of warfare on land would be. ‘The principle of the block- ade, however, remains. It consists in pre- venting all trade by sea between the nation blockaded and the rest of the world. It can be justified only if it is effective, because an ineffective blockade bears unequally upon neutral nations. But, if it is effective, the principle is not changed whether the war- ships which enforce it stand just outside the enemy’s territorial waters or range the seas. It has been somewhat of a question whether a belligerent is justified in stopping neutral vessels from taking goods destined to the enemy or originating from the enemy to and from neutral ports. This question involves what is called “the doctrine of continuous voyages.”’ Great Britain adopts this doctrine by declaring that she is going to undertake to stop such commerce with the enemy even though carried through neutral ports. Prece- dent for this doctrine is found in American practice. It is noteworthy that in its an- nouncement Great Britain assures to neutral nations relief from some of the hardships that THE OUTLOOK 24 March have to be endured in the case of an ordinary blockade. What the Allies have instituted might be called a long-distance blockade or marine siege with certain alleviations for neu- trals. There is no doubt that the rules of naval warfare, as they have been formulated from past practice, are not to be, and cannot be, lit- erally followed ; but it is difficult to see in what respect the principles on which those rules aré founded are by these orders-in-council disregarded. The questions involved in these orders-in-council are legal, not moral—ques- tions not of right and wrong, of humanity and inhumanity, but questions concerning the application of precedents and principles to unprecedented conditions. In view of these facts, the American Gov- ernment is justified, of course, in taking every precaution to see that American rights are protected; but there is no occasion for any such vigorous protest as would have been justified by the invasion of the principles of humanity. There is every reason why the questions at issue should be settled without excitement. WHAT ARE THEY FIGHTING FOR?P Most of the world’s controversies are due in whole or in part to misunderstandings. The Roman Catholics did not understand the Protestants, nor the Protestants the Roman Catholics ; the Cavaliers did not understand the Puritans, nor the Puritans the Cavaliers ; the men of the Southern States did not un- derstand the men of the Northern States, nor the Northerners the Southerners. It is one of the tragedies of this tragic war that the men in the trenches do not understand one an- other. The English believe that the Germans wish to take permanent possession of Bel- gium and get military control of the English Channel. And yet itis reported that an issue of a Munich paper has been suppressed be- cause it advocated the permanent occupation of Belgium. Was this suppression because the German Government has no such plan, or because it does not wish the plan prematurely disclosed ? We do not know. The Germans believe that the English and the French are jealous of Germany’s prosperity, have banded together to destroy her, and intend her dis- memberment. They are fighting for the life of the Fatherland. There has been no dec- laration by or on behalf of either of these Allies
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1915 to warrant this widespread German belief ; and yet if this belief were not widespread it is doubtful whether the military authorities would have the support of the German peo- ple which is now accorded to them. Can anything be done to correct these mis- understandings and so prepare the way for a peace founded on justice and good will? We think something can be done. The Allies have agreed together to make no peace which is not made by them in common. It is apparent that France and England have agreed to act together in what amounts to a blockade of Germany. Why cannot the Allies unite in a public and authoritative statement, not of the terms on which they would make peace, but of the terms on which they would be willing to cease hostilities for the purpose of peace negotia- _ tions ?. We should like to see such a state- ment issued with the joint authority of Eng- land, France, Belgium, Russia, Servia, Mon- tenegro, and Japan, which might read some- thing like this : We do not hate Germany. We are not jealous of her prosperity. We do not fear her commercial rivalry. We recognize the service she has rendered to the world in the past in literature, music, science, and indus- try." We have no wish to humiliate her. We do not seek her dismemberment. And we shall be glad at any time to enter into nego- tiations with her for the permanent peace of Europe provided, first, the following condi- tions are complied with : (1) Her Chancellor declared at the outset of the war that Germany was violating inter- national law and doing an injustice to Belgium in crossing her borders, and that whatever could be done would be done to repair this injustice when the war was over. As a first condition of peace negotiations she must cease this injustice, withdraw her military forces from Belgium and Luxemburg, re- store’ political and industrial liberty to the peoples of these states, and declare herself ready to do whatever can be done to repair the wrong inflicted upon them. (2) She has taken possession in times past of the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine and Schleswig-Holstein without the consent of the people of those provinces. As a second condition of peace negotiations she must agree that the people of Alsace-Lorraine and the people of Schleswig-Holstein should be left free to determine by a referendum WHAT ARE THEY FIGHTING FOR?P 667 with what country they wish to ally them- selves. (3) She has accused Servia of complicity in assassination, and refused the offer of Servia to submit the question of her guilt to an impartial tribunal. As a third condition of peace negotiations she must withdraw that refusal and consent to submit for impartial investigation her charges against Servia either to the Hague Tribunal or to a con- ference of the European Powers. (4) She has incited the Turkish Govern- ment to make war on the Christian popula- tions of Europe. As a fourth condition of peace negotiations she must consent to the emancipation of the Christian populations of Europe from the domination of the Turkish Government, to the expulsion of that Govern- ment from Europe, and to proper interna- tional provision for making the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles free passages for the commerce of the world from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. (5) Militarism has proved a crushing bur- den to the peaceful and industrial inhabitants of Europe in times of peace and has brought upon them the awful tragedy of a great war. As a fifth condition of peace negotiations Ger- many must agree to enter into a conference with the other European Powers and agree to combine with them in taking such meas- ures as may be necessary to relieve the peaceful peoples of Europe from the bur- dens and perils of militarism, and to secure for the subject races of Europe, specifically the South Slavs and the Poles, such measure of civil, religious, and industrial liberty as can be secured for them consistently with peace and order. We have here outlined these preliminary conditions to peace negotiations in order to present this proposal to our readers in a clear, concise, and understandable form. Some of our readers may think these proposals inadequate, others may think some of them unnecessary. Very likely both may be right. Weare not trying to legislate for the Allies, but we believe that if the Allies would formally and officially unite to declare the terms on which they would be willing to enter into peace negotiations, and issue this declaration in all the languages of modern Europe, they could do something—perhaps much—to remove current misunderstandings from the minds of the common people, and could do much to justify their resolute atti-
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668 THE OUTLOOK tude and insure and confirm the sympathy of the neutral Powers. BERNHARDI’S CHANGE OF HEART With the outbreak of the great war Gen- eral von Bernhardi’s writings were brought home to the world with a force and rapidity which amazed his compatriots. The vigor of his style and of his personality—neither of which was entirely lost in translation—com- pelled respectful attention while they evoked a chorus of disapproval. Frank paganism is not to be despised, even though it be hated and feared. It is therefore with considerable surprise that the reader notes Bernhardi’s comments upon the war, recently published in the New York “Sun,” where, in a signed statement authorized by the Kaiser, he reviews the history of the last few months and gives his interpretation of events. ‘“‘ England,” he says, “‘ is every way respon- sible for the world war.’”’ Well, what of it? Why should this fact, if it is one, call for con- demnation by one who has twice quoted so admiringly Frederick the Great’s remark tothe effect that ‘“‘ no man, unless he is an idiot, will leave his enemies time calmly to adopt his measures to destroy him, but take advantage of his start,” or who quoted again from the same royal author, ‘Is the term ‘ assailant” such a terrible one? It is a scarecrow to frighten cowards only.” If this policy is sauce for the eagle, why not for the lion? Why should the man who wrote, ‘“ I hope the German people will assert and maintain itself as the dominating race of Europe,” now protest that the British claim that ‘“‘ German victory would mean the subjugation of the world” is “absolutely without foundation and ridiculous ”’? With German troops masters of Belgium he now says, ‘‘ No weaker neutral state need fear any violation in the case of victory on the part of Germany.” For this fact he finds ready justification in his review of the strategy of the war. He writes: The great mass of the French army was to have been collected in northern France in order to advance against the right wing of the Ger- man army. Then, if the Germans—as appar- ently was assumed on the part of France would be the case—should on their part march into 24 March Belgium, in order to gain room for the disposi- tion of their troops and to oppose the French offensive, then the Belgian army, together with 150,000 English landed in the meanwhile, were to advance against the right flank of the Ger- mans to crush their right wing, and, in conjunc- tion with the French main army, to roll up from the north the entire German army standing on the French border. Disregarding for the moment the fact that the main French offensive happens to have been sent into Alsace and Lorraine, we may justly paraphrase Bernhardi’s words as fol- lows: France, finding that Germany had invaded Belgium, no longer considered her- self bound by the pledge to keep her own troops off Belgian soil; therefore France was primarily guilty of offending against the neutrality of that unfortunate state. The logic of this argument is not quite conclu- sive. There is another shaft, however, left in Bernhardi’s bow. ‘“ Belgium,” he says, quot- ing from the familiar documents upon which Dr. Dernburg placed such stress, “long before the beginning of the war had made agreements with England in case Britain should become involved in a war with Ger- many. England had declared that under such circumstances it would positively land troops in Belgium, and Belgium has not made the least objection to this violation.” This quo- tation is equally unconvincing, however, for, - like Dr. Dernburg, General von Bernhardi also ‘chooses to ignore the statement made by the English military attaché responsible for the papers discovered by Germany that “the entry of the English into Belgium would only take place upon the violation of her territory by Germany.” Furthermore, Bernhardi chooses to ignore his own previous interpretation of the collective guarantee of Belgian neutrality. He says in “‘ Germany and the Next War:” ‘** By acollective guarantee is understood the duty of the contracting Powers to take steps to protect this neutrality when all agree that it is menaced. Each individual Power has the right to interfere if it considers the neu- trality menaced.” The italics are General von Bernhardi’s. Frankly, Bernhardi the militarist is a more inviting figure than Bernhardi the apologist. Sentimentalism does not become a roaring lion. Somehow one is tempted to wonder if with the permission of his Kaiser to write an article for the New York “ Sun ”’ there came
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1915 also an order as to what that article should contain. e FINE THINGS IN WAR We hope every Outlook reader saw the letter by Professor Joseph W. Roe, of Yale University, which we published last week. In it Mr. Roe refers to a suggestion of Professor Conrad Matschoss, of Charlottenburg, Ger- many. We repeat that suggestion here: The daily newspapers of the warring nations assume a terrible responsibility when they per- sist in publishing only those news items which seem suited to increase hatred against the enemy. Would it not be an act of mercy for neutral nations to spread in a systematic manner such news as would allay this terrible hatred ? Some -of the important German newspapers have already begun such a campaign. On one occasion, for example, the German public was acquainted with the fact that Frenchwomen had decorated the graves of German soldiers with flowers as well as French graves. On another occasion they reprinted the protest of an Eng- lish paper against the persecution of Germans in England. German military authorities exam- ine carefully every report about acts of cruelty perpetrated by our enemies and contradict in all the newspapers every untruth and exaggeration. If all the fine things which can be told about the different warring nations could be gathered and systematically placed before the public, how much good might be accomplished for that ulti- mate understanding which, after all, cannot indefinitely be, deferred ! service ought, in my opinion, to be the great American mission. In last week’s issue of The Outlook we printed a picture showing how the British fired a salute of honor over the grave of the commander of the German battle-ship Bliicher. There are recorded, too, in the present issue some of the acts of courtesy of the Japanese towards the Germans during the war. Unquestionably the German peo- ple and German soldiers have individually manifested the same spirit of chivalrous thoughtfulness toward their enemies. We urgently ask our readers to send us any inci- dents of this kind that may have come to their notice through responsible newspaper clippings or, better, from personal letters. We propose to follow the suggestion of Pro- fessor Matschoss conveyed to us by Profes- sor Roe, and to print, if we can get them, the records and incidents of the fine things which the war has brought out even among the IN LENT Such a wonderful . 669 combatants. We especially want German incidents. The horrors of war have been too much exploited. We hope our readers will co-operate with us in making this record of good deeds. IN LENT THE PRICE OF THE SOUL The health of society is being more rigor- ously guarded than ever before. As fast as science discovers the sources of disease she lays upon us the duty of removing them. Drainage, sanitation, pure water and milk, good food, are no longer matters of choice ; they are matters of necessity. Public health is a public duty; an epidemic of typhoid fever is a disgrace to a community ; it is an evidence of criminal ignorance or criminal carelessness. The time is coming when death as the result of laxity of supervision or indifference will involve a penalty on the offending community. Health is an achieve- ment ; it can be secured and preserved only by ceaseless vigilance. Society can exist only by sustained exer- tion of body, mind, and soul; the life of men in the world depends on sleepless fidelity and effort. Play is as much a part of life as work, but play is a refuge from work, a relaxation from the strain of attention it involves. ‘The race will never be able to retire from activity and live on its accumu- lated capital. The conditions of work will probably become easier ; it is certain that they will be made to conform to a keener sense of justice. They will secure wider leisure, but they will never make idleness possible. If society ever attempts to sit with folded hands and give itself up to pleasure on the fortune bequeathed to it by its vigorous and tireless ancestors, it will go into bankruptcy of char- acter and estate. No business can be so solidly founded, so wisely organized, that it will go on its suc- cessful way by its own momentum ; it must be served by fresh ability, managed with ever- renewed skill, or it will be overtaken by disaster. The Church cannot thrive on the traditions of a great past, preserve the reverence of the world by recalling and repeating the names of the saints, or serve the twentieth century by using slavishly the words and methods of the apostolic age. It must understand
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670 the conditions and temper of the men and women of to-day, it must have the consecra- tion of saintly lives in this generation, it must renew its youth in fresh vows and modern forms of activity. In every art subsidenc2 of the creative spirit follows fast on loss of present courage, faith, and confidence ; the spirit of the masters lives, not in the copy- ists whose easels are set up in every art gallery, but in the works that throb with the vitality of to-day and are beautiful with the light of this morning. We are finding out in this country that democracy is not an end in itself but a method which demands more work and thought and devotion from more people than any other form of government. A perfect system of administration of public interests directed by weak, incompetent, and corrupt men would fail as disastrously as the most irresponsible oligarchy. In the whole world nothing will do its work without constant oversight except some kinds of automatic machinery; and machinery wears out and must be renewed. Vigilance is the price, not only of progress in society, but of health and safety. Men must not only guard but renew their possessions. A man’s character is determined by the habit he establishes of choosing the good or the evil thing; it is at stake every day; it must be reinforced every hour. In a weak moment, or a passing mood to which he sur- renders his will, he may wreck it; the battle must begin again every morning, and ends only when night falls. However we may explain it, we cannot shut our eyes to the downward drift in society; a drift which can be overcome only by resolute and sus- tained effort. The moment this effort is relaxed moral standards become. blurred, men begin to degenerate, communities begin to decay. For society as for the individual, moral disease and death follow fast every relaxation of moral effort. for its life, and for every man and woman the same struggle is appointed. - The soldier who sleeps on sentry duty is a traitor, however patriotic his intentions may be; the best purpose in the world will not help him when - the line he was set to guard is brokén and the enemy has pressed through ; he must not only mean well, he must keep awake. A soul is a priceless possession ; no present standards of measurement can give us any real sense of its intrinsic value; it can be kept in safety only by tireless vigilance. THE OUTLOOK Society must fight hourly - 24 March | A BOSWELL MEMORIAL IN LONDON An attempt is being made to preserve the two houses on Great Queen Street in London in which Boswell lived for a number of years and largely prepared the biography of John- son. ‘These houses have a double interest : that of literary association and that of archi- tectural distinction. They are fine types of seventeenth-century domestic building, pre- senting “‘a united facade divided into six bays by five pilasters.” The organization which owns them proposes to demolish them, and the friends of Johnson and the lovers of the ‘great biography are making an effort to raise the necessary funds to preserve these memorials, not so much of Boswell as of the group of men with whom he was associated. For Boswell shines by a reflected light precisely as does Queen Elizabeth, and as Queen Victoria will shine in the not remote future. If one has an ambition for the kind of immortality which consists in being men- tioned in connection with other people, it is a great piece of good fortune to know famous men and women. But the light that shines on Boswell is by no means a wholly reflected light. He was a snob, a vulgarian, and nvany people of authority have called him a sot. Carlyle said that the lower part of his face was “ of a low, almost brutish character,” and Macaulay describes him as ‘servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blus- tering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a tale-bearer, an eaves- dropper, a common butt in the taverns.” This is put rather strongly, after the fashion of Macaulay; but there is a great deal of truth in it. Nevertheless, the bigot, the sot, and the snob wrote. one of the most enter- taining biographies in the literature of the world, a book which is likely to survive all the books by the other members. of the Literary Club. The “ Life of Johnson” holds a unique place in the literature of biography becatise it is so uhflinchingly intimate and frank ; although Boswell likes to compose his picture so that he appears himself within the radius of the camera, he shows the great lexicog- rapher in his habit as he lived. If there had been anything mean, despicable, or unsound about Johnson, he could not have survived the uninterrupted and unescapable scrutiny to which Boswell submitted him. It must have
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1915 been at times intolerable ; and when Johnson cried out in a moment of revolt, ‘‘ You have but two subjects—yourself and myself—and I am heartily tired of both!” it suggests the high price which he paid for this wonderfully lifelike portrait. As a rule, the writing of a biography is a devitalizing process, and gives us, instead of a living man, a black-and-white silhouette. Very few biographers have the courage to let their subjects speak for themselves. They are eager to present an artistic picture of a rounded and symmetrical character, and in the process they sacrifice that element of life which is most precious and desirable in a por- trait! There are biographies, as there are portraits, which are excellent pieces of artistic work ; valuable not only for what they tell us about the subject, but for the fine workman- ship which they reveal. The real portraits which give us the face with the wart on it, to recall Cromwell, are not common; and they are always interesting. The portrait-painters of two hundred years ago have given us a series of charming portraits because they were scrupulous courtiers. It was their busi- ness to present distinguished men and women in their most beautiful clothes, wearing their most becoming wigs, costumed for the per- formance, and as affable as if they were stand- ing in the presence of posterity. What havoc Mr. Sargent wouid have played with the subjects of Sir Peter Lely, for instance ; what shockingly immoral women we should have looked upon if he had painted the court beau- ties of the time of Charles II! There isa portrait of old Dr. Parr in the dining-hall of one of the Cambridge colleges in which his attitude is represented in a very peculiar manner. He was painted in his own time with a churchwarden pipe which, report declares, he sometimes smoked in the pulpit. Later that pipe was thought to be an undignified adjunct to the venerable old scholar, and it was removed, with disastrous effects to the portrait. One is reminded of a vopular American writer who was accidentally photo- graphed with a little group of friends on a house-boat on the Maine coast when he hap- pened to have a meerschaum pipe of immense size in his mouth. The snap-shot strayed into unscrupulous hands, got into the news- papers, and evoked protests from all parts of the country from those who thought that pipe-smoking was not consistent with the idealistic verse and the delightful prose of the well-known writer. A BOSWELL MEMORIAL IN LONDON 671 That which makes men and women lova- ble is not faultlessness, but generous human qualities. | Washington has suffered im- mensely because he fell into the hands of mis- taken idealists who thought it necessary to eliminate all human weaknesses in order to justify the idolatry of the country. Now that we know that Washington had a passionate temper which occasionally broke loose beyond his control, and that he was by no means the impressive automaton which for a long time was imposed on the credulity of the country, he has become a lovable as well as an august figure. It was this machine-made Washing- ton that prompted Oscar Wilde to ask the question, “* What can you expect of the art of a country whose hero had no imagination and could not even tell a lie!” One of the great differences between Washington and Wilde was that Washington could tell a lie and would not. Of course Boswell was a gossip, as was Pepys, but he was a much less lovable person than Pepys, who was full of faults, but who had a great many pleasant qualities, while Boswell shrivels more and more as we look at him. But Boswell had a great subject. He was not, like Pepys, keeping a running chronicle of an entertaining time; he was making the record of a really great man; a man of whom it may be said that few now read what he wrote, but that he remains and is likely to remain the most definitely realized man of letters of his period—one of the great figures in English literature. It was Boswell’s extraordinary luck to have this great person- ality to record, and to have the good sense to keep himself so often out of the way and let Johnson tell his own story. The “ Life ” is largely an autobiography ; and one’s sympa- thy for Johnson is lost in the joy of possess- ing so veracious a portrait of a great man. If 3oswell occasionally put to him such pro- found questions as, “‘ Doctor, what would you do if you were locked up in a tower with a baby ?”’ the pain was for the moment, while Boswell’s portrait of Johnson himself remains a joy forever. It would be absurd to preserve a memorial of Boswell alone ; but any remembrance of Boswell involves the presence of Johnson ; and it is not surprising that the annual din- ner of the Boswell Society, eaten in the old tavern of the Three Crowns in Lich- _field,on Johnson’s birthday, brings together many of the most distinguished men in England. a ee
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THE STORY OF THE WAR’ ' BY GREGORY MASON PRING has come and has found no S decisive change in the two great battle lines that stretch from the English Channel to Switzerland and from the Baltic to Rumania respectively. By the winter campaigns in these fields the killing of thou- sands of men on each side is about all that has been gained toward a conclusion. At this rate, the only peace that can be gained is the peace of exhaustion, peace by the oblit- eration of the forces of one of the two rival camps, which is not a pleasant prospect to contemplate. So far as the western campaign is con- cerned, since the third week in September I have not had a chance to shift the colored pins that stand out like clustered mushrooms on the war map near my desk. The German breakwater that has held back the French and British tide across France and Belgium has not even quivered under the successive waves of armed men that have been hurled against it. On the other side of beleaguered Germany such changes as have occurred in the align- ment of the contending forces since Winter laid his grip on these battlefields have mainly favored the Kaiser. The Czar’s forces have been flung back across the Carpathians. The pressure on Austria in the south is easier than it was during-the last days of 1914, and almost the only Russian uniforms now seen in East Prussia are worn by prisoners and corpses. Field Marshals January and February, traditional allies of the Czar, who helped Peter the Great and Alexander I, have failed Nicholas II in his greatest need. THE PROMISE OF SPRING Spring in France will soon give firm footing for Lord Kitchener’s fresh millions in their long-heralced drive, but in the east it will bring slush and mud that for weeks will be more of an impediment to the armies than the sncw and frozen ground of winter. But, at all events, until they succeed in breaking the German railway arteries on one side or the other the Allies will hardly accomplish anything that will stand out on the pages of history fifty years hence. And from present indications the Kaiser’s millions will defend these vital lines 1 Mr. Kennan’s article this week is to be found on page ). 672 with the grimness of the hard-dying hundreds of Leonidas at Thermopyle. A BUSY WEEK AT SEA News relating to the conduct of the war on the sea continued to crowd despatches from the contending armies to the inside pages of newspapers during the week March 10 to March.17. The flurry of ex- citement over the sinking of an American ship by the German converted cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich soon subsided—an evidence of the clearheadedness of the American people —for there is really nothing in this case to arouse either our wrath or our alarm till Germany definitely refuses to pay for the destroyed American vessel. Apparently, however, the Eitel will not be permitted to emulate the exploits of the Confederate sea vampire Alabama again in this war. The conclusion of the story of the German cruiser Dresden, which was written’ by the British cruisers Glasgow, Orama, and Kent off the Chilean coast near Juan Fernandez Island of Robinson Crusoe legend, leaves but two German commerce harriers to be run down by the Allies. These, the cruiser Karlsruhe and the converted liner Kronprinz Wilhelm, have proved so elusive that one is tempted to credit them with having the pro- tection of the ‘“‘ Seven Wild Gods of the Sea.” There was no disgrace to her gallant crew and captain through the fact that her shredded flag came down a few minutes before the Dresden plunged bottomward, although this is the first time in this war that a regular German war-vessel has struck her colors. ‘Their conduct during the crowded five min- utes’ fight before théir ship was put out of action proved that the men of the Dresden were of the same stuff.as the men of the Emden and the Gneisenau, which is not very different from the stuff that was in the mak- ing of the men of England’s Revenge and Victory and the brave tars of our own Bon- homme Richard and Old Ironsides. The Kaiser’s submarines made the week a busy one. In three days alone they are said to have torpedoed seven British vessels, four of which sank. - Since the war zone decree went into effect on February 18 about a score of British vessels have been blown to the bottom, while four Unterseeboten of the Kaiser have
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THE STORY OF THE WAR 673 gone to Davy Jones’s locker. The British Admiralty would probably be glad to sacrifice ships at this ratio, as it would use up all of Germany’s submarines long before Britain’s vast merchant fleet was seriously reduced. The seagulls that saved a British war-ship from probable destruction when they flew from tke vicinity of the vessel to a spot sev- eral hundred yards away, where careful ob- servation discovered the periscope of a German submarine, deserve to be enrolled as scouts in the ‘“ King’s Navee.”” Furthermore, they should be given a perch in history with the geese that saved Rome and the eagles that led Regulus to victory. Great Britain’s declaration of what is a virtual blockade of Germany—although the word is not used—is treated editorially else- where in this issue of The Outlook. This fulfillment of the policy of reprisal forecast by the British Premier recently has been well called a “long-range block- ade,’’ since it seeks to lock the gates of the sea upon Germany at a safe distance from German mines and coast fortifications. The gist of the course in which Britain is joined by her Allies is the severance of all sea com- merce between Germany and the outside world, irrespective of the usual laws in regard to contraband. This is the first time that an attempt has been made to put the seas under martial law since the time of Napoleon. SLOW PROGRESS IN THE DARDANELLES True to history and tradition, the Darda- nelles are proving a hard nut to crack. Ap- parently most of the ships of the Allies are still not far from the entrance of the strait, making occasional rushes into the narrows bristling with Turkish artillery, while the Queen Elizabeth and a few other heavy- gunned leviathans from the Gulf of Saros pound away at Bulair and Gallipoli at the narrow junction of the Gallipoli Peninsula with the European mainland. Landing par- ties of the Allies are reported to be trying at this point to cut the railway connecting the forts of the European Dardanelles with Con- stantinople, as the Japanese severed the Rus- sian communications at Port Arthur. As the days pass it begins to look as if this game for supremacy between Europe and Asia, which is being played at the ancient Hellespont, might be more stubbornly fought out than we at first expected. ° The first of the three historic struggles between the continents, it will be remembered, was an easy victory for the vast host of Xerxes. The second was won by the lances of Alexander’s robust ‘‘ Companions ” against the effeminate grandees of Persian Darius at Arbela in 331 8.c. The third big match was won for Asia when Mohammed II and his swarthy army of the faithful took Constantinople in 1453. If Europe wins the fourth, as she bids fair to do, she is likely to hold her laurels against the decadent East for centuries, unless a real Yellow Peril develops unexpectedly. UNHAPPY POLAND Last week I said that ‘“ Poland’s misfor- tune has been perhaps less dramatic than Belgium’s, but no less acute.’’ ‘That may have been an understatement. It was such, judgirg from the following excerpt from a letter from Mr. Ernest P. Bicknell, National Director of the American Red Cross, who has been in- vestigating conditions in France, Belgium, Servia, and Poland -for the Rockefeller Foundation. ‘T am not exaggerating,” writes Mr. Bick- nell, ‘when I say that we have seen in the past three days a degree of destitution and misery and squalor which surpasses anything in Belgium or any other country. . . . Cer- tain sections of Poland have been crossed six times by the fighting armies, and the country has been swept completely clear of horses, cattle, and animals of all kinds. Food sup- plies of every sort have been taken, and only enough potatoes remain to last a few months if carefully managed.” Mr. Bicknell gives the Germans credit for many efforts to alleviate the condition of the Poles, but these efforts, he says, are a mere drop in the bucket. Servia, this observer reports, is now harder pressed by epidemics of typhus and typhoid fever than by Austrians. GREECE, ITALY, AND AUSTRIA The new Cabinet of Greece seems to have developed a ‘“ watchful waiting ”’ policy all its own, but Italy appears to be leaning more and more toward intervention. It is hardly likely that Austria will pay the entire price of continued Italian neutrality alleged to have been demanded, which, by and large, comprises all the Trentino and a slice of Austrian terri- tory on the east coast of the Adriatic, including Trieste, Fiume, and Pola, an important naval base. Unofficial despatches say that Ger- many has assured Italy of her intention and ability to persuade Austria to part witha sizable piece of this territory at least, and enehaat ee iu a NRE es RRO aS RUN
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sapere nora COUNT SERGIUS WITTE FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY A. PASETTI
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THE STORY OF THE WAR for weeks reliable Swiss and Italian papers have predicted that this would be done and that Austria would save her face by ceding the territory to Germany, who would then throw it over to the Italians. Such a four de Jorce was adopted after the war of 1866 be- tween Italy and France on one side and A GREAT Witte is dead. Witte does not sound like a Russian name. It is not. Sergius Witte’s ancestors were Dutch; and the non- Russian name was always useful to his ene- mies. He was born in 1849 at Tiflis, Trans-Cau- casia, and began life as a porter and ticket agent on the Odessa Railway. The foundation of hissuccess was thesplendid efficiency shown, amid general incompetence and corruption, at a critical period of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 in facilitating the removal of train sup- plies and troops to the front. This signal efficiency was displayed by Witte throughout his public career; and so, though in a land of inveterate prejudice and hide-bound custom, he rose to be Division Superintendent, Min- ister of Railways, Minister of Finance, Presi- dent of the Council, First Constitutional Prime Minister. The husband of a Jewess, for whom he sought social recognition, Count Witte was, of course, specially sensitive to the out- rageous course of the Russian Government towards his wife’s people. John Hay once said that if any Russian could lead the Jews out of bondage in eastern Europe Witte was the man. When told this, Witte said, “I must believe that the Jewish question is the chief reason: for any alienation of American friendship for Russia,” and frankly admitted that ‘‘our Government may have. adopted some measures affecting the Jews that were perhaps better not adopted.” Witte was a big, burly, blond man. Phys- ically and mentally he towered over most of his Russian contemporaries. His appearance anywhere attracted instant interest. His hearty, vigorous, impressive speech often challenged sympathy. Yet, like many other Russians, his manner. was unsteady, some- times petulant, full of the unexpected. His lumbering form moved uneasily to and fro, he often seemed ill at ease. He was a G ite is ae as he called it, Sergei— 675 Austria on the other. . Venetia, for whose redemption the Italians had been fighting, was handed over to the French by Austria France then passed on the province to the Italians, and Austrian pride was ostensibly unhurt. New York City, March 17, 1915. RUSSIAN moody man, albeit a great statesman; a man ready to do the sudden deed, albeit a man of lethargic manner. But his great, earnest, eloquent eyes held you. It was the Portsmouth Conference, called to dis- cuss the terms of peace to end the Russo- Japanese War, that first made Americans well acquainted with this Russian. Sergius Witte was the chief Ambassador from his country to the Conference. At that time American sentiment was in general pro-Japanese. Under these cir- cumstances, to the consternation of the Japanese, the Ambassador did not _hesi- tate to reveal to the newspaper cor- respondents at Portsmouth the twelve Japanese demands on Russia which had been secretly made. Witte thus appealed to his hearers’ sympathy: ‘‘ Haven’t I already yielded on seven out of these twelve de- mands ?”” No other Russian would have dared todo so much. ‘ What more can you ask ?”? ‘But the other five demands con- tained the real tug of war,’ was the rejoin- der. ‘Let us not say ‘tug of war,’” he answered, “ only contrary opinions.’”’ Largely owing to powerful international intervention, Russia got off. without paying indemnity, while making fewer territorial concessions than had been expected. Witte deserved some of the credit for the result, and the Czar made him a Count. Count Witte’s Premiership followed the Portsmouth Conference, and lasted but a short time. His enemies forced him to resign. These enemies belonged to three categories. First, there were the bureaucrats, who hated him because he demanded that they stop the old systems of red tape and Government graft, and because he demanded with decided harsh- ness an instant and uncompromising honesty and businesslike procedure. Second, there were the Pan-Slavs, who shunned him because he would not espouse their plans for foreign aggression in general, and for the overrun-
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676 ning of the Far East in particular. Third, there were the Liberals, who were shocked to discover that the anti-bureaucrat was, aiter al, a good deal of an autocrat, that he did not really believe in truly representative government for Russia. But Witte’s monumental services to his country remain. They may be seen in sev- eral departments of Russian economic better- ment: the state control and systematization THE OUTLOOK 24 March of Russian railways, in especial the construc- tion of the Siberian road; the development of Russian industries, and the inducements offered to foreign capital to be the means of this development; finally and chiefly, the establishment of the Empire’s finances on a gold basis. More than to any other man’s work, the Russia of to-day would seem to owe to him her present status in the domains of transportation, trade, and finance. WOMEN AND WAR HROUGH the voice of Mme. Rosika Schwimmer, of Budapest, Hungary, the Publicity Secretary of the Inter- national Woman’s Suffrage Alliance, a million women of Europe, it is estimated, have asked the women of America if they will help bring this war to an end. And thousands of the women of America have replied with an em- phatic affirmative. Soon after the men of Europe had mobil- ized to fight each other volunteers among the women of Europe mobilized to fight war. Suffragists initiated the movement and organ- ized it, but they were soon joined by women’s peace clubs, women’s councils, and women’s federations of every sort. Mme. Schwimmer, whose photograph appears on another page, was appointed to take to President Wilson this resolution : That we urge the President of the United States to invite the neutral countries of Europe to send envoys to meet the delegates he will appoint to carry the message of our nation, and that these envoys shall unite in a demand upon the nations now_at war that they declare a ces- sation of hostilities until this message shall have been delivered, being confident that this armistice would be the first step toward permanent peace. This message came from women of Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Austria- Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, Swe- den, Norway, and Holland. Mme. Schwimmer saw President Wilson on September 18. He _ was _ interested, sympathetic, and very encouraging, but weeks went by, and months, with no action from the American President. Growing im- patient more rapidly than some of their sisters, women in England, Holland, Ger- many, and Belgium resolved to act for them- selves, and issued a general invitation to all members of their sex, irrespective of national- ity, to join in a huge mass-meeting of protest against the continuance of the legalized slaughter of human beings. This meeting will be held in Holland on April 28, 29, and 30. / Delegations from the United States, Canada, and Australia have already promised to join their -European sis- ters at the Congress. No course of action has been laid out in advance. Many of the women who are going to Holland to add their voices to the denunciation of the rule of Mars advocate absolute disarmament and other expedients which have never seemed practicable to ‘Tie Outlook. It is significant, however, that some of the women who are going to this conference in Holland are will- ing to a. considerable degree to lay aside national ambitions in order to secure peace. “The women of Austria-Hungary,” said Mme. Schwimmer to a representative of The Outlook, “are not in sympathy with the war on Servia, and if they had their way they would permit the secession of any Slavs in the Empire who want to leave it. ‘* Women are fundamentally more merciful than men, and they would find other means than war to gain the ends of National ambi- tion if these ends appealed to them. For instance, the women of Italy do not want to spill blood to get the Trentino, but they would gladly set aside a part of their earnings each week, if they are workingwomen, or sell some of their jewels if they belong to the idle rich, in order to raise a fund for the purchase of the lost province.” Mme. Schwimmer cited fact after fact to show what women of the belligerent nations, particularly those on the Continent, are doing to stem the tide of war before it swamps the civilization of Europe as the civilizations of Athens and Rome were submerged. The women of Germany in particular, said she,
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Paced ta Ae 1915 IN THE LIGHT OF BILLY SUNDAY 677 are becoming increasingly obdurate. An example of this temper is the following ex- cerpt from a recent proclamation by the President of the Woman Suffrage party in Germany : ‘** Shall this war of extermination go on? ‘‘ Women of Europe, where is your voice ? “ Are you great only in patience and suf- fering? “The earth reeking in human blood, the millions of wrecked bodies and souls of your husbands, sweethearts, and sons, the outrages inflicted on your sex. Can these things not raise you to blazing protest ? “In south Europe men have come to- gether to exchange words of peace. “In the north of Europe men have met to work for peace. ** Women of Europe, where is your voice, that should be sowing seeds of peace? Do not let yourself be deterred by those who accuse you of weakness because you wish for peace, who say you will not hold back the bloody march of history by your protest. * Strive at least to put a spoke in the bloody wheel of Time with strength, courage, and humanity worthy of your sex. ‘** Come together in the north or south of Europe, protest with all your might against this war, which is murdering the nations, and make preparations for peace ; return to your own country and perform your duty as wives and mothers, as protectors of true civilization and humanity.” These women of all races, when they meet in Holland next month, may make history. IN THE LIGHT OF BILLY SUNDAY BY WILLIAM T. ELLIS o ILLY has put religion under the B spot-light, where it belongs. It does not often get there, and it isn’t easy to keep it there, but wherever Billy goes he gets the spot-light for religion.” That shrewd comment upon the Rev. William A. Sunday’s greatest achievement was made to me by the manager of a Chautauqua. In the speech of the stage, that expressed the greatest work that this unconventional evan- gelist has done. He puts the master subject into the plain man’s thinking and conversa- tion. The average minister is fearful of being sensational ; consequently he escapes that peril utterly. ‘There are few inherently im- portant things that create less sensation of any sort than the average church; whereas Jesus, who defied the conventions and tradi- tions of his day, was, in his own dignified way, as truly sensational as Billy Sunday. He made himself, and therefore his message, the talk of the countryside. A certain grim humor attaches to the fact that Billy Sunday is really interesting. All sorts of people like to hear him speak. Some of us who are ourselves guiltless of the offense of being interesting charge this against the evangelist—as if to preach relig- ion in a way that grips the attention and im- agination of the crowd were asin! ‘There is grave importance to the issue which this con- dition raises before all ministers: Is Chris- tianity really so dull that an entertaining preacher of it affronts his message by being interesting ? or is it that.the intrinsic interest of Christianity is obscured by dull preaching ? That question straightway brings to the fore the subject of Sunday’s slang. He is colloquial to the limit. His sort of speech is oftener heard in bar-rooms and workshops than in religious conventions. It is as far removed from the petrified phraseology of the pulpit as Niagara is from the Arctic glaciers. I hold no brief for Sunday’s speech ; some of it affronts me and makes me cringe. That it does not seem to “faze ” his crowds for an instant makes me ask whether I am not dwelling in a world apart from men, where a hypersensitive few pay undue regard to the niceties of language. Beyond all ques- tion Billy’s vocabulary makes his meaning plain to the people, and it does not offend them. When he calls a certain type of the- atrical performance a “ leg show,” I revolt ; but when I search my memory I recall that that is the name, and no other, which the majority of men naturally use for the per- formances they attend. Billy knows the big crowd, and surely speaks the language of the people, especially the city people. I wish their language were more elevated; but I remember what the !
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678 sporting editor of a Scranton newspaper once said to me: “ What Billy says ain’t slang. That’s the way people talk. It’s the lan- guage that the preachers use that is slang.” The argot of the pulpit, the shop talk of the preaching profession, is perhaps less com- prehensible to the average man than the colloquialisms of the street corner. There is real evidence that, taking them by and large, people donot really expect to understand the exact meaning of the average preacher. Sunday’s success is vocal with the message to the ministry that they should use a speech which can ‘get across,” as the theatrical lingo has it. Nor would they have to go to this evangelist’s lengths to do this. Would, however, that they knew real life as he knows it! They would then exchange some of their conventional generalities for living particu- larities and specifications. When Billy goes after a sin, he furnishes a bill of particulars. There is little left to the imagination after he is through painting the portrait of the frivolous and useless society woman or the “ man about town.” When indicting popular taste, andits loss ef respect for womanhood and the marriage vows, the evangelist cites recent popular songs, as “ I My Wife, but, O You Love Kid,” and ‘* My Wife’s Gone to the Country, Hurrah ! Hurrah !” Sunday’s speech is extravagant. His dia- monds are “as big as hazel nuts ;”’ his well- dressed women not only wear silks and furs, but also diamond tiaras, whether it be morn- ing, noon, or night. Everything is in the superlative degree with him, even as he knows nothing short of highest heaven or blackest hell for the soul’s abode. But this is the American temperament, which Kipling hit off in his “ Enslaved, illogical, elate, _ He greets the embarrassed gods, nor fears To shake the iron hand of Fate Or match with Destiny for beers.” Americans who hear him seem quickly to sense his real meaning. They take him “ for substance of doctrine,” and laugh away his excesses and excrescences. Imagine Sun- day, though, in England or Scotland ! As day after day I have watched hundreds of ministers, many of them having made pil- grimage to Philadelphia from afar, listening to this son of the log cabin and baseball dia- mond, I have wondered whether they are making mental notes on how to tell stories. Billy is the best story-teller in the pulpit THE OUTLOOK 24 March to-day. He knows how to bring cut the high lights by added touches of detail. He has the courage to omit non-essentials. He sees his climax from the beginning and marches straight on to it. And his stories thrill and move men. Especially his patriotic anec- dotes lift people to the fighting pitch. They are not “illustrations” dragged in by the ears; they incarnate the message of the moment. The stories he tells, Sunday also acts. Perhaps he is “a born actor,” yet credible report says that he once was as tedious and tiresome a speaker as the average preacher. At some point in his experience he dared speak with abandonment. Flinging dignity into the ash-can, he became the embodiment of his stories. If he speaks of throwing a ball, he throws it. When the Marathon win- ner falls prone—* plump,” there lies Billy on the platform. (Which is an athletic feat that I would not counsel the average minister to attempt, and for other reasons than those of dignity.) ‘ Animation” is the first ad- jective to use concerning Billy Sunday’s preaching. Gifts differ, of course, but the general proposition is safe that if there were more perspiration in the pulpit there would be more power. Why should not a man seem to be as earnest as he really is? If Billy Sunday should get through a sermon without wilting his collar, probably “ Ma” Sunday would become solicitous. The spectacle of that tireless, tense, dripping figure, with gray, drawn features, at the close of a sermon is itself a moving exhortation. No wonder Billy does not wear (or own) a frock coat, and no wonder he has to be rubbed down by a trainer after every sermon ! Moody used to mimic the surprise of some pastors should anybody be converted under their preaching. ‘If converts came down the aisle, you would not know what to do with them.” Billy is so sure of his message that he expects results; and takes it as a matter of course that more than a thousand persons should in a single day “ hit the sawdust trail,” grasping his hand in token of desire to begin the Christian life. His sermons take aim and bring down the game. Nothing is eas er to hit than nothing—which is what many sermons are aimed at. Of course Sunday’s theology is old-fash- ioned. But it is the same body of teaching which the Christian Church has preached for well-nigh two thousand years. He adds
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pT tb Fas Be AGES PD 1915 IN THE LIGHT OF BILLY SUNDAY 679 nothing to it and subtracts nothing from it. Most to the point, he believes it utterly and unequivocally. If he were to have any doubts, Billy Sunday would be done for. Evidently the multitude of men—university graduates as well as mechanics—prefer Sunday’s convictions to other men’s specu- lations. Clearly, the world wants a religion of authority. Had Billy not preached with absolute and convincing assurance, it would not have been his privilege to grasp the hands of more than a quarter of a million persons professing conversion. “Thus saith the Lord” is the preacher’s privilege and power. Billy Sunday uses it oftener in denunciation than in invitation. The prophet’s ancient art of arraigning evil, apparently long lost, has been found again by this master of the biting word. He shows the ministry how to denounce sin. Therein he has stumbled upon a tremendous truth. The pulpit to-day has lost the words of satire, scorn, and condemnation from _ its vocabulary. Yet these words abound in the speech of Jesus and of the Apostles and of the prophets. The modern ministry is trying to entreat some men who, as Billy says, ‘need a currycomb and a fly-blister.’”” The excoriation of sin, which is so plentiful in a Sunday campaign—definite dealing with sin by its own every-day name—is responsible for most of the response of the strong men who want to “ quit their meanness.” This is the secret of Sunday’s potency as a moral, social, and civic factor. Repentance, resti- tution, and righteousness are inseparable from his programme of redemption. For illustration, some men are trying to wash out the liquor traffic with tears; Sunday is trying to burn it up with scorn and hot indignation, Remembering how the average pastor works with one eye ever upon the statistical tables in his denominational year-book, so that he may make a good showing, it is re- freshing to find an evangelist—especially an evangelist—who is blithesomely indifferent to figures and reports. Billy Sunday himself does not know how many converts he has made. Only a toilsome digging out of the local reports of his meetings for the past eighteen years uncovers the fact that his total number of professed conversions reaches the unprecedented total of more than a quarter of a million. He keeps no records and wears no scalps at his belt. ‘Thus one must learn from other sources than from him that out of his Wichita meetings grew the ‘“ Gospel ”? Teams ” of laymen, a movement that has become National and that has brought hun- dreds of business and professional men into active Christian work and won literally _thousands of new members for the Church. Neither can Sunday pass an examination in the number of towns, cities, and States that have gone “ dry ” following his campaigns. One solicitude Sunday shows. He wants crowds. He is after people, multitudes of people. He plans for them and expects them. His huge, nondescript “‘ tabernacles ”’ are built so that multitudes may gather in comfort and every one hear. In Philadelphia the turtle-backed building holds twenty thou- sand persons. On one single night a crowd estimated at twenty-five thousand was unable to secure admittance to the overflowing struc- ture. Hundreds and thousands are turned away daily, and those who do get in are pres- ent hours before the time set for opening. Every Sunday Billy addresses in three serv- ices sixty thousand persons, and forty thou- sand on week-days in two services. Probably no other living man has ever spoken directly to so many of his fellow-men as Billy Sunday. His zeal for preaching is so insatiable that his Mondays, the day of rest, are usually spent in addressing out-of-town meetings. Although his work marks a high-water achievement in religious publicity—all the great Philadelphia newspapers give him first- page position regularly, with many columns and even pages daily—Billy Sunday has never spent a dollar for publicity. He employs no press agent and supplies no advance notices to the papers. But he is always accessible to reporters and photographers, and _ his secre- tary gives out, a few hours in advance of delivery, to papers asking for them, copies of his sermons. He is himself good “ copy,” and his meetings are more so. The great choirs, the nightly visits of delegations from stores, factories, schools, organizations, and institutions, the dramatic scenes when the converts “ hit the trail,” all give the livest sort of material for the most skillful pens. There are authentic instances of persons having been led into church membership merely by reading the reports of Billy Sunday’s meet- ings and sermons. He effects a natural co- operation of the secular press and the Gospel ministry which is eloquent with exhortation to the Church. Without knowing anything about psychol- ogy, Sunday has a capital substitute for it in his sound ‘horse sense.” He understands
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680 what works. That people are chiefly inter- ested in people, and that crowds attract crowds, is a principle which he puts into operation in every campaign. ‘The intense human interest of the spectacle of men and women “hitting the trail ” itself is enough to draw a multitude; the congregation mounts the benches with craning necks to witness this daily climax of the Sunday meetings. Always he is assured of a crowd by the co-operation of the churches. Sunday never accepts an invitation unless there is a sub- stantial unanimity of support on the part of the local congregations. Berating the churches and the. ministers as he does, Billy yet holds the most old-fashioned belief as to the place of the Church. “ All my work is for the Church,” he says. Without the organization, the tireless and devoted labor, and the militant loyalty of the churches he could accomplish nothing. ‘The idea may be novel, but it is true that Billy Sunday is sim- THE OUTLOOK 24 March ply an agency of the Church—an extraor- dinary tool for a great task. This little story of a unique personality and work is not a plea for more Billy Sundays; the imitations of him who are appearing in various places are a nuisance and worse. My purpose is merely to remind the Church that new times and new tasks may require new methods ; also that God still seems. to be using the weak and foolish things of earth to confound the mighty. This man Sunday, poorly equipped, ill-balanced, intellectually negligible, seems to be an instrument chosen to call the Christian Church back to the first task of preaching to the whole mass of man- kind a gospel which she believes, and of preaching it in ways that attract and con- vince men. Humanity has not lost its inter- est in vital religion. It was never more eager than to-day for a clear, comprehensible message of conviction upon the theme of God and of man’s relation to him. In an article to be published later the Spectator will describe a typical Billy Sunday service as it appeared to one of the audience THE RUSSIAN MUZHIK BY GEORGE KENNAN ' 8 Y HATEVER may be the outcome of the present war, the nation whose destinies and whose relations to the rest of the world seem likely to be most affected by it is Russia. If she succeeds in the great struggle in which she and her allies are engaged, one of two results must neces- sarily follow: (1) her people, united and in a certain sense reinvigorated by the war, will liberalize and reform their governmental in- stitutions ; or (2) the Czar and the bureau- cracy will gain strength and prestige from victory, will continue to hold the people in subjection, and will try to use the forces and resources of the nation in new schemes for Imperial extension and aggrandizement. In either case, Russia will almost certainly play amore important part in the history of the world—and particularly of Europe—than she has ever played before. Which of these possible results is the more probable I shall not venture to say; but in either case the most important factor will be the Russian people. If they gain control, or even it they merely acquire increased power, they will more cr less govern or direct the state ; while, if they remain in subjection, they will still supply the resources and the armies which the state must have. In any attempt, therefore, to forecast the future of Russia, the people, and especially the peasants, must be consiciered first. What, then, is the character of the Russian people, ana what are the capabilities of the one hundred million mwzz.tzés (peasants) who not only support the state but give it all the productive, offensive, and defensive power that it has ? I shall not attempt, of course, within the limits of two thousand words, to answer these comprehensive and far-reaching questions ; but it may be possible, even in a short arti- cle, to throw some light upon them, and to give a few reasons for regarding the future of the Russian people with hope, if not with assured confidence. There seems to be a general impression in the United States that the common Russian
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1915 muszhtk is more or less stupid, incompetent, and unprogressive ; and that, as compared with the peasant of France, Germany, or Scandinavia, he is distinctly inferior. But Americans often confuse illiteracy with lack of intelligence, and assume that because the muzhik cannot read and write he is necessarily stupid. ‘These are hasty and superficial judg- ments. Owing to causes over which they have had no control, the Russian peasants— or a majority of them—are backward and illiterate; many of them are ignorant and superstitious, but they are almost never stupid. In natural capacity they are fully equal to the peasants of any other country, and in certain fields, as I shall presently show, they display remarkable intelligence, enterprise, and resource:ulness. In discussing the question of their mental capacity a Canadian scholar who has made a profound study of Russian life and character says: “Inert or slow in its movements as the Russian peasant mind seems to be when con- fronted with problems to which it is unac- customed, its instant and decisive grasp of other problems disproves the common charge of mental inactivity.” 4 Then, as an illustration of the difference that there is between illiteracy and incapacity, Professor Mavor gives the following incident from his own Russian experience : ‘‘T lived for a short time with a group of Russian peasants who had just migrated toa new neighborhood. They took with them practically nothing but some flour, some leather, some iron bars, and their tools for carpentering and blacksmithing. Immedi- ately upon their arrival at the site they had chosen they searched for clay, found it, made bricks, sun-dried them, and built two sets of ovens. In one set the women made the bread for the group, in the other the men burned wood for charcoal. Within two days after their arrival they had six blacksmiths’ forges going by means of the charcoal and the bellows which they made out of the leather. Within other two days they had made several dozen spades and a wagon whose wheels were rimmed with iron forged by them on the spot. During the same time they had made shoes for their horses. Dur- ing the four days some of them had been engaged in building houses, and within a few more days these were completed. Yet not 1“ Economic History of Russia,’ by Professor James Mavor, Vol. II, p. 255. THE RUSSIAN MUZHIK one of these peasants could either read or write. They could, nevertheless, discuss with great gravity and intelligence their reasons for adopting an immovable instead of a movable whiffletree on their wagon, for making their spades with long instead of short handles, and for their preference for the light Russian plow in stony ground to the heavy plow of the manufacturer.” It is impossible, I think, to describe these illiterate peasants as either stupid or unedu- cated. Their association for a common pur- pose, their intelligent ard skillful work, and their resourceful enterprise in a new environ- ment all showed that they had brains and capacity even though they were ignorant of the alphabet, had never read a book, and could not sign their names. In my own Russian wanderings I have met hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such muszhiks, and the idea that they were dull, stupid, or unedu- cated merely because they could not read and write never once occurred tome. ‘They were better fitted perhaps for their environ- ment in Russia than I was for mine in Amer- ica; and if we had all been shipwrecked together on an uninhabited island every one of them would have been worth a dozen of me. Even when confronted with problems or conditions that are wholly new to them the Russian muzhiks, if they are not hampered or restrained in any way, show great natural sagacity. In 1886, for example, ten thou- sand of them were attracted to the wildest part of northern Manchuria by the discovery there of gold. Finding themselves in a region that was outside the effective control of the Russian as well as the Chinese authori- ties, they promptly set up a miniature state of their own, which they called “ The Zhel- tuga Republic,” and in less than a year they were successfully governing themselves, with an elected president, a constitution, a code of mining laws, an internal revenue system, a postal service, and even a free public hos- pital with two surgeons and a corps of nurses. All this was the work of common Russian muzhiks, with no help except the advice and writing ability of an ex-clerk from one of the Siberian provinces.’ It is doubt- ful whether ten thousand average Americans brought together in a wild part of Alaska under similar conditions fifty years ago would have ~ § For a full account of this remarkable Russian experi- ment in self-government, see “ The ye Republic,” in my “ Russian Comedy of Errors,” the Century Com- pany, New York, 1915.—G. K.
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682 shown as much constructive ability and set up as strong and well-ordered a_ govern- ment. One reason for the success of the Russian muzhiks in dealing with such conditions as these is their remarkable capacity for work- ing together. ‘They have a natural taste and “aptitude for co-operation; and one of their oldest social institutions is the labor union, or artel (pronounced air-tell, with the accent on the second syllable), which under that name or the name vataga has been a feature of Russian peasant life for at least six hundred years. The Russian avte/, however, differs essentially in almost every respect from the labor union of England and the United States. It is not, as a rule,a permanent organization, but rather a temporary group of individuals who undertake jointly a particular piece of work, accomplish it, share the profits, and then separate. It is precisely like a syndicate of bankers or promoters which floats a loan or reorganizes a railway and then dissolves. Twenty or thirty muzhiks, for example, will enter into an agreement to float a raft of timber down the Volga River. When they have finished this particular job, they divide the profits and separate. Then every mem- ber of the dissolved a7¢e/ is at liberty to com- bine with another group, which may be en- gaged in the same kind of work or in another kind. Sometimes a syndicate of timber- rafters will finish their job, divide the profits, and then, recombining as a syndicate of harvesters, will enter into a contract with a neighboring farmer to reap his crop. The life of the azte/ terminates with the completion of the particular enterprise for which it was formed; and a single individual may be a member of two or three av#e/s, one after the other, in the same season. While it lasts the a7te/ is an independent, self- governing body, which is held together by a verbal agreement, and which is responsible for the labor and the conduct of its members, jointly and severally. It has an elected starosta, or head man, but he has no power beyond that which is givento him. The ar¢e/ decides. all questions that arise in connection with the work, and the s¢avos¢a acts merely as spokesman and negotiator. Many, if not most, of the small industrial enterprises which in western Europe and America are managed by individuals are con- ducted in Russia by peasant syndicates. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of these temporary organizations THE OUTLOOK 24 March are formed and dissolved in Russia every year ; and among them are ar#e/s of hunters, fishermen, lumbermen, prospectors, team- sters, stevedores, ballast-handlers, coopers, packers, carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, and laborers or artisans in a dozen other vocations or trades. In recent years these ar/e/s have shown a tendency to hold together for longer and longer periods, and thus to become perma- nent co-operative societies. Instead of form- ing a syndicate for the execution of a single task or job, the peasants are now beginning to combine for the purpose of carrying on a business through a term of years. In this form the avte/s are sanctioned and registered by the Government, so that it is now possible toknow how many of themthere are. Their rapid growth is one of the most noteworthy features of Russian industrial life. In 1902 there were only 1,625. In the next ten years the increase was more than tenfold, and on the 1st of January, 1912, they numbered 18,083, not including the hundreds of thou- sands of jobbing avée/s, of which no record has been kept. If we take one hundred members as the average numerical strength of each co-operative society, and that is probably an underestimate, nearly two million Russian peasants, representing a population of ten millions or more, are now engaged in co-operative work. One of the most remarkable and success- ful achievements of peasant co-operation is the development of the butter-making indus- try in western Siberia. As soon as the Trans- Asiatic Railway opened up the extensive pas- ture lands of ‘Tobolsk and Tomsk the muzhiks in those provinces began to organize co-op- erative societies for the manufacture and export of butter. Beginning with only four artels in 1896, they steadily widened the scope of their operations until, five years later, the four azte/s had grown into 101 co-operative societies, with a total member- ship of 20,000. From that time the butter- making industry developed by leaps and bounds.’ In 1906 there were in western Siberia alone 526 co-operative societies, whose 37,000 members lived in 517 differ- ent villages and owned 182,000 cows. In 1912 the number of these societies had grown to 1,500, with a membership of 120,000, and the annual export of butter from Siberia had increased from 6,000,000 pounds to 180,000,000 pounds. In 1907 a number of the Siberian socie-
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1915 ties (which were still called a7te/s) formed a great co-operative union, which now has five branches and more than five hundred cream- eries, and which has established selling offices in various parts of western Europe. In London it is incorporated as the “ Union of Siberian Co-operative Associations,” and it sells every year in England alone butter to the value of 13,000,000 rubles. It now publishes two newspapers—the ‘ People’s Gazette” and the “ Information Leaflet ”— supports its own technical school, has estab- lished a number of co-operative stores for the benefit of its members, and has recently begun the manufacture on a great scaie of ‘Chester’ cheese. Fortunately there is no Sherman Law in Russia as yet, and the peasant managers of this great butter trust— a combination of competing arte/s—are in no danger of being sent to jail for forming a union to better develop the Siberian butter industry. Premier Stolypin predicted, a short time before his death, that Russia would eventually get more gold from her Siberian cows than from her Siberian mines. That prediction has already been fulfilled. ‘Three thousand cream- THE BRITISH WAR MACHINE 683 eries in the provinces of ‘Tomsk and Tobolsk are now producing annually 71,000,000 rubles’ worth of butter, while the Siberian mines are yielding only 50,000,000 rubles’ worth of gold. The ‘l'rans-Siberian Railway is running five special “‘ butter trains ”” westward every day, and if the industry continues to prosper the time is not far distant when half of Europe will be supplied with butter from the Siberian steppes. The manufacture is now extending even to eastern Siberia. Two hundred cream separators have recently been sold to peasant arze/s in the trans- Baikal, and thirty to butter-makers even in the remote sub-Arctic province of Yakutsk. Taking into consideration the fact that this immense and rapid development of co-oper- ative activity, including the butter industry, is largely the work of the Russian mushiks and is the outcome of their initiative, it is impossible to regard them as generally stupid or unprogressive. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that when a more liberal Government gives them larger oppor- tunities and better facilities for education they will surprise the world with their ability and enterprise. THE BRITISH WAR MACHINE BY ARTHUR BULLARD THE THIRD ARTICLE FROM THE OUTLOOK’S SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT IN f \HE Germans were wont to call the English “a nation of traders.” In so far as this epithet implied lack of military capabilities it was utterly false. Whether or not one believes that war is ever justifiable, whether one is pro-English or pro- German in this particular war, one cannot help marveling at the way the British Empire, which six months ago had one of the smallest armies in Europe, has suddenly become a great military Power. The Germans had the most highly developed war machine in the world ; all they had to do was to turn on the power and operate the mechanism. The British had to build their machine. They had very little to start with. Great Britain had promised her friends in case of war to land on the Continent an ex- peditionary force of 125,000 men. Exact EUROPE figures are as yet unobtainable, but it is prob- able that the British had considerably less than 100,000, possibly less than 75,000, men in the opening battles. Their force was below their number, for they were ill equipped—notably weak in artillery. At Mons they encountered at least three times their number of the _ best-equipped army in Europe. It is not to their discredit that they were beaten—as they certainly were. But it is a phenomenon without prece- dent in military history that they were able to take this appalling beating without demorali- zation. Their commissary—as was to be expected in a headlong retreat—went to pieces. ‘It was not pleasant,” an officer who was in it told me, to “‘ run away on an empty stomach.” The men who were there make no bones
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684 about telling how they ran. But, as they are English, it is harder to get them talk- ing about the interludes in their retreat when they stood and fought. They never stopped long. If three to one was not enough to start them running again, the Ger- mans brought up ten to one. After much cross-questioning as to how they found the will to stop so often and accept more punish- ment, how they avoided utter rout, this officer said: ‘* Well, you see, we began with the idea that one of us was good for four Germans. It did not seem the thing to run away from less.” ** You’ve more respect for them now ?” “ Yes,” he laughed. ‘“ We had to revise our estimate a bit. It isn’t just the number of men, you know; it’s the equipment, too. I don’t think our Tommies would feel right running away from two Germans now—not unless they had a big superiority in artillery.” Field Marshal Sir John French, in describ- ing the Battle of the Marne, said that the Germans seemed to think that they could ignore the British contingent. According to all military text-books, they had a right to think so. Theoretically an army so thor- oughly beaten ought to need several months of reorganization before it entered the fight- ing again. But when the new French army fell on von Kluck’s flank along the Ourcgq, all that was left of the British expeditionary force jumped into the combat as if nothing had happened to it. The German General Staff can hardly be blamed for surprise at its reappearance. But Sir John French’s force, despite its unprecedented pluck, was a very small ele- ment in the first month of the war. The German drive towards Paris was stopped by the French—and the Russians. The expe- ditionary force numbered perhaps one-twen- tieth of the soldiers of the Allies. It had covered itself with glory, but if the British Empire was to be a noticeable factor in the war on land, it was necessary to create a new army. ' ** Recruiting ” was probably the phase of the task which worried the British War Office least. The“ nation of traders ” has made up its mind to win. One hears little talk now in England about the causes of the war, little discussion as to who is to blame for it. War exists, and victory has been decided upon. In Lord Kitchener they have a man whom they trust. ‘There will be very little opposition to anything he says is necessary. THE OUTLOOK 24 March If he wants more men, he can have universal conscription to-morrow. But he needs an army, not a mob, and that means equipment and training more than numbers. Too many men volunteered at first. There was no organization to handle them, there were no uniforms, no guns, no barracks, no officers at hand to train them. Equipment was the pressing need, and for that it was necessary to mobilize British industry and commerce.. How many shops were there in England that could supply rifle ammunition? Cer- tainly there were notenough. It was neces- sary to know how many iron. works were equipped to make the needed machinery. An industrial census was necessary—not only of England, but of all the world where the English can buy. The “ right of emi- nent domain ” was strained to the limit. It did not matter whether or not a manufac- turer wanted to work for the army. If he possessed the necessary machines, he had to. I visited one large iron works which before the war had a world-wide reputation for mining machinery. They have canceled all their private contracts. All of their plant which is suitable for making tlie things the army needs is at work. The useless machinery—thousands of dollars’ worth— has been scrapped to make room for new lathes, furnished by the War Office, which will turn out shrapnel shells. And every machine—new and old—is working twenty- four hoursa day. And where factories which could be turned to military use did not exist the War Office has built new ones, from the foundations to the roof. One of the greatest feats in this matter of equipment has been the manufacture. of shoes. It was not hard to find shoe factories —England is full of them ; but it was neces- sary to find the machinery aid raw material for the good quality, heavy army shoe. In times of peace such a shoe is too cumber- some for the rich and too good for. the poor. It was necessary to create a new industry. And the English have not only made the shoes for their own army but have furnished at least as many to France. It would be easy to pile example on exam- ple. Britain went into the war very short of artillery and heavy ammunition. She has made good her own shortage—the new army will have better field artillery than the Ger- mans—and she has also saved the situation for her allies. One artillery officer has esti- mated that during the Battle of the Marne
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1915 the French were firing 80,000 of their ‘75 ” shells a day. Their factories could not turn out much more than half as many. The fac- tories of England have now placed the Allies beyond any danger of ammunition bank- ruptcy. Equipment is so much more serious a problem than recruiting that the British War Office is more worried over finding skilled artisans for the army factories than over the number of volunteers. At first the War Office was hampered by an old tradition of ‘“ concentrating ” their orders. It is cheaper—saves some of the taxpayers’ money—to buy things in bulk from one concern than to scatter your orders through a dozen factories. But for a nation which may at any time have to increase its purchases immensely and suddenly this penny- wise policy is pound-foolish. One small ex- ample of this point was furnished by the case of the wooden boxes for shipping rifle car- tridges. There was only one factory in Eng- land equipped for turning them out. The money which had been saved in the past by this concentration was very little compared to the cost of suddenly creating enough fac- tories to meet the very urgent demand. But determination to win has overcome these problems, and now—after six months— every British soldier who lands on the Conti- nent will be fully equipped. The day when the Germans had an unquestioned superior- ity in all mechanical contrivances is*past. There have been surprisingly few graft scandals in connection with this work of equipment. There are of course people in England—as everywhere—who would be glad to reap huge profits out of their coun- try’s distress. The scandal one hears of most often was the building of emergency barracks to house the first wave of recruits. The contracts were ‘let carelessly. The shacks which were too flimsy for use and had to be rebuilt cost the Government more than good ones should have cost. But this was in the eatly days before things were running smoothly. Kitchener has little respect for the ‘rights ” of the army furnishers. When a ring of woolen merchants tried to hold him up on an order for blankets, he appealed to the nation to give their extra blankets to the army. The corner in blankets fell with acrash. On the whole, those who hoped to make fortunes out of “ furnishing ” the army are a discontented lot—never in history have they had such poor pickings. THE BRITISH WAR MACHINE 685 One thing which has greatly lessened their profits has been American competition. The price of saddles, to take one instance, is regu- lated in the United States, to the great cha- grin of the more greedy among the English saddle-makers. But the greatest blow to the hopes of those who expected to cheat the army has been given by the trade unions. The organized labor of England refuses to be a party to such unpatriotic profits. The manufacturer who tries to fill War Office orders with rotten leather or shoddy cloth finds a strike on his hands. Judged by what happened in the Boer War, the trade unions have saved the Exchequer several million pounds. ‘They have protected the soldiers at the front from the most cruel treachery. Next to equipping the new army the most important problem was how to train it. <A shortage of officers cannot be overcome easily. The mortality among the officers of the expeditionary force was appalling. But in the training of the recruits this loss is not so serious as it at first appears. It is only the young, inexperienced officer who exposes himself recklessly. The casualty list shows that it is the lieutenants who get themselves killed. In the organization of the British army the subalterns are of little use in train- ing recruits; they are very poorly educated in comparison to the officers of other coun- tries, and little more is expected of them than to give an example of coolness under fire. A keen young man can learn most that they need to know in a few weeks. It is their function to transmit to the ranks the orders they get from above. The English army depends on its generals and non-commis- sioned officers. In whipping new men into shape the drill sergeant is the important person. It is here that experience counts for most. And, owing to their organization and liberal pensions to retired petty officers, the British army has an unusually large list of “reserve non-coms.” Some of them are too old for service at the front, but they are ideal drill-masters. In most of the veteran regiments men from the ranks have been promoted to these posts, and the experienced non-commissioned officers have been kept at home to drill the “ recruits.’’ And it is amaz- ing how soon they can get their men into shape. I visited the training camp of a new unit of the Scottish Horse. ‘Two months before the men had been working at their trade or
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686 behind the plow. Their equipment was com- plete except for shoe-laces and the strip of tartan for their caps. Everything was brand new. Half of their horses—Canadian—had been in camp only two weeks. Two-thirds of their complement of commissioned officers, almost all of the subalterns, were as green as their horses, but ninety per cent of their sergeants and corperals had had at least five years’ experience in the regular army. They certainly could not be compared to a crack regiment like the Horse Guards on parade. But they could perform smoothly all the maneuvers one ever sees in the field. ‘They were soon to go to the butts for a month of rifle practice—the marksmanship records of some of these new regiments is most cred- itable. It comes down to the old proposi- tion of pedagogics, that the speed with which we can learn a thing depends entirely on the intensity of our desire to know it. Four months after enlistment these Scottish Horse will be quite ready to try their strength against the Uhlans. But they will not be used so soon; they will have a couple of months more guarding communications before they will meet the enemy. Some of Kitchener’s new army has already gone to the front. Just how many have been sent to the Continent is a carefully guarded secret. But probably there are at least a quarter of a million British soldiers in France and Flanders. The men at the front are the best-cared- for—the best-fed and best-bathed—soldiers in history. ‘Their equipment is now at least equal to that of the Germans, and daily, as the new guns arrive, the strength of their artillery increases. Every one back from Flanders is full of praise for the commissariat. Never has so much been done for the com- fort of the private soldiers. After their spell in the trenches they are marched back to ‘rest camps.’’ Great vats have been built for their bathing; after a scrub in hot water they are given clean, dry clothes and a few lazy days of smoking and reading and sleeping. Tommy fights better for such care. All the responsibility for the intricate work behind the army—the arrangements for these comforts, for feeding, for moving troops and supplies, for getting up ample ammunition, the taking care of the wounded and notifying the families of the dead —all this responsibility is in the hands of a general who started life as a lackey. And this in the British army, where the corps of officers is so largely THE OUTLOOK a ‘“gentlemen’s club,” means stupendous ability. Kitchener and French - had great reputations before the war. ‘They could not be expected to do more than live up to them. The man whose reputation this war has made is Robertson. He was a footman before he enlisted as a private. By sheer ability he had fought his way up to the grade of general and a K.C.B. before the war; but very few people .outside of the army knew his name. Now he is on the books for Kitch- ener’s Chief of Staff. But all’ the men at the front hope he will stay where he is. If he goes to the Staff, it will be hard to find his equal for the commissariat. At the outbreak of the war the British navy was the most formidable in the world. But the Admiralty was not content with this initial superiority. There is to be a new navy to match the new army. When the ship-yards get to running smoothly, the navy will complete and put into commission one submarine every three days, one torpedo- boat or destroyer every week, and one super- dreadnought every month. ‘They expect to have things organized to this point by the first of May. And, once started at this rate, they can keep it up indefinitely. People whose estimate of British military strength was based on facts six months or a year old—as mine were—can hardly believe their eyes when they look at the transforma- tion. A few months ago the British army was not only small, it was slack. The officers of little countries like Belgium and Portugal were better trained than the English officers. Politics was rampant in the army. Dozens of officers resigned in order to train the vol- unteers of Ulster and to assist in illegal gun- running. It was perfectly good form for the officers to go in for big-game shooting or polo and leave the care of their men to the non-coms. Every department of the army was hopelessly bound up in red tape. Even the jolt of the Boer War did not really wake them up. They were notably slow to take up such innovations as flying-machines and submarines. ‘The truth of the matter was that nobody cared. All that has changed. Something obscure, but very real, has hap- pened to the British Empire. The people have made up their minds to win. The House of Commons has recently voted for an army of three miilion men. The ‘“ nation of traders’”’ will emerge from this conflict with the most formidable war machine—on land and sea—the world has ever seen.
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Current Events Pictorially Treated COPYRGHT BY AMERICAN PRESS ASSOCIATION THE AMERICAN SHIP WILLIAM P. FRYE, SUNK AT SEA BY A GERMAN CRUISER The European war has been brought geographically closer to the United States than ever before through the arrival at Newport News of the German converted cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich, with the captain and crew of the American sailing ship William P. Frye. This ship, with a cargo of wheat consigned ot nese apr po from Seattle, was sunk in mid-ocean by the German cruiser, on the allegation that her cargo was “contraband of war.” See editorial pages for comment
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PHOTOGRAPH BY BAIN NEWS SERVICE ROBERT LANSING, CHAIRMAN OF THE NEUTRALITY BOARD The recommendations of the Neutrality Board as to the action of the German cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich in destroying the American ship William P. Frye have been presented to the President, and will have an important bearing on the disposition of the delicate questions involved. See editorial pages
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PHOTOGRAPH BY UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD PHOTOGRAPH BY UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD KING CONSTANTINE QUEEN SOPHIE The King has opposed the popular sentiment in favor of The Queen is a sister of the Kaiser, and her influence has war against Turkey and her ally, Germany been strongly against the Allies PHOTOGRAPH BY INTERNATIONAL NEWS SERVICE PHOTOGRAPH BY MEDEM NEWS SERVICE EX-PREMIER VENIZELOS PREMIER GOUNARIS M. Venizelos has favored the Allies; as a result, with The new Premier’s policy a it is believed, be one of his Cabinet, he has been forced to resign strict neutrality, though popular sentiment favors war CONFLICTING COUNSELS AMONG THE RULERS OF GREECE
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FROM A aedet PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN FOR THE OUTLOCK BY THE BAIN NEWS SERVICE ROSIKA SCHWIMMER, PUBLICITY SECRETARY OF THE WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE ALLIANCE As the representative of the women of eleven nations, Mme. Schwimmer has been visiting the United States for the purpose of persuading the President to call a congress of the neutral nations of the world, wit the aim of asking for an immediate cessation of hostilities to consider terms of peace. Failing in this purpose, the women of these nations will meet_in Holland next month ata gigantic mass-meeting to protest against the war. See comment elsewhere
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BEA THE CHURCH OF THE FAT LAND THE FIRST ARTICLE IN A SERIES ON THE COUNTRY CHURCH BY MARTHA BENSLEY BRUERE AND ROBERT W. BRUERE The series of articles, the first of which follows, is the result of several months of travel and observation by the authorsin many sections of the United States. The articles answer in the negative the assertion that the country church is dying out. They show that, on the contrary, it ts adapting itself to new social conditions and human wants. Incidentally the articles recount personal experiences of unusual interest—sometimes amusing, often illuminating. Articles to follow will be entitled “ The Church of the Lean Land,” “ The Church of the Other Six Days,” and “ Pew versus Pulpit,” and there will be a final article drawing conclusions, with illustrative incidents. Mrs. Bruére will be remembered -by all readers of The Outlook as the author of a striking series of articles on “ Home Efficiency” Mr. Bruéere is well known as a writer on social topics in New York, as m 1912, which appeared in The Outlook an officer of the Rand School of Soctal Science, and in connection with other soctological work.—THE EbiTors. RUSTING people who live in the | cities and who read denominational reports are quite convinced that religion is dying out of the rural districts. They take it for granted that the power of the country church is measured by the strength of the responses from the ‘“‘ Amen corner,”’ by bearded deacons and frock-coated elders, and the willingness of the congregation to sit through the long prayer on uncushioned benches; and there are plenty of official statements to confirm them in their illusions. In 1911 the Rev. H. G. Beeman said : In the States of Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa in twenty-five years 281 Baptist churches have been dropped from the lists and 82 are on the point of being abandoned. In Ohio there are 150 pastorless Baptist churches, and 100 would be classed as decadent. The Presbyterian Board reports that out of 232 rural churches in Indiana 37.6 per cent are standing still and 47.8 per cent are losing ground; that of 225 churches in Illinois covering twenty denominations, including the Roman Catholic, 45 are at a standstill, 56 have lost membership, and 47 have been abandoned in the last ten years; and that in three counties in Missouri where 4 survey was made 8 per cent are stationary, 24 per cent losing ground, 19 per cent dying, and 11 per cent are dead. Practically every denomination makes similar statements. Led on by such statistics, we went out early in 1913 to see for ourselves the passing of religion in the country. The first abandoned church we found was in the richest agricultural section of the United States—the southern Iowa section of the corn belt. It was a poor, decrepit old thing, stumbling down on its forequarters like a lamed horse, but impressive because of the virtue that had gone out of it in the days when Iowa was new and the struggling settlers crowded in to hear about the Promised Land as the nearest place where there was plenty to eat and a chance torest. The stiff hinges yielded to us reluctantly; a startled bird fluttered up from its nest on the inner arch; everything was in disorder except the dust, which had not been disturbed since the last funeral. Lying on the pulpit was a report containing eight letters from the churches in the district : From the church at Caldwell—* One conver sion, but no additions to the church.” From the church at Freewill—* Some interest, but no additions to the church. We report five members excluded for non-fellowship.” From the church at New Sodom—* We have been strengthened by the addition of six mem- bers, four of whom were young sisters from the ranks of our Sunday-school.” From the church at Paleton—“ Was sorry to lose two by letter and one dismissed by re- quest. One confessed Christ with great joy and praising God.” From the church at Pleasant Rose—* Our 695
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THE CHURCH OF THE FAT LAND 697 church is in a languishing condition; still we have a faithful few who are trying to hold up the cross of Christ.” From the church at Riverside—‘ Five conver- sions and two renewals.” From the church at Turner—* On the part of members of our church there has been very little done.” From the church at Leath—“ We feel as if we have not done as much for the cause as we would like to have done, and as a church we feel very weak.” With these is published a circular letter containing this church counsel : Jesus never came to this world simply to show it how to live.... He came to die. ... The mis- sion of Jesus Christ to this world was definite and distinct, and so is the mission of his Church and of every man and woman in his Church. ... What is this mission of the Church? ... To answer this we go back to our question, What brought Jesus to this world? We say again, to die. These obedient churches show an aggre- gate decrease in membership of seventy-five ; a falling off of $691.85 in contributions ; a loss of $495.38 in financial resources, and of $400 in the value of property ; and an in- crease of $50 in their debt since the previous year. After visiting five of these eight, we took an automobile and wandered up and down the fat land to see if there were more like them. Everywhere we came upon aban- doned church buildings into which the people had crowded fifty years ago—rotting refuges for tramps, targets for the rifles of small boys, and rookeries for wild birds. In Iowa, the very richest State of all, they so. encum- ber the land that the Legislature has passed a law for their disposal. Whenever we reached the just-alive ones on Sunday. we were sure to hear the minister take the text in his teeth and start for the goal of eternity with it, incidentally scattering reproaches on his sparse congregation because it wasn’t larger, as a rocket scatters sparks from its tail. And the people who listened to him were invariably the very old who had con- tracted the habit in early youth and the very young who couldn’t help themselves. Now, so long as we ran rapidly and tried to read while in action these things seemed sufficient reason for saying that religion in the rural districts was in a bad way, and that something strenuous and sudden had got to be done about it if we were not to have an unchurched farming coramunity. But as soon as we began to go loiteringly and look at something besides decaying _wood and dropping plaster we found that the land was fairly cumbered with visible manifestations of the grace of God—* dry’’ towns every- where, consolidated schools, thrift, and pros- perity, with crime and pauperism reduced to a minimum. Were these people abandoned in wickedness ? The first inkling of the truth came to us one Sunday when we drove eight miles to find a certain meeting-house, discovered it boarded up and abandoned, photographed it as a sad example of decaying religious life, and, driving on down the road just because the warm sun was pleasant and the wind from the clover fields was sweet, found the new meeting-place of that congregation with twenty automobiles at its gate, crowded car- riage-sheds, and a great gathering praising God till the hills rang. And we had thought the abandoned cocoon of that church was evidence that it was dead ! Charlotte Perkins Gilman pictures a butter- fly as most dissatisfied with its metamor- phosis : “*T do not want to fly,’ said he, ‘I only want to squirm. I hate to be a butterfly, I want to be a worm.’”’ After vainly arguing with that unhappy insect on the advantages of aeronautics, she Says: “T left my fool in red and black ; The last I saw was this,— The creature madly climbing back Into his chrysalis.” Is that what the frantic denominations want the country churches to do? Don’t they know that only a dead worm stays for- ever in the cocoon? Certainly they are pouring out money to seal hermetically these bursting chrysalises. ‘The American Baptist Home Mission Society alone gave for this cause $293,311.32 in 1912, and the Baptist is not the largest Church through the country districts by four. ‘* Nobody wants to keep our church at the Four Corners open any longer—that is, no- body that belongs to it does,” a deacon’s wife in Ohio protested to us. ‘ We all want to go to Lebanon to church—it’s only seven miles, and the roads are fine. All but two families have got automobiles or carriages, and we’d be only too glad to see that those two get rides in whenever they want to go to church—
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which mostly they don’t do now. Why, in Lebanon there’s a beautiful church with a pipe organ. ‘They have a choir, and there’s a big enough congregation to pay a good minister and do a lot of interesting things. All our children go into town to high school ; why shouldn’t we go there to church? But the Home Mission Society won’t hear of us giving up this church—they keep sending us money. Don’t they think we can raise our own money if we want to ?” It is obvious to the meanest intelligence that they can, for the land flows with corn and cattle; there is plenty to eat, plenty to drink, plenty to wear, and work for every- body. Why don’t they, then? They do! Wherever a church has come out of the chrysalis stage and is preaching real religion it is well supported; but it wasn’t till the Rev. Richmond A. Smith, country church secretary for the Baptist Church of Iowa, invited us to an inter- denominational service at a church in south- ern Iowa, that we found it out. The distant members of that church must have started as soon as milking time was past—and it seems a violation of farm polity to milk a cow after the sun is up. We watched the roads fill with surreys and wag- ons and automobiles, loaded with women in muslin frocks, with flower-trimmed hats set properly low over the eyes, and men in ready- made clothes and the standardized straw hats of Broadway, Hennepin Avenue, and State Street. They were a most cheerful, happy group, and yet our sitting-by-the-bedside atti- tude of mind was still on us, and we entered the church velvet-footed lest we disturb the mourners. The conference opened with the singing of Gospel hymns led by one of those pro- fessional evangelists who used to light the fires of repentance for the country peo- ple fifty years ago. Shouting, “ Now, al- together! Praise God! Hallelujah!’’ he swung into lamentations over the lost and dreary world by sin oppressed, urged them to “plunge into the crimson flood,” and worked himself into a frenzy of rejoicing over the imminent prospect of exchanging the toil and care of this vale of tears for the “ home on Zion’s hill.” The people joined in dutifully at first—had not their parents and grandparents sung the same lines? But in the midst of sunshine and plenty the world didn’t seem such a bad place—not a 698 THE QUTLOOK vale of tears, anyway—and they showed no proper anxiety to be removed to Zion’s hill. And when the Rev. Richmond A. Smith began to speak he threw aside the outworn ideal of putting away this world, and held up before them the new religious theory that it is sacrilegious to discard anything so valua- ble. He did not place his emphasis on be- coming a better man, but on creating a better community. The sins he spoke of were social sins—the neglect of the roads, the neglect of the schools, indifference to filth about houses and barns from which disease might spread—and, ahove all, he spoke of the right use of the land and that hunger for speculation that is sweeping the corn belt like a plague. He was no human gadfly trying to sting each individual stray sheep back to the fold, but an engineer concerned to make all places safe for even the littlest lamb. Neither did the second speaker act as though he kept 2 dictagraph in the council chamber of the Most High. He chose for his text: “ Raise pigs to the glory of God,” and insisted that to do your every-day job in the best and most modern way was real religion. When the service was over, the congrega- tion crowded up around the speakers, and the only criticism came from a sturdy farm- er’s wife who wanted to know why so much had been said about pigs. “Why didn’t you talk about raising hens to the glory of God? That’s what we women want to do.” During the outdoor picnic lunch which followed, the talk ran back and forth over the sermon. “Didn’t he say that thirty-seven out of every one hundred farmers in the State was renters ?”’ ‘“‘ That’s what he said, and I guess he had the facts. You can tell it by the way they let the weeds go to seed on their roads. What’s it to them if they ain’t goin’ to be there next year ?” * That’s so! But it’s a lot tous. Have you seen the Canada thistles along the Grey farm that’s rented this year? The seeds ’ll blow over the whole township if they ain’t cut.” And then and there they agreed to go to- gether and cut the weeds on the Grey farm, and there was talk of how it was a good thing when the preachers “knew farming too.” At the afternoon meeting every inch of the Pata ter aoriias TORI 25?
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ce ae, recente A CHURCH IN THIS WESTERN TOWN HAS RENTED THE OPERA-HOUSE SHOWN IN THE PICTURE AND EXHIBITS “MOVIES” IN IT SOME “THE WAY OF SALVATION ” Church workers devoting a day to road-making for the cause of religion NEW ACTIVITIES OF THE CHURCH OF THE FAT LAND
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room was packed and the windows and doors were filled with listening faces. All the speakers interpreted the Gospel of Christ as a message of right living. One of them, turning to the Cradle Roll, the list of children born into the families of the church, which hung near the pulpit, spoke of the religious importance of having children well born and healthily reared, and, following the lead of his text, ‘“‘ Suffer the little children to come unto ine,”’ built up a climax of health maxims that culminated in a burst of righteous wrath against the filthy condition of country privies. Instead of its being a minister’s chief busi- ness to sit by death-beds, this one seemed to think that he ought to keep his people out of them as long as possible by means of modern hygiene and sanitation pastorally applied. When he was through, an elderly lady rose up in the midst of the church and said: ‘*We want to thank you for preaching such sense. ‘The Prayer says, ‘ Thy kingdom come on earth.’”’ After the service a farmer, whose home, with its trim white-enameled mail-order fur- niture, its acetylene lights, and its modern plumbing, we had seen, came to the speaker and said : “ I’m glad you talked about our school. I sent my children there last winter, but I sha’n’t do it again till it’s ventilated and warmed as well as the house. It ain’t fit to put pigs in now.”’ And the next morning we heard the dea- con say, as he salted his sheep : ‘ That was good gospel you preached about our privies. ‘They are about as bad as might be, and it’s time we cleaned things up.” Apparently these church members saw religion as a far more comprehensive thing than their fathers dreamed of when they built the now deserted meeting-houses. Fat hogs and modern plumbing they understood to be spiritual manifestations, and their Christian experience covered most of the good things in a world that God so loved. Having once seen the new social religion sprouting out of the old individualistic doc- trine, we were not again deceived by such unimportant symptoms as deserted church buildings, and we went down to the church of Jordan’s Grove, from which the Rev. Mr. Smith had come to be church secretary. When the Rev. Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith were first installed in the Jordan’s Grove par- sonage they could see from the gentle rise on which it stands that the farmers’-homes weré 700 THE OUTLOOK painted, that the farmers’ pigs were fat, that the farmers’ wives had silk for Sunday— which they didn’t wear to church! ‘The church was torn asunder by purely personal issues, the saints in the congregation thinking themselves privileged to peck at the sinners. The membership was dwindling and the meeting-house was falling to ruin above it. The new pastor was desperately discouraged. But one night the country doctor sent word that there was a sick man who wanted to see him. Being new in the neighborhood, Mr. Smith wasn’t sure where the sick man lived, so when he had gone as far as the doctor told him he inquired at a farm-house. No one there had ever heard the sick man’s name, no one knew that any one in the neighborhood was sick. ‘The pastor drove to the next house, and there he found a man in the last stages of a long illness. The man was a tenant, his landlord lived in a distant town, he had come into the township a stranger, and it was as a stranger that death took him away. As the pastor drove home through the dark that night a host of new thoughts flitted through his mind to the rhythmic squeak of the singletree. There were ten farms along that particular road between the church and the boundary of the parish, and of these ten he knew that seven had changed occupants during the last year. How could he establish the bonds of Christian neighborliness on so uncertain a foundation? Might there not be some connection between the tenant system and the evil days that had befallen the church at Jordan’s Grove? The seminary had taught him that his business was with men’s souls, and yet the Prayer said, ‘Thy kingdom come on earth.” ‘“‘T came to believe,” he told us, diffidently, “that it was the business of the church to show men how they might be doers of the Word.” Mr. and Mrs. Smith began doing the Word themselves by organizing a singing class, and out of the singing class grew a merry-go- round of oyster suppers, and out of this the Circle of Jordan’s Grove, a sort of club to which most of the families in the township belong. Just how much this Circle had ac- complished we didn’t know till we had visited Jordan’s Grove ourselves. We happened there on Children’s Day. The old building fairly glittered with new white paint, the walls were freshly frescoed, and the people crowded up to look at the new TSI: S
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702 concrete porch before they came into the church. ‘There was music by a young peo- ple’s orchestra—gay, pleasant, sunshiny music; there was. singing by everybody— gay, happy, laughing songs, not a note of religion being a Sad thing concerning itself with sin and punishment. . There was a gym- nastic drill by eight young girls with ‘gayly covered hoops—a graceful adaptation of the once’ popular Japanese fan dance. And the service ended with a little modern morality play called an ‘‘ Emblematic,” for which the pulpit was set as a stage—flower-trimmed, decorated with vines, and with a ‘ practica- ble ” gate to Eternal Life through which the young pilgrim, who, like Everyman, had been tempted by Riches ‘and Pleasure, Fame and Learning, at last was led by Religion and Faith and crowned with Christmas tree gold. , After the service everybody greeted every- body else, everybody asked everybody to din- ner, everybody told everybody the doings of the week, as was fitting where all were friends. The pecking saints and the pecked-at sinners had been brought together in a community service. Nobody was making an awful busi- ness of being good—they were enjoying it. And the Jordan’s Grove Circle was turning the good understanding with their neighbors which the church’ had brought about ‘into profit. The year before the Circle had started a co-operative stock sale. « ’ : .“ Everybody’ll be in it next year,” one of the farmers told us. ‘‘ Why, one: man’s offered: to enter twelve thoroughbred hogs already'! the dealers’ll be glad to come to us and save themselves so much traveling about, and we'll-get better prices.’ : Some of them, dissatisfied with the coal and feed dealer they were forced to patronize, had united to buy out his business and were running it co-operatively for the general bene- fit» And all together they were smarting over the school situation. “It’s a disgrace,” said the farmer’s wife who has managed the music since Mrs. Smith left, “‘a disgrace not to have a high school nearer than six miles. . I wish we could all get together and pay a good teacher to come here and teach them. can’t use the church till we get a big enough school-house. We'll be willing to help pay for it, though it’ll be a good many years before our children are ready to go.” You see, if we all get together and ~ guarantee the quality to be as represented, I don’t see why we ~ THE OUTLOOK And she hastily righted the youngest, who was just learning to walk. They did not use the name “ Social Center at Jordan’s Grove, but that is practically what it has become—a Baptist church in name, a Union Social Center in fact—and their social religion has already produced peace and neighborliness ; a rise in land values, people being anxious to live in so pleasant a neigh- borhood; a community effort for schools; a co-operative stock sale; and a full meeting- house. Certainly the prosperity of the people rather than the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the new church at Jordan’s Grove. For it is prosperity that has done away with the deadly monotony of country life, where the godly are cut off from the legitimate excitements of feeding beggars, reclaiming drunkards, or visiting prisons, and thrown back’ upon an undue consideration of their personal faults and the antics of their private and particular souls. Farther north in the corn belt we came upon a young Presbyterian minister who was called to struggle with a tiny church in a tiny farming center to which nobody who could avoid it gave any money. Instead of treat- ing religion as a sort of disease that anybody was likely to get if he was exposed to it frequently enough, he proceeded on the theory that it is the business of the church to conserve the interests of the community. He began his work by converting the parson- age lawn into a children’s playground, and marking out a tennis court back of the church for the use of the whole township, and came to an understanding with the manager of the little moving-picture show by which the min- isters of the town will back the “ movies ”’ if the ‘movies ” will consent to be censored by the ministers. Through this campaign he has got all the churches but one to join in union services in the evening, and on the night before we visited him he had preached to 260 people out of a total town population of 500! Sometimes, as in the case of Mr. Smith and this Presbyterian minister, it is the pastor who catches at the new life in the old faith and knits it into the community; sometimes it is the congregation itself that wakes the butterfly in the cocoon. Out where the fat land begins to climb into the Western mountains we found an old church of the Scotch Covenanters standing beside its attending tombstones. A group of ”
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A PROGRESSIVE PASTOR INTERPRETING HIS NEW GOSPEL TO THE D&ACON “THE NEXT MORNING WE HEARD THE DEACON SAY, AS HE SALTED HIS SHEEP: TIME WE CLEANED THINGS UP’”
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704 automobiles rested on the smooth green be- fore it, and the sheds were full of horses. Each family had cushioned its wooden pew to suit its own taste; there were flowers on the pulpit and a choir to lead the singing, a large congregation, and all the earmarks of a place where religion has taken hold on life. But the young minister devoted his entire sermon to confounding some heretic who had suggested that after four thousand years God might review the records of the damned and release some on_ probation from the torturing flames. Nothing to his mind was more certain than that damna- tion was damnation world without end, and that he could still scare people into being good. But when the sermon was over we gath- ered with a group of farmers in the Bible class. The lesson in the leaflet about Joseph was merely a starting-point for them. Why had Joseph been preferred above his breth- ren? Because he was the son of a favorite wife. And didn’t this prove that it was wrong for a man to have more than one wife, because, if he did, there was sure to be a favorite? And then, by leaps of reasoning that put logic to shame, the class plunged into a discussion of sex hygiene for the coun- try schools, in which they all believed ; and talk of the schools led to taxation, and roads, and farm tenantry. Before the lesson hour was over they had evolved a broad commu- nity programme through which Christians, seeing the world’s work to be God’s work, could do it properly. ‘“‘ Isn’t this a rather unusual discussion for a Bible class ?”’ we asked the leader after- ward. ‘Not here,” said he. ‘ These are the things we always thrash out. ‘They mean religion to us. We leave eternal damnation to the preacher.” And then he told us of a church farther north that had opened a co-operative store, and one farther east that was dragging the roads of the township, and another to the south that was adding to the public school teachers’ pay so as to insure a longer term ; and we dotted these places upon our map of the corn belt. In every live church that we visited we heard of other live churches doing similar work, till to cover our itinerary was a life journey. Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and the rest all are alive with the new gospel which manifests itself also in courses for country ministers at the agricul- THE OUTLOOK 24 March tural colleges and in Sunday-school societies to swat the fly. It is the very fatness of the corn belt that has made possible this religious awakening. Prosperity has done away with isolation and ignorance till people demand religious and social satisfactions that cannot be given by numbers of tiny churches dotted along the highways and presided over by underpaid and usually undereducated clergymen. What has been mistaken for irreligion is in reality a more reverent attitude toward life—a con- viction that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. And men who have left the church wherever it continues to preach personal salvation only are filling it to over- flowing wherever it lays the foundation of the kingdom of God on earth. For the church that was possible fifty years ago is impossible to-day. The environment to which it was adapted has disappeared. Nothing can bring it back, for a new religion has already sprung from the new soil and is blooming in the new atmosphere. The first wild corn of religion has been plowed under. It was food for the winter-bound birds of the spirit, no doubt, and some of these may now go hungry ; but in its place the tested seed of social welfare is springing up in even rows and the sober flocks of the Gospel are ex- ceedingly full fed. And this awakening of the spirit proves itself in print. In the teeth of an incredible number of churches that the denominations report as dying or dead the last Government enumeration of religious bodies shows that in the North Central States—that is, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Min- nesota, Iowa, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas—the propor- tion of the population reported as church members has increased 7.2 per cent since the previous report. These men of the new religion are going about the will of God with as much orderli- ness and precision as though it were their ordinary business. ‘They are formulating a programme, a new Thirty-nine Articles, so to speak, and in Iowa at least they are making a State-wide survey as a basis for it under the authority of the Baptist Church. The blanks on which the facts for this survey are fiow being tabulated hold 216 questions, which range from the kind of soil in the dis- trict and the length of the haul to market, to the wages paid the school-teacher and what excuse the preacher may have for not
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ene. 1915 THE CHURCH OF THE FAT LAND 705 attending the rural life conferences at Ames. All the necessaries of religion are supposed to be included in the survey, but there is not one question on theology in the whole list. We came upon a retired clergyman who preached in the Missouri bottoms and the Iowa prairies when they were just emerging from the grip of pioneer poverty. “T have dreamed of the country church as it might be,” he said. ‘It would be some- where down by the edge of the road, and there would be flowers about it, and places for the children to play, and a big veranda out in front. And the church room would have a polished floor covered with a rug, and the church pews would be chairs; and when the young people wanted to dance, the chairs would be pushed back and the rug would be rolled up, and if it were square dances they could call them from the pulpit, while the Sunday-school superintendent played the piano. And part of the church would be a great kitchen where the girls—yes, and the boys too—would learn about domestic science. And the room where the minister preached and where the children danced would have tables that could be moved in so that we could have supper or dinner or after- noon tea or anything else we wanted. And there would be a rest-room open every day in the week and all night for whoever was tired or needed it. And there would bea moving-picture machine running at least one night in the week, and they’d give those wonderful films from Dante and the Odyssey and ‘Parsifal ;’ and they would have the Gov- ernment demonstrator down to teach better farming, and an artist from somewhere to teach about beautiful pictures and beautiful clothes ; and when the church wasn’t being used for anything else it would be a gymna- sium, and the minister would be the director of it. And a public library would be there, too, and the minister or the minister’s wife would be the librarian. And if ever a man or woman came to that parish that knew more about anything than the rest of them did, that man or woman would be telling about it in the church or the minister would know the reason why. ‘That country church would be busy every day and evening ; it would never be shut. It would be the recreation center of the township, and the minister would be the social secretary. And all this would be in addition to what is ordinarily called the religicus instruction. I’d preach to them of the spiritual things of this world as well as the next. I’d tell them—” ** Oh,” said we, “ you’d teach them your- self? This would be your church ?” He laughed a little ruefully. * It would have to be, I guess. You see, it’s only a dream.”’ But it isn’t a dream. We have seen every separate part of it in the fat land, and in the little farming center of Maroa, Illinois, we found nearly all of it. The Presbyterian church there has a gymnasium and free baths; it conducts a cooking class and a public reading-room ; it has a stereopticon and a moving-picture machine; it has given the use of its basement to relieve the pressure on a crowded country school; and one of its advertisements in the local paper begins : “This is a church advertisement. It is meant to serve the business of religion.” “T like to think,” said the Sunday-school superintendent, “that Christ goes with us through cooking and playing and everything. Hitherto the churches have separated these things from religion.” This church is always busy, and yet the pastor says they have just begun to use it. The socialized church of the country which some people have been hoping for is already here. The richness of the corn belt has created it. To be sure, this Church of Pros- perity isn’t so multitudinously housed as the one it developed out of, not so frequently steepled, nor anything like so architecturally visible to the human eye. A good many of its services occur quite casually and far away from the meeting-house. It is not a congre- gation of terror-stricken children hiding frightened heads in the skirts of the Almighty, but of strong men working shoulder to shoulder with God in the perpetual creation of his world.
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WEST OF IRELAND BY WARREN BARTON BLAKE HAT is there west of Ireland but America? Well, there are the islands of the jagged Galway coast. Now Galway is in some ways Ireland at its most Irish, in spite of all they tell you of the romantic admixture of Spanish blood and French—blood of the shipwrecked Armada, and of the merchants who helped to make Galway a thriving port in days long before steam. ‘The islands off Galway are far less touched by British influences, far more purely Irish, than Galway itself. The islands nearest Galway town—for there is a county as well as a county seat of that name—are three in number, the Aran Isles. Aranmore, Inismaan, and Inisheer (for that is how they are named) ought to be, for historical and literary reasons, to say nothing of human reasons, the best-known rural area of the whole country. They are not. Something tells me that they will re- main comparatively unknown and almost entirely untraveled even after I have had my say about them. And I am not sorry. I want to go back to them, and if they were ever to become a stamping-ground for tour- ists they would be spoiled for me. And where should I go then? For there is noth- ing in Ireland west of Aran. Only Amer- ica! And ‘it’s a fine experience staying on Aran for one’s vacation,” said a Dublin man whom I met at Edward O’Flaherty’s hotel in Kilronan—the insular metropolis. ‘“ It puri- fies one’s mind along with one’s blood. My friends are persuaded, all the same, that I am mad to come here for vacations.”” The man I quote is a finely made fellow of thirty or a little more, with a long head that seems to me marked by thoughtfulness and refine- ment and distinction. I took him for a bar- rister or journalist rather than a business man, but he is instead proprietor of a big laundry—not a poetic business. We were discussing Aran just after England had de- clared war on Germany, and he said he had seven delivery wagons and horses, and feared that they had been requisitioned by Govern- ment. At Galway a great many horses had been taken only the day. before by the authorities, including car horses, bakers’ horses, the bottlers’, and others. Even the west coast of Ireland feels the pressure of war. . The mail steamer for the Aran Islands makes the trip from Galway docks thrice weekly. It was eight o’clock of a Thursday morning that we cast off, and I was a pas- senger for Kilronan, on Aranmore, the largest island of the three. It was more than noon when we reached our destination. Yet the distance is not great—not over thirty miles. And the time seems less than it is—provided always that one isn’t seasick. Galway Bay is said to be protected from storms by the islands themselves. Yet it can be rough there, and is seldom wholly placid. On this particular voyage there was a fresh wind, and the little steamer plunged and reared like a. performing broncho. In some weathers indeed she has to put back and postpone her trip for two days. But, whenever she does put out, she is met by curraghs from the two smaller islands—frail canoes of tar-coated canvas that ride the waves like cowboys of the sea. It is only at Kilronan that there is a stone quay and all the conveniences of an urban landing-stage. Indeed, the steamer herself is something of a curiosity to many people of County Galway and County Clare. Folk from inland come down to look her over as New Yorkers go to the Chelsea docks to inspect a newly arrived leviathan on her first voyage west—the Lusitania, for instance, some years since. Of the passengers who dis- graced themselves on my particular Thursday, two were young men from Clare, who came down to the docks only a few minutes before sailing time. They had never seen a steam- ship, and asked if they might board the Dun Aengus and look her over. ‘ Sure,” said the captain; but they stayed too long at her inspection, and soon they were under way. About five miles from shore they inquired if she wouldn’t soon turn back. ‘‘ You'll do well if you get back to Galway by six o’clock to- night,”’ said the mate; and they exclaimed at this: ‘* Then we'll miss the races altogether !” The poor fellows being sick, they doubtless acquired grand and expensive appetites. Their fares alone must have cost them each three shillings—plus dinners. But they can tell the villagers at home of their real ocean voyage. And the Galway Plate is an annual event. Many an Aran Islander has taken more of a voyage than this. There are something 707
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708 under three thousand on the islands, but in America there are probably twelve thousand Aran Islanders, and a good many of those now on the islands have lived in the States. On the middle island lives a man who re- turned from America with $10,000 and is regarded as a millionaire. He has built a good little cottage and lives there with his wife. I talked with one man who had stayed ten years in Massachusetts ; and Mrs. O’Flaherty, whose husband keeps St. Ronan’s Hotel, re- turned so long ago that she’s forgotten when, after spending well-nigh a generation in Boston and ’Frisco. Her son-in-law, who lives at Seven Churches, spent his youth in Mexico and the States, and has come back a rich man, by Aran standards. When Mrs. O’Flaherty described his house to me she said I would know it by the garden in front of itggnd by its grandeur—“ as fine a house as ever you sawin America.” And certainly Mr. Concannon’s house and O’Flaherty’s own are the finest on the islands—always except- ing the clergy’s and the barracks of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The garden, too, is a notable feature in Aran, where every square inch of arable land must do its part in sup- THE OUTLOOK porting life—so wide are the pastures of rock and so thin the soil. Primitive Aran, that has never seen a motor car, and probably never will, with its peasants in homespun and. sandals of un- tanned cowhide, has other distinctions than antiquity of modes and virtues. Its history and speech and legends and only half-canon- ical saints are rivaled by its geological curi- osities ; for physically it is one of the most curious groups of islands on any coast whatever. Its cliffs are matched in wonder by its great prehistoric relics: forts made of stones fitted together by the Firbolgs-with such refinement of labor that they have stood, without mortar, some of them two thousand years. Frankly, these strange relics of the warfare of leg- end’s twilight fascinate me more than the beehive cells whither holy men withdrew for fasting and for prayer, or the “ Grave of the Seven Romans,” or even the. old’ ruined churches and sites of monasteries. But here stood the schools that were cyclone cellars of Christian culture when the light of learn- ing had seemingly been all but extinguished by the storm of wars waged on Ireland’s mainland and in the brutalized Europe of the “GALWAY BAY IS SAID TO BE PROTECTED FROM STORMS BY THE ISLANDS THEMSELVES, YET IT CAN BE ROUGH THERE, AND IT IS SELDOM WHOLLY PLACID”
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a alias “SHE IS MET BY CURRAGHS FROM THE TWO SMALLER ISLANDS—FRAIL CANOES OF TAR-COATED CANVAS THAT RIDE THE WAVES LIKE COWBOYS OF THE SEA” dark ages. Some say that these western islands were more frequented in that time than the shores near by ; that, besides being a kind of university, Aran was in one sense the second birthplace of Christianity. That Christianity endured in Ireland, or in west- ern Europe even, is credited in large part to the island missionaries, and Aran is crowded with their dismantled relics. At Seven Churches, on Aranmore, my voluntary guide points to a dry well, and calls it the Well of the Holy Virgin. People still come to it on pilgrimage, for its waters (when they flowed) were famous for their cures; and on the bushes that grow at its mouth they tie small bits of flannel to indicate the number of prayers they have already said—each keeping a particular twig for her prayers or for his; so that the appearance of the well is dis- orderly enough—with red rag and blue rag and gray rag fluttering in the breeze. I re- call some earlier traveler to the west of Ire- land recording a remark spoken to some such peasant as the one I met at Seven Churches. “ Surely,” said he, ‘‘ you cannot think that the saints of heaven need those bits of rag to remind them of your prayers ?” “Troth, no,” was the peasant’s quick answer. ‘No more than your good friends in the grand houses where yous go visitin’ would bé wantin’ to be remembered of you. But you lave the little white ticketeens all the same, to let the quality know you’d been in it; and them little dockets and the rags, as you call them, are the same thing.”’ Yes, Aran has been a refuge of Christian- ity in wild times, just as it remains a wonder- ful storehouse of Gaelic tradition and lin- guistics. So many students of Ireland’s ancient speech—German as well as native Irish and French and American—have vis- ited these wild wet islands that Synge says in his remarkable account that most of the strangers the islanders see are indeed phi- lologists. . Hence the natives conclude that language studies, particularly Gaelic, are society’s chief occupation. “‘T have seen Frenchmen and Danes and Germans,” one islander told Synge on Inis- maan, the middle island; ‘“‘and there does be a power a Irish books along with them, and they reading them better than ourselves. 3elieve me, there are few rich men now in the world who are not studying Gaelic.” 709
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Cs wa Se a arn FERRE SS Ee abs shea ote oe For my own part, I met no strangers at all on Aran, save an English concert master, some Irish gentlefolk from Dublin and Cork, several priests, a young actor of the Abbey Theater Company who was allowing himself a few short hours at Kilronan to absorb ‘“‘local color,’’ and two or three American tourists hardly convalescent from their rough trip out from Galway; but in the visitors’ book at the St. Ronan Hotel I read some in- teresting badinage between English and Ger- man visitors to the place. ‘Two Englishmen from Lancashire, who had spent parts of three days on the largest island in the sum- mer of 1911, wrote this frank comment on what they saw and found: A deeply interesting island and people, and a pleasant, homely hotel. If only the villagers’ houses were as clean and cozy, Kilronan would become an almost popular holiday place. The white exteriors are curious'y contradicted by the interiors, with their pigs, poultry, and peat- smoked walls. We commend to visitors a visit to the rocky coasts of the other side of the island, and the plays of J. M. Synge, which are concerned with the life of these islands. And the next entry, by ‘“ Heinrich Mar- tens, Berlin, Germany,” is brief and to the point. Herr Martens writes: An Englishman can see nothing Irish except pigs. It is perfectly true that Englishmen who live in neatly ordered villas at Bolton, Lan- cashire, or Americans inhabiting well-ordered flats in Manhattan or detached frame houses, eight rooms and bath, in Newton Lower Falls, would-be miserable in the cottages of Aranmore. It is equally true that any one looking into one of those cottages stands a fair chance of seeing a cat on a chair, a dog on the dirt floor, and chickens and ducks quite at home ’most anywhere—pigs, too, no doubt. Why not? Wouldn’t any one look- ing at it through lorgnettes exclaim, ‘‘ How primitively sweet and St. Franciscan !’’ if it occurred in a painting of the Holy Family by some old master? For the Aran islanders are not sophisticated folk. And their spirit of communism, which keeps them, poor as they are, from supplying dny candidates for Galway poorhouse, extends to the animal kingdom generally. In the north of Ireland one hears the phrase, ‘(a Protestant-looking town.” It means (even when used by Catholics) that the houses are neat—perhaps even overgrown with roses. And in County Antrim I met a 710 THE OUTLOOK hustling young Ulsterman who, discussing the poverty of the south, said: ‘“‘ You can’t pity them very much. ‘They won’t work.” Now, whether this be true of the south, I shall not argue here; but any one who uses this statement as an argument against Home Rule, and against Catholicism in Ire- land as compared with the beneficence of Presbyterianism, ought to be reminded of these Aran Islands—flinty spoils snatched by devoted endeavor from the sea itself. ‘“ And if it is damp and wet so often,” says an old man ” (and this on rather the richest of the islands), ‘‘ lucky it is that it is so, for other- wise what rye would we have at all, and what potatoes ?”? For, no matter how poor the land west of Ireland, these people seem able to grow fine potatoes on it, never a weed in the patch. Flowers too, since O’Flaherty’s front yard is full of vivid pinks (a great flower in Ireland), bachelor’s-buttons, asters, nas- turtiums, hollyhocks, sweet-peas, and all sorts of flowers I don’t know by name, with pan- sies of all colors and great size. The house itself is all rose vines and ivy, and there are geraniums brightening the windows. All these flowers bloom especially well in this Irish climate ; the sea (as always) heightens their shades. This particular establishment is, you remember, on an island nearer to America than any other part of what we call Europe; its air is clean and clear and pure. And when it rains? ‘Oh, when it rains, it’s dirty everywhere,” says your islander. I have mentioned John Synge in an earlier paragraph, quoting from his book on the Aran Islands—a book destined to live as one of the most personal and pungent of travel books, worthy of mention in one breath with Borrow’s “ Bible in Spain ” and ‘Stevenson’s “ Travels with a Donkey.” Synge, the dram- atist, and his use of Aran material must be known everywhere to those who know vivid English prose, instinct with the spirit of satire and the spirit of, poetry. One evening in the kitchen of Edward O’Flaherty’s little inn there were gathered round the range the man of the house and herself and Nellie (diligently reading by a ruinous light) and Michael and myself. And for the first time I mentioned the name of Synge and asked the assembly if they had ever heard of him. ‘* He was a sort of poet and playwright,” I explained, ‘and came here from Dublin, I am told, and wrote books about it.” Michael had heard tell of him. ‘ He was cop
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COPYRIGHT BY UNDERWOO) & UNDERWOOD “IN THE NORTH OF IRELAND ONE HEARS THE PHRASE, ‘A PROTESTANT-LOOKING TOWN.’ IT MEANS THAT THE HOUSES ARE NEAT—PERHAPS EVEN OVERGROWN WITH ROSES”
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712 THE OUTLOOK a clergyman,” he said; “but that was long ago.” *“ Ah, no, but it isn’t the clergyman the gentleman means,” said Mrs. O’Flaherty. “Tt is the nephew of the clergyman, a young man who came down to the islands just like the gentleman himself, and went to live for a time on the middle island, and not such a long time in it either—perhaps a month it was.” *“ Yes,”’ said O’Flaherty, “‘ and then wrote it all down in a book when he got back to Dublin, and made it a pack of lies, and told how the islanders were a set of raving sav- ages. I looked into the book myself, and half of it is not true at all.” “If he should come down from Galway again,” volunteered gentle Michael, “he would not write a book again, but wouldn’t we boys be pushing him over one of those tall cliffs you were telling us of at Dun Aengus ?” ‘* He is dead, I believe,” I said, somewhat hastily, for I hated to think of Michael as a murderer. “T know,” says Michael; ‘and left a great fortune when he died.” “ He was a nice-looking young man,’ mused O’Flaherty, more charitable than the rest, for he alone was puffing a pipe. “And ’twas a bad use he made of his looks, then,’’ says Mrs. O’Flaherty, usually bd so kind andscharitable—so kind that she is sorry that German ships even should be “drowned” at sea—‘for he went to the Atlantic Hotel on this island, and when he told them he was nephew of Mr. Synge, who had been the clergyman here, they made free with him, and he would sit with them evenings; and then afterwards he made a book of it all and didn’t get things right either. For he was a stranger, and was only two weeks or the like in it at all.”’ I wonder if any one who ever wrote a really notable travel book, or regional fiction, or drama of strong vitality, was appreciated ‘or tolerated even. by those of whom he wrote? I think of no such case. After they had once seen his writings Daudet never dared return to Tarascon, that I remember. Kipling thought to pay a tribute to our Massachusetts fishermen, but they found harsh words for him and rude corrections at Gloucester. Mr. Cable has been regarded in New Orleans as an interloping alien, I am told. And Canon Hannay, of St. Patrick’s— ‘*George A. Birmingham ”—is not popular at Westport. When his play was acted there by an English company last spring, the scenery of ‘‘ General John Regan” was damaged by the vegetables they threw. The case of Synge and the Aran islanders is in no sense an exception. “rr IS PERFECTLY TRUE THAT AMERICANS INHABITING WELL-ORDERED FLATS IN MANHATTAN OR DETACHED FRAME HOUSES IN NEWTON LOWER FALLS WOULD BE MISERABLE IN THE COTTAGES OF ARANMORE” S{ = A SS AF re me OF Oe MR zs
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REMINISCENCES’ BY LYMAN ABBOTT CHAPTER XV THE NEW JOURNALISM HE New York “ Independent ”’ was established in 1848 as a representa- tive of radical Congregationalism, and placed under the joint editorship of three Congregational ministers—Dr. Richard Salter Storrs, Leonard Bacon, and Joseph P. Thomp- son. Independence in Church carries with it independence in State, and the new journal gave voice to the reforming spirit of the time. It was especially vigorous in its interpretation and advocacy of the anti-slavery movement. In 1861 Henry Ward Beecher succeeded the triumvirate and became editor-in-chief, and the editorials which he wrote on the slavery question were quoted and copied North and South and exerted a powerful influence in shaping public opinion. But he soon wearied of the regularity and routine inevitable in editorial work, and in the fall of 1863 retired, giving place to Theodore Tilton, his protégé, a brilliant writer but an erratic thinker. Mr. Beecher continued, however, to write for the paper at intervals, and was under contract to give to it a sermon every week for publica- tion. When the Republican party, after the death of Abraham Lincoln, enforced upon the South a policy of universal suffrage which devolved the political power in the Southern States upon the ignorant and incompetent, too often led by the self-seeking and the corrupt, Mr. Beecher parted company with his old anti-slavery allies, and when a soldiers’ convention was held in Cleveland, Ohio, to pledge from men of unquestionable loyalty their support to President Johnson in his resistance to the Republican radical policy, Mr. Beecher wrote a letter of sympathy which aroused against him almost as much indigna- tion as Daniel Webster’s 4th of March speech in favor of the compromise measure had aroused against that statesman sixteen years before. The ‘“ Independent,” which adhered to the radical wing of the Republican party, sharply criticised its former editor, and at the same time, without notice to Mr. Beecher, ceased the publication of his ser- mons. The criticism Mr. Beecher bore, as he bore all such criticisms, with equanimity. ~ ¥ Copyright, 1914, the Outlook Company. If the withdrawal of the sermons had been accompanied with any explanation to the pub- lic, I think he would have borne that also. But no explanation was offered; the public, which is accustomed to jump to its conclu- sions without waiting for a knowledge of the facts, assumed that Mr. Beecher had out of pique ceased to furnish his sermons to the paper which had criticised him, and he was deluged with letters from all over the country rebuking him for acting in such disregard of the principles and the spirit which in his preaching he inculcated. In sheer self-de- fense he gave to the “ Independent” the three months’ notice required to end the con- tract, and at the same time let the facts be known. It may be presumed that the pro- testing letters now began to pour in upon the “Independent.” At all events, it promptly proposed to recommence the publication of the sermons. But, while Mr. Beecher was not easily aroused by any injustice to himself, when his resolution was once taken he did not easily reverse it. His connection with the ‘“‘ Independent ” was never renewed. This break took place in the fall of 1866. Mr. Beecher’s friends at once proposed to start another weekly which should be the exponent of his views, political and religious ; but for a time he resisted all persuasions which would lead him into a position of apparent rivalry with the journal whose editor, Theodore Tilton, and publisher, H.C. Bowen, were members of his church and had been his warm personal friends. Three years passed—time enough for the public to forget the incident and to give the “ Independent ”’ a standing quite apart from Mr. Beecher. A little paper called the ‘Church Union,” with a circulation of two or three thousand, was in existence, devoted to the promotion of an organic union of all Protestant churches. in one body, an ideal which Mr. Beecher thought neither practicable nor desirable. The publishing house of J. B. Ford & Co. purchased this paper and converted it into the “Christian Union,” devoted to the pro- motion of a unity of feeling and a co-opera- tion of effort of all Christian churches, and 713
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714 in June, 1870, it began its new life with the salutatory of Henry Ward Beecher as its editor-in-chief. In this salutatory he defined both the purpose and the spirit of the new journal. ‘The “Christian Union,” he said, “will devote no time to inveighing against sects. But it will spare no pains to persuade Christians of every sort to treat one another with Christian charity, love, and sympathy. . Above all, and hardest of all, it will be our endeavor to breathe through the columns of the ‘ Christian Union’ such Christian love, courage, equity, and gentleness as shall ex- emplify the doctrine which it unfolds, and shall bring it into sympathy with the mind and will of the Lord Jesus Christ, in which great labor we ask the charity of all who differ, the sympathy of all who agree, and the prayers of all devout men, whether they agree with or differ from us.”’ Nearly twenty years before, F. D. Maurice, whose provocation was great and who was never lacking in courage, had made, in a letter to Lord Ashley, a bitter attack on the religious press of England, in which he said : “The principle of doing evil that good may come, that it is lawful to lie to! God, that no faith is to be kept with those whom they account heretics, are principles upon which these Protestant writers habitually and sys- tematically act. The evil which they do to those whom they slander and attack is trifling ; the evil which they do to their readers and admirers is awful.” I do not think the American religious press ever deserved so severe an indictment; whether the English press deserved it or not I do not know. But, with the possible exception of the ‘“ Inde- pendent,” all the religious papers of any note were denominational organs. They have been not inaptly called ‘trade jour- nals.” Their first duty was to report the doings and defend the practices and tenets of their respective sects. And the amenities which characterized their denominational con- troversies is not unfairly illustrated by the following paragraph from the New York ‘ Independent,” published about the time of which I am writing, and referring to a con- temporary religious weekly : Take a man who can neither write, nor preach, nor keep his temper, nor mind his own business ; thrill his bosom day by day with a twenty years’ dyspepsia; flush his brain with the hallucination that his bookkeeping mind is So quoted in his biography, but I suspect is a mis- print; probably should be “ lie for God.” THE OUTLOOK competent to religious journalism; put a pen in his hand wherewith to write himself down a Pecksniff ; set him, like a dog in his kennel, to make a pastime of snapping at the respectable people of the neighborhood, and then, gentle reader, you have a specimen copy of the “ Evangelist.” That a paper could be a Christian paper and not a church organ appeared to this sec- tarian press quite impossible. The novel proposal was greeted with a chorus of pro- test, criticism, and derision which was not always free from personalities. The following paragraph from one of Mr. Beecher’s earliest editorials must here suffice to interpret to the reader the kind of reception which was ac- corded to the “ Christian Union ”’ by its re- ligious contemporaries and the spirit in which Mr. Beecher replied to their welcome : The “Watchman and Reflector” has intro- duced a needless personal element into its re- marks: “ With the highest respect, however, for Mr. Beecher’s pulpit ability and his great freedom from a blind regard for sect, we doubt his competency to guide Protestant Catholicism. He is too impulsive. He is too sentimental. He is too loose. He is too ready to surrender truth.” In editing the ‘* Christian Union ” Mr. Beecher no more proposes “to guide Protestant Catholicism ” than, in editing the “ Watchman and Reflector,” Mr. Olmstead proposes to guide the Baptist churches of New England. May we not be allowed to contribute what little we can to so good an end as the more cordial co-opera- tion of all Christians? As to the rest of the paragraph (“ He is too impulsive. He is too sentimental. He is too loose. He is too ready to surrender truth”), we shall take it to heart and strive henceforth to be slower, dryer, tighter, and more obstinate. The public appreciated the purpose of the “Christian Union” better than did the de- nominational organs, and it sprang at once into a circulation of thirty thousand, probably larger than that of any church organ, with possibly one or two exceptions. It was the chromo age, and also the age of giving pre- miums to subscribers. The enterprising publisher got two charming chromos of a little child with the descriptive titles ‘‘ Wide Awake” and “ Fast Asleep,” had one hun- dred and thirty thousand copies printed in France, gave a copy of each print to every new subscriber to the “ Christian Union,” and in a single year pushed the circulation up to one hundred and thirty thousand or thereabouts. Meantime I was both writing a weekly
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PHOTOGRAPH BY TABER HENRY WARD BEECHER AND MRS. BEECHER litle paper ... . was in existence, . The publishing house of J. B. Ford & Co. purchased this paper and converted it into the ‘ Christian Union’ . ». andin June, 1870, it began its new life with the salutatory of Henry Ward Beecher as its editor-in-chief. ... Mr. Beecher during the first year of the ‘ Christian Union’ had written constantly for it; and what he wrote had the impress of his genius.’’ See pages 713 and 716 a ae hme a,
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716 letter for the ‘“‘ Christian Union” and doing some incidental editorial work for the ‘“ Inde- pendent,’ chiefly book reviewing. This casual and intermittent employment gave me a somewhat intimate acquaintance with the feeling of both the editor and the publisher of the ‘‘ Independent,” and I took occasion to warn Mr. Beecher that the phenomenal success of his paper had intensified their hostility to him, aroused by his withdrawal three years before. He laughed at my fears ; and I must confess that when the conspiracy against him was consummated and charges were brought against him with the avowed purpose of driving him into retire- ment, I was no less amazed than he. My conviction, which at the end of the long trial I expressed editorially in the columns of the *‘ Tllustrated Christian Weekly,’ that ‘“ the inherently improbable accusation is the product of a jealous malice,” is the judgment of history. Accusers and accusation are now alike-.forgotten. But, coupled with other causes, they proved at the time disastrous to the “ Christian Union.” The subscriptions purchased by chromos did not stay purchased. It was said that in one Canadian town French- Canadian subscribers were obtained who could not read the English language, and who had subscribed to the paper solely for the pictures. Another chromo for the next year’s campaign proved ineffective. The firm of J. B. Ford & Co. failed, whether owing to this collapse in the subscription list or to other causes I do not know. A small corporation of friends of Mr. Beecher was organized to publish the ‘“ Christian Union.” But at that time Mr. Beecher’s name was not a name to conjure by. His church was still ccowded. Whenever he lectured throngs flocked to hear him. But the paper which bore his name had to make its way against an ebbing tide and an adverse wind. I believe, however, that it would have more than held its own, in spite of these adverse circumstances, if it had not been for one other circumstance not less adverse. Mr. Beecher, during the first year of the ‘ Chris- tian Union,” had written constantly for it; and what he wrote had the impress of his genius. Then came the time of accumulating difficulties. To write -became an arduous task. When he wrote, there was no audience visibly present to inspire his pen, as there was when he spoke to inspire his tongue. Though his name stood on the first page of the ‘“‘ Christian Union ”’ as its sole editor, he THE OUTLOOK the 24 March rarely wrote for it. Yet he would not allow its columns to defend his good name from attack. I doubt whether there was any jour- nal in America which had as little to say about him as the ‘‘ Christian Union.” His enemies would not take it because it carried hisname. His friends did not take it because it carried nothing of his but his name. His associate, Mr. George S. Merriam, under other circumstances, would have made a great editor. He wrote a beautiful English because his was a beautiful spirit. His per- sonality illustrated Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase ‘“ sweetness and light.” He had a spiritual and luminous quality which often reminded the reader of the editorials of R. H. Hutton in the London ‘ Spectator.” His character enabled him to draw about him a notable corps of contributors. The ‘“ Chris- tian Union ” under his editorship was, in my judgment, the best, though not the most popular, literary weekly in America. But, though it offered to its readers Mr. Beecher, it gave neither Mr. Beecher nor anything about Mr. Beecher; and Mr. Merriam re- signed. It was necessary to give somewhat fully this early history of the ‘‘ Christian Union ” in order that the reader might understand the conditions which confronted me when, on September 13, 1876, I became associated with Mr. Beecher in the editorship of the paper, and practically assumed its entire con- trol. The following letter from my father will serve to indicate to the reader that the winter preceding was a time of special work and special anxiety : “Sunday Evening, “ My dear Son: ” Fobtuary 20, 1876. “IT slip this line for you into my letter to H , to say how much we all think of you at this time when you are under so heavy a pressure of duty and responsibility—with the care of the ‘ Weekly,’ the work of pushing forward the Commentary, attending to the preparation of so many other miscellaneous writings, and, last of all, the duties of the very responsible position you occupy in the Council. We read all the articles of yours in the papers, and watch especially for your name in the daily reports of the proceedings of the Council. How you can stand up under the load of such complicated burdens, I don’t see. I feel a great desire to help you in some way, for, though I well know you have long since outgrown all need of any help that a father can render, and all capacity of receiv-
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1915 ing benefit from it, still the tendency to wish to render it still lingers, and I have no doubt your aunts share with me in this feeling. All we can do, however, is to say, Take good care of yourself and do not work too hard. And especially do not add to the other thoughts that press upon you the feeling that such a line as this requires any answer. ‘ FATHER.”’ The Council to which my father refers was the once famous but now forgotten Advisory Council called by Plymouth Church to advise it respecting its course in dealing with the charges which had been preferred against Mr. Beecher by Theodore Tilton and Henry C. Bowen. It was the largest council ever known in the history of Congregationalism, consisting of two hundred and _ forty-three delegates, including some from as far west as Kansas and Minnesota. It was in continu- ous session for nine days, from February 15 to February 24. As I was made chairman of the Business ‘Committee, my presence at all its sessions was necessary, and my respon- sibility for the preparation and arrangement of the business was considerable. The Com- mentary to which my father refers was proba- bly the volume on the book of Acts which was published in 1876, and which I was there- fore at this time seeing through the press. As this volume was elaborately illustrated by pictures selected not for ornament but for the purpose of aiding the reader to understand the Apostolic narrative, its publication in- volved some special research and a good many conferences with both artist and printer. In addition, during the summer of 1875 I prepared the article for ‘“‘ Harper’s Weekly ” on the Beecher trial referred to in a previous chapter, and also prepared a pamphlet of fifty-four pages entitled “« Uncon- tradicted Testimony in the Beecher Case.” My brother Austin was one of the counsel in that case, and had day by day collected and arranged the testimony with a series of cross- references, indexing it both by subject-matter treated and by the names of the witnesses testifying. I went over this testimony, sub- jecting it to 4 careful analytical examination in order that, on the one hand, I might fall into no error in the pamphlet, and, on the other, omit no material fact in my article for ‘“‘ Harper’s Weekly.” About the same time there arose a serious problem respecting the management of the “ Illustrated Christian Weekly.”’ Its circulation had fallen off, though REMINISCENCES 717 it still had a circulation larger than most of its religious contemporaries. I wished to meet this falling off by providing some addi- tional attractions in the paper. The business manager wished to meet it by cutting down the appropriations. It was at this juncture, in the spring of 1876, that the proposition was made to me to become associated with Mr. Beecher in the editorship of the ‘“ Christian Union.” The objections will at once occur to the reader of the foregoing pages. It was an- other experiment, and it seemed to me that my life thus far had been nothing but a series of experiments. I had been an ex- perimental lawyer, an experimental pastor, an experimental secretary, an experimental author, and now it was proposed that I should exchange one experiment in editor- ship for another experiment in editorship. The paper to which I was invited had gone through a boom and a collapse, and it is diffi- cult to say which is the greater blow--to per- manent prosperity. But this very fact ap- pealed tome. Because some of Mr. Beecher’s old friends had turned against him and others had deserted him and were maintaining a neutral attitude, I wished publicly to identify myself with him. I wanted to stand where _some of the shots aimed at him would strike me. I had obtained something of a reputa- tion, and believed that joining him in his newspaper enterprise would be a distinct, and possibly an important, advantage to him. The atmosphere of the Tract Society was charged with suspicion if not with hostility to him and to much for which he stood, so much so that when I penned the editorial in the “Illustrated Christian Weekly ” charac- izing the accusations of Mr. Beecher as a product of “ jealous malice” I was by no means certain that it would not be objected to by some members of the Publication Committee, and I had decided that if such objection was made I would resign my posi- tion. Most important of all the considera- tions in favor of the change was the addi- tional freedom which it promised me. I be- lieved heartily in the purpose and spirit of the ‘Christian Union” as they had been defined by Mr. Beecher in his salutatory. ‘The op- portunity to have some share in promoting the unity of Christendom, not by an organic union of all churches in one church, but by the co-operation of all churches in the teaching of Christian truth and the inspira- tion of Christian life, constituted: a strong
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718 appeal to me. My father, whose counsel I sought, as I did on all important questions, followed his usual course. He put before me certain considerations which occurred to him, both for and against the change, much as a judge in his charge presents the argu- ments pro and con to a jury, and then left the decision in my hands. The letter is so char- acteristic of his wise method that I repro- duce it : ** Monday morning. ** Dear Son: ‘* T wrote you on Saturday in regard to the great question which is now before your mind, and though I have thought of it much since, I have very little more to say; and yet cannot let the letter to Abby go without adding a word. As to the question of divid- ing one’s time between books and editorial labor, I think most favorably of the former on the whole, as I have found it much easier to lay up means for the future in the form of books of permanent value than to save it out of present income. And were it not for the ‘friction’ and other discomforts connected with the ‘ Weekly,’ I should feel much hesi- tation in leaving it for a less certain though more promising venture in another but more engrossing field of labor. But then working against friction is the most uncomfortable way of spending force, whether mechanical or mental ; excepting one, and that is getting drawn gradually into a hopeless and intermi- nable controversy. I am more and more con- vinced of the importance of what I suggested in my previous letter—that is, in event of embarking in this new enterprise, of taking efficient means at the outset to prevent the paper’s becoming the special champion in a controversy in a great measure so personal. But in whichever way you are led to decide I doubt not you will be led to decide wisely, and I am sure that if anybody can draw the ‘Christian Union’ out of the position of danger I fear for it, you are the man.” After much deliberation and many confer- ences between the managers of the ‘‘ Christian Union ” and myself, I accepted the invitation. These conferences extended from the last of April into August. ‘There were some im- portant changes that had to be made, which, though they seemed wise both to them and to me, could not be settled upon without consid- erable deliberation. The Christian Union Publication Company owned a printing-press, bought when its circulation was one hundred THE OUTLOOK and thirty’ thousand. For such a press it had no need, nor could it find employment for it unless it was to open a job printing office. It was disposed of. The by-laws of the company gave to Mr. Beecher absolute authority to determine what should go into the “‘ Christian Union,” whether in its literary or its advertising pages. The trustees con- ferred on the associate editor, in the absence of the editor-in-chief, this authority. As the editor-in-chief was always absent, my author- ity was practically absolute. My name was put with Mr. Beecher’s at the head of the columns. Whether Mr. Beecher wrote much or little, no subscriber could justly complain that he was promised Beecher and given only Abbott. Finally, it was agreed that I should have one full year to make trial of my abili- ties; after that time the contract between myself and the company could be terminated by either party on reasonable notice to the other. I have never wanted to work for any employer after he ceased to want my work. From the very first Mr. Beecher put the whole control of the paper unreservedly into my hands; how promptly and how unre- servedly the following note will show. The reader will observe from its date that it was sent to me two weeks before the first issue of the ‘* Christian Union ” under the new management. ‘The circular to which he refers was one which I had prepared for use in announcing the change in the paper : “ August 25; 1876. “ My dear Mr. Abbott : “T return the Circular with such additions as suggest themselves. If in any point they can be changed to advantage, they are sub- mitted to your judgment. I think the body of it excellent. *T inclose also an editorial which you can change in any manner that seems to you judicious. Yours truly, “HH. W. BEECHER.” Theretofore the proof of the “ Christian Union ”’ had been sent to Mr. Beecher every Monday morning and his revisions called for Monday night. Sometimes those revisions had been considerable, on one or two occa- sions revolutionary. ‘The first Saturday after I had assumed charge the foreman of the printing-office came to me to know whether the proofs should be sent as usual. This was my first knowledge of the custom. I considered a moment, then replied in the negative. If I sent them, Mr. . Beecher
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HORAZIO C. KING, eae Vou. XLV.—No. 11. NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 13, 1876. $3.00 YEARLY mx ADVANCE. U.S. and Canada postage prepaid. Coprniont 18% BY THE CuRIeTIAN UNION PUBLISHING ComPaNY. CONTENTS. Paar, PLYMOUTE PULPIT: Christ's Joy in Living....... Books aND AUTHORS: George Eliot's New Novel.. 212 The Norman Conquest...... 212 Bishop Simpson on bis Sect 212 Notes. m3 BOMORLAL ARTICLES Star Paper: A Ride in the Clouds....... Portry: ‘The Moth Fiy .... CONTRIBUTED ARTICLES: An Eventide Conference... 208 ‘The Marquis De Lafayette. 200 My Interview with the Arch- eeeceseceesereeereses 710 RELIOIOUS News... -+ 218 THE CALENDAK.... voter 28 ART AND AXKCHITECTURE.., 213 bie! SCIENCE........000-ce0ee Giving Children Pleasure.. 210 | pany awp GARDEN.......... 22 Letter from Boston.......+. 2tt ap Pover .. * og | PUBLISHER'S DePARtvEnt..272 Social Science . 26 | PINANCTAL.... 2. 219 EprroriaL DEPARTMENT.— Letters for this department, aod @anuscripte offered for publication. should be addressed * Editors Christian Onion, 7 Park Ph New York.” Ooaccepted articies will be returned, if, at the twme they are sent, this ‘se requested. and postage stamps are enclosed. The Editors wiil pot be re- sponsible for the preservation or return of manuacripts not accom- panied by stamps. HENRY WARD BEECHER, LYMAN ABBOTT, i Eprrors. ANNOUNCEMENT. COQ= readers will with great pleasure see the name of Lyman Abbott joined to Mr. Beecher’s in the Christian Union of this date. He will from this time'forth give his well-known experience and energy to the conduct of this paper. Mr. Abbott has for many years been before the public as an author, a preacher, and a journalist, and has won influence iu each character. He has been the editor of the American Tract Society’s ‘‘ Illustrated Christian Weekly” since its publication began, and steps from that post to the Christian Union. Mr. Charles L, Norton and Mr. John Hab- berton will continue their relations to the paper, which has been so long indebted to their zeal and skill. It is only just to accredit to Mr. Norton the good conduct of the paper for the past year, as he has had to a great extent the management of it. With a sound pecuniary basis, with reinvigo- rated editorial force, the Christian Union, having outlived much trouble, enters upon its seventh year with brighter prospects of useful- oess than ever before. Henry Warp BEECHER. An order from the Attorney-General instructs all United States Marshals that it is their duty, as representatives of the National Government, to secure peace and orler at the Presidential election, and for that purpose, wherever neces- sary, to call on all the citizens, including State and National military, to aid them in quelling disturbances, and in arresting disorderly per- sons. There can be po question that this order is Constitutional ; for the notion that the Con- stitution merely secures the right of negroes to vote, but does not prevent a mob from compel- ling them to vote the Democratic ticket, can only be regarded as one of the grim humors of the campaign. The recent riots in Charleston and Baltimore, the former an attack by negroes on some colored Democrats, the second an ut- tack by roughs on a Republican meeting; the assassination, for political opinions, of Dr. Din- grove, in Louisiana; the not remote disorders in that State and in Mississippi, and the official reports of intimidation threatened iu other States, continue to afford ample justification for the Attorney-General’s order. The appreben- sions of military despotism, which certain polit- ical journals have assumed with considerable bistrionie effect, are quite groundless; for no one supposes that General Sherman would use the army to intimidate voters if he could, or that he could use an American army for that purpose, if he would. But we do not apprehend great results from any action of the National au- thorities, Intimidation is too subtle a danger to be counteracted by bayonets. The marshals cannot prevent the merchants in New Orleans from com- bining to refuse employment to any man who votes a Republican ticket; or the planters of Louisiana from turning off plantation bands for the same reason; or the local officers in Atlanta from providing one bailot-box in lien of a dozen, and the crowd so thronging it that timid voters choose to stay away ; or actual riots in remote districts, where all will be over before the soldiery oan arrive, There is one remedy for intimidation and only one. when both purties are sdlicitons for the negro’s vote, both parties will unite in seeing that be votes without let or hindrance. The Democrats have certainly done a wise thing in nominating Charles Francis Adams in Massachusetts for Governor, Governor Gaston did a graceful thing in proposing the nomina- tion, and Mr, Adams has done a significant thing in accepting it. It can mean nothing less than that he regards the issues growing out of the war as settled, the financial issue as good as settled, and the matter of administrative reform as safer in the hands of the Democratic party than in those of the Republicans, Whether his nomination will materially affect the vote in Massachusetts is another question. American citizens have a habit of making up their own minds on public questions; nowhere is this habit more fixed than in Massachusetts , and we shall be surprised if Mr. Adams’s opinion that the Democratic party is the one to reform our civil service induces any very large number of the Republi of M tts to vote to put the finances and the negroes in the hands of the party which, at no very remote period, has de- manded indefinite inflation, and still in party conventions in the Southern States denounces negro saffrage. There is good reason for believing that Tweed has been arrested in Spain and will be delivered to the United States for the asking, there being no extradition treaty to give the transaction a formal shape. It is understood that this act of courtesy is in reciprocation for like ucts on the part of our government in former years. It is now asserted that the government has known of the fugitive’s course since a few weeks afcer bis escape, and that he was nearly caught in Cuba, but escaped in a sailing ship bound for Spain. The long voyage gave ample time for prepara- tion, and orders for his arrest were sent to all Spanish ports. He was identified before leaving the ship at Vigo, and will no doubt be sent home in time to take part as a couineutator in the political campaign if so inclined, How many people will be glad to have him back, how many will be sorry, and what we shall do with him when we get him, are questions which it will be time enough to answer when he is once more on American soil, The Servians have been driven back with heavy loss at Alexinatz. The defeat is as com- plete as that of Metz, and, if Turkey and Servia were the only parties concerned, would be de- cisive of the war. The Servians, reiuforced by Russians, have stood their ground better than before, have only yielded to overwhelming num- bers, and are not demoralized, hardly discour- aged. On the whole, though badly defeated, and in a way apparently to leave their country open to the Turk, their prospects appear to be better than before. For meanwhile the “ Daily News” has revolutionized public sentiment in England. Its reports of the Turkish outrages in Bulgaria have aroused a feeling which the apathy of the government and the vis inertia of the- people can bardlf resist. It is true that there 1s no Parliament in session now to enforce this public sentiment; but public sentiment, not Parliament, rules Great Britain. Indeed Earl Russell in a letter, Canon Liddon in a sermon, Mr Gladstone in a pamphlet, and the press generally in editorials, have expressed their opinions in such positive terms that neither Disraeli nor Lord Derby can disregard them, and the signs of yielding are already manifest. The British Ambassador at Constantinople has presented a formal demand to the Porte for the conclusion of an armistice, ;to be followed by negotiations for peace, and has given notice that if refusal and armed foreign intervention ensue, the aid of the British Government must not be reckoned ov. If Turkey yields, and the foreign powers undertake to adjust the affairs of the Christian provinces, they will hardly con- sent to leave them at the mercy of the merciless Turk, some guarantees will be required. If Turkey refuses, Russian sentiment is ulready so strong that intervention from that quarter ap- pears probable. The order of the Spanish government that “all native and foreign Protestant chapels, Bible societies and schools, immediately remove all external signs, placards and descriptions, in- dicating their faith,” does not at first thought seem promising for the future of religious lib- erty in that land. Yet it probably signifies rather the power of a narrow-minded priesthood over an ignorant populace than the feelings of the authorities, One thing at a time. It is something gained to have liberty to worship God according to the individual conscience in the birth-place of the Inquisition. - It is not necessary, this year, to provoke either priest- FACSIMILE FRONT PAGE OF THE “CHRISTIAN UNION ” The issue of the “ Christian Union ” for September 13, 1876, was the first to bear the name of Ly \ itor t “Th gave to Mr. Beecher absolute authority to’determine what should go into the ‘ Christian on the associate editor, in the absence of es a this authority. See page 718. Beecher. ne by-laws of the company nion.’. . . The trustees conferre editor-in-chief was always absent, my authority was practically absolute.” , As the The reader will notice on the page here reproduced interesting references to the forthcoming momentous Hayes-Tilden election that was to result in a critical situation, to the notorious Tweed, and to what seems like a report of the : r ‘ present European war but is in fact the Serbo-Turkish War preceding the Russo-Turkis War man Abbott as joint editor with Mr.
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720 would consider himself obliged to revise them ; if I did not send them and he wished to revise them, he could send for them. He never asked for- them, and they were never: sent. I think he was glad to be rid of a disagreeable task. In a paper presented to the Committee of the Tract Society shortly before: my résigna- tion I had ‘said that ‘‘ €ach week’s issue of the paper must have a definite and apparent relation to the. current. week. . It is not enough to give each week ,ten or twelve pages of generally entertaining and instructive literature. The literature must belong to the time. The information must be upon topics of present interest; the discussions must-be upon themes of ‘present interest ; the morals must be drawn from the events of the pres- ent.”” Only to a.very limited extent had-I been able to carry out this idea in the “ Illus- trated Christian Weekly.”. The saying that ‘‘great bodies move slowly ” was strikingly illustrated. by that Society.. Precipitate action necessarily involves occasional errors, where- fore the. Tract. Society dreaded precipitate action. ,If photo-engraving was in use at all at that time; it certainly had not been brought to any degree approximating per- fection, and the Tract Society was obliged to draw .and engrave all. its iHustrations. Moreover, it had an enormous stock of illus- trations stored in -its vaults, and to-some_of. my associates it seemed an extravagance to leave these unused and go to the expense of making new illustrations. . Finally, while there never was any attempt made to interfere with my editorial liberty after it had been accorded to me, there were many topics which could not- properly be treated in a periodical published by an undenominational religious society. Many theological. topics were necessarily tabooed in such a journal, and only the most general treatment of political topics was permissible. I had hardly consummated the change from the “‘ Weekly ” to the “ Union” before [ wrote to my wife: ‘[ have heard of persons being intoxicated with success. I am quasi-intoxicated with the exhilaration of work with the hand- cuffs all off. I did not know how much I felt them before. And I want a few days to sober down.” ‘This was written on my way to Farmington, where I was going for a few days of rest after a summer of strenuous and perplexing work. For, partly by way of experiment, I had tried my hand at editorial writing for the ‘ Christian Union” THE OUTLOOK before giving to its proprietors my final decision. I remembered my father’s principle that it is a law of morals; as of physics, that to move from one point to another it is necessary to pass through all the intermediate points, and I was. careful. not to. signalize my assumption of editorial reform by any sudden changes in the paper. The most apparent change was the commencement of a series of papers on the International Sunday-school Lessons, for which my work.upon -the ‘“* New Testament Com- mentary ’”’ and upon the “ Bible Dictionary ” had given me some preparation.. The most important change was the gradual transforma- tion of the ‘‘ Christian Union ”’ from a weekly periodical. of ‘generally entertaining and instructive literature ” to a weekly history and interpretation of current events. ‘This change was only gradually brought about. The im- mediate effect .of it was the change of what had been a series of incidental-editorial para- graphs ‘into a: systematic. paragraph history of the week. I had introduced such a feature into the “ Illustrated Christian--Weekly,”’ to which: I gave the title of The Outlook. There was, of course, nothing original in such a:paragraph account of the week. The London “ Spectator ” had given its readers sucha history, perhaps the New York “ Nation” also. The similar department in the ‘“‘ Christian Union.”’ differed: from those of-its predeces- sors in being prophetic rather than historical. -I-do not mean that it undértook to foretell the future.. But it undertook, not merely to nar- rate the events of the week, but to interpret them; to turn the mind of the reader toward the future and help lim to see in what direction current history .was moving. This endeavor was founded on the faith that all human prog- ress is a divinely ordered progress, and that all events are to be measured, not by their relation to a political or a church organization, but by their relation. to human welfare and human development. In this endeavor I have always been guided by my faith that the solution of all problems; whether individual or social, is to be found in the principles inculcated and in the spirit possessed by Jesus Christ. In the early days of the “Christian Union” I myself wrote nearly the whole of this weekly history. In doing so the model I followed was found in the Hebrew prophets and in the four Gospels. From the first it was my aim to make the paper Christian without making it either theological or ecclesiastical My purpose
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AADC Chee joined the staff of the ** Christian The photograph here reproduced was tee a few years oe Mr. Mabie * the editorial staff and soon so n 1879 Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie joine proved his rare ability as an interpretative critic that the literary department of the 884 he was surprised one morning by put under his charge. his name with mine at = head of the paper as associate editor.’”’ { j | { | 4 init Ea ae
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722 THE OUTLOOK was defined for me and in considerable meas- ure inspired in me by my father. An extract from one of his letters, written to me five years before, when I was laying out the plans for the “ Illustrated Christian Weekly,” defines this indefinable spirit. The best way, he said, for a mother to influence her chil- dren is to make her children love her, and then to be herself what she wishes them to be. **So my idea of what the conductors of such a religious paper should aim at is not to prove religious truth by such ‘ discussions ’ as you refer to in your letter, but simply to make people like the paper and then express in it the truths and sentiments we wish them to imbibe. “If this view is correct, the true policy would be, not to make the paper exclu- sively religious, but to make it a general storehouse (of course not to too great an extent) of everything that would be useful, entertaining, and instructive for the family and the fireside. Making books or publications tvo exclusively religious tends in some degree to dissociate religious sentiments and thoughts from the ordinary affairs and avocations of life, whereas it has always seemed to me desirable that the two sets of ideas and feel- ings should be indissolubly blended.” I need hardly remind the reader that this is in spirit essentially what Mr. Beecher had said in his salutatory quoted in a preceding part of this chapter. When, in 1876, I became jointly with Mr. Beecher editor of the ‘‘ Christian Union,” it was published at 27 Park Place. It em- ployed no shorthand writers and no type- writing machines. Its circulation was not quite fifteen thousand. It had one floor devoted to the editorial and business offices, and a loft used as a composing-room. ‘The editorial offices were separated from the business offices only by a partition which did not reach the ceiling, so that anything that went on in the public room was liable to be an interruption to the editors. Colonel Charles L. Norton, who had conducted the paper for the year following Mr. Merriam’s retirement, remained as managing editor. John Habberton was also connected with it as a special contributor and occasional edi- torial writer. One other young man assist- ant was employed to prepare the department known as Religious Intelligence, which con- sisted of gossipy items concerning churches and ministers of all denominations and all sections of the country, a department which, 24 March after undergoing several changes, was finally abandoned. For the last five years the circulation of Thé Outlook has averaged from eight to ten times the circulation the ‘Christian Union” had thirty-eight years ago. It has a staff of seven editors, each having his own room, four stated editorial contributors on special topics, and correspondents in different parts of the country on whom it depends for special infor- mation. The subjects treated cover a much broader range, covering every department of life. The journal is more sociological, less theological, but, I hope, not less religious. Every week the editors meet for conference, spend two or three hours in discussing the important events to be treated and in compar- ing views as to the meaning of these events and their proper interpretation ; and the par- agraph history of the week, which thirty years ago I wrote almost entirely myself, is now the product of a number of minds acting in co- operation after joint deliberation and often considerable correspondence. Each issue of The Outlook is essentially the product of team work. My experience of the inspirational effect of writing “with the handcuffs off” has been of great value to me in my edito- rial career. No editor ever writes for The Outlook anything other than his sincerest convictions. From the first my wife, whose versatility during over fifty years of married life was ever a new surprise to me, was an unofficial co-editor. She read manuscripts, wrote letters, gave me her critical judgment on books, counseled with me as to policies, was the best, because the severest, critic of my editorials, and did much to develop a department of the paper for which I had neither time, inclination, nor ability—its do- mestic side. Out of this grew what was for several years a characteristic feature of the paper, its Aunt Patience Department. As Aunt Patience she opened a correspondence with the children of the homes into which the paper went. She received many hundreds of letters from children of all ages, published some of them with comments, others she answered personally. Every Christmas she sent to her correspondents a specially pre- pared Christmas card containing some appropriate motto of her selection, as, “The virtue lies in the struggle, not in the prize,” or of her origination, as, ‘“‘ May this blessed Christmas help us to be more strong to resist, patient to endure, con- ee
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4 4 si P 1915 REMINISCENCES 723 stant to persevere.” After the department had been continued for two or three years the letters of the new group of children repeated in substance the letters previously published, the department became to the general reader monotonous, and was discon- tinued. In vain I urged her to continue it in a new form, substituting for the children’s letters her own editorials of counsel to them. She was too self-distrustful to write for the public, nor could I persuade her that the public was made up of individuals, and what would interest one child would interest ten thousand children. But as long as she lived we met from time to time fathers and mothers who greeted her warmly as the ‘“* Aunt Patience” of their childhood. In 1879 Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie joined the editorial staff, and soon so proved his rare ability as an interpretative critic that the liter- ary department of the paper was put under his charge. In 1884 he was surprised one morning by finding that I had placed his name with mine at the head of the paper as Associate Editor. The subsequent years of literary partnership have been years of deep- ening spiritual friendship which nothing ever has, and I believe nothing ever can, sever. Other editors have from .time to time been added to what we are acccustomed to call the Outlook family, which includes all who co-operate in the publication from the errand boy to the editor-in-chief. To narrate here the successive changes which out of the “‘ Christian Union ” have developed The Outlook would take me too far from this purely personal narrative. There are, how- ever, two important events, one making, the other reflecting, a direct and important change in its character, which must here be mentioned in order to complete this chapter in its history. In 1878 or ’79—I am not sure as to the date—Mr. Lawson Valentine bought a farm in Orange County about six or seven miles from my home in Cornwall, and began attend- ing the little church where I was preaching, as described in the previous chapter. Of course my wife and I called upon the family. So commenced a friendship which is one of the most sacred of the many friendships which have enriched my life. It has con- tinued to the second and third generations. Mr. Valentine’s son-in-law is the Vice-Presi dent of the Outlook Company, and a grandson is one of my associates on the editorial staff. I shall not undertake an analysis of Mr Lawson Valentine’s character. Genius is difficult, perhaps impossible, of definition. It has been called an infinite capacity for taking pains. That is exactly what it is not. I know of no better sign of it than Owen Meredith’s saying, ‘‘ Genius does what it must, talent does what it can ;” no better definition of it than Coleridge’s, ‘‘ Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.” ‘To genius life is always fresh, novel, a new call to adventure. It includes fertility, originality, spontaneity, a certain unlikeness to other men. Within its domain it is audacious. It both dreams and dares. If this be a true estimate, then Mr. Lawson Valentine was as truly a genius as any man I have ever intimately known. I compare him in my own mind to an electric dynamo. He was charged with a perfectly exhaustless current of energy, but he needed a transmitter to convert that energy into practical action. From the first I think he liked me; from the first I know I liked him. The liking grew into admiration, then into deep affection. He was often an enigma to me, but always a fascinating enigma. His suggestions were often puzzles, and I could not always find the answer ; but studying them was always worth while. On the hill above his country house he made a camping ground, built a road to it, and opened it to the public. They came and carved their names upon the trees. Instead of a prohibition he put up a great board, and on it a sign, “‘ Carve your names here,” and the public complied. He once suggested to me that the New York churches all close their doors for one Sunday, send their congregations out to hunt up suffering to be relieved and need to be supplied, and put on the church doors the notice: ‘‘ Closed for the day to enable the congregation to practice Christianity instead of listening to it.’’ Quite impracticable ? Very true. And yet one can imagine how, if the churches could have been induced to take such action, the country would have been shaken by the message from center to circumference, as no preaching could possibly have shaken it. Some letters written between 1884 and 1891, during which time Mr. Valentine was active as an inspiring and directing spirit in the ‘“‘ Christian Union,” lie before me. From them I make some characteristic extracts : Atlanta,Ga. My dear Doctor. I hope that things may work so favorably that I may some
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Vi yy if. = ——s = DRAWN BY V. GRIBAYEDOFF AND FIRST PRINTED IN THE ‘* CHRISTIAN UNION *? FOR MAY 14, 1891 ‘* T shall not undertake an analysis of Mr. Lawson Valentine’s character. Genius is difficult, perhaps impossible, of defini- tion. . compare him in my own mind to an electric dynamo. He was charged with a perfectly exhaustless current of energy, but he needed a transmitter*to convert that energy into practical action.” See page 723
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726 day hear you lecture in this city under this text: “THE WAR IS OVER” I think the whole South is fifty-one to eighty- one per cent ready.for an hour’s talk with your spirit of Union as the. warp and encouraging words as the filling. Whatsay you? Our paper is wanted here if known. The need of what you term “ vital theology ” is evident, and I am with you To TRY and make the vita/ the only test of any and every work, no matter what it is called. 1884. My chief desire.is,as*in the past, to strengthen your hands so you can do your work in the best way to the largest number. We are on the edge of labor matters that will be greater than any of this century. The “C. U.” is now in shape to lead in that evolution at least as one power. I take the cry of “ Stop my paper ” as the best evidence that the editors are trying at least to do their duty, and I wouldn’t have an editor that couldn’t-draw this cry now and then. Isle of Wight. I vote England and the Con- tinent for 4, 8, 12 months for our editor-in-chief as soon as it can be brought about. Now I must wait the vote of the office and yeur action in Faith. I feel perfectly easy about what you and Mr. Mabie can do to fill my ideal of what such a paper as the “ Christian Union” should be, and then we will show the country what the Nation needs in the way of Liberty and Action, that it may do its part as a great people. I have a/ways been a reader of Carlyle and Emerson. Now what do they mean for this generation? Is it nothing? .. . Editors, what say you to the wésdom of Carlyle and Emerson to help those of the years 85, 86, 87, 88, and then a new style of President and Presidential election? Editors, what say you to the power of your press to bring to life again these two minds for the good of the people ?” I have printed these extracts in advance of their chronological place in the narrative be- cause I want my readers to know my friend as he is interpreted by his own words. And by his deeds. I think I have never seen a man so possessed by a passion for helping his fellow-men. It was not exactly philanthropy. It seemed to me that his boundless energy called on him to help every endeavor for human welfare if it seemed to him whole-hearted, much as a soldier in bat- tle might be eaget to be sent to the front THE OUTLOOK I was at seventeen. 24 March with every detachment, whether it was cav- alry, infantry, cr artillery. He found a man struggling with the problem of establishing in Cornwall a village paper, and gave him money, advice, and courage. The immediate result was failure; the ultimate result an excellent and successful local weekly paper, though conducted by wholly different hands. The question of the incorporation of the vil- lage came up for discussion. It seemed to us who lived within the village limits essential to our prosperity, and no one, I think, con- tributed more to the successful campaign than he, who lived five or six miles away. Under our State laws each town elected its own excise board. In the early anti-saloon campaign to secure a board which would reduce the number of the saloons, and later in the campaigns under a local option law to exclude them altogether, he was a quiet but vigorous and effective supporter of the anti- saloon forces. Among my letters is one from him offering to provide me with an assistant for my church work if I would select one. The offer was not accepted because I needed no help to do the work I was doing in the town, and I had neither time nor strength to undertake even the supervision of any additional work. He wanted me to secure the appointment of a committee, of which I should be one, to plan and construct some mountain paths up Storm King for pedestrians. Nothing came of that sugges- tion either. ‘The work I had in hand took all my time and strength. I have always held that, as it is a wise financial rule to spend less money than one earns, so it is a wise hygienic rule to spend less strength than one can ac- cumulate. Perhaps it is for that reason that I am in better health at seventy-nine than Mr. Valentine was an advocate of good roads, and in the roads on his place set an example for the town. He made in one of the buildings upon his farm a small assembly-room of which his neighbors were invited to make use for the discussion of matters.of public interest, and it proved to be the forerunner of a grange hall which is in effective use in the vicinity. His farm of five or six hundred acres, named for his wife Houghton Farm, he made into an experimental station for the study of agricultural problems and _ the promotion of agricultural interests. ‘This farm was organized and carried on as an object-lesson for the benefit of the com- munity, and students of agriculture came
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1915 from far to study its processes and methods. It had a flock of sheep with an English shep- herd to care for them and to teach the community what true shepherding is ; some magnificent Norman horses especially im- ported in order to give the country Mr. Valentine’s ideal of the horse for farm work; a herd of Jersey cattle as beautiful as deer and the greatest butter-producers in the world; the latest and best provisions both for the care of the cows and the pro- duction of the butter; careful scientific soil- feeding conducted by soil experts, based on the truth, only now gradually coming into general recognition, that agriculture is a form of manufacture and requires for its success- ful conduct educated intelligence employing scientific knowledge in«the process of cre- ating food products out of the soil. The whole was under the direction of an expert scientific agriculturist. One incident out of many illustrating the wide uses which the farm served is furnished by the coming, about 1884, of a Japanese student to this farm, where he spent two years learning the art of agriculture by practical experience, ‘and then went back to Japan to become a professor and. Dean of the College of Agriculture in the Tohoku Imperial Uni- versity at Sappora, Japan, and a leader in the agricultural development of his native land. Since Mr. Valentine was what he was, it is not strange that he speedily became in- terested in the work which I was trying to do in the “ Christian Union.”? And since he had a genius for originating suggestions and I had some talent for accepting them, working them over and utilizing them, it is not strange that we soon became fast friends. His interest, I think, at first was simply a wish to help me in what I was trying to do.. But partly because I was eager to get the benefit of his genius—and all, even of his friends, were not equally eager—his interest soon grew first into a desire to have a share in what I was doing and then into a desire to widen the scope as well as to promote the progress of my enterprise. He and Mr. Beecher were con- genial spirits. I find among my letters a brief correspondence, so brief and so charac- teristic of them both that I reproduce it here. I think it grew out of a suggestion of mine that we meet at luncheon from time to time and discuss around the lunch table plans for developing the “Christian REMINISCENCES 727 Union.” This elicited from him the following telegram : . Llike your Delmonico; keep at work on this line all summer. L. VALENTINE. I sent the telegram to Mr. Beecher, and received it back with this note indorsed on the back : You are not the only fellows that like Del- monico. We are willing to patronize him all summer if you will pay the bill. H. W. BEECHER. This was two months after Mr. Valentine had bought some of the stock of the * Chris- tian Union ” and was taking an active interest in its affairs. His interest, however, was still in me rather than in the paper, and he bought this stock, if I am not mistaken, primarily for the purpose of enabling me to buy it of him on the installment plan, the only method which was for me practicable. Six years later he purchased a controlling interest in the “ Christian Union,” and became, in fact, almost its sole owner. ‘This came about in the following way. I had flattered myself that I could get some “ copy ”’ for the *‘ Christian Union ” out of Mr. Beecher. My plan was to get him to come into the editorial rooms on Monday mornings and chat, and with a shorthand writer get enough out of his chat to make a Beecher editorial.every week. But the plan did not succeed. Once, in conversation with me, Mr. Beecher compared himself to a town pump: “ Anyone,” he said, “ can get a drink if he will work the handle.” But on Monday morning the well was dry—no water came. He would chat entertainingly, but not on cur- rent affairs, and rarely with any such continuity of purpose as made his talk matter for an arti- cle. For a time he indulged himself in the pleasing delusion that next month or next season or next year he was going to take hold of editorial work with vigor. But he never did. One could not blame him. The * Chris- tian Union ”’ had never paid him a dollar in dividends, and he had paid it a good many dollars in capital. Itnever paid him any sal- ary. ‘There were other journals always ready with their check for anything he would send them. The lecture platform was always open to him, and its remunerations were large. He could talk easily, but writing grew more and more irksome. At last, in the spring or sum- mer of 1884, he and his friends proposed to sell. ‘The suggestion came from him, neither directly nor indirectly from me. Negotiations
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728 continued intermittently throughout the sum- mer. It was the most anxious summer of my life. There was another bidder in the field,, but Mr. Valentine was too good a business man to compete in an auction against a com- petitor who, for aught he knew, might be bid- ding in order to raise the price. In December, 1884, the negotiations ended satisfactorily to him, and on the first of January, 1885, he became the principal owner and the President of the Christian Union Company. Mr. James Stillman was, next to Mr. Valentine, the largest purchaser. Like Mr. Valentine, he bought, not as a promising investment, but to aid me, a personal friend, in my work. What Mr. Valentine desired to do for the ‘Christian Union”’ he described in a char- acteristic paragraph in a letter to my wife. ‘‘T am trying,” he wrote her, “to organize each department from the editor-in-chief down to the newest boy coming in to-morrow, to do each their different work independently, and like a good watch let us bring in the wheels all perfectly made, put them together, wind up the machine, put a good motto into it, and let it run and keep as good time as an English Fodsham.’’ What he did in car- rying out this purpose, what experiments he made, what obstacles he met, what disap- pointments he encountered, what were his failures and what his successes—and _ his every failure only nerved him to a new endeavor, every success only aroused in him a new enthusiasm—is not to be here nar- rated ; for this is not a history of ‘The Outlook, but a history of myself. Except for a brief period, when I unsuccessfully attempted to combine the work of business manager under Mr. Valentine’s direction with that of editor- in-chief, I had nothing to do with the business administration of the paper. And at no time in its existence did either Mr. Valentine or Mr. Stillman make the slightest endeavor to direct its editorial policy. I have always written with an absolutely untrammeled pen. At times the editorial policy has cost us hun- dreds of subscribers ; at times it has cost us hundreds of dollars in advertising. But under no business management has any effort ever been made to modify its editorial principles. The tradition established by Mr. Beecher in the creation of the “ Christian Union ” and confirmed by Mr. Valentine in its subsequent history has continued unmodified to this day. Looking back, I can now see what neither Mr. Valentine nor I realized at the time, that his influence on the paper led logically to a THE OUTLOOK 24 March change in its.name because it led to a change in its character. Mr. Beecher had started the “ Christian Union” for the purpose of expressing a Christianity broader than any sect. But, though not the paper of any church, it was still a church paper. It interpreted the thought and life of all the churches, though with a breadth of vision which saw the Chris- tian spirit alike in the Episcopalian and the Friend, in the Protestant and the Roman Catholic. But I gradually began to realize that Christianity is not only larger than any church, but larger than all the churches ; that a man can possess the Christian spirit, not only if he is a Friend or a Unitarian, but if he is a Jew or an agnostic. My acquaint- ance with the works of Matthew Arnold and Darwin and Huxley and Tyndall not only gave me a respect for their- opinions, but a respect for their spirit. I found an under- standing of the Bible in Arnold, a fairness of statement in Darwin, an eagerness for truth in Huxley, and a prophetic vision in Tyndall, which seemed to me sometimes conspicu- ously absent from the writings of the church- men, and especially from the columns of the church press. This growin conviction was intensified by my personal acquaintance with some agnostics and some Jews. ‘The most profound influence upon our character is often exercised when neither he who exer- cises it nor he who experiences it is conscious of it. Such an influence was exerted upon me by one of my neighbors and friends in Cornwall—Mr. E. A. Matthiessen. He was a well-known business man, by birth a Dane, in his religious opinions an agnostic. He never went tochurch. Many of the beliefs which I had entertained from childhood he absolutely disbelieved, and some which I had regarded as essential he neither believed nor disbelieved. If I were to define his theology, I should say that he regarded the Bible as a book of primitive religion, containing much that is elevating but much that is barbaric ; Jesus Christ as a noble man and the teacher of noble sentiments, but by no means infal- lible ; the invisible as always the unknowable, and therefore God and immortality unknown. And yet when two church members in Corn- wall became alienated and the quarrel between them was a matter of town gossip it was he who sought to reunite them, and for that purpose quoted to them the words of their Master. His integrity, public spirit, and personal philanthropy made him the honored
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1915 friend of al classes in the village. The difference in our philosophies did not pre- vent us from becoming fast friends. His wife and my wife also became warmly attached to each other. She was a devout Roman Catholic and he an agnostic, yet a happier home I have never known. An ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory. My previous theory that certain theological convictions are essential to a Christlike char- acter disappeared before the convincing argu- ment of my friend’s life. He died many years ago; yet I hope that he may know of this testimony to the influence which his life and character have exercised on my life, and [ am sure on many others wholly unsuspected by him. Thus when it was proposed to change the name of the paper, I was not wholly unprepared for the suggestion. ‘There were business reasons for the change. There was a “Christian Advocate,” and a ‘“ Christian Intelligencer,”’ and a ‘‘ Christian Herald,” and a “Christian Messenger,” and a “ Christian Register,’’ and a simple “ Christian ’’”—in all, I believe, some twenty papers which carried the name Christian as part of their title. Subscriptions intended for one of them some- times came to us; subscriptions intended for us sometimes went to one of them. Our title naturally caused’ the public to classify us with these denominational organs. Non- churchmen looked upon the ‘“ Christian Union” with suspicion as an ecclesiastical journal ; churchmen looked upon it with sus- picion as not ecclesiastical enough. I began to feel a disinclination to the title, as I have always felt a disinclination to white neckties and ministerial clothes ; uniforms are not to my taste. . When I was starting the ‘ IIlus- trated Christian Weekly,’’ I had consulted with my father as to atitle ; ‘“‘ Glad ‘Tidings ”’ had been suggested. He wrote me in reply : As to name, we do not think of anything we like better than “Glad Tidings,” though I do not myself gzz¢e like that. I shrink from any- thing which is sensational or emotional, or is connected with /ee/ing in any way, ina name, which is necessarily to be handled so freely and knocked about, even, so rudely by clerks, print- ers, salesmen, and newsboys. To hear a boy run into a news-room and call out roughly for “thirteen ‘Glad Tidings’” does not sound just right. But more important than any of these con- siderations was, hardly a conviction, but an ill-defined feeling, that during the thirteen REMINISCENCES 729 years’ since the ‘ Christian’ Union” was founded it had gradually and unconsciously broadened its scope and purpose. It had become something more than a representa- tive of the truths and principles held by all Christian churches. It had become an inter- preter of the world’s current history. It was an outlook upon the time in which we were living. It was still a Christian paper in its spirit and purpose; but it wished to be so Christian that.it might express the Christian spirit as expressed in the lives and character of agnostic, Jew, and pagan. In accordance with this conviction, and after months of deliberation as to whether it was wise to make any change, and, if so, what the change should be, it adopted the title which it had given to the review of the week which was a feature of each issue. On the first of July, 1893, it became The Outlook. In August, 1911, I received two !etters, one from a Jew, one from a Zoroastrian, which seem to me both to interpret and to justify the change, not merely in title, but in the conception of the true function of such a journal as we wish The Outlook to be. They were both in response to a series of articles from my pen on incidents and teachings in the life of Christ, entitled ‘“ ‘The Master Builder.”’ From these letters I quote these extracts. The first letter was from a Jew: “ Lechu Doydi * LTicrass Kaluh “In Moravia “* In Wirsely ’ *** Count Korinsky’s town’ ‘In the Jewish synagogue the place of my birth you can hear the above Friday evening—Eref Shabes—to-day as_ regularly as fifty years ago. The synagogue is open every day of the 365. But here our Rabbi is on his vacation, so we content ourselves in reading Rabbi Lyman Abbott in The Outlook. His ‘ Master Builder’ is wonderfully beauti- ful and instructive. When a Jew has read The Outlook .as long as I have, he learns new lessons not only in Judaism and Christianity but in humanity, and it becomes the Sabbath bride at his home and fireside. Thanks for your splendid work.” The second letter was from a Zoroastrian : ‘‘With the greatest interest have I read your article in the issue of the 12th on ‘The Master Builder,’ and before going any further wish to assure you of my great love and
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730 esteem in which I hold Jehoshush the Christ. I am a Zoroastrian by faith, and as such do not believe in anything that is a miracle or claimed to be such. You ask the question, ‘Is he an example?’ Indeed he is, worthy not alone to pattern atter, but to do greater things which are within the reach of all, as he said himself, ‘Greater things than I did ye shall do!’ ... Jesus to me is indeed a master builder, a physician, priest, leader, and adviser—in fact, everything that is of the best, but, above everything else, as he says himself, ‘ a son of man.’” Mr. Valentine did not live to see realized all his ideals for The Outlook. He died sud- denly at his home in Cornwall, May 5, 1891. But he lived to see the journal which he had done so much to recreate established on a firm financial foundation, with subscribers in THE OUTLOOK 24 March every State in the Union and in every civilized country abroad, its influence on the life of the community far exceeding any I had ever anticipated, and its business conducted by asso- ciates who have become his successors, inspired by his purpose and imbued with his spirit. What, chiefly through The Outlook, but also through the pulpit, the platform, and occasionally through other periodicals, I have been endeavoring to accomplish in the theo- logical, industrial, and political life of the community since 1876, when I became asso- ciated with Mr. Beecher in the editorship of the “ Christian Union,” will be narrated in following chapters of this autobiography. But first I must give an account of my church work during the eleven years in which I added the duties of pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, to those of Editor-in-Chief of The Outlook. COMMERCE AND FINANCE A MONTHLY ARTICLE BY THEODORE H. PRICE PUBLIC OPINION AND THE SHERMAN LAW IS ITS REPEAL DESIRABLE? / \HE paragraph headed “Co-operation, Combination, and the Sherman Law,”’ in the article written for The Outlook of February 24, has brought me many letters from all over the country. I am under many obligations to the writers of these letters. My address is 24 South William Street, New York, and I hope that all who read what I say now or hereafter will feel free to write me whenever they can be helpfully critical or adduce sound rea- sons for disagreeing with my views. I am entirely unrestricted by the editors of The Outlook in the opinions I express in this magazine, and it is a great privilege to get in epistolary touch with my readers and to be thus enabled to see myself as others see me. All those who write for the public will testify to the satisfaction and stimulation they get in facing an audience that will “talk back ”’ instead of being compelled, like actors at a rehearsal, to repeat their lines before a dark and empty house with only the manager (or the editor) for a critic. For the liberty SOME LETTERS FROM OUTLOOK READERS that the editors of The Outlook have thus allowed me I thank them most cordially, and take advantage of it still further to publish the two letters that follow. These two letters have been selected from many as well-reasoned and intelligent state- ments of the opposing opinions of the Sher- man Law held by two separate schools of thinkers in America. Mr. W. H. Cameron, of Napa, California, writes : Referring to your article in The Outlook of the 24th, perhaps you will not take it amiss if I submit a few opinions not in agreement with the views you state and suggest. First, let me say I think I have read every article you have written for The Outlook, and have been impressed and instructed by the knowledge and acumen with which you have treated your various topjcs ; also, which will no doubt please you more, I have been convinced of your patriotism, and especially appreciated your occasional revelations of fine idealism. These impressions remain fixed, though T find something in the article before me which does not please me, and which I am thoroughly con-
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1915 vinced is wrong; otherwise this would not be written. You assert the identity of “ co-operation” and “combination,” and the desirability of the thing which you find they both mean. Is there not a difference between the two, however, in the general understanding of them? I take it that words have an atmosphere which sometimes means a great deal, though it may be difficult to define it. I would say, for instance, that “ co- operation ” more implies uniting for oxute‘ving, that “ combination ” means uniting for zzéaking. We “co-operate” to build bridges, free slaves, and help the Belgians. Men “combine” to crush weak competitors, to work other men twelve hours a day for seven days in the week at low wages, that they may become rich, and bribe legislators to obtain practically for noth- ing privileges at the expense of the pubtic. I think that I have suggested above the kind of “co-operation” that President Wilson wishes to see in business, also the kind of “ combination ” which he condemns. Let me refer briefly to one of the so-called good trusts or combinations—the “ Harvester Company ;” since its organization it has slightly increased its prices on that part of its manufac- turing of which it holds a practical monopoly, but, as I read its reports, has thereby largely increased its profits in that department. In the same years it has taken up the manufacturing of other lines on which it has reduced prices to a point yielding but a negligible profit; making it, of course, very difficult for the smaller, inde- pendent concerns to survive. I hold that, however clean Mr. McCormick’s hands may be as an individual, it is not in the interest of the people that they should grant him a license to assemble such wealth and power in his hands. Again, referring to another phase of “ combi- nation,” though less directly a part of the sub- ject under discussion, your Eastern roads have combined until with their power they control nearly every organ of public opinion, and were able finally to secure a rate advance without inaugurating any of the reforms which the Commission outlined as justly precedent to granting such advances. The freight rates received by the strong roads showed for the five-year period of 1909 to 1913 anet profit of more than twenty per cent arising from the whole territory, and the better earnings were shown largely in the middle section of the terri- tory. During this period your leading roads spent $200,000,000 on New York passenger ter- minals, which, added to their property charges, makes their passenger traffic unprofitable. How can you, Mr. Price, defend the justice of raising the cost of carrying coal in Ohio, so as to pay dividends on investment represented by your beautiful terminals in New York? Of course the general public does not know all these de- COMMERCE AND FINANCE 731 tails and has very limited means of finding out except when the crisis comes and the distin- guished and able advocates of combinations and profits (for the millionaire) seek to put their theories into practice and undertake to “ repeal the Sherman Law” even as the people of the South repealed the “ Missouri Compromise.” Then, thank Providence, a few “ demagogues” like Brandeis, or La Follette, or Lincoln, get the truth before them notwithstanding the pol- ished purity of our great and finely literary magazines and newspapers. It may well be admitted, Mr. Price, that much may be said in favor of “co-operation ;” but until the financial world is purged of such atrocities as the Frisco, Rock Island, and New Haven deals, and until the big corporations cease to use their power to crush the small com- petitor, it will be idle, in my judgment, to ap- peal to the people to permit such changes in our statutes; and I judge that reforms will come from within the sacred precincts of “money ” and “ combination” about as soon as we shall find monarchs advising restrictions on their power. No, it doesn’t come that way. It comes only when the pure spirit of a Lovejoy demands that “ freedom be forall” or the raging szoujik takes his club to kill the Czar who denies him his freedom. W. H. CAMERON. Mr. Thomas N. Carter, of Richmond, Vir- ginia, writes : I have read with interest, your comment on the Sherman Anti-Trust Law in The Outlook of February 24. Yours is the first criticism on the principles of that law that I have seen in print for a long time. Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson have indorsed the doctrine of the law, and the politicians with one accord urge its enforcement. It has always seemed to me vicious in principle and in practice as well as uncerta in inits terms. I have wondered why the people so much affected by it have kept quiet. You think there is a chance of having the law repealed. If so, why not continue your letters on the subject and expose all of its weak points in detail? You might explain how it came about that the words “ restraint of trade” have come to mean “restraint of competition.’ They seem to me entirely different things. Cer- tainly the Standard Oil, Tobacco, Steel, and Harvester Companies have not restrained trade, although they may have restricted competition. On the contrary, they have extended trade, buying more raw material, putting out more manufactured goods, and distributing them over a greater territory than the constituent parts ever did or ever could have done. American oil and tobacco are now sold in every habitable part of the globe ; American steel and machin- ery in most parts thereof. The farmers have made and sold more tobacco and more oil wells
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732 and mines have been opened and developed under the big business system than could have been done under the management of a number of small concerns with little capital. I have no proof that competition makes trade, in spite of the maxim that “competition is the life of trade.” In my experience two railroads com- pete for the same business until one is destroyed, two grocery stores do the same thing, etc., etc. You might explain, too, to us laymen how anybody monopolizes a business when everybody has a right to go into it, and how the courts construe the capacity to monopolize, as a viola- tion of the Sherman Law. They might just as well put me in jail for arson because I have the capacity to commit arson. How did the courts ever get away from the Sugar Refinery Case (Knight case)? That always seemed to me to be the law. I never could see how an agreement to combine made in one State between the manufacturers of that State was in restraint of inter-State commerce. It seems to me that the President recognizes the principle of combina- tion when he advocates it for our foreign trade. If it is necessary to fight foreign combinations on their own grounds, why is it not necessary to fight the same combinations on our ewn grounds if the tariff bars are down? The only way to get the Sherman Law repealed is by making the public understand it. THOMAS N. CARTER. Mr. Cameron, who writes the first letter, is a member of the firm of Cameron & Co., Inc., and is presumably a merchant. Mr. Carter, who writes the second, is a lawyer. Both are apparently thoughtful and patriotic men. Neither, as far as I know, has any affiliations or interests directly affected by the Sherman Law. They had no reason to expect that their letters would be published. Both seem to be sincere and ethically considerate of their fellow-men. Why should they disagree ? One must be right and the other wrong. Mr. Cameron maintains that ‘co-operation ”’ to be justifiable must be “ outgiving ’’ and that when it ceases to be altruistic it becomes ipso facto malevolent “combination.” He seems to agree with Robert Burns, who in his ‘‘ Epistle to a Young Friend ” wrote : *T’ll no say men are villains a’. The real and hardened wicked, Who hae nae check but human law, Are to a few restricted : But, och! mankind are unco weak, An’ little to be trusted ; If self the wavering balance shake, It’s rarely right adjusted !” THE OUTLOOK 24 March Upon this theory Mr. Cameron would keep upon the statute-books a law which renders all forms of co-operation and combination subject to prosecution, and puts upon them the burden of proving their beneficence before the bar of the: Supreme Court and of a public opin- ion of which, in the last analysis, the judg- ments of that Court are but a reflex. Admitting all that Mr. Cameron says with regard to the maladministration and oppres- sion of the railways and the power and profit of great corporations, would it not be better to have some tribunal to which application could be made for authority to combine when combiriation seems desirable, as in the case of our export trade, rather than to make combination entirely impossible to those who were unwilling to face the possibility of being prosecuted as lawbreakers ? If a license to combine were obtainable upon the approval of a candid statement of the purpose in view, and the license were withdrawn whenever it was abused, should we not have a prompter and more effective protection against corporate oppression than the Sherman Law affords ? No one denies the right of society to pro- tect itself against the exactions of monopoly and of ruthless power, whether it be the power of wealth or of superior physical strength. This right is as old as the Magna Charta or the ancient laws against forestalling. It is, however, a very different thing to deny the principle of co-operation and combination as the Sherman Law does and subject every one who attempts it to the risk of being haled through three successive courts and put upon proof that he is innocent of doing what five out of nine justices of the Supreme Court may think is “‘ unreasonable.” If the Dred Scott Case were not a suffi- cient proof of the fact that the Supreme Court changes its mind, a great many others less well known could be cited; but every one knows that even the highest courts are changeable, like everything else that is human. The injustice of the Sherman Law is that, literally construed, it negatives the principle of co-operation, that it has been twisted by judicial construction into a statute that is indeterminabie, that its application depends upon the caprice of the prosecuting officers and a judgment that must be ob- tained in each particular case at a cost and notoriety that is killing, and that it results that honest and law-abiding men in the same line of business are almost afraid to consult
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1915 together, while those who are willing to take the remote risk of prosecution do not hesi- tate to evade the law for an unworthy purpose. Of the accuracies of Mr. Cameron’s state- ments with regard to the Harvester Company I know nothing. ‘That Company is shortly to submit its case to the Supreme Court, and it would be indecorous to discuss it. As to the expense of the railway terminals in New York and the justice of treating that expense as part of the whole cost of trans- portation, it may be said that if the New York terminals are an unnecessary or extravagant investment, then the unnecessary portion of their cost should be treated as a loss to the stockholders. If as built, however, they are, or will be, necessary in the near future to the railways, then their cost is legitimately an addition to the capital upon which the railway should be allowed to earn interest and amor- tization charges. If Napa, California, is without a railway station that accords with its prosperity and ambition, it should proceed to get one; but I doubt if Mr. Cameron would agree that the cost should be exclusively assessed against the traffic that originates at Napa or stops there. None of the railway scandals to which Mr. Cameron alludes has been exposed because of the Sherman Law. The agency that has investigated them, and will probably prevent their recurrence, is the Inter-State Commerce Commission, and there is hardly a railway man or shipper in the country who would now advocate that the Inter-State Commerce Commission should be abolished. Mr. Cameron’s contention that co-operation means ‘“ outgiving”’ and is necessarily altru- istic, and that combination means “ intaking,”’ selfishness, and greed, is ingenious, but the assumption that a desire for profit through combination is censurable is a mistake. This assumption abrogates the law of self-interest, the intelligent application of which has induced most of the world’s progress up to date. The Golden Rule is, ‘‘ Love thy neighbor as thyself,”’ and not de¢/er than thyself. ‘There is not an altruistic petition in the Lord’s Prayer, and the first one, ‘“‘ Give us this day our daily bread,” is an appeal that springs out of economic necessity. Humanity could not survive a disregard of self-interest and an abandonment of the co- operation and combination that are selfishly induced; but it is equally true that ‘he profits most who serveth best,” that ‘ hon- COMMERCE AND FINANCE 733 esty is the best policy,” and that an equality of consideration for ourselves and others is the only permanent basis for a society of self-respect. The mistranslation of St. Paul’s apostrophe to charity as greater than faith and hope is responsible for much altruistic attitudinizing that is as mistaken as it is insincere. What St. Paul really did say, as Henry Drummond has so beautifully pointed out, is, “* And now abideth faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.” Love is a warmth of fee/- ing that makes us sympathetic and consider- ate of others. Charity is oftenest an act of patronizing condescension designed to mag- nify the giver. ; What we need to encourage in business and in politics is, not an artificially created “altruism ” ordained by statute and main- tained by prosecution, but honesty and sym- pathy and love sustained by public apprecia- tion and sentiment. My own belief, deduced from thirty-five years’ observation and expe- rience in business, is that we are steadily progressing toward higher ideals of honesty and service. When I contrast to-day with the time when Jim Fisk was glorified as the Master of Wall Street, and the participants in the Crédit Mobilier and the Whisky Ring were permitted to go unpunished and almost un- censured ; when I recall how during the first years of my business career my profits and those of my competitors were almost entirely dependent upon the freight rebates that we could secure ; when I remember that not so many years ago it was considered justifiable to corner the money marxet to force a decline in stocks; when I recollect the advertise- ments of the Louisiana Lottery that were to be found in nearly every newspaper ; and when I think how impossible it now would be for any railway president to say, ‘‘ The public be damned!” I must admit that times have changed, and changed for the better. In the year 1883, when in England for the first time, it was my privilege to hear Gladstone make one of his greatest speeches. His subject was “‘ Home Rule,” and the climax of his oration was reached as he said of Ireland: “ By force you hold her, by force you have held her, by love we ask you to hold her.” We would, I believe, be better off to-day with less law and more reliance upon the instinct for fair play that prevails when there
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734 are but few laws to be evaded. ‘The Deca- logue contains only ten commandments. The latest compilation of the United States Statutes includes, so I am informed, 10,598 sections bearing directly or indirectly upon the conduct and rights of a citizen. This does not include about 4,000 acts or parts of acts which relate, more or less, to a par- ticular locality, and are not general in their application. Many times this number of laws are on the statute-books of the forty-eight separate States. It has been said that no one can go from his home to his office in New York City without doing something that is illegal. There is little respect for law because there is too much of it, and there is little respect for public opinion because we have attempted to make law a substitute for it. The schodl-boys that are watched will gen- erally cheat. When they are not watched, cheating becomes a disgrace. Combination and co-operation are essential to the moral, National, and commercial progress of this country. Why try to prevent what is inevita- ble instead of providing a means by which any abuse of a natural right may be promptly rebuked and checked ? “ B Pluribus Unum,” the very legend on our National shield, is an assertion of the principle that is denied by the Sherman Law. Why should we attempt to enforce a measure that is contrary to the genius of our Govern- ment and opposed to the idea of Union for which so many men have sacrificed their lives ? In his * Data of Ethics ’’ Herbert Spencer concludes his chapter upon the ‘ Sociological View ” with this statement : The leading traits of a code under which com- plete living through voluntary co-operation is secured may be simply stated. The funda- mental requirement is that the life-sustaining actions of each shall severally bring him the amounts and kinds of advantage naturally achieved by them; and tiis implies, firstly, that he shall suffer no direct aggressions on his per- son or property, and, secondly, that he shall suffer no indirect aggressions by breach of con- tract. Observance of these negative conditions to voluntary co-operation having facilitated life to the greatest extent by exchange of services under agreement, life is to be further facilitated by exchange of services beyond agreement; the highest life being reached only when, be- sides helping to complete one another’s lives by THE OUTLOOK specified reciprocities of aid, men otherwise help to complete one another’s lives. There is abundant evidence that men are prcevressing toward the acceptance of the Spencerian “ code under which complete liv- ing through voluntary co-operation may be secured.” The extraordinary interest in all economic subjects is one of the phenomena of the day. My recent offer to send a pamphlet upon Bankers’ Acceptances to those who asked for it and would pay the postage has elicited over three hundred and fifty replies from among readers of The Outlook. I rather think it would have been ignored five years ago. We have one college professor as our President, another is a director of the New Haven Railroad, and a third a director of the Southern Railway. Their selection is largely due to a recog- nition of the increasing influence of education upon thought and development in the twen- tieth century. I am an optimist because there is on every hand a multitudinous desire to know the truth and because I have high authority for believing that “ you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” I believe that the people of the United States are, for the most part, anxious to obey the laws and willing that enterprise in indus- trial and commercial service should be fairly paid. I agree with Chancellor Van Hise, of the University of Wisconsin, that the Sherman Law “destroys conservation, wastes natural resources, and produces a profoundly immoral situation.” I concede that Government regulation of combinations is necessary, but I earnestly advocate that they should be regulated by a Commission that will prevent the abuse of power, rather than by prosecution under a law that is indeterminate and can be applied only after the harm is done and guilt has been laboriously proved. Note.—I have a letter from Mr. James H. Crosby, of Claremont, California, to which I shall reply in a suc- ceeding article. I am indebted to Mr. Crosby for point- ing out an error in the figures of “ Our International Ac- count Current” published in The Outlook of February 24, and regret that his letter came too late for me to deal with the subject this month.
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THE NEW BOOKS STORIES OF CONTRASTED TYPES ‘‘ Sanine ’’? is a record of despair, acry out of Bedlam; but it has passed through some- thing like a hundred editions in Russia, and has been, according to accounts, the sensa- tion of Europe for the last five years. It was written by an ‘ intellectual ” in the terri- ble depression that followed the failure of the last revolutionary movement. It is the after- math of a great abortive political and social disturbance ; and init, as in a mirror, one sees the tremendous reaction of disappointed hopes and defeated ambitions. Recalling Turgenev, ‘* Sanine ” shows many loose ends, but it also seems to fulfill many of the prophecies in ‘“ Smoke,” ‘On the Eve,” “ Fathers and Sons,” and the short stories of the great Russian. The lack of organization in the Russian temperament and in Russian agita- tion which Turgenev touched with such a masterly hand receives confirmation and bears fruit in this story. ‘ Sanine” is a kind of Dead Sea fruit, a novel of futility. It is full of endless discussions which never ar- rive at results. Denunciation, revolutionary purposes, audacious declarations, go up in smoke and beer; and one gets from the whole story a sense of restless theorizing and futile agitation. Like a lake that has become stagnant after great disturbance, it is without movement. The whole order of things is utterly futile. Sanine himself deifies the natural in- stincts of man. His career and his character have no spiritual unity, no moral responsi- bility. He has a cool head; he is without principles ; he cares for no one but himself. When his sister becomes the victim of a cheap, cowardly officer, he treats the thing as a ‘natural ’’ occurrence; they have both fol- lowed their instincts. Then when he de- nounces the seducer as a coward and expels him from the house, receives a challenge from him and refuses it, he strikes the officer in the face and literally compels him to com- mit suicide. The men are mere talking-machines ; the women mean well, but before the book is ended two of them have been seduced, three of the men have committed suicide. The frankness of the story is brutal, the 1Sanine. By Michael Artzibasheff. Translated by , Percy Pinkerton. B. W. Huebsch, New York. $1.35. dramatic ability is very considerable, and its only value is as a kind of human document reporting the state of mind of a group of Russians—young men who have lost their old standards and for whom as yet no new standards have defined themselves ; vic- tims of moods, tossed hither and thither by waves of impulse, without power of will; creatures of a disturbed and disturbing envi- ronment. It is not easy to imagine a greater contrast of motive and background than is presented by ‘“ Sanine ” and “ Brunel’s ‘Tower.’”?! One represents chaos, the other stands for moral order. Both have tragic motives; but in the Russian novel the tragedy is like the funeral march in “‘ Die G6étterdimmerung,”’ a dirge without hope, while the tragedy in Mr. Phillpotts’s story seems to open the door into immortality because it is the result of a noble deed. The scene of the novel is the southwest country of England, which Mr. Phillpotts knows so well, and which he has often described with such graphic power. A boy of bad inheritance escapes trom a reform- atory and finds employment in a pottery built up by a man of sterling character, intellectual energy, and integrity. Extraor- dinary ambition and eagerness to learn, to- gether with quickness of mind and alertness of hand, rapidly win for the boy the favor and confidence of his employer. Everything promises well for the waif except that he has no moral character. Nothing has ever given him any notion of right and wrong; the moral side of life has never come under his observation or been revealed to him. He is capable, faithful, efficient, and devoted to the interests of his employer—devoted to such a degree that he finds out, by unscrupulous means, the secret on which is based the success of a neighboring pottery. When his employer learns the way in which this secret has been discovered, he dismisses the ardent, devoted, but unscrupulous boy with bitter reproaches. This dismissal opens the eyes of the untrained youth, and moral laws begin to define themselves to him. ‘The contrast between the strong, upright master potter and the able, ambitious, untrained boy is very strikingly drawn. In the course of the story the process of _ 1 Brunel’s Tower. By 1 Phillpotts. The Macmillan Company, New York. §Il. 735
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nail 38 pottery manufacture is minutely described. It furnishes, indeed, a symbolic element which, though sometimes pushed too far, is very effective and interesting. The general symbolism between dealing with clay by human hands and dealing with it by divine hands is obvious; but there are two or three characters in this book so identified with their work and so loyally consecrated to it that clay has ceased to be matter to them, and they find in it intimate companionship and responsiveness. Mr. Phillpotts has written more engrossing stories, but none of finer fiber than ‘“ Brunel’s Tower.” In “The Sword of Youth”? Mr. Allen goes back to the blue grass region which he celebrated with such intimate and tender skill in those early stories that have taken their places among American classics, and becomes again the prose idylist of “The Kentucky Cardinal ”’ and “ Aftermath.” Years have passed since “Flute and Violin ’’ appeared, and the landscape of the world has changed as if an earthquake had shaken it; agitation and unrest have dis- turbed the social and political order with al- most revolutionary violence, and an immense energy has been liberated to find expression in new forms of activity with an intensity which recalls the seventeenth century. The volume of experience and emotion has flooded the channels of artistic expression, and for a decade American fiction has been notable for energy and force rather than for the power of sustained and vital art. For the moment that high achievement which we call art has been obscured by the pressure of more im- mediate interests. But art has a long day and survives many hours of forgetfulness. The beautiful early work of Mr. Allen’s with which “ The Sword of Youth”’ relates itself has become part of American literature. The shadow of the Civil War rests on this story, and its theme is the inevitable separa- tion in point of view and feeling between the older and the younger generation. The boy of seventeen, son of a mother whose husband and four sons have been taken away by the call of the cause to which they are devoted, is torn by two conflicting duties—his duty to the desolate and strong-willed woman and his duty to his country. There is no plot in such a story, but there are tragic collision and dramatic incident; and filial devotion in con- 1The Sword of Youth. By James Lane Allen. The Century Company, New York. $1.25. 736 THE OUTLOOK 24 March flict with -military discipline creates striking situations. The past and future are set in momentary conflict, and a lightly sketched idyllic love story lights the loneliness of the diverging paths of mother and son with a common devotion. The background is part of the story, as in the earlier tales from the same hand; it not only envelops the actors in a mellow atmos- phere, but it explains and interprets them, for Mr. Allen has thought deeply about the shaping influences of both heredity and en- vironment, and in his most characteristic stories nature is present in obvious and delicately sketched landscape and in subtle reflection in temperament and _ character. “The Sword of Youth” is likely to be over- looked by seekers after the melodramatic, the overstrained and the undertoned novel ; but it will select its readers and offer them something rare and fine. It is not a fault- less story, but it has distinction of quality and of workmanship. “V. V.’s Eyes” was one of those stories which become ‘“ best sellers” by virtue pri- marily of their human quality. It was by no means faultless either in construction or style, but its attitude towards life was affec- tionate, with a humorous and whimsical seri- ousness of tone. It had much to say about the conditions of some working people and the heartlessness of some employers, but it was a story of persons, not an indictment of classes nor an advocacy of causes. It wasa novel, and not a badly disguised pamphlet. Mr. Harrison’s new story is in a lighter vein, and one must be grateful that he has presented the various types of women now before the consciousness of the world without portentous gravity of mood or unpleasant rancor. There is no evidence in ‘ Angela’s Business”' that the past has been a disastrous failure, that suffrage for women is the one ray of hope in the situation and an issue of such supreme im- portance that it dwarfs all other issues into insignificance. No question ever presented for solution has needed the sanity and saving grace of humor more than the suffrage, and few discussions have so generally missed it. “ Angela’s Business ” barely touches suf- frage, but what is crudely called the “‘ woman question” is fundamentally involved in the story. A self-confident young writer con- ceives it to be his mission in life to under- t Angela’s Business. By Henry S. Harrison. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $1.35.
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1915 stand women, and sets to work to make a complete table of the contents of the “ mind of woman.” The inevitable results follow ; his search for the womanly woman leads him into all kinds of disaster, and, in the end, he find his reward in life rather than in art, and makes the discovery that a woman may be liberal-minded, brave to face prejudice, coura- geous in her determination to meet life with open eyes, and yet, at the end, suddenly reveal herself, not as an “ egoette ” bent on living her own life at all costs to other people, but full of the passion of sacrifice and the power of love, things which have been and always will be characteristic of the highest and finest types of womanhood. ‘“ Angela’s Business” is a wholesome story for those men who understand neither women nor the immense extension of women’s activi- ties in the modern world. It is a whole- some story also for those who belong to the “lunatic fringe of reform,” the extreme femi- nists and the radical disciples of the Newness. There is a delightful description of a meet- ing of a group of advanced people, when Miss Hodges was making a “ demonstration of Woman’s Sacred Duty of Developing her Ego.”” She said much of “‘ the Higher Law and the Richness of Personality, of Contri- butions to the Race, and Enhancement of the Life Stream ;’”’ above all, she shouted “fiercely and_ relentlessly, Shall Modern Woman hack away all that impedes her Self-Development—all, I care not what it is ?” ** Angela’s Business ” is not a great novel, but it is sane, normal, wholesome; light in manner but serious in temper, lacking neither wisdom, wit, nor humor. It shows a great advance in simplicity and soundness of style over ‘“ V. V.’s Eyes.”’ In ** The Man of Iron ” the English author (whose real name is Clothilde Graves) aims to present a living picture of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, something in the same manner in which she presented the Boer War in her story called ‘* The Dop Doctor.’”’ With this historic aspect is mingled a personal tale of romance, tragedy, and struggle. Pen pic- tures of the men of the day—Bismarck, Moltke, the German Emperor, the French Emperor, the French Prince Imperial, and others—are included, and the author does not hesitate to paint them boldly, without flattery, and sometimes. with very plain speaking 1The Man of Iron. By Richard Dehan. erick Stokes Company, New York. $1.35. The Fred- THE NEW BOOKS 737 indeed. ‘The method of writing is pano- ramic; the reader is taken from point to point and from scene to scene with almost confusing swiftness. There are obvious faults in the book—excessive emotionalism and exaggeration in laying on the literary colors; at the same time in a tumultuous way the great events described and the stir- ring incidents of war times are brought very close to the reader’s mind and perception, while the character work is often extremely good. Altogether the book, although it is exasperating in parts and is of extreme length, has enough of substance and interest in it to make it unusual and well worth reading. Another war story, ‘“‘ Red Fleece,” is the first novel of any real consequence dealing with the present war. Its point of view is correctly described by the publishers as pre- senting the author’s “ passionate vision of the idiocy and waste of war and its crime toward the peasants who are made cannon meat.” The Russian revolution, according to this fictitious narrative, is still going on behind and within the lines, and its apostles are dy- ing daily by execution as they are found teaching the doctrine of a world patriotism and urging soldiers ‘‘ to cease to kill.” The young American correspondent who loves the daughter of a revolutionist is involved in this dangerous situation. War is made bru- tal and bloodthirsty, and there is little sparing of the reader’s sensitiveness. As in previous stories, the author, although abrupt and some- times all but obscure in expression, is intensely earnest, has high human ideals (although perhaps attainable only in a distant era), hates oppression and overgrown national ambition, and certainly knows how to arouse thought as well as to stir the feelings. What- ever its shortcomings, the book is distinctly neither weak nor immature. Some reviewer has very aptly headed an an appreciative talk about “ Bealby,”? Mr. Wells’s latest story, “Mr. Wells Takes a Vacation.” It is certainly a very enjoyable vacation for the reader who has perhaps been a little overburdened by the extreme seriousness of the author’s elaborate: at- tempts to deal profoundly with social condi- tions. Here, as in several of his earlier stories, Mr. Wells is not ashamed to indulge "1 Red Fleece. By Will Levington Comfort. Double- day, Page & Co., New York. $1.25. ?Bealby. By H. G. Wells. The Macmillan Company, New York. £1.35.
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738 in pure entertainment. The story of the misadventures of the boy Bealby, who comes into comic conflict with the Lord Chancellor of England, is amusing, sprightly, and full of THE OUTLOOK 24 March surprises. ‘The book, so far as we can see, has no lesson, and we are glad of it. Itisa pure bit of fun, sometimes a bit farcical, but never silly. On the Cosmic Relations. By Henry Holt. i volumes. Houghton Mifflin Company, Bosfin. A good many years ago Sir Oliver Lodge, in discussing the baffling case of that celebrated New England “medium,” Mrs. Leonora Piper, suggested that quite possibly the only valid ex- planation of her trance utterances could be had by postulating the existence of a universal mind “of which all ordinary consciousnesses past and present are but portions.” Other psy- chical researchers, notably William James and Frederic Myers, tentatively advanced the same idea with reference to certain particularly per- plexing phenomena of a seemingly clairvoyant character. But none of them attempted to de- velop this Cosmic Soul and Cosmic Reservoir theory in any systematic fashion, and to utilize it for the explanation of psychic phenomena in general. They wrote and spoke, in fine, as though they regarded it merely as a “last resort ” hypothesis, to be fallen back on when all other explanations were proved untenable. Now comes an author, the veteran New York publisher Henry Holt, who boldly declares his belief, not only that the concept of a cosmic consciousness is indispensable to a correct un- derstanding of things psychical, but that only through this concept is it possible to understand many every-day but puzzling phenomena. As Mr. Holt views it, the personality of every human being is but a fragment of a larger per- sonality, possessing powers transcending those of any given individual, but utilizable by the individual under exceptional, and as yet ill- defined, conditions. When these conditions happen to obtain, there results an inflowing, as it were, of the cosmic consciousness, with un- usual, if perhaps only momentary, enlargement of the individual’s powers. Thus, for example, Mr. Holt would explain the phenomena of dreaming, particularly of those dreams in which the imagination is most creative, as in the case of Robert Louis Steven- son’s dream-originated stories and novels. Thus also he wouldl explain the achievements of genius. What makes a genius, in his opinion, is “ability beyond that of people in general to evoke the contents of the subliminal conscious- ness, whatever it may be—Cosmic Soul, if you please—into the supraliminal or vigilant or wak- ing consciousness.” As with men and women of genius, so with those differently endowed persons known as “ mediums,” “ sensitives,” or “ psychics.” Of these Mrs. Piper is easily the best known, as also the most investigated, and Mr. Holt devotes a large portion of his bulky work to a survey and analysis of her trance utterances as observed by himself and as recorded by the investigators of the Society for Psychical Re- search. Unlike Sir Oliver Lodge and Frederic Myers, he does not find these amounting to proof positive of survival after bodily death, but he does find them strongly suggesting sur- vival, and he decidedly finds them explicable as a whole only on the theory that in some way Mrs. Piper while entranced enjoys extraordi- nary access to the realm of universal knowledge possessed by the cosmic mind. By what mechanism she does this, he frankly admits that he does not know. He admits, indeed, that his cosmic explanation is wholly hypothetical; or, as he prefers to put it, a “guess.” But he insists that, un'ike many so- called scientific explanations, his theory is not guesswork “built up on a jumble of words which in themselves are but professions of igno- rance; it is a tentative interpretation of facts which we have got to interpret somehow, or resign the right and responsibility to use our intellects.” Psychology of Maeterlinck (The). “iP eneip Forbes Sturgis. R.G. Badger, Boston. $1.50. The author gives us here not a a discus- sion and criticism of Maeterlinck’s art, but also an analysis and description of each play. This latter feature makes the book of special value to classes and clubs which wish to makea systematic study of the great Belgian drama- tist’s work. A biography adds to the value of the book. Mr. Sturgis’s philosophical analysis finds “ rational determinism ” at the base of Mae- terlinck’s philosophy. He is more interested, however, in the dramatist’s psychology than his philosophy, and in its exposition of the plays’ psychological meaning the book occupies new ground as compared with others on the same general subject. Revolutionary Period in Europe (The). By Henry Eldridge Bourne. The Century Historical Series. The Century Company, New York. $2.50. The period covered by Professor Bourne’s contribution to this valuable historical series is the half-century from 1763 to 1815—that is, the period which witnessed the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon. Naturally these two outstanding features, which to a large extent determined the history of Europe during this period, occupy the major portion of Profes- sor Bourne’s book. His treatment of the French Revolution is particularly good, its complicated causes being handled convincingly and clearly,
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1915 and its tragic course being followed with fair- ness to the principal actors. The question of Robespierre’s share in the horrors of the Terror is studied with special care, and Professor Bourne’s view, that he has been on the whole over-severely judged, is borne out by the facts -here marshaled. A chapter of timely interest is found in the account given of the reorganiza- tion of Germany by Stein, whose institutional changes have counted for so much in the up- building of the Germany of to-day. Professor Bourne, indeed, is at his best in describing in- stitutions, and his account of the social and economic arrangements of both the old ré- gime and the revolutionary epoch is admirably comprehensive, without being too detailed. Altogether, he has presented a helpful review of one of the most important periods in European history. Chief Contemporary Dramatists. Edited by T. 9 eae Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $3.50. Twenty plays are here included—English, American, German, French, Russian, Swedish, and others. Each play stands for one play- wright, and as the book aims to represent really contemptrary drama just as a collection of Elizabethan plays would represent that era, it is interesting to give here the names of the twenty playwrights selected. They are: Wilde, Pinero, Jones, Galsworthy, Baker, Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, Fitch, Moody, Thomas, MacKaye, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Brieux, Hervieu, Maeterlinck, Bjérnson, Strindberg, and Tchekhof. The one notable omission is Ibsen (although Shaw’s admirers might ques- tion this), and. for this two reasons are given: that he is to-day not quite “ contemporary,” but was a pioneer of the era rather thana part of it; and, secondly, and more forcibly, we think, that no one play would fairly represent Ibsen. As to the choice and content of such a collection, no two editors could possibly agree; but we doubt very much whether it would be easy to improve this as a whole. Science and Faith. By W. K. Azbill, A.M. The Standard Publishing Company, Cincinnati. $1.50. This decidedly interesting volume gives new readings of the mysteries of the universe. Its main topics are the ether of space, electricity, the atmosphere, magnetism, and life. Light, heat, and all the phenomena of magnetism are deemed due to waves or commotions of the ether. These impart motions to matter in innumerable ways. The movements of planets are produced in the same way as ordinary mag- netic effects. The “pull of gravity” is pro- nounced a fiction. Gravitation, magnetism, cohesion, and chemical valency must be attrib- uted to electricity and the ether. Electricity protects the forms of organic matter as a bu‘fer to the agitations of the ether. A planet, in its THE NEW BOOKS - oan ns ae 739 entire volume, is more a globe of electricity than of anything else. Magnetism is defined as a state of extreme molecular loss of electrical charge. Itis affirmed to be the bond that unites the worlds in each system, holds each system of the universe in its relation to neighboring sys- tems, and maintains the integrity of the uni- verse. These revolutionary propositions may pro- voke incredulity, but deserve a hearing of the evidence advanced in their support. Mr. Azbill cites what scientific authorities have to say, presents his case against them on scientific grounds, and submits it to the court of intelli- gent readers. These will wish to hear from the scientists so sweepingly assailed. More readily accepted will be the conclusion reached here, that all energy, movement, and order in the universe’ result from the rationally directed power of an eternal Life. It is simply fair to Mr. Azbill to add that his treatise is said to have received some indorsement in high quarters. Walloon Family in America (A). By Mrs. Robert W. de Forest. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $5. The upbuilding and vicissitudes of family life in the early days of this country form a subject of increasing interest to all thoughtful Ameri- cans. Werealize more and more that our often blundering forebears were industrious, strong- hearted, and God-fearing. A recent and ex- tremely valuable contribution to our knowledge in this direction is Mrs. de Forest’s volume. While it is typical of certain aspects of early life in America, it is of particular interest just now because the family whose history she records took its rise in a country—Belgium— of much pathetic and vivid interest at the pres- ent moment. re The de Forests were Walloons, a race in- habiting northeastern France and southeastern Belgium. They were skilled in trade and effective in war. To-day the Walloons num- ber about four million people. A million of them still live in France and about three millions in Belgium. One of the de Forests became a Huguenot convert and went to Ley- den, where he found a company of English Protestants. We find this man later petitioning the Virginia Company in London for permission to settle a Walloon colony in the new American province. But the Virginian project had to be given up, and the early de Forest set forth upon an expedition to explore a site for a colony in South America. He died in Guiana. His record forms a singularly important and read- able part of Mrs. de Forest’s book. Three of his children later made their way to America to the Dutch Colony of Amsterdam in the New Netherlands, and one of these became the founder of the present family, well known and distinguished in the annals of the metropolis.
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THE READER’S VIEW AMERICA AND THE WAR As several of your correspondents have point- ed out, the attitude of the United States baffles ordinary comprehension, especially considering the fact that the sister Republic of France, and even before—America will never forget Lafay- ette—was their old ally. Putting all question of Great Britain aside, as may well be done, here was the spectacle of a long-premeditated, wholly unprovoked attack on two democracies—the crowned- republic of Belgium, and France—by a Power which since 1860 has acted as the bully of Europe, with hopes of enlarging its sphere of tyranny and rapine to embrace the whole world. The Belgian representatives went to Washing- ton to report on the outrages of the Germans in Belgium. They were kindly received, and the spokesman of the States read them a little hom- ily about justice in the abstract—and that was all! The heart of the American people is with the victims of the brutal régime at Berlin, but the politicians talk mildly of the virtues of neu- trality! It is unfortunate, indeed, that the reallv representative men of the great Republic are not in a position to assist their country to play the part destined fora Power which has ever stood forward as the champion of the oppressed. Six months ago Belgium was one ot the hap- piest and most prosperous countries in Europe. Now it is a ruin. Its people have been mur- dered, driven into exile, and brought to poverty— a country this of free institutions, a land where learning and civilization, material advance and enlightenment, have marched together. The States are pledged by the honor of their name, their past traditions, apart entirely from treaties to which their signature has been appended, to stand for the right of humanity—the common right to live and work. That right has been trampled in the mud. The criminal hooligan- ism clothed in nauseous hypocrisy which is the main characteristic of the German policy has affronted every code on which the American power is based, and America, through its repre- sentatives of the day, talks of neutrality and stands aside. America keeps its Ambassador in Berlin. Berlin has outraged every moral sense, every canon of truth, every law—human and divine. There can be no confusing of the issue. Apparently America would have looked on with supreme impassiveness if France— France which has held the torch of civilization high through past ages, when the rest of Europe was plunged in barbarism—had been crushed under the iron heel. Maybe there is yet a mighty réle for America to play, not as presiding genius at the peace, for the Allies will stand in no need of outside assist- ance. It is late, indeed, but even the Saturday 740 in the week of the world is good for action, though the opportunity has been dallied with. The real occasion was in the days of last sum- mer, when the crime of all time was perpetrated, when alittle nation was fighting—fighting for what? Just the right to live, to guard its own, to be at peace. And when the arch-impostor who has brought the German name to ignominy and has disgraced a dynasty first threw his armies at his little foe, that was the time when America might have spoken with a voice which would have aroused the entire world, declaring the infamy of the crime of the Hohenzoliern crew. It might not have stopped the war, but it would have curtailed the chances of mischief on the part of the criminal dolts of the Wilhelm- strasse. It would have shown to all who pass down the world’s highway that the honor of America is as high now as in 1898, when it freed Cuba. There is yet time. Oris it to be written down finally in the annals of history that America could not do its duty because another did not stand in the place of power? CLIVE R. FENN. 30 Rue Bassano, Paris, France. “SELF-RAISING CHILDREN” The Outlook pokes fun at Mr. Frank P. Walsh’s reference to self-raising children in the February 17 number, and laughs at the pros- pect of self- raising colts, lambs, pigs, flowers, and vegetables.. It occurs to me that there is more reason in Mr. Walsh’s statement than at first appears. The Outlook’s attitude on these mat- ters, as indicated in Mrs. Cuilde’s excellent arti- cle on concentration, encourages me to say that no child-raising is of ultimate value that is without the individual self-finish, or the element of self-raising ; and it appears quite certain that most of our so-called best families do entirely too much “raising” and allow the child too little opportunity to “ raise ” himself. Whether it be culture of mind or body, for brain or manual labor, the test of the individuals is that they must “ be doers of the word, and not hearers only.” It is common knowledge that our “best” class of American parents are over-raising, not under-raising, their children. They are taught too little to “do” and too much to “hear.” They are nursed through infancy; shielded from “ work” till they reach the college age; pampered through college at a sacrifice that leaves “dad” broke and brings forth an edu- cated fool, in too many cases, who is not a “doer,” because he has been only a “hearer,” of the word. The fault is that the child has not been given a proper opportunity to test by actual work his capacity, has not been given an opportunity to raise himself. Mr. Walsh is in a measure right, if I un lerstand his position,
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THE READER’S VIEW for the attempt is too much to raise the child and too little to allow him to raise himself. Franklin, Greeley, and Lincoln raised them- selves ; and the policy should be to allow our children at the earliest practical age an op- portunity to “do” something in the way of raising themselves. While child labor laws have. their uses, it is more important that parental laws shall guard against child indolence. The body and mind and morals should be developed to the highest possible degree for each individual ; and this wjll be done by giving the individuals the opportunity to be doers, and not hearers only—by self-raising themselves. Bruce L. KEENAN. Tallequah, Oklahoma. SMOKE AND POLITICS I am interested in everything published in The Outlook, and was particularly interested in the article “The High Cost of Smoke,” which appeared in a recent issue. The accuracy of your statements can usually be relied upon, and I am willing to admit that this article was substantially correct as applied to conditions in times past, but it cannot be applied to present times. Nothing like this is happening now, due to the fact that there is no smoke in Pittsburgh, and has not been since March 4, 1913. Your article, applied to conditions under the reign of the G. O. P., was very apropos. In those times smoke was issuing from every stack, pay-rolls were averaging approximately sixteen million dollars every two weeks, and, while the smoke may have been detrimental in some respects, yet we were enjoying the benefit of these pay-rolls. Now, however, as always under Democratic misrule, we have neither smoke nor pay-rolls. True, the war is making some business, without which Pittsburgh would look like @ whitewashed cemetery. Please write another story based upon the “High Cost of No Smoke.” This is the condi- tion in Pittsburgh to-day. Give us the smoke. We can erect new build- ings if we have the pay-rolls. E. E. GREGG. Federal Lumber Company, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. THE LUTHERAN CHURCH I have been a subscriber and reader of The Outlook for many years, and have found it valu- able in many ways as a source of information. To-day, however, I am greatly surprised and disappointed in the treatment you give the Lutheran Church in your statement on “ Church Gains in 1914.” The position you give the Lutheran Church as to membership is utterly at variance with the facts in the case. Intentionally, of course, you would not do this. You mention a number of the Protestant 741 churches that have passed the “ million mark” as tonumbers. Then you say, “ There are now nine denominations which number more than one million adherents each,” and name these denomi- nations. But you omit the Lutheran Church, which stands ¢Azrd as to numerical strength, hav- ing a communicant membership of 2,375,843 in this country. You say, “ The various German churches— Lutheran and Reformed—show unusual gains.” The facts are: the Lutheran Church is not a German Church pure and simple, having a very large membership using the English language. Why not give the Lutheran Church her proper and rightful place when speaking of “ Church gains”? Her percentage of increase, accord- ing to the latest Church statistics, has been greater than that of any other of the Protestant churches in this country. Of the 152,000,000 Protestants in the world, 76,000,000 are Lutherans, 21,600,000 Episco- palians, 17,800,000 Methodists, 11,500,000 Bap- tists, 9,700,000 Presbyterians, 5,500,000 Congre- gationalists, and 10,000,000 are members of other Reformed churches. In addition to the above facts, the Lutheran Church preaches the Gospel in more languages than any other Church in the world. H. C. Hotzoway, D.D.: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. [In the Federal Council’s Bulletin from which we quoted the twenty-one separate bodies which come under the general heading “ Lutheran ” are reported as totaling 2,444,970; no single Lutheran body is given as exceeding the mill- ion mark.—THE EDITORS.] A NATIONAL BOARD OF PUBLIC WORKS The editorial in The Outlook entitled “ The Last Week of the Sixty-third Congress ” men- tioned, among other things, the thirty-four mill- ion dollar appropriation for rivers and _har- bors, ete. Although a reader of The Outlook for a number of years, I do not remember of ever seeing therein any suggestion relative to the organization under our Federal Government of a Board of Public Works with a Cabinet officer at its head. Why is it better and more eco- nomical for the Government of the United States to carry on its numerous and costly public works through a medium of separate and distinct departments than under a single de- partment devoted to that purpose, as is done by practically every other civilized government in the world? Moreover, this question also ap- plies to the government of the State of New York ; and would it not be pertinentvat the pres- ent time to take thought relative to this matter, in view of the coming Constitutional Conven- tion? THERON M. RIPLEY. Watertown, New York.
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BY THE WAY According to the editor of the Paris “ Figaro,” since the war began there has been a marked diminution of crime in Paris. “ During the past five months,” he says, “ not more than two or three acts that are really criminal have been committed in Paris.” A correspondent of the “Figaro ” suggests that this happy condition of things may be in part due to the elimination from the press of lurid descriptions of crime, and hopes that when peace returns the news- papers will curb their customary “advertising of crime.” The longest regular route for a river steam- boat in the United States at present is believed to be that from Cincinnati to Memphis, 749 miles. From Memphis boats run to Vicksburg, where they connect with boats for New Or- leans. The long passenger runs of former times, a Government bulletin states, have been almost entirely discontinued. “Within a very short time,” says “Good Roads,” “the frost will be out of the ground. ... When it comes out it will leave a majority of the earth roads in a rough, badly rutted con- dition, and in most communities some attempt will be made to ‘work’ the roads.” The plan, unfortunately too common, of using a _ road- machine to scrape the ditches and of piling the resulting débris in the center of the road is de- scribed as entirely wrong, for such material should never be placed on'the surface of the road. The “jitney” bus has conquered large sec- tions of the country and is still marching on; Philadelphia’s first jitney appeared a few days ago in the shape of a five-passenger car which took its stand in front of the City Hall bearing a sign which read: “5c. Jitney Bus—Stops Anywhere. 5c.” Now comes the philologists’ problem in find- ing out the derivation of the word “jitney.” The San Francisco “ Examiner” devotes a column to interviews with various authorities, from college professors to newsboys, who are at odds as to the originof the word. Some trace it to Yiddish and others to Hindustanee. A philological friend sends us this contribution to the controversy : “ Small coins are frequently called ‘chicken feed.’ In analogy with this, a handful of nickels may have been called ‘chutney,’ a conglomerate sauce. This would easily become ‘chitney’ or ‘jitney.” In fact, ‘chitney ’ is to be found asa variant of ‘chutney * in the Oxford English Dictionary.” Large quantities of abandoned railway mate- rial are said to be scattered along the routes of many impoastant roads throughout the country. One of the Eastern railways recently organized a movement to reclaim this wastage. During nine months four enginemen each picked up mere than a hundred dollars’ worth of such 742 material. The man at the top of the salvage list was credited with saving $313 inthis way. Advocating university instruction in dramatic technique, a writer in the “ Dramatic Mirror” says that it is no longer possible for a young writer to have his early plays produced upon the regular stage. “ At one university at least, namely Harvard, this fact has been appreciated. There Professor Baker has a small group of students who act in their own plays before a special audience which is selected for its critical acumen... . In this way the young playwright is given the opportunities denied him in the con- temporary theater.” Frank W. Tannenbaum, the I. W. W. leader who was sent to prison fora year for leading a raid on St. Alphonsus’s Roman Catholic Church in New York City, on his release recently after serving his term on Blackwell’s Island said: “Tam here to fight the social system that per- mits men to stand meekly in bread lines begging for food. I want to show those men who are broken in spirit that they havea right todemand work, and I want to show the world that an empty stomach is no excuse for a broken head just because of the tyranny of the police.” But is it necessary for the sensible fighter of the social system in America to go to jail ? A despatch from Amsterdam announces that the Academy of Fine Arts at Louvain has been reopened in the building formerly occupied by the staff of the Civil Guard. The stout-hearted Louvainese evidently do not mean to wait for the cessation of war to begin again the activi- ties of peace. The lure of sunken gold still attracts the diver. The latest venture of this sort is an attempt to recover $200,000 lost in the wreck of the Russian stoop-of-war Neva off Cape Edge- combe, near Sitka, Alaska, sixty years ago. Our War Department has issued an official permit to a marine diver who will try to salve the submerged treasure. Some international amenities are neatly ex- changed by two Japanese critics of Western ideals as reported in “ Life.” The respective humanity of German and American soldiers is thus commented on: ‘German soldiers has no respect for womanhood, childhood, and other forms of mankind ; ladyship and infanticide are shot down without ruth when gunfire approach,” argues “Nogi.” To this “Togo” responds: “ Perhapsly you have forgotten work of Colo rado militia; . .. removal of female influence by bullets were very nicely observed there by those who looked.” “Those who look” may see behind these alleged brutalities an argu ment for bringing all disputes, industrial as well as international, before tribunals instead of bayonets.